Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (36 page)

“Yes, Zhuli,” he said. “The Red Guards have all gone now.”

There was no more time. She was moving and yet she was still on the road. She was kneeling and yet she was lying in a dark, humid room. She heard Ba Lute, she heard Flying Bear crying, and Kai saying that two of the women targeted in the struggle session were still on the road, they were dead. One, a professor of mathematics at Jiaotong, had been dragged along the pavement for a kilometre. Zhuli pushed the noise out, it was coming at her not through her ears, but through a breeze against her arms, her hands. Someone washed her, she knew it could only be Sparrow. She knew she was safe and could now open her eyes if she chose to, but she did not choose to. Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything, owned everything, eventually took everything.

Red Guards came to the house. She heard them coming nearer and nearer, they came in and things fell down, more shouting, they saw her and said they would come back. Someone was crying. It was the neighbour, Mrs. Ma, she cried, “Shame, shame!” but at whom? Zhuli didn’t know, she was afraid to guess. Shame was a corkscrew inside her, winding together the selfishness, the
frivolity, the hollowness of what she was, until there was no more possibility of change.

In the next existence, Zhuli decided, there would be more colours than in the human world, there would be more textures and varieties of time. This would be the world of Beethoven as he sat with his back to the audience, when he understood that sound was immaterial, it was nothing but an echo, the true music had always been inside. But take away music, take away words, and what would persist? One of her ears had been damaged. She longed for her mother and father. How brightly the core of herself flickered before her, just out of reach. What are you, she asked. Where are you?

She sat up and realized it was night. She sat up again and again, imagining herself pushing aside the sheet, walking to the doorway, to the outer room, to the fresh air outside.

—

Sparrow heard his cousin waking. He had fallen asleep in a chair beside her bed. She had already left the room and turned down the hallway before he fully opened his eyes. He could not move. She would see the posters that were drying on the kitchen table. Da Shan and Flying Bear had been forced to criticize Zhuli, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, and these denunciations would be pasted up in the morning. “Call her the daughter of rightist filth,” Ba Lute had instructed. “You have to. Just write it down. Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing, only words.”

Da Shan smudged the ink, and his father threw out the poster and made him do it again.

“Da Shan,” he said, “if you don’t denounce Zhuli, they’ll only make it worse for her. They’ll turn around and says she’s a demon, that she infiltrated our lives. Let them humble us, if that’s what they want. Isn’t it better to be humbled? Do you want your poor father, your brothers, to lose their lives?”

Trembling, the teenager dipped his brush. Carefully, he wrote Zhuli’s name.

Ba Lute had now been summoned to the Conservatory twice, where the struggle sessions had lasted a full twelve hours. Their neighbour, Mr. Ma, had disappeared, and so had Zhuli’s teacher, Tan Hong. “The criticism I receive is very light, compared to the others,” Ba Lute said, when he returned. He had bruises all over his body. One eye was swollen shut and his face was bloodied and lopsided, but his accusers, his own pupils at the Conservatory, had left his hands alone. People who had been labelled rightists in earlier campaigns, even those who, like Swirl, had been rehabilitated, were far less fortunate.

Twice, Sparrow had been taken away by a group of Red Guards. They had locked him in a storeroom at the Conservatory but nobody had come to criticize him or denounce him. Eventually the door was opened and he was sent away. It was as if he floated underwater, inside a bubble of air. On the streets, the students sang and wept and shouted their love. The targets who had been humiliated once were humiliated again and again, as if a familiar face elicited the most hatred, they were the ones to blame for the receding promise of modernity, the violent sacrifices of revolution, this malevolence that seemed to infect the very young. Only it was not malevolence, it was courage and they were loyal soldiers defending the Chairman. Sparrow had to protect Zhuli, he had to finding a hiding place, but where? His father had said the violence was most extreme at the universities. The radio proclaimed that, in Beijing, the writer Fou Lei, once celebrated for his translations of Balzac and Voltaire, was being subjected to daily struggle sessions alongside his wife. The family’s books had all been burned and the piano destroyed. Their son, the pianist Fou Ts’ong, had applied for and received political asylum in the West. The father, Fou Lei, the quiet traitor, the poisonous needle wrapped in a silk cover, was finally being called to account.

The morning grew hotter. When Sparrow woke again, Zhuli was sitting in bed, under the window. She had left a space for her
mother, as if Swirl might arrive home at any moment. With her hair cut off, she looked even younger than she was.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back to sleep.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” He sat up in his chair, rubbed his face, pushing his uneasy dreams away. “No, I was only thinking.”

“I’m fine now, and I know when you’re telling fibs.”

He smiled. One hand drifted up to the opposite arm, rising to her shoulder, finding the ends of her hair.

“Six months,” Zhuli said in a low voice, “and everything will grow back.” She gazed at him, and the dark smudges on her face, the bruising which had turned a sickly yellow, made her appear shadowed despite the sunlight in the room. “Sparrow, have you seen my violin?”

“Your violin,” he said stupidly.

She waited, watching him.

“Zhuli,” he said. He despised the quaver in his voice and pushed it down. “It was destroyed.” She nodded, as if waiting for the second half of the sentence. He looked at her helplessly. “It was destroyed.”

“It was,” she said. “But then…”

“Red Guards came yesterday, no, it was two days ago. They came and smashed all the instruments. They even came in here but Ba…we asked them to leave. Ba Lute was denounced, he had to go to a meeting but it’s finished now. He’s home. The Conservatory is closed. Maybe for good.”

Zhuli nodded. She seemed, to Sparrow, almost unbearably lucid.

“Where are Da Shan and Flying Bear?” she asked.

“In Zhejiang with Ba’s cousin. Mrs. Ma took them by train. You need to go as well–”

“Yes,” she said, and then so flippantly he didn’t quite believe she had spoken. “I should have studied agriculture after all. Cousin, haven’t you been listening to the radio? The campaign is everywhere. Zhejiang will be no different from here.”

He did not tell her that four professors at the Conservatory had killed themselves in the last week and that Professor Tan had been locked in a room without adequate food or light. Zhuli did not mention the denunciations Da Shan had written. A wave of chanting overran the streets but they acted as if they did not hear it. It moved along Beijing Road, circling them. Zhuli asked if he had seen Kai.

“I saw him two days ago. I couldn’t tell how he was.”

“But he’ll be protected, won’t he? Nobody will harm him. They won’t harm you.”

The feeling in her voice came from another time, an old longing that did not know how to fade. He didn’t know what to do but nod.

She closed her eyes. “I’m glad, cousin.”

When she spoke again, her voice was very calm. “I’m glad,” she said. She touched her hair again and then let it go. “It’s like morning when the stars are painted over by daylight, Sparrow. You think it’s very far away, all this light, and anyway there’s a great universe of stars and other things and so you never believe they’ll disappear…Sparrow, of all the things they say I am, they are right that I am proud. I was proud to be myself. I really did believe that one day I would play before the Chairman himself, that I would go to London and Moscow and Berlin!” She laughed, like a child at the antics of a little pet. “I know now. Those places will only ever be words to me. My pride was so great I imagined that I would stand in the room where Bach lived, I would see his handwriting, his rooms and his little bed, and I would show people what it meant to me. They would hear it. They would hear Bach in me, they would know that he was mine, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why…”

The lucidity in Zhuli’s eyes frightened him.

“There’s a joke inside of it,” Zhuli said, “that’s why everyone laughs at me. Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are
nothing compared to the things we did have
. A life can be long
or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening…I looked through this window and made my own idea of the universe and maybe it was wrong, I don’t know anymore, I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too. I saw things…I don’t want the other kind of life.”

Sparrow stood and went to close the door that was already closed. He went to the window, which was latched tight, he drew the curtains and tried to think of what to do. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to Zhejiang. You won’t be alone. Flying Bear and Da Shan–”

“No,” she said. “It would only cause trouble for them.”

But what option was there? It was unbearable that there should be no escape. Think, he told himself, you must think clearly. The notebook, pen and cup beside the bed drew his attention, and he slid the pen aside and picked up the notebook. He was shaking. The sight of Wen the Dreamer’s handwriting disturbed him. Where was Big Mother, where was Swirl? They alone, not he or his father, knew how to protect her. He despised his own weakness. “Zhuli,” he said. “This disturbance will end. It must end.”

“My poor father. What will he feel when he comes home and sees what has happened to us all?”

He didn’t answer and Zhuli reached her hand to him, to the notebook. “I finished this one. Let’s continue. Chapter 17, it’s your favourite chapter, isn’t it? Here’s the box, under the bed. I had to hide it from Ba Lute.”

He lifted the box out. Zhuli combed her hands through her hair, as if preparing to receive a visitor. She said, “I have this idea that…maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived. That’s why it seems so familiar to us now. The future is arriving. We’ve come all this way to meet it.”

“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s we who keep returning to the same moment.”

“Next time, we’ll meet in another place, won’t we, Sparrow?”

“Yes, Zhuli.”

Sparrow read the chapter aloud as afternoon became evening, as if reading from the Book of Records was the same as shutting and bolting the outside door. Inside the room, Da-wei would soon leave America and return home, but before his departure, a composer named Chou brings him to a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. A hundred musicians radiate from the central figure of the conductor, Edgard Varèse, and, meanwhile, a second, smaller orchestra plays from an adjoining room. Alternating and colliding, audible but invisible to one another, they perform a single symphony using drums, alarms, scraps of song, sirens, a shouting flute, the bang and clank of metropolitan horns. The pandemonium of the symphony is the most beautiful thing Da-wei has ever heard. It seems simultaneously to include him and usher him on his way.

“Da-wei, you mustn’t go back,” Chou tells him afterwards. “It’s too late to return.”

Da-wei does not know how to answer. Before him, the orchestra has vacated the stage but their music stands wait like a flock of cranes.

“Myself,” Chou says, “I left Shanghai during the worst of the fighting. The Japanese pursued us, but we managed to disappear into a crowd…” His face, so alive in its story, turned grey. “The army apprehended another group, mistaking them for us. They rounded them up and shot them all. They were massacred…You see how it is. A life for a life. I can never go back.”

In the chamber, it feels as if all the hundreds of chairs are inclined towards them, listening.

“I tell you: our country has no need for us. You and I, we’re all yí mín, altered people, which is to say, we will soon be the most common people in existence.”

When the chapter ended, Zhuli took the notebook in her hands. She said, “I have never heard Varèse. I have heard so little modern music from the twentieth century. I wish, one day, I could go abroad and listen to what they’re hearing.” She said, as she if hadn’t
realized until this moment, “Da-wei is the shadow of my father. All these years, because of the handwriting, I imagined he was writing to us directly. To me. It was never just a book, was it?…Sparrow, promise me. Don’t let Ba Lute burn the notebooks.”

“Yes, Zhuli. I promise.”

—

Nearly three thousand kilometres away, Wen the Dreamer arrived in Yumen City, Gansu Province. Since his escape from Jiabangou, he had crossed and recrossed the Northwest for nearly two years, no longer the same bookish young man with poems folded into his pocket. In his mid-forties, darkened by the sun and burned by the wind, old before his time, he was lithe, alert and physically toughened. He stole the identity cards of passing strangers, thereby changing his name on a monthly basis; he stopped, when necessary, to earn money or ration coupons by working in a wheat or millet field, or a cement factory. With his battered suitcase, he crossed and recrossed the desert, learning how to live in the dry moonscape of Gansu Province, how to evade capture and how to exist on air alone. One day, he found, in a book barrow in Xinjiang, a copy of Chapter 6 of the Book of Records. He stared at the pages, fearing that he was lost. Hallucinating that Da-wei, May Fourth and the Book of Records was a myth, an allegory or a system around which all their lives were knotted. Seeing his distress, the child tending the book barrow said, “My father read that book, he got it from our cousin. He doesn’t have the whole book though, just a few chapters. This one’s extra. He won’t sell the rest.”

“Where does your cousin live?”