Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

until the day arrived when no more letters came.

Despite my efforts, I still do not know.

When her father died, she had been dispossessed. She, too, had passed away.

A story that contained my history and would contain my future.

Everything passes, Big Mother thought, as she sat in the low bunk of the train returning home.

It was 1956 and Big Mother’s family had been in Shanghai for almost a decade.

“Oh, good. A new campaign. As Chairman Mao says, ‘After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be the enemies without guns.’

“Big Mother, you’ve got to learn to hold your tongue.”

The woman who was staring at her said, “Thrown out. Executed like criminals.”

“Long live our glorious land reform!”

have crossed into death itself, Big Mother thought.

“Is is really you, my sister?” Big Mother said. Swirl turned, peering into the darkness.

She did not need a lengthy explanation, it was clear what had taken place. But in Shanghai, she had not witnessed the land reform campaign.

But revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows.

“Do you remember that book I told you about,” Swirl asked. “The thirty-one notebooks? The Book of Records.”

The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home.

When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen.

Only…I worry about Zhuli. She’s been born into the wrong class, she’s the daughter of Wen the Dreamer. The daughter of a landlord. Nothing I do can change that.

Much later, in the years after Swirl had been released from the desert labour camps, when Zhuli had already grown into a young woman, Big Mother pieced the story together.

Last year, when delegates from the Bingpai peasants’ association arrived at their gate, the brothers had not resisted and had relinquished the title deeds for all seventeen acres of the family holdings, which would be redivided among the

village.

“Go home,” the girl whispered. “Tomorrow your house will be taken over by the peasants’ association, but there are some empty shelters up on the hillside. They’ll bring you there.

But all this would not be told to Big Mother Knife until much later. Swirl would not speak and neither would Wen.

Big Mother did not fully comprehend that struggle sessions and denunciation meetings still continued.

Was it this box in her arm that was pushing open so many doors in her memory? What kind of creature was this book?

and all the books and pages that Wen the Dreamer and his mother, uncles and Old West had so carefully, or fearfully, preserved would be relegated to ash and dust. Except, perhaps, for this book, which would go on to another hiding place, to live a further existence.

Sparrow had been dreaming.

Old Bach himself had come to Shanghai, he was seated at the furthermost piano.

The seventh canon of Bach’s Goldberg Variations rolled towards Sparrow like a tide of sadness.

The ninth variation caused Sparrow to rest his head upon the

desk. All he wanted was to live inside these Goldberg Variations, to have them expand infinitely within him. He wanted to know them as well as he knew his own thoughts.

Glenn Gould played on, knowing that the music was written and the paths were ordained, but sounding each note and measure as if no one had ever heard it before.

“There’s no future in music,” Ba Lute said.

Chairman Mao says, ‘If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.’

Big Mother’s escapade with the God of Literature seemed ages ago and miles away.

“Let us just say, the God of Literature summoned it home.”

As often happened, Big Mother Knife decided, impulsively, to adjust her strategy.

as if she were leaving a secret meeting and the documents she carried could bring down systems, countries, lies and corruption.

were were so explosive, but the names of the readers that must be protected. Courageous cliques, resistance fighters, spies and dreamers!

She had a vague sense, a disturbance, of people struggling up, people rushing over one another, and on and on these people climbed and fell and pulled each other down, in a large and sickening silence. But for what crime?

“This hidden library may have been built by Comrade Wen’s mother during one war or another, to hide these rare books from invaders.

“Hush. You’re the only one who still thinks of yourself as a revolutionary.”

A lifetime ago, Swirl had gone to the ticketing office in Shanghai, ready to buy passage to Hong Kong, but she had been distracted by a novel, the Book of Records. It embarrassed her now, the way she burned candles so unthinkingly, gazing at words that seemed to hide ideas, or ideas inexpressible in words, how the sentences had carried her forward like a river or a piece of music. And yet how close the truth had seemed back then. She had been twenty-four years old and she had fallen in love.

Maybe her crime had been as simple as the inability to believe. In truth, since the age of fourteen, and until she met Wen, she had believed in almost nothing.

“What I later wondered,” the Translator said, laying an index finger gently on her own nose, “was how I could have studied Dostoevsky so keenly and not realized I was digging my own grave?”

Against the grey-blue wave of oncoming pedestrians, Sparrow wanted to clear a path for her and so he walked with his chest out and his slender arms swinging, deluding himself that he was a tank and not a paper boat. But nobody, not even schoolchildren, moved aside for him.

Zhuli was balanced gracefully on a concrete ledge, one hand hooked around the iron fence, the rest of her body tipped to the side. Her hair, gathered into a long braid, sat on her shoulder and the ends seemed alive in the breeze.

“What do you think, cousin?” Zhuli said, making a soft landing beside him.

Yet when his cousin played his work, it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.

Time itself, the hours, minutes and seconds, the things they counted and the way they counted them, had sped up in the New China. He wanted to express this change, to write a symphony that inhabited both the modern and the old: the not yet and the nearly gone.