Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

A free fall into the second movement,

A sound gone just as it was learning to be heard.

And wasn’t it your birthday?” “He never celebrates,” Zhuli said. “He starves himself of joy. Luckily, joy seeps into all his compositions.”

Without Sparrow’s noticing the transition, Zhuli was telling the pianist about Ba Lute and the confrontation with the public security officers this morning. The pianist’s walk slowed. “What camp was your father at again?” he said. “I don’t know. But it’s in Gansu Province, isn’t it, cousin?” “I’m not sure, Zhuli.” She tensed. Faint perspiration gleamed on her forehead and her cheeks. She looked as if she could take on any campaign, criticism or family member, and leave them battered on the floor. “You don’t have to worry about me, cousin,” she said, her voice low. “I know when to keep my mouth shut.

“I think that half my life might be spent running from one position to another until I trip and make a fatal mistake.”

One day soon, she thought, she would play for her father, whose face she no longer recalled, but who used to sing, “Little girl, where are you going? Tell your father and he will take you. Tell your father and he will find a map, bring the tea, make the sun lift, and string the trees along the road.”

She heard it on waking and she knew it continued relentlessly through her sleeping hours; she, herself, came and went, not truly real, but the music had no beginning, it persisted, whether she was there or not, awake or not, aware or sleeping.

She had accepted it all her life, but lately, she had begun to wonder what purpose it served. Prokofiev, Bach and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation and Chairman Mao occupied for others. Why was this? How had she had been made differently?

People stared as he passed but no one spoke. Instead, a cold ring of quiet seemed to expand around this injured stranger, like water filling a plastic bag.

small of Sparrow’s back, the place, she knew, Sparrow had sustained an injury.

wondered how Kai had ever managed to learn piano if he had grown up in a destitute village outside of Changsha.

What kind of strings could a village boy pull? The pianist was a bag of tricks, she concluded. He wore his rural background well, like a penny novel wrapped inside an elegant cover. When not smiling, though, he had a face that could only be described as vigilant.

She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.

Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present.

What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.

Zhuli recognized the story right away, Da-wei’s radio station in the desert, May Fourth’s journey into the western borderlands, and the great revolution that had overtaken their lives. The tantalizing, epic Book of Records.

“Your aunt and I will go together. We travelled the length of this country when we were young.” “It’s not the same as it was.” “True. Back then, there was the war against Japan, famine, and then the Nationalists bombed the Yellow River and terrible flooding came…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Zhuli said. “The neighbourhood grandmas will talk and the public security men will break down the door again. They’ll say you’re siding with a convicted rightist. And then what?”

“Since she’s leader of the Song and Dance Troupe, she arranged for me to accompany her. She already told the neighbours she’s going to handle my resurrection back into society.

but there was a look in her mother’s eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

They would use the same code as the original author, folding locations and information into the names of Da-wei and May Fourth, clues meant only for Zhuli’s father, changes he would recognize immediately as not belonging to the original Book of Records.

The location belonged to a third party, the Lady Dostoevsky, who had been resurrected by the Party and was now living in Gansu Province,

working for a plant and flower clinic.

“She calls it Notes from the Underground.

Hiding in plain sight.

She had climbed down into it as if into a magic kingdom and, in doing so, altered her parents’ lives forever. Did such caverns still exist, she wondered. If she found another, would she enter it again?

“Zhuli, be careful what you say and whom you trust. No one is immune. Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.”

Once or twice now, she’d had nightmares of standing up on stage before a thousand people, the eternally sleepless faces of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi gazing down on her from the walls, but when she set bow to strings, the first notes of Tzigane refused to sound.

“I’m the daughter of a convicted rightist, Teacher. I won’t be allowed to compete abroad.”

But two nights ago, Kai had told her that some, if not all, of these opportunities–competitions, scholarships–would be withdrawn.

“One day soon,” Kai joked, “we’ll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked.”

“If it weren’t for Ba Lute, they would never have accepted me into the Conservatory at all,” she said. “I fully expect to

be transferred to an agricultural college in Sha...

One of her classmates, wearing a crimson armband, made a show of taking down her name.

Back at the Conservatory, they showed their newfound knowledge by continuously questioning their teachers, their parents and music itself.

“What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?” “If it is beauty against ugliness, then choose ugliness!”

Now the class turned their attention to the playwright, Wu, and the poet, Guo. Both men, once celebrated, had been discovered to be enemies of the People.

mocked Zhuli for favouring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor,

Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys,

she thought his eyes had the saddest light.

She closed the door behind her and felt as if she had stepped into outer space.

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart.

Dear Kai. Ah, she thought, quickly correcting herself, the word “dear” was stupid with sentimentality and had been struck from permissible usage.

For all her talent, and for all of Kai’s, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift.

The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

Still, she heard a recurring pattern inside Sparrow’s new work, as if they were the very footsteps of Wen

the Dreamer. At night, her father walked across her own dreams, too.

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