Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (17 page)

—

All morning, the words floated through Sparrow’s thoughts and would not leave him, even when Flying Bear dropped his breakfast on the floor and Da Shan walked barefoot into porcelain shards. The letter continued even as Sparrow washed blood, pottery and breakfast out of Da Shan’s foot.

“Should we go to the clinic? Probably I need stitches?”

“I don’t think so. Antiseptic should do.”

“Of course.” His voice a disappointed trombone.

Meanwhile, Swirl cleaned the floor, Ba Lute dished out another bowl of food, his mother yelled at everyone, and Flying Bear pretended to spear his brother in the back.

The letter sat in his mind and brought unexpected tears to Sparrow’s eyes.

Da Shan leaned forward, wiped the tears away with his delicate fingers and said nothing.

My dear friend, I trust this letter finds you well and that you remember me, your dreaming friend who treasures you like his own son. Today I am neither in the east nor the west. One day I will tell you all the vagaries, cliff-hangers and digressions of the story. But, in short: I escaped from H–camp and have gone into hiding. I cannot describe conditions to you, little bird. The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes. For the last month, I have been searching for a safe house. Last week, fate brought me to Shanghai and I saw my family. They did not see me and I did not dare make myself known. The authorities closed in and I left the city headed for G–Province. Little bird, please do all you can to prevent my family from searching for me. I must close this letter. A book could not hold all I wish to say.

Your friend,

Comrade “Bach”

P.S. I have found a further chapter of our Book of Records.

It came into my hands in the most unlikely of places, after my transfer from J–.

P.P.S. If ever the chance presents itself, seek out Comrade Glass Eye in the Village of Cats and do present a copy of the Book of Records to him. He was my companion at J–and his preferred composer is Schönberg. Tell him you are well acquainted with his childhood friends, the adventurer, Da-wei, and the fearless May Fourth.

Three days passed before officers from the Public Security Bureau showed up at the door. Like the destitute stranger, the officers came early in the morning, before breakfast was even on the table. Unlike him, they banged on the laneway gate and bullied their way in. They said that the “counter-revolutionary, criminal, rightist, political pollutant”…and here they had to pause and search through their papers…“Comrade Wen!”…had escaped, critically injuring two army officers. They accused Ba Lute of harbouring an enemy of the state.

Ba Lute listened calmly, but when the two officers announced that Swirl and Zhuli must come immediately for questioning, he leaped forward, flinging down the draft of Sparrow’s Symphony No. 3 that happened to be in his hands. “How dare you shame me in my own house!” he shouted. He began rampaging through the rooms. “Come over here! Is Comrade Wen under the bed? Is he in the closet? Did we use his corpse to fuel the stove? Check the garbage pail, shit house and laundry bag!” He hurled objects across the room as the security officers, pale and unconditioned, knocked each other down in their haste to escape the careening objects of Ba Lute. Sparrow’s father was taller than ever but only half as round, and therefore twice as intimidating. “Comrade Wen has the aggression of a falling leaf! How did he injure two officers? The way a drop of rain injures the pavement? Who’s selling potatoes here?”

“Uncle–” Zhuli said.

“Have you lost your mind?” Big Mother Knife said calmly.

“I’ve had enough!” Ba Lute shouted. “You’ve wrongly imprisoned his wife! That’s right! Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu! Check the records yourselves, she’s been resurrected! She’s working for the Party now and she’s probably ranked higher than you are! You little shits have stained our Revolution and one day I’m going to haul you before Chen Yi himself and have him whip your balls. Donkeys! Do you have any clue who I am?”

Mrs. Ma was summoned and she sternly informed the officers that she was the head of the residential committee, and there were absolutely no escaped rightists in her jurisdiction. The very thought, she murmured, was appalling. Everyone here had their papers and household registration in order, they could be sure of that. She tossed her sleek head and offered to escort the officers outside.

Beside the door, Sparrow said nothing. The pages of his symphony, flung aside by Ba Lute, had shoe prints on them. He went to gather them up.

Only when the officers were gone did Swirl turn to Big Mother. “Did they say that Wen escaped?”

“Yes,” she said. Her better eye moistened and she turned away to gauge the destruction that had befallen her house.

“But how?” Swirl said, sitting down. “Where could he go?”

Ba Lute blustered back into the room, yelling, “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what have I done?” Sparrow hustled his younger brothers into the kitchen, distracting them with little sugar pyramids and a quick game of Watching the Tiger, and then he went to the balcony and peered into the can that held the ashes of Wen the Dreamer’s letter. There were a dozen ends of cigarettes, a thick wad of tobacco but not a trace of the page, the writing or the words. Sparrow looked over the railing. In the laneway, the two officers were deep in agitated conversation. Mrs. Ma was firmly shaking her head. Waste water from the gutter circled their feet.

The letter had disappeared for good, Sparrow thought. It had dissolved into the air itself, escaped to where no officer, spy or
committee chairman could ever retrieve it. At the first opportunity, when no one else was around, he would tell Aunt Swirl what Wen the Dreamer had written.

—

Sparrow left with Zhuli, his cousin clutching her violin case in both arms, walking with one foot narrowly in front of the other as if she regretted every inch of space she inhabited. 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. Bicycles whizzed so close their handlebars clipped his elbows. How unlike Ba Lute he was. Given his father’s heft, Sparrow felt soft, flimsy and inessential.

The tram arrived. Zhuli turned and smiled distractedly back at him before the rippling blue of her dress disappeared among the other passengers. They did not meet up again until the gates of the Conservatory, where she called down to him from above. 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. Inside the gates, the pianist Yin Chai, the brightest star of the Conservatory and admittedly appealing in army-style shirt and trousers, was sitting on a bench. He had returned from Moscow after taking second place in the Tchaikovsky competition and everywhere he went, or so it seemed to Sparrow, a flood of stage lights followed him.

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

The chatter of the students drummed at him like a headache. He smiled to hide his envy and fell back on a cliché, “ ‘Can the sparrow and swallow know the will of the great swan?’ Yin Chai is a national treasure.”

“I prefer your compositions to his melodrama.”

“Do you?” Sparrow said, unable to believe it. Yet when his cousin played his work, it was as if she sifted the dust away, lost the notes and found the music.

He told Zhuli he would come find her in Room 103, her preferred practice room, and then dodged the crowd and climbed the imposing staircase. On the ground floor, all five hundred of the Conservatory’s pianos seemed to be singing and feuding together. He skirted Room 204 with its gongs and cymbals, 313 with its many-stringed zithers, and the violin-making workshops of 320. On the fourth floor, he glanced past an open door and saw the President of the Conservatory, He Luting, deep in conversation with a cadre Sparrow didn’t recognize. “That’s your decision,” He Luting was saying, “but exactly what constitutes a crime these days?” President He was famously blunt. Occasionally he invited Sparrow to his home to drink lemonade, listen to records and read over his compositions. The whole Conservatory knew that, when He Luting was a child, his elder brother had owned a French music text, and the book so enthralled Comrade He that, at night, he would sneak downstairs and copy it out by hand. Fascinated by the construction of Western music, he taught himself staff notation. When he finally became a Conservatory student in the 1920s, he was famous for falling out of bed with his hands still moving in the air. Sparrow longed to know what He Luting had been playing in his dreams. Had he been performing or composing? Had he been dreaming of his teacher, Huang Zi, who had himself studied under Paul Hindemith? Could dreams shed light on the architecture of the music in his head? Sparrow, too, dreamed all the time of things he had not written. Each morning when he woke, he heard these pieces like a vanishing noise in the street, and he wanted to weep over the music he had lost.

“No need to waste time. Just put your threats in
Liberation Daily
and see what else I say–” He Luting’s glasses had slipped far down his nose. In response, the stranger wore a complacent smile. Sparrow hurried on.

Further along the corridor, he arrived at the office he shared with Old Wu, a prodigy who played the erhu as if it were no more strenuous than clipping his toenails. He hadn’t seen Old Wu in weeks.

On Sparrow’s desk was a note written in the margins of a scrap of newspaper: “Teacher Sparrow, thank you for lending me your copy of
Musical Life of the Germans
. I read it in a single sitting and couldn’t sleep all night. Shall I come by your office today, around one? Respectfully yours, Jiang Kai.” Sparrow reread the letter. At one this afternoon, Yin Chai would be performing Tchaikovsky in the auditorium to oceanic waves of applause. Kai must have forgotten.

Sparrow slipped the note into his desk. The four ivory walls of the little room seemed to angle towards the window’s opening. He took out his Symphony No. 3, shoeprints and all, and laid the first movement across his desk. Try as he might, he could not smooth out the crumpled pages. He took up his pencil anyway.

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. The ticking in the first measures was a quote from Prokofiev’s whirring machines in Symphony No. 7, and in the foreground was a dance, allegro risoluto, quickening until the bars were rickety with steps, twisting free at last like a gunshot to the sky. A free fall into the second movement, a scherzo, a trio of violins that did not sound like themselves, withdrawing as winds and brass began a slow march. A sound gone just as it was learning to be heard.

From the opposite wall, Chairman Mao gazed at him with a knowing smile. What have you ever written, Chairman Mao said chidingly, that is original? What can you possibly say that is worthy? Time passed and the paper grew warm in its patch of morning light. Three-quarters of Sparrow’s time was spent meeting quotas for the latest political campaign, and the other quarter teaching composition music theory. His own Symphony No. 1
had been performed, and well reviewed, only to be criticized by the Union of Composers. The symphony, they said, suffered from formalism and useless experimentation; the solemnity of the third movement did nothing to elevate the People; and the meaning, overall, was not immediately clear. If it hadn’t been for He Luting’s protection, the criticisms would have been far worse. Symphony No. 2, which he knew to be a work of great beauty, languished in his desk drawer, having never even been submitted for approval. Last month, he had set six poems of Wang Wei and Bertolt Brecht to music but these, Sparrow knew, were better left unheard. His students wanted revolutionary accessibility and his superiors tried to educate him on the correct political line, but what line could this be? As soon as he contained it in his hand, it opened its wings and filled the sky. What musical idea stayed fixed for a year or a lifetime, let alone a revolutionary age?

He squeaked open his desk drawer and looked again at Kai’s confident handwriting. Like He Luting, Kai had come from the remote countryside, he was playful and virtuosic, possessed an extraordinary memory, and loved music as mysteriously, as confusedly, as Sparrow himself. But Kai was prepared to succeed. To be a renowned musician, one surely had to be already successful in one’s own mind; only musicians with this nature could rise above the others. Life, Sparrow felt, would have no choice but to be generous to Kai.

He tried not to think of his own diminishing opportunities. He erased the last twenty measures he had written. For a long time, he sat, thinking, until the room itself became another room. On the empty page, a line came to him. The line moved forward along a steepening curve. He followed it, no longer conscious of the act of writing.

—

The morning passed. Sparrow was thinking of the letter from Wen the Dreamer and the mysterious Comrade Glass Eye when the door jumped open and Zhuli appeared, pale as an unlit candle.
She was holding a green thermos, her violin case and a paper bag. “Cousin,” she said, “isn’t your stomach rumbling? I waited for you in Room 103, but you never came!”

He had forgotten. She waved his apology away and grinned. In her old blue dress, Zhuli looked tired but also energized, older than her fourteen years. He got up and went to the little table laid with cups and dishes, picked out two that were the least tea-stained, and examined the package of pear syrup candies that Old Wu had received from an admirer, a girl nicknamed Biscuit. Old Wu had sampled one and abandoned the remainder.