Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (11 page)

On the fourth night of her stay, Big Mother lay awake. This entire mud hut, she thought, was smaller than the pantry in Wen the Dreamer’s former house. The straw roof, of poor quality, needed to be replaced, it sounded like an ancestor shivering in
the wind. She closed her eyes and a fragment of the famous poem that she had recited at Swirl’s wedding came back to her:

The marriage of a girl, away from her parents

Is the launching of a little boat on a great river.

You were very young when your mother died

Which made me the more tender of you.

Your elder sister has looked out for you,

And now you are both crying and cannot part,

Yet it is right that you should go on….

The words came from an earlier version of this country, another dream. On the kang, Little Zhuli dug her heels into Big Mother’s back as if to say, “There isn’t enough heat to go around! Keep me warm, old lady, or go your own way.” How could such a puny creature take up so much space? Fed up, Big Mother climbed out of bed. The little devil grunted in satisfaction, expanding into the warmth she had left behind.

Big Mother found her shoes. She shook them out ferociously. When she was satisfied no prickly creatures had nested there, she slipped them on. Overtop a second sweater, she buttoned her padded coat, pulled down her woollen hat and went out.

The winter air was not so terrible as she had feared. Big Mother pointed her good eye right then left, taking stock of her position. The moon was muffled by clouds and so she trusted the compass inside her own head, walking downhill until the trees fell away and she was surrounded by snow-draped land. A fallen branch sat on the crisp whiteness. She picked it up.

“But why am I awake,” she asked herself, “and on whom will I use this weapon?”

Her heart, which earlier had been thumping, quieted. When she reached the elegant house, Big Mother did not hesitate. She lifted her stick, strode confidently through the gateless entrance and climbed the first staircase.

Bit by bit, her good eye adjusted to the pall. Here and there she could make out clumps of rubble but not a whiff of furniture.

This morning, she had asked Swirl, innocuously, if the item she wished to retrieve was difficult to reach. “Yes and no,” Swirl had said. “Do you remember the steps in the east wing that go up to the alcove?” Instead of ascending all the way, her sister told her, the stairs served as a ladder to reach a high shelf, a very long, narrow ledge. “On the far side, there’s a little opening below the roof. It’s a headache to get to it, a person could slip and break their neck. The peasants’ association will surely look in easier places first.” Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick, she paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:

When the mind is exalted,

the body is lightened

and feels as if it could float in the wind.

This city is famed as a centre of letters;

and all you writers coming here

prove that the name of a great land

is made by better things than wealth.

She ascended.

The ledge, when she reached it, was indeed narrow, barely half a foot across and stretching far along the wall. The wraiths, however, had done her a favour because the shelf, stripped clean, was clear of obstacles.

Unwieldy as a pigeon, cursing the thick coat she wore, she stepped out onto the shelf. “I refuse,” she told herself, “to end up a bag of bones on the floor for my sister to carry away.” Big Mother inched along the ledge. She could feel her feet sweating inside her shoes. She cursed the God of Literature for not telling her to bring along Flying Bear. Her smallest son could be counted on to do
stupid things like this. At last, the shelf ended. She groped blindly for the hiding place but could not find it. As she reached out once more, she lost her footing. Her hip jutted out, she flailed wildly for a handhold but grasped only air. One foot kicked out. Big Mother flung herself desperately to the right. She collided with the wall, her right hand shot wide and then, just as her thoughts slowed and she knew she was done for, her fingers caught on an opening. Big Mother held on for dear life, her fingers squeezing so hard she could feel the small bones scraping together. The room straightened. She was still standing, one leg up in the air.

She started to laugh, but thinking better of it, grew serious. In this opening, she found, just as Swirl had said, a cardboard box. Still, she wanted to be sure and so, with one hand, she undid the string, pushed off the lid, and slipped her hand into the opening. She had never held the notebooks before but their surfaces seemed utterly familiar to her, as if the Book of Records had touched her fingers a thousand times before.

“Old God,” she said gleefully. “I shouldn’t have cursed you. Look what I’ve found!”

With one arm cupped around the box, she waddled back along the beam, alighted on the platform, descended the stairs and took hold of her weapon once more.

Air swelled her lungs as she retraced her steps. The walking stick served her well, reminding her of the sighted child leading the blind musicians through the rubble of war and away from the obliterated town. It was a lifetime ago, and the child must be grown now. Big Mother hurried through a passage that led to the inner courtyard until she arrived, finally, gulping clean air, under the night sky. In their clarity, the stars seemed to exist within arm’s reach. Was it this box in her arm that was pushing open so many doors in her memory? What kind of creature was this book? She thought of Swirl’s little boy, the one who had died in 1942. He had been only a few years older than Sparrow but, unlike Sparrow, had never seemed afraid of gunshots, explosions, screams or fire. She
remembered lifting his small body from her sister’s arms, and how the tears Swirl wept had seemed to burn Big Mother’s skin.

This house, she perceived, would one day decay to rubble. It would disappear from the face of the earth and leave no imprint, 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.

—

That night, Sparrow woke in the darkness. Music was seeping from the walls, entering the room where he and his two younger brothers slept. Music was mixing with his brothers’ uneven snoring, as if both children performed in unison from the same corner of the orchestra. The five-year-old, Flying Bear, was small, pretty and he snored like a tank. He must have been kicking at his brother because Da Shan was squeezed up against the wall, having relinquished both blanket and pillow. Already, at the age of seven, Da Shan was an ascetic, preferring hot water and steamed bread to all else; the boy was determined to join the People’s Liberation Army at the earliest opportunity.

Sparrow had been dreaming. In the dream, he had been walking along the first floor of the Shanghai Conservatory, past a room where violinists were lined up like figurines in a shop window, past a stately chamber with a guzheng, pipa and dulcimer, arriving at last in a hall where seven grand pianos stood like mighty oaks. Through the shimmering windows, the nighttime sky was exhaling into morning. 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. Sparrow wanted to step out of the way but he was too slow and the notes collided into him. They ran up and down his spine, and seemed to dismantle him into a thousand pieces of the whole, where each part was more complete and more alive than his entire self had ever been.

As he lay in bed, Sparrow wondered if Herr Bach had ever dreamed of Shanghai. He pushed the covers aside and sat up. Seeing Flying Bear’s annexation of the whole bed, Sparrow pulled him backwards; the boy bleated angrily. Da Shan, sensing open space around him, rolled back from the edge. Sparrow left the room.

There was music trickling through the house. He’d forgotten his slippers and the floor bit him with its coldness, but still he kept walking until he reached his father’s study. The door was ajar, music escaped through the opening. Knowing that his father would be angry if he saw him, Sparrow made not a whisper of noise. So when Ba Lute called out to him, at first he could think of no response.

His father spoke again. “It’s warm in here, Sparrow. Come in.”

Sparrow entered the room.

Ba Lute was sitting on a low chair before the record player. He was hunched over, almost wilted, and hardly looked himself. The apartment was hollow without Big Mother Knife, Sparrow concluded. Her discontent and foul mouth were as fundamental to their lives as the beams of the house, the food they ate, and his father’s Communist Party membership.

“I’ve heard this piece of music a hundred times before,” Ba Lute said. “But to hear it alone, in the night, is really something.”

Thick smoke from his father’s Flying Horse cigarettes made Sparrow’s eyes water, but still he ventured further into the room, sitting down at his father’s desk. Ba Lute did not object. The music went on, merging with the smoke, now quick and light, quarter notes blurring like a flash of wings, a tapering branch. Ba Lute had bowed his head. His eyes were half closed as if he was looking at something inside himself. When the second side ended, he turned the record over and set it playing again. 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.

“But what if there’s trouble?” Ba Lute said. “Does she think they’re immune?”

Sparrow looked up. Who are they, he wondered.

Wanting to sound like the son of a Communist hero, Sparrow said, “We could go and rescue her.”

His father didn’t answer.

The music continued.

Sparrow walked out into the moonscape of the fifteenth variation, side by side with his father and yet separated from him. 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. It was so distinguished and yet so real, that he sighed audibly thinking that, even if he composed music for a hundred thousand years, he would never attain such grace.

“There’s no future in music,” Ba Lute said. His voice held no reproach. He could have been saying that this room was square and the motherland had twenty-two provinces, one autonomous region, and a population of 528 million. Sparrow listened as if his father were speaking to some other individual, to the portraits of Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai and Vice-Premier Liu Shaoqi, for instance, that gazed at them intelligently from the wall. His father’s face seemed to fall in line with the portraits. “When you were a child, fine, it was okay to be a dreamer. But you’re a bit wiser now, aren’t you? Isn’t it time to start reading the papers and building your future? In a new world, one must learn new ways. You should be studying Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought with greater fervour! You should be applying yourself to revolutionary culture. 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.’ ”

The sixteenth variation came upon them majestically, a stately entrance garnished with trills. As the notes quickened,
they seemed to carry Sparrow with them. He saw an immense square filled with sunshine.

“When you practically
live
in the Conservatory,” his father was saying, “when you shut the door to that practice room, do you think no one hears you? Do you believe, truly, that no one notices that you have played Bach for seventy-nine consecutive days, and before that Busoni for thirty-one days! You refuse to trouble yourself with the erhu, pipa or sanxian. And I have done so much for the land reform campaign! I have been a model father, no one can say otherwise…” Ba Lute drank morosely and fell silent. “Why do you love this Bach and this Busoni? What does it have to do with you?”

His father stood up, circled the room until he came face to face with the portrait of Premier Zhou Enlai. “Of course Bach had his faith, too,” Ba Lute conceded. “The poor son of a rabbit had more duties than our own Party Secretary: every week another mass, fugue, cantata, as if Bach was a factory not a human being. But look at my life, Sparrow.” From the portrait, Premier Zhou seemed to nod in sympathy. “Every week, fifty performances in schools, factories, villages, meetings! I’m a machine for the Party and I’ll perform on my deathbed if necessary. Old Bach understood that music serves a greater purpose, but don’t I know this, too? Doesn’t Chairman Mao?…In your heart, Sparrow, you think the foreigner is a brighter comrade than your own father.” Ba Lute let out a heavy sigh. “What is it that he promises you? At some point, you must stop stealing Bach’s chickens and get your own, isn’t it so?”

Outside the world was dark and the young wutong tree in the courtyard seemed to hold the weight of the winter night upon its thin crown. Sparrow wished that he could turn the hands of the clock forward, wind it another year, and then another, to when his symphonies would be played in the Conservatory’s auditorium. He imagined an immense orchestra of Mahlerian proportions, large enough to make the music inside him rattle the ceilings, vibrate the floor and realign the walls.