Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (23 page)

“At least another day and night,” Sparrow said.

“I’m glad to hear it, and by the way, Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the incomparable Communist Party!” His throat crackled when he said the words and he had to stop and cough in between. “Last night, my little niece told me she heard Shanghai musicians performing at the Small Peach Garden and I knew it must be you.” He flicked open his fan as if snapping open a knife. “Hot, isn’t it? Wuhan, you know, the furnace of the South.” As he waved the fan in slow, brutal strokes, he recounted how, before the war, he had lived in Shanghai and studied the violin briefly with Tan Hong. “By the way, my name is Old Huang, but please address me as Jian, as my friends do. Not the jiān that means ‘flounder’ but jiān as in the mythical bird with one eye and one wing.” He pulled his chair closer towards them and whispered, full of emotion, “Please tell me about my dear friend Tan Hong. Does he still teach at the Shanghai Conservatory?”

They spent half the morning eating melon seeds and discussing the state of music.

Jian invited them to stay with him. “It’s a simple room,” he said, lifting his right arm and fanning the top of his head. “Hardly fit for two celebrated musicians such as yourselves, but the garden has fine acoustics. When I heard you on the bus, I realized that it’s been far too long since I heard anyone play the erhu with such articulated feeling. And if I may be frank, Comrade Sparrow, I feel I already know you. Last year at the Wuhan Cultural Palace, visiting musicians performed your String Quintet in C Major. It is an understatement of unforgivable proportions to say that your compositions enraptured me. Truly, such intricate counterpoint and depth of feeling is unusual in these times. Please honour me with your presence!”

Sparrow accepted on their behalf.

In Jian’s dwelling, after a lunch of fiery noodles, they sat in the shade of a parasol tree and smoked. Sparrow felt grateful for the sun touching the top of his head and the tops of his knees, for the pale yet bitter tea and the fragrant sponge cake that Jian had divided into two large pieces, with one tiny sliver for himself. His thoughts turned inward and he settled on the composition lecture he wanted to give on revolutionary expressionism, Schönberg’s
Treatise on Harmony
, and Tcherepnin’s essay on folk music’s eternal line. “Developing variation,” he would begin, quoting Schönberg, “means that we begin with a basic unit, and from this unit elaborate the idea of a piece. As composers, keep in mind fluency, contrast, variety, logic and unity, on the one hand, and character, mood, expression on the other….”

Just then, Jian slapped his head as if he had forgotten to put out the brazier. He ran out and, when he returned, he carried a very old, astonishingly beautiful violin. He offered it to Kai who in turn handed it to Sparrow, who accepted it with solemnity. Under the elderly man’s watchful gaze, Sparrow tuned the instrument. He felt the thinness of the strings and the fragility of the violin’s body. What music would best suit an instrument of this pedigree and seniority, he wondered. He wiped the strings down and considered the possibilities. Finally, he lifted the instrument and played the opening aria from Handel’s Xerxes, and then Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words.” The violin was worldly-wise and expressive. Sparrow glanced at Jian. Their host sat in the shadows and remembered and smiled and seemed to grow young again.

When Sparrow finished, he offered the violin back to its owner.

“Now that we are familiar as brothers,” Jian said, accepting it, “may I ask what brings you to Wuhan? I assume it is not just to see the renowned Guqin Terrace.” His broad forehead caught the afternoon light in a melancholic way.

“Comrade Kai and I are collecting folk songs from Hebei Province.” After a moment, he added, “And, if circumstances allow, I’m looking for a friend of my family.”

Jian nodded. He allowed Sparrow’s trust to rest in the air for a moment before answering. “Tell me the friend’s name and perhaps I can assist you. You see, I work in the town planning office, and keep track of all the permits, births, deaths, promotions, demotions and rehabilitations. I am the keeper of all the numbers in this town, and know them horizontally, vertically and upside down. Our world is made of numbers,” the old man said and smiled sadly, “and long may the fires of Revolution burn.”

“I know this friend only as Comrade Glass Eye.”

Jian took up the violin, thinking. He played an echo of Handel’s
Xerxes
, and then held a low E / D-sharp while leaning forward in his chair. “I have a friend who suits that description but does not normally carry that name. You look surprised,” Jian said, smiling, “but this is not so surprising because, as you know, I’m called Jian, after the one-eyed bird. This left eye, you see, is made of glass, and I have worn a prosthetic eye ever since I was a teenager.” Jian half turned his face so that he looked first at Sparrow, then at Kai, with his glass eye. Sparrow leaned towards it, mesmerized. “My friend’s name is Teacher Ai Di Sheng and he has made my glass eye ever since I lost the original. But then, in 1958, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, he was labelled a rightist and sent to a reform-through-labour camp in the Northwest. A year after he was detained, my only glass eye was stolen! I was devastated. I preferred to starve and die rather than to show my empty eye cavity in this town. For many years, I wore a scarf to hide the wound. There is no eye left behind, you see.”

As Sparrow stared, the eye shone with a disconcerting light.

“When Teacher Ai Di Sheng was resurrected and came home, I felt as if I, myself, had been released from the edge of the world. Without the prosthetic, I knew this society would never accept me or see me as one of its own. I had heard labour camp conditions were miserable, and so I brought him a basket of food, the best I could find under the circumstances, and some food coupons I had been saving. It wasn’t much but gifts like this were
extremely rare back then. He had to make the new eye three times because he hadn’t held a glass tube or a paintbrush in ten years, and his hands shook continuously. I was the first to visit him, but eventually his patients began arriving from across the province. Truly, he is famous in these parts.”

Carefully, Jian lifted the violin that was resting on his knee like a beloved cat and set it inside its battered case. A moment later, Sparrow felt a light rain beginning to fall.

“I’ll pay him a visit this evening,” Jian said. “If he agrees, we can go and see him tomorrow. Your timing is perfect because he’s been on my mind recently. Teacher Ai is not a young man and he lives all alone.”

He began to gather the tea things. When they stood to help him, he smiled and laughed again, and he seemed a young man, younger than they, as if his eye would never grow old and it carried him along, subtly renewed.

—

Sparrow woke before dawn. In the small room, shapes swam out of the darkness: a writing table and the spindly leaves of a spider plant, peeling wallpaper and a cloth cap hunched over a hook on the door. Kai’s breathing seemed to come from the bed itself: from the long pillow they shared and a quilt rumpled around them. Sparrow felt aware of every creak of the bed and the window frames, of the nearness of the wall and of Kai. He heard the low splash of water falling into a bucket followed by silence, and wondered if the gentleman violinist was this very moment slipping the glass eye into its orbit. He recalled how the prosthetic had not stayed still but had moved minutely as Jian spoke. It shifted more slowly than the other eye as if it had a mind of its own. Kai was awake now. He turned onto his side and lightly touched Sparrow’s jaw and neck, above the curve of Sparrow’s collarbone. This near to one another, it was impossible to hide. All his life, he had slept on mats and narrow cots beside his brothers and his classmates, but for the first time he felt the intimacy of what it meant to lie
beside another person. The sudden heat in Sparrow’s skin grew shameful and humiliating but Kai did not turn away. He left his hand where it was, and then he laid his palm flat against Sparrow’s chest as if to hold him where he was, always at a remove yet always near. Desire, or something so small as love, was subservient to revolution; this truth he knew, but the truth Sparrow felt led to another life entirely. He knew, or feared, they could not be reconciled. Outside, they heard the old man humming to himself. Kai drew back, pushed the cover aside and got out of the bed.

—

The sun was still low and the town misty when the three of them climbed onto Jian’s moped, a vehicle allocated to him by the town planning office. They flew along a paved road that gradually broke down into stone, then gravel, then white dust, as if they were moving through time, to an age before stones and cities, or perhaps to an era in the future. Or this is how Sparrow felt with Kai seated behind him, the pianist’s hands on Sparrow’s waist, holding on against the force of their speed.

Initially, he worried that Jian would not see vehicles, plough animals or bicycles approaching from the left, and he committed himself to keeping watch, but as the town shrank and the sky brightened, he began to feel as if nothing bad could happen to them. Jian was wearing a cap with furred earflaps, one of which was pinned up, the other flapping freely in the wind, so he seemed truly one-winged and folkloric. At length, Jian turned onto a narrow road heading east and navigated them towards daybreak, past a string of houses, down a mangy dirt lane, arriving finally at a mud brick house with asymmetrical gables. They came to a stop.

A wiry man of indiscernible age, wearing ill-fitting clothing and holding a watering can, was standing inside a patch of dust-covered vegetables. He set the can down and came forward to meet them. Jian hailed him with, “Long live Chairman Mao!” and introduced Sparrow and Kai as the celebrated musicians they had discussed the previous night. The wiry man nodded. “You’ve
suddenly materialized,” said Comrade Glass Eye, “like the travelling musical troupes who visited in the first years of our great Republic.” Even his voice was thin, as if his vocal cords were made of reeds. He studied them with both lightness and wariness.

Sparrow reached into his bag and withdrew a bulky package. He presented their host with a carton of Front Gate cigarettes, a bottle of cognac and a bag of White Rabbit sweets, which Ba Lute had given him to ease his journey through the province, calling them the new currency of the Republic.

“Gifts for Comrade Glass Eye,” Sparrow said, trying not to drop the bottle which was sliding out from between his fingertips.

The man’s head bobbed as he graciously accepted the gifts. “Very few people know me by that name,” he said. “Locally, I’m called Ai Di Sheng, after Thomas Edison, of course, because of my experiments with electricity. The villagers mean it as a joke, but a friendly joke. Sometimes the children and the drunkards call me Teacher Suiren, the fabled creator of fire. I guess I have been called many things. My workshop is just over here. Come in, please.”

He turned and began walking quickly towards the door beneath the second gable, the gifts rustling against his oversized shirt. Sparrow had to jog to keep up. Quietly, Comrade Glass Eye said to him, “Who instructed you to search for me by that name?”

“My uncle, known as Wen the Dreamer.”

The man showed no expression but kept on walking, balancing his gifts.

A wooden door opened without a creak or complaint and then a lamp hissed on although the man had touched nothing. Sparrow, Kai and Jian followed him inside. They dodged an enormous glass fishing buoy, climbed three steps, and entered a room with a single long table and a wall of shelves. Wires of light began to gleam, as if awoken by their movements. Comrade Glass Eye put his gifts down. He gestured towards the full yet uncluttered room and said, “You are welcome to look around.”

“Teacher,” Kai said, “is your main interest light?”

“It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.”

The man paused for breath and to consider the long table, which held only a few items. “Come and look at my eyes,” he said.

He lifted out a cabinet, set it before them, and slid open a drawer that curved to the side like a hidden wing. Laid out on a notched paper surface, in even rows of eight, were eyes. Another light crackled on automatically. The eyes were ordered in a spectrum from black to chestnut irises, each with a subtle interweaving of lines, fissures and depths. They were hollow half-spheres made to fit, the man said, over the non-working eye, or over a sphere which had been implanted in the socket.

“These are for the right side,” he said. He slid open the second drawer which extended in the opposite direction. Forty further glass eyes appeared. “And these are for the left. Each one is paired to another, but I prefer to store them separately.”

Sparrow inched closer, hypnotized by the play of colours and the unreal, discomfitting feeling of the eyes moving over him.

“It seems like yesterday,” said Jian, who had been silent until now, “that I first met Teacher Ai Di Sheng, in this very room. I had lost my eye when my best friend, in a regrettable moment, punched me in the face. How could I lose my eye over something so inconsequential? Afterward, I couldn’t eat or sleep properly, and when I looked at my reflection all I saw was the empty socket, as if my entire self was being funnelled into that small, ugly opening. All night I would sit in my dark room and play my violin and its voice was the only thing that comforted me. Only music could express my pure feeling. I was broken by the loss of that eye.