Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (25 page)

“My father’s love for her, meanwhile, was set to flow evermore towards her, no matter where she went or what she did, and it burned brightly until the end of his brief and patient life.

“Anyhow, by 1955 I was a bachelor and an orphan, and the Chairman chose this moment to launch his brightest campaign. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ he told us. ‘Let a hundred schools of thought contend!’ We were told we must question ourselves, our superiors, and the state of our nation so as to make a country that was both unified and just. Young Sparrow, I had spent too long in my workshop, alone with my crystal radios, homemade batteries and amplifiers, in a closed room where inanimate objects listened to me and to one another. So I came forward with my mother’s letter in my hand and I asked that her crimes be forgiven and forgotten. I thought that if she was rehabilitated, she would be allowed to come out of exile and return to China, and I could see her once more. Love is a revolutionary act, I argued. My mother had broken with the Old Ways, with the suffocating hierarchies of Confucianism, and she had embraced her destiny.

“What a mistake. I should better have argued that Emperor Hirohito and Chiang Kai-shek deserved a villa in France, paid for by the Communist Party of China. I should have heeded the wise saying,
no flower can bloom for a hundred days
. Every joke ends! At first, they listened to me and were compassionate. ‘Brave Edison,’ they said, ‘it is right that you show this fidelity to your lost mother. You are a faithful son of the Revolution!’ The Hundred Flowers Movement was still a spring bouquet and anything could be said. It was an exciting time, my friend. All of us, young and old, were awakening towards freedom. I felt a deep pride in my country and I know I wasn’t the only one. So of course, I didn’t stop there. I went on about the waste in the village bureaucracy, the favours and bribes that bankrupted the poor, the laughable quality of our scientific education, even the quality of our trains. ‘With all the gifts of our homeland,’ I proclaimed, ‘we should be the flowering tree of modernity!’

“The Anti-Rightist Campaign began. Everyone with something to lose, from our Great Helmsman to the local village brute, had heard enough. They summoned me to a meeting in town. I was convinced that my mother had finally arrived and I would see her again! I spent a fortune on a new set of clothes and a jade necklace for her. A very bourgeois thing to do, I admit. When I arrived at the hall, there were hundreds of people already there. I searched every face for hers. A dozen times I thought I saw her.

“I heard my name echoing on the loudspeaker. It was as if I was underwater and my name was breaking apart in the current. Two cadres pushed me up onto the stage where a man stood, holding my mother’s letter. I was ecstatic. I looked all around, convinced she waited behind the curtains. The man waved the letter in my face to get my attention. I tried to focus. The man accused me of bourgeois familial tendencies and gross sympathy for the enemy. ‘What enemy?’ I asked, confused. He slapped my face. Enraged, I tried to grab the letter from his hands but it ripped. I had to get away, I thought, so that I could find her. She was somewhere in this room. ‘Ma,’ I called. ‘I am here. Where have they put you?’ The two cadres
tied my arms with ropes as if I was a beast. The crowd began to shout my name and curse me. I thought it was a dream. Someone was bleeding but it couldn’t be me. Someone was being beaten for the edification of the crowd, but surely it wasn’t me. I imagined that the letter expanded and covered me and hid me and everything became dark. I woke up when they emptied a bucket of water on me, and then I shouted in rage and called them betrayers, monsters and ghosts. My words touched no one; instead, they were recorded in a file. This is how I know what was said: because the words have been repeated back to me so many times since then.

“I was carted away to Jiabangou. For months I simply refused to believe that I was there. Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets, empty the public toilets and denounce their own husbands. We could protest all we wanted but it made no difference. The guards told us we were lucky that, not only had we been spared execution, but we had a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet.

“There are many stages to hunger. By 1959, they were burying us by the truckload. The cold, young Sparrow, was metallic, bitter, and had appetites of its own. The cold crawls into your body and destroys you from the inside. Even the camp leaders told us not to waste our last days on this earth digging ditches. So we were free: free to wander the desert in search of something to eat. Wen the Dreamer used to say it was like searching an empty pocket for coins. Still, we persevered. There were times when the only thing we carried back, after an entire day of scavenging, was each other. Nothing in our stomachs but an echo. Wen weighed no more than a ten-year-old child. Often we didn’t have the energy to return to the caves and so we slept, unsheltered, in the open.

“When he was weak, we sat so close our heads touched. He would pick up the story he’d been telling me as if he’d just set it
down a moment ago, as if he had only to close his eyes and find the right page. His chest had caved in, his eyes had grown frighteningly large, and his bones were knives, but I think Wen was most afraid of silence. Again and again, he told me that his daughter was the light of his days and his wife was the centre of his world. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her, too. Every lovely thing in the air was his beloved Swirl: the turquoise sky, sand that shimmered like stars, the sunlight that touched our rough skins. He spoke to her at night as if she was seated beside us; when he had a fever, he would crawl out of the cave determined to find food for her. Once I saw him washing grains of sand in a pot of water, convinced that he was cleaning the rice for his suffering Swirl. But even mad, he could tell stories. Maybe he told them better than in saner days, I wouldn’t know. We swore never to leave one another because the worst fate would be to feel abandoned in this frozen and beautiful world. It is one thing to suffer, another thing to be forgotten.

“Later on, he rarely spoke his wife’s name. Instead, he occupied himself by telling a story that had no beginning and no end, and that was born of the Revolution. One of the characters, May Fourth, reminded me very much of my own mother. May Fourth leaves her life and disappears into the wilderness; meanwhile, Da-wei searches for his family across the ocean and the desert. Wen could divide their lives into pieces and distribute them over a hundred days or over a thousand.

“One day, I recognized myself in the story: there was suddenly a young man who made glass eyes for a living and felt most at ease, most himself, among the partially sighted and the blind. I also began to recognize the lives of our fellow inmates in Jiabangou. I heard the echo of their star-crossed loves and youthful dreams. In the end, I never knew how much Wen the Dreamer made up, or how much was part of the original book he had memorized. Perhaps no one knows but the author himself; even Wen has lost track of where he begins and where the story joins him. He has become far more than a skilled calligrapher.

“The Year of the Rat arrived. It was 1960. Strings were pulled by a childhood friend of my mother who had heard of my case and worked discreetly to have me freed. I was unexpectedly resurrected. I was literally brought back to life because, in a few months’ time, there would be almost no ‘rightists’ left. Professors, thinkers and scientists, leaders who had taken part in the Long March, grandfathers who had spilled blood for the Party, good men, weak men, honest and conniving men, bachelor men and men with a dozen desperate children: they were no more. Our great Communist community turned away as these human beings were ground to dust.

“I had to leave, even if it meant breaking my promise and abandoning Wen. The last time I saw him, your uncle told me that he had made a plan of escape. I actually laughed. Getting out was impossible. He might as well have made a plan to turn Mao Zedong into Charlie Chaplin. I told him his ragged clothes weighed more than he did. Worse, there was nowhere to go. The Party guarded the train station as if it were a storehouse of gold.

“ ‘But I am not gold,’ he said.

“ ‘Then what are you, my friend?’

“ ‘Just a copy of a copy. A migrating soul.’

“He was mad, I thought, and soon would leave this world. This was the only escape open to him. I hid my grief and I said to him, ‘One day the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Jiabangou will be common knowledge, the way the Boxer Rebellion and the Long March are written into our books and our memories. My brother, we will not be abandoned by history.’

“Wen said to me, ‘That will not happen in our lifetimes, nor the lifetime of this stone beneath my foot.’ Then he looked down at the ground on which there were no visible stones, only dry grass and splintered branches. Who was right? It’s too soon to say.

“There was no one around us, there was not even a breeze. There was no one to overhear me but I had gotten into the habit of whispering. But what could I say that was honest and true? What had I learned in these three terrible years? Did I know more about
living or dying? ‘Wen,’ I said, ‘this country exists in fear. I am a rationalist and a scientific man. I believe the rules of life become ever more intricate, there are unseen wires from each to each that we cannot see, not yet. We are here to learn and not to forget, here to question and not to answer. You are a man of questions. Of all the destinies of the world, this is a heroic one, and yet it carries suffering for it is hard to live with so little certainty. Why were we sent here to Jiabangou? Whose purpose did it serve? For I believe it must serve some purpose: we are the builders of the Revolution and also its scapegoats.’

“ ‘Escape is the only answer,’ Wen said.

“ ‘Escape is death.’

“Wen smiled. He had wasted away. If he lay down to rest his head, I feared he might never rise again. He said, ‘I would never walk knowingly to my death.’

“He showed me his suitcase. Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. What new movement could the Party proclaim that would bring these dead souls into line? What crackdown could erase something that was hidden in plain sight?

“ ‘This is my fate,’ Wen the Dreamer told me. ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.’

“And so he escaped,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “With the suitcase, I am sure, and convinced of his destiny.” He wiped his eyes. “I am glad Wen the Dreamer sent you to me, but I wonder which story he wanted you to hear. You know how it is: pull one thread, and the whole curtain unravels.”

“He wanted me to hear just the story you told,” Sparrow said. “I am sure of it.”

“There is the engineer we called Geiger, and also the former soldier, Paper Gun.” He waved at the air as if the two men were standing beside him. “I was given the name Comrade Glass Eye. Perhaps that is the lesson the Party wanted us to learn: in our basic needs–air, water, food, and shelter–nothing separates the doctor from the flea, the educated from the ignorant. So, in fact, I was re-educated after all. I learned this lesson all too well.”

Across the clear morning, Sparrow could see Kai bringing water to the garden, ladling it out with a small container.

“If you had to guess, where do you think my uncle might have gone?”

“Wen the Dreamer has no identity papers and he has, therefore, little room to manoeuvre.” The old man shook his head. “He is a refugee in his own country. There are two routes that I can see: either the northern journey of May Fourth into the desert, or across the ocean like Da-wei. Which would your uncle choose?”

“Neither. He will not leave my Aunt Swirl or Zhuli.”

“Agreed. Regardless of his trajectory, you will hear from him.”

“Yes,” Sparrow said. “He can’t prevent himself from putting pen to paper.”

The old man laughed. He seemed to emit light for a moment and then the light wavered and dimmed.

“Come,” Comrade Glass Eye said. “I think your friend has recovered from last night’s festivities. He is ready to continue playing music for us and I’m ready to rest my feet and close my eyes, bend my head, and listen attentively. I remember now that Wen the Dreamer always began his stories with the greeting, ‘Kàn guān. Dear listener.’ ”

—

That same day, while practising Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Zhuli could not stop thinking about her parents. Had Swirl and Big Mother Knife reached Gansu Province? What was the
probability that her father would come across an altered copy of the Book of Records? It was as likely, Zhuli thought, as her being invited to play Prokofiev before Chairman Mao and the villagers of Bingpai.

She had been just a child then, only six years old, when she discovered the underground library. Sitting alone, frozen by the winter sun, she had seen a stranger emerging from the soil. His head had seemed to lift from the ground as if he were crawling out of his own grave. The stranger turned north, his long, baggy body melting into the trees. Zhuli had stood, peering after him. Was he an escaped convict or just a stranger passing through? Maybe it was the ghost of her great-grandfather, Old West.

Zhuli went to investigate. After the land reform had been achieved, after they had been assigned the mud brick house, Zhuli had been expelled from the village school. The child of a disgraced landlord, the peasants’ association decided, should study the textbook of the fields and the equations of the sky. Besides, she already knew how to read and should no longer take up precious space. With nowhere to go and no one to play with, Zhuli had tried to stay with her parents in the fields, but she got in the way of the plough and cut her feet on the sharp rice stalks. Her mother, exasperated, yelled at her to go home. She obeyed but inside the hut, the loneliness became unbearable.