Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (35 page)

She heard scuffling nearby. Zhuli stood. A low moaning was coming from the cellars in the basement. Had someone been down there this entire time? Her body began to tremble. No, she told herself, her mind was troubled, she’d hardly slept. Still, she heard someone moaning in pain. Room 103 struck her, for the first time, as an echo of the underground library. Zhuli left the room, rushed up the stairs and out into the warm air. It was still early, still dark outside, as if the counting of time had paused and was only now being restarted again.

She had the family’s oil and grain coupons in her pocket and she walked in a daze, her hand over the opening, hiding them and protecting them. Since Big Mother and Swirl’s departure, it had been her responsibility to pick up the rations.

The queue for oil had already reached Julu Road. When she saw how long the line would take, her distraction turned into guilt. She should have come here first thing. It had been a mistake to go to the Conservatory, she had known better and yet, once again, she had followed stupidity and selfishness. She took her
place at the end of the line, behind a girl who wore nothing on her feet and whose eyes were squeezed shut. The cut of her hair was as blunt as an anvil. Nobody spoke. Every building was shrouded in red banners. A broken chair lay in the road beside a length of rope caked in what looked like ink. Three phrases swung together in her thoughts: Party-mindedness, people-mindedness, ideological content. It is my thinking, Zhuli thought. Everything correct becomes something poisoned. If only I could quiet my thoughts. She felt as if she hadn’t closed her eyes in days.

Distribution wouldn’t begin for another hour. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she would reach the front of the line by noon. If they ran out of oil, she would come again the next day. She would give in, she would forget the Conservatory and walk away. A weight lifted from her shoulders at this thought. “Yes,” she said, startling the girl beside her. She was addressing these thoughts to Kai, but the thoughts no longer seemed like hers. “There is always tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It is not too late to reform and grow.”

Around her, people, buildings, objects all appeared disproportionately large, not only their substance but their shadows too. Had there ever been such a light-filled July? She saw now that she was standing beside a wall covered in posters. “Denounce the…” “Destroy the…” “Rise up and…eradicate…shame.” The words, written in colossal characters of red ink, buzzed in her thoughts. “Bombard the headquarters!” It sounded like a game that Flying Bear and Da Shan had invented. How odd it must feel to write violent words in such orderly calligraphy. Zhuli shook the thought away. Dissonance required as precise a technique as beauty. In her mind, Prokofiev’s libretto kept repeating:
The philosophers have tried in different ways to explain the world; the point is to change it
. Prokofiev quoted Marx, the Red Guards quoted Chairman Mao, everyone shouted borrowed ideas, her classmates memorized the Chairman’s slogans and adopted his poetry as their own. So we are not so different from one another after all, Zhuli thought,
except that I speak in the language of Bach and the musical ideas of Prokofiev but still, none of us knows the true nature of our voices, no matter the cause, none of us speaks with our own words. At the core, is there only desire but no justice? All we’ve learned since the fall of the old dynasties is how to amplify the noise.

This noise was splitting inside her now. She heard Sparrow’s
Symphony No. 3
, as if from the air itself. Her own voice wept, “There is always tomorrow and the day after. It must not be too late.”

The line nudged forward.

—

Zhuli had nearly reached the head of the line. Each time she saw another person leaving, their full quota of rations in their exultant hands, she felt increasingly giddy. She allowed herself to count the people in front of her. Eighteen. It was midday, the shade had long retreated and, in the glare, the buildings were dissolving into watery reflections. She stepped to the side and peered ahead. Seventeen. The pavement had a dulled to grainy whiteness. There was a growing disturbance behind but Zhuli, focused only on obtaining the rations, didn’t turn. Voices chafed, followed by a woman’s fearful answer, a sagging E minor tone. She was easily drowned out by taunts. Still, Zhuli wouldn’t turn. Ahead of her the queue had begun to shift and in her exhausted thoughts, she saw the line as if from above, a millipede straining its tiny head forward. Zhuli was up against the barefoot girl in front of her, and when the girl turned, Zhuli turned as well, as if they were joined. She saw a woman being pulled from the lineup. The woman was her mother’s age. A Red Guard, a tall, spindly girl, was pushing down on the back of the woman’s neck as if the woman were an ox.

The woman was wearing a pale blouse and a navy skirt that fell below her knees. It must be her clothing, Zhuli thought dully, that had attracted the fury of the Red Guards. “Comrades, look at this trash!” the tall girl shouted, dragging the woman along the line. The girl was yelling so loudly her pink mouth seemed to swallow her face. Zhuli fought the urge to giggle, to dissolve in skittishness,
to turn away and hide her shock, but just at that moment the girl pushed the woman straight towards her. “Slap her insolent face!” the girl screamed. Zhuli froze. “Slap her!” the girl shouted. Someone next to Zhuli reached out and gave the woman a stinging slap. The sound, or was it the echo, was soft and drawn out. The woman’s face was hidden by her dark hair which had come loose from its elastic, and then her head was yanked back and Zhuli saw blood on the woman’s mouth, both full and delicate. The woman, she thought dully, was being punished because of the desire, the degeneracy, inside her. “You, Comrade!” the girl cried. Zhuli lifted her eyes. “Teach this whore a lesson!” Someone very near, a man, was speaking in her ear, “Go ahead, don’t be afraid. We all have lessons to learn, don’t hesitate!” The woman was so close to Zhuli she could see the trembling of her eyelids and new droplets of blood starting to form. The girl was screaming words that made no sense. “Where have I put the ration coupons?” Zhuli thought, perplexed. “Has the line moved? I don’t want to lose my place. I’ve been waiting such a very, very long time.” She lifted her right hand but nothing happened. “Go on,” the man urged. Softly, so softly: “What’s wrong? Don’t hesitate!” More and more people pressed towards them. The woman was suddenly yanked away. Zhuli’s hand remained open, as if she was waiting to catch something in the air. “Little capitalist spy,” the girl was saying. “Stinking whore!” The line was running forward. Someone appeared in the corner of her eye with an unthinkably large bag of flour. Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a plane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late.

“Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered. “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”

Was it the little girl with no shoes? But when she turned, she saw only a press of bodies and no sympathetic face. The queue no longer existed and had been reshaped by the crowd. Where were her ration coupons? Had somebody pulled them from her hand? No, they were still here, tucked in the pocket of her shirt. She felt nauseated and knew she would vomit. Where was the woman? What hideous flaw had they seen inside her? The crowd seemed to swell and hide her, separating her from the hysterical Red Guards, the mob was both a terror and safety. In its frenzy it was evolving from hundreds of bystanders into a single entity, a snake with a thousand eyes twisting this way and that, searching with ever greater intensity, magnifying every speck of dirt within it. The snake wound its long neck around and around. When it found her, it lifted her right up and forced her through the crowd. “Don’t be afraid,” she thought, “this is not real.” She found herself standing in another line. Was that her voice crying out? There were a dozen people with her, old women, mothers and even girls, staring in shock. Red Guards swaggered around them, pushing them to their knees. Zhuli felt a shock of pain as she hit the concrete. Momentarily she became dissociated, she was watching from a few steps away, she was a part of the crowd and could see the targets and also herself. A girl, a different girl, was coming with scissors. She was yanking the heads back one by one and cutting off great clumps of hair. “Disgusting bitches,” the girl repeated. Zhuli re-entered herself and felt the blinding snap of the scissors and then an alien lightness as a swath of hair fell. “It’s nothing,” she thought, “only I must not lose the ration coupons. Ba Lute will be very angry if I let them fall from my pocket.” Other things began to happen. Someone said, “Oh, this is the violinist. The stuck-up bitch whose father is a counter-revolutionary.” They pulled her bag from her, turned it upside down and the Beethoven score slid out in a wild flutter of pages. She heard crying and begging, the rough splitting of clothing, but Zhuli focused on the papers. “I know this filth. Her mother is a rightist dog!” They
were laughing at it, stomping on it, pretending to sing from it. People had arrived with dripping buckets and she saw streaks of black cutting through the air. They threw ink, or was it paint, on all the kneeling bodies. Zhuli bowed her head and it was as if the jeering and the spitting had broken the surface, everything was coming inside. The first three, five, seven slaps made her cry out in pain and anger but after that, there was a numbness as she began to lose feeling. Time expanded, just as it had in Bingpai when she was a child, and her father was kneeling in the centre of the room. She had wondered, then, why her father had not stood up. Why would they not let him rise? She thought of Ma and what passed from mother to daughter, from husband to wife, from one beloved to another, a bloodline, a touch, a virus. “I was the one who opened Old West’s library,” Zhuli thought, beginning to lose consciousness. “It was my mistake and it is destroying my parents’ lives. Every slap, kick and humiliation that I receive is one less for my mother. What am I inside? What is it they finally see?”

“I’m talking to you, you little slut!” They kept shouting. Her head was pulled back again. “How did this dirty whore slip through?” “Confess who you are!” They were screaming through their loudspeakers right into her ears as if they wanted to deafen her. They slapped the side of her head over and over. Is it a crime to be myself? Is it a crime to disbelieve? She wanted to weep at her own slowness, her own naïveté. The ink drying on her face made the skin tight and painful. All the other women were confessing to something. Zhuli seemed to be the only one still kneeling. She knew she was guilty but she could not confess. Around her, the crowd gave the impression of expanding and rising in exultation. “Open your mouth, you demon!” More slaps, and now they kicked her, pulled her upright again, and now they tied her arms behind her so that her wrists were high up, above her shoulders, and her head was nearly on the ground. “Hours of practice,” Zhuli thought deliriously. “I have practised and practised. I have memorized thousands of hours of music, and what will this be? A tiny pearl
of time soon to be dissolved.” Zhuli could not hear. She saw faces all around her, she was aware of movement without noise. They seemed to think she was useless, an imbecile, and they turned their attention to the woman beside her who was crying so hard she could no longer hold herself up. Pity overwhelmed Zhuli and she saw darkness behind the woman. That is the place I must get to, she thought. But paint, or was it ink, and sweat had gotten into her eyes and she could not wipe them clean. It was unbearably hot. They would be back for her but she could hear only murmuring, a quiet, and it protected her. “I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music. The words of Goethe’s Faust returned to her:
How great a spectacle! How great…But that, I fear / Is all it is
. The quiet would show her the way out. Silence would expand into a desert, a freedom, a new beginning.

—

She became aware of movement and felt there was a great deal of space around her, a darkness that she took for asphalt, the road, or nighttime. Where were her arms? They seemed to have detached from her body and fallen away. “My fingers have gone to gather my hair,” she thought, wanting to smile, “they have gone to pick up my beautiful hair.” It was useless to try to open her eyes. They were crusted shut and she had nothing to hold on to but a stabbing pain that seemed to come from deep in her lungs. Piano music came, unidentifiable. How near it was but no, the music was a prank. Who played the piano in times like these? “Oh,” she thought as a trickle of water touched her eyes and then her lips, “my good hands have brought me water.” She heard an echoing and then it was as if the air changed pitch, a fog gave way to rain, rain shaded into tone, tone into voices. And then one voice in particular, which she knew immediately and impossibly to be Kai. “No,” she thought, the pain in her lungs increasing, “it is not
good to fall into his hands.” Again the sensation of movement. Then the road came away from her skin. Kai was with her. At the bottom of all these tangled impressions she glimpsed a changed idea, another way of loving someone that she had not experienced before, an attachment like that to a brother, to a friend, to a lover who could never be her lover, of a musical soulmate, a companion who might have been a lifelong collaborator. “It is a great pity,” she thought, “that we will never have the chance to play
Tzigane
together because we brought something to it that had never been heard before. David Oistrakh himself would have recognized us; it is the truthfulness and the shame, no, the solitude, that comes from being at odds with oneself. It is loneliness. Only that, Kai,” she thought. Yes, if only it were Kai.