Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (40 page)

One morning, when he had been at the factory for more than a year, Sparrow’s work unit was summoned to the meeting hall. Attendance was mandatory and so, long after the room was full, workers continued to squeeze themselves in.

Six televisions had been set up. Abruptly, a live broadcast began, the first televised struggle session of the Cultural Revolution. An elderly man was dragged onto centre stage by a phalanx of Red Guards. To his shock, the Red Guards were known to him; they were former Conservatory musicians who had risen to leadership positions. The stage, white with klieg lights, seemed to shear the television screen in half. Sparrow watched, frozen. Kai stood among a group at the front. He looked sturdier, more self-possessed. At first, Sparrow did not recognize the elderly man, whose head the Red Guards were forcing down so brutally his face could not be seen. A slow pandemonium unfolded. When the elderly man looked up, Sparrow saw that it was He Luting, former President of the Shanghai Conservatory.

Kill the traitor! Kill the traitor!
The chanting in the meeting hall was deafening. Unable to turn or move, he felt as if the lights were being trained on him, growing brighter every moment.

Questioning began. It went on and on but He Luting stubbornly denied his guilt.

Yu Hui stepped forward, dressed entirely in olive green as if he had joined the army or a vegetable stand. “Are you so stupid you don’t understand that you could be killed?” he asked. “Do you think we’ll grieve if one more traitor has his head cut off?”

Knock him down!

“
Before I die,” He Luting said, “I have two wishes. First, I want to finish my current composition, a seven-part orchestral work. Second, I intend to clear each and every charge against me.”

Unable to respond, the Red Guards took turns striking him.

“I am not guilty,” He Luting cried. He looked frail, much older than his age. Another blow from the Red Guards would surely cripple him. He Luting’s wife, children and grandchildren had been gathered on the stage behind him, their heads also pushed down, light reflecting off their hair. Words that He Luting had spoken to him, years ago now, returned to Sparrow. “Music that is immediately understood will not outlast its generation.”

“You opposed Chairman Mao!” Yu said.

“I am not guilty.”

“Disgusting traitor! You’re nothing but an animal we have to slaughter–”

“Your accusations are false! Shame on you for lying!”

Around Sparrow, in the hall, people stared, bewildered at He Luting’s temerity, his stubbornness.

On screen, the Red Guards, too, could not believe that this old man, this traitor and counter-revolutionary, this ridiculous musician, could possibly be challenging them. One yanked the microphone away.

He Luting reacted quickly, grabbing the microphone back.
“Shame on you!” His voice broke, but he kept going. “Shame on you for lying! Shame on you for lying!”

In an instant, they had twisted his arms so viciously that he fell to the floor. The jeering of the crowd intensified. He Luting was in terrible pain. Kai’s face blurred into the screen and out. Amidst the shouted laughter, the Red Guards released him. Sparrow could see that they, too, wanted to laugh, to swell themselves up again, but He Luting was suddenly on his feet.

“Shame!” he shouted. The words ricocheted through the speakers. “Shame on you, shame on you!”

The room was shocked silent.

“Shame on you for lying!”
His voice was hoarse and broken but still it cut through, by far the loudest sound emanating from the television. “Shame!”

The image disappeared.

Sparrow waited. The room seemed to tilt away from him, but he was held upright by the pressure of the bodies around him. The live broadcast did not resume. A newsreader appeared on the screen, but the transmission split into grey lines of static.

A buzzer sounded and and the workers returned, orderly and subdued, to their positions on the assembly line.

Punching in, Sparrow looked at the card reader and was surprised to realize that he had missed his birthday. Yesterday he had turned twenty-eight years old.

—

Eight months later, Chairman Mao decreed that cities were wasteful and the educated must be sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to experience rural poverty. All universities and middle schools still open would now be closed, all classes not yet cancelled were officially over. This new generation would be the heroic zhī qī, the sent-down youth. In early 1969, Sparrow was summoned by his work unit leader who informed him that, effective immediately, he was assigned to a factory 1,400 kilometres to the south, in Guangxi Province.

“Have you been been to the South before?” the cadre asked him.

“I have not.”

“You should thank the Party. They have given you this opportunity to faithfully serve the People.”

“I thank the Party and our Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao.”

This time he was not so naive as to ask if he would be allowed to compose once more.

Three days later, at the Shanghai Railway Station, hemmed in by a sea of young people, he heard a woman’s voice shouting his name. It was Ling.

The kindness of her expression and her obvious pleasure at seeing him surprised Sparrow, eliciting an unfamiliar pain; he had been alone for a long time.

“Tell me where you’ve been, Sparrow. Have you been in contact with anyone?”

His first instinct was to hide the truth. “Nowhere. No one.”

“Kai’s in Beijing now, did you know? He intervened and made sure we were both assigned to the South, and not to the coal mines at the Russian border.” Her voice dropped. “He’s done well, he performs regularly for Madame Mao.” When Sparrow didn’t answer, she continued. “Kai asked me to look for you. He said you might take a position with the Central Philharmonic…”

“But I don’t write music anymore.”

Ling studied him. She looked at him with a familiar intimacy, as if they were still the same people, as if nothing stood between their present and their past. “I was a month away from receiving my doctorate,” she whispered. “And then the announcement came, the university was shut down and it was over. Why aren’t you writing music? Listen, I still remember…” She hummed in his ear, so low that no one else could possibly overhear, a phrase from Bach’s
Concerto for Two Violins
, and he wanted to put his hand to her lips, to quiet and protect her.

The day before, Sparrow had posted three hastily written letters: one to Big Mother Knife who was stuck in Yumen City and
had not yet been granted a transfer back to Shanghai; one to Ba Lute, who was interned at a camp in Anhui Province; and one to Kai in Beijing. That night, enforcers from the Shanghai revolutionary committee had surprised the neighbourhood. They had pulled everyone from their rooms and ordered a renewed search for counter-revolutionary materials. Numbly, he had fed his books and music into the bonfires, even the three records, given to him by Wen the Dreamer twenty years ago. Sparrow had even burned the papers he had hidden up in the trusses of the roof. His beautiful Symphony No. 2, the still unfinished No. 3–they went into the flames. Nothing remained. He had watched, mesmerized, overcome by a sickening relief, as the albums and the papers, the music and the imagined music, twisted together into a kind of gelatinous mud.

All Sparrow carried in his rucksack was a light jacket, two changes of clothing, a washcloth, a sleeping mat, a cooking pot and, because he had promised Zhuli, the Book of Records.

“Have you had any news of the Professor?” he asked Ling.

She shook her head. “Even my aunt doesn’t know. He was detained and disappeared. And Kai cut all ties with him…You heard what happened to San Li?”

A train was hurtling into the station. “Yes,” he said. San Li had died, jumped from a window or was pushed. And then, more to himself than to her, “But since no one is responsible, there is no one to forgive.”

She spoke directly in his ear. “There is no point in forgiveness. We need to prosper.”

He could not imagine what she could possibly mean by the word prosper.

“Kai said we’re being sent to a place called Cold Water Ditch,” Ling said. “The closest town is Hezhou. I’d never heard of it before.”

“Cold Water Ditch,” he answered, wishing to make her smile. “The height of prosperity.”

“Comrade Sparrow, how would you define prosperity? I believe there is no prosperity but freedom.”

The doors of the train cranked open. People crushed forward. Ling gripped his arm so that, in the melee, they would not be separated.

The further they travelled from Shanghai, the more he felt as if he was breaking apart. At each station he whispered, as the older generation might have done, to the ghost of his cousin, “Don’t leave, Zhuli. We have no family in the city anymore. Stay with me.”

“She’s here, Sparrow,” Ling said. “Zhuli won’t leave us.”

So that when they arrived, after many days’ journey, in Cold Water Ditch, it was as if Zhuli, in some invisible way, had reattached herself to Sparrow’s life, to his consciousness and his being. A year later, he and Ling received permission to marry. And a year after that, they had their first and only child, a daughter, Ai-ming.

—

In the spring of 1970, Big Mother Knife finally returned to the laneway house on Beijing Road. There, she found her entire family missing. Even Mr. and Mrs. Ma were gone; their oleanders had grown wild, blanketing both wings of the house. She smashed all the crockery. She did it carefully, disposing of her favourites immediately, all the while singing: “Comrades, amputate the branches and tear down the leaves….” Her neighbours thought she had lost her mind and backed into their doorways when they saw her coming. By the end, as she was smashing an insipid vase Ba Lute had once given her, despair overwhelmed her. When she crushed it under her shoe, the smallest pieces reminded her of little teeth.

“Make revolution,” she thought bitterly. “I will make the biggest revolution of them all.”

In the bedroom, she found a dress of Zhuli’s and one of Ba Lute’s straw shoes, and she sat down with them, uncomprehending. All the musical instruments and scores were gone. That night, she took the train west to destitute Anhui Province, where Ba Lute had been consigned to a re-education camp. It took three days to reach him and, when she finally did, they wept and argued and
fought nonsensically. Ba Lute could not even speak Zhuli’s name; for the last four years he had kept Zhuli’s suicide from her, going so far as to make up stories about her whereabouts and her accomplishments:
At this juncture, it is not advised for Zhuli to write to you. She has been offered the opportunity to study in Paris
. Big Mother spat the words back at him. Now Ba Lute told her that he had personally written a letter to Chairman Mao, who could not possibly know all that was being done in his name. Society was in disarray.

“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”

“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”

It was, and would always be, the only thing he ever said that made her weep. “How can he redeem us? Can he turn back time? Can he give a child back her life? You didn’t even have the courage to give her a proper burial!”

“Big Mother, it was impossible. Don’t you understand? It was the transformation of the world.”

“That poor child,” she said, turning away.

For days and then months, she thought only of Zhuli. Swirl and Wen the Dreamer had left Mongolia and crossed into Kyrgyzstan where they awaited word from their daughter, but Big Mother could not imagine telling them that she was dead and had been dead since 1966, that she had taken her own life. How could Swirl accept it? Her sister had already lost one child, the little boy who fell from the tram so long ago. Disbelief would push Swirl to come home, she would return to Shanghai at the cost of her life. If Swirl was rearrested…Big Mother could not finish the thought. She could not do it.

Back in Shanghai, Big Mother put in a request to be transferred to Sparrow’s town, Cold Water Ditch. Finally, after a year of badgering her superiors, deploying gifts, reciting Chairman Mao’s most obscure poetry, and confusing everyone with both
intimidation and deference, her request was granted. Travel permit and registration papers in hand, she left Shanghai by train. A premonition told her she would never see the city again: by the time the wheel of history tumbled forward and this country awoke once more, she would be stone blind. Annoyed, she glared into the overloaded compartment and cursed every blurry face, every hand, every belly, every cadre, every little Red brat. And then, feeling guilty, she closed her eyes and cursed herself.

The decrepit train hobbled on, into the humid South. Some little turd had drawn a lopsided egg on the dusty window, or maybe the egg was a zero left behind by someone with bad handwriting. What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn’t zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? Thanks to the painful slowness of the train, she had another fifty hours to think this over. Big Mother sighed and slapped her knee so violently she grunted in pain. None of the other passengers cared. “This silly melon of a train!” she shouted. “It stops at every clump of bushes! By the time we get there you kids will be grandparents and I’ll be dead! We’re going so slowly we might as well be going backwards!” A murmur of agreement slid down the length of the compartment, easeful and reassuring as the midnight breeze.

PART ZERO

Music which is so dear to me, and without which, more than likely, I couldn’t live a day.

–DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH