Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (26 page)

Zhuli decided to investigate the spot where the old man had emerged. Crouching in the shade of a gnarled tree, she saw a clean, dark stone and, beneath it, flattened grass and a branch worn smooth: it was a handle. She lifted the trap door. There was a rope with knots. She was small and, even in her bulky, padded coat, climbed down easily.

In some ways, this hidden space was more comfortable than the bare room in which she lived with her parents. It was just below ground, as if a very large and well-made wooden box, a shipping container, had been buried with a living room inside it, like an afterlife for Old West. There was a cushioned chair large
enough for six Zhulis, an imported kerosene lamp and a full case of oil, stacks and stacks of books, and a soft, woven mat on the floor. She lit one of the lamps and, pulling shut the trap door, glimpsed two musical instruments, a qin and an erhu, though she hadn’t known their names at the time. When she set it on her lap, the qin was heavy and cold. It had a creaking roughness and, at first, she simply sat with it and stared at the room which, in comparison to the mud house, seemed modern and strange. The crumbling books were from another age, they were literally from another continent, but the heavy qin felt alive. On her lap it seemed to breathe in and out, like the great-grandfather to whom it must have belonged.

Zhuli went down almost every day, even if only for an hour. Over an entire season, she tested the range of the qin’s five, battered strings. She did not know how to tune the instrument but quickly settled on a harmony that seemed to suit both the strings and herself. Later on, she learned that the classical guqin was associated with elderly scholars and erudite books (“With snakes, conservatives and reactionaries,” her classmates said) and it was true, Old West’s qin had made her feel part of a floating darkness. The sounds it made were otherworldly, and had more in common with punctuation than with words. At night, Zhuli slept curled up beside her mother, longing to be in the underground library. She needed to make sure the instrument was still breathing. Truly, it felt as if the old qin was her stronger, braver twin.

Spring was late that year and all the farmers and the hungry people were anxiously watching the ground. An otherwise kind boy named Lu saw her emerge from the soil, just as she had glimpsed the old man. That very day, the container was dug up and all the objects carted off. The books, the soft carpets and the cushioned chair were confiscated, proof that Old West’s descendants were biding their time and continued to conceal their wealth. Neighbours whom Zhuli knew, who always greeted her on the paths and sometimes gave her something small to eat,
came and plastered the mud brick house with hastily written denunciations, the words so large they could be read from the road. She knew only a handful of characters, but she recognized the ones for girl/daughter 女 and sky 天, which had been linked together to form a single word, witch 妖 (yāo).

That evening, the little hut was very quiet. Zhuli asked her mother why the word yāo was written on their house. Her mother combed Zhuli’s hair and said it was nothing, a small disagreement with the neighbours and, anyway, what an odd word to recognize. Swirl did something she never did, she mixed a paste of herbs and eucalyptus oil and rubbed the mixture over Zhuli’s arms and legs, gently massaging her arms, legs, feet, fingers and even her toes. With every circular motion of her mother’s fingers, Zhuli disappeared piece by piece. She remembered the soothing warmth of the kang and her father’s suitcase with its dulled fabric and brass clasps, and a keyhole the size of her pinky. Once she had asked for the key but he said it didn’t exist.

Night fell. Into the silence a true demon came. It shouted and raged as if to topple the hut. All at once there were people everywhere, some holding ropes and even singing, then hands shoving her aside as she tried to reach her mother, who had been forced to her knees. Swirl was saying, “Pity…pity.” There was a loud clap and her mother cried out. Wen the Dreamer’s voice shook as if it was coming from the foundations of the little house itself. Zhuli cried and cried. Was it her screaming that frightened all the demons away? She imagined she was the daughter and sky twisted up, demonic, and all the neighbours were afraid of her now. The men left, half carrying, half dragging her parents with them, as if they, too, were objects retrieved from underground. And then the room, in shambles, was silent. She climbed up onto the kang even though its warmth had dulled. She was afraid to feed coal into its mouth and heat the bed again, so she pulled all the quilts around herself, lay down and closed her eyes. She asked herself how the underground room could harm anyone, and why knowing of its
existence was enough to bring forth demons. No answers came to her. Events were like dreams, she concluded, and thus could not be real. When she awoke from this dream, she told herself, the bed would be warm and her parents would be here and it would be morning. This time she would be very careful when she climbed into Old West’s buried library, she would smuggle the qin out and hide it here. Was it still breathing? A day passed and then another. There was nothing to eat but she stole a few leaves from the young plants in the communal garden, and her dreams grew lengthy and warm and elastic. Was it then that she saw the excavation and the hole in the ground? Perhaps other events occurred as well but she no longer recalled them. She drummed her fingers on the cold bed and hummed to herself, and the music comforted her.

—

When she woke after the third night, a young woman was sitting in her father’s chair with a bag of White Rabbit sweets in her lap. Zhuli stared at the woman but could not remember who she was. Nevertheless, she said politely, “Good morning, older sister.”

“Pack your things,” the woman said firmly. Her words were oddly accented because the candy had made her teeth sticky. Zhuli took the five objects that were nearest to her, which included a dress, a washcloth, and two of her father’s records.

They walked under the village gates and towards the next town. Zhuli knew she had been to town before but she could not remember why. Nothing looked familiar. They came to a roundabout with a half-dozen soot-covered minibuses. The White Rabbit muttered that her parents were lucky not to have their heads chopped off, they were fortunate that the worst excesses were a thing of the past. “They’ve been sent for re-education, that’s all,” she said. “Since you’ve never been educated at all, it seemed pointless to send you along with them.”

Inside the bus, the rim of the windowsill overflowed with the husks of sunflower seeds. Every time Zhuli moved, the plastic bag with her belongings crackled like a witch laughing.

The countryside appeared to be breaking up into a rubble of shapes, tilting huts, splattered concrete and blocks of ash. People appeared from every road, moving and running to keep up with something she couldn’t see. The White Rabbit talked a lot but her voice seemed to pass over Zhuli’s head and out the window. She looked down at her feet and saw that her cloth shoes were muddy and that she had violet bruise on her left knee. The more she stared at it, the bluer and deeper it seemed to grow. She must have fallen asleep because when she woke there was a big moon outside the bus, and also a patter of electric lights, but everything else was darkness. The bus seemed to turn around in many circles before finally stopping and everyone suddenly leaped into action, pulling down bags and birds and chickens. A dog ran onto the bus and people ran off. The woman smelled of the sweets she had been eating all evening. They walked. There were many people on the sidewalks and Zhuli’s bag scratched against their legs. The White Rabbit is taking me to my mother, she thought. Zhuli quickened her steps and, as the woman hurried along, too, Zhuli feared that she might snap, lift with happiness and break apart as soon as her mother took her in her arms. The bag cackled and snickered beside her,
To my mother, to my mother
!
To Ma, to Ma
!

They came to an archway, a lane and then an alleyway. She followed the woman along the rows of doors, so similar they all seemed to be children of one another. The White Rabbit chose one and stopped. “These are your relatives. Knock here and ask for your aunt.” The lady knelt down and gave her one last candy and an envelope with red letterhead. She touched Zhuli’s knee and the big, round bruise, which Zhuli had forgotten about, shot pain up her leg all the way to her eyes. “Good luck, Zhuli,” the woman said and then she, too, disappeared. Zhuli faced the door, listening to the echoing sound of the woman’s footsteps. She waited for the pain in her knee to subside, and she slipped the candy into the envelope. After waiting what seemed a long time, she lifted her hand and knocked.

The eerie creaking of the door made her shiver. A teenaged boy appeared. He had uncombed hair and nice eyebrows.

“I’m looking for my aunt,” Zhuli cried.

His eyebrows lifted. He saw the two records angling out of her plastic bag.

“Bā Hè,” she said. Bach. The teenager’s eyes and the door opened wider. “You should tell my aunt that I am here,” she said firmly. She shoved the paper with red letterhead against his stomach.

Late that night, she woke up, alert, and saw moonlight on her exposed feet. There were monsters beside her on the bed–her cousins, she later learned, Flying Bear and Da Shan. She crawled away from them and out of the room, towards a light waving at her in the distance.
To mother, to mother
. Zhuli was pulled forward until she reached that room. Two candles were lit and their fire swayed like unsteady feet. She saw Sparrow’s teacup first, and then his hand, and then his arm connected to his shoulder, and so on, until she reached his eyes. He was not surprised to see her.

She wanted to cry but she climbed onto a chair beside him as if waiting to have her fortune read.

Her cousin was doing his homework and she picked up a pencil thinking that she could do something for him. Sparrow got up and gave her a cup of tea. She requested a task and he thought for a moment, then gave her some paper and a list of words which he instructed her to copy. She could not read all of them but reading seemed secondary; Ba had taught her how to copy neatly. All she wanted was the paper and the pencil and something to do. The list of words must have come from Flying Bear’s homework, some kind of vocabulary lesson around the word shū 书 (book). For years, she kept this sheet of paper written in her child’s hand:

Qin shū (a story that is sung), jìn shū (a banned book), tīng shū (to listen to a performance of storytelling), shī shū (the Book of Songs and the Book of History), mò shū (to write from memory), chuán shū gē (carrier pigeon), huǐ guò shū (a written repentance),
niǎo chóng shū (bird writing, a style of calligraphy), jiǎn tǎo shū (self-criticism).

After her pencil was dull and her teacup twice emptied, Sparrow lifted her up and returned her to the shared bed. She asked him where the plastic bag had gone away to. He said nothing. She told him that she had wanted to keep the old qin but it was too late. What had they done to it? Had her devotion to the qin caused her parents suffering? Perhaps she was not speaking aloud because he still didn’t answer. I did this, Zhuli thought. How did I do this? Because of me, Old West’s treasures have all been taken away. Her parents came back to her in a rush of images. Was she powerless or powerful? Had Zhuli, herself, opened the door to the demons who barged in? Her parents had been roped together as if they were oxen. Why had her mother wept for pity? How had the men known, Zhuli thought, that she was part girl and part sky, a yāo who had been seduced by wood and strings that were not alive. But the qin
was
alive, she thought, fighting sleep. She and it were the very same thing.

The next day, Sparrow sat her down in front of the record player and played all the music he could find. Her cousin listened with his eyes closed and Zhuli copied him and did the same. Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway. Sparrow showed her how to remove the record from its paper sleeve, how to set it on the turntable, how to place the needle in its groove. Everything in Big Mother Knife’s house was careful and considered; a world away from the bullying she had recently endured. Everything in Ba Lute’s home made music. Zhuli watched them all playing their instruments, she watched their hands and bodies, she let the music write itself into her memory. She felt, as with the qin, that she had always known this music. That they recognized one another.

There was a small violin that belonged to Flying Bear, which
he shunned. One day she sat beside it for several hours and finally, she placed it on her lap like the old qin and tentatively plucked the strings. She did this day after day but her cousin told her: “It’s not a zither and, in any case, you are too young to learn the violin.” She continued for nearly a week and finally Sparrow took the violin from her, lifted Flying Bear’s bow and began to play. It was too small for him, and his body folded around the instrument as if to prevent its voice from escaping. Zhuli recognized that voice, she felt she had known it longer than she had known life. Sparrow became her first violin teacher. Later, when she was eight, he passed her on to Professor Tan at the Conservatory. She accepted every word, gesture and criticism; her teacher was blunt and, during his tantrums, Zhuli feared he would smash her violin on the floor or break it on her head. But it was all drama. Professor Tan recognized that, in each piece that she played, she heard more and more music. But what was music? Every note could only be understood by its relation to those around it. Merged, they made new sounds, new colours, a new resonance or dissonance, a stability or rupture. Inside the pure tone of C was a ladder of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a man wearing many suits of clothes, or a grandmother carrying all her memories inside her. Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations? What was chronology and how did she fit into it? How had her father and mother escaped from time, and how could they ever come back?