Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (28 page)

A few months later, Yasunari asked me to marry him and I did. I was twenty-eight years old, but still far too young and unsettled in myself. Indeed I might go so far as to say that I was hostile to myself; I was, in so many ways, my father’s daughter. I broke Yasunari’s heart when, after only a short time, I abandoned our marriage, and I felt as if I had torn my own future into pieces. My father’s death consumed me, a rift had opened between my thoughts and my emotions, and one day I woke with the sensation that I was falling through that rift and would fall forever. I was drawn to suicide.

Time passed. My emotional life was, as Big Mother Knife would say, as firm as a stack of eggs.

And yet, during this time, my research flourished. Blindly, I followed the first principle of pure mathematics, the hunger for beauty; in number theory we say that beauty exists in the
machinery. Unexpectedly, my work on elliptic curves won a French number theory award and the revered journal,
Annals of Mathematics
, published one of my papers. My name was put forward for a Meadows Prize. I wondered at the absurdity of things. I had no explanation, except perhaps that I fell asleep as one person and woke as another. The surface of my life confounded me. Yet, in the world of numbers, everything felt possible: numbers had no substance and were made entirely of thought.

My mother’s voice returned to me.
If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. Li-ling, you have to climb out by yourself
. Month after month, my father’s copy of Sparrow’s sonata sat in a drawer,
waiting. I woke one morning unable to deny this truth, that the love I carried for Ba had survived undimmed.

—

In 2010, I travelled, for the first time, to mainland China.

I was attending a number theory conference in Hangzhou, but it was Weibo and QQ, Chinese social media sites, that absorbed me. As many as 700 million Chinese, more than 50 percent of the population, regularly access the internet; until recently, 60 percent of internet users did not use their real names (as of 2013, anonymity became illegal). The Great Firewall, as it is commonly known, routinely deletes
16 percent of all Chinese internet conversations. Looking for Ai-ming in cyberspace was like trying to pluck a needle from the sea, but I saw, too, that the internet was a series of doors: all I had to do was create the door she could open. I began posting scanned copies of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records; I also posted jokes I knew Ai-ming would love. For instance, “The Yoda embedding, contravariant it is.” Or, “Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.” Every post was a letter to the possible.

From Hangzhou I took the train to Shanghai, where I visited the Conservatory. I found nothing on Kai, Zhuli or Sparrow; it was as if they had never been.

That night in Shanghai, I fell asleep to the clamour of radios, a profusion of opera, disco, Beethoven, shouting and speech. When I woke, nothing stirred. It was as if my bed had fallen into outer space. In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ←. Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday (前 天) is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow (後天) is the day “behind” ↓. This means
that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind (後 代). Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around, a mirroring echo of Walter Benjamin’s famous evocation of the angel of history, “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” How we map time, how it becomes lived and three-dimensional to us, how time is bent and elastic and repeated, has informed all my research, proofs and equations.

When I was a child, I would continuously pester Ai-ming. “Don’t stop!” “What happened to Swirl and Big Mother Knife?” Or: “What happened to Zhuli? Don’t let it finish!” She had come into my life at the crux of her own. She was a sister to me; from the beginning we were joined, two halves of the world Sparrow and Kai had left behind. Long after she departed, Ai-ming’s voice tugged away at my thoughts, returning me again and again to the same ever-expanding, ever-contracting piece of music.
Could I awake now and cross towards her? Near the end, she seemed almost to forget that I was there and it was as if the story came from the room itself: a conversation overheard, a piece of music still circling the air.

ZHULI WAS IN ROOM 103
, following the magisterial Prokofiev up his porcelain staircases, when Kai entered without knocking. She ignored him: Prokofiev required all her concentration. Every measure brought her closer to the disgraced Russian, who had been accused by Stalin of formalism, his major compositions banned; yet in this room, Prokofiev was becoming flesh and blood while Zhuli herself was vanishing. From eighths to sixteenths then three times as fast, the notes chipped into one another, every note had to touch the air, make its singular gesture, and elaborate this unending melody.

And then, the music stopped. Her bow stopped. It was as if she could hear nothing, or had forgotten everything, or had been pushed underwater. Trembling, she lowered her violin. Kai and Sparrow had only just returned from Wuhan the previous day. She had heard Sparrow coming in after midnight.

Kai was still watching her.

“What do you want?” She hadn’t meant to say it so brusquely, but the expression on his face, the pity, enraged her. “I reserved this room until eleven o’clock! And, as you know, the piano is in terrible condition anyway.”

“Will you come upstairs with me?”

Ah, she thought, looking back at her violin, glimpsing her own reflection. Who was real and who was false?

“Comrade Zhuli,” he said. “Something has happened.”

She wiped the strings of her bow, latched her violin case and followed him out of the room. At the staircase, he took hold of her hand briefly. All the way to the fourth floor, her hand prickled with heat and discomfort. She heard yelling above them. The staircase became chaotic. Zhuli was separated from Kai and pushed down the corridor. On both sides, the walls were covered with dà zì bào, big character posters, the same as had appeared in Bingpai long ago. She glimpsed the word yāo, which seemed to crawl from sheet to sheet. Someone, or something, was being denounced. The language of these attacks was copied from newspaper editorials, these were the same words that spilled endlessly from Party cadres and shouting loudspeakers,

WE MUST SWEEP AWAY THE HORDE OF DEMONS WHO HAVE ENTRENCHED THEMSELVES IN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

she stopped and students pushed roughly past her, laughing.

BREAK THE BOURGEOIS “SPECIALISTS,” “SCHOLARS,” “AUTHORITIES” AND “VENERABLE MASTERS” AND TRAMPLE EVERY BIT OF THEIR PRESTIGE INTO THE DUST
.

Without realizing it, she had reached the office of He Luting, the President of the Conservatory, and she heard, absurdly, music. Could Professor He truly be practising inside his quarters? Yet there was no piano in his office and so the music, Debussy’s
Petite Suite
, with its uneasy mixture of triviality and sorrow, must be coming from a recording. Zhuli fought a hysterical wave of laughter. She had not heard Debussy for months, not since the composer had been targeted in
Wen Hui Bao
and the Beijing papers, his music labelled decadent, and the long-dead Frenchman a composer whose “elaborate impressionist cookery” was an insult to the hardships of the poor. Sparrow had confiscated all her Debussy scores and put them who-knows-where.

“But ‘La plus que lente’ is inside my mind,” she had said, handing the music over. “Can you erase the Impressionist cookery in my mind?”

The longest, most vitriolic poster had been affixed to Professor He’s door. The sheet, torn from butcher paper, was as tall as she was and the calligraphy, very square, was oddly beautiful. It was surrounded by other smaller posters. Zhuli stepped closer, the words wavering. The ink looked so freshly black, she thought she could wipe the malicious words off with her hands.

She had almost touched the word yāo when Kai came up beside her. She turned to him, her hand outstretched and, out of nervousness, smiled. Her attention was caught by the dozens of posters continuing down the hallway. The words jeered and seemed to move, to come loose and slide along the walls. She saw a long essay, written in ungainly calligraphy, filled with names, and this list of “scholars” and “specialists” included Sparrow, Ba
Lute, Professor Tan and a dozen more teachers and musicians. Stunned, she went closer. Petite Suite trickled and teased through the walls. It was the piano, not the names, that made her shudder. The music came to her as if she were watching a dozen points of glass falling towards them.

“There are more posters,” Kai said. “In the courtyard and on the gates.”

“But who is targeting them?” she said. She should have lowered her voice but she did not. “Why are they denouncing my uncle?”

Kai was already pushing back into the crush of people, some chanting, some grinning like opera-goers. Here were Biscuit and her Page-Turners, as Zhuli called them, and here was the string class as if they always travelled ensemble.

Zhuli said, “Ba Lute performed for Chairman Mao.”

Nobody seemed to hear her except Biscuit, who looked at Zhuli with unexpected kindness.

“My uncle was a hero at Headquarters,” Zhuli told her. “He led a battalion of the New Fourth Route Army.”

Biscuit blinked nervously and looked away.

Kai took her hand and pulled her behind him. At the end of the corridor, the noise lessened. How hot it was, how desperately humid, yet Kai’s hand was cool and dry. She clutched the handle of her violin case, stood very still and listened with all her strength, but under the bursts of contemptuous laughter she no longer heard the Debussy.

—

Outside, the posters were more precise and prescriptive. When Zhuli had arrived this morning, just before 6 a.m., the walls had been bare, so the posters must have been pasted up in broad daylight, with the approval of the class committees or even…Zhuli’s thoughts became confused. Big Mother Knife had been right. A new campaign was underway.

STAND UP AND REBEL! KILL THOSE WHO WOULD SABOTAGE OUR REVOLUTION. STAND UP AND BE FREE
.

“It’s not just here,” Kai said as he led her through the east gate. “This morning there are denunciations at Jiaotong University, and even at the Beijing universities, at Tsinghua and Beida. They all say the same thing.”

On Fenyang Road, people flowed to work, talking, complaining, pulling children, weighed down by bags, water drums, instruments, birds, chairs, unidentifiable metal objects, pushed forward by hunger, routine, necessity, even joy. The air was sticky. Zhuli wanted to crouch down with her throbbing hands over her ears and block out the sun and the noise. No, she decided suddenly, her thoughts clearing. Those denunciations, those posters, could not be real.

“How was your trip to Wuhan?” She spoke the words casually, as if they had just now met on the street. “Sparrow looked exhausted when he got up this morning. And yet here you are, already hard at work!”

He looked at her steadily, as if trying to hear between the words. “I slept on the bus.”

“And did you and my cousin come home with recordings full of music?”

Kai still said nothing. He reminded her of a cat with one paw raised, about to touch the ground, momentarily confused.

“That was your mission, wasn’t it?” she reminded him. “To traverse the countryside, to record and preserve the folk songs of our motherland.” Whose words was she using, she wondered. She forced herself to look him in the eye.

“Oh,” he said, one hand shading his face from the sun. “We came back with three reels.”

She wanted to beg him to come away with her, to come and play for a few hours. Or to go to the music library and browse the old recordings, there was a Shostakovich string quartet she longed
to hear. Instead she said carelessly, “I have to go. I left my scores in Room 103.”

“Forget them. Go home, Zhuli.”

“I’m no prodigy like you,” she said. “I don’t improve by merely wishing it.”

“This is the start of a new campaign. Don’t you understand?”

The sincerity in his eyes brought both hope and fury to her.

He said, “The Red Guards can turn your life to ashes. They will.”

Before I met you, Zhuli thought, I had no one to please but myself. Jiang Kai, you are as real and unreal as the shadow of an airplane. She wanted to ask Kai if he loved Sparrow for who he was, or if it was his talent that was the true attraction. Didn’t he understand that a gift like Sparrow’s could not be bought or borrowed, it could not be stolen? Did Kai love the person, or did he love what Sparrow’s music made him feel? Her own thoughts surprised and upset her. She nodded brightly. “Until they do, I can only practise.”