Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (29 page)

He smiled at her, in the way that Ba Lute sometimes smiled thinly at Flying Bear. Kai reached into his satchel and withdrew a sheaf of music. “Don’t be stubborn,” he said. “Take these.” She stared down. He had placed in her hands familiar pieces by the deceased composer Xian Xinghai, a hero of the Revolution.

In her bewilderment, she felt entirely alone. The concrete buildings, crowded roads and all the passersby seemed to move inside a light that didn’t reach her. “Jiang Kai,” she said spitefully, “now I understand. I’ll forget Prokofiev. I’ll play the ‘March of the Volunteers’ and ‘The Internationale’ for all eternity.
The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing
. That should win me the Tchaikovsky Competition and please everyone, you most of all.”

There was his patronizing half-smile again. “Comrade Zhuli, don’t make the silly mistake of thinking your talent is enough.”

“My talent doesn’t concern me,” she said. “What I need to know is, will Sparrow’s talent protect him? That’s what you and I care the most about, isn’t it?”

Instead of speaking, he painstakingly tied up his bag, which was patched in both corners and on the strap. He should conduct, Zhuli thought, all his movements have the illusion of expressing so much.

She wanted to ask him how he could acquiesce on the surface and not be compromised inside. You could not play revolutionary music, truly revolutionary music, if you were a coward in your heart. You could not play if your hands, your wrists, your arms were not free. Every note would be abject, weak, a lie. Every note would reveal you. Or perhaps she was wrong and Kai was right. Maybe, no matter his or her convictions, a great musician, a true genius, could play any piece and be believed.

She wanted to put all these thoughts into questions but by the time she had recovered herself, Kai had turned and walked away.

The movement in the street rustled and shamed her; no one else had a moment to rest, to think, to be afraid. Yet here she was, with time on her hands. She looked down at the music he had given her, which she saw now had been transcribed for violin and copied out by hand. Midway through, the notes wobbled and tilted, as if running into the wind. It must have taken him hours. But why would Jiang Kai do such a thing for her? When did he have time?

She began walking, directionless, fearful that the posters trailed behind her like mud stuck to her shoes. The words: counter-revolutionary, monsters, blind feeling, false love, witch. Inside her head, Ravel’s
Tzigane
refused to be quiet. It billowed on and revealed itself as the composition of a madman. To escape, she rushed between the bicycles to Xiangyang Park. The grain and oil lineups snaked past her, and a line of grandmothers stood in studied silence, clutching their ration coupons. The sun was high now and the heat intolerable, but everyone seemed blank and unsweating. Of course, I will go back and find Kai and apologize, Zhuli thought, even though she kept walking. How many self-criticisms had she written? A thousand pages, two thousand? Yes,
she was selfish and plagued by immoderate desires and yes, her love for music was a weakness. She had confessed these faults since she was eight years old, but she had stubbornly refused to purify her heart. Chairman Mao said, “To be aware of one’s own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them means taking a liberal attitude to oneself. These people talk Marxism but practise liberalism. Yes, this is how the minds of certain people work and they are extremely harmful to the revolutionary collective.” The park came like a sip of water. There was a shaded bamboo bench and she sat down, her violin case on her lap.

In the grass, a boy, no more than five or six years old, was curled up on the ground while his mother stood a few feet away. She wore a grey suit and a grey cap made of wool, a furnace in this humidity. The mother had a ball which she nudged towards her son, but the boy ignored her. Even the ball was grey. She retrieved it, turned and kicked it back to him. Still her son did not move. He lay motionless in the grass like an injured animal. Minutes passed. The boy leaped up as if suddenly awakened.

The boy went to the ball and faced his mother. But, unexpectedly, he turned and kicked the ball in the opposite direction. A thump echoed in the grove.

The boy waited.

The mother ran gracefully past her son and caught up with the ball. Undeterred, she returned it to him. Once again, he made as if to return it, but then, at the last moment, gave it a hard kick in the opposite direction. Once more, the mother chased it down. Again and again this scene repeated itself, the boy nastily kicking the ball away, the mother patiently retrieving it, the boy standing idly.

Zhuli closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she saw that the torment had ended and that the boy and his mother were playing. They dodged one another, feinted, floated the ball towards an imagined net.

Zhuli slid sideways on the bench, opened her violin case and stared at the instrument. She had a lunatic desire to smash it on
the ground. Beyond the park, she heard what sounded like an encroaching sea but was only Red Guards. “Down with Wu Bei!” the students shouted. “Kill the traitor, destroy the criminal gang, down with Wu Bei, down with Wu Bei!”

The boy, who moments ago had been laughing in delight, inexplicably grew weary. His mother passed the ball to him and he abruptly turned and walked away. The ball rolled past him, into the trees. He sat down. His mother ran after the ball, tapped it back to her son and waited. When nothing happened, she pecked it forward again but the boy was now prone in the grass. Still his mother circled him, the ball creeping ahead of her. They seemed oblivious to the shouting of the Red Guards at the outskirts of the park. She had never seen a child and a mother act in this manner; it was as if the world had fallen on its side and the child had been shaken into irritable old age. The mother hovered in her shapeless grey suit. What was love to this child? It could be rescinded as easily as a command.

“The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the People!” “What will you sacrifice, what will you sacrifice?” “Stand up and serve the Revolution!”

Something is coming for me, Zhuli thought. “The more ruthless we are…” But an ocean, she thought, overcome suddenly by inappropriate laughter, only an ocean would destroy her. She closed the violin case and set it in carefully in the grass. Ravel’s
Tzigane
slid over the shouting and covered her thoughts. Note by note, the music began again, it sounded so fiercely that her arms strained from hallucinatory exertion, her shoulders ached, and yet the music in her thoughts played on lavishly. Music was pouring into the ground. Far away, the voices of the students sounded like weeping, “We must remake ourselves and change the world! We must serve the People with our hearts and minds! From the Red East there rises a sun, in China there appears a Mao Zedong!”

Time, the park, the slogans, the mother and child: she pushed them all away.

Time, the pressure of the strings against her fingers, the weightlessness of the bow, would not leave.

When the last note ended, she awoke into the quiet. The demonstration had moved on. The grove was empty and the mother and the boy had vanished as if they had never been. Even the patch of shadow in which they had stood was gone.

There was someone watching her. The haze in the air and her own distraction had made her careless, and she had not noticed this other person. He stood up now and came towards her. Zhuli finally recognized him. Tofu Liu, her classmates called him mockingly. He was a soft-hearted, soft-spoken violinist. He was almost camouflaged; both his trousers and shirt were the same shade of army green.

“Long live Chairman Mao,” he said, “and long live our glorious Revolution!”

“Long may it flourish. Long live the great Communist Party of China.”

“Comrade Zhuli,” he said. “I didn’t mean to follow you. Actually, as it happens, I wanted to ask you…it’s nothing really. So.” He remained standing, as if hoping some campaign would sweep him away. When it didn’t, he shifted his violin case to the other hand and continued. “Well, Professor Tan says that
Tzigane
is one of the most impossible pieces to learn, yet you play it effortlessly.” The smile that touched his lips was swift and sad. “There’s a Prokofiev for two violins I’m eager to learn and Professor Tan had an idea that you…Of course you have your own concert to prepare for. I believe this piece might suit you perfectly. Really, it isn’t boring at all. The Prokofiev for two violins, I mean. Not boring. Say yes only if this would interest you. Or if it might please you…Well, do you want to?”

How would he survive? Zhuli wondered. He was as firm as a beaten egg. “I like Prokofiev.”

Liu smiled. His eyes were too bright, too kind. “I’ll copy the score and bring it for you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said. To her own surprise, she asked him, “Little Liu, what is happening now? What is happening to us?”

He hadn’t moved but it felt as if he had taken a step closer to her. “It’s what happens to every generation.”

She didn’t understand. The very trees seemed to bend and hold them.

“Don’t you recognize it, Zhuli?” he asked. “I think history is not so different from music, all the different eras, like when the Baroque ended and Classical began, when one kind of understanding transformed into another…Our parents used to blame a person’s suffering on destiny, but when traditional beliefs fell away, we began to understand the deeper reasons for society’s inequalities.” He was speaking nervously, as if unwinding a breathless Tchaikovsky descent. “Chairman Mao says we must defend the Revolution by identifying everyone and everything that is counter-revolutionary. We students have so many fights and arguments because we are still developing our political understanding. We’re teaching ourselves to think in an entirely new way, uncorrupted by the old consciousness. But the youth are capable, aren’t they? Truly, I think we are more selfless than the generation before us. My father was a rightist like yours…Maybe we can become…But it is difficult because we must struggle
against ourselves
, really question our motivations and ask on whose behalf we’re building a more just society.” He was timid but there was no shame in his eyes. “If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how we can talk to one another? We will never find common purpose. I believe in the Party, of course, and I don’t want to lose faith. I will never lose faith…”

“Yes,” Zhuli said. “I agree with you.” Here it was again, welling up inside her, laughter and fear.

“I’ve always known I can speak openly to you, Zhuli. You’re not like the others. We saw what our fathers went through. So…” He looked at her and nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

Liu was already walking backwards, his violin case smashing against his right knee. He turned and his green clothes faded into the sunshine. Zhuli watched him go and felt a painful hammering in her heart. Why did he trust her? Whom should she trust? Her hands had no sensation, as if they were made of wood. But the notes filled her thoughts as if she were still in Room 103, as if her mind had not noticed that her hands no longer moved.

—

Up until the instant he entered Kai’s room, Sparrow had convinced himself he was not going. The meeting, or as Kai called it, the study group, was not meant for someone like him. Yet, for nearly forty minutes, Sparrow pedalled his bicycle east, turning left at Henan Middle Road, right at Haining and finally into a kaleidoscope of smaller streets. He dismounted and walked in circles until he discovered the alleyway and a staircase into the concrete block building.

On the third floor, he knocked at number 32. Kai appeared, windy-haired even though he probably hadn’t left his room. Pleasure flooded his face the moment he saw Sparrow. “I was afraid you wouldn’t find it.” Sparrow smiled as if he, himself, had never doubted.

How small it was, and dark. A radio was placed up against the door, the volume deafening. There were shapes that could be people or could be objects, but no fan and the room was stifling. A young woman, despite moving aside to make room for Sparrow, was still so close that he was submerged in the almond scent of her hair. Someone demanded Sparrow’s ID card, others laughed, and a young man said, “Too puny to stand up to the wind. Definitely not public security.” “Were you followed?” And then a grandmother’s prickly voice: “He probably followed
you
, San Li.” Laughter. Sparrow was trembling, he could smell his own sweat. “Just relax,” the almond-scented girl said impatiently. “Are you really the great composer that Kai goes on and on about?” Before he could answer, they began talking about a book he hadn’t read: he hadn’t even
heard of it. They mentioned a book he did know, Kang Youwei’s
Book of the Great Community
, but the moment he silently congratulated himself, the conversation rumbled on.

In the corner, Kai had not spoken. He was at least a decade younger than the men and women in this room.

“Old Cat, what did you bring? Where are you?” “In your lap.” This was the grandmother speaking now. “San Li, pay attention to what’s in your lap for once!”

The grandmother reached into a cloth bag and pulled out a small stack of books. “A few odds and ends.
Essays in Skepticism
–”

“Delightful,” the almond-scented girl, whom they called Ling, purred.

“And Xi Li,
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
, Shen Congwen, and what else…”

Another candle was lit. Ling picked up Xi Li, or Friedrich Schiller, searching for the place they had left off the previous week. Sparrow knew Schiller only as the German writer beloved by Verdi, whose poem Brahms had used in a funeral song:

Even the beautiful must die!

See! The gods weep, all the goddesses weep

Because the beautiful perishes, because perfection dies

Even to be a song of lament on a loved ones’ lips is glorious…