Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel (42 page)

I nodded, unable to speak.

Delicately, he loaded the spool into an antique wire recorder. When it was ready, he turned a knob.

The notes came to me. I half turned away.

I thought I saw curtains shift and Ba looking down at me from a window above. On the ninth floor, he leaned out. Did
anyone else see him? Was it only me? My father had blindfolded himself, he had tied a piece of cloth over his face before he took his life. I had learned this only after obtaining copies of the Hong Kong police files, and the detail had broken me.

This was the first time I had ever heard Ba playing the piano. Jiang Kai seemed a stranger to me, someone who had always been more alive, more full of memory, than I could know. And yet, hearing Zhuli’s violin, her measured, open voice, why did I feel as if I had known her all my life?

We listened to the recording three, four, five times. Each time I heard something different, a separation and a unity, the musicians, dust, the machine, our breathing. Music. Each time, at the end, I heard my father’s voice, speaking. I had not heard it since I was ten years old. His voice like no other voice that had ever lived.

I wept. Seeing that I was upset, Mr. Liu brought me a cup of tea. “It’s difficult to understand,” he said. “The pressure on us was unimaginable. Don’t forget, back then, your father was only seventeen years old….we were all too young.”

We returned to the table. I showed him my copy of Chapter 17 of the Book of Records.

“Teacher Liu,” I said, “I’ve made tens of thousands of copies of all the notebooks. With a few keystrokes, it’s possible to send files anywhere in the world, instantaneously. I want it to exist everywhere, to keep growing and changing.” From my bag, I took out Sparrow’s composition,
The Sun Shines on the People’s Square
. “This is the piece of music I mentioned to you. It seems only right to perform it here in Shanghai. To record it. But…I really wonder at my sanity.”

Liu took the pages. Slowly he read through them.

I watched the curtains move and the wind alter; Ba and Ma had left this world, yet I was here in Shanghai. I still breathed and changed and dreamed.

After a long time, Liu looked up from the score. “Ma-li,” he said, “I’m sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life’s work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked
yourself? Surely it’s what we each carry, in greater and greater quantity as we age, remembrance.” He used the word jì yì, which has two meanings: 记忆 (to recall, record) and 技艺 (art). He was silent for a moment, looking down at the pages. “The music reminds me of something Zhuli said when we were rehearsing Prokofiev. She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear? Is it better to have been loved, or to love? Of all his compositions, this is Teacher Sparrow’s most extraordinary.”

He opened his violin case and lifted the instrument out. A phrase filled the room, it seemed to move both backwards and forwards, as if Sparrow wished to rewrite time itself. Note by note, I felt as if I was being reconfigured.

When Teacher Liu set the violin down, he asked me, “Do you play the piano?”

“I never learned.”

“Then I’ll arrange everything. Teacher Sparrow meant for this music to be heard here.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

Before I left, I showed him a photograph of Ai-ming.

“Why, it’s Zhuli isn’t it?” he said in surprise, staring at the image. “It must be. No? It’s Teacher Sparrow’s daughter?
Ai-ming
. Ah, well. How remarkable. She has the very same face as Miss Zhuli.”

Tofu Liu gave me the recording to keep and I gave him a copy of Sparrow’s music. I remembered, then, something that Ai-ming had said.
I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that’s how the world is, isn’t it?”

S
PARROW WAS PEDALLING SLOWLY
home from Huizhou Wooden Crate Factory, pushed forward by a steady breeze. It was late August, just after rainfall. Along the road, loudspeakers announced a special program: “Tonight in Beijing, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy, will perform for Madame Mao. This is their third concert in the city, one of a total of six performances in China.”

The newsreader had said the date, September 14, 1973.

But it was 1976. The concert had been almost three years before. Others, too, were staring up at the loudspeakers, just as baffled. It had been nearly a decade since the radio had broadcast any music besides the eighteen approved revolutionary operas. Now, music exploded above them, the feverish opening crescendo of Respighi’s
Pines of Rome
. Sparrow coasted to a stop, bewildered by its detail, the cheerful, almost absurd piano and the tinkling brass.

By the time he reached home, the second half of the program had begun. His daughter ran out to meet him. “It’s a new work by Madame Mao!”

Sparrow smiled, despite himself. “No, Ai-ming. This is Beethoven and it comes from another century.” This is a fragment,
he thought, of something that once existed but that no longer grows here, like a field cut down.

He went inside. The Sixth Symphony, Beethoven’s Pastoral, trotted gaily through the rooms. Even Big Mother was lost in thought. He thought the walls were creeping nearer to him, they brushed his arms and scraped the back of his neck. You could close a book and forget about it, knowing it would not lose its contents when you stopped reading, but music wasn’t the same, not for him, it was most alive when it was heard. Year after year, he had wanted to play and replay it, to take it apart into its component pieces and build it once more. And then, finally, after six years, after seven, and then a decade, his memory had gone quiet. Without trying, he had stopped remembering. But this broadcast, what was it? Were they hearing the future or was it only the final outburst of the past? Long ago, He Luting had shouted, “Shame, shame. You should be ashamed,” and Zhuli said, “I will make Prokofiev himself proud.” If the concert truly took place in Beijing, Kai must have attended. A sound inside a sound. But what if all of this was only in his mind?

The applause that came was so fierce, he feared the radio might topple over. Violent catapults of applause, rhythmic, sustained.

From the opposite side of the room, Big Mother said, “What bloody change is coming now?”

The music was nothing more than a broadcast, a simple program, but he turned and saw exultation on his daughter’s face. Little Ai-ming had pressed her forehead up against the radio, his daughter was overjoyed, she had been transported, she looked as if all her nerves were alight. She looked like Zhuli. For a moment he had no idea where he was. He wanted to pull her back, to take the machine away and bury it noiselessly in the ground. Trembling with cold, he walked across the room and switched the radio off.

—

Because her father was so quiet, Ai-ming had, from an early age, turned to Big Mother Knife; her grandmother was her
confidante, her teacher and also her pillow. No one in this life cared about her as Big Mother did, and so she took great pleasure in climbing over her, sleeping on her and fluffing Big Mother’s curls. Ling, her actual mother, had been reassigned to Shanghai nearly five years ago, and only visited once each year, during Spring Festival. Her father, Sparrow, was the Bird of Quiet.

“Don’t be fooled,” Big Mother once told her. “He’s not moving, as usual, and he’s not thinking either, sadly. Your father is empty as a walnut shell.” She had leaned close and whispered in Ai-ming’s ear: “The world is like a banana, easily bruised. Now is the time to watch and observe, not to judge. Ai-ming, believing everything in books is worse than having no books at all.”

For weeks after, Ai-ming wondered about these words. On the August night when the Philadelphia Orchestra performance was broadcast, she had spied on her father as he listened to this Beethoven, and she observed how, for at least a year afterwards, the radio returned to its usual music, playing only
Shajiabang
and
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
. Once, though, there had been a broadcast of Albanian music, and it had made Sparrow stop what he was doing and turn towards the radio, as if it were an intruder. In school, as the daughter of a class enemy she was forbidden to join the Young Pioneers, among other injustices. This was a new word for her, injustice, and she liked to roll it on her tongue for the shock of it. In school, they recited essays about what made a good revolutionary. She began to wonder what made a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person. Are you a good person, she thought, looking at her teacher, or are you a good revolutionary? Are you a good revolutionary, she thought, looking at Big Mother Knife, or are you a good grandmother? Was it even possible to be both?

The game intrigued her. How pleasurable it was to bury words inside the soil of her thoughts. She imitated her father’s expression, a studied emptiness. But sometimes his expression failed him. Sometimes Sparrow looked at her with so much
anxiety, she felt her hair stand on end. Ba, she thought, are you a good person or a good worker? Is Chairman Mao a good person or a good leader?

One morning, Big Mother unlocked the battered suitcase that was used primarily as their dining table. Inside the trunk was a single straw shoe, a pretty blue dress, a sheaf of music in jianpu notation, and a cardboard box full of notebooks. Her first observation was that the books were grubby.

“Your mouth is hanging open,” Big Mother said.

Her grandmother fanned the notebooks out, removed three and told Ai-ming to close the suitcase. When it was latched and locked, Big Mother set the notebooks down and opened the first one: the pages looked even older than her grandmother. Big Mother’s face swooped down as if to taste the paper. From this position, she turned her head and looked at Ai-ming. “This,” she whispered gruffly, “is what excellent calligraphy looks like.”

Ai-ming went in for a closer look. The characters seemed to hover just above the paper, like ink over water. They had the pristine cleanliness of winter flowers.

“Waaa! Isn’t it strong?” Big Mother said.

Delight squeezed Ai-ming’s heart. “
Waaa
!” she whispered.

Big Mother straightened, grunting her approval. “Of course, the calligraphy is not as robust as Chairman Mao’s but still, it’s pretty good. Refined yet with a depth of movement. Maybe…you want to read some to me. Chapter 1, but no more. You’re still far too young.”

It was early morning. Her father was at the factory which, last year had been reborn. Now it was Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, and he had gone from building wooden crates to making radios. The Bird of Quiet could assemble the new Red Lamp 711 shortwave radio in the shake of a feather.

Outside, loudspeakers were chiding the world. Rain fell in continuous sheets, beating the tin roof like a regiment of horses, so they hid under the blankets. The many wrinkles on Big
Mother’s face reminded Ai-ming of the dry, patient earth in February, thirsty for spring.

How can you ignore this sharp awl that pierces your heart? If you yearn for things outside yourself, you will never obtain what you are seeking
.

And so the novel of Da-wei and May Fourth began once more.

—

It pleased Big Mother Knife that Ai-ming did not appear to notice the transition from the original Book of Records to the new chapters written by Wen the Dreamer. Unable to recover the rest of the book, he had simply continued on from Chapter 31. He, like the character of May Fourth, would spend the greater part of his life in the deserts of Gansu, Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan, where, they said, more than three hundred ancient settlements lay beneath the sand. Their traces–documents on wood and paper, silks and household objects–had endured, preserved by the dry air. In the new chapters, Wen continued the old code, hiding their whereabouts inside the names of characters. Sometimes the code was descriptive: wěi 暐 (the bright shining of the sun), wēi 微 (a fine rain), or wěi 渨 (a cove, or a bend in the hills). Sometimes heartbreaking: wèi 未 (not) or wéi 偉 (to flow backwards).

Throughout her childhood, little Ai-ming asked for Chapter 23 to be reread so many times, the words must have shown up in her dreams. What the child pictured, or how she made sense of it, Big Mother could not say. “This literary resurrection of yours,” she wrote to Wen the Dreamer, “has won another admirer.” She meant Ai-ming but Wen the Dreamer imagined Zhuli, now grown. It was 1976, and Zhuli would have been twenty-five years old. Big Mother had begun letter after letter, telling Swirl that her daughter was gone, but she did not have the courage to send a single one. In September of that year, she wrote that Zhuli had received permission to study at the Paris Conservatory: their beloved child had crossed over into the West. Big Mother half believed her own letters. It was the first time since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that such a lie was even remotely credible. My beloved
Swirl, she thought, I fear you will never forgive me. She sealed the letter and entrusted it to their messenger, Projectionist Bang, who travelled the hinterlands showing movies in the villages, and was a trusted confidant of Wen the Dreamer.