Do Not Say We Have Nothing Read online

  “You mean those packages are still arriving?” Big Mother said, incredulous. “You should have told me sooner. It could be a criminal gang or a political trap!”

  Swirl could only laugh.

  “And please don’t give me this nonsense about literary taste,” her sister continued. “That kind of talk is just camel’s lips and horse’s mouth. Speaking of which, when will you stop living with those miserable widows and come stay with me?”

  The next time they met, Swirl didn’t mention the novel at all. Big Mother brought it up, saying that such fictions were a false world in which her younger sister, if she was not careful, would lose her corporeal being and become only air and longing.

  But Swirl was only half-listening. She was thinking of the novel’s characters: Da-wei, the adventurer, and May Fourth, the scholar. Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life. She recognized in them desires which, until now, had gone unexpressed in her. She smiled at her sister, unable to mask her sadness. “Big Mother,” she said, “don’t take it so seriously. It’s only a book after all.”

  After the thirty-first notebook, she waited as usual. But day after day, and then week after week, no more deliveries came.

  As time passed, the cold loneliness of Swirl’s life reasserted itself. She ate her dinners and the notebooks piled up across from her, like a friend gone quiet.

  Downstairs, rumours abounded.

  The manager was worried that, with Chairman Mao in power, teahouses would be denounced as bourgeois frivolities, singers would be assigned to work units, and the lyrics of every song monitored. Bread Crumb fretted that the government would ban all games, especially and including chess. Not for the first time, Swirl wondered if it was time to leave Shanghai; passage to Hong Kong was getting more expensive by the day. But down at the train ticket office, she ran into the owner of the Library of the Gods, who was out taking the air with his cockatoo. In her distraction, she mentioned the mysterious notebooks. The bookseller teased her and said she had a twin in this district–a failed poet known as Wen the Dreamer was going from place to place, seeking a copy of the very same book.

  “Try the Old Cat at the Perilous Heights bookstore. Suzhou Creek Road,” he said. “Third lane down. She’s got her whiskers in everything.”

  Swirl thanked him. She took the tram to the bookshop, thinking she would buy the rest of the novel and take it with her to Hong Kong. The Perilous Heights Bookstore was housed in one wing of a stout courtyard house, and the books were three-deep from floor to ceiling. In the literature section, she climbed a sliding ladder and began scanning shelves. But with neither title nor author, the search was futile. Meanwhile a steady stream of patrons arrived, young men and women who gazed all around, from north to south, as if looking for something they had dropped. One approached the bookseller and began whispering urgently. He was pushed aside by a grandfather wearing a Western jacket over a dark blue gown.

  “Is it ready?” he said, between dry coughs. The Old Cat, who didn’t look all that old, handed him a mimeographed sheaf of papers. From her vantage point, Swirl could see it was a copy of Guo Moruo’s translation of Dr. Faustus.

  The Grandfather’s lips began to tremble. “But what about Part 2!”

  “This is not a factory,” the Old Cat said, slapping a lozenge on the counter. “Come back next week.”

  Others wanted foreign novels, works by philosophers, economists and nuclear physicists. As she fielded questions the Old Cat barely looked up. She herself was copying endless pages in her flowing script. Apparently the mimeograph was in need of a part that might never be replaced.

  When Swirl climbed down from her ladder and inquired after Da-wei and May Fourth, the bookseller muttered, “Not again.”

  Every morning, Swirl would go to the bookstore; it was calm inside and the shelves were full of treasures. Surely another story could serve the same purpose, and lift her out of her solitude. She lost herself in travel books about Paris and New York, imagining a journey that would bring her to the far west.

  Behind her table, the Old Cat rarely lifted her eyes; the only movement came from her ballpoint pen which slid efficiently up and down the page, so that the pen seemed to be the one delivering advice, information and succour. A bestseller, Poor Persons Take Up Guns to Revolution, kept the papers from flying away.

  Several weeks into her new routine, Swirl saw another tower of paper settle on the desk, as if the first stack had drawn an admirer. Then, her eyes lifting, she took in a clean grey coat with cloth buttons, a pocket filled with papers, and finally, smooth, ink-stained hands. She looked again and saw a young man with wavy hair looking at her with embarrassed recognition in his eyes.

  “Wen the Dreamer,” she said.

  “Miss Swirl,” he answered.

  “Took long enough,” the Old Cat said. Her pen bobbed against the sea of the page.

  The young man’s manuscript threatened to fall, and he steadied the pages with the fingertips of his right hand. Swirl climbed down from the ladder and stared unashamedly at the top sheet, studying the neat columns of words, the calmly passionate calligraphy that had described the impossible love affair between May Fourth and Da-wei. She wanted to scoop the manuscript up, to rejoin May Fourth in the train to Hohhot, peering through the dust-caked windows to see her beloved smoking on the platform; he would still be there in a week, a month, a lifetime, if she asked him to. It is not in me, she realized, to fall in love with someone who would wait. I can never settle for half a freedom.

  “May I?” she said, nodding at the manuscript.

  The young man’s fingertips refused to lift from the pages.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “unfortunately, due to my negligence…”

  He was not at all like her husband. So this was the writer, the mysterious sender of packages. Wen the Dreamer was wispy and pale, while her husband’s Nationalist uniform had barely seemed to contain him. She blushed.

  “Forgive me,” he said, beginning again. “I’m afraid this manuscript is a different story. A different writer.”

  “It’s yours, though.”

  “Yes,” he said. “No. Well, you understand, the writing is mine.”

  She had inched nearer to him. Almost there.

  “Quit cowering in the bushes,” the Old Cat said. The pen lifted its head and pointed its nib at Swirl. “If you, Little Miss, are looking for Da-wei’s creator, good luck! I’ll be the first to congratulate you when you find him, and to offer him, of course, a generous remittance, excellent terms, etc. But the author’s whereabouts are as big a mystery to you as they are to poor Wen here. That said, if you need someone to copy your letters or write out your correspondence, well! There’s no finer hand or gentler soul than his.”

  “I’ve looked everywhere for the rest of the novel,” Wen the Dreamer said. “There must be, at least, another five hundred pages. Maybe more. I think it’s called the Book of Records.”

  “But you–” Swirl began. She kept her gaze on the manuscript, which seemed solid and unimpeachable.

  “I made a copy of the book for you, because I hoped…I wanted…”

  Swirl knew she should end the conversation. Yet she could not bring herself to move away from the table.

  “I wanted the story to bring you pleasure. What the Old Cat says is true, the words are not mine.” His slender hands came together and clasped themselves. “I sent the first chapters before I finished copying the manuscript. When I realized what had happened, that the book ended, literally, in mid-sentence, I tried to write my own chapters. I tried to finish the story but I…”

  “You did not have the talent,” the Old Cat said.

  His wispiness grew sorrowful now. But still he did not falter or retreat, he stayed very still and would not stop looking at her.

  “Perhaps one day.”

  “Pardon me,” Swirl said, stepping backwards. She felt ashamed but could not fathom why she should feel this way, if the emotion belonged to him or to her.
She turned and walked to the door and managed to twist it open. Fresh air filled her lungs and she heard pages fluttering on every side.

  “You’d be amazed at how few people can tell a story,” the Old Cat was saying. The sound of her voice was as rough and reassuring as pebbles rolling together. “Yet still these new emperors want to ban them, burn them, cross them all out. Don’t they know how hard it is to come by pleasure? Or perhaps they do know. The sly goats.”

  “Might I have the honour of walking you home?” Wen the Dreamer said.

  The wind seemed to push her backwards and spin her around. But once she was facing him, once she saw his observant, hopeful eyes, words failed her. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  “Heavens, the suspense!” the Old Cat said.

  Finally, as if it were also the wind’s doing, Swirl nodded in answer to Wen. “If you must.”

  Wen the Dreamer was at her side, he was holding the door, and she walked out.

  Leaves were falling everywhere. Soon winter would come with its padded coats and knitted mittens and, at the arrival of the first frost, Wen the Dreamer would bring her scarves and woollen socks, jars of honey, and novels that he had copied by hand in his contained yet passionate script.

  Winter was kind to Wen. His wispiness became a delicate kind of hardiness. Young girls and their mothers hung their washing across the alleyways and admired the elongated question mark of his body as he loped down the slippery walks, towards the teahouse where Swirl sang. “Don’t go too fast,” his neighbours called. “Your words will get scrambled!” He still didn’t know how to talk about the new political order, the different factions and all his ideals; lines of poetry occupied his thoughts, he wrote them down and threw them out. He wrote and wrote and burned the pages. He waited.

  “Carrier pigeon!” they called him.

  And, still, out of an insistent curiosity, Swirl began approaching strangers reading in teahouses to enquire if they were acquainted with Da-wei, if they had perhaps journeyed to the Taklamakan desert and been impressed by his ingenuity in sending private messages to his lover over the radio broadcast, even while tens of thousands of people listened? “Hiding in plain sight,” a well-dressed lady answered. “But, no, I’ve never heard of this devil.”

  “Are you certain it’s a local writer?” a poet asked. “Everyone here is worthless. It must be a translation of a foreign work.” A university student was convinced it was plagiarized from a novel by She Lao, another thought it sounded like a modern retelling of Record of Heretofore Lost Works or maybe Li Mengchu’s Slap the Table in Amazement. “Anyway, don’t waste your time on novels,” someone told her. “The one to read right now is that upstart gun collector poet from Chengdu. Though, in general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish.”

  One night she returned to the old notebooks, reading them all over again from the beginning. As her candle flickered, she became certain that the writer had gone into exile or perhaps met with some tragedy. Perhaps she was one of the war wounded, she had been torn from her former existence, and the novel was now no more than a dream disturbed. Or, perhaps, like Swirl’s husband, the writer had been killed in the fighting, and the last chapters could only be recovered in the next world. Wen had told her that it was not he but the author who had written the names of the major character–Da-wei and May Fourth–with different ideograms. Wen, too, believed, that the names were part of a code, a trail that someone could follow. But to what end? Swirl wrapped the notebooks carefully in brown paper; she must be vigilant. After all, the Book of Records was just a distraction from the realities of modern life. It was only a book, so why couldn’t she let it go? She opened her trunk and saw objects from her past, a vanished time and a former self. If she let her guard down, she could almost see her son crawling towards her. He was pulling on her dress, on her fingertips, his delight like a string around her heart. Swirl had given birth to him when she was just fourteen years old. On the night he died, it had been too dark, too windy, for a child to travel to the netherworld on his own. She had wanted to follow him over the cliff edge, into the sea, but Big Mother had wept and begged Swirl not to leave her.

  She could not sleep and lay awake until morning.

  A dull light framed the curtains. Swirl heard an infant weeping, went to the window and when she looked down, she saw a couple trying to fit their baby into his winter coat, adjusting arms then legs then head as the baby lolled and weakly fought, then scrunched up his face and wailed, and still the outerwear refused to fasten. Wen the Dreamer came along the avenue, a block of pages sticking out of his pocket. He leaned towards the weeping child like a comma in a line so that, momentarily, the child, confused, suspended his wailing, the outerwear was fastened, and the little family went on their tremulous way.

  Later that morning, when she stood with Wen on Huaihai Road, when he venerated her missing parents and older brothers, her lost husband and beloved son, when he wished for the blessing of her older sister, Swirl had a pure memory of her little boy. He had lost his footing and fallen backwards from the tram onto the concrete. Not even a scratch on him. He had laughed and asked if he could do it again, and then he had reached out his frail hand and snatched the bread out of Sparrow’s mouth. Sparrow’s lips had closed over air, bewilderment flooding his little face.

  On Huaihai Road, Wen was asking her to be his wife.

  Swirl remembered the quiet of the bed when she had woken suddenly. She had picked up her son’s perfect hand, and a grey sadness seemed to move from his chest into hers, and in that moment, when she knew her child was dead, she lost her parents, her brothers and her husband all over again. Unable to stop crying, she had refused to let go of the child’s body. But he grew rigid and cold in death. Only Big Mother had finally managed to lift the body from her arms.

  “Miss Swirl,” Wen said now, as shoppers with empty bags wandered past, “I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again.”

  “Yes,” Swirl said, as if his words were a prayer. “Let us.”

  ONCE, AI-MING SAID TO ME, “Ma-li, I’m sure I’ve disappeared. Have I? Can you really see me?” She lifted her right hand and then her left, ever so slowly. Unsure if she was teasing or not, I echoed her movements, imagining I was at the mercy of the wind, pushed forward, turned sideways, only by forces unseen. “I’m invisible, too, Ai-ming. See?” I pulled her into the bathroom where we stared at our reflections as if they, and thus we, ourselves, were a mirage. It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

  It was 1991, mid-March, and Ai-ming had been with us for three months. Ma was working all the time now, and had taken an extra job to cover expenses for Ai-ming, for the future. I decided to use my Chinese New Year money, my lucky money, to treat Ai-ming to dinner. My plan was to take her to my father’s favourite restaurant. The night we set out, the weather was mild, and we held hands as we walked beside the shrubs on 18th Avenue, past sagging houses and unkempt lawns, beneath cherry blossoms that perfumed even the saddest-looking blocks.

  At Main Street, we turned north. I remember that an old grey cat lay in the middle of the pavement and didn’t move as we approached, she only stretched one foot further away, and swiped her tail from from side to side. The restaurant seemed to step out from the shadows wearing a vest of lights. It was a Polish place called Mazurka. It was warm inside and a quarter full, and there were white napkins and heavy utensils, and tea lights in miniature glasses. With Ai-ming, I felt grown-up and worldly, a true sophisticate. She, after all, came from Beijing, a city that, in 1991, had eleven million people. Ai-ming had explained to me the law of large numbers (LLN), and the various methods of constructing a mathemat
ical proof, including the “proof without words” which used only visual images. I marvelled at statements like

  If we know x, we also know y, because…or

  If p then q…

  In the summer of 1989, while still in Beijing, Ai-ming had sat the national university entrance examinations. Shortly after, she had been offered a place in the newly established computer science department at Tsinghua University, the most prestigious scientific university in China.

  “I should have gone,” she told me. “But how could I?”

  Her decision not to attend Tsinghua, a principled but reckless choice, astonishes me now. But when I was eleven years old, I told her it all made sense.

  Over cabbage rolls and perogies, Ai-ming told me that she was grateful for my mother’s generosity but she felt unworthy. She felt vulnerable in the daytime, afraid to be seen, but she needed to be courageous and start her life again. Ai-ming told me that solitude can reshape your life. “Like a river that gets cut off from the sea,” she said. “You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself. That’s how I feel. Do you understand, Ma-li?”

  I remembered a night before Ai-ming came to live with us, when I had submerged my face under the bath water and imagined what it would be like to stop breathing, to stop time, as Ba had done. I said I understood. How I yearned to understand everything.

  The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room. The waiter spoke to us kindly, as if we had come from very far away, from a place where words waited for their echo. I feared my childhood would pass before he finished a sentence. And even when I answered him in my impeccable Canadian accent, he continued with the slowness of the ages, until I, too, felt my pulse slow, and time became relative, as the physicists had proved it was, so perhaps Ai-ming and I are still seated there, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting for our meal to come, for a sentence to end, for this intermission to run its course.