Do Not Say We Have Nothing Read online

  Big Mother turned and walked outside. She went slowly through the inner courtyard, all the way to the front of the house. Here she lost momentum and sat down on a low brick wall a hundred yards from the entrance. Nobody had followed her and the kerosene lamp continued to flicker from inside. Now she heard the thwack of their shovels. That bus driver was the grandson of a turtle! He’d certainly dropped her at the wrong place. Ba Lute’s warnings were getting under her skin. She pulled on her hair and tried to wake herself, she pressed her hands violently to her face, but no matter what she did, her eyes refused to open and the dream would not end. She stared all around and saw the absurdity of her travelling bag, the muddy ground, the grey house and tiny night stars coming out. She would have to go back into the house and straighten things out. Yes, she would go back inside. It was a strange, windy night and she could hear a shrill cry echoing over the hillside. What ghosts were visiting this place? She could hear shouts now, coming nearer, and the ringing of a gong. A funeral, she thought numbly, but still Big Mother did not stand up or withdraw.

  —

  A crowd was coming along the road, swaying and heaving in a procession. Big Mother pushed herself onto her frozen feet. She had no idea how long she’d been sitting here, but the women with the shovels had gone home. In the fog, and in their excitement, they had not even seen her as they passed.

  As the parade approached, Big Mother could hear their voices more distinctly. Although there was indeed a gong, bells and the occasional burst of singing, it was not a funeral. Certain words were repeated, “stand up,” “have courage,” “devil,” but the shouting was oddly disjointed, as if opposing leaders were battling for control of the slogans.

  At the head of the procession, Wen the Dreamer walked with his body crookedly bent. A woman walked behind him. Swirl’s hair fell loose and wild. She was completely tipped forward, as if she carried a piece of furniture on her back, but there was none. The distance between them halved and then halved again. Frenzied faces closed in on Big Mother, crying and groaning. She could not make out all the words but she heard:

  “Honour the Chairman!”

  “Kill the demons!”

  “Long live our glorious land reform!”

  I have crossed into death itself, Big Mother thought. Now she saw that her sister’s arms were roped together behind her, in a position that forced her two elbows up into the air. Everyone seemed fuelled by exhaustion, as if they had recently been shaken from sleep. The cavalcade stretched along the road, but they were so absorbed by their own noise that they, too, did not notice Big Mother. The very last person, a small boy struggling to keep up, glanced in her direction but his eyes did not fix on her. He hurried along.

  Big Mother stood up and, leaving a wide gap, followed them. The procession continued for at least another hour. Finally, just before the tree line, the shouting faded and the people drained away like rivulets of water. By the time Big Mother reached the end point, her sister and Wen had been untied and were standing, incongruously, by themselves. They were cautiously testing their backs, slowly stretching out their arms. They were carrying their own ropes, as if the ropes were only props.

  “Is is really you, my sister?” Big Mother said.

  Swirl turned, peering into the darkness.

  “Little Swirl,” Big Mother said again, afraid to touch the woman. “Is that you?”

  —

  Big Mother did not hear the entire story that night or in the nights that immediately followed. All her sister would say was that these parades, “struggle sessions,” she called them, had been going on for the past three months.

  “Most of the time, it’s harmless,” Swirl said. “They take us to the schoolyard and denounce us as landlords. We have to kneel, but all they want is a thorough self-criticism. Occasionally, like tonight, we’re paraded through the village.”

  Big Mother could not contain her fury. “And the rest of the time?”

  Swirl glanced at Zhuli, who was folded into her father’s lap, and said nothing.

  Everyone spoke in whispers, as if afraid to wake the gods of destiny, or even Chairman Mao himself. The hut, with its mud walls and straw roof, was meant for animals, that much was abundantly clear. Big Mother wondered where the evicted pigs and cows had gone.

  “We’re not suffering,” her sister said.

  “It was inevitable,” Wen the Dreamer told her, his voice barely louder than the steam from his tea. “Justice had to be done eventually.”

  In this way, two days and two nights passed in a silence that cut deeply into Big Mother. She did not need a lengthy explanation, it was clear what had taken place. But in Shanghai, she had not witnessed the land reform campaign. In the cities, people from all corners of life and with every political affiliation had been reassigned to new quarters. People who had lost their homes were given new ones. It had been part of the war recovery.

  On the third night, Big Mother lay on the kang beside her sister and the child, Zhuli, who was already five years old. The child snored vigorously. The kang, heated from below by a charcoal stove, looked like a relic from somebody’s tomb. To make space, Wen’s elderly mother had gone to stay with a relation.

  Despite the relative warmth of the heated bed, her sister was shivering.

  “Tell me something,” Swirl said suddenly. “Just a few words to distract me from this place.”

  Big Mother swallowed several times to alleviate the dryness in her throat. Outside, Wen was smoking; the thin walls might as well be cloth. She told her sister about Sparrow and his brothers, about the jianpu music that ran from page to page. Sparrow never stopped composing. He didn’t breathe, she thought, he only emitted music. “My boys are energetic and have more hidden thoughts than a cartload of books. A mother never knows her children as well as she imagines.”

  “How true, how true,” her sister breathed.

  Big Mother said she’d been back to an old teahouse where they used to sing, the Purple Mountain Teahouse. “They’ve changed the name,” she said. “It’s now the Red Mountain People’s Refreshment House.” Swirl giggled. “The rooms are closed and all they serve is tea and melon seeds. But, still, the usual crowd comes to chatter, drink a little or fill their canisters. There are even singers who perform the new repertoire, ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Song of the Guerrillas,’ and all that. It’s stirring, who can argue! Even I want to overthrow something when I hear it. But revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. Of course,” Big Mother continued hurriedly, “in the New China such sorrows as we knew are long gone.” She went on to describe a few of the patrons, including the ones who still came with their orioles and thrushes, and the storytellers and balladeers who now told the epic of Chairman Mao’s Long March, in fifty dogged episodes.

  “Do you remember that book I told you about,” Swirl asked. “The thirty-one notebooks? The Book of Records.” Her voice barely reached Big Mother, even though they were curled together on the narrow kang.

  “You burned it, I hope? Anything that inspires such devotion is surely banned.”

  “Burn the Book of Records?” her sister asked. A flash in her voice. Indignation. “How could I?”

  “To save yourself,” Big Mother said.

  “To save myself, I couldn’t.”

  The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation.

  “I need to go back to the house,” Swirl said. “I have to get those notebooks back.” />
  “Don’t be a fool.”

  The words were spoken harshly but Swirl didn’t seem to hear. “Wen’s grandfather was a copyist, too, did you know? There are books hidden in the ground that have been preserved for centuries, all the books that Old West brought from America.” She pulled the cover up to her chin so that only her eyes and the bridge of her nose were visible. “Everything on this earth has its lifespan and then, it must be natural, we have to make it disappear. As if the new didn’t come from the old. As if the old didn’t grow from the new.”

  Big Mother hesitated and then she asked softly, “But what is this upheaval?”

  “Haven’t you seen it? I thought the land reform campaign had reached everywhere. During the war…I’ll never forget the cruelties we saw. I understand why nothing can stay the same.”

  “Of course, but…”

  “Once everything is broken, they can build society once more.”

  How many times had her sister spoken these words? “They,” Big Mother said. “The revolutionary committees? The Communist Party?”

  “They say it’s the wheel of history. I’m not afraid. You know how it is, one hand can’t stop the flood from destroying the bank. Only…I worry about Zhuli. She’s been born into the wrong class, she’s the daughter of Wen the Dreamer. The daughter of a landlord. Nothing I do can change that. What if I can’t protect her?”

  “Come with me to Shanghai. My no-good husband can arrange it.”

  “It’s the wheel of history,” Swirl said. There were no tears in her voice, just the cut glass of pragmatism. “The Party says only the guilty try to escape punishment. If we run away, not even Ba Lute will be able to intervene. We can’t risk it. I have to protect Zhuli, but how?”

  —

  Much later, in the years after Swirl had been released from the desert labour camps, when Zhuli had already grown into a young woman, Big Mother pieced the story together.

  The Party men had arrived in Bingpai on the day Wen and his uncles were dragging ice off the mountain lake. It was arduous work, but worthwhile because, once covered in straw, the ice, ever useful, would keep for many months.

  The uncles used to have labourers but now preferred to do this kind of work themselves. The previous year, when land redistribution had reached Bingpai, the brothers had known better than to argue. There were far worse fates than having to give up a few acres of land. In the neighbouring county, a dozen people had been struggled against–a sort of large meeting where accusations were shouted, where the accused were beaten and sometimes tortured–and executed, but the dead had been, mostly, rich men infamous for their savagery. Last year, when delegates from the Bingpai peasants’ association arrived at their gate, the brothers had not resisted and had relinquished the title deeds for all seventeen acres of the family holdings, which would be redivided among the village. True, Er Ge’s wife had left him, but he still had the two grown children. And Ji Zi had talked of killing himself, but no one took him seriously. Meanwhile life continued: until land reform was finalized, the fields still had to be tilled and orchards tended. In fact, the harvest of sweet apples that year was the most bountiful in the brothers’ memory.

  As the cart complained its way through the gate, Wen and his uncles were surprised to see two strangers, as well as the village head and the chairman of the peasants’ association, standing outside. Da Ge stepped out from behind the block of ice. He greeted the visitors and invited them inside to share a meal. The village head declined. It was all rather uncomfortable and Da Ge, who had always been impatient, said, “Well, if there’s nothing urgent, we’ll get back to work. The ice can’t wait.”

  One of the strangers, who had yet to introduce himself, intervened. There was a meeting underway at the village school, he informed them, and the brothers were late.

  The village head stepped forward. “These two teachers,” he said, indicating the strangers, “have come all the way from the county Party committee. Of course, as your family is so prominent in Bingpai, how could we start the meeting without you?”

  In the courtyard, the silence seemed to echo off the bricks and ice. Where was everyone anyway? Neither Da Ge nor his brothers had eaten in almost six hours. Still, he led his siblings and Wen through the gate and fell in line behind the strangers and the village head.

  —

  At the primary school, Swirl had been bundled off to the side with her daughter, where they knelt with twenty-odd others on the cold ground. Among them were the wives of Wen’s uncles, who had been brought under guard and were now at centre stage. The crowd was already in the hundreds, yet more people kept arriving to take part in the meeting. Da Ge’s wife was repeatedly slapped and kicked until she cried out for mercy. The fierce, no-nonsense woman, already in her mid-fifties, was hysterical. She was pawing at the ground as if trying to find a coin in the ice.

  Zhuli had long stopped crying. She clutched her mother, completely silent. Swirl didn’t dare try to comfort her. When I get home, she told herself, I will warm a little water, wet a cloth and wipe her frozen tears away. It’s nothing. Nothing that a little warm water can’t clean away.

  Now the men came, the four brothers and her Wen. They were surrounded and quickly trussed up. Swirl could hear Da Ge shouting. Her daughter was weakly calling out, “Ba!” Swirl cupped her body around Zhuli, thinking that the child must not see, nothing must happen. But hands came and pulled at Zhuli. Voices shouted at the child to open her eyes, she had to learn. Swirl stumbled to her feet and tried to get her daughter back, but they moved decisively and brutally. When she looked up from the ground, she saw that Zhuli had been lifted onto a man’s thin shoulders. The girl sat, unmoving, staring ahead of her.

  The arrival of Wen the Dreamer and his uncles had brought renewed life to the freezing crowd. New accusations came to the fore. One spoke of the famine and how he’d sold his land to Da Ge for nothing. “Robbery!” someone shouted. “You used your good fortune to trample your neighbours into the mud. How else could you acquire over seventeen acres in so short a time?” The brother of Er Ge’s wife accused Er Ge of mistreating her, beating her and even depriving her of food. Er Ge denied it, he tried to put up a fight but others came to knock him down. It was chaos. The strangers had dispersed through the crowd asking people, “Who beat you? Who humiliated your fathers and raped your daughters? Was it them?”

  “It was…It was…”

  “Who made their fortunes during the war?”

  “These landowners think they can spit out a square of land. They think you should get down on your knees and bless them!”

  “We must free ourselves!” There was revenge in their voices but also grief and weeping.

  “Comrades, have the courage to stand together once and for all!”

  “A life for a life!”

  “Who humiliated you? Tell us. This is not your shame! Why should you carry it?”

  A woman had rushed into the circle. She pointed at a man in a dark blue gown. “This man raped me when I was six years old,” she said. “He covered my face with my mother’s clothes and he…” She was cradling her stomach and began to sob. “That was only the beginning. He saw that my father was dead and I had no one to stand up for me. This monster, this animal! Every pain I suffered gave him pleasure.” Someone pushed a shovel into her hands. At first her blows were weak, as if only grief, not rage, motivated her. But the chanting of the crowd drove her on and the shovel took on a new, determined rhythm. She continued to land the shovel even after it made no difference.

  “Twenty years of war and for what? To be thrown back into the gutters of society again?”

  “I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!”

  “I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out.r />
  “Fair?” The man laughed bitterly.

  “Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!”

  “If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.”

  Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny.

  “Aren’t these your countrymen?” a man said, turning on Wen. “Isn’t this your crime?”

  “My crime,” Wen said.

  The man slapped him. “Is this your crime?”

  “I admit it. I accept,” he cried.

  Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved. Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed. Torches were lit and others demanded yet more killing. She saw Wen dragged forward. Her husband begged for mercy. The gun moved away from him, came back, moved away, came back. Her daughter was crying, struggling to free herself from the stranger’s rigid arms. “Ba!” she screamed. “Ba!” Er Ge was shot in the chest and then in the face. Three more men were shot. One would not die and had to be beaten. Swirl felt herself losing consciousness. A deep silence seemed to come at her from every side.

  “It’s over,” someone said. She lifted her face and searched the darkness. A woman was hovering over her. It was the wife of the deputy village head, a girl who sometimes came to sit with Swirl in the village school and share a few stories of the city, learn a few songs. “Go home,” the girl whispered. “Tomorrow your house will be taken over by the peasants’ association, but there are some empty shelters up on the hillside. They’ll bring you there. They won’t leave you without a roof over your head. They are better than the landlords of the past.”