Do Not Say We Have Nothing

A few days later, a second chapter arrived. Why was someone harassing her with mail? The following week, she received a third and a fourth. The novel continued, following first Da-wei and then May Fourth, as they made their way across a China in ruins. The narrative leaped and turned, as if entire chapters or pages had been ripped out; but Swirl, too, had been uprooted by the war, and she had no trouble filling in the missing gaps. Bit by bit, her irritation gave way to recognition and, slowly, without her realizing it, attachment.

On its surface, the story was a simple epic chronicling the fall of empire, but the people trapped inside the book reminded her of people she tried not to remember: her brothers and parents, her lost husband and son. People who, against their will, had been pushed by war to the cliff’s edge. She read the fourth, ninth and twelfth notebooks as if reading would keep these characters anchored to the pages. Of course she was only a spectator; one by one, they spilled into the sea and were swept away. There were moments so piteous, she wanted to slam the book shut and close her eyes against its images, yet the novel insistently pulled her forward, as if its very survival depended on leaving the past and the dead behind. But what if the novel was written by someone she knew? Her family had all been singers, performers and storytellers. What if they had somehow lived, or lived long enough to write this fictional world? These irrational thoughts frightened her, as if she was being tempted backwards into a grief larger than the world or reality itself. What if the notebooks came from her dead husband, a Nationalist soldier killed at the start of the war, letters misplaced in the chaos and only now arriving? Swirl had heard of such a thing happening, a bag of mail lost in northwest China in the fourth century, preserved by the desert air. Thirteen hundred years later, an Hungarian explorer discovered them in a collapsed watchtower. But such things were as good as fairy tales. She chided herself for her delusions.

The parcels arrived on Sunday or Thursday evenings, when she was occupied in the teahouse downstairs, performing The Dream of the West Chamber. Could the writer be someone in the audience, or did he or she simply take the opportunity to slip in unnoticed, leaving the parcel at her door? Sleepless, she burned candles she couldn’t afford to waste and reread the notebooks, searching for clues. Something else had caught Swirl’s attention. The writer was playing with the names of Da-wei and May Fourth. In the first notebook, for instance, wèi had been written 位 which means place or location. In the third, wèi 卫, an ancient kingdom in Henan or Hebei Province. And in the sixth notebook, wēi 危, another name for Taiwan, as if the writer’s location was coded into the book itself.

The day she received the twenty-fifth notebook, she met her sister in Fuxing Park. “I can’t shake the feeling that I know this person,” Swirl said. “But why such an elaborate game and why am I the recipient? I’m just a widow with no literary taste whatsoever.”

“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.

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