Sparrow crouched beside the teenager, who stared up at him as if towards a face he knew, the only visible person. “Tell me your name,” Sparrow said. He was shouting, he worked anxiously, trying to stop the flow of blood with his hands and then with his shirt. The boy said his name was Guoting and that he was a student at People’s University. “What did they do to me?” the boy asked curiously. Sparrow did not have the words. It seemed only yesterday that he was walking his baby daughter around and around the courtyard of their home in the South, whispering lullabies, Ai-ming, turn your eyes to the sky, don’t look at the ground. Look elsewhere, Ai-ming…But this year, he had turned forty-nine years old and time, which for so long had seemed to stretch unbearably, was now contracting. He held the boy’s hand and saw blood expanding towards him. “Guoting,” he said firmly to the boy. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t leave you. Look up at the sky. See how it belongs to us…” The soldiers were not leaving any room for people to turn back or retreat. The noise of the crowd shattered his thoughts. A soldier who had fallen into the hands of the crowd was crying out for mercy. The boy on the ground was dying. Could the middle of his life have come now, delayed, twisting around again, retrieving him? Minutes later, Sparrow stood up and the boy’s lifeless body was carried away on a cart. The streets seemed simultaneously empty and full.
The couple he had seen earlier were now standing in the intersection. Lights from the tanks found them, and the woman carrying the child darted into an alleyway. The man, frozen with fear, remained where he was. My love, the woman cried, desperate. My love. All the noise of the street came to Sparrow as he began to run towards the line of soldiers, it ran beneath all the sound in his head. He no longer felt any fear. Big Mother’s voice came to him: “Never forget: if you sing a beautiful song, if you faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon the musician.” As a child, he had hidden away in the practice rooms of the Conservatory, repeating Bach’s canons and fugues until his fingers were numb. He had not been afraid, then, that his hands, his eyes, his mind, had given themselves over to something else. Zhuli played the opening aria from Xerxes for her mother. He wrote the words, I will come, and mailed this letter to Kai. He remembered the train platforms crammed with young people, the great exodus of a million people to the countryside, an endless motion of blue and grey coats. He remembered carrying Zhuli home. The weight of her body, her head against his shoulder. He saw Kai seated before the piano, playing the symphony never completed. The words and passages he remembered surprised him. All the pages had glued themselves together, he saw there had never been any hope of reaching the end. The lights from the trucks and tanks were blinding. The woman’s voice no longer called, and he knew that the father had gotten away, he was safe. He stopped running, his hands up for them to see. His daughter, his wife. What had any of them done that was criminal? Hadn’t they done their best to listen and to believe? There was nothing in his hands and never had been. The crack of the gun was delayed and came to him too late, but the sound gave him the sensation of closing a thousand doors behind him. Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?
—
At the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, Ai-ming lay on the concrete, looking up at a sky grey with smoke. Despite the humidity, someone’s thin blanket covered her feet, and another was draped over her shoulders. Dishevelled, hysterical students kept arriving, crying out that the army was shooting in Muxidi, that the hospitals in the west of the city, from Fuxing to Tongren, were overrun with the dead, that the wounded numbered in the thousands. Street by street, no matter how many Beijing residents stood on the road, the People’s Liberation Army was forcing its way into the centre. She pulled Yiwen closer to her. “We have to leave before it’s too late. Please.”
Yiwen stroked Ai-ming’s hair in a listless daze. “It’s already too late,” she said. She was no longer crying, it was as if she had already gone away. “Hours ago, it was already too late.”
Rumours kept circulating as the minutes dragged on. Dead at Fengtai, at Muxidi, at Xidan. The loudspeakers jolted into life again, only now it wasn’t the student broadcasters but the government who had controclass="underline" For many days the PLA has maintained the highest degree of restraint, but it is now determined to deal resolutely with the counter-revolutionary riot….She closed her eyes. How could it be so humid and cold at the same time? An air of unreality pervaded everything she saw. Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately. We cannot guarantee the safety of violators, who will be solely responsible for any consequences….The concrete shook as if from a disturbance directly below them. “What time is it?” Ai-ming said to no one, and a handful of voices answered. Three o’clock, two minutes after, almost three. She had not seen the fire in the northwest corner begin, but now it rushed high into the night, scattering light on the waiting soldiers. The fire consumed the ransacked tents, the makeshift tables and all the papers of the independent workers’ union. “I hope they burned their lists,” Ai-ming said. “I hope they remembered to make all the names disappear.” Rioters have savagely attacked soldiers of the PLA. Cooperate with the PLA to protect the Constitution and to safeguard the security of the country….
A boy with an enormous rifle was dragged screaming out of a tent. The boy wept that the soldiers had shot his older brother in the back. “My brother is dead!” he shouted. “He’s dead, he’s dead! I’ll kill them! Let me kill them!” A student marshal smashed the rifle again and again on the concrete until it snapped. “Do you want to get us killed, too?” he said. Another put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and pulled him away.
What could anyone say? Yiwen’s fingers in her hair moved slowly, as if winding down.
Now the army had them surrounded. A professor, Liu Xiaobo, and the musician, Hou Dejian, had been on hunger strike in support of the students, and now they hurried from their tents, running back and forth to the regiment of soldiers a few hundred feet away. They were trying to negotiate a retreat. Clusters of people followed them, broke away, rejoined. Meanwhile, leaders gave speeches about the necessity of non-violence and the purity of sacrifice. “I am not afraid,” Yiwen kept whispering, her entire body trembling. In a burst of shouting, soldiers who had been hiding in the National Museum now marched out, thousands of them, the long bayonets on their rifles lifted in a glittering parade. Around the perimeter of the Square, Ai-ming could see tanks. She felt almost grateful when the lamps in the Square clattered off, the loudspeakers were cut, and this new quiet surrounded them like a tunnel. It was too late to leave, too late to turn around.