“I don’t know.”
“Are you Miss Ai-ming?” his asked. “Is this Ai-ming?”
“Yes.”
“I need to speak to your father, Ai-ming. Is everything okay? Please trust me…”
“We checked the hospitals,” Ai-ming said.
“The hospitals?”
“I don’t know.” She was afraid her voice would break and if she began crying again she would never be able to stop. The phone felt preposterously large against her ear. “You should write to my mother. I don’t know.”
“What’s happened? I’m a friend of your father’s, Sparrow was my professor at the Shanghai Conservatory. I live in Canada and I can help, please let me help.”
She felt nauseous. The letters, the foreign stamps, the record player, the stranger with the pure white shirt. The name Kai could be written, or overheard, so many ways. She had never guessed it always was the same person. “You should write to my mother. I don’t…I can’t.” She was crying now, out of confusion. “He always wanted to play the piano.”
“What?” There was a pause and then, “Ai-ming, are you still there? Please don’t hang up!”
He was shouting and she was sure the Sun family and Yiwen could hear the panic spilling out of the phone, and this realization terrified her.
“I don’t know if you’ll see him soon,” Ai-ming said. “He isn’t here. I don’t know. He isn’t here.”
“Ai-ming,” he said.
“I have to go.”
“Wait, please—”
“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry that I can’t help you. I’m sorry you can’t help him.”
She pulled the receiver away from her ear and held out the phone to no one.
Mrs. Sun bundled forward. Her eyes were red, as if she had been squeezing them shut. She took the receiver. Jiang Kai was still speaking. Mrs. Sun broke into the crackling noise. “Comrade Sparrow hasn’t come home since the night of June 3. Don’t upset his daughter. She really doesn’t know, poor girl. She’s only a kid…”
Yiwen was holding her hand. Who was trembling? Was it her or the other girl? Why were they shivering so much?
The wall of Sun family members had broken into conflicting voices. “Didn’t you hear they were burying bodies in a schoolyard not far from here? The school is complaining about the smell…” “What nonsense! When will you learn…”
Ai-ming stepped carefully over the children and around the Sun grandmother who had sunk deeper into her chair. More people had come into the flat, but she and Yiwen pushed between them, out through the crowded doorway and into the alley. Whispering voices seemed to catch like needles on her clothes, on her hands and feet. To scrub them off, Ai-ming ran ahead, straight out of the laneway, afraid that if she screamed, if she let any noise escape, something terrible would happen. On the street, she collided with a couple walking by, the woman jolting into the man, the man stumbling sideways and dropping his bag of fruit. Behind her, Yiwen was already apologizing, and the man, irate, yelled at them to be more careful. “Imagine if we’d been…” But he didn’t finish his sentence. “Look,” he said, picking up his plums. “They’re all bruised now.”
The street was surreal in its regularity. Someone had cleared the rubbished bicycles away. Night workers were sweeping the sidewalks, the grocer pulled down his metal shutter, copies of the People’s Daily were pinned up on bulletin boards. Ai-ming stopped to read a page, “The pernicious effects of bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution are to blame for this counter-revolutionary riot…” There followed a report about the heroic sacrifices of the People’s Liberation Army. But other parts of the paper wrote of heavily armed soldiers and machine gun killings, as if the paper itself was fracturing into different voices. Ai-ming turned away. Yiwen was telling her that at Beijing University, Tsinghua and Beijing Normal, Premier Li Peng was being denounced as an enemy of the people and tens of thousands of students were throwing their Youth League or Party memberships into a heap, and setting them on fire.
“But the government won. It’s over,” Yiwen said. “It’s finished, isn’t it?”
Ai-ming could say nothing. Everyone said that the foreign newspapers were reporting a massacre in Tiananmen Square, but she had been in the Square. She had seen the students walk away. Didn’t they know the tanks had come from the outside? Didn’t they know about the parents, the workers, the children who had died?
She remembered, in April, riding her bicycle down Chang’an Avenue, how this wide street had felt like a path not only to the middle of the city, but to the centre of her life. The open, unwalled space of the Square. She thought of the records of Prokofiev and Bach and Shostakovich that Sparrow used to bury under the floor in Cold Water Village, she thought of Big Mother Knife and Ba Lute who were on their way to Beijing. She thought of her mother’s face, once so impassive, now incapable of hiding her pain. How could this be the same street? How could these be the very same walls? How could she ever pretend that it was?
They walked back down the alleyway. The door was open. In a dream, Ai-ming entered, thinking that Sparrow had come home. All the cupboard doors in the kitchen had been flung open. She heard a noise in the back room, her bedroom.
“Wait,” Yiwen said. “Don’t go in.”
Ai-ming pulled her hand out of Yiwen’s. She kept going. In her parents’ room the dresser had been overturned.
She could hear voices, a woman and a man.
She turned the corner and entered. All her books lay jumbled on the floor. Neither the woman nor the man were familiar to her, nor were they wearing a uniform of any kind. The woman asked for Sparrow’s residency permit and his factory badge. Her voice was almost kind. Ai-ming shook her head. The man was busy rummaging through papers. He tore up her study notes. He began to tear up the piece of music that had been sitting on the table, her father’s composition. The man did it tiredly, almost without thinking, that’s what it looked like to Ai-ming, as if he was just folding laundry or washing dishes. She began to cry for help. Yiwen was there, she shouted at the strangers to get out, to leave them alone. The woman told them to find Sparrow’s work unit ID because they would be back. For reasons Ai-ming could not understand, the man and woman went out through the window, climbing out into the alleyway. Yiwen tried to pick up the pieces of the composition but Ai-ming said, “Leave it, leave it.” She knelt down on the floor. She pulled the pieces from Yiwen’s hand and began to tear them up into smaller and smaller pieces. She wanted it all to disappear. Yiwen kept shouting at her, calling her name, grabbing pages back. It was only later, when Ai-ming finally stopped shaking, that she saw what she had done.
Yiwen salvaged what she could. But in the end, she and Ai-ming were only able to piece nine pages back together. The rest of Sparrow’s composition was gone.
—
Ling opened the front door soundlessly, slipped off her shoes and went into Ai-ming’s room. The moon was faint, the night was utterly quiet, and her daughter slept, curled up on her side, one hand splayed open. The book Ai-ming had been reading weeks before, The Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky, lay on the floor beside her, still open. Three days had passed since officers from Public Security had entered the apartment. Ai-ming had tidied the room and gotten rid of the mess the agents had left behind, but still Ling imagined she could see their footprints beside the desk, as if they had been chiselled into the floor.
Ling sat down on the floor, beside the footprints.
Ai-ming seemed to turn slightly. In sleep, her daughter’s fear lifted momentarily, so she appeared younger, more like the child she had been.