At home, Ling pushed her shoes off, went to the dining table and hung her purse on the chair. The apartment was quiet. She knocked at Ai-ming’s door and, receiving no answer, opened it. Sparrow was writing. When he looked up, it was as if he had no idea where he was.
Ling took a breath. The room smelled of alcohol. “Has Ai-ming gone to the Square?”
“She was already gone by the time I came home.”
His hand covered the sheet of paper before him.
Outside, the street noise grew, dissolved and came again, like an explosion.
“Every citizen is on the streets tonight it seems. Except you, dear Sparrow.”
She came nearer, looking closely at her husband’s face. He was extremely pale. “What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you worried about the demonstrators? The government won’t arrest the whole city. They can’t.”
He couldn’t look at her. “What are the students asking for?”
“I’m not sure they know anymore. The government accused them of inciting chaos. They compared them to the Red Guards and the students don’t agree. Nobody does.”
Sparrow stood up. “They have no idea of the risk,” he said. He moved towards the door as if this room was too crowded.
Ling followed him out. The sheet of paper, turned over, remained where it was.
“But what if…” she said, following him into the kitchen. Suddenly exhausted, Ling sat down at the table. “Those students are rebelling against us, too. Against our generation, I mean.”
Sparrow said nothing.
When had they last had an honest conversation, she wondered. Could it be months, or even years, since they last confided in one another? “We let the Party decide our jobs, our fates, our homes and the education of our children. We submitted because…”
“We thought some good might come.”
“But when did we stop believing it? Look at me, I edit transcripts and I’m grateful for the job. My life is a mountain of paperwork and a sea of meetings.” She laughed, but found her own laugh alarming. “Unlike us, these young people have literally no memory. Without memory, they’re free.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about my life, Sparrow. Not the past but the future. Don’t you ever think about yours?”
“Yes, of course, but here in Beijing…sometimes I imagine that I…but we—”
Ai-ming burst into the apartment, elated. Ling caught a glimpse of another girl darting down the alleyway, a flash of neon colour. It was the neighbour’s wild daughter, Yiwen.
Sparrow turned towards the door. “Where have you been?”
“At the Square, of course! You should see it, all the people—”
He began to berate her. Ai-ming stared at her father as if he were a stranger.
“How can I protect you?” he yelled. “How?” He had drunk more than Ling had supposed. She stood up from the table and went towards him. Sparrow kept on: “The government is right. You’re no different from the Red Guards! You think you know everything, you think you can judge everyone, you think you’re the only ones who love this country. You think you can overturn everything in a day, a moment!”
“Sparrow,” Ling said.
“They stole everything,” Sparrow said, turning to her. “But why did we let them do it? Why did we give in? I remember everything now. My brothers. I couldn’t…Zhuli. They needed me to help them, but I didn’t. Why did we throw away everything that mattered to us?”
Ling’s heart was breaking. She had never seen him come apart, she had stopped thinking that he could. It was as if someone had cut a single wire inside him on which everything had depended. “Sparrow, let it go.”
“How?”
“Ai-ming,” Ling said, wanting to shield their daughter. “Go to your room.” Ai-ming obeyed. Tears streamed down her face.
“How can I forget?” Sparrow’s face was drained of colour. He looked at Ling as if she had always known the answer. “If I forget, what’s left? There’s nothing.”
All she wanted was to lie down, close her eyes and rest, but she had to get out of this room, out of the falseness of this home. Ling picked up her purse from the chair. The walls were pressing in on her and she couldn’t breathe, thinking of everything she had given up for her family, but most of all for the Party. She looked once more at her husband, who had covered his face with his hands. “Don’t you see?” she said. “Things are changing.”
He didn’t answer.
“Live your life, Sparrow. It’s the best thing either of us can do for our daughter.” She went out the door, through the alleyway, and into the street.
—
When Sparrow woke, the room, the city, was quiet. He got out of bed, lit the lamp and took the letter out of its hiding place. On the kitchen table, the paper gleamed whitely.
Even if I had the means to leave
I was content in my life
The night sky was a thickening dark. He would like to have a piano, he would like to sit, right now, in the darkness of a practice room. Music, for him, had always been a way of thinking. He pushed the pages away. Sparrow could not imagine leaving his daughter behind. Ai-ming was so much like Zhuli. Were they similar because of him, had he failed to give his daughter the room she needed? In the eighteen years of Ai-ming’s life, he had never been separated from her, not for a day. He covered the letter with his hands and chided himself for being mournful. If he could sweep away all this mournfulness, which must only be a kind of dust from his previous lives, he would be a better father and a kinder husband. Ling’s confidence and goodness had always sustained him. He had no right to grieve. Their neighbour was listening to the radio, Sparrow could hear the anchor’s even drone but not the words. Music began, echoing through the alleyway, but it was music he couldn’t recognize, music from an era he didn’t know, music composed in the present.
—
Ongoing disruptions in the street, in the factory and in his home continued. He suspected Ai-ming was going to the Square every day, but neither he nor Ling had the will or influence to stop her. On the May First holiday, he telephoned Cold Water Ditch on the neighbourhood phone. Big Mother came onto the line and shouted, “Workers’ Day? We live in a Communist country. Every day is workers’ day!” He could hear Ba Lute giggling behind her. Big Mother grumbled, “Tell that lazy Ai-ming to study hard.” When he said there was unrest in Beijing, she said, “Good! Nobody should be at rest.”
How, he wondered, when he put down the phone, had Big Mother managed to raise a son like him? It was impossible not to believe in the mischief of the gods.
The May Fourth demonstrations came and went, as large as the preceding April 27th demonstration, and included a contingent from Sparrow’s own Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. But he did not go.
Sleep became impossible. Sparrow took to walking at night. Even at two or three in the morning, bicycles roamed the streets, students flitting from one place to another. Time felt elastic, stretching into unfamiliar shapes, so that he could be both in Beijing and in Shanghai, an old man and a young man, in the world and in his thoughts.
One night, he came across three men and two women playing music at the closed gates of Jade Pond Park. The musicians made time disappear. On Chinese instruments, they played the dignified promenade from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Mussorgsky’s ten movements depicted an imaginary tour of an art collection, and the composition had been written in honour of his friend, a painter who had died suddenly at the age of thirty-nine. A deep and unfamiliar calm pervaded Sparrow. On a nearby pillar, someone had pasted up a letter, “I’ve been searching for myself, but I didn’t expect to find so many selves of mine.” When morning came, the musicians packed up their instruments. Sparrow bought a dough stick and savoured it as he watched the night workers go off duty and the day workers go on.