At the Muxidi intersection, Sparrow found himself on streets that he knew, and he recognized familiar buildings and the houses of his neighbours, things that made him feel irrationally safe. The noise was overpowering, exploding canisters of tear gas, people shouting, petrol bombs flaring along the road, crawling up over the army tanks. A long vibration suddenly exploded somewhere near. If he closed his eyes for too long, rows of buildings might be erased, just as lines of people, too, were vanishing. The soldiers had been singing the words of Chairman Mao: If no one attacks me, I attack no one. But if people attack me, I must attack them. Sparrow walked towards the armoured trucks where soldiers moved in glacial, melting shapes: Kneeling. Shooting. Standing. Creeping forward. Their olive green uniforms, the hard shell of their helmets, seemed out of keeping with their young faces. Too young, they looked the same age as Kai and Zhuli had been long ago. They walked impossibly slowly, as if the soldiers’ bodies were balloons and their guns were made of lead. He heard the flat crack of a concrete block hitting an armoured tank. Sound accelerated. One tank rushed towards the place he had been standing only a moment before. He thought he was still there, watching the tank grow larger. The people running appeared to be suddenly unmoving. All of the shapes he saw became sound, the cracking of trees, the swinging of a rifle, the edges of a bayonet. He felt the whistle of bullets passing near, but the crack of the rifles was delayed, the noise coming a second, two, three, later.
Sparrow did not know where Fan was. He recognized the closed storefront of a train ticket office, and saw a couple huddled there. Loudspeakers above continued urging them to Go home, Go home….but PLA soldiers were coming out of their trucks and infiltrating the small streets and alleyways. The man was dressed smartly and had wavy hair and a thin face, the woman was carrying a small child in her arms. “We have to go,” the man was saying. “No, no,” she whispered. “We’re trapped, they’re shooting back there.” The surreal sound of a pop song was tinkling down from above, someone had left a radio or a television on. Gunfire punctured the alleyway, making sparks of light. Sparrow wanted to protect them, but did not know how to give them the same terrifying invisibility that he seemingly possessed. The woman’s dark hair gleamed wetly, and he saw now that a long stain of blood was moving from her hair, down her clothes, over the child in her arms, and dripping onto the sidewalk. The man was sweating. His dress shirt had the softness of an old newspaper. “Give her to me,” the man begged. The woman refused, hugging the child closer. “Why are they shooting?” the man said brokenly. “How can they?” More armoured trucks were rushing along Chang’an, as if they were late for an appointment further ahead. “Don’t be scared,” the woman said to the motionless child. “We’re almost there, stop crying. We’re almost there.” Now the trucks stopped and more soldiers poured out. “Fascists, fascists!” an old man shouted. He was wearing shorts and a white undershirt. He was instantly surrounded by three soldiers. Sparrow saw a teenager with a camera, the camera hovering in front of his face. The soldiers turned and shot him. Sparrow began to run towards the teenager, shouting. The soldiers kept firing. One came forward in a vicious motion and bayoneted the boy in the stomach. The teenager gripped the bayonet with both hands, screaming, trying to pull it out. By the time Sparrow reached them, the soldier was gone and the student was curled up on the ground, blood and internal organs coming out of his body. The strap of the camera, twisted around his wrist, was moving in a hallucinatory way. Bricks rained down on the soldiers and one fell, the crowd suddenly doubled, tripled, surrounding the vulnerable soldier. A burning mattress flew in slow motion onto an army truck. Someone had thrown it from an apartment above, and the mattress was exploding as it fell. “Why have you come here?” a woman wept. “You’re not wanted here. Don’t you understand? They’ve tricked you. It’s all lies!” If no one attacks me, I attack no one! “How can you turn your guns on us?” “We won’t kneel down anymore!” But if people attack me, I must attack them. “Murderers, murderers…” “Shame, shame on you!”
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.”