“Ai-ming, Mrs. Sun sent me to find you. Someone’s looking for your father, they’ve called in on the neighbourhood line.”
Yiwen’s face reminded her of something or someone else. What was it? Won’t you come with me! I want to grab your hands. Come with me…
“Give me your hand, Ai-ming. Let’s go together.”
Ai-ming began folding up her father’s composition and then stopped and left it where it was. The window scratched her bare legs as she climbed through, and she wondered if she’d grown to a monstrous size. The things she touched seemed out of proportion to the shape of her body. Outside, the concrete against her bare feet was warm, a heat that burned through her body and vanished into the air.
They went to Mrs. Sun’s flat, which normally housed the telephone station in the window. The phone had been moved inside. “For security,” Mrs. Sun was saying now, as she pulled Ai-ming into the room. It was crowded with too much furniture, as well as the Sun grandparents, nephews, son and grandchildren, but they all squeezed back, away from Ai-ming as if she were an unpleasant, desert wind. Mrs. Sun appeared, leading Ai-ming firmly towards the telephone. In Ai-ming’s hands, the receiver felt slippery, as if it was sweating. She held it close and said, “Yes.”
“Hello?” The caller had a smooth, melodious voice. His Shanghai accent was odd, slightly flattened. “I’m looking for Comrade Sparrow.”
She felt as if the walls had grown fifty pairs of eyes. Mrs. Sun’s youngest grandson had sidled up to her and was hugging Ai-ming’s knees. “My father isn’t here. I’m sorry, who’s calling?”
He said his name was Jiang Kai, that he was calling from Hong Kong and that he was a pianist. He might as well have been speaking in code, the words made no impression on her whatsoever. “When will your father be home?” he asked. “It’s urgent that I reach him.”
She recognized the man’s name, but in the confusion of the room, whatever knowledge she had dissolved like a lump of soil in her hand. “I don’t know.”
“Tomorrow?” Jiang Kai said hopefully. “I was afraid…I’ve been following the news on television.” His voice appeared and disappeared. “Do you know when I might speak to him?”
“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.