—
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.
One evening, he arrived home from the factory to find a gift from Ai-ming. She had bought one of the new Japanese cassette players, small enough to fit into one hand. His daughter was so delighted with the gadget, she could not restrain herself from testing all the buttons and trying the headphones herself, adjusting and readjusting the volume. They might have toyed with it all night had Ling not dragged them out for supper.
He continued his nighttime walks, listening to the Walkman. Ai-ming had made a dozen tapes for him, copying them, she said, from someone called Fat Lips. Lately, she had friends all over the place. One evening, Sparrow walked all the way to the university district listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the darkness, one could always hear better. The music became as real as the concrete sidewalks and stout brick walls. Elderly guards at the entrance to Beijing University were immersed in their midnight card game, and so Sparrow passed through the gate unimpeded. Perhaps in his innocuous clothes, he had been mistaken for a cleaner or a parent visiting from the countryside.
Low lights flickered in the student dormitories where, now and again, excited figures were visible in the narrow windows. The tape ended and he hit the eject button, removed the cassette and turned it over. The machine made satisfying clicks. Cannonades of laughter came from the dormitories, arriving in staggered bursts. Posters clung to every surface, banners wept from the windows, the ground was a deluge of papers and empty bottles. Workers were sweeping up the debris, twig brooms scratching the cement. The Variations started up again. The cassette was Glenn Gould, Ai-ming had told him, but a different, 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations. In the opening aria, each note seemed to Sparrow as if it had been pulled open rather than pressed down. Occasionally, he heard Glenn Gould himself, humming. Why had Gould gone back to record the same piece of music again? No one could tell him. Fat Lips only had this one edition, Ai-ming had said, a copy of a copy that a foreigner had given him.
The counterpoint folded over in his mind. The further Sparrow walked into Beijing University, the greater the quantity of political posters. Even the trees had not been spared. Torches had been set up, and here and there boys wandered by in shorts, reading the posters, just as people of Sparrow’s generation, at the post office and elsewhere, studied the newspapers displayed in their plastic boxes. More posters were being pasted up over the old ones, making an ever-thickening book of protest. In 1966, Beijing Red Guards had written, “We must tell you, a spider cannot stop the wheel of a cart! We will carry socialist revolution through to the end!” Twenty-three years later, Beijing students wrote, “Democracy takes time to achieve, it cannot be accomplished overnight.” But several proposed an immediate hunger strike that would occupy Tiananmen Square before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in four days’ time.
A tall boy gestured menacingly at him, but Glenn Gould prevented Sparrow from hearing the shouted words. Sparrow pushed his headphones off. “I said, don’t think of tearing anything down!” the student said impatiently. “I know you’re a fucking government spy!” Sparrow was so surprised he mumbled an apology.
He backed away, nearly tripping over a gracefully written pennant with the words, “A society that speaks with only one voice is not a stable society.”
The breeze cooled him. He left the grassy hill and exited through the gates of Beida, to the tree-lined edge of Haidian Park. In this unfamiliar city, Glenn Gould seemed his only confidant, the most familiar presence. Do I really look like a spy, Sparrow wondered. Are there spies who behave like me?
—
A hundred radios passed through Sparrow’s hands.
In the evenings, when he went to Tiananmen Square, the boulevards had a serene yet haunting openness, the wide streets themselves seemed to promise an end to this impasse. The government had not reversed its condemnation of the student protest, but had begun to speak in soothing tones. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had worked closely with the deceased Hu Yaobang, had used a May 4th speech to air his own point of view. The students, he said, were calling on the Communist Party to correct its mistakes and improve its work style, and these criticisms were in line with the Party’s own assessment of itself. “We should meet the students’ reasonable demands through democracy and law. We should be willing to reform and we should use rational and orderly methods.” To Sparrow’s great surprise, the press had begun reporting on student demonstrations that were occurring not only in Beijing, but outside the capital, in some fifty-one cities. A fracture had appeared in the system, and now water was rushing in to widen it. Ling said that even within her work unit at State Radio, the consensus was that the government had been too harsh. The demonstrations offered an opportunity: if the Party could prove its sincerity, it would win the loyalty of a further generation.