Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

  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.”

  Yiwen stroked Ai-ming’s hair in a listless daze. “It’s already too late,” she said. She was no longer crying, it was as if she had already gone away. “Hours ago, it was already too late.”

  Rumours kept circulating as the minutes dragged on. Dead at Fengtai, at Muxidi, at Xidan. The loudspeakers jolted into life again, only now it wasn’t the student broadcasters but the government who had control: For many days the PLA has maintained the highest degree of restraint, but it is now determined to deal resolutely with the counter-revolutionary riot….She closed her eyes. How could it be so humid and cold at the same time? An air of unreality pervaded everything she saw. Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately. We cannot guarantee the safety of violators, who will be solely responsible for any consequences….The concrete shook as if from a disturbance directly below them. “What time is it?” Ai-ming said to no one, and a handful of voices answered. Three o’clock, two minutes after, almost three. She had not seen the fire in the northwest corner begin, but now it rushed high into the night, scattering light on the waiting soldiers. The fire consumed the ransacked tents, the makeshift tables and all the papers of the independent workers’ union. “I hope they burned their lists,” Ai-ming said. “I hope they remembered to make all the names disappear.” Rioters have savagely attacked soldiers of the PLA. Cooperate with the PLA to protect the Constitution and to safeguard the security of the country….

  A boy with an enormous rifle was dragged screaming out of a tent. The boy wept that the soldiers had shot his older brother in the back. “My brother is dead!” he shouted. “He’s dead, he’s dead! I’ll kill them! Let me kill them!” A student marshal smashed the rifle again and again on the concrete until it snapped. “Do you want to get us killed, too?” he said. Another put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and pulled him away.

  What could anyone say? Yiwen’s fingers in her hair moved slowly, as if winding down.

  Now the army had them surrounded. A professor, Liu Xiaobo, and the musician, Hou Dejian, had been on hunger strike in support of the students, and now they hurried from their tents, running back and forth to the regiment of soldiers a few hundred feet away. They were trying to negotiate a retreat. Clusters of people followed them, broke away, rejoined. Meanwhile, leaders gave speeches about the necessity of non-violence and the purity of sacrifice. “I am not afraid,” Yiwen kept whispering, her entire body trembling. In a burst of shouting, soldiers who had been hiding in the National Museum now marched out, thousands of them, the long bayonets on their rifles lifted in a glittering parade. Around the perimeter of the Square, Ai-ming could see tanks. She felt almost grateful when the lamps in the Square clattered off, the loudspeakers were cut, and this new quiet surrounded them like a tunnel. It was too late to leave, too late to turn around.

  The students huddled up on the first tier of the Monument were in chaos, shouting through their loudspeakers, trying to organize a vote in the darkness.

  “Who is determined to stay and who wishes to leave?”

  Hou Dejian managed to get hold of a loudspeaker. “Students, a peaceful evacuation is still possible.” He said that the army had agreed to open a corridor and let them exit through the southeast corner of the Square. They would not be harmed.

  “Shame! Shame, cowards!” The hissing around Ai-ming nearly drowned him out.

  A few voices shouted that a rebel army, led by Zhao Ziyang, was on its way to rescue them.

  A student beside Ai-ming stood up. “We have to hold out until 6 a.m. The United States Army is going to intervene.”

  “Hou Dejian, shame! Shame!”

  “We must stay. Out of our sacrifice will be born a new China!”

  At the northern perimeter of the Square, the soldiers began shooting into the sky. The cracking of hundreds of rifles made it seem as if the air itself was exploding. A lamp above them was blown out. A boy beside Ai-ming was so terrified he fainted. He was shaken roughly back into the present.

  The vote began. Each person called out, simultaneously, their vote. She herself shouted, “Leave!” and beside her, Yiwen countered, “Stay!”

  The voices died down. She heard the buzzing of the lamps, already dark but still burning out, and Yiwen’s exhausted, almost inaudible voice, “Stand firm, stand firm. How can we let it end like this?”

  The soldiers were moving quickly. She saw the rustling of their lines rising towards them.

  “We’re leaving!” a girl ahead shouted. “They voted to leave.”

  Her words were met with rage. “It’s not true!” “We want to stay!” “More people voted to stay!”

  Yiwen stumbled to her feet. “Other people died for us!” she cried. “Now we’re going to collaborate with their murderers? Have we no shame?” Others called out similar words, but the shouting mutated into exhausted crying. They had been in the Square more than five hours, and only now did Ai-ming find herself breaking down, thinking of the promise she had made to her father, unable to comprehend how Yiwen was ready give up her life and the lives of others. For what? To hold Tiananmen Square, which had never belonged to them.

  “Line up, line up in rows often…”

&nbs
p; “Get in your battalions! Lock arms!”

  She joined arms with Yiwen and with a tiny girl beside her. There were thousands, perhaps several thousand, students still here. University banners were awkwardly raised, they shook as if already falling. Yiwen and Ai-ming were displaced and found themselves walking under the flag of Beida. This is the first and only time, Ai-ming thought, that I will belong to Beijing University. The achievements she had once wanted for herself seemed a lifetime away, they were the aspirations of a completely different person.

  Tanks were entering the Square, they made a shattering vibration. People around her began screaming and Ai-ming turned and saw the place where the Goddess of Democracy had been standing. The statue was light, almost constructed of air. The army, she thought numbly, did not need tanks to push her over. They could have done it with their bare hands. The shaking of tanks and helicopters continued, as if the concrete itself was being ripped apart. Would they have a parade now? she wondered. Now the soldiers were pressing in from both sides, funnelling the students between a narrow corridor of bodies. She saw a soldier strike a boy ahead of her with his baton. Behind him, a girl turned and spat in the soldier’s face. But still the procession kept pushing inexorably forward. The people around her were weeping. At the front, the student leaders began to sing the Internationale.

  Arise, slaves, arise!

  Do not say that we have nothing.

  We shall be the masters of the world!

  The soldiers stared.

  The students left the Square. She and Yiwen broke off from the procession and walked home. In a daze, they scrambled down side streets, avoiding the sound of gunfire. By the time they arrived back in the alleyway, the sun had risen and the sky was white.

  DAY AFTER DAY, they went to the hospitals to search for Sparrow but finally, after three weeks, Ai-ming refused to pretend. Instead, she let her mother go alone while she sat in the little room, staring at the sheaf of pages taped together like an accordion book. Unfolded, Sparrow’s composition hung down on both sides of the desk and touched the floor. This music, she thought, was the record of something her father had never heard with his own ears, he’d had no access to a violin let alone a piano. It had only ever existed in his mind and now here, silently, on paper. On the back, he had copied out a quote, “Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed.” The afternoon disappeared and twilight retreated into darkness. She heard a rattling at the glass and looked up expecting to see her mother, but instead it was Yiwen, impossibly pale, impossibly beautiful.

  “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?