Ke pointed at a youth picking his way through students sprawling on the stone, clicking his camera as he went. Nobody bothered to stop him.
‘Some kids have been here for almost a month and they are coming out in sores …’
A breeze lifted and a deep stench hit Leah, stopping her, making her eyes water.
‘Bit worse than Turtle Land?’ Ke pointed to the dull green tarpaulin walls near the museums. ‘The latrines are godawful, and the doctors are really worried about an epidemic. In fact if it wasn’t for the arrival of us students from the provinces, Tiananmen would have finished.’
Ke stepped aside for a small girl with earrings, sunglasses hooked in her shirt and exhaustion in her eyes.
‘And her.’ Ke nodded after the girl. ‘Most of the leaders wanted to quit. But we didn’t want to, so Chai Ling is staying on with us.’
They crunched through empty food packets and crumpled leaflets toward a village of tents. Between the tents there were others, made of sheets and plastic coats. Students were still sleeping on grass mats in the tents. As Leah watched one boy rolled groggily off a mat and another took his place.
‘During the day we have a big crowd, but at night we only have five thousand. We have to think of something new.’
Leah pointed back at the large white banner on the top terrace of the monument. ‘Isn’t that something new.’
Ke shrugged. ‘It’s a new hunger strike and it’s got only four volunteers and they won’t do it for any more than three days. The sign says: “No other way”.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘Ah, forget it. Anything happen at home?’
Leah talked about Li-Nan, Tong, Joan, the pig that missed the banquet, the slimmer geese – and, reluctantly, Heng.
‘You!’ said Ke, in delight. ‘Really? My corruption-smashing cousin!’
‘It wasn’t much.’
‘It will do. Better than I have done here.’
Leah sobered as she remembered Heng’s face. ‘He was pretty angry about it.’
Ke looked past the Goddess at the sombre windows of the Great Hall. ‘I guess they all are. The village cadres and the old men in the Politburo.’
Two white-coated men carried a girl on a stretcher toward a distant ambulance.
‘But it doesn’t matter now. It is finishing. Some kids want to keep it going, but I think I’ll maybe go home next week.’
‘Li-Nan will be glad.’ Leah paused. ‘We all will be glad.’
Ke rubbed her neck. ‘Thanks, kid.’
‘You sorry you came?’
Ke looked thoughtfully at Leah. Then he shook his head. ‘No. You see … Tiananmen is the heart of China, not the Great Hall. The throat of democracy. We have shown the Politburo what the people want. They will have to make the changes.’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose.’
‘Yes, yes, they will! Gorbachev has seen our strength. Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, our sister countries are watching us. The world is watching us – and them. They have no way to go but our way.’
Leah smiled. She could feel Ke’s sudden excitement, but she could still see the dirt and tiredness around her.
‘And after marching for us in Turtle Land, you Zhu Leah, are part of this.’
‘Come on.’
‘Well, it doesn’t look – and smell – very good at the moment – ’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘ – but for seven weeks Tiananmen Square has been free, and nobody’s going to forget that.’
‘Well, okay.’
Ke laughed. ‘Never mind. Hang on, got to show you something.’ He groped in his pocket and pulled out a shimmering blue egg.
Leah took it from him and felt the weight. It was like holding a small globe of deep sea water in her hand, with tiny sparks rising through the blue, and something in the centre.
‘Like it?’
It was a solid piece of glass, sealing a peculiar butterfly. ‘It’s nice.’
‘Found a man in Beijing who does glass-blowing. Thought it was an idea.’
Not a butterfly. Two halves of a coin forced apart by one swelling bubble. Forever dancing about each other, never quite touching.
‘That’s lovely!’
‘It would have been, but for that little bubble the glass-blower coughed into it. The two halves were supposed to touch.’
‘Doesn’t matter Ke, doesn’t matter at all.’ Leah turned the egg, playing the light across her face. ‘Look, could you lend it to me until tomorrow. I want to show Joan what you’ve done with it.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Thanks. Makes sure I come back.’
Leah half-turned, then turned back with sudden mischief in her eyes. She grabbed him by the shoulders.
‘Well – ’
And kissed him.
29 Saturday
Leah did not return the egg to Ke next day. Joan had booked seats on a tourist bus for the Great Wall and that was that. They coiled smoothly out of Beijing and cruised across flat farmland to scrubby hills and the Wall.
Joan had intended to climb a small part of the Wall, walking stick and all, but when she saw it rolling over steep hills like a lazy python she settled for a few photos and left it to Leah.
Leah found there were two possible climbs, the hard and the far harder still. She tackled the harder, slopes so acute that she could touch the stone paving with her finger without stooping.
When she returned, panting, Joan studied her thoughtfully and said: ‘Which side do you think David would have chosen?’
Leah faltered. ‘The hardest one, of course!’
Joan smiled, but her eyebrows lifted.
‘Oh, all right – the easier side. The bum.’
Leah took her mother’s arm and they strolled back to the bus. She was not sure how it had happened, but now she could think of Dad without pain – almost without pain – and think of him as he was, as an old friend worth taking the mickey out of. She supposed Joan, Crazy Joan, was in there somewhere, part of the cure, part of growing up, part of everything. She would work it all out one day.
In the deep of the night Leah was awakened by some distant shouting and a broken string of sharp reports. She had heard something like that a long time before. In Guangzhou, on her first full night in China.
Crackers, she thought. Someone’s getting married tonight.
30 Sunday
Leah bounced out of bed to greet a wild storm of grey birds outside her window. She thrust the curtain aside and watched them swoop from the high blue sky, scudding over the orange tiles of the hotel roof, twisting, soaring, shimmering, a great ghostly animal. The birds scraped past her nose, exploded toward the sun, flashed – and disappeared, as if they had never been.
‘Joan …’ Leah was pushing her cheek against the glass, searching the sky above her.
But Joan did not move. ‘It’s Sunday and my ankle is giving me hell. Is it important?’
‘Doesn’t matter. They’re gone.’ If Little Swallow could only have seen that. But she wouldn’t have believed it. ‘It’s a great day. You should see it.’
‘Sorry. Maybe I’ll feel better later. You go off and grab Ke and we’ll feed the boy tonight. All right?’
‘Great.’ Leah hummed quietly while she showered, dressed and glided from the room, carrying Ke’s egg. She walked past the hotel’s idle taxis and ordered short soup at the very small restaurant at the end of the lane. She felt guilty but she had to admit that she was glad Joan was not with her this morning. She was beginning to enjoy working things out by herself.
The restaurant owner was interested in the egg. ‘That is pretty. What is it?’
‘A very old coin, see in the middle. It is not mine.’
‘What a pity. What do you do today?’
‘First I return this to its owner in Tiananmen Square, then –’
The smile died on the man’s face. He shook his head violently. ‘Tiananmen is gone.’
A su
dden chill. ‘But the students –’
‘All gone. The army comes, and they are all gone. Many dead, a great tragedy.’
Leah was not hungry any more. She paid for the food and hurried outside to the sun, the wheeling birds and the dappled lane. A little girl waved at her from her mother’s passing bicycle.
Nothing was real.
Two old men sat on very low stools and drank glasses of tea while they played chess. A man pedalled slowly past with a cupboard balanced on his trailer.
No. Everything here is real. What that man said was a mistake.
Leah leaned against a wall, letting the sun bake the cold out.
All right. Maybe the army has come and pushed the students out. Ke was always worried about that. For Chrisake, in Australia they send in the cops, don’t they? Army’s in, the students are out. The rest of it is just rumour. The restaurant owner wasn’t in Tiananmen was he? Tell Joan? No. Not yet. Tell Joan and you’ll get locked up in the hotel.
Leah looked at her map.
Catch the underground railway. Goes right to Tiananmen. If Tiananmen is out of bounds the soldiers will stop you from getting off and you finish up back here.
Leah walked along the drowsy lanes to the highway, past a couple of high buildings under construction and reached the ‘Underground Dragon’, the railway.
It was closed.
Leah stood outside the grille-locked entrance and realized that the highway and the streets were almost deserted. There were no buses at all, no taxis.
Something very bad had happened.
She could see a haze of black smoke rising round a corner and walked toward it. She was trying to recreate in her mind the sounds she had heard last night, when she saw the jeep.
The jeep was in the middle of an intersection and it was burning. It had been burning for a long time, but now the blaze had subsided to a dead smouldering with only a single tyre showing a flicker of flame. The camouflage paint blended with the black burn smears; the bonnet lifted from the body; the headlights, the windscreen were smashed and scattered across the road. The half-doors had been wrenched wide open.
People rode their bicycles past the jeep, but never stopped and looked.
Leah walked back to the neighbourhood of the hotel with a slight tremble in her stride.
That was soldiers, she thought. And they died last night. They must have died. What has happened? What has happened to Ke?
The street near her hotel was sombre, with a few clusters of people standing on the footpath, spilling out onto the quiet road. A white-faced young man with a dark stained bandage round his head was telling his crowd something, but Leah could not hear. He was straining forward in anger, hissing every word, rolling his fist constantly across his palm. She could not understand.
She bought a soft drink at a footpath stall and tried to work out what to do.
‘Hello, do you speak English?’ A boy about Ke’s age sat on the step near her.
She nodded, still thinking about things.
‘Do you know what happened at Tiananmen?’
Leah looked at him. ‘I don’t know. The army.’ A small crowd was forming around her.
‘Some were hiding in the Forbidden City.’
Leah remembered those closed doors.
‘Last night they came out with sticks and they were crazy men, hitting everybody.’
Sticks. That was not so bad.
‘Then more came with guns. We tried to talk but they laughed at us and they started shooting.’
The crackers, the ‘wedding’ last night!
‘And you were there? You got away?’
‘Yes, I ran at the first shots.’
Then Ke got away. Or did he? ‘Were people killed?’
‘Many, many.’
‘How many?’ Leah was finding it hard to talk.
The youth began to talk, then a serious-faced young woman caught his arm. ‘We must get it right.’
The youth nodded. ‘I think a hundred. I ran before the tanks came.’
The woman said: ‘It is more. I am an intern at the Japanese-Chinese Hospital, only a small hospital and there are many big hospitals in Beijing, but we had ten dead. Many more had bullet wounds. But we must go now, before we are seen.’
Leah trailed back to the hotel. She reassured herself that Ke could not be one of the hundred dead – a hundred dead! a hundred! – and he knew where she was. He would phone to say that he was all right. He had probably phoned already.
But he had not. Leah spent the rest of the day close to the phone. Joan was there. She had talked to her for hours, but she could not remember what they had said.
At night the government television station mentioned the Tiananmen violence, with a quick view of a tank rolling over the Goddess of Democracy. The army had recaptured Tiananmen Square from the thugs and counter-revolutionaries, but with a few casualties. Of 30 deaths, 27 were gallant soldiers. The others were thugs.
‘Do you believe that?’ Joan said. ‘I don’t either.’
Ke did not phone that night.
31 The Avenue of Eternal Peace
‘I can’t just sit here and wait, Mum!’ Leah rolled away from the silent phone and threw the paperback at the wall.
Joan looked across the room. ‘I know how it feels,’ she said quietly.
‘Then why can’t you help!’ It was unfair, but Leah had to hit out at someone.
Joan kept her voice gentle. ‘How, Leah? We tried to phone the hospitals. Before they couldn’t cope. Now they can’t talk. We can’t do anything.’
‘I’m sorry. Look, can I walk around? Just a little bit.’
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘It’s over, Mum. Whatever it was, it’s over. I’ll stay around the hotel, nothing ever happens around here.’
Joan breathed out heavily. ‘Just stay close.’
As Leah moved to the door Joan was staring at the black TV screen. ‘Wonder if Li-Nan has heard …’ she was saying.
Leah left the hotel quickly. Through the idle taxis, up the quiet lane, around the market, and she stopped.
Now what? Walk around the block again, and again, see the burnt-out jeep and the closed station.
Or just walk slowly toward the centre of the city.
You promised to stay round the hotel.
Just a little walk. Stop at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can learn about Ke and the rest …
Leah sucked her tongue and crossed the road. Past closed shops, people walking quickly, tensely. There was a burned-out bus across an intersection. No, it was a two-car trolley bus, with a wisp of smoke still curling from a window. At the next intersection there was a burnt-out bus and a van toppled sideways, then two buses and a truck. Very few cars were moving on the roads and cyclists crept about in isolated pairs.
But nothing was happening. There had been violence, terrible violence, but it had all been two nights ago. She was only seeing the signs of the past.
She wandered into Wangfujing Street. Normally it would be a major shopping centre, with thousands of tourists pouring into the shops, office workers, families, hotel builders in the crush on the footpath. Joan had planned to come here and shop before leaving China, but now Wanfujing had been shut down.
For its entire length metal shutters had been pulled over the walls of glass, locked and left. A handful of people drifted along the footpath, as aimless as the scrap paper tumbling by their shoes. A few cyclists gathered near the tower of the Beijing Hotel, single cycles and a few empty cargo cycles. The cyclists stood on the road, talking softly and looking at the broad boulevard, Changan, that cut across Wangfujing. They were all standing astraddle, their bikes under them.
Leah felt her arms prickle, but she kept moving toward the cyclists at the corner. Three days ago she had stood on the edge of Changan, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, with the Forbidden City behind her and the bright fair of the students at Tiananmen. She had stood no more than a couple of blocks away from where she was now. From the corner she wo
uld now be able to look along Changan, see the Forbidden City on this side of the avenue and a little of Tiananmen on the other side …
A series of reports suddenly punctured the air.
Leah stopped. She stopped walking, stopped breathing.
They were shots. Softer than crackers – she would never think crackers were shots again – but with quick tearing impacts. And the shots were still coming, echoing from the other side of a building mass to her right.
Run!
Nobody was. But people were sliding behind thin trees, into doorways. The shooting was coming along Changan, toward Tiananmen. She pushed herself flat behind a half-column and realized that she was only protecting an ear, an arm and a leg. She was beginning to tremble.
Maybe you cannot run. The legs won’t move.
The shooting stopped. And started again as lazy single coughs.
A tank rolled before Leah, the long barrel sniffing the air as it clunked down Changan.
Oh God.
A second tank ground slowly across the street, the deep jungle paint baking in the sun.
Leah remembered the bandaged student rolling his fist across his palm. Again and again. Tanks.
Five tanks passed Leah and were followed by a long chain of open trucks loaded with impassive soldiers. Some of the soldiers were shooting in the air, as if they were frightened of the men and women watching them from bicycles.
When the first fear eased, when the fifteenth truck passed her, Leah looked at the young faces in their too-big helmets and their shabby uniforms and she remembered. In the concrete Ji house in the Good Field village Joan and Leah had slept in a dusty room. A room owned by Tiny, the brother of Dragon, the brother who had left an army hat and a photo of a young man in uniform with a gun. Was he here?
‘Look at them!’ A young woman with a camera and white lips threw her hand at the trucks. ‘Look at them, the filth! They have broken the covenant.’
Leah looked at the woman.
‘We have been brothers, the people and the People’s Army. We have been together against the Japanese, against Chiang’s warlords, together in the hunger. But now it is finished!’
The China Coin Page 15