The Season of the Stranger (16 page)

“From where do you come?”

“We come from the university to the northwest.”

The officer inspected the crowd. Girard stepped behind a tall student and lowered his head. “How do I know that you will not disturb the peace?” the officer asked.

“We come only for the meeting,” someone said. “We will go directly there.”

The officer lit a cigarette, turning his back to them and to the wind. They waited while he drew on it. He looked back at them and blew smoke and smiled. “Good,” he said. “If there is trouble you will not leave the City.” He walked to the guardhouse and leaned inside to say something. He came back to the railing and watched them silently, pulling tighter his padded brown overcoat. The gate swung open. They pressed toward the passageway. Girard looked at the top of the wall. The chubby young soldier who had come out with the rifle was leaning on the railing and his gold front tooth gleamed as he smiled. He saw Girard and his gold tooth disappeared. Girard saw him move along the wall toward the officer and then Girard was in the passageway and out again in the City.

The carts and trucks were lined up and soldiers were searching them, pushing pointed iron rods through the sacks of grain, ripping open wooden crates. A truck driver spat. “Students,” he said. “You bring trouble always. Now you have given them time to inspect us.” Girard turned and saw the soldier and the officer talking on the wall and gesturing toward them.

They were not bothered after they left the gate. The students with the banner grouped again so that the banner could be read. Two men at the side of the road had finished dividing a pig and they stood, each with half a pig on his shoulder, waiting to cross the road. A man with an iron pot and four dirty cups broke into the ranks and stood as they split around him and offered tea at five hundred dollars a cup. When they had passed him Girard looked back and saw him squatting at the curb drinking.

At the large corner a white-helmeted serious policeman held them for an official car and two motorcycles and then waved them ahead. Two foreigners stepped off the curb and decided to wait until the marchers were out of the way. They stood in the gutter looking at the faces and when they came to Girard's they turned to each other with their lower lips speculating.

They marched into the Plaza. There were probably three thousand before them. Some of the early group shouted when they saw the newcomers and came running to the gate of the Plaza and marched with them to the platform. They finished a song and broke up noisily. Girard walked around in the screaming and laughing looking for someone to talk to. He was looking for Ma Chi-wei. He went to the platform and watched the men set up the loudspeaker. There was a Hong Kong label in English on the control box. He sat on the edge of the stage and looked for Ma Chi-wei. The dusty parade ground was filling. A short thin boy motioned in marionette spasms as he talked to a sallow girl. There were no soldiers in the Plaza. There were three foreigners standing against the far wall. One of them was a French journalist. Girard did not know the other two. After a few minutes he lit a cigarette and stopped looking.

He finished the cigarette and stamped it out in the dust. He was cold. He tried to remember whether or not there was a tea-shop near the Plaza. He thought of one and pushed himself off the platform and started through the square. The noise behind him increased and when he was across the square he looked back. There was no one on the platform. They were staring toward the sky. On the highest of the surrounding buildings they had hoisted the flag of the Three People's Principles. The noise was for the flag. Another flag went up. When the red and blue of the government unfurled and flapped the noise stopped. Someone laughed. The crowd drifted toward the platform. Four men climbed to the stage and when Girard left the Plaza they were bowing and the students were making more noise.

He was gone for twenty minutes and when he came back into the Plaza again the sun broke through and there was a cheer for that. They were happy now, laughing and chatting through the speeches and waiting for jokes from the speakers. The light came from Girard's left and threw long pale shadows. Some of the students stood facing like sunflowers into the glare from the west. Near the stage they were sitting in the dust.

Ma Chi-wei was not on the stage even then, and Girard wove quietly through the crowd trying to find him. He saw one of his students sitting with his back to the high wall of the Plaza. He walked over to him and asked if he had seen Ma Chi-wei. The student said no, and that the long walk had tired him. Girard told him to rest because examinations were coming and walked back into the crowd.

They were all over the Plaza now. The stage was in the north-west corner and along the northern and western walls students reclined and listened sleepily. Along the eastern wall were foreigners and some Chinese Girard did not recognize at that distance. Most of the listeners were still grouped around the stage in a quarter-circle. The last rows of the audience were almost in the southeast corner. There were probably five thousand of them.

The speaker was reading the text of a resolution which, in petition form, would be signed by every student in north China, he said, and presented to the government. When he finished reading the resolution he put it away and gripped the microphone and told them what the petition would do for them. “They must listen to us,” he said. The Plaza roared. “We are the intellectual life of the country.” The Plaza roared again. When he mentioned the government the Plaza roared and when he mentioned the students the Plaza roared. He was talking about the government and the students and the Plaza spent most of its time roaring.

Girard went to the west wall and leaned against it and looked at the second hand of his watch. At the end of seven minutes he had calculated that for every twelve seconds of speech there were fifteen seconds of roar. He sat at the base of the wall and lit another cigarette and closed his eyes.

He opened them when something wet passed across his cheek. The dog was standing at his side wagging the stump he had for a tail. Girard blew smoke at him. The dog enjoyed that. He lowered his head and put his tail in the air and barked. Girard closed his eyes. When the dog jumped into his lap Girard threw him off. The dog landed about a yard away and yipped, and then got up and went to look for someone else. The Plaza roared. The dog seemed to think it was for him and pranced off toward the stage.

The roar did not die off into respectful and expectant silence, the way the others had. It hung over the Plaza and subsided by levels to a murmur. The murmur lasted half a minute and then became stronger. The speaker was fidgeting anxiously near the microphone. No one was watching him. Girard stood up and walked toward the stage. Everyone walked toward the stage. Those who had been sitting in the dust stood up and the crowd pressed them close to the platform. The loungers along the walls pushed themselves off the ground and walked toward the others. The murmur was louder and then it stopped being steady and gossipy and became many voices shouting at one time. Girard heard the word “soldiers” and ran around to the back of the audience where he could see both entrances to the Plaza.

While he was running he saw khaki figures in the south gate, where the marchers had come in, and when he got further around the Plaza he saw them pouring in the north gate. There was a noise to the east and he saw half a dozen of them on the eastern wall. The group at the north was setting up a machine gun. The noise increased. A girl wailed, a five-note chant. She wailed again, the same notes.

Six of the khaki men came at a trot from the south gate and cut through the crowd and mounted to the stage. One of them, an officer, stood in front of the microphone and held both hands over his head. Sound fell away in a rushing gasp. Only the wailing girl tongued hysterically.

“Your meeting is declared unlawful, by order of the commanding general,” the officer said. He opened the thick brown leather holster at his belt and took the pistol from it. He waved the pistol in the air and said: “We have reason to believe that the speakers are treasonous.” No one moved or spoke until they had all understood; and then at one time they shouted, all of them, a deep funeral protest that rolled through the Plaza and rebounded from all sides to the center, to themselves. Tears came and some of them wiped the flapping blue sleeves across their faces, their mouths open, and when the sleeves had passed the moisture of fear and despair was left on the faces.

The officer waved the pistol again and moved his arms in wing-like passes at the men and women. No one saw him; they stood lost, crying. The officer faced the north gate and motioned with one hand, the hand that held the pistol, and a grating sputter cut through the screaming and froze the Plaza. The machine gunner smiling patted the barrel of his weapon. “You have five minutes to leave the Plaza,” the officer said. “You will use the two gates. No one will go over the walls.” He holstered the pistol and jumped from the platform. He led his men running to the south gate.

The men and women pressed herding to the center of the mass, white faces staring at white faces and rejecting and staring again, as though here could be found an ancestor or a god returned, one, someone, anyone willing to lead them from their wilderness. They walked singly, hiding in themselves and in one another, weaving aimless patterns, the great blue spread of them static on the yellow Plaza ground, only the bewildered motion inside the circle, like unattached, homeless ions, the design of their fear. In the darkening blue and grey of early dusk the Plaza was quiet, the soft shuffshuffshuff in the dust alone voicing the fear, until the girl sounded again mechanically the dirge of five notes. The last breathless high note stopped the even trailing of the white faces. They turned to her and the silence of fear became another kind of silence, a calm; they waited, and when she cried again they started to the gates, smoothly cleaving in two clots of moving blue, flowing apart like twinned and tilted drops of ink, hearing the bellwether's hopeless unconscious command.

When the last of them had filed through the gates Girard found Ma Chi-wei. He was near the stage, talking to three men. There were a dozen spectators at the west wall. They stood in the shadows and looked at Girard and at the four students. The officer came across the Plaza again and took the microphone and said, “You have one minute. There will be no exceptions.” The spectators walked in the shadow of the wall toward the stage and the north gate. The four students walked away from the officer and the microphone and came to the center of the Plaza. “Out,” the officer called. “Out.” Girard looked at his watch and moved toward the students.

He walked carefully and counted the steps by watching the toes of his shoes flick forward into vision. They were black and the ground of the Plaza was dust, all dust and very yellow. No one spoke as he walked. The footsteps along the west wall stopped. Girard looked up. Ma Chi-wei was weeping noiselessly, his features calm.

“What will you do?” Girard asked.

“We are deciding now,” Ma Chi-wei said.

“Do you want to be martyrs?”

“Possibly. But it is not vanity.”

Girard drew a line in the dust with his shoe. “I know,” he said. “A question of usefulness.”

“Yes.”

“The war will be here soon,” he said. “The City will fall. You will be useful then.”

“You are probably right,” Ma Chi-wei said. He scuffed his toe in the dust and drew a line parallel to Girard's. “What will you do?”

“I thought I would leave with you,” Girard said, “if you are leaving.”

“Then you have not seen her,” Ma Chi-wei said. “She is near the west wall now.”

Girard's throat closed. He spread his feet and balanced himself. “Is she alone?”

“Yes.”

Girard looked over his shoulder at her. She was standing looking at him, her mouth half open.

Ma Chi-wei touched him. His muscles contracted. Ma Chi-wei smiled. “Go there,” he said. “We have lost enough today.”

“And you?”

“Let us decide.” He took both Girard's hands. “Go ahead.”

Girard squeezed his hands and turned and walked to the wall. He stopped in front of her and looked into her frightened eyes. As he watched her she shivered.

“Your time is up.” The voice came from behind him. The officer stepped away from the microphone and crossed his arms on his chest and stiffened his back deliberately. He dropped his arms then and took the pistol from its holster. Ma Chi-wei and his three friends were walking to the northern gate. The officer moved the pistol above his head. Ma Chi-wei was watching him. The shots came in a low one-second burst that whipped the dust in front of the four men. They stopped, Ma Chi-wei erect and the others with their legs apart and their trunks forward, heads pulled in low to their chests, waiting for Ma Chi-wei to speak. Then the three ran, whirling and passing the machine gun and disappearing through the gate. The soldiers laughed behind them. Ma Chi-wei stood watching the officer. The dust, almost invisible in the soft grey light, floated near his legs.

The face of the officer did not change. The light leathery cheeks fell into the short chin, and the ears, protruding, supported the cap. Only the nostrils moved with his breathing; the cheeks remained smooth and still. He did not swallow. His eyes were dark and unblinking and did not move in their sockets. He glared like the statue of an avenging god at Ma Chi-wei.

Girard understood then, accepting the knowledge as a certainty, as something already in the past. He shouted Ma Chi-wei's name and tried, frozen in the numbing shock of panic, to go to him, and then he could move but there was still the numbness as with the petrified heavy steps of a dreamrunner he went to him, went on until in puffy clouds the line of dust floated in front of him and rolled sharply up to his face. On his stomach, hearing then, seconds later, the echo of the shots, he choked dust into his lungs and felt the tears streak into mud. Ma Chi-wei was holding his side and moving grey lips, making no sound. Girard rolled to his hips and with his hands flexed his legs and forced himself toward Ma Chi-wei in one crouching step, and dropped again into the dust as the splashing line spattered again into his face; and lay with his anklebones and hipbones and fingers gripping the hard ground. He heard men running and shook in long uncontrollable spasms. His muscles would not respond and when they relaxed completely he stopped shaking and felt the moisture run onto his legs and into the cloth of the trousers. He saw them raise the bayonets and the next time he looked a soldier was tossing against the wall the hands and feet of Ma Chi-wei and the other soldiers were dragging what remained of him through the gate. Girard was sick on his sleeve and in the dust and when that stopped he was shaking again.