by Spencer Wise
Ivy still didn’t move.
She was dead. She was Hu Dan dead on the ground and the police were drawing closer. Three policemen in white uniforms and peaked black caps were coming toward us with their German shepherds. The one out front swelled his chest and shouted, “What is happening?”
The officers were nearing the outer perimeter of the crowd. The onlookers began to part.
Suddenly Ivy jumped to her feet.
Snarling at Ivy, the officer’s dog lunged forward, but right before it reached her, the officer snapped the leash taut and the dog heeled.
The officer shouted at Ivy, “Hey! What is this? What’s going on here?”
“I was resting,” Ivy said. “Very dehydrated. And no benches to sit in the square. So I lie down. If I have committed a crime against the country by sitting down, I apologize. Forgive me.” She held up her ID and she took a slow step backward. “I am a good proper citizen. I bleed nationalism!”
The main officer frowned. His eyes flashed from Ivy to the noisy crowd. Eyebrow cocked. I could tell he was trying to make a quick decision: Am I going to arrest them all, or am I going to arrest her?
He didn’t know what the hell to do. He barked an order to his subordinates and one of the officers went up to a lady in a neon visor and oversize shades and started dumping the contents of her purse on the ground. I could hear the other officer shouting for IDs.
I turned my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ivy inching away toward the edge of the crowd. For a second our eyes met. A look. I wasn’t sure what she meant by it—if I was supposed to follow or stay.
To follow, wouldn’t that just draw attention to her? And if she’s seen with a Westerner maybe that would make things worse for her. When the officers first came up, it wasn’t clear that I was with her. But if they now see that I’m attached to her they’re going to think that something really bad was happening back there.
Just then, in the middle of these thoughts, a young performer in a full clown suit with a red button nose rode past with a bouquet of roses in the basket of his bike and he honked his nose-horn twice.
The dog began barking its head off. The crowd laughed and jostled. The head officer yelled and shook his fist as the clown quickly pedaled off with another few honks.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Ivy edging away. She’d almost made it out. Almost reached the West Side Road where she could slip into the flow of tourists. I could go after her. I had an opening with the officers distracted. I wanted to follow. No, I shouldn’t. Hang back a little. Play it safe. Let her get out ahead. That’s it. I made up my mind.
The head officer blew a shrill note on his whistle. He’d heard enough laughing. He drew an imaginary line with his gloved hand and started waving people behind it. The officers pulled people apart, trying to organize them, shouting, “You, over there. One line. No, no, no. Get over here. Don’t object!”
Over my shoulder I saw Ivy fall in step with the tourists burdened with shopping bags marching toward Chang’an Avenue. Her head was down. I made the right choice. She’d wanted me to stay.
I waited a few minutes to show my passport to one of the officers, who, upon seeing that I was American, grunted and waved me off.
Then I started up the West Side Road after Ivy. For a moment, I turned back. I saw that the officers had the crowd lined up now, shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed, and I felt my skin prickle because it was as I always imagined the soldiers in Lithuania with the Jews lined up on the riverbank. The kind of soldiers who never waste bullets. Who even make you take off your shoes at the Vilija riverbank before tying up everyone’s hands and feet in a human chain. Then they shoot one Jew in the back, who falls dead into the icy river, dragging the others in to drown, and all that’s left of them are shoes lined up along the snowbank.
I dashed after Ivy. I was moving north on Renda Huitang road, past the I Heart Beijing T-shirt vendors, and I was thinking about the stones it took for the Chinese to come out into the street and take on the CCP and the Red Army. Was that smart or insane? Have we Jews ever done anything like that? I mean, did we ever gather in the shadow of the Sphinx singing V’shamru and protesting? Or have we always played it safe? No, I remembered my grandparents telling me about Vilna. Their hero, Hirsh Lekert. Twenty-two-year-old boot maker who had the balls to shoot the governor in the back of the head at the playhouse, middle of the second act, shot him for whipping Jews—Bundists—on May Day. They hanged Lekert and threw his ass in the river. After that my grandparents helped close up the shul and they set up in the brick cellar beneath the Vilnius Opera House. They waited for the pit orchestra to lift their instruments and start playing before praying. Have we always known that? That you were a Jew in the cellar but a good honest Litvak in the street.
Ivy was just up ahead waiting at a stoplight at a big intersection on Chang’an.
“You scared me back there,” I said, once I caught up to her.
She didn’t answer. Ivy kept looking straight ahead. I let it go at that.
“I ran,” she said after a moment. Her eyes were bloodshot. Face pale. “I ran away. It happened so fast I ran.”
She was talking about back then. It took me a second to get that.
“You had to,” I said. I wanted to do or say something more but I didn’t know what.
Then there was the tingle of a bell and she pulled me back from the edge of the sidewalk right as a bicycle swiped across my face, and the rider, a lady carrying a baby on her back and a suitcase in her free hand, shot me a foul look.
“Careful,” Ivy said.
She led us down into the Zhongsheng hutong crisscrossed with overhead power lines. Above us, roosting in the branches of the poplars, jackdaws cawed loudly but I kept hearing those goose-stepping boots thundering, the ones that could well have trampled Hu Dan or my grandparents’ cousins crouched in a basement sump pit.
“Back home,” Ivy said, “the police came to our door and make us sign papers apologizing for Hu Dan’s crimes. But no burying. No. If you died in Tiananmen, your body does not go home. I only wish I do for her what we do for Ruxi. Something like this. You don’t leave a body out in the world alone. To turn into a famished ghost. A lonely soul. We slept in a bed together for thirteen years and kept warm. She was my other half. But I made a choice. You understand?”
I nodded. I felt nauseous by the whole thing.
It was a sunny day and there was the smell of real strong coffee wafting out of the UBC café we passed and if I wanted to be honest with myself, me, my family, we got rich off Tiananmen. What was Tiananmen to me? When it happened: a story on the news for ten fucking minutes before flipping to Cheers. Then I got this flash of Dad at the Vegas shoe show with his old partner Alan Berkowitz after they’d closed the booth and Tiananmen’s on every TV and Dad’s saying to him: “Now there’s a government that doesn’t jerk you off. Not like our yellow gutless George. The balls to act—that’s what counts. Making tough decisions. You know what this is, Alan, do you? This isn’t censorship. It’s a free TV spot saying, ‘We don’t give a shit about our people and neither should you. You want to manufacture? Here’s the place. You won’t hear a peep out of our workers. Why? Because business comes first.’ You see that, Alan? See how it’s wonderful news. An opportunity. Is it still a shanda? Yes, a sin. Terrible what happened. But it’s also our chance.”
That hurt to think about. After everything we’d been through, Dad would see Tiananmen on TV and think jackpot. Playing right into that goyische stereotype of the greedy Jew. Usurer. Loan shark.
Worse is that he went through with it. Willing to turn around and do the same things to others that had been done to us for hundreds of years. Sure, he didn’t shoot anyone, it’s true. But pogroms and shooting kids in public streets weren’t the only ways to persecute people. He’d lost something. Dad had. Reciting kiddush and breaking some matzo didn’t cut it. Something deeper
. His deepest Jewishness.
Maybe, when it came to Dad, this was right in front of my face the whole time. Who he really was. Or also was. I just didn’t want to look. A man who would run through a brick wall for his family but everyone else could go to hell.
It wasn’t going to happen to me. I wouldn’t let it.
It was making my palms sweat to think about.
I wanted to say to him: How did you miss it? How many Tiananmen Squares have we been through? That’s me and you out there running from tanks and goose-stepping troops. We’ve been persecuted and poor, and now you’ve just turned around and done it to other people. Exploiting, abusing—how do you call yourself Jewish?
We walked past little outdoor food stalls, suan fen and chicken wings, and the smell of chili and vinegar wafting out of the iron wok. And we stopped at one of them and ordered two beers.
We took our beers over to a plastic picnic table up against the hutong wall. The beer was real cold. I drank half of it in a gulp and held the sweating bottle against my cheek.
I watched this tree sparrow dive in and out of a hole in the rotted roof beam of the restaurant. She had a little crab apple in her mouth. She hopped and screeched and then flew away, refusing to feed it to her babies who ventured closer to the edge of the hole, and maybe she was trying to lure them out because they’d outgrown their place, outgrown her, and she was saying, Get the hell out. Come on. Fly off. Go.
“One of the Four Pests,” Ivy said, tracking my eyes.
“Sparrows?”
“Like I told you with my father. Mao accused them of eating the people’s grain, so they had to be killed. Greedy, bourgeois birds.”
Shaping her hand like a gun, she aimed at the bird, squinted one eye closed and triggered her thumb.
I thought of her father. I thought of Mao ordering the peasants to exterminate all the sparrows. Chased with rakes and hoes and wood spoons, chased until they dropped from the sky exhausted because you can only run for so long.
“This might sound weird,” I said, “but I used to be afraid of my parents’ shower. Closed on all four sides. No curtain. A door—frosted glass. Floor to ceiling. Tight box. When it got all steamed up, I thought it was gas. I know. I was little—four or five. Before I even knew the words Zyklon B prussic acid. You get what I’m saying?”
She nodded.
“From Hebrew school I knew the gas was colorless—like steam—and smelled like almonds, like the shampoo my mom bought. So—”
“You were a boy.”
“It’s not rational, I know. Doesn’t need to be. I mean, I saw the steam and smelled the almond and felt terrified. Obviously my parents wouldn’t gas me. I wasn’t that bad. But for a split second, I believed.”
She lifted an eyebrow, took a swig of her beer and set the bottle down hard on the table. She was studying me. Trying to read my face. I was only trying to comfort her, trying to say that we were together, or made the same way, or some greater reason brought us together, something, when all that just floated out, like flakes of charcoal ash off the barbecue grill beside us roasting oysters on the half shell.
It was stupid what I said. In light of everything here. Which I couldn’t pretend to understand. But I understood what she was acting out in the square. I knew the anger. The fear. That you were always an outsider and the moment they found out who you really were, they’d hunt you dead. That the world was just one big crawling cattle car where everyone slept on the edge of a train whistle and you only opened your mouth to scream.
Ivy stared at me. The oysters hissed and a long silence stretched out.
“Maybe I am a traitor,” she said.
“No, don’t say that. You were smart. Brave. Really fucking brave.”
I was almost jealous of her. To survive this there had to be something in you—not just some Cohain bullshit, but something truly rare.
“What could I do?” she said. “I saw arms and legs. People. Blood—” Her voice trailed off. Then she covered her mouth with her hand, but I still heard her say, “How do I know she was dead?”
“No, you couldn’t go back. Go back out there you’re shot. You did everything you could,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Ivy said, lowering her eyes to the ground. “Worst is not knowing what happened. Maybe she was trampled by soldiers, stepped on.”
She took a swig of her beer.
“Sometimes,” Ivy said, “I wish I did more. Do you understand how I said this?”
“I know. We’ve been through this too. So many times. It keeps happening.”
“And what did you do?” she said, leaning in closer. “Your people.”
“We ran. We moved. Exactly what you did. Go on. That’s the only revenge.”
I wasn’t sure she understood what I was saying, but she nodded her head just once, firmly, sat back in her chair and gave me a sad little smile.
* * *
In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly in our hotel room in Wangfujing. On the far wall, bathed in moonlight, I saw the silhouette of Ivy’s hands crossed and flattened, and I rubbed my eyes and focused, saw she was making a kite, her fingers the wings, gliding, running over a field, and it sent this chill down my back.
I said her name.
“I didn’t know you are up,” she said.
“I’m up,” I said, propping myself up and facing her. “What are you doing?”
“Bad dream,” she said. The glider vanished. “They come to our village with paint. Mark the walls chai. Paint the big character. White with big circle around. Dripping. They go house to house, painting it on the doors. Then the big yellow bulldozers come.”
“Chai?” I asked. “What does that mean? In Hebrew it’s life.”
She shook her head. “Demolition. Remember Ruxi’s village.”
I remembered graffiti, but I thought it was the same kind you’d find anywhere. A kid’s tag-name. Or a fuck you to anyone who’d listen.
“This is how they mark the buildings. In my dream, they paint on the people. My mother, grandmother. Their chest. White. To be destroyed.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Where were you?”
“I ran away,” she said.
Then she rolled over, her palm under her cheek, facing the wall, and she drew her knees up, and then I thought I heard her say, quietly, “I won’t allow,” and that gave me a chill too, not what she said, but this eerie feeling that she wasn’t speaking to me.
9
THE NEXT DAY we were walking up ten flights of stairs at an apartment complex outside the south gate of Tsinghua University in Wudaokou.
The face that answered the door was hard and flat, and I knew right away it was Zhang, the leader of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, and it took only a split second for him to recognize me too. His face softened and he bowed slightly, smiling, and said, “Come in please,” in English. Behind my shoulder, Ivy greeted him in Chinese. I stepped into his flat and it was too quiet. There was no one else in the apartment.
“To the left,” Zhang called out, and I moved through an open door into a small living room with a writing desk and bookcase on the left wall and a two-seat red chenille couch on the right, where we sat down. Zhang took the matching love seat beside it. We were facing a little tea table with a bowl of apples. In front of me was a pass-through window into the kitchen.
Most of the stuff in the flat looked like standard IKEA crap, except a small, tapered shrine table flanked by round-back chairs with characters carved on the splats. Probably belonged to his parents. On top of the table was a frosted glass figurine of Guanyin, an enameled offering plate in front of her with some coins, orphaned keys, a bike tire air cap.
“I never introduced myself,” Zhang said all of a sudden, slapping his knees and standing.
Shaking hands, we exchanged our full names. Bowed at the shoulders. He was scrawny. Thin w
rists. When he lifted his head I noticed a touch of gray in his hair. He was older than Ivy by a few years. Or it was his eyes. Dark and sad. Heavy lids. A stitch of wrinkles at the corners. Acne scars on his face. He must have had pretty shitty skin as a kid, and that couldn’t have been an easy way to go through life.
“You speak perfect English,” I told him. “I didn’t expect that.”
“My father. A professor, before he was blacklisted. I also studied at university for many years with the others.”
“Where are the others?” I asked. There were other things I wanted to ask but couldn’t. It was a delicate balance. You couldn’t just come right out and say, Okay dude, what kind of revolution are you running from this sleepy flat? Does one of these walls open up? Secret door? Where are the guns? The arsenal?
“The others are coming,” he said, but his eyes skittered just enough to give him away. My hunch was he wanted to test me out first on his own. See if he trusted me. He struck me as a good leader. Maybe it was his eyes. The strong jaw.
He saw me taking in his outfit: a pointed waiter’s vest and black trousers.
“Work later,” he said. “Beijing Hotel. I work as a waiter.”
“I see.”
“The son pays for the father. They are one. His crimes are mine.”
I nodded my head. He meant he was blacklisted too. From better jobs. The last trace of filial piety left in the system.
“It’s not the Intercontinental,” he added with a little bite.
How much had Ivy told him? I wondered. But then Zhang’s gaze slid toward the foyer and when I followed his eyes a breath popped out of my chest. A three-foot lizard was squatting by the door, his tongue flickering, bright green, a crest of black horns along his back down to a long tapered tail.
I waited a beat or two for Zhang to explain the reptile situation, but then I realized he was waiting for me to say something about my hotel.
“Actually I’m pretty tired of it,” I said.
He arched an eyebrow.
