than it would have in Boston or New York; I’d grown used to bicycling as part of a moving wave of people, a particle massed so closely with the others that I almost didn’t have to steer.
When we turned down Dongsi we began to see people again, clustered in knots around the posters and photographs pasted on trees and poles. They were crying, shouting, reading the posters out loud. I passed a burned-out bus and then a group of grim soldiers clearing away a heap of rubble at an intersection. The soldiers looked at us but didn’t stop us; maybe Jody’s smile disarmed them. I pedaled faster, toward the noise and smoke, and finally reached the gate to the hospital. The soldiers stopped me there.
‘No admittance,’ one of them said to me. We spoke in his language, which had become one of mine. ‘And you are forbidden to be on the streets. Please return to your place of residence.’
‘My baby is sick,’ I said, but Jody, no help at all, reached for the soldier’s cap and laughed.
‘Not sick,’ the soldier said. ‘Go home.’
‘He has asthma,’ I lied. ‘His medicine is all gone. I have to get some before tomorrow, or he’ll be sick.’
Jody parroted me. ‘You qichuan bing,’ he said gaily. Asthma. His accent was better than mine.
Despite himself, the soldier smiled. And then he looked at Jody’s hair and eyes, which were nothing like mine. ‘Chinese baby?’ he said. ‘Speaks Chinese.’
‘He’s very smart,’ I said. ‘He learned from our neighbors.’
‘Nay-boors,’ Jody said in English.
‘Let her go in,’ the other soldier said. ‘The doctors are very busy, but maybe you will find someone to help you.’
They let me pass, and in a second we were in. I threw my bike on the ground and ran up the steps.
It took me twenty minutes to find Xiaomin, and in that time I saw more than I’d ever wanted to of what had been going on. Worse than Jianming had said, worse than the rumors we’d heard – I took Jody off my back and pressed him to my chest, both to shield him from the sights and to comfort myself with his flesh. There were people everywhere, in the lobby, the halls, the rooms, on the stairs, people lying on the doors and planks on which they’d been carried in, people draped across chairs and on the dirty floor. Some were unconscious. Some groaned and bled. Some, who’d been treated already, lay on make-shift pallets and beds outside the overflowing rooms. Others were dead.
A medical student pulled me away from the door I’d opened, which led into a room packed with shrouded bodies. ‘The morgue is full,’ he said tightly. ‘Everyplace is full.’ And then he looked at my face again, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Why are you here?’
Jody started crying; he’d caught my terror by then and was wailing and kicking in my arms, screaming at me to put him down. The medical student reached for him. ‘Is he hurt?’ he said. ‘Even little babies …’
I held Jody tighter. ‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘He’s just frightened.’
‘Everyone is frightened,’ the student said. ‘The soldiers have been in and out of here since Sunday. They forbid us to allow the relatives of the dead to claim the bodies, to talk to reporters – are you a reporter?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Too bad. But you should go home. Go home and tell everyone what has happened here.’
The air was dense with the smell of blood and disinfectant, and beside us someone groaned. A girl, no older than Wenwen, was using her right hand to support her left, which was bound in a green strip of cloth and missing two fingers. The student turned away from me and began murmuring to the girl. ‘Gunshot?’ I heard him say. ‘This morning? Where?’ But when I moved toward the elevator, he looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘You must go out.’
‘Dr Zhang Meng,’ I said. ‘Do you know him? I have to find him or his wife. She’s a biologist, Dr Yu Xiaomin …’
The student nodded. ‘I know her,’ he said. ‘I know them. Dr Yu has been helping her husband here since Sunday. Please – wait outside on the steps. I will send her to you.’
I picked my way back through the wounded people until I reached the fresh air and could close the door on the sights and sounds I’d never meant Jody to see. Jody climbed down and grabbed one of the posts supporting the railing. When he saw me begin to cry he started kicking the post with one cloth-shoed foot.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said.
And so I stood silently. I had once spent a week in this hospital, which had been sleepy and quiet and clean. The halls had been empty except for the soft upholstered armchairs. The sun had shone on the smooth wooden floors. And when I’d returned the following June to have Jody, I’d had the same sun, the same quiet, and a roomful of smiling mothers for company. I’d had Xiaomin, who, as the door banged open now, stumbled into the light.
Jody looked up and called ‘Minmin!’ – his name for her – and then ran up to her leg and seized it. Xiaomin was pale and drawn and her hands were shaking, but she bent down and smoothed Jody’s hair while she greeted me.
‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘We were so frightened. And the baby …’
‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘He slept for most of our bike ride in.’
She smiled at that. ‘You’re fine,’ she said. ‘You’re both fine. And the students?’
‘They’re all right,’ I said. ‘Some soldiers came to the campus earlier this afternoon, but almost everyone was gone by then. And then I thought I’d better come find you. I wasn’t sure you’d be here, I was afraid you’d be at home …’
‘I’ve been here with Meng the whole time,’ she said, and then she spread her hands in the air and turned them over and back, as if they were chickens at the market. ‘I assisted him,’ she said. ‘All the wounded people – he cut and I held what he told me to.’
In the sun her hands looked transparent. ‘Have you slept?’ I asked.
‘A little,’ she said. ‘Not much.’ She looked down at Jody, who was fiddling with the hem of her pants.
‘I brought our notebooks,’ I said. ‘And the drafts of the papers. What do you want to do with them?’
In the distance we heard a single sharp pop, which might have been a truck backfiring or another gun. ‘What does it matter now?’ she said, but when I dug them out of my sack she took them and pressed them to her chest. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But the important thing, the important thing is to get you out of here. Thank God Zaofan is gone.’
We looked at each other then, and Jody looked up at us. Thank God indeed – Zaofan, Xiaomin’s oldest son, had left China in the fall of 1986, and that was what Xiaomin and I had said to each other the first winter he was gone, during the demonstrations that led to the downfall of Hu Yaobang. Those had involved a few thousand students, a handful of arrests, but both Xiaomin and I had been convinced that Zaofan would have been one of those detained. If he’d been here now, he might have been shot.
‘He called Monday night,’ Xiaomin said. ‘From Massachusetts.
