Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Oh, Tao, much as I would love to see you again, whatever you do, never come back here.

May 1st, 1967

I went to the square today to see Chairman Mao. There were hundreds of thousands of students there, most of them Red Guards. I have never seen so many people in Tiananmen before. On the guan bo public address system, they were playing ‘The Helmsman’ and ‘The Eight Disciplines’, then ‘The East is Red’ just before the great man appeared on the rostrum in front of the Forbidden City. Then everyone was chanting ‘Long live Chairman Mao’. The atmosphere was extraordinary, like some fanatical religious gathering. I did not know what to feel. It is hard not to be swept up in the emotion of it all. But all I really wanted to do was weep. I do not think anyone noticed my tears.

June 5th, 1967

This was what I had been dreading. Yue Shi came to the house this morning and sneered as he told us your father must attend the school today. I told him he was not well enough. But the boy just said that if your father did not turn up, others would be sent to fetch him. He would be forced to go on his knees, if necessary.

Oh, Tao, I am so glad you are not here to see this. But I miss you so much. You are so clever, I am sure you would have known what to do. I wish I could just talk to you and hold your hand for comfort.

Li paused. There were three small round blisters on the paper, yellow and raised, and a fourth that had blurred the ink on the character of Tao’s name. Tears, Li realised, spilled more than thirty years ago. A simple statement of the hopelessness felt by Yuan Tao’s mother as she wept for the son that she knew she would never see again. More eloquent than any words she could have written. And then, with a slight shock, Li realised that they might not be her tears after all. And he thought of Yuan Tao reading his mother’s words all those years later. Of the pain and the guilt that he must have felt. It was more than possible that they were the tears of a son spilled for his parents. He read on.

Although it was hot, your father was shivering, and I dressed him warmly for the walk to the school. He had your grandfather’s stick in his right hand, and I held his left arm, but he could hardly walk, and we had to stop every ten metres for him to catch his breath. It is a terrible thing to see the strong, young man you married reduced to this.

When we got there, there was a big crowd in the square, gathered around a small wooden stage they had built alongside the basketball net. The geography teacher, Teacher Gu, was standing on the stage, bent over with his hands on his knees and his head down. There was a sign hanging around his neck with his name painted on it upside down in red and scored through.

The students and the Red Guards were roaring, ‘Down with Teacher Gu.’ Every time he tried to lift his head one of the Red Guards would push it back down. They kept screaming questions at him but wouldn’t let him answer. And then they screamed at him again for refusing to speak.

When they saw us arrive, some of the Red Guards — Pauper and Yue Shi and Pigsy and Tortoise — came and grabbed your father from me. They hung a sign around his neck like Teacher Gu’s and pushed him through the jeering crowds to the stage. I tried to go after him, but children swarmed all around me like bees, calling me a ‘landlord’s daughter’ and the ‘mother of a black whelp’. I saw your father trying to get on the stage, and when he couldn’t, the big boy, Ge Yan, hit him on the back of the neck with a long cane and he dropped to his knees.

Eventually they lifted him on to the stage and Teacher Gu was pushed aside. Your father became the centre of attention. I could see the tears in his sad, dark eyes, but there was nothing he or I could do about it. One of the girls who used to come to our house for extra tuition took my arm and led me away to a classroom. She wore a red arm band, but I think she was only pretending to be one of them. She got me some water and told me I should not look. But I could not leave my husband to face this alone.

When I went to the door of the classroom, I could see him on his knees on the stage, his head bowed, the sign swinging from his neck. They were shouting, ‘Down with Teacher Yuan.’ They demanded to know why he had neglected his students, why he refused to work. Did he think he was too good to serve the people? What could he say? Even if he were capable of answering, how could he answer such questions? He was ill, so very, very ill.

But each time he failed to answer, they would take it in turns to hit him across the back of his neck with the cane. I could hear the sound of it. I could feel his pain with every stroke. Then Ge Yan pulled his head back by the hair, and the one called Zero forced him to drink a pot of ink. He gagged and was sick, but still they forced it down his throat.

I screamed at them to stop, but no one could hear me over the noise, and the girl who had taken me to the classroom stopped me from trying to reach him. I have the bruises of her fingers on my arms as I write.

It was just their revenge. Because he had shouted at them and threatened them with his father’s stick if they hit me again. I feel so guilty, Tao. It is my fault they did this to him. If I had not tried to stop them tearing up our family photographs, if I had just accepted there was nothing I could do, perhaps they would have let him be.

When he fell over, at first they tried to get him back to his knees, but he was quite unconscious and I think they thought then that he was dead.

It was strange, because suddenly the whole square went quiet, as if somehow the game had all gone terribly wrong. Just children. They had no idea what they were doing.

I ran to the stage, and they all moved aside to let me past. No one stopped me as I got up and removed the sign from around your father’s neck. His mouth and face were black from the ink, and there was vomit all down his tunic. But I could hear him breathing. Short, shallow breaths.

I kneeled down and drew him up into my arms, but he was too heavy for me to lift on my own. I called out, ‘Will anybody help me?’ But no one moved. And then Ge Yan, the bird boy, ordered some of the children to give me a hand to take away this ‘black revisionist’.

When, eventually, I got him home and into bed, I went to get the doctor. But when I told him what had happened he did not want to come, and so I have sat here alone with your father for hours now, keeping him cool with cold compresses, tipping his head forward to make him take some water.

It is dark. I don’t know what time it is. Sometime after two. Outside it is very quiet, and the house is very still. And yet I can barely hear your father breathing. I don’t know what he has done to deserve this. You know what a kind and gentle man he is. Oh, Tao, I am so, so weary.

June 6th, 1967

Tao, your father is dead. Sometime after four this morning, I fell asleep in the chair by the bed, and when I awoke he was quite cold. He died alone, while I slept. I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself. I am so sorry, my son. Please know that I love you. I hope you will make a better life for yourself than this.

It was the last entry, although there were many blank pages after.

Li sat with tears filling his eyes, and saw that the first grey light of dawn had appeared in the sky. As a young boy he had been devastated by his mother’s death in prison, shocked and distressed to see his father reduced to the palest shadow of his former self. But he could not imagine how Yuan Tao must have felt, nearly thirty years on, reading his mother’s harrowing account of his father’s death. Of the sickening humiliation and brutality meted out by barbarous, ignorant youths whom his own father had taught. He could picture tears, and anger, and knew that in reading those lines the seeds of revenge had been sewn deep in Yuan Tao’s heart.