The Seventh Day Read Online Free Page A

told her I was the man engaged to tutor her. She nodded to indicate that she knew of the arrangement, but looked around blankly. “Mom and Dad aren’t home yet.”
    “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said.
    “We won’t be here tomorrow,” she said. “Call my dad,” she suggested, “he’ll know where we’ll be tomorrow.”
    “All right,” I said, “I’ll call him.”
    As I clambered back over the rubble, I heard her voice behind me. “Thanks, teacher.”
    It was the first time I’d been called “teacher.” I looked back at the girl in the red down jacket. Sitting there, she softened the ruins.
    I walked back to the city square, where now there were gathered two or three thousand people holding banners and shouting slogans—this time it looked as though they really were demonstrating. The perimeter of the square was filled with policemen and police cars, and the police had closed the roads and were preventing others from entering the square. I saw a demonstrator standing on the steps in front of the city government headquarters. He was holding a megaphone and shouting over and over again at the restive crowd: “Keep calm! Please keep calm!”
    With the repetition of this message, the demonstrators gradually calmed down. Holding the megaphone in one hand and gesticulating with the other, the man began to address the crowd. “We are here to demand equity and justice. Our demonstration is peaceful. We mustn’t do anything extreme, we mustn’t give them a pretext to discredit us.”
    He paused. “I have to inform you all,” he continued, “that in the demolitions conducted this morning at Amity Street, a married couple were buried under the rubble and it’s not clear if they are alive or dead….”
    A van stopped next to me and seven or eight men jumped out of it, their pockets bulging. They went up to the police who were blocking the roads, waved ID in their faces, and then proceeded directly in through the cordon, first with a swaggering confidence, then at a rapid trot. They ran onto the steps in front of the government offices and began to yell, “Smash the city government!”
    They pulled stones out of their pockets and threw them at the windows and doors of the city government headquarters; I heard the sound of breaking glass. Police now poured into the square from all directions and began to disperse the crowd; chaos ensued as the demonstrators fled in all directions. Those who tried to resist were soon pinned to the ground. The group of men who had broken the windows came trotting back, nodded to the two policemen standing in front of me, and hopped into the van, which immediately sped off. It had no license plates, I noticed.
    That evening I went to a restaurant called Tan Family Eatery. It served tasty food at a reasonable price, and I had become a regular customer, though all I ever ordered was a bowl of noodles. I tried calling Zheng Xiaomin’s father several times from the phone next to the cash register, but nobody ever picked up and all I heard was a monotonous ringtone.
    On TV they were covering the afternoon’s demonstration. The report claimed that a small group of troublemakers had created a disturbance in the square in front of the city government headquarters, misleading those ignorant of the truth and causing damage to public property. The police had detained nineteen suspects and the situation had now been stabilized. The TV did not broadcast any video footage and all we saw were the two news anchors, a man and a woman, reporting this news. Then the media spokesman for the city government—well-dressed, sitting on a sofa—appeared on the screen, taking questions from a network reporter. The reporter would ask a question and the spokesman would answer it, the two of them simply repeating the lines uttered just a few moments earlier by the news anchors. Then the reporter asked if a married couple had been buried in the rubble during the demolitions on Amity Street. The spokesman