Forbidden City
Authors: William Bell
ALSO BY WILLIAM BELL
NOVELS:
Crabbe
Absolutely Invisible
Five Days of the Ghost
No Signature
Speak to the Earth
Zack
CHILDREN’S BOOKS:
The Golden Disk
River, My Friend
Acknowledgements
Thanks to John Pearce for support and encouragement in the writing of this book; to Philippa Dickinson for valuable suggestions; to Chris Thomas, Marcello Tulipano, Dawn Edmonds, Candace Nelson, and Dylan Bell for helpful ideas; to Shaun Oakey for painstaking work on copy-edit; and to Doug Woolidge for technical information about acupuncture.
Last and most of all to my beloved friend for her invaluable assistance in virtually every aspect of this book, and whom, because of the subject matter of this novel, I cannot name.
This book is dedicated
to the memory of my father
,
William Bratty Bell
We studied a poem in English class last spring and, believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It’s about a young soldier-king named Ulysses who sails off to fight a long bitter war in a far away country. On his sea-journey home he gets battered off course a few times and endures many adventures. When he finally drags himself out of the waves and onto his own shores he’s a lot older than he was the day he left. In more ways than one.
The thing is, he doesn’t fit in anymore. His adventures have changed him so much that the island kingdom he missed so much seems like a pile of barren rock. His wife and son are strangers. His subjects don’t understand him.
I know how Ulysses felt. How relieved he was at first that it was all over and he was safe. How messed up and alienated and alone he must have felt after he had been back for a while.
I’m not saying that what I’ve written here is like the poem. This is just what I put together from a journal I was keeping when life was pretty calm, and from the notes and tapes I made when everything began to blow apart.
Dad was pretty worried that night when I sort of went mental for a few hours. He seems to think that writing this will help me re-adjust to normal life. I don’t know. Maybe he’s right.
I can’t help thinking about Ulysses, though. Because, at the end of the poem, he takes off. He never did fit in again.
Sometimes I wonder if my father will ever grow up.
Take the day when this all started, for instance. When I got home from school I heard his excited voice rattling out of the study, going a mile a minute, obviously not listening too closely to the person on the other end of the phone because whoever it was couldn’t have gotten a word in sideways.
I wondered why he was home from work so
early. There he was in the chair behind his desk, leaning back so far you’d swear he was going to go over backwards like a slap-stick comedian, with the phone wedged between his shoulder and his neck, yakking away while he tried to tear open an envelope. Probably so he could read his mail while he was talking. Then later he’d probably get what was in the mail and what was on the phone mixed up. My dad.
“Yeah,” he said breathlessly into the phone. “Just got the assignment today. What? You bet I’m excited!”
He was, too. I could tell from his eyes that something big was going on. His eyes are bright blue, like mine, and when he’s turned on to something they sort of dance. They were rockin’ and rollin’ today, all right.
“It could be the start of something really important over there,” he went on.
I tuned him out and looked at the mess on the floor of the study. There was a new Sony Betacam just unpacked from the carton. It looked like Dad had torn open the carton in a fit of rage. There were squares and oblongs of white styrofoam lying all over, along with clear plastic bags, twist-ties, and tons of those styrofoam bits that Dad calls plastic mouse droppings. But it was just his usual method of unpacking — rip and tear until you find what’s inside.
Then my eye caught another smaller box, ripped open but not emptied. I looked inside. It was a camcorder, the kind tourists and proud mommies who want to take pictures of their kids’ birthday parties buy.
You’d never believe it to look at him now, his lanky form splayed out in the chair, light brown hair in a mess, shirt wrinkled, jeans creased, but my dad is one of the top news cameramen in the country. I’m really proud of him, although I wouldn’t tell him that. He works for the
CBC
and he’s won a couple of awards, like the time he just about got killed videotaping the capture of a gang of bank robbers who had gotten stuck in traffic on the Gardiner Expressway.
Long ago I realized that it was my dad’s childish — no, child
like
, he always says — personality that makes him such a great camera man. It’s his crazy risk-taking that makes his work extra special.
But sometimes I wish he’d realize that there are other things in the world than cameras and film and lenses and videocassettes.
I wonder how Dad scored a new Betacam, I thought as he chattered away into the phone. “Right. It’s been thirty years since the break, with lots of conflict in the meantime. This will be a really big story.”
His voice faded as I left the study. He had finally noticed me from behind the piles of papers, stacks of files, and collection of mouldy coffee mugs on his desk and waved, so I left the room. I knew I’d get a full rundown of the conversation — whether I wanted it or not — later on, so I went downstairs to the basement.
I flipped on the light and was struck by the stern
faces of a few dozen soldiers staring at me. They were lined up in ceremonial formation, soldiers from an ancient army. They stood erect and proud on a piece of thick plywood. I looked at them from the doorway, scanning the lines of miniature men, looking for a flaw in the deployment of the ranks, a tiny lead soldier’s tunic painted the wrong colour, a bowman kneeling on the wrong knee. I knew I’d find no flaws, but I looked the soldiers over anyway.
There wasn’t a whole army of course, only three dozen miniature men and one war-chariot with four horses. I had made every one of them from moulds I fashioned myself, then hand-painted each one, carefully, so as to get the detail perfect. There was six months’ research and then a year’s work of casting, finishing and painting. Now the display was almost ready.
This was my most ambitious project. I had been a nut about all aspects of military history for a long, long time. I had model planes hanging on threads from my bedroom ceiling. Three tanks guarded my dresser. An armoured personnel carrier defended my desk. And in the basement were stored boxes of “tin” soldiers, along with layout plans for battles. I had done the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle at Frog Lake from the Riel Rebellion, the Plains of Abraham, naturally, Dien Bien Phu and more. I had won lots of trophies from exhibitions put on by hobbyists all around Ontario.
But this one was going to be the best anybody
had ever done. I hoped. I got the idea from a TV show I saw about two years ago. It was some kind of documentary on Chinese history, and it concentrated on a burial site near Xi’an, an ancient capital in northwest China. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi-huang, is buried under a huge tumulus — that’s a tomb hidden under a man-made mountain. The Qin dynasty was in power from 221 to 207
B.C
. and Qin Shi-huang, the founder, was the emperor who built the Great Wall of China. Actually, he linked together a lot of walls that were there before he came to the throne. The Chinese still haven’t opened the tumulus yet. Anyway, about a klick and a half from the tumulus a farmer was ploughing the ground one day, struggling along behind his mule or ox or whatever, and he looked down and saw the top of somebody’s head. Turned out it was the head of a life-size model of a soldier made of terra-cotta clay.
But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that there was
a whole army
of these clay soldiers buried in three different sites. The site this farmer found had more than five hundred soldiers and six war-chariots — each with four horses. There were three phalanxes, each with an honour guard of seventy men. And the soldiers were buried standing up, in ceremonial formation, facing the tumulus. The books I read about this said the soldiers were lined up as if to protect the tumulus from desecration but I’m sure that’s dead wrong. It has to be. You don’t face
towards
what you’re defending — any fool
knows that — you face
away
from what you’re defending. You face the enemy.
The more I read about these terra cotta soldiers, the more fascinated I got. Each one is made with great detail. You can make out the small squares the armour is made of, the studs that hold the squares to the backing, the folds of cloth on their scarves and long coats, even the hair on their moustaches and beards. There are officers, enlisted men (you can tell from the clothing and armour), bowmen, spear-bearers, horsemen. They all wear clunky-looking square shoes.
All that got me reading other stuff about Chinese history and wars and battles. The most famous book, and the hardest to read, was
The Art of War
by Sun Zi. Great stuff. Then I got the idea of building a display based on the Xi’an site and entering it in an exhibition. I was now way ahead of schedule. The show wasn’t until the end of June.
I walked over to the display and sat down on a stool behind the display. Facing me were six men who had not been painted. I turned on my desk lamp and got to work.
But I didn’t get much done. The banging of the basement door and thump of footsteps on the stairs told me my dad was finished with the telephone. The lens of a Betacam appeared in the doorway and then a phony TV-announcer voice droned, “And here is the famed military historian, seventeen-year-old Canadian Alexander Jackson, hard at work, deep
in the damp catacombs of his home in Toronto.”
My dad moved into the room slowly, the new Betacam perched on his shoulder. The lens zoomed in and out.