Forbidden City (2 page)

“Tell us, Alex,” said my father, “how —”

“Cut it out, will you, Dad? I’m trying to concentrate.”

He lowered the Betacam. A mile-wide grin was plastered on his face. He picked up one of the unpainted soldiers, looked at it, and then stared straight into my eyes. His eyes bounced and danced.

“How would you like,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement, “to see these famous guys close up? I mean,
really
close up. How would you like to stand on the tomb of Emperor Qin Shoo-wing —”

“Qin Shi-huang, Dad.”

“Yeah, him. How would you like to stand on his tumulus and look out on the place where these guys used to live?”

“Come on, Dad, get real. We’d have to go to—”

“Right. We’d have to go to China!”

Dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. I had hastily put away my paints and he was filling me in on a meeting he had had with his boss earlier that afternoon. It was hard to follow sometimes because when he was excited he rushed around
inside his own sentences, starting thoughts and leaving them unfinished as he jumped over to new ones. But what I had gathered so far was that the
CBC
cameraman assigned to Beijing had come home with hepatitis. That’s a liver disease. He didn’t want to be treated in the Chinese hospitals — “And who can blame him?” Dad had added — so he came home and now there was a correspondent in Beijing without a cameraman.

Dad said the Russian premier, Gorbachev, was making an official visit to Beijing, the capital of China, in May. Jack, Dad’s boss, wanted to send Dad to replace the sick guy. He wanted Dad to go to China soon to do a lot of background stuff. And Jack had an instinct that this story would be bigger than just the state visit. “All good newsmen and women trust their hunches almost as much as their sources,” Dad added.

“So,” Dad finished up a long, convoluted sentence, “Jack asked me if I wanted to go. I said yes, he issued me with a new Betacam, and I went out and picked up a little camcorder for our own use because, on the way home, after we’ve done our work in the Centre Kingdom —”

“The Middle Kingdom, Dad.” I knew he made goofs like that just to kid me and I hated to disappoint him by letting them go.

“Yeah, whatever. And on the way home, we can flip over to Siam — yeah, okay Xi’an, don’t look at me like that and take some footage of your pals
who’ve been standing under all that dirt for almost two thousand years waiting for you to come and see them. What do you say?”

I could hardly believe it. China! Seven thousand years of history. I’d miss the military history exhibition this spring, but there would be another in Hamilton in the fall.

“What about school, Dad? I might lose my year if I go now.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Well, I’ll call the principal and fix it. You’ve got pretty good marks, right?”

“Yeah, I’m doing all right. But I’d have to miss exams. Or will we be back before school gets out?”

“Doubt it. We might be there for months.”

“Could be tense, Dad. I don’t know if they’d let me go.”

“They’ll have to. I’ll tell them we have no choice.”

I thought for a moment. I knew I had to work this through, cover all the bases. If I left it up to my dad, he’d just pack us up and away we’d go.

“They might say I could live with Mom and finish my year. They know she lives in Toronto.”

He scowled. “You want to live with her while I’m gone?’

“Course not, Dad,” I said hastily. “I’m just saying that might be what the principal will say.”

“Well, I’ll take care of that. Where are you going to learn the most? Sitting at a desk and doing busy work, or travelling across the world?”

“You don’t have to convince
me
, Dad.”

“Leave it to me, Alex. I’ll charm that principal right out of his socks. What’s his name, anyway?”

“He’s a she, Dad.”

“Whatever.”

And he did. I have three courses this semester. My French teacher gave me an estimated mark (a B), my computer science teacher let me do a special project that took me a week of slugging to complete to make up for the stuff I’d miss, and my history teacher, Mr. Bronowski, who likes me because I’m a history nut like him, let me go with an A as long as I keep a travel diary of my experiences and hand it in to him when I get back. I started it tonight, after Dad came home and told me all the arrangements.

“There’s only one wrinkle,” he added.

“What? What?” Why is it, I thought, that things never just work out nice and neat?

“Well, Jack says the assignment might be a little longer than he expected. Apparently the guy who got hepatitis is out of commission for a while.”

“How much of a while, Dad?”

“Well, maybe a year.”

“A year! That’s your idea of a little bit longer? I thought our plan was to be out of Beijing by the end of May, then go to Xi’an for a week or so, then come home. A year! No way, Dad.”

“Why don’t we see how it goes? Play it by ear.”

My dad is the only person in the universe who would fly halfway around the world, stay a bit, then
“see how it goes.” Sometimes he drives me nuts. “Play it by ear” means not having a clue what we’re doing next. No plans, no schedules, just floating along. I hate that. I mean, things should be organized.

“Dad, I can’t live there for a year. I just can’t.”

“Okay, let’s make a deal. We’ll cover Gorbachev’s visit, do the follow-up, then go to Xi’an. Then we’ll see. If one of us wants to come home at that point, we will.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He smiled and his eyes sparkled as he pushed his long hair out of his eyes.

I felt a lot better once we had things settled. So here I am, scribbling away like crazy, hardly able to write for excitement.

Because we leave tomorrow.

I could tell my dad was mega-serious about this whole China caper when he came downstairs early this morning — dawn is more like it — in a clean white shirt, neatly pressed slacks and polished shoes.

He wasn’t fooling me one bit, though. I knew that a few minutes after we got to Beijing — we would be living at the Beijing Hotel — he would be back into his faded jeans and T-shirt. He always says that his
body rejects formal clothing the way a healthy organism rejects invading germs, and he’s probably right. Me, I like to dress up once in a while. It makes me feel good. Especially when it’s a special event.

Anyway, that was this morning, and already it seems so long ago. I’m writing this on the plane. My notebook is barely lit by the little reading light above me. The ride is a little rough at times, so my handwriting, which isn’t prize winning at the best of times, is jiggly. The cabin lights are out and most passengers are sleeping.

We left Toronto about ten o’clock this morning. I love to fly, especially the take-offs when you feel that terrific rush as the engines roar and slam you back into your seat and you feel the plane’s acceleration, then the wicked tilt, then the floating sensation as the ground drops away.

But my dad is a big suck when it comes to planes. What he does is, he gets what he calls “blasted”. He’s got it down to a science. He pops half a Gravol to calm his jittery stomach just after he checks his bags, then half a Valium when they call the flight, then as soon as the plane is up and cruising he flags down a flight attendant and orders a double whisky. All this is really strange because he doesn’t drink much at all and he’s absolutely death on drugs, legal and illegal. Once he’s blasted, he says, the panic leaves him, and although he never
enjoys
a flight, at least he can almost relax. But it means I have to handle the tickets and boarding passes and steer Dad around.

Anyway, we made Vancouver in five hours and a bit, changed planes after an hour and a half lay-over, and took off again. We had a boring meal of some kind of chicken and then watched an equally boring movie about a rock star who loses her voice and starts up a cosmetics company. Right now we’re approximately ten hours out of Vancouver. I slept a bit, but I’m too keyed up and cramped and uncomfortable to sleep soundly.

I’m six feet right on and I have to sort of fold myself into the seats they give you in the economy section. Dad is taller than me. He’s beside me in the window seat, sleeping all twisted up, like a pretzel. His head is thrown back and his mouth is open and he’s snoring away as if he was in his right mind. He looks pretty silly, actually. I know that a normal seventeen year old would be a little embarrassed to be sitting beside him. I’m just being honest.

You know, we’re all mega-terrified that our parents will embarrass us by saying something dumb at the wrong time or answering the door in really goofy clothes or something. I used to be like that, years ago, but not anymore.

I can’t sleep so I’m writing. Just letting thoughts come into my head.

I take a lot of flak from kids because I’m interested in military history and weapons and restaging battles and stuff like that. I think I’m the only kid at my school who even knows what a blitzkrieg is. The other kids couldn’t care less about war and
most history teachers like to babble on about governments and constitutions and the causes and effects of wars, as if the wars themselves were chapters in history that you could skip over without changing the story.

I’m not saying I’m crazy about people getting killed and cities getting bombed, but it happens, so why ignore it? Pacifists are just simpletons as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing I like better than a war movie with lots of battle scenes, noise and smoke, explosions that shake the ground, and the wicked chatter of machine-gun fire. Or a tank battle, the tanks moving like chess pieces, like in the movie
Patton
. That’s the thing. It isn’t the killing and ghoulish stuff that interests me. It’s the battle plans and the strategy and the weapons. It’s like chess or curling or bridge — those are all games I really like.

Someone — probably Mr. Bronowski — once asked me when I started getting hot on military history, and until then I didn’t realize that it started around the time Mom left home and went to live on her own. My whole world fell apart. I was only twelve and I had a hard time understanding what was going on and why. At first I thought it was my fault, but Mom and Dad — especially Dad — worked hard on convincing me it wasn’t. Then I figured if it wasn’t my fault she left, Dad must be to blame. Maybe she got sick of him, the way he was a fanatic about his work, or the sloppy way he dressed. Mom always looked like she just stepped off the
front page of a magazine. I didn’t know, but I was sure, for a couple of months at least, that I lost my mom because there was something wrong with my dad.

Then one night I woke up from a bad dream. I had been having a lot of them around then. I padded down the upstairs hall on my way to the kitchen to get some milk. When I came opposite Dad’s bedroom door I heard something strange. The door was open a crack, and I looked in. Dad was sitting on the bed in a pool of soft light from the small lamp on the dresser, holding a framed photo in both hands, staring into it. I knew the picture. It was one of Mom and Dad and me at a cottage in Haliburton when I was about seven and it usually hung on the wall beside Mom’s dresser. Only her dresser wasn’t there anymore.

The strange sound I had heard was Dad crying. His shoulders and head shook from the deep sobs that came from down inside him.

I watched him carefully after that, because that night was when I realized how badly hurt he was, as badly as me, and I knew that no matter whose fault it was we had to face it together. We had both lost her. And the more I thought about it, the more I knew that she left us because she wanted to, and that, no matter what her reasons were, I would never forgive her.

Anyway, I’m only saying that I think that’s when I started getting interested in all this military stuff. What I liked most about reading battle plans was the
feeling that there were rules and strategies and traditions and everything was clear. And when I got into building model soldiers and reconstructing battles I liked the feeling of control. I’d draw plans and try to picture the troop movements, attacks, feints, retreats, traps, all that, and I’d lose myself for hours in a world that made sense.