Forbidden City (26 page)

The man behind the counter exclaimed something in Chinese when he saw me and pulled a clean handkerchief out of his pocket. He handed it to me. I wiped the blood from my face as best I could.

Without waiting for me to speak, he asked, “What country you from?”

“Canada.”

“Canada upstairs.” He indicated a wide stairway at the far end of the hall. “This all United States down here.”

Silently I turned and hobbled to the stairs. People rushed by, not seeming to take any notice of me. I got to the stairway and was relieved to see an escalator there. But it wasn’t running. Gripping the
handrail with both hands, I pulled my way up the wide staircase.

At the top, I stopped. I felt dizzy and held onto the bannister for a moment. When the woozy feeling passed I wiped my face again. The cut on my forehead was still bleeding. I walked along a wide hallway. People sat along the walls, talking quietly, suitcases and backpacks lined up in front of them. I came to a wide lounge full of people. One wall of the lounge was a big picture window. A counter stretched along the far wall. People stood before it in quiet lines. A sign on the wall said Information Registration.

I limped towards the sign, drawing stares from the tired, scared-looking people around me. A woman in front of me turned away from the counter, almost bumping into me.

“My god!” she said. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.” She hurried away, passport in hand.

The woman behind the counter had a big loose leaf binder open in front of her with dog-eared sheets of paper filled with names. Her eyebrows jumped and her mouth dropped open when she looked up and saw me. But her voice was cool and professional.

“Do you need medical aid?”

“Is my father here? I have to find my father. Or Eddie. Maybe Eddie is here. Lao Xu isn’t here because he’s dead. They killed him.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“They killed Xin-hua, too. They tried to kill me,
but Xin-hua made them leave me alone. She saved me. She got me out.”

“Son, listen. What’s your name? You tell me your name, okay? Are you Canadian?”

“Shan Da.”

“What?”

“It means big mountain,” I explained. “Because I’m tall.”

“Son, what’s your name. What’s your father’s name?”

“Um, Ted. Ted Jackson.”

She ran her finger down the lists, up and down, up and down. “Edward Jackson? Canadian? From Toronto?”

“He’s a news cameraman.”

“He’s here, son. At least, he registered here … let me see … yesterday.”

I turned away from the counter and walked slowly back down the centre aisle of the lounge examining all the people in the chairs and on the floor on my right. When I reached the end of the aisle I turned and started back, this time scanning the chairs on the window side.

My father was sitting in the last seat in one of the rows, closest to the window.

His long legs stretched out into the space between the seats. His jeans were rumpled and creased. He wore a while T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved in days and his long, light brown hair was greasy and uncombed.

He moved. He drew his legs towards him and
leaned his forearms on his thighs. He stared at the floor between his feet.

I limped towards the window and stopped in front of him. He didn’t raise his head at first. The people on either side of him murmured to one another, sneaking glances at me.

After a few moments my father looked up and the flat light from the window fell across his pale, haggard features. His blue eyes seemed dull and without energy. I realized he didn’t recognize me as I stood before him in torn, dirty Chinese clothes, face bloody, cap pulled down over my dyed hair. He looked down at his feet again.

Then he looked up again. He searched my face, his eyes coming alive.

My father rose slowly to his feet, saying nothing, keeping his eyes fixed on my face. When he had reached his full height his mouth began to quiver and tears streamed from his eyes. He stepped towards me and put his arms around me and his body shook with deep sobs.

I stood with my arms hanging at my sides. “Dad,” I said, “they killed her. They killed Xin-hua. They killed Lao Xu. They killed everybody.”

Dad told me afterwards that we got a plane out early the next morning. The airport was a total crazy house. A lot of the people who boarded the plane that the Canadian government had chartered to take us out had no baggage, and some, like me, had no ID or passport. We all got past the airport security anyway. People from the embassy shepherded everybody along. The only people the security guards — they
were regular airport security, not
PLA
— the only people they stopped to question were those who looked Chinese. I don’t remember anything about the flight home. I was sedated the whole way. So this time I was the one who was “blasted.”

We flew directly to Vancouver, then through to Toronto. The entire trip took about twenty hours. I slept through almost the whole thing, even in the transit lounge at Vancouver Airport. Mom met us at Toronto and drove us home in the dark.

By the time she pulled her Audi into our driveway the sedatives had mostly worn off. My body still felt tired and heavy and my mind was a bit numb, like I wasn’t too interested in what was going on around me. I was just sort of passive. That’s the only way I can describe it.

Mom and Dad clucked and fussed around me. First thing they did was order me upstairs to have a bath. I guess I smelled pretty bad. My Chinese clothes were dirty and bloody, with a couple of days’ sweat soaked into them.

The bathroom was clean and dry, the overhead light shining on the blue and white tiles, and the air smelled of soap and shaving lotion. Dad was standing beside me dumping bubble bath into the water, telling me I’d probably have to get a really short haircut because the shoe polish wasn’t going to come out very easily. I unzipped my pants and let them fall to my ankles, then pushed down my underwear.

Four 8mm video cassettes clattered to the tile floor.

“What the —” Dad exclaimed. “Alex! Are those what I think they are?”

The sight of the cassettes and the noise they made when they hit the floor snapped me back to reality. “There’s two rolls of film in my shirt pocket,” I said. “I put them there when —”

Dad gathered up the tapes, retrieved the film, and put them on the sink, then helped me into the bath. I lowered myself down into the hot, soapy water.

Mom came into the bathroom. She put the lid of the toilet seat down and sat there chain-smoking while I talked. She was well-dressed, as usual, and had a new hairdo. Her hands shook as she lit her cigarettes.

Dad sat on the floor, leaning against the cabinet, shuffling the tapes like thick black cards. He looked whacked, and he needed a bath as much as I did. And a shave.

A few minutes later I was giving Mom and Dad a condensed account of what had happened to me since the night of the fourth. Dad knew Lao Xu and Xin-hua were dead because I had told him at the airport. But when I got to the part where Xin-hua was murdered, Mom started crying. Her carefully made-up face twisted in anger and she kept saying, “How could they? How could they?”

Dad stopped fiddling with the tapes and stared down at them. I knew what he was thinking. He looked up at me, at my eyes. I knew he understood that we owed it to Xin-hua to get the contents of the tapes and films on the news.

Then it was Dad’s turn. He told me that on the night of the fourth, he was shooting tape fast and furious on Chang An Avenue — the burning armoured personnel carrier, the students helping the soldiers out, the soldiers disappearing into the crowd, all of it made a perfect image. Then the troop trucks came and the soldiers jumped down from the trucks and started to fan out. He saw a knot of uniformed men coming at him in his viewfinder.

“I tried to outrun them — or out-push and shove them. You could barely
walk
through that crowd. Some students saw what was happening and tried to protect me. They formed a circle around me but they were no match for gun butts and bayonets. The soldiers got to me, smashed the radio with their gun butts, smashed the camera, and dragged me back behind their lines. I was thrown into the back of a car and taken away somewhere. They kept me overnight and criticized me and took me to the airport the next day. Told me to get out on the next plane.”

Dad went on to say that as soon as they had left him at the airport he took a cab to the foreign hotel compound on the airport road. He figured the Lidu Hotel would be the best place to phone from. He called the Beijing Hotel time and time again, finally getting hold of Eddie, who was all right but worried to death when he got back to the suite to find no one there. Eddie had said to stay at the airport because Dad would never be able to get back to the Beijing Hotel.

“I could hear the gunfire over the phone,” Dad added. “Eddie said he’d try to find out where you were. It was hell, Alex. All we could do was wait to see if you showed up.”

“What about Eddie?” Mom asked, lighting another cigarette.

Eddie had headed back to the hotel after he had told me he would. He got back safely.

“What happened to his two-way, Dad? He went off the air suddenly and I couldn’t raise him again.”

Dad smiled — for the first time a real smile, not a forced one. Eddie had been on his way back to the hotel on the east side of the square. He stopped to look at the students’ barricade of buses across the square near the Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes. While he was lighting his pipe he dropped the radio.

Over the next few days, I got poked and prodded by the doctor, who said I was “traumatized” — as if I needed him to tell me that — and clipped and buzzed by a barber — so I am almost blond again with a brushcut.

Xin-hua’s videos made it onto the news. There are reports about China on the news almost every night, and the stuff that Xin-hua and I got has been shown — edited, of course — over and over again. It’s all there for the world to see.

Eddie sent all my journals and notes over from
Beijing, along with a nice letter to Dad and me, saying he was sorry the way things had worked out. He’s still there, still at the hotel, still sending reports. He reported that the Chinese government is telling a bag full of lies about what happened in Tian An Men Square on June fourth, just like Xin-hua said they would. They’ve been rounding up the so-called hooligans and bad elements who caused the so-called counter-revolutionary revolt and executing them. There’s a massive hunt on for student leaders and for people who talked to foreign reporters. These people are being shot, too. Eddie found out that after the government shoots someone, they send the victim’s family a bill for the bullet.

Last night Dad had to go out after supper. He fussed about leaving me alone — he’s barely been out of the house since we got back — but I convinced him I wouldn’t fall down in a fit if I was alone for a couple of hours. After he left I flopped in front of the TV, using the remote to flip through the channels, looking for a brainless sitcom to take my mind off things. One of the American channels was showing a program called
Storm in Beijing
.

On the screen was a video clip that had been shot in daylight from the roof of the Beijing Hotel. The date given was June sixth. That would be when I was still at Nai-nai’s house. On the screen a convoy of
four tanks was rolling down Chang An Avenue towards the hotel, unchallenged in the deserted street. The hatches were closed and the big machine guns up top were covered in canvas.