Forbidden City (27 page)

I felt a chill of fear as the tanks seemed to draw me back to the wide avenue in front of the Forbidden City. My hands shook as I searched for the button on the remote to change the channel.

Suddenly a man sprinted out into the street. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He carried a little briefcase in one hand, and a rolled-up windbreaker in the other.

He stopped right in front of the lead tank, facing it, defying it, standing almost at attention.

The tank stopped so suddenly the big gun dipped. I held my breath, waiting for the machine-gun burst that would rip the man from his feet and hurl him backwards onto the road. Nothing happened for a moment. Then a belch of diesel smoke spurted from the side of the lead tank. It moved forward, then swung sharply to one side to avoid the man.

The man sidestepped, skipping in a lateral motion that kept him in front of the ugly machine. The tank stopped again. The man stood at attention, challenging. Another belch of smoke as the tank pivoted again, this time to the other side. The man moved with it, forcing it to halt.

Then he walked forward and climbed up onto the tank.

His arm rose and fell as he banged on the hatch. Finally the hatch opened, but no one appeared. The man seemed to be talking to whoever was inside.

He climbed down from the tank and turned his back on it. Again the puff of diesel smoke spurted out the side of the tank. As it began to move forward, the man turned and stood in front of it again, stubborn, unyielding, a thin ordinary man against the military power of the PLA.

Just at that moment, three or four people dressed in civilian clothes ran into the street from the right. They grabbed the man and appeared to plead with him. Finally, they pushed him roughly to the side, his body bent in a bow as he resisted them. The tanks started up again and ground forward along Chang An Avenue, the Avenue of Long Peace.

I let out a sigh, relieved.

On the screen was an American news announcer. He said the man was a student named Wang Ai-min. He had apparently pleaded with the soldiers in the tank to stop the killings that continue in Beijing.

I felt a surge of admiration for the stranger whose name I now knew. He seemed to represent all those people I saw in Tian An Men Square demonstrating for democracy, facing the guns with empty hands. Well, I thought, at least
someone
escaped.

“Shortly after this incident,” the announcer said, “Wang Ai-min was arrested. Yesterday he was executed.”

I sat there on the couch, numbed by what I had
heard. I don’t know how long I sat there, probably just a moment or two. But with every passing second something inside me, something like a steel spring, wound tighter and tighter. The TV announcer’s words replayed in my head. “Yesterday he was executed … Wang Ai-min was arrested. Yesterday he was executed.” The spring coiled tighter and tighter until it screeched with the tension. “He was executed … executed … executed.”

Then the spring snapped.

I jumped up from the couch, screamed something at the top of my voice, and fired the remote against the TV. It hit the top corner, split open, spilling out the batteries, and fell to the floor. I ran from the room, crying and cursing the murderers in uniform who were still murdering, and charged up the stairs and into my room. I stood just inside the door, panting, my wounded leg throbbing from the pounding on the stairs, and glared at the plastic model planes that hung from the ceiling on black threads. I had used black to create the illusion that the planes were actually flying. I punched at the nearest plane, a
MIG
fighter, and felt a jab of pain as the plane spun on the thread and arced out of reach. I swung again as it arched back towards me and missed. I cursed again and flung open my closet door and rummaged around for a moment before I found an old hockey stick.

Grasping the stick at the blade end I started swinging it like a bat, crying and shouting in anger as
I wailed away at the planes. The
MIG
spun away and cracked into halves against the wall and fell to the floor. A military transport streaked across the room, one wing ripped off it, and plopped onto my bed. It split into bits as I brought the hockey stick down on it. A HUEY helicopter exploded into a thousand pieces that dropped to the floor like plastic rain.

When I had smashed the planes out of the air I turned to the model personnel carrier on my desk. Two quick crushing whacks and it was a small pile of splinters. I turned next to the tanks that guarded my dresser. I imagined a thin isolated figure standing in front of each tank, defiantly. Then I raised the stick over my head. I slammed at the tanks over and over, pounding them into a confusion of dark green plastic bits, bogey wheels, strips of track, and broken guns.

Last came my trophies. They were lined up along a shelf on the wall. I held the stick at arm’s length and slid it along the shelf, watching with satisfaction as each trophy toppled off the end of the shelf and crashed to the floor. They lay there in a meaningless pile.

I was still crying, still sobbing, when I stopped. I was breathing heavily. I looked down at my shaking hands. Blood flowed freely from a deep gash in my finger onto the handle of the hockey stick and down to the blade. I threw down the stick and left the room.

I had to walk downstairs carefully. My calf throbbed where the bullet had gone through. I walked into the kitchen and flung open the cupboard where Dad keeps all the pots. I yanked out the
biggest, a Corning glass saucepan, sending the rest of the pots crashing down and tumbling out onto the floor. Holding the pot I went down into the basement, switching on the light when I got to the bottom of the stairs.

The ancient Xi’an army stood silently — the honour guard of the First Emperor — in formation. The bowmen were kneeling, their empty hands waiting for the arrows that I hadn’t made yet, the long arrows that they would hold in a formal pose. In my head I heard Lao Xu’s quiet voice. “Thank you for lending us your arrows, Cao Cao. You can be sure we will return them soon!” The overhead light gleamed on the soldiers’ bright clothing and winked on the brass coloured studs on their armour. Six men remained to be painted.

I limped to the hot plate I use for making the soldiers, slammed the pot onto it, and turned the control knob to
MEDIUM
. I hobbled over to the big cupboard, pulled open the doors, and began to lift out the shoe boxes inside. I placed them on the Xi’an display board and unpacked the lead soldiers from the cotton batting inside, standing them upright on the painted plywood. Then I tossed the shoe boxes and cotton aside.

I stepped over to the hot plate and turned the heat to
HIGH
. In a few moments the bottom of the pot glowed cherry red. I went to the Xi’an display and gathered up a handful of the new two-thousand-year-old lead soldiers. The blood from my finger leaked onto their armour.

I carried them to the hot plate and dropped them into the pot.

The paint smoked and burned as the soldiers began to melt. I limped to the table, scooped up more soldiers, fed them into the pot one by one. The bottom of the pot was a lake of lead and each bloodied soldier sank slowly into it.

I worked steadily, calmly. When the Xi’an army was gone I began on the others, lifting them to the pot, dropping them in one after the other, Horsemen of the Light Brigade, guerrilla fighters from Dien Bien Phu, Canadian infantry from Vimy Ridge, Mounties and Metis from Frog Lake, bows, arrows, cannon, sabres, rifles, machine guns. All the soldiers from all the wars melted down together into lead again.

Later on, Dad came home. From my room I heard him come in, slam the door, utter an exclamation. Footsteps raced to the basement door, clattered down the stairs, creaked slowly up again.

In the kitchen, the sounds of tea being made — water running, the whistle of the kettle, the clink of spoons in mugs. Then Dad’s footsteps climbing the stairs to my room. Silently he handed me a mug of tea and sat at the foot of the bed, holding his tea in both hands. He sat there, silent, for a few moments.

“You know, Alex, I think I’ve finally started to grow up.”

I leaned back against the headboard and said nothing, just waited.

“Even when the soldiers roared into the square and jumped down from the trucks I was still at it, still trying to get the perfect image, you know? Still after the great award-winning shot. As if I wasn’t there, as if I was a camera, not a person, not …
involved.”

He shook his head and took a sip of his tea. I looked into his face. He was confused. This was hard for him. He was trying to work things out, like Xinhua when she explained about the
PLA
in the Five Pagoda Temple compound.

“Even when I was being arrested, part of me was saying, This is great! The big newsman arrested while he tried to get the story out to the public. Hero stuff.

Then when I realized that you weren’t at the hotel, that you were
gone
, it wasn’t a game anymore.”

He stopped talking and swallowed hard. His hand trembled as he raised the mug to his lips and sipped the steaming tea.

“I realized it could have been
you
Alex. All those kids about your age, shot down, bleeding in the street. Any one of them could have been you.”

Dad looked around the room, composing himself again. His eyes rested on my dresser, then my desk. The tank and armoured personnel carrier models had been beaten into bits. He looked up at the empty strings dangling from my ceiling. He nodded slowly.

“So it’s all gone,” he murmured.

“Pardon, Dad?”

“All that work you put in, Alex. All those hours. And the lead soldiers, they’re gone too.”

Then I knew what he meant. “I guess it was all a game to me too, Dad,” I said. “It isn’t anymore.”

I thought about Beijing, the big spring winds, the walls and alleys, the Forbidden City and Tian An Men Square. The night filled with machine-gun fire and screams, crackling flames and Lao Xu’s shout of outrage before he died. And, a few days later, that single crack of gunfire.

I hadn’t been able to do anything to help. I hadn’t been able to stop anything.

I had known two real heroes in my life and they were both dead. I had seen another on TV today and he was dead, too. Not one of them had worn a uniform.

I took a long drink of my warm tea. “Nothing will be the same now, will it, Dad? Everything will be different, and we will too.”

A couple of moments passed before he answered.

“Yeah, but we can’t let this get us down. We can’t let this beat us.” Dad’s voice had some of the old fire in it. His eyes sparkled. He tried to smile. “Right, Shanty?”

I smiled too and shook my head. “It’s Shan Da, Dad.”

The number of those killed in the Beijing massacre on June 4, 1989 has never been officially recorded.

Approximately one month after the incident, Chen Xi-tong, Mayor of Beijing, submitted his report to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. “During the whole operation,” he wrote, “no one, including those who refused but were forced to leave, died.”

The Chinese names in this book are given in the official form of transcription called Pin-yin, and each syllable is given separately. Here is a brief pronunciation guide for surnames:

• Xu —
  Hssoo
  

• Wang —
  Wong
  

• Nie —
  Nee-uh
  

• Liu —
  Lee-oh
  

• Zhao —
  Jow
  to rhyme with the bow of a boat
  

Other words:

• Lao — pronounce the “A” as in
  father
  

• Xiao — long “I” and long “A”:
  hss-e-a-oh
  

William Bell holds Masters degrees in both Literature and Education. Currently the Head of English at Orillia Collegiate, he has also taught at the University of British Columbia as well as colleges in Harbin and Beijing.

William Bell’s other novels include
Crabbe, No Signature, Speak to the Earth
, and
Zack. Forbidden City
has been translated into more than ten languages.