Authors: Andy Oakes
“… you need to look at your life again, young Sun Piao. See what colour its eyes are. Your mother has been through a great deal in her life, all of our generation have been through a great deal. …”
He sipped the tea, the dainty cup held in fingers that were more bone than flesh.
“… the Cultural Revolution was a ten year earthquake that people of your generation can never understand, but you should at least try. For your mother to be pregnant with the child of a foreigner. To be in love with a yang-gui-zi …”
The Director shook his head.
“… lives split apart like bamboo. These were very difficult times …”
He swallowed hard …
“… I would do anything to see my own father again, just to say to him that I understand.”
To see his father again. The Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard’s hatred of the ‘Four Olds’. Old ideas. Old culture. Old customs. Old habits. There wasn’t one family in the whole of the Republic that didn’t have a tale to tell, that couldn’t drive a tear from the most arid of eyes. Piao knew the Director’s tale, it was worse than most. His father had been one of the country’s most gifted concert pianists. One night the Red Guard had called … had hauled him from his bed. In a street in central Shanghai, not more than three miles from where they now sat drinking tea, his father’s hands had been held firm to the road surface. A line of over two hundred and fifty Red Guards had marched across them in their boots. He had nearly bled to death that night, on the kerbside, but a skilled surgeon, whom the family had known had saved him. But not his hands. Not his mind. He had committed suicide six months later.
To see his father again. Just to say … I understand.
The Senior Investigator finished his tea, placing the cup and saucer firmly down on the antique desk. A punctuation mark begging a change of direction.
“Director, your team, when will they investigate the house near Harbin?”
The old man smiled, plough lines deepening around his eyes, his mouth. Piao had known him as a man in the spring of middle age. Skin taut. Eyes clear and fixed to the future. Seeing him now, it tugged at his own mortality. Knowing the feeling every time that he looked into a mirror. Every time, except the morning that he had woken with Barbara’s hair splayed across his chest. Her breasts rising, falling, against his arm.
“A change of subject. You make a good detective Sun Piao. You would make an even better politician …”
The Director pushed a report across the desk.
“… this is between you and me, Senior Investigator Piao. Madam Hayes was never here and this report does not exist. I give you this only because your mother is so good looking.”
“Your team, they have already been to the house, haven’t they?”
Director Chieh locked his fingers together and placed them on the desktop. A texture of gnarled tree bark resting on walnut veneer.
“We regard the smuggling of our national heritage, our cultural relics, as a serious problem. The Party and the government do not differ in this view and so our budget allows us to respond swiftly. As it so happens, it was most fortuitous that we already had a team working in the general area of Harbin. They were at the house just hours after you communicated with us … before you had even landed back at Hongqiao.”
“What was a team doing around Harbin?”
The Director sipped his tea … a prop only. The tea itself had long grown cold in its cup.
“Pingfang.”
Barbara saw Piao’s irises widen, the words strand themselves in his throat.
“Pingfang, what is it, a place?”
“Our tragedy …” Piao replied, leaning toward her. She still smelt of that night and of a continent only partly explored.
“… we have heard of your Dauchaus, your Belsens. You have not heard of our Pingfang. The west that you live in would like to corner the market when it also comes to human suffering …”
Dust in the room, its smell of old books, pottery fragments and glue.
“… when the Americans liberated the camp from the Japanese Imperial Army, they guaranteed the freedom of those murderers involved, in return for all of the data that had been collected during the experiments on our citizens. Our experts believe that this made a significant contribution to medical research in the west.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Apologising for a nation. Straws in the wind. It sounded so meaningless as it left Barbara’s lips.
“Memories fade, Madam Hayes; they were designed that way …”
Director Chieh’s words, a welcome Band-aid applied over the running sore.
“… but our case against the Japanese for compensation for what occurred, that does not fade. Our team at Pingfang has been collecting evidence for eighteen months now. It will be integrated into a report and a legal case will be brought against the Japanese government in the new year …”
He smiled. His face like a crumpled paper bag.
“… not our usual field of work, but very rewarding to the soul. Very difficult for the soul also. Investigating your house in the Yanshou snowfields was a very welcome interlude.”
Blood soaked into the wooden floor. A son’s life ripped and spilt of its contents. ‘A welcome interlude’ … he made it sound like a tea dance. The Senior Investigator tapped his knuckles on the buff of the report.
“I have no time for paper, not with Liping sitting on my shoulder. What does it say, Director?”
Chieh stood, slowly, carefully. His posture, that of a question mark. His attention focused solely on Barbara. The old man had an eye for the women that time had not diminished. Does the bee ever lose its taste for the honey?
“Excuse me, my dear, if I slip into my lecturing mode …”
He smiled, she nodded.
“… your initial report has been noted, Senior Investigator. And our own investigations, although brief, I can assure you were most thorough. As they always are …”
He studied his nails. A lifetime as an archaeologist had left its indelible print; the skin as yellow-brown as the soil of the Huang He’s Great Loess Plains. The nails … thick, ridged, as tough as steel trowels.
“… as you are already aware, Madam Hayes, your son was never officially in our country and I am not in a position to challenge this. Neither would I wish to. Swimming in the sea when you know that it is the season of typhoons, is a dangerous way to relax, if you take my point. And as your son was, officially, never in our country, he could never have officially worked for the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology under the site director, Wang Xueli …”
The old man fingers formed a crooked, pointing spire.
“… but, we know, Madam Hayes, that your son did exactly that …”
Barbara felt a jolt of focus. Chieh’s words flowing over her.
“… one of my archaeological inspectors, on several occasions, visited a very important site of a dig near the ancient capital of Changan … twelve miles out of Xian. It is the first extensive excavation of a Han Emperor’s mausoleum in what we like to call ‘the sleeping town of the Emperors and their wives and concubines.’ Eight hundred tombs have been located on this single plain and although none of the royal tombs had been opened, there was a sense that the sleeping town should now be woken. Your son was a part of this process. One of the alarm-clocks. One of the first archaeologists involved. A gifted Han scholar I have been told …”
The Director turned, truth in his eyes.
“… my inspector met him on two occasions. My department, this department, was the one to give your son a permit allowing him onto the Jing Di site.”
She couldn’t talk, tongue riveted in place by the simple truths that he had just spoken. Wanting to ask about Bobby. Mother things. But Piao spoke first … detective things.
“The coin that we found, was it a miniature burial item from the site that you talk about?”
Chieh took a small box from his desk drawer and opened it. The coin sat cleaned of earth on a bed of white cotton … blue-green bronze.
“The depth of your knowledge surprised me, Sun Piao. Your mother would complain that you were not the most accomplished student at school. But, yes, you are correct. The coin is a burial item, Mingqi. And, yes, once more, it comes from the site near Changan where the American boy worked. The fired clay dirt that you found at the house also confirms this.”
“So, Director, do we know what it could be that was being smuggled from this site?”
The old man pressed a button and spoke overloudly into an intercom, it was answered within seconds by a meek tap on the door. A tall man entered the office, his face instantly forgettable; he placed a sealed wooden box on its end on the desktop and left. A box that was of identical size to the ones that Piao had seen in a corner of the house in the Yanshou snowfields. Chieh took a pair of cutters and snipped the wire that held the boxes sliding front in place. A thick, blood-red seal falling heavily onto the desk. Slowly the old man slid open the front of the lined box to reveal a crumpled padding of soft brown paper; Chieh’s fingers pulling it out with care, laying it on the desk. His torso hiding the dark wood interior of the box. Moving aside … a gasp caught in Barbara’s throat. A statue of a human figure, naked, armless. Slim, as a young boy. Soft muscled. Gently contoured. Terracotta … a fired clay of pale brown, almost pink. Hair, worn lacquer black and tied back into a tight bun. The face, beautiful. Hinting of a secret delight. A smile, generous, honest, across its open features. So different, but it reminded her of Bobby. He would have been around seven, going on eight, in a rush to grow up. Miami, a summer vacation spent on the beach. Hot days, long days, pierced with sighing Coca-Cola cans. Sand on his body. Watching him run toward the water, the surf falling across his shoulders, his back. As sleek, as glistening as a dolphin.
The Director was also smiling. His teeth as yellow as the sand on that beach in Miami.
“To see them is to smile, yes? In New York they realise up to fifty thousand dollars each on the art market. Ten of them appeared at auctions just one month ago. All were from the Jing Di site. Beautiful, are they not?”
Barbara nodded. Yes, they were beautiful. So was Bobby.
“We call them ‘Men of Mud.’ They are worth smuggling, do you not think so? Perhaps even worth dying for? Your son would not have been the first, Madam Hayes.”
“Yes they are very beautiful, but worth dying for? No, they’re not worth dying for, Director. I don’t know anything that is worth dying for, except your own child.”
He studied her eyes for several seconds.
“Yes, very beautiful, but perhaps you are right …”
He removed a pipe from an inside pocket of his jacket and tapped it hard on the window ledge. A litter of black tobacco decanted onto white paint.
“… in March 1990 they were building a highway from Xian to Xianyang Airport, the road passed the tomb of Jing Di, fifth ruler of the Han Dynasty who reigned from 157 to 141 BC. The builders of the road noticed discoloration in the soil. They called us …”
The Director turned the pipe over and over in his fingers.
“… ground tests revealed a total of twenty-four pits on the site. They contain the terracotta army of Jing Di, only the second imperial terracotta army to be found in our country. The first was the honour guard of over ten thousand life-sized soldiers that were found in the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang Di, the builder of the Great Wall. At the Jing Di site, where your son had worked, only eight pits have so far been investigated. They contain over seven hundred figures. Seven hundred Men of Mud …”
He stroked a finger down the statue’s cheek, its chest, the flat of its stomach. Barbara trying to imagine seven hundred smiles.
“… as an Emperor during the Han period, Jing Di would have been considered divine. His people believed that he interceded with heaven on their behalf, their prosperity depended upon him. Too sacred even to name, as Emperor he would have been addressed by the words meaning ‘foot of the stairs’, the highest that a person could look in his presence. We know that the Han believed that the afterlife was a prolongation of this life, and so when life no longer possessed Jing Di, his mausoleum would have mirrored the magnificence of his residence on earth. Finely woven silks, musical instruments, food, drink, and an army to fight the Emperor’s battles in the underworld …”
Director Chieh sat, fingers tracing the shape of the bowl of his pipe.
“… the building of an army that might be required after death was taken extremely seriously. Jing Di, it is known, once accused his most loyal general of buying too many weapons for his own tomb. The man was charged with the intent of leading a rebellion against the Emperor in the afterlife. The general was imprisoned and humiliated. He was a proud and loyal officer. He starved himself to death …”
The old man passed a photograph across the desk; a deep pit, its sides rough and uneven. From out of its base, rows of heads sprouting like cabbages. Fired clay smiles floating on a sea of nicotine brown dust.
“… Pit 17, it contained seventy terracotta soldiers marching behind two carriages drawn by wooden horses. An armoury of iron swords, shields, bows, arrows. The far end of the pit was filled to a height of two metres with grain. Then, as now, growing food to feed the masses was a national duty. A day after this photograph was taken, Pit 17 was filled in to allow farmers to sow wheat on the surface. A national heritage re-buried for a few hundred loaves of bread …”
He shook his head vigorously, the smoke curling around him in silver meanders.
“… our inspectors have reported with frequency that the Jing Di terracotta site of twenty-four pits and the hundred foot high tumulus, that is the Emperor’s actual resting place, were at the mercy of tomb-robbers. Our other Emperors’ tombs also. Xuan and Wen, east of Xian. Wu, Zhao, northwest of Xianyang. These alone fall in an area that is around nine hundred square miles. How do we hope to guard such a vast area? Who is to say what is sowing wheat, harvesting corn … or robbing the graves of the Emperors and smuggling away our most prized cultural relics?”
Chieh tapped his pipe on the desk twice.
“We do not know how many Men of Mud have been smuggled from the Jing Di site. We do not know how many Men of Mud were at the Jing Di site! How many grains of sand are in your fist when you plunge it into a dune … see how they drift through the gaps between your fingers the more you guard against it and tighten your grip?”