Agamemnon's Daughter (17 page)

It was probably a wise move on their part, since by making off to the hills, they would spare themselves the officials’ whip, at the very least, not to mention many other punishments of every kind. I’d never understood why they constantly take masonry from the Wall to build their hovels and yards, knowing full well that they would have to bring it back to rebuild the Wall.

The process, they tell me, has been going on for hundreds of years. Like the skein of wool used to make a scarf — which is then unpicked to knit a sweater, which is then undone to knit another scarf, and so on — the Wall’s great stones have made the return trip many times from peasant hovel to Wall and back again. In some places, you can still see streaks of soot, which predictably fire the fantasies of tourists and foreign plenipotentiaries, who can’t imagine that the marks are not the trace of some heroic clash but only smoke stains from hearths where, for many a long year, some nameless yokel cooked his thin and tasteless gruel.

So when we heard this afternoon that the peasants had abandoned their dwellings, we guessed that the whole of China had already heard news of the call to rebuild the Wall.

Although it was a symptom of heightened tension, the repair work did not yet add up to war. Unlike armed conflict, rebuilding was such a frequent occurrence that the Great Wall’s middle name could have easily been: Rebuilt. Generally speaking, it was less a wall in any proper sense than an infinite succession of patches. People went so far as to pretend that it was in just such a manner the Wall had come into being in the first place — as a repair job on an older wall, which was itself the remaking of another, even older, wall, and so on. The suggestion was even made that at the very beginning the original wall stood at the center of the state; but from one repair to another, it had gradually moved ever closer to the border, where, like a tree that’s finally been replanted in the right soil, it grew to such a monstrous size it terrified the rest of the world. Even people who could not imagine the Wall without the nomads sometimes wondered whether it was their presence that had led to the building of the Wall, or whether it was the Wall rising up all along the border that had conjured up the nomads.

If we had not seen the coming of the Barbarian delegation with our own eyes, and then seen it going again, we might have been among the few who would have attributed this rise in tension (like most previous events of this kind) to the disagreements that frequently flare up inside the country, even at the very center of the state. Smugly content to know a truth lost in an ocean of lies, we would have spent long evenings constructing all kinds of hypotheses about what would happen next and about the plots that could have been hatched in the palace, plots with such secret and intricate workings that even their instigators would have had a hard time explaining them, or emanating from jealousies so powerful that people said they could shatter ladies’ mirrors at dusk, and so on and so forth.

But it had all happened under our noses: the nomads had come and gone beneath our very feet. We could still recall the polychrome borders of their tunics and the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves — not forgetting the expression
“Barbarians always go back over in the end”
uttered by my deputy, along with his sighs and his blank stare.

In any other circumstance we could have felt, or at least feigned, a degree of doubt, but this time we realized there were no grounds for such an attitude. However tiresome winter evenings may be, we could find better ways of filling them than fabricating alternative reasons for the state’s anxiety apart from the coming of the Barbarians.

A vague feeling of apprehension is coming down to us from the northlands. Right now the issue is not whether this state of heightened tension derives from the existence of a real external threat. From now on, and this is more than obvious, the only real question is whether there really will be war.

The first stonemasons have arrived, but most of them are still on the road. Some people claim forty thousand of them are on their way; others give an even higher figure. This is definitely going to be the most important restoration of the last few centuries.

The call of the wild goose awakes the immensity of the void.
Yesterday, as I was looking out over the wastes to the north, this line from a poet whose name I forget came back to me. For some time now, fear of the void has been by far the greatest form of apprehension I feel. They say the nomads now have a single leader, a successor to Genghis Khan, and that amid the swirling confusion and dust that is the Barbarians’ lot, he is trying to set up a state. For the time being we have no details about the leader except that he is lame. All that has reached us here, even before the man’s name, is his limp.

These last few days, nomads have been emerging from the mist like flocks of jackdaws and then vanishing again. It’s clear that they’re keeping an eye on the repair work. I am convinced that the Wall, without which we could not imagine how to survive, is for them an impossible concept, and that it must disturb them as deeply as the northern emptiness troubles us.

Nomad Kutluk
I’ve been told to gallop and gallop and never stop watching over it, but it’s endless and always the same, stone on stone, stone under stone, stone to the left, stone to the right, all bound in mortar, however much I gallop, the stones never change, always the same, just like that damn snow that was always the same when we chased Toktamish across Siberia at the end of the Year of the Dog, when Timur, our
Khan kuturdi-lar,
told us: “Hold on in there, men, because it’s only snow, it’s only pretending to be cold like a conceited bitch, but just you wait, it’ll turn soft and wet before long.” But this army of stones is much more harmful, it won’t flake or melt, and it’s in my way, I don’t understand why the Khan doesn’t give us the order to attack that pile of rubble and take it down, the way we did at Chubukabad when we laid our hands on the Sultan Bayazed Yaldrem and the Khan sent us this
yarlik:
“Honor to you who have captured Thunder, no matter that you have not yet handcuffed the heavens entire, but that will come”; then, like at Akshehir during the Year of the Tiger when we buried our prisoners alive, all bent double as in their mothers’ wombs, the
Khan kuturdilar
told us: “If they’re innocent, as Qatshi the Magician believes, then Mother Earth, whose womb is more generous that that of a woman, will give them a second birth.” Oh! those were the good times, but our Khan hasn’t sent any more
yarliks
asking us to raze everything to the ground, and the chiefs, when they assemble to hold a palaver in the
kurultai,
claim that what people call towns are only coffins we must be careful never to enter, because once you’re in you can never get out, that’s what they say, but still the
yarlik
of destruction keeps on failing to come, all I get is that never-ending order over and over again just like the accursed stones: “Nomad, keep watch!”

Inspector Shung
Repair work is apparently proceeding along the entire northwestern stretch of the Wall. Every week parties of stonemasons arrive, gaily flaunting the many-colored flags and banners from their province (the regions of the Empire compete with each other to send the largest work detail to the Wall), but nowhere can any troop movements be seen. Nomad lookouts flit across the horizon as before, but because the fog has thickened in the winter season, we often cannot make them out very clearly, neither the rider nor the horse, so that they look less like horsemen than mutilated body parts from who-knows-which battlefield whipped by wild gusts of wind into a flying swarm.

What is happening is like a puzzle. At first sight, you might think it a mere maneuver, each camp trying to show its strength by displaying contempt for the other. But if you consider matters with a clear mind, you can see they contain perfectly illogical elements. I do believe it is the first time there has ever been such a gap between the Wall and the capital. I had always imagined they were indissolubly connected, and that was not only when I was working in the capital, but even before then, when I was a mere minor official in the remotest valleys of Tibet. I always knew they had tugged on each other the way they say the moon does on the tide. What I learned when I came here was that while the Wall is able to move the capital — in other words, it can draw it toward itself or else push it farther away — the capital has no power to shift the Wall. At most, it can try to move away, like a fly trying to avoid the spider’s web, or else come right up close so as to nestle in its bosom, like a person quaking with fear; but that’s all it can do.

In my view, the Wall’s forces of attraction and repulsion are what explain the movements of the capital of China over the last two centuries — its shift to the south of the country, when it went to Nanking, as far away from the Wall as possible, and then its return to the north, to the closest possible location, when it came back to Beijing, which for the third time assumed its role as China’s capital city.

I have been racking my brains these last few days trying to find a more accurate explanation for what is going on at the moment. Sometimes I think the wobble, if I can use that word, results directly from the proximity of the capital Orders can be countermanded more easily than if the capital were, say, four or five months away —when the second carriage bearing news of the cancellation of the order either fails to catch up with the first carriage or, because of excessive speed or its driver’s anxiety, the carriage tips over, or else the first one crashes, or they both do, and so on.

Yesterday evening, as we were chatting away (it was one of those exquisitely relaxed conversations that often arise after time spent hidden from the view of others and thus seem all the more precious), my deputy declared that if not only the capital but China herself were to move, the Wall would not budge an inch. “And what’s more
,”
he added casually, “there is proof of what I say.” Indeed, we could both easily recall that in the one thousand or so years that have elapsed since the Wall was built, China has more than once spilled out over its borders, leaving the Wall all alone and without meaning in the midst of the gray steppe, and it has shrunk back inside the same number of times.

I remembered an aunt who in childhood had had a bracelet put on her arm, a bangle. As she grew plumper, the bracelet, forgotten but left in place, became almost buried in her flesh. It seemed to me that something of the same kind had happened to China. The Wall had alternately squeezed her tight, and loosened its grip. For some years now, it had seemed about right for her size. As for the future, who could say? Each time I saw my aunt, I recalled the story of her bangle, which continued to obsess me. I really don’t know why I could not stop thinking of what would have happened if the bangle had not been taken off in time, and, taking things to their limit, I could hear it jangling incessantly after her death, hanging all too loosely on the wrist of her skeleton . . . I lay my head in my hands, embarrassed at having imagined China herself decomposing with a trivial adornment around her wrist.

It was a starless night, but the moonlight gave off such a strong sense of indolence that you could believe that in the morning everyone would abandon all activity — that nomads, birds, and even states would lie flat out, exhausted, as lifeless as corpses laid out beside each other, as we two then were.

We have at last learned the name of the nomad chief: he is called Timur i Leng, which means Timur the Lame. He is said to have waged a fearsome war against the Ottomans, and after having captured their king — called Thunder — had him paraded from one end of the vast steppes to the other.

Apparently, before long he’ll be going after us next. Now it is all becoming clearer — the order for the rebuilding of the Wall, as well as the temporary calm which we all hastened to describe as a “puzzle,” as we do for anything we can’t understand in the workings of the state. While he was dealing with the Turks, the one-legged terror did not constitute a threat. But now . . .

A returning messenger who stopped here last night brought us disturbing news. In the western marches of our Empire, right opposite our Wall and barely a thousand feet from it, the Barbarians had built a kind of tower, made not from stone but from severed heads. The edifice as it was described to us was not tall — about as high as two men — and from a military point of view it was no threat at all to the Wall, but the terror those heads exude is more effective than a hundred fortresses. Despite the meetings with soldiers and stonemasons, where it was explained that the pile was, in comparison to our Wall, no more significant than a scarecrow (the crows that nonetheless swarmed around it had actually suggested the comparison), everyone, soldiers included, felt the wind of panic pass through them. “I’ve never had so many letters to take to the capital,” the messenger declared as he patted his leather saddlebag. He said most of the epistles had been penned by officers’ wives, writing to their aristocratic lady friends to report intolerable migraines and so forth, which was a way of asking them to please see if they could get their husbands transferred to another posting.