Once on a Moonless Night (23 page)

7

A
FEW HOURS AFTER I ARRIVED, THE MONKS
held a long meeting to consider my request to stay in the monastery until my “close friend” returned from Japan. Their votes fell in my favour, given that there was no hotel in Pagan (which had been reduced to the size of a small village since the earthquake); and two extra woven mats—one for my interpreter and one for myself—were laid down in Tumchooq’s house on stilts, a little way away from the monks’ dormitories. Before going to bed that night we went to wash beside a well. I untied the black silk belt securing my scarlet
tongyi
, a long piece of fabric which I wore around my waist like the Burmese women, and poured a bucket of water over my head. As the water ran over my hair and seeped into my
angyi
(a sort of blouse with a high neck and full sleeves), it billowed and filled and I thought I would finally experience the peace that Heaven had so far refused me. What if, I wondered, I end up like my interpreter, with silver bracelets all the way from my wrists to my elbows and a pretty ring, a “nose flower,” in my nose?

As I climbed the stairs back to the house on stilts I fainted for the first time; scalding waves of heat washed over me, I shivered with cold, chilled to the bone by the draught coming up through the woven bamboo floor. My old demon was back again, but was no longer satisfied with drenching me in a cold sweat and making my whole body feel like a thawing pond; it had its eye on something else, although I didn’t know what. My repeated fainting fits worried me more than the fever. I couldn’t find these symptoms listed anywhere, not even in the most exhaustive medical manuals, and I was worried they were a warning that I was losing my memory.

The following morning my interpreter went to the dispensary at the lacquer school but, apart from medicines for everyday illnesses, she found nothing that would ease my suffering. She was reduced to pushing my hair aside in sections so that she could massage my scalp, as well as my temples and nostrils, with Tiger Balm. Towards the end of the afternoon the monastery deputy arranged a healing session with my consent; it was held in Burmese and I don’t understand a single word of the language, but the ritual itself was so explicit I grasped its significance perfectly. I felt as if I were sliding into the abyss of time and becoming part of this scene described by Marco Polo:

They have no doctors, but when they are ill they call for their magicians. These men can charm the devil and it is they who serve the idols. When the magicians arrive, the sick tell them what ails them. And the magi immediately begin beating their instruments, singing and dancing until one of the magicians falls over backwards on the ground, foaming at the mouth, looking dead, and this is because the devil is in his body. He remains in this state, as if dead. And when the other magicians, because there are several of them, see that one of their number has fallen as I have described, they start talking to him and asking what illness the sick man has …

As Marco Polo’s words ran through my mind, providing a commentary for the action in which I was the passive—not to say paralysed—protagonist, I tried to remember whether Paul d’Ampère had written any notes about it. This attempt proved treacherous, for I was soon lost on a tide of words, French, Chinese and Tumchooq, clashing together, intermingling, forming and re-forming, glittering or going out like dead stars.

A fragment of text surfaced from my memory, a short text I myself had written, not one of those countless projects I never saw through to the end, but a school essay, and the incongruity of its sentences struck me as even more grotesque than the scene with the magicians. The monks’ chanting lulled me until I sank into unconsciousness again. It was years since I’d slept as well as I did after that ceremony, and I spent two whole days immersed in cataleptic but peaceful sleep. When I finally woke my fever and listlessness had disappeared and I was quite overwhelmed with happiness at this resurrection. Feeling my way, I crept out of the house without waking my interpreter.

8

C
LIMBING DOWN A WINDING PATH THROUGH
the woods beside the monastery, I came across everlasting seedlings (which I recognised from the bird-like shape of their red and yellow flowers) as well as mango, orange and avocado trees with cocoa pods peeping from beneath them. As I cut across the wood my footsteps were, admittedly, still tentative but my energy gradually came back to me until, passing in front of a Saman, a rain tree, I clung to its great supple vines, although I wasn’t sure why, and swung through the air like a child.

The monks’ dormitories were dotted about under these luxuriant trees, whitewashed wooden buildings, each comprising over a dozen rooms and, through their open doors, I could see the beds which consisted of planks of wood laid over vertical logs driven into the beaten earth of the floor. Outside the huts, the monks’ robes and tunics hung on washing lines, still wet and pegged close together. Behind the buildings, which apparently had no wells, I saw the monks doing their morning ablutions round barrels positioned under drainpipes that channelled water from the roofs. By way of toothpaste, they snapped off a branch from a tree I didn’t recognise, some sort of hibiscus, and crushed one end of it to polish their teeth. As soon as they saw me they seemed embarrassed and looked away.

The mill where the paper for sacred books was made stood outside the confines of the monastery, in a loop in a river, probably a minor tributary of the Irrawaddy It was a timeless relic with massive wheels, which I didn’t see straight away because the morning fog was still thick, but I could hear their jumbled purring and then all at once they loomed out of the mist like giants made of massive moss-covered rocks, dripping with water and seeming to come to meet me, with an ancient, ponderous slowness, before becoming weightless, swallowed up by another, still thicker blanket of mist.

The fog crawled over the ground, sprawling and occasionally hanging motionless, so that soon I couldn’t work out whether I was dreaming or had been struck down by the tropical fever again, particularly when I stepped over the threshold and made my way inside that mysterious, ghostly architecture, its structure blackened by the passage of time. I felt lost in the clouds. A few rays of morning sunlight probed through small high windows, and I saw two monks working away in the half-light, keeping an eye on the millstone, speaking to each other sometimes loudly, sometimes in hushed tones. As the millstone circled around, they emptied baskets of raw materials into it, bark from some sort of local tree, white on the inside. With its repeated turning, the millstone ground the bark, compressing it until immaculately white raw sap spilled from it. This was then mixed with water to form “Pagan paper pulp,” which, I was told, repelled insects.

I crouched down and, with the tip of my finger, touched the warm, viscous fluid whose smell reminded me of Chinese medicines. Just as that thought came to me, I shuddered, thinking I could see him in the white fog. It’s him, I thought, it’s Tumchooq, right here, on the other side of the mill, the same stature, the same way of leaning towards a basin of water as I saw him bend over baskets of aubergines so many times. I came very close to calling out his name, at the risk of giving everyone doubts about my mental health. The illusion dissipated as I drew closer, but I was still disturbed by the resemblance between Tumchooq and that monk who stood stripped to the waist plunging a big wooden sieve loaded with wet paper pulp into a basin and, when the water was up to his elbows, freezing in that position with such concentration that the gesture, which lasted only a fraction of a second, seemed to go on for an eternity. He shook the sieve in the water, so gently the movement was almost imperceptible, then lifted it straight back out again: the shapeless lump of pulp had transformed itself into a sheet of virgin paper, as if he had wrested it from the depths of the void. All that remained was to dry the sheet outside. But when he looked up and recognised me his smile gave way to embarrassment mingled with a hint of fear.

In the xylography workshop, on the other hand, complete silence reigned. From a distance I thought I saw little points of light gleaming like minute yellow halos over the heads of saints in religious frescoes, but as I came nearer I realised they were the shaven heads of twenty or so monks sitting side by side in a huge room, busy engraving wooden plates for printing sacred texts. Most of them had a magnifying glass clamped over their right eye, some over their left eye, and each of them worked under a lamp whose beam lit a specific area. I had to strain my ears to hear the wood creak under their engravers’ styles, sometimes a slight crack followed by a sigh. Perhaps because of their watchmakers glasses, I felt as if I were surrounded by the assorted ticking of clocks, alarm clocks, watches, every sort of timepiece of which xylography itself is a perfect example.

First a sheet of paper bearing the text in manuscript is placed facedown on a wooden plate about the size of a book and stuck onto it until the ink seeps into it, leaving a clear imprint of the writing; then the paper is removed and the wooden plate (preferably made of a hardwood) is pared away little by little, millimetre by millimetre, until only the letters are left in relief. The chiselling work, line-engraving the letters, was so subtle that my eyes eventually clouded over while I watched, as if staring at an ant eating a grain of rice. Engraving just one letter took ten or twenty minutes, I could barely make out the progress of a single upstroke. I later learned that engravers can work only two lines of text a day, that it often takes them a good ten days to finish a page—a wooden plate—in Pali text of the teachings preached by Buddha two thousand five hundred years earlier; and just one seconds distraction, the slightest carelessness, can mean they have to start all over again.

The sound of chisels, the fragmented light, the watchmaker’s glasses behind which their eyes were hidden, probably fixed, motionless, slightly protruding and perhaps very beautiful, a little cough, an engraver’s right hand sculpting the wood, a panoply of chisels in different sizes clamped in his left hand, mouths blowing softly over the plates raising a fine wood dust changed into powdered gold by the lamplight—it all constituted a separate world.

Several monks were repairing old plates, some as much as a hundred and fifty years old with areas that needed reworking with a jigsaw, because the letters were so worn, a clear sign of an abundant print run. Here time was immutable, immutable as dogma, and I started trying to gauge the three years Tumchooq had spent here engraving—in relief or intaglio—two lines a day, not to mention the years he spent in the kitchens and the paper mill. He might never have launched himself on the same trail for which his father had already suffered so much, the pursuit of the integral version of the torn manuscript, if he had had the least idea of the patience this titanic Long March would require. I found it difficult, almost impossible, to imagine the look on Tumchooq’s face when he first engraved a whole plate, bringing it up to the light to check a few details, then taking off his watchmakers glasses to appreciate his work as a whole, the solemn letters, the exquisite widening of lanceolate forms, the contrast between the width of a vowel and the narrowness of a consonant, between thick vertical strokes and fine horizontal ones, the clarity of a small ligature, the assurance of the strokes, the accuracy of the diacritical symbols. No one is left indifferent by the beauty of a printing plate. Then he would deliver it to the printing workshop, a layer of ink was applied to the surface, a sheet of blank paper laid over it and, by lightly brushing over the back of the paper, the page was printed. It was removed straight away The letters in relief on the cut-away surface of plate appeared black, shining and still moist, on the white background of the paper. Only the chapter headings, whose letters are carved out of the wood, are printed in white on a black background.

The sun was only just up, the meticulously swept path with not a single fallen leaf on it glittered beneath my bare feet, and each of my footsteps, I was aware, was an act of meditation. With its sand and its occasional stones positioned here and there, as if among the extinguished, collected, cooled ashes of our passions, without the least spark of an ember to reignite them, that little path was like the life of whoever walked along it. Perhaps its maker wanted it to remind us that our footprints, like the happy days of our lives, disappear with the first gust of wind, without leaving any trace at all. I suspected this path of sand had been made by Tumchooq himself, because it was so like the “sea of stones” at the chateau at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet that I visited as a teenager, a “sea” devised by Paul d’Ampère, who later described its soft lapping of waves to his son.

That sandy track took me right to the entrance of the Cave of Treasure, where its keeper, an elderly monk, was cleaning an antique printing plate with sandalwood pulp. When I arrived he lit a cube of camphor on a copper dish and, gesticulating furiously to make himself understood, invited me to run the tips of my fingers through the flame and bring them up to my forehead. Then, without a word, he opened the door and let me in.

The cave was enormous, unfathomably deep, and filled with shadow, if not complete darkness. Daylight barely reached inside, filtered through a single gap carved through the rock and half-covered with vegetation, but it went astray somewhere along the way and was swallowed up before reaching the floor. By this pale glow, which could be mistaken for moonlight, I made out the silhouette of a gigantic multi-tiered stupa standing in the middle of the cave: at the top of its prodigious height a gold roof twinkled.

All of a sudden, as if hallucinating, I heard the click of an electric switch and the edifice, lit up from the inside by countless lamps, appeared in all its splendour. Its pyramid-shaped base and each of its eight levels borne on pillars were made of finely sculpted white marble, but the walls were of glass, affording glimpses of shelving, which went right up to the ceiling on each level and was laden with engraved plates, all tightly packed together, like thousands and thousands of hefty volumes of an encyclopaedia, the largest in the world, an encyclopaedia in raw wood, overrunning the eight levels of that stupa and its shelving, which carried on as far as the eye could see, into infinity for all anyone could tell. Its prison of rock cut it off from the outside world, erased the present, the past, seasons, rain and heat, making it barely possible to distinguish between day and night. Voices, the sound of footsteps, the least little cough produced a subtle echo like the diffuse hubbub of a river or the rumble of an underground tremor. Swallows, which I at first mistook for bats, flew to and fro through the air around me, skimming my hair with the tips of their wings, some coming very close to crashing into the glass walls, lit up like a palace of memories in that amphitheatre of eternal printing plates.

It was only when I climbed the long, steep staircase at the centre of the stupa and reached the shelving up a bamboo ladder that I found the first personal touch from Tumchooq: numbers traced in curcuma formed a lustrous bronze embellishment to each sacred plate, probably an inventory system, numbers in a familiar hand, like those I saw long ago in the greengrocers written in chalk on the price boards, or in pencil in the shop’s accounts book. Seeing the particular care Tumchooq had taken over the top floor, I realised that this had been the focus of his attention, towards which all of his efforts—and even his suffering—had converged over the years. A filigreed wooden frame hung on the lintel over the doorway and written in golden capitals on a blue background was the word
“Jataka”
—the sacred works relating Buddha’s previous lives, which constitute one of the most significant bodies of sutras in the Pali language, and whose narrative style and content, according to Paul d’Ampère, come closest to the Tumchooq text on the torn scroll.

There were very many engraved plates there, with labels indicating their titles and giving summaries in Pali and Burmese, which—to my great regret—I couldn’t decipher. Some of the labels were accompanied by a simple illustration (the archivist’s whim or instructions to illiterate monks?), often drawings of the animals in whose form the future Buddha was incarnated: buffalo, lion, elephant, ass, horse, camel, stag, tiger and lots of birds—partridge, blue tit, sparrow, dove, stork, turtledove, etc. The creator of these pictures seemed to have a predilection for the grey parrot, and I then remembered that his father had told him these birds were the most eminent living linguists on the planet: the silky grey of their plumage, their black beaks, the red tuft crowning their heads, and most of all the incredibly human look in their eyes; I knew he’d been thinking of his father as he drew those birds.

As with the house, there was no furniture, except for a hammock in faded fabric hanging between the shelves, and its thick ropes had carved the furrows of passing time in the beam it was attached to. In places the worn rope held by only a few twisted, muddled, blackened fibres, while the woven rush matting over the floor had been flattened beneath the master’s feet. How many times did he walk up and down in one night of insomnia? Thousands? Inspired by a desire to know, I counted the engraved plates, first on that floor, then, going from one level to another, in the whole stupa: the total figure, insofar as my estimate could be accurate, was in the region of two hundred thousand, without counting the damaged plates, icons, matrices and wood engravings piled up in great sacks in the basement. Considering the average sutra comprises thirty pages, and therefore thirty engraved plates—a hypothesis reached after some deliberation—I reckoned Tumchooq must have examined seven thousand texts of the Buddhist canon through his watchmakers glasses. Day and night, summer and winter, year after year, his eyesight must have deteriorated, clouded, been ruined as he worked exhaustively through the monastery’s incalculable collection, probably without ever achieving the goal he had set himself eleven years earlier beside his fathers grave: to find the integral text of the torn scroll, in whatever language he could.