Once on a Moonless Night (24 page)

I felt intuitively that his trip to Japan was all part of this interminable quest, his unfinished project, like a step in a new direction, perhaps even the last. That sutra which was believed lost for ever could resurface out of nowhere at any moment and against all expectations—in the antique book markets of Kyoto, in the cellars of a Japanese military library or religious institution. I wondered whether, in his obsessive search for the sutra, this man who was used to living and managing on so little and who, like his father, was first and foremost an adventurer, I wondered whether he would resist the temptation to repeat his Burmese experience in Japan, to disappear only to roam far and wide with no identity or official papers, researching, learning the local language, researching further until he found another collection as priceless as the one at the Pagan monastery.

The door to the cave opened and two black silhouettes, almost like shadows, appeared against the daylight, slipping silently inside: it was the monastery deputy and my interpreter coming to invite me to a major ceremony of exorcism and prayers to Buddha, asking him to bless and protect their superior, Tumchooq, who was threatened by the spectre of misfortune. I should have guessed there had been a dramatic development from the awkward way the monks behaved whenever I came near. The words uttered by those two shadows, still with the light behind them, reverberated around the cave and their echo lent them such an other-worldly quality that I had trouble understanding my translator, but I didn’t need her explanations to guess as my legs shook, my knees gave way and the stupa seemed about to crumble beneath my feet.

The news had come two days earlier while I was laid low by fever. According to a telegram sent by the Kyoto Buddhists’ International Conference, Tumchooq had been arrested by the border police at Tokyo airport, and a Japanese monk who had come to greet him had witnessed the scene. Tumchooq was accused of being in possession of a false Laotian passport. (“It was the first passport he ever had,” the monastery deputy told me. “He bought it a few days before he left, through a man who specialises in that sort of transaction, in a slightly offhand, last-minute way. Unfortunately, instead of a Burmese passport, he was given a Laotian one. A false one.”) Despite his religious robes and the intervention of his Japanese co-disciple, Tumchooq was immediately deported to Laos and handed over to the judiciary, and this in a country where the sentence for identity fraud was liable to be life imprisonment.

EPILOGUE

PEKING
OCTOBER 1990

S
URREAL, COMPLETELY SURREAL, THAT
was how the sequence of events felt to me, and I can only describe them now in broad outline, because Tumchooq’s arrest and imprisonment so clouded my thoughts. The white mists engulfing my mind mingled with the bluer ones of the Irrawaddy which lapped at the foot of the walls around the monastery. I remember nothing of our leaving, nor of the boat that took us to Mandalay, still less of how we first approached the Burmese government on the subject of Tumchooq’s release, but the only thing I can be more or less sure of is that we very soon decided to wage the war on two fronts, Laotian and Chinese: the monastery deputy went straight to Laos to mobilise monks there and I took the first flight to Peking, where I was to find Tumchooq’s mother and obtain documents from the Public Records Office to establish her son’s identity.

It had been eleven years since my flight from Peking. The light, which had been so distinctive in late afternoon, was no longer the same, nor the smell; there was a hundred times more traffic than before, so that, when my taxi came off the motorway between the airport and the city centre, it found itself trapped in an endless queue of cars, groaning and edging almost imperceptibly forward, only to grind to a halt again. The physiognomy of the cars and passers-by seemed to have changed, too. Their clothes were brighter, their faces darker and more strained, but it was the look in their eyes that really struck me. They looked at me without a glimmer of curiosity. They no longer had that probing policeman’s expression, but that of an experienced salesman who was absolutely meticulous in his accounting and gauged each customer as he came into the shop. A professional eye, looking after its own interests. Still, I recognised Peking by one detail: the taxi driver, irritated by the traffic jam, wound down his window, cleared his throat and spat forcefully into the road, proudly watching his spittle’s parabola until it landed bang in the middle of the street, and not even contemplating any kind of apology.

I decided to stay at the Cui Min Zhuang Hotel, not for its proximity to Wang Fujing Street, which is a sort of Peking Champs-Élysées, but because it is close to the East Gate of the Forbidden City, a few hundred metres from the residence for museum employees where Tumchooq’s mother had two rooms in a brick-built house at street level, with a traditional courtyard in the middle of which, if memory serves, there was an exuberant kaki tree with deeply scored black bark and, in summer, leafy branches reaching beyond the walls and bowing under such a weight of fruit you expected them to crush the tiled roof. Not forgetting the tap for running water that Tumchooq had mentioned so many times, I felt I had already seen it.

“One morning,” he had told me, “after a stormy night, I looked out of the window and saw my mother going out of the house. Her red boots marked out her footsteps in the glittering white blanket of snow, right to the middle of the courtyard, where she turned on the tap to wash some vegetables. She chopped white turnips into little cubes, put them in a basin and sprinkled them with a thin layer of salt as white as the snow. The basin was in white enamel and on the bottom it had a red peony with green leaves, and the enamel was chipped in places.”

The sun had set some while ago, even though I hadn’t wasted any time in my fifteenth-floor hotel room with its view over a tide of giant modern buildings with flashing luminous signs on them. A few metres from the hotel the indistinct silhouette of a slender bridge spanning a major traffic artery appeared above the tiny, fine and mostly broken roof tiles of a few very old houses, all curved lines and low-slung frames. A white cat, perhaps a Persian, ran along the roofs, jumped, climbed up a sad single wall among the demolished houses to the thrumming of bulldozers that I could hear but not see. When I left the hotel and turned into the first side street, the headlights of the machines toing and froing across the demolition site lumbered towards me incredibly slowly, blinding me. There were a few traditional old houses left, waiting their turn to be demolished, and the lights still lit in their doorways looked like the pitiful flames of candles burnt almost right down, exhaling their last glow, their last breath of warmth, while the bulldozer headlights peered at them like monsters examining victims paralysed with fear, before pouncing.

This part of the city had been my favourite place over a long period, not only because of the emotional connection with Tumchooq and its proximity to the Forbidden City, but because for two thousand years it had represented the real Peking, and Tumchooq had had a map of it on the wall of the greengrocers, so that, night after night, word by word, he could learn the Chinese characters most frequently used in daily life (and often the most beautiful): those that made up the names of the streets in the city The map was a lithograph representing a bird’s-eye-view panorama of the entire Imperial City (which surrounded the Forbidden City) with its four gates and Tiananmen in the middle. The tumultuous profusion of
hutong
, Peking’s narrow streets, were picked out as white lines on the black background of the map, forming a spider’s web so clear it was worthy of the very best engravings. The lines were often straight, cutting across each other, spreading east, west, north and south. Sometimes they changed into fluid ribbons snaking around lakes, white marks dotted here and there like whimsical drops of mother-of-pearl. In places the lines were cut by a bridge, a villa or an aristocrat’s residence, while in others they melted into marshland. Along each white line representing a
hutong
there was a name, in the writing of the day, carved with noble skill. Tumchooq made me read them out loud with him, road by road, quarter by quarter. Some of the names, the way their ideograms were combined, sparkled with exquisitely nuanced elegance; others captivated me with the sound they made: subtle, sensual, occasionally exuberant, particularly when he said them, my Tumchooq with his attractive Peking accent. Even though the Tumchooq method was elementary from a pedagogic point of view, it was terribly effective: at the time I could find absolutely any street in the city centre, however small, and any footpath, however twisting and winding, as if Tumchooq had carved the map inside my head.

I decided to go to Tumchooq’s mothers house on foot, but I should have guessed this decision would lead only to disappointment, if not a nightmare. The further I walked, the more struck I was by the complete absence of simple street pedlars when there used to be an endless stream of them from morning till night, their bicycles laden with heavy bags of food, which bulged over both sides of their luggage racks. Tumchooq could do a brilliant impression of the ones who sold grilled sweet potatoes, the yellow flesh with a hint of red, so much better than chestnuts; or those selling sweet or sour apricots, which made you drool in summer; or hot, crispy, deep-fried cakes; spicy, salted crabs; dried carrots covered in chilli; steamed dumplings; stinking soya cheese; or even those selling aphrodisiac plants reputed to make a man pee higher than an electricity pylon … I couldn’t hear anything except the rumble of bulldozers reverberating like thunder in the stifling night air and the long, irritable, aggressive toot of car horns.

Fifty metres further on I stood for a moment under a spanking new streetlight casting its light over a metallic sign on which the name of the street was written, but where I expected it to say
EAST GATE STREET
, there was another, unfamiliar name, the name of some ghostly impostor calling itself
JOY OF THE EAST STREET
. Disconcerted by the change, which I initially put down to a slip of memory on my part, I asked a passer-by whether he knew East Gate Street, but he looked at me as if I were mad and walked off without answering. Despite all this, I set off down the street, but the little restaurants where I used to have a bowl of warm soya milk and a steamed dumpling for lunch had disappeared like the
hutong
, without a trace. The street had become smooth, impersonal and wide, edged with concrete buildings some ten or twenty storeys high, some of them still under construction. Next there was a no-man’s-land of luxury shops—Gucci, Dior, Chanel, Lacoste, L’Oréal—with flags by the door and brightly lit windows where Western-style mannequins adopted poses, blond women with green or blue eyes, beautiful black athletes with well-honed muscles, shiny, life-size photographs of Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo … and all at once I understood.

Gone, alas, was the world of the old map in the lithograph. Gone, alas, the spiders web of tiny streets, which had constituted the flesh and bones of Peking since the Yuan dynasty in Marco Polo’s day. I wondered whether anyone had made a note of how many
hutong
had disappeared in this neighbourhood, which now belonged to a new era. A thousand? Two thousand? What a shame! Even if only for their names with their wealth of retroflex consonants, which only natives of Peking could pronounce, their diphthongs and other exquisite sounds. Not sure what I was doing, in despair, I started to run and was soon going frantically, foolishly fast. Like a lost child. As if trying to exorcise something. There were cars in front of me and others coming to meet me, ruby of rear lights, dazzle of headlights. I couldn’t breathe properly. My legs weren’t really under my control, disobeying my need to escape, in places refusing to take the turning I wanted. I let them carry me through that world of illuminated signs for boutiques, financial corporations, estate agents, cosmetic surgery clinics offering breast enhancements, remodelled noses and tautened eyelids, dubious hair salons with red lighting, Indian or Thai massage parlours, Finnish saunas, Turkish baths, Brazilian grills, advertisements for foot baths using forty Tibetan plants, shops selling aphrodisiacs, which all claimed to deal in “contraception and adult health,” sex shops offering gadgets more realistic than the actual thing, acupuncturists promising to cure stammers, restaurants with aquariums illuminated by finely tuned lighting to show off crabs with long pincers, soft-shelled turtles known for their curative properties, strange lobsters …

When I reached the bridge at the North Gate of the Forbidden City I couldn’t see the single-storey house with the square courtyard where Tumchooq’s mother lived. Paralysis of memory or losing my mind? I scanned the place again, concentrating twice as hard. No. It wasn’t there any more. It had gone. The house had gone, along with the whole block of houses which used to be behind it, forming a small street called the Hutong of Figs, which started at the exact point where the palace walls turned eastwards on the corner of a watchtower in carved wood. The
hutong
wound its way between the moat and the tall imperial wall, which it followed for a kilometre until it reached South Pond Street. That, too, had disappeared, struck off the map. So had “lover’s paradise,” a discreet strip of wooded land along the moat from the North Gate right the way down to the beginning of the Hutong of Figs, a place that had been the secret haven of love for more than three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. There had been no streetlights. Every evening when the last glimmers of dusk had disappeared from the dark surface of the moat, couples would arrive from all over Peking, men and women, boys and girls, unmarried people who lived in collective dormitories, walking deep into the thickets, sheltered under the exuberant foliage to exchange a first kiss in the shadows, a fleeting embrace, rapturous fondling, in fact, the whole panoply of sensual pleasures provided by a lovers touch. This earthly paradise had had no more luck escaping sudden death: it had been replaced by a sanitised park with dodgems.

Back at Cui Min Zhuang, my hotel, I managed as best I could to get some rest after an eventful shower in a tub protected by a torn plastic curtain, with taps that needed constant adjustments, because the temperature of the water was so capricious and unpredictable. One minute I was screaming as it scalded me, the next dying of cold under its icy flow, because another customer had turned on a furred-up tap above, below or on the same floor as me. That shower was such a test of my nerves that I emerged from it completely dazed. I fell asleep as soon as I lay down and didn’t even have the strength to turn out the light.

Despite the establishments promising appearance, despite the pretty emerald tint to the tiles covering roofs all the way to the outer wall and even though, in the distant past, the building had been the secondary residence of Mei Lanfang, the best singer of all time at the Peking Opera, the rooms had absolutely no soundproofing, but nothing could have drawn me back from that sleep as my body gave itself up for dead, not the noises from the room next door, nor those from the one above, where the water gurgled through the pipes and a man sang in his shower.

In the middle of the night, perhaps towards dawn, a toilet flush thundered directly above me like a waterfall storming down a cliff face, so loudly that it woke me. The old cracks on the ceiling shuddered, widened and turned into gaping wounds with debris flying out of them, crumbling whitewash, dust, spiders’ webs, soot, etc. The noise really is appalling at Cui Min Zhuang, I thought to myself, but, before I had even finished the sentence, my body drifted back to sleep. My mind, however, did not, since I could hear voices: at first I thought they were coming from the television, which I’d probably forgotten to switch off, because I thought I could hear the crackle of its speaker, like fine sand running down the walls. I was so overwhelmed by sleep it was impossible to get up and switch it off.