Once on a Moonless Night (25 page)

The voices were low to start with, but suddenly became very distinct, a change I put down to the television set, which was likely to be just as unpredictable as the hotel’s plumbing. As if in a dream, I could hear two men talking. The first was telling the other what had happened at the museum in the Forbidden City while he was on a poorly paid but instructive and eventful placement as an expert in ancient painting; all this reported in a voice devoid of involvement or emphasis, bordering on curtness but very precise.

The incident had happened two years earlier in Mr. Xu’s office; he was the last leading light in valuations and, although he was already seventy-two, the Forbidden City gave him a considerable salary every month to delay his retirement. For several years he had been passing on his knowledge to young colleagues from various museums in the four corners of China. A single sentence from the master about calligraphy or a painting was priceless. His practised eye, familiarity with the works and phenomenal memory earned him a supreme position in China and international renown, because—as anyone who has read essays on Chinese art will have gathered—Western scientific methods are incapable of dating a work accurately and even less of identifying its author.

The scene took place in the second half of August, towards half past six in the evening, at the end of a long day’s work; most of the offices were closed when one of the guards from the Great Gate brought a young Manchurian of about twenty into Mr. Xu’s office. He introduced himself as a school leaver who had been accepted by a highly reputed university in Shanghai, but his lack of funds to pursue his studies was forcing him to sell a collection of antique paintings, which had been in his family for generations. The acquisitions department of the museum was closed and he was in a hurry to catch the train to Shanghai, because he didn’t have enough money to pay for a night in a hotel, which was why the guard had brought him to the master’s office.

The latter smiled and entrusted his apprentices with the task of valuing the works. There were about thirty of them, tied up with string, relatively recent calligraphies and paintings of no great value, except for one which attracted the experts attention. It was one half of a torn roll of silk, the silk itself very old, probably from the Han dynasty, yellowing raw silk covered in the seals of several emperors’ collections, notably that of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, although the red colour had blackened with the passage of time.

At that point the voice stopped and the sound of a toilet flushing thundered somewhere in the hotel. I held my breath, not daring to open my eyes, as if moving one centimetre would shatter the dream, if that’s what it was, and interrupt what this man was saying, when I didn’t want to miss a single word. The writing on the fragment of scroll was not Chinese but rather the unfamiliar signs of an unknown language, two horizontal lines written from right to left.

Strange though this may seem, Mr. Xu skimmed his fingers briefly over all the pieces, not lingering for a second over the torn scroll, as if it had no more value than the others. He wore the same polite little smile he had his entire life, no more, and the young student was already preparing to leave again with his property. But that is not what happened. The master asked the young man to follow him to the accounts department, where he told them to give him a sum of money which still seems astronomical today: twenty thousand yuan for all the pieces, way beyond the boy’s expectations.

“The moment he left the accounts department,” the voice went on, “the master asked me to go to the station with the boy on the pretence that it was on my way home, to try to find out his address in Shanghai and, most importantly, where the piece of torn silk came from. In the Number 113 bus, heading for the station, the young man told me that one day in the 1930s his grandfather, who was a Manchurian peasant and the only man in his village with a bit of education, was working in the red sorghum fields when a Japanese military aeroplane flew overhead. A piece of silk fell from the plane, gliding through the air in the dazzling rays of sunlight, and landed about a hundred metres from him. When I reported this back to the master he was overcome with joy and disbelief. ‘That’s what I wanted to hear, a piece of silk falling from the sky!’ He said that three times with tears in his eyes and explained that he hadn’t dared offer more money to the boy for fear of awakening any suspicions in him that might have threatened the sale. ‘It’s impossible to put a value on this half scroll,’ he added. Tomorrow I’ll arrange for the museum to pay him another hundred thousand yuan as a mark of my gratitude. I’ll also ask for the guard to be given a reward of fifty thousand yuan, because without him the opportunity to acquire this treasure would have slipped past the door and disappeared for ever. This is the most precious acquisition in our museum for fifty years, because, if memory serves, we already own the other half, which was obtained at the time by less scrupulous means, because its owner—a Frenchman granted Chinese citizenship—was condemned to life imprisonment so he would never be in a position to claim back his property’”

It was only towards the end of this story that I looked at the television, but the screen was a blur. Broadcasting must have finished some time ago, because the screen was striped with evenly spaced lines. There was absolute silence, not the tiniest rustle or sound of water seeping somewhere. I didn’t immediately grasp the importance of what I had heard, because I was so convinced I had dreamt the conversation, given that it hadn’t been on television. “Only in sleep do certain things have a way of appearing unannounced.” That Chinese proverb is what first came to mind as, going back over each sentence I had overheard, I gradually regained a foothold in reality.

A door slammed suddenly. The one to the room next door. Its occupiers came out and stayed on the landing for a moment, looking for something. One of their voices left me in no doubt: he had been the one relating the events earlier. I obviously hadn’t been dreaming, because he now went on with incontrovertible clarity:

“Extraordinary though this may seem, I knew the Frenchman’s wife from the Department of Imperial Archives. A beautiful woman, elegant and aristocratic-looking, who withdrew into a sort of perpetual widowhood out of guilt for her husband, whom the authorities had forced her to accuse. According to Mr. Xu, she was given the choice between charging him with a crime he’d never committed or losing the child she was carrying ”

The following morning I was one of the first visitors into the Forbidden City; dawn was just skimming over the petrified golden waves of alternate peaks and troughs in that ocean stretching as far as the eye could see. The light of the sun was picked up by the myriad roof tiles on the buildings like so many mirrors in matt gold. And when the huge red disc was partly obscured by heavy clouds, its replicas on the roofs distorted into aubergine shapes, their lower halves soon twisting into as many monstrous snakes, before turning into long needles of light. Eventually, the sun spread glistening fluid over the roofs, a golden colourwash, a layer of twinkling icing. Flocks of crows, in their thousands, wheeled with fantastical elegance, their wings shimmering with the pink of reflected sunlight as they glided languidly above the walls, palaces, pavilions, white marble esplanades and paved courtyards stretching into infinity. According to elderly inhabitants of Peking, generation after generation of crows had enjoyed the privilege of breeding and growing up here, fed and housed by the imperial family to whom they devoted unfailing loyalty. After the last dynasty collapsed and the last emperor, Puyi, fled, the crows—refusing to see usurpers in their former masters’ place—took to leaving the palace early in the morning only to return at nightfall, with such regularity and precision that their cawing in the evenings was the welcome signal for the end of the working day for all the museum staff.

Having skirted round the major edifices, I cut across countless courtyards in the quarters once kept for widowed empresses and which now act as the museums offices, closed to the public but teeming with two thousand employees. I walked past the Imperial Archives building, where Tumchooq’s mother had worked for three and a half decades as a specialist in transcribing and often abridging ancient musical compositions from the notation of their day into notes and neumes.

At this early hour I couldn’t find anyone; perhaps she had already retired. I thought I would come back later and ask for her new address. Outside the building stood the Bodhi tree Tumchooq had told me about, the one his mother used to bring him to as a child, often on Sunday mornings, to pick fruit when he was actually far more interested in the crows’ nests perched up high and deserted at that time in the morning. If Tumchooq himself was to be believed, his mother radiated a volcanic youthfulness, a dormant volcano, which occasionally billowed out lava, belying her neat, married woman’s chignon and the strictly dictated clothing of the time: a roomy, black corduroy jacket, wide beige trousers, flat canvas shoes … In that sacred tree she shouted at the top of her lungs with her son. Shrieking like a schoolgirl in the playground, she would mysteriously disappear, only to pop up again above him, in among the overlapping leaves, clinging to one branch, with her feet on another. Rosy-cheeked and with her chignon falling apart, she bombarded him with rock-hard fruit, burst out laughing, leapt back, climbed even higher, ran on all fours like a monkey, sat astride the end of a branch, which swayed beneath her weight, and there, looking indescribably sensual, she challenged her son to try to reach her, punctuating an entire Sunday morning with her laughter.

Thirty-odd years had passed since the days when they came to glean fruit from the Bodhi tree, and the windfall I picked up was such a charming thing, with fine gold stripes on its skin, that I put it in my bag and decided to take it all the way to the prison in Laos where Tumchooq was being held.

In the area for “Heritage Exhibitions,” next to the great hall dedicated to Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, I found the “Tumchooq” room, a more modest space exhibiting “Renat’s maps,” which were forgotten in an archive for two centuries and discovered by Strindberg, who, before becoming a playwright, worked at the Royal Library in Stockholm, where he studied Chinese in order to make an inventory of a collection of books in that language.

Sergeant Johan Gustav Renat of the Swedish artillery was made a prisoner of war by the Russians after their defeat of Sweden at Poltava in 1709. He spent seven years in Siberia, near the Chinese border, before being captured by a group of Kalmouks, the Djoungars, whose sovereign, Tse-wang Raddan (1665-1727)—known for his violence and his ambition to create a vast Mongol empire between Russia and China—was delighted with this gift from heaven: an artilleryman who knew the secret of building cannons. Over the course of ten years a turbulent relationship developed between the tyrant and the Western captive, a combination of death threats, mutual mistrust and peculiar friendship. Renat returned to Sweden after the death of Tse-wang Raddan, who had given him two geographical maps, one drawn by his own hand on thick, yellowing paper with an uneven grain. Its easy flowing images depicted mountains in green, lakes in blue, his own residence with its scarlet columns and his spotless tents with their red doors, inscriptions in Kalmouk, and the vast territories of Hi and western Mongolia, not forgetting the Gobi Desert, coloured in light brown. In the middle of the desert a blue-green oasis by the name of Tumchooq was indicated beneath a Tibetan-style temple with a flat roof on which three silver tridents were positioned to ward off evil spirits. It was the only temple on the map. According to Strindberg’s biographers, the young librarian and future great playwright pored over this map for hours on end, fascinated by the Tumchooq temple: Why had Tse-wang Raddan drawn it? Some raised the possibility of a pilgrimage, made by Renat, in an attempt to obtain spiritual protection for his son, the fruit of his love for one of the sovereigns daughters, for the child was an albino, a sign of bad luck in the natives’ eyes, and therefore at risk of assassination at any time.

After this geographical display the exhibition was devoted to the origins of the Tumchooq kingdom, notably with a presentation of an entire page from a Tibetan manuscript discovered in cave 1656 at Dunhuang, preserved at the Peking Library, and in which Kanghan Zanbu, a twelfth-century pilgrim, explains the origins of this kingdom, which, in his time, was already buried under the sand: one day, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, the chief of a nomadic tribe met a goddess who had come down from heaven, and he married her. Shortly after their wedding he went off to war, and while he was away his wife had an affair with a foreign traveller; she became pregnant, but managed to conceal her condition and hid the child she bore under a tree, as agreed with her lover. When he came to collect the child, on a starless night, his burning torch was assailed by every moth in the woods, dancing, flitting, jostling each other and forming a thick cloud around him. Some, nudged forwards by the others, burnt their wings and perished. This strange procession went on all night. The baby woke the following morning with a beautiful butterfly stuck to his forehead, a variety called Thum-suk, because of the colourful markings, in the shape of a bird’s beak, on its wings. And so the father called his son Thum-suk Blung
(blung
meaning “fog” in Mongol).