Once on a Moonless Night (5 page)

INTERROGATOR B:
Superstitious nonsense! Listen to me, prisoner, make an effort to confess your crimes without any of your propaganda for reactionary superstitions! All that’s been wiped out by the great Chinese people.

PRISONER:
I acknowledge my crime, comrade interrogator, and I swear I will not re-offend.

INTERROGATOR A:
In your opinion, was this hallucination you’ve described the symptom of an illness such as schizophrenia, or the effect of a drug, opium, for example?

PRISONER:
I’m not an opium addict, sir.

INTERROGATOR A:
Perhaps the Japanese drugged you? Gave you an injection claiming it would calm you down? Or some pill for travel sickness? Tell the truth. This detail could mitigate your guilt.

PRISONER:
No injections … or pills … Wait, I do remember something. I can see an officer handing me a bottle. It was in the car on the way to the airfield.

INTERROGATOR A:
What sort of bottle?

PRISONER:
The glass was matt, very opaque, with a white vapour inside, which I breathed through a straw as if drinking it.

INTERROGATOR A:
Probably “ice” as the Americans call it, “crystal.” The more fanatical doctors in the Japanese army gave astronomical amounts of it to kamikaze pilots at the end of the war before they crashed themselves into American ships. Go on.

PRISONER:
The rain stopped shortly before we took off. We reached a certain altitude, but the pilot couldn’t get the plane to go any higher; it was shaking so much I thought it would explode, and I held on to the sumo’s arm as I looked down through the window at the town of Tianjin, which I was probably seeing for the last time in my life. I told myself all those tiny black dots milling about in every direction, smaller than ants, that they were Chinese people who were my enemies now. Then we flew parallel to the coast of the Eastern Sea before cutting northwards. Ships, fishing boats, a couple of little islands appeared, framed by the window, then vanished. Then we were wrapped in thick fog, which looked as if it had come from the depths of the sea. Despite our low altitude I could hardly see anything now, except the dark silhouettes of a funeral procession. I couldn’t make out the musicians, but the music drifted up to me in snatches and tears of nostalgia clouded my eyes. When the fog dispersed, I saw the faint outline of a river mouth beneath us and the riverbed flooded by the high tide, with the funeral procession winding its way along it, crossing a bridge so insubstantial it almost wasn’t there, ephemeral, ready to vanish into thin air at any minute. The sight of it revived memories of my thwarted experiences as an artist, because painting would have meant that, with a few swift brushstrokes, I could have captured this devastating image of death, this burial of my Chinese identity, which was apparently being celebrated before my eyes. Long after it disappeared, the funeral tune—a strident, almost vulgar air—stayed with me like a melancholy obsession, so insistent that, when the sumo opened the chests and I looked through the purest masterpieces in the imperial collection—I’m sorry, in my collection—which were going to travel all the way to Manchuria with me, all I could see was the funeral procession with its black and white banners rippling in the wind, shrouded in autumn mists. Most of the rolls were not very large and I personally opened a work by Huizong chosen at random, unrolling it a section at a time. One by one birds spread their wings before my eyes, but, all of a sudden, the roll slipped from my hand and fell. Not that the jolting of the plane was too violent, or that the roll was weighed down by the tears I couldn’t help shedding. No. But a long, long snake had sprung from the depths of the clouds and smacked against the misted window in mid-air. I wanted to get a closer look at it, but it melted away and it was only when the sun broke through the low cloud that I saw it again, stretched out beneath us, dead, or nearly, its black dragon’s jaws opened to the shimmering sea, paralysed in its final agony, swept away by the tide. I watched that snake in terror; its heart had stopped beating but the body still displayed all its arching beauty in the sinuous trajectory winding through the mountains, or rather in a thousand and one trajectories, in arcs and spirals, sometimes in loops, until together they formed the biggest and most mysterious question mark in the world: The Great Wall of China. The contours of the wall quivered slightly, making it look as if it were squirming, suffering, a reptile smeared with saliva, unable to sleep until it was sated. That was when I picked up a roll of manuscript, written in an unknown language; I went over to the sliding door and opened it. A gust of wind snatched my glasses. My hands were so weak I had to tear the roll with my teeth, into two pieces initially, but before I could tear it further I saw the reptile, its rings paler than before, springing once more from the depths of a cloud, and I threw the two halves of the manuscript at it. Just as it raised its hideous head to take this sacred food in its gaping jaws, I noticed its uneven grey teeth, some long and pointed, others as small as the teeth of a saw. The monster hurled itself at me, wrapped itself round me from head to foot, squeezing me so tightly that its icy scales punctured my skin. When I regained consciousness, I don’t know how much later, I was lying on my seat, still shaking from the experience. Under the implacable watchful eyes of the two officers, the sumo was picking up what was left of the mutilated roll, in other words the strip of silk bearing the colophon written by Huizong, and the valuable shafts it was rolled on, made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory.”

2

T
HE PERIPATETIC EXISTENCE OF THIS
mutilated scroll, although captivating, would have remained insurmountably removed from me, like the earth from the sky, had I not met Tumchooq a few months earlier in a certain Little India Street. This street, which had nothing Indian about it, partly justified its name: it really was very little, barely six metres wide. Every time two lorries crossed they toyed with catastrophe: there were horn-blowing duels, exchanges of cursing and insults, but mostly a test of each drivers determination with neither prepared to yield a whisker. Little India Street was to the west of my university, running alongside the grey bricks of the campus, sketching a gentle slope and lined with small shops: a grocer, a baker, the Zhang sisters’ haberdashery, a tailor, a traditional pharmacy, which wafted aniseedy smells of bark, dried herbs, cinnamon and musk and which had big glass jars on the counter with snakes coiled inside them bathed in greenish alcohol, ophidians imprisoned in the land-locked sea of those jars, the geometric patterns of their faded skins almost completely lost. At the top of the slope, in once white stone blackened by smoke and dust, was a statue of Mao in a raincoat that flapped in the east wind to symbolise political storms, while, perched limply on his head, was a Lenin hat with a visor in proportion to the size of his head, so large that one day a nest of straw and twigs caked in saliva and gastric juices appeared on it, complete with a swallow on a clutch of eggs. From the full height of its twelve metres the statue overlooked a clump of ugly single-storey administrative buildings: a police station from which the occasional isolated cry of despair could be heard as if from a psychiatric asylum; a post office where my grant arrived at the end of each month, a postal order for a pitiful sum; a small hospital; the Revolutionary Council where public records were registered, a haunting, sinister place I sometimes visited in my dreams, where I was married, registered the birth of my child, and where my death certificate was presented; the Peoples Bank; the Peoples Militia; the Community Arts Centre; a former library converted into a hall for political studies; and the premises of the Party Committee and the Communist Youth. The profane swallow that appeared on Mao’s cap was shot and her nest destroyed. The anti-revolutionary trails of saliva and white droppings that had covered one of his ears, carving a diagonal torrent across his face and streaming untactfully all the way to the leaders astonishingly prominent chin, were meticulously cleaned, but, if the rumours are to be believed, the swallows ghost, slightly smaller than the live bird, as if shrunken in death, zig-zagged across the sky at night, even in winter, making piercing, mournful sounds like the shriek of a rusted saw, tormenting the ears of insomniacs.

After this political high point, Little India Street started on a downward slope as gentle as its rise. Two modest restaurants stood facing each other: The Peking Kitchen to the right with a menu that horrified me (grilled scorpions, pan-fried pig intestines …) and The Capital’s Kitchen on the left with grilled scorpions, steamed pig intestines …; next came a shop selling salt, soy sauce and vinegar; a butcher; a cleaners; a bookshop; a little bicycle-repair stall; and at the end of the street, where it met the main road into the centre of Peking, between two shops which owed their prosperity to ration tickets sold on the black market, was a greengrocers.

At nightfall this shop was the site of a strange ritual, which I would surely never have noticed if a spring shower had not interrupted my evening stroll one day in 1978, forcing me to shelter under the bicycle-repair man’s awning. At seven o’clock the shop selling alcohol was the first to close, then the tobacconist and the bookshop. I watched the lights dancing through the rain and going out one by one, like a fluorescent millipede gradually being swallowed up by the darkness before disappearing altogether. The bicycle-repair man, with his pipe in the corner of his mouth, was spinning a wheel in the air, listening for any resistance.

On the other side of the street the greengrocer’s, which was usually so ordinary, attracted my attention with its inexplicable goings-on. At first sight, the small, hunched salesmen looked like a group of schoolboys sitting in a classroom, but, on closer inspection, they made you shudder. They were unusually short, sitting in the harsh light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and had faces that seemed a hundred years old, their features hollow and furrowed like masks sculpted in rock. I’d be frightened of going into that place, I thought, among all those men with their wild eyes, the salesmen wearing butchers’ white aprons and the deliverymen dirty blue ones, looking like something straight out of an annual meeting for some crime syndicate. They sat holding their breath, all eyes on a man in glasses, the youngest of them (perhaps the only one who could count and write?). Standing under the bare light bulb, he opened a drawer and took out handfuls of banknotes and coins, piled them on a table and started counting them. He behaved as if it were some unimaginable booty amassed by pirates disguised as greengrocers, when in fact it was simply that day’s pitiful takings, earned entirely for the benefit of their employer: the State. A pile of cash collapsed under its own weight, and like something in a silent film the coins rolled to the ground without a sound. They picked them up quickly and, using the tip of a knife taken from a hook on the wall, eased out those caught in cracks or swallowed up by holes hollowed out over time in the beaten earth of the floor.

One of them stood up, his back stooped, and headed haltingly for the door. He stopped in the doorway, emitted a stream of spittle, which described a long curve before melting into the rain, then lowered the metal shutter. Motionless as a statue, leaning slightly onto his good leg and with a majestic air of contempt, he disappeared centimetre by centimetre, along with his colleagues, behind the metal shutter, which creaked as it came down, soon leaving just a narrow strip at ground level, a crack of light. All at once the light went out inside. (Who switched it off? The man with the glasses?) The golden line between the doorstep and the metal shutter had evaporated. As I wondered what they could possibly be doing in the dark the light suddenly came on again and the metal shutter was immediately raised with the same oriental nonchalance and by the same limping salesman leaning on his good leg. How long did the power cut last? Ten seconds? Twenty? Thirty at the most. No hope of guessing what had gone on inside the shop plunged in darkness for those thirty seconds. There they all were again, some on a bench, one on a cardboard box or a crate of cabbages, carrots or turnips, like actors back on stage after a short interval, sometimes clearly visible and then less so, depending on the oscillations of the light bulb. As if unaware of the interlude, they picked up the scene in the same place: the money was piled carefully on the table again and the young man with glasses started counting it. Impossible to tell the colour of his eyes, because of the distance. (Although I did see him closer to in different circumstances, the colour of his eyes, which altered according to the light, was always a mystery to me. Most of the time it hovered between deep black and a bright, intelligent brown, but sometimes the thick coating of grease accumulated on his glasses had a capricious and even rather fanciful way of altering his eyes, giving them different nuances: the green of a jealous lover, the grey of gentle fog, the list could go on and on, but never blue.)

From the far side of the street I could hear him murmuring numbers and, even at that distance, his voice seemed spellbinding, somewhere between a teachers and a sorcerer’s, but with a hint of self-mockery I was amazed by his prominent chin, the strange shape of his head, which was not as wide as his companions’, but most of all by his name, which one of them used, a name with a gently exotic ring to it, like birdsong, like a grain of sand in the far-off Gobi Desert or the northern steppes, whipped up by the wind, carried by storms, swirling through the sky, travelling, crossing whole countries without knowing quite how, and ending up in the crook of my ear. Incredible though this may seem, jealousy was my instant reaction, jealousy for the beauty of that bespectacled young man’s name: Tumchooq.

My instinct was not wrong.

Tumchooq: Toomsuk in Pali, the language in which Buddha preached; Toomsuk in Sanskrit; Doomchook in Mongol—all meaning “bird beak.” This was the name given to an ancient kingdom because of its very small size and the shape of its territory. In 817, when it had been in existence for some ten centuries, Tumchooq, which had resisted wars, invasions, coups and droughts, was completely buried by a sandstorm.

Paul d’Ampère,
Notes on Marco Polo’s
Book of the Wonders of the World
(Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne)

“Not one centimetre of our vast territory evades the State,” ran a slogan at the time, and the modest vegetable shop huddled at the end of Little India Street demonstrated to everyone that these were not empty words. No gain was too small to feed the greed of our all-powerful State, and it never recognised the limits of its own power, even when confronted with vegetables, disobedient, anarchic, often mad vegetables … occasionally even vengeful. Take cabbages, for example, they simply could not be sold on some days, but, depending on plans made in an anonymous office, industrial quantities of the things might descend on the unfortunate little shop, even though it had nowhere to store or preserve them; at times like this, mountains of cabbages piled up everywhere, swamping the pavement and encroaching into the road, rotting, oozing, mingling with filth, metamorphosing into trails of mould on which passers-by slipped and fell. At other times Little India Street was viciously struck by long shortages of cabbages, not a leaf was seen for weeks, whole seasons even, until people forgot what they tasted like. Sometimes a decision-maker would suddenly come up with the idea that that year, instead of cabbages, the population should be eating turnips, and waves of turnips would instantly stream into the shop, flooding it for weeks even though they could not sell half of them.

I often find myself thinking of that shop; I can still see it now: a basic, single-storey building with just one long narrow room, its brick walls painted with greying, flaking whitewash and lined with shelves made from cardboard or plywood which, under the weight of unsaleable goods, had lost their original colour and horizontal form; curving, undulating shelves that shook and looked ready to snap with the very next crate but had not actually collapsed for years, even though they were far beyond any acceptable level of deterioration. There was no ceiling. Chinks of sky filtered through gaps between the roof tiles along with dead insects, raindrops …

When I think of that shop, more than its smell, it is rather the state of the floor that comes to mind: the rest of the room was so drab I could barely take my eyes off it, they were glued to it. It was made of beaten earth. I just have to close my eyes to picture those arabesques worthy of a Rubens or a Matisse formed by thousands of fine, sinuous grooves creating images that were bold in places, more delicate in others, like a lip or ridged like vertebrae. A floor worn down with use, its bumps encrusted with filth and scraps of vegetable; I felt I could read in it the sophisticated, labyrinthine finger-prints of time, furrowed by countless forking and intersecting paths, and the footprints the salesman had made in it day after day, month after month, year after year with their daily comings and goings, especially as six of them (a good majority of the staff) were lame, including a former general and two ex-colonels of Guomindang’s army, men who had once been enemies of communism and were now prisoners of their physical infirmity as well as their shameful past. What heavy footsteps they had, those political cripples living a form of penitence in that greengrocer’s shop.

In theory, every sale, which often represented only a few pennies, had to be recorded in minute detail (name of the vegetables, quantity, time of the transaction, price per kilo, price paid, etc.) in the beautiful upstrokes and downstrokes of the ex-officers’ handwriting in a booklet which was meant to hang on the wall but often drifted about on the floor, evidence of the Government’s impotence. One feature of vegetables, in comparison to other State merchandise, is how they vary in weight depending on the time of day: a hundred kilos of celery in the morning becomes eighty at noon and seventy by evening, with no external intervention; like a piece of cloth washed for the first time, vegetables shrink, they dry out of their own free will, refusing to collaborate, showing utter contempt for figures and evading any system of control. On top of that, it was always possible to claim they had rotted, victims of some blight or other, and a large proportion of them had had to be thrown away to avoid contaminating the rest of the stock. The relativity of their turnover was, therefore, a source of delight to the salesmen. Still, only those closest to them would ever know the truth about the ritual they performed every evening when the light went out between the lowering and the raising of the metal shutter.

“I was nineteen when I had that fantastic, intoxicating experience for the first time,” Tumchooq once told me. “The exhilaration! I shook with fear and excitement. My glasses slipped off and I don’t know where they landed. Before I even knew what I was doing, my hands were in there with all the others, blindly raiding what was on the desk: the States money, the day’s takings. We were so violent I thought the desk would tip over and I heard the drawer sliding open. The masks were off, we’d thrown off any simulation of obedience or admission of guilt; the good socialist workforce had disappeared; in the dark we were stripped bare like worms, like animals hungering, thirsting, greedy for money. The little shop had turned into a sort of lair: we couldn’t see the others, but we could feel their breath, our hot animal breathing.

“When the light came on and I put my glasses back on I felt a bit dizzy; the bulb hanging from the ceiling seemed higher up than usual, not so bright, not so harsh, wobbling slightly, in slow motion. I thought I could see specks of dust suspended above our heads. I looked, one by one, at the faces of the colleagues I thought I knew so well; I knew exactly who hated whom, who had borrowed money from whom and never paid him back, who had denounced whom, who suspected he had been denounced by whom, etc., and there they were now, pretending to count the coins left on the desk, as calm, impassive and serious as real accountants. I was touched by the trust they showed in initiating me into their game. We were accomplices now, old friends, fellow soldiers who had fought the same battles. In fact, the thought did cross my mind: Were they all from the same regiment, had they known each other since the war? I was so happy it wouldn’t have taken much for me to start imitating the lame ones and join the halting ranks of that shadowy army of one-legged veterans as if a communist bullet had struck me in the leg long ago, happy to be part of the collective alibi and of this perfect crime where no one could give anyone else away, because no one could see a thing in that hellish moment of darkness.”