Once On A Moonless Night Part 2

The solitary traveller slowed down and started to walk along a path, or rather to advance along it almost on all fours, while his last bamboo stick was consumed by the flames without which he could go no further, growing steadily smaller, one centimetre at a time, heralding the onset of complete darkness. It was a long path, not dug into the rock but formed by a landslip which made the going very dangerous and provoked the eminent intellectual to swear in French: "s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+tting h.e.l.l!" The path was barely thirty centimetres wide but seemed to go on for ever, at least fifty metres, every centimetre of the way fraught with risk, because there was nothing to either side, apart from the terrifying drop of the cliffs, the unfathomable abyss, darkness, death.

The small flame of his torch, now reduced to one twig, flickered, a few sparks flew and every glimmer of light went out. As if struck blind, Paul d'Ampere stood still on the path, unable to see anything, defenceless, in all that darkness, which grew bigger and more dense and swallowed him up. I couldn't see him now but guessed his reflex action in the dark: he automatically took off his gla.s.ses, breathed over the lenses and, unseeing, cleaned them with the dirty rags wrapped round the side-pieces. He reminded me of his son Tumchooq, who, on the rare occasions that we argue, sits on one of the benches in the shop, runs his hand over his face in an atavistic gesture, irritably rubs his forehead and eyes, seeming to have aged ten years in a flash, and-just like his father-launches into meticulously cleaning his gla.s.ses with the end of his s.h.i.+rt or his T-s.h.i.+rt, which may be just as dirty and impregnated with sweat as his fathers rags; I'm quite sure he's happy he can't see me any more and, for one furtive moment, has managed to make the filthy outside world disappear.

Low, heavy cloud spreads across the mountain, impenetrable mists crawl over the rocks and along the path where, suddenly, after the sound of several matches being struck, a dazzling flash lights up as Paul d'Ampere's s.h.i.+rt burns; he now stands stripped to the waist, holding this improvised and short-lived torch and entrusting himself to it, not sure where it might take him. Who cares? He wasn't crawling now, as if no longer afraid of falling, as if he couldn't care less, he was hurrying along that path barely the width of two hands, lit by his s.h.i.+rt, which burned like a sheet of paper. Ashes fluttered away, b.u.t.terflies of black silk so light they floated in the air around Paul d'Ampere, who talked to himself as he hurried on; a flood of words poured from his mouth, sometimes streams of furious syllables, sometimes a fluid melody or an overflowing torrent of eloquence which carried me along with it even though I didn't catch a single word. Was this an epic in ancient Persian? One of Plato's speeches in ancient Greek? Or a sacred writing in Tumchooq?

All of a sudden I was struck by three words in Chinese, "Cao ta ma!," "Cao ta ma!," their long echo ringing round the mountain, endlessly repeated and merging into one. Not that I was surprised to hear him p.r.o.nounce them without a shadow of an accent, but those three words that millions of Chinese utter every day, and I do too from time to time, were none other than a synonym for the swearing he had hurled out in French a few minutes earlier: "s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+tting h.e.l.l!" Then I understood: he'd just shouted out the expression in every language-Asian, Indo-European, living, dead or dialectal-that he knew, an impetuous river of swear words pouring out in great roaring waves, beating against the rocks, crossing frontiers, roaming across continents, pa.s.sing through Russia, Germany, Italy, detouring through Spain and Portugal, going back to his native country, taking in Corsican, Breton, Basque and the patois of the western Pyrenees ... meanwhile, after his s.h.i.+rt, he held his trousers aloft and they burned with a feeble, flickering bluish flame just enough to probe the thick mist and light the other end of the path about twenty metres away, where a dark tree loomed and a bird, perhaps an eagle, called out, promising relief and deliverance. their long echo ringing round the mountain, endlessly repeated and merging into one. Not that I was surprised to hear him p.r.o.nounce them without a shadow of an accent, but those three words that millions of Chinese utter every day, and I do too from time to time, were none other than a synonym for the swearing he had hurled out in French a few minutes earlier: "s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+tting h.e.l.l!" Then I understood: he'd just shouted out the expression in every language-Asian, Indo-European, living, dead or dialectal-that he knew, an impetuous river of swear words pouring out in great roaring waves, beating against the rocks, crossing frontiers, roaming across continents, pa.s.sing through Russia, Germany, Italy, detouring through Spain and Portugal, going back to his native country, taking in Corsican, Breton, Basque and the patois of the western Pyrenees ... meanwhile, after his s.h.i.+rt, he held his trousers aloft and they burned with a feeble, flickering bluish flame just enough to probe the thick mist and light the other end of the path about twenty metres away, where a dark tree loomed and a bird, perhaps an eagle, called out, promising relief and deliverance.

Submerged by this flood of words, I wondered whether, during the course of his interminable prison sentence, Paul d'Ampere had toyed with the idea of creating a dictionary of swear words, listing them by country and region with phonetic variations, historical origins, linguistic mutations and degrees of vehemence, const.i.tuting a sort of "J'accuse" against all the injustices and tortures suffered in his long years of detention.

Then the filthy verbal diarrhoea came to an abrupt stop; I couldn't hear anything, not even the sound of a fall, nothing but total silence in which his still-blazing trousers flew away, hovered for a moment, then went out completely, unleas.h.i.+ng such a strong feeling of vertigo and terror in me that I felt I'd fallen off the edge of the cliff myself.

My eyes peered through the darkness, but to no avail, because they were clouded with tears. Then it started snowing in the mountains and I could already picture Paul d'Ampere being found by chance decades later, sleeping naked at the foot of the cliff, a pile of frozen, fractured bones and a pair of gla.s.ses with lenses held on by wire, and side-pieces once wrapped in dirty rags long since gone. I can't think of another event in my life which provoked such emotion. There were tears streaming down my cheeks when I suddenly heard him swear again in French and saw him hanging on the edge of the cliff where his hands had managed, in the briefest fraction of a second during his fatal fall, to grab a tuft of gra.s.s rooted deeply in the ground. He didn't dare move, afraid the least movement would make the gra.s.s give way, sending him into the unfathomable depths. He didn't move but gave a cry, perhaps his last, which woke me from my dream ...

The greengrocer's shop was steeped in almost complete darkness, with the exception of a ray of bluish shadow between the bottom of the metal shutter and the threshold. It was still raining, outside and inside, dripping on the cuc.u.mbers, pumpkins and sweet potatoes with a duller echo than the noise it made on the spinach leaves, chives, chervil, dill and celery fronds, interrupted occasionally by the sound of Paul d'Ampere's harrowing cry, which continued turning inside my head. Still, it wasn't difficult overcoming my initial fear, because the image of that fall, I realised to my own astonishment, was merely the matching piece to another image, the one on a slide that Tumchooq had projected on one of the shop's walls a few weeks earlier, using a projector borrowed from his old teacher, the frustrated painter who had converted to amateur photography. Tumchooq hadn't given me any warning, but I'd known for a long time he had a photo which meant more to him than life itself and which I suspected was a portrait of his father.

I listened intently to the soft purring of the projector; a dazzling beam of light blazed rather theatrically, making motes of dust appear and dance in its path, while the wall with its dirty marks, nail holes and remnants of propaganda posters started to glow, its uneven surface lighting up in the dark like a screen. My heart beat anxiously, I was worried there would be a power cut, which happened quite frequently in Peking and always when you least expected it. I could tell Tumchooq was moved in spite of himself, seeing that image, the only picture he had of the famous mutilated scroll, of which only half remains. The photograph must have been taken around midday, judging by how overexposed it was, unless that was an illusion on my part, lending it a slightly hazy, fantastical quality like a mirage, particularly as the image wobbled a little because the electric current was inconsistent or under the effects of an imperceptible gust of wind, a breeze rippling the roll of silk. The scroll, Tumchooq informed me, was held up by one of the curators at the Forbidden City, in other words by the hands of the State, the new owners of this Chinese treasure, this legacy of successive dynasties, torn by Puyi, then the property of Seventy-one, who was by then blind, only to end up causing the downfall of a Frenchman who traded in his own wife for it ... Or was the image shaky simply because Tumchooq's heart quivered as he pressed the shutter, confronted with his own fate-which strikes me as the most appropriate word to describe the artefact.

As if not wanting to swamp the near-sacred atmosphere of the projection with unnecessary detail, he spared me the account of how she-the curator-succ.u.mbed to his supplications and demonstrated exceptional courage in allowing him to take a photograph, within the confines of the Forbidden City, of a scroll that had not seen the light of day since the State acquired it; in other words, since Paul d'Ampere was imprisoned. Tumchooq's dark shadow moved across the beam of light as the letters of that language which gave him his name appeared on the wall-screen, and as he read them syllable by syllable, in a soft voice, a murmur, utterly transformed, almost ecstatic, in a state of veneration, as if presiding over my initiation to some religious rite, or revealing a secret buried beneath the earth for centuries, a favour that would unite us for ever. Behind his gla.s.ses his eyes were ablaze with a beatific light I had never seen in them before. He read the text his father had deciphered first in its original version, then in its Chinese translation; each word pierced my heart, and I in turn translated the words to engrave them onto my memory: ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT A LONE MAN IS TRAVELLING IN THE DARK WHEN HE COMES ACROSS A LONG PATH THAT MERGES INTO THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MOUNTAIN INTO THE SKY, BUT HALFWAY ALONG, AT A TURN IN THE PATH, HE STUMBLES. AS HE FALLS, HE CLUTCHES AT A TUFT OF GRa.s.s, WHICH BRIEFLY DELAYS A FATAL OUTCOME, BUT SOON HIS HANDS CAN HOLD HIM NO LONGER AND, LIKE A CONDEMNED MAN IN HIS FINAL HOUR, HE CASTS ONE LAST GLANCE BELOW, WHERE HE CAN SEE ONLY THE DARKNESS OF THOSE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS ...

18TH JANUARY.

Every couple of months Tumchooq makes the most of the general anarchy at the greengrocer's shop and does what no other son would do in his shoes: he takes the train, often without a ticket, and travels in the "hard-seat" cla.s.s for three days and two nights to visit his father at his work camp in Sichuan, five thousand kilometres from Peking. While he's there he stays with a camp employee nicknamed the "poetess" (a former prisoner of indeterminate age and marital status), and for the five or six days of his stay he goes to the visiting room where Paul d'Ampere has the right, for twenty minutes at a time, to talk through the double wooden grille and initiate him in the ancient language of Tumchooq, its p.r.o.nunciation, spelling and syntax, although not actually encouraging him to share in his obstinate search for the missing part of the sutra, a search which for many years has maintained-more existentially than physically-his contact with this world from which he could so easily withdraw altogether. It's a secret garden he has kept hidden throughout his long sentence, except once when he mentioned it in an offhand way, almost as a joke. It was in the winter of 1977, right after the Great Helmsman's funeral, which marked the beginning of a new era. The first sign that spring had arrived, the first crack in the great Proletarian Dictators.h.i.+p, was a change in the university system. Until then universities had selected their students exclusively on the recommendations of the Party, but now they opened their doors to anyone under the age of thirty who succeeded in compet.i.tive exams in mathematics, literature, physics, chemistry, foreign languages, history and politics. Overnight, a great whirlwind blew across the entire nation, a whole generation found new hope and buckled down to preparing for those exams ... except Tumchooq, whose condemnation to three years at reform school blotted his record. Not that it stood in the way of his profession as a greengrocer, but it cruelly forbade him from enrolling for the compet.i.tive exams along with the blind, deaf-mutes, the lame and the infirm all over the country.

"The week after I got the letter of rejection," Tumchooq told me, "I felt a mark of infamy, shame and sorrow weighing on me; I hid all day long in a little tea-house mulling over this destructive, not to say fatal, failure which had struck me down before I even went into combat, and I looked my future in the face with a terrible feeling of impotence at the prospect of being condemned, excluded from society, you could say, for my whole life. I shut myself away in silence. Talking-even to say one word, a simple 'h.e.l.lo'-took superhuman effort. Sometimes I'd open my mouth and no sound would come out. At the end of the sixth day it was the evening before my birthday; I was on the brink of my twenty-third year. At ten o'clock in the evening, with a bottle of cheap booze in my freezing hand, slugging it straight from the bottle, I skated like a drunken madman over the frozen moats at the foot of the imposing walls around the Forbidden City, in the area where I'd spent my childhood. Commercial skates were way beyond my means, so I made do with some holey old trainers onto which I'd attached some metal rods, the way they did in the ancient kingdom of Tumchooq, according to Marco Polo's accounts. This meant I could more or less glide over the ice, like a wandering ghost, pursued by the rather pitiful sparks flying from my Tumchooqian skates on the dirty surface, and tracing two black grooves, one deeper than the other. Those sparks sprayed and scattered, filling my flared trousers, dazzling me like fireworks marking the feast day of a Tumchooq prince, which, I knew perfectly well, bore no relation to my lifelong status as a seller of vegetables. My mind was left far behind by my body as it ran and jumped and danced, carried away as much by speed as by alcohol. For the first time in days I started quoting Holden Caulfield, my favourite hero, talking to a cab driver in The Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye, one of the first American novels translated into Chinese and which conquered an entire generation. It was the part where Holden talks about the ducks on the lake in Central Park, wondering what they did in winter. Did they fly away or were they picked up and taken somewhere? But the cab driver thinks it's a stupid thing to wonder about.

"I must have seemed just as stupid, but I didn't come across anyone to talk to apart from invisible fish breathing in that icy water. When the huge clock on the Telegram Centre struck eleven I went under the Bridge of the Divine Army, turned towards the Beach of Sands and arrived beside the National Library, where countless table lamps still glowed, casting an extraordinarily dreamy light through the misty condensation on its tall windows, so that the whole sumptuous edifice with its Western columns and Chinese roofs stood out clearly against the dark sky, conjuring in my mind Kublai Khan's palace as it appeared to Coleridge in an opium-induced vision, a sparkling, glittering palace floating over the ice, while inside guests in the same drunken state as myself drank a mixture of alcohol and fermented mare's milk flowing copiously from artificial trees in which Kublai Khan had hidden his soldiers, just as my father described in his Notes on Marco Polo's Book of the Wonders of the World Notes on Marco Polo's Book of the Wonders of the World.

"It suddenly struck me with enough force to leave no room for doubt that living without taking university entrance exams wasn't a handicap but rather an advantage, and I could take the academic authorities' refusal as a lucky turning point, a new departure giving me an opportunity to realise a plan I'd been nurturing for some time: to annotate Marco Polo's book using Chinese doc.u.mentation, doing it in my own way, quite distinct from my father's version.

"I still wonder, if all those circ.u.mstances hadn't come together, if the lights in the library hadn't been on, how that night of drink, loneliness and misery might have ended. I don't know how long or in what sort of state I skated, or which way I went-a tram on route 103 or a bus on route 330?-to get back to Little India Street and my greengrocer's shop at dawn.

"That revelation, which was so salutary for me, provoked absolutely no reaction in my father when, in the visiting room a few days later, I told him what had happened from my receiving the rejection letter from the university right up to my final inspiration. He sat there on the far side of the double grille. His hair, which he'd been allowed to grow since being appointed the camp's pig-keeper, was all tangled, full of filth and mud from the pigsty, a thick red mane standing up on his head in haphazard tufts. He was wearing a worn pair of trousers and a sheepskin jacket, another privilege he owed to his new status, as he no longer had to wear a prisoner's uniform. He listened attentively to my story, took off his gla.s.ses all patched with bits of wire and, using the dirty rags wound round the side-pieces, meticulously wiped the lenses, without looking at me or saying a word. When he did eventually open his mouth it was, as with all my visits, to teach me some Tumchooq vocabulary.

"I can hardly remember us talking once about anything personal; Tumchooq has been his only means of escape for two whole decades and I get the impression that-except in Tumchooq-he's forgotten everyday words, and every aspect of real and personal life that goes with them is buried deep inside his memory. He never asks anything about my mother, her circ.u.mstances or her life, no more than about mine. I've got used to the enormous barrier he's built out of a dead language, and I carry on erecting it around him, always frightened the truth about his personal feelings might escape through some crack; and yet everyone recognises that, in camps, prisoners tend to cling to their loved ones, and want to know everything that's going on in their lives ... but not him.

"Our language lessons in the visiting room arouse palpable, virtually universal hostility, judging by the muttering and sideways glances from the other prisoners-most of them common criminals-and their families sitting in the neighbouring booths. Far from being frightened, I take comfort from this hostility, not to say disgust, because it makes me feel not only that my father has his own value but that I too, a humble greengrocer, have mine, and that he's raised it with those Tumchooq words reverberating around that pitiful room, words whose resonant rise and fall the others perceive as mere modulations belched by a solitary camel in the middle of a desert. I pity them, because they're not equipped to admire this language, half angel music, half siren song, even if, when my father speaks it, with his head resting against the wall and his eyes blank, he always looks as if he's suffering some appalling and incurable pain, and his face never shows any trace of the verbal pleasure described by the camp's director, but rather two decades of acc.u.mulated unhappiness in each of his craggy features.

"That particular day, because most of the visit was taken up with my story about entrance exams, we had barely ten minutes left to devote to studying Tumchooq and he taught me only two new words: mokasha mokasha, which means relic or bones a.s.sociated with a saint, a word whose p.r.o.nunciation, according to my father, bears similarities with certain central Indian languages, particularly Prakrit and Pali, both languages in which Buddha preached and which are as soft and transparent as pearls and corals beneath the limpid waters of the Indian Ocean. The second word, alaghaci alaghaci, means ma.s.sacre and has a brutal, warlike ring to it, clearly indicating Persian or Parthian origins. My father, who's a connoisseur of the subject, couldn't help telling me its roots (ala (ala-killing, and alaca alaca or or alaja alaja-a.s.sa.s.sin), as well as its nominal and pa.s.sive forms; and it is thanks to these two forms, he claims, that a Tumchooq sentence maintains all the versatility and variety of Sanskrit constructions, despite the absence of inflexions and declensions. To finish, as he usually did, he gave me a syntax exercise using the two new words, putting together a sentence which he uttered so unbelievably slowly I was completely bemused: 'I wouldn't be in the least surprised were you to end up like me with a ma.s.sacred relic' (that's a rough translation, given that the Tumchooq language only has present, future and conditional tenses, and has no subjunctive form).

"At his request, I repeated the sentence until I knew it by heart, although I didn't understand its exact meaning or logic. His voice grew deeper and deeper, petering into a silence in which he might have been picturing the future he had just drawn for me, until the guards shouting to say visiting time was over brought him back to reality. He left with them and the door closed once more on his unimaginable suffering.

"The true significance of his comment in the form of a grammatical exercise had escaped me. I didn't understand what either of us had to do with a 'ma.s.sacred relic.' The following day I set off for Chengdu in a lorry laden with stones, from there I took the train to Peking and my fathers enigmatic remark faded as my mind was steadily exhausted by that ordeal of three days and two nights on a hard, cramped seat, an ordeal that always ends up erasing every kind of suffering and unhappiness, and even the most memorable words ...

"But two weeks later, back in Peking, in an underground train at the stop for the Temple of the Source of Law, the doors of my carriage opened and I heard a boy singing in the language of I have no idea which minority, with a refrain in Mandarin. His voice was heavenly, resonating as if in a church, with a tremulous celestial grace. When the train set off I saw the boy sitting on a bench next to a monk; they were at the far end of the platform and the pa.s.sengers were slowing down to admire him as they pa.s.sed. The monk was wearing bright yellow Burmese robes and the young singer, who was ten or eleven, wore a very fine length of linen wound around his waist, like a long white skirt falling to his feet, attached with a black silk belt, Thai style; and his top, which b.u.t.toned up to the neck and had wide sleeves, was so white it shone under the lights. He was a novice of extraordinary beauty, head shaven, round eyes, straight nose and s.h.i.+ning teeth. When my carriage pa.s.sed him, in spite of the deafening noise the wheels made on the rails, I couldn't believe my ears when I heard him sing: 'I love the Lotus Sutra, which taught me that the sutras are Buddha's relics, his supreme relics.'

"In a fraction of a second the mystery surrounding my father's words disappeared and I understood for the first time that I would end up like him, searching for the missing part of a ma.n.u.script, a mutilated sutra, in other words a ma.s.sacred relic."

26TH JANUARY.

The first day of spring is nearly here and with it the holidays, the university deserted, the student residence almost empty I don't know whether my exam results or my friends' invitations make me happy or unhappy I don't know who I really am. Either way, a feeling of emptiness put a lump in my throat earlier when I went along Little India Street, past the greengrocer's where the coral pinks of carrots, the matt ivory of parsnips and the tiny green marbles of peas made bright splashes of colour under the red lanterns set up for the celebrations, celebrations without Tumchooq, who's gone to spend them with his father, and I gauged what an infinitely long time it takes for a week to go by in his absence. Outside the shop the only feeling I had was of emptiness, of missing him; I should have bought lotus roots, sweet potatoes and red-hearted turnips to eat raw this evening, chomping into them as I sit alone in the courtyard listening to the firecrackers that will be going off, but all I could think about was slinking away.

I a.s.sociate Tumchooq less with s.e.xual pleasure than with the taste of the various vegetables he's taught me to eat raw; the first steps towards a radical re-conversion for someone like me, who grew up with boiled green beans and mashed potatoes. It started, if I remember right, one Sunday in the middle of summer when the two of us set off by bike to visit a temple on the outskirts of Peking, which was once very famous but is now in ruins. On the way back, the sun, like a vibrating ball of lead setting the rhythm for Tumchooq's pedalling and our beating hearts, was so hot it had melted the tarmac; in other words, we were pedalling through an oven with our throats on fire, so we made a beeline for an isolated house by the side of the road where Tumchooq succeeded in making a friend-a natural gift for him, he's equally at home with princes and beggars. In this instance it was a farm labourer of about forty, a thin man with very tanned skin and one arm missing so his s.h.i.+rt sleeve flapped limply, who took us to a well in an inner courtyard, beneath a large ginkgo. Using his one arm, with a deftness and grace all his own, he lowered a bucket on a long rope into the depths of the well. We heard a dull impact right at the bottom and the m.u.f.fled echo of the bucket smacking the water, sinking into it and filling up. The man tugged sharply on the rope, the bucket came back up, he grabbed it by the handle and, without a word, poured it over Tumchooq. Gasps of surprise, laughter. Then he lowered the bucket back down and it sank into the water again and came back up; when I screamed, half the bucketful was already streaming over my hair, shoulders and body-pure, cold, refres.h.i.+ng water; I took a big gulp of it, shuddering with pleasure while the other half of the bucket gushed down inside my T-s.h.i.+rt and my trousers, and I felt them billowing out around my waist, stomach and legs.

After this restorative shower, Tumchooq took some long lotus roots (probably stolen from the shop the day before) from his rucksack, washed them a.s.siduously with help from our new friend, who filled the bucket again and slooshed the roots to remove the mud from them, revealing fragrant, creamy, almond-coloured skin. Like the two of them, I picked up a long root and bit into it: it turned out to be so juicy, fresh and crisp that it later became my favourite vegetable, always a.s.sociated with our "meetings of the clouds and the rain," either as a prelude, or at the end.

As for Tumchooq, he knows no greater pleasure than biting into a turnip from the Zhangjiakou region: the skin on the bottom half buried in the ground is the colour of jade, an almost transparent green, on the top half it's ivory-coloured; the flesh is white as snow, with a pattern of purple veins shot through with a ruby-red thread. Holding a turnip in his hand, Tumchooq likes imitating street vendors, bellowing a sing-song "Zhangjiakou turnips, better than Guangzhou pears ..." Then he throws it on the ground, the turnip splits into pieces and he bites into one, chews it, then pa.s.ses it to me, mouth to mouth, like feeding a baby bird. The sugary, exquisitely refres.h.i.+ng juice pours over my tongue and down my throat, and spreads through my whole body for an immeasurable length of time; it sometimes feels as if the taste will stay with me till the end of my days.

Tumchooq left a week ago and after three days on the train-"listening to the hammering of the wheels," as a popular song goes-he must have arrived in Chengdu on Monday evening, set off for Ya An on Tuesday morning, that's the day before yesterday, and spent another whole day on the bus on a rutted mountain road, "a snaking, silvery ribbon climbing to the clouds," if his greengrocer's funds allowed. Sometimes lack of money means he has to get to the prison camp by hitchhiking and he spends hours by the side of the road. When he's been refused by several lorry drivers he hides behind some trees on a corner where the lorries have to slow down before a steep slope. He's described it to me so many times I can picture him running behind a lorry, launching himself at the back, gripping onto iron bars or a rope that holds down a tarpaulin, then, in a dangerous manoeuvre, heaving himself up to this access point, freeing one of his hands, untying the rope, opening the tarpaulin and climbing inside; then the lorry gets smaller and smaller and I lose sight of it. But that's not always the end. Often, somewhere along the four hundred kilometres he still needs to cover, he has to jump out of the lorry at the last minute and get into another one, because the driver changes direction without any warning and heads for somewhere else-Luo Shan, Emei, E Bin, but not Ya An-usually accelerating, hurtling off at top speed, thundering along, as if to express his pleasure, his eagerness to deliver this trapped man to justice. A real nightmare. Tumchooq knows he'll have to retrace his steps, but first he needs to escape the possessed vehicle. He closes his eyes and jumps, and sometimes he lands in a rice paddy by the side of the road and sinks into mud and s.h.i.+t full of worms no one's ever seen in any biology textbook, Sichuan worms covered in white down, which squirm and writhe, until one of them settles under the skin on your forehead or in the pit of your chest.

NOTEBOOK.

CHINESE NEW YEAR 1979.

Ya An, "Exquisite Peace," is the name of a mountain town which is now small and poor with barely sixty thousand inhabitants, but, if the regional annals are to be believed, it had a glorious past as the capital of the province, complete with bustling streets, a cinema, the governors palace, two decent hotels, its opium trade, its vegetable and spice market (where the heads of decapitated criminals were displayed), and its Tibetans and Lolos who made up part of the population. In 1955 Ya An was demoted, reduced to the status of princ.i.p.al town in a region of eight districts, each more dependent on the mountain economy than the last ... in other words, extremely poor. An area from which Westerners were banned. Over several decades under communist rule this region achieved fame across the whole of China for the number of people who died, nearly one million between 1959 and 1961-that's forty per cent of the population-anonymous victims carried off by famine, most of them dying long, slow deaths, too weak to stand upright, crawling on the ground like animals breathing their last. So Ya An became synonymous with a giant ma.s.s grave. After that scandal no one mentioned the sinister place again, the shameful wart erased itself from collective memory and all that remained were prison camps, lost among the dark silhouettes of its towering mountains, which curved bizarrely through the fog. One of these camps, on the River Lu, is known by millions of admirers of Hu Feng, a writer and great intellectual condemned by Mao himself, who always appeared extremely jealous of this particular prey, though no one ever knew why. (Hu Feng has been imprisoned there since 1955, a detention, I notice to my horror, which-give or take a couple of years-coincides with that of the French orientalist Paul d'Ampere, also incarcerated at the River Lu camp.) His sister Hu Min describes the camp in her memoirs, which were recently published in Taiwan: When the main road from Chengdu to Tibet reaches Ya An it carries on climbing westwards for fifteen kilometres, and comes to the Pa.s.s of the Immortal Steering Wheel, a name which perfectly emphasises how perilous the topography is and reminds mortals how dangerous and difficult it is to pa.s.s. There the road forks. On the right is an uneven track of beaten earth, not to say mud, scored with deep ruts carved out and churned up by lorries laden with stones, a barely practicable eighteen-kilometre stretch along the River Lu, which carves its own bed at the foot of tall cliffs and is in fact not navigable because it has so little water and an infinite number of ma.s.sive, dark rocks that have tumbled from the top of the mountain-rocks so macabre and ugly, so loaded with menace, they look like the bodies of the infirm, the deformed and the mad subjected to unimaginable tortures, screaming in pain, struggling, squirming and finally petrifying in the tormented shape of their final punishment, of death by fire or iron. In geographical terms, choosing this place to set up a prison camp on the side of a mountain is a stroke of genius because the Pa.s.s of the Immortal Steering Wheel need only be closed for it to be cut off from the world, and any attempt at escape would be bound to fail.The substantial river becomes narrower and narrower until it is little more than a stream, running dry most of the time, as it crosses a tiny plain one kilometre long by two wide, thrown up in the heart of the mountains, surrounded by cliffs and painstakingly sealed off with high walls of barbed wire. At fifty-metre intervals along the fence there are watchtowers guarded by armed soldiers and equipped with searchlights, which sweep their powerful beams over every corner and recess of the grounds.The camp is divided into two areas: on the right bank of the River Lu are the administrative buildings, residences for prison staff, an infirmary, a shop, the warders' canteen and a strange concrete edifice built in the 1960s to house the directing staff of the provincial police force, should there be an American invasion, a sort of shapeless lump partly buried underground with a vast dome camouflaged under artificial trees standing on a three-storey quadrilateral with walls also smothered in ivy and climbing plants, which are stirred by the slightest wind, the slightest breath of breeze, turning the building into a monster, a peculiar species of hedgehog.As the American invasion never came, by the early 1970s the edifice was lived in by the families of the head warders who, even on their days off, keep a watchful eye over the other part of the camp on the more steeply sloping left bank of the River Lu, the part reserved exclusively for prisoners: first, the work camp proper, a mine exploited using medieval techniques where each gem shaft is indicated by a heap of earth around an opening a couple of metres in diameter, gaping holes dug at random into the bank or beside the river bed. At first light an army of ghosts-how many of them? a thousand? two thousand?-winds its way down to the river bank in single file in detachments of twenty or so individuals, each stumbling and swaying to a separate shaft. Fifty light bulbs come on one by one along the river, each lighting its own shaft, where a warder does a roll call of his uniformed, shaven-headed prisoners (only cooks, pig-keepers and barbers are allowed to keep their hair), who line up like soldiers while he bellows out their numbers, which echo around the mountain. The warder then repeats, as he does every morning, the punishment each of them exposes himself to for the least breach of discipline, before the prisoners-one by one, each laden with heavy tools, packs of explosives and bamboo baskets-silently climb down an infinitely long bamboo ladder to reach the bottom of the shaft, a dozen or so metres below ground. One of them, often the most experienced, lights three candles in a basket, lowers it gently to the bottom and sets it at the mouth of the gallery they have to dig. This is the only security measure available to them in that, if oxygen runs low, the three candles will go out.Just one prisoner stays on the surface (he might once have been an engineer or a great opera singer, who knows?) and he takes a mouthful of fuel and spits a thin stream of it onto the carburettor while pulling the cord, and the motor shudders with heavy spasms, which make the ground shake as it comes to life. A pump spews out black water drawn from the bottom of the shaft as the sound of other motors carries from shafts further away. The racket from these thrumming witches' cauldrons heralds the beginning of a long day of forced labour in the shadows, with the members of each team staying underground for six hours, barefoot in mud and water, standing and digging or kneeling and digging into the clay that falls away in blocks, fingering and prodding the walls in the hopes of finding a trace of gem-stones, but knowing from experience that there is a one-in-ten-thousand chance of success. They fill baskets with clay and indicate when they can be hauled up by blowing a whistle so deadened by the damp that it sounds like a long moan, a lost cry emanating from a dark tomb. The man on the surface pulls the rope, raises the basket, pours the clay into a sieve and, using water from the pump, sorts through it minutely for precious stones.It is this same dirty muddy water that sprays over the naked prisoners a few hours later at the end of the day. The first man up washes his hair and shoulders while his teammates are still climbing the ladder in a state of near exhaustion. One after another they pause as they reach the surface, as much to take a lungful of dry air as to readjust to the light of day. It is not unusual for one of them to be unable to heave himself out. He then has to be dragged by the arms and pushed from behind before he can collapse by the edge of the shaft, prostrate on the ground, struggling to exhale, more dead than alive.The gem shafts stay with their slaves once the work is over. On nights when the wind blows and the moon is bathed in a sort of yellow nimbus, the shafts keep their hold on the prisoners' minds in a different way as they lie on their bunks in vast sealed hangars with corrugated iron roofs: through the tall, high windows they can hear strange noises coming from the shafts, a hundred of them in all, if the camp's nickname is to be believed, each transformed into an enormous echo chamber, a deep abyss swallowing the mountain wind, which wails and cries: plaintive, tormented cries, shrill, piercing cries hurtling up to the sky and whisked away or metamorphosing into mournful muted exhalations, like a long sigh hovering in the air for a moment before slumping in a corner of the dormitory or dissolving into the darkness above what might have been the bed of a prisoner carried off by dysentery, malaria, jaundice, hunger or exhaustion. Sometimes it sounds like ghost voices whispering for a few seconds, and some think they hear their own names or the names of lost companions.On terrifying stormy nights, when the wind swoops unbridled through the mountains, these sounds develop into a drum roll as if an army of vengeful spirits were launching an attack on the camp. On quiet nights, so quiet they can hear the corrugated iron cracking as it shrinks in the dropping temperature, having expanded in the heat of the day, a gunshot sometimes shatters the silence, followed by a burst of three further explosions coming from the summary executions site, not far away in the same valley. Always four shots, four related but different sounds, most likely from four rifles to leave no glimmer of hope for the bound and gagged escapee who has just been stopped-yet another one-and now kneels before a hole in the ground into which his body, shot through by four bullets, is to fall.The camp prisoners are arranged in two distinct categories that never intermix: the common criminals and the "thought criminals." Each group of twenty prisoners has a leader who must belong to the first category creatures still more sinister and cruel than the warders who appointed them, and more dangerous since warders do sleep at night, whereas these leaders, equipped with the t.i.tle of guard helpers, are absolute masters of their groups, both physically and psychologically, and can exploit the other prisoners' weaknesses without having to account for their actions to anyone. A group leader might, for example, organise a meeting about escaping the moment a shooting is over, asking each individual to admit to his own errors and delve into the deepest recesses of his mind to find the merest shadow of longing to escape. The leader has the right to decide whether a nocturnal meeting like this takes place with or without the lights on, and, when it happens in the dark, it often turns into sessions of common criminals beating up the "thought criminals," because as soon as one of the latter opens his mouth, he can barely get three sentences out before he is a.s.sailed by black shadows that spring from every direction, his fellow prisoners in the first category jumping onto him, covering his head with a sheet, punching and kicking him, then going back to their places and, safe in their perfect immunity, carrying on with their own confessions and sincere promises to mend their ways. And all the while their victim bleeds and cries in pain, aware that his suffering only enhances the pleasure of this collective barbarity, which was either ordered or encouraged by the leader and thus by the whole staff and the entire penitentiary system. The only "thought criminals" to escape this brutality along with the slavery of forced labour in the depths of the gem mines are prisoners held in the other sector visible in the distance, beyond the Pa.s.s of the Immortal Steering Wheel, on the rare days when the mountain is not shrouded in mist and when the air is transparent: eight dazzlingly white buildings in two straight lines on the side of the mountain, set apart from the main dormitories; a little separate world no one knows anything about except that the rooms there are individual or double, never communal, and that its residents-mostly major Party figures who once reached pinnacles of power-may well be prisoners but they enjoy the wonderful privilege of reading The People's Daily The People's Daily, the official organ of the Party.

Tumchooq has a black-and-white photograph from the early 1970s, in the small eight-centimetre-square format of the day, given to him at the same time as The Secret Biography of Cixi The Secret Biography of Cixi by his childhood friend Ma when he came to Peking. The fact that their unfortunate nocturnal outing cost Tumchooq three years of reform school did nothing to change their feelings; quite the opposite, particularly as when they were reunited each had come a long way, one through reform school and then a greengrocer's shop, the other having been "re-educated," and they had both gained in confidence and a degree of experience in life. by his childhood friend Ma when he came to Peking. The fact that their unfortunate nocturnal outing cost Tumchooq three years of reform school did nothing to change their feelings; quite the opposite, particularly as when they were reunited each had come a long way, one through reform school and then a greengrocer's shop, the other having been "re-educated," and they had both gained in confidence and a degree of experience in life.

Ma was eighteen when he took the picture. A year earlier, when he left school, the state had sent him for "re-education" to live with poor revolutionary peasants on the Mountain of the Phoenix in the Yong Jin district, one of the eight miserable districts in the Ya An region. Thanks to his "minor virtuosity as a violinist," as he called it, a reputation that spread beyond the mountains, he was spotted by a local semi-professional propaganda group who "borrowed" him from his village. He was not remunerated-although his board and lodging were free-but this absurd temporary employment meant he could escape hard toil in the fields and rice paddies. For many months the group travelled all round the region by bus putting on revolutionary shows, and Ma became friends with a little genius of a flute player by the name of Chen, the son of a warder and a nurse at the River Lu camp. The day this boy asked him to spend the 1973 New Year celebrations at his parents' house, "I jumped at the opportunity," he later told Tumchooq. "I even had trouble hiding my joy. It wasn't to visit the camp, which disgusted me, but to try to lay my hands on a priceless treasure that anyone familiar with the black market in forbidden books dreams of getting hold of by whatever means possible: a ma.n.u.script which, according to rumour, Hu Feng had secretly written during his long period in solitary confinement. It was called Storm on the River Lu Storm on the River Lu, and some pa.s.sages, for lack of ink, were written in blood p.r.i.c.ked from his finger with his pen."

It was the first time Tumchooq had seen a picture of the place, an overall shot of the River Lu camp in the middle of winter, and the palpable shaking of the photographer's hand as he hastily, secretly took the photo gives the place a Siberian feel, like a Sichuan Gulag Archipelago Gulag Archipelago. Seen from above, the dormitories look like burnt matches, black carca.s.ses tracing geometric figures on the snow, the prison buildings forming rectangular courtyards surrounded by the circles of the mine shafts, all cloaked in cold and infinite indifference. Above was another inhabited area, the white buildings of the privileged inmates, also geometric but with ephemeral patches of reflected snow making them look like a lunatic asylum, a place dominated by endless boredom, another form of incurable evil.

Further up still was an isolated house, visible only as a sloping tiled roof, since the rest of it was masked by a very high wall, no doubt also very smooth, very thick and impossible to climb. It was here, if the flute player was to be believed, that Hu Feng, "the emperors prisoner," as he was known, was kept in isolation, but the only evidence of his presence was the dark foliage of a mandarin orange tree he had planted at the beginning of his imprisonment and, at the time the photograph was taken, the top of the tree was taller than the top of the wall, standing as isolated and proud as the man who planted it.

"I looked at that mandarin tree for a long time," Ma told Tumchooq. "A vibrant green s.h.i.+mmered over its monochrome leaves, but I don't know how long it had been since the sun had made even the shyest appearance through the clouds or the light of dawn had skimmed the tops of its foliage. I wondered whether birds came and perched in it to keep the writer company in his incarceration that dates back such a long way it almost stands outside time."

He took this photo on his first visit. He had spent an unimaginably long time looking at the camp, until he knew its topography by heart, picturing himself getting past the armed guards on their rounds to climb up the thin, narrow almost s.h.i.+vering line which, on the photograph, represented the only pathway up to the isolated house. In the three years after his first visit, even though he'd already left the propaganda group (whose new leader thought the violin an instrument designed to express only bourgeois sentiments), Ma went back to the River Lu camp several times, still entertaining the hope of acquiring Hu Feng's secret masterpiece.

He lived with Chen's parents, showering them with presents from the Mountain of the Phoenix-eggs, chickens, medicinal plants, terracotta dishes, etc.-but the isolated house with its mandarin tree remained as inaccessible to him as a star, the moon, the sun or Kafka's castle. Eventually, he admitted defeat and decided never to set foot in the camp again and shortly before leaving he confessed his regret to Chen's father, who, in the meantime, had climbed a few echelons in his long career as a warder and was now one of the six a.s.sistant directors of the sector for ordinary prisoners. They said their goodbyes in the kitchen.

"You, and you alone, have a way of doing that," Ma told Tumchooq. "Even though we were separated by an impossible distance, you have this ability to pop back up out of nowhere; it knocked me speechless, struck me dumb. A resurrection isn't something you explain, it just happens. Ten minutes after saying goodbye to Chen's father I was still there with the smell of cooking oil and chillies, not because I was thinking over what he'd just told me but because for the first time in ages I was wondering where you were. I thought back to that night so long before in the Forbidden City, in the hall with the exhibition of instruments of torture."

According to Chen's father, Hu Feng's secret work was pure legend, based on nothing at all: at the beginning of his incarceration the writer had a phobia of paper, the source of all his troubles, given that he was arrested and incarcerated because of a letter he had addressed to Mao. Before 1957 there were few "thought criminals" at the River Lu camp-as in the whole of China at that time-so the prison staff had little experience of this new category, and the Hu Feng case was beyond them, at least for the first few years of his incarceration, because he was a national figure who had made his mark on Chinese history. His family were, therefore, allowed to bring him books, particularly his own published works of literature, as well as his notebooks and private diaries. But one night he burned them all in the courtyard of the isolated house (to prove that his faith in literature had been destroyed just when he most needed it, perhaps, or to punish himself for losing the ability to write?), and people whispered among themselves that this gesture marked the beginning of the madness into which he descended. He was seen holding completely imaginary conversations with Mao from morning till night. One day, prison guard Chen saw him with his own eyes standing out in driving rain arguing with Mao, his eyes turned to the skies as he gesticulated and explained at length his opinions on democracy, censure, education and religion. From time to time, drawing level with his young mandarin tree, he would bow his head, incline his body and plead with the invisible Great Helmsman, quite unaware that the rain was beating down ever harder, his s.h.i.+rt clinging to him, his trousers flapping in the wind and water streaming over his hair (which he was allowed to wear long at the time because of his privileged status), running over his face and into his eyes, mingling with his tears and filling his mouth, which went on emitting s.n.a.t.c.hes of words and icy breath, fading to moaning and mumbling-but never an obscenity or insult-until he was reduced to silence.

During this period people noticed an increasingly rapid decline in his memory, as if his brain were somehow ossifying. He could no longer remember recent events-clean clothes, for example, the meagre meals he ate alone or the nurses name-then he stopped recognising the warders and the camp director until the day, during one of her rare authorised visits, when his wife wondered whether he even recognised her. She begged him to say her name and wept when she realised he could not, his ravaged brain was just a s.p.a.ce filled with shadowy mists and shapeless, nameless monsters; she broke down on the spot, for no one knew better than she how phenomenal her husbands near-legendary memory was. One thing is sure: at that point, in spite of his youth, the writer was closer to descending into senile dementia than to writing a novel; he no longer had the physical or intellectual means to do so.

No one ever knew whether it was a surge of pride, a lucid moment, a way of escaping the isolated house which had become his tomb, or an accident in a fit of hysteria that made him hit out at one of the guards, resulting in his expulsion: his head was shaved, he was moved to a communal barrack, slept on creaking wooden planks and began life as a common prisoner, taken to the gem mines like all the others in the morning, and climbing down into them, never knowing whether he would come back out safely. In the depths of a mine shaft he crossed paths with a man who was, in some senses, as mad as himself and who from his first day at the River Lu camp had never spoken in anything but Buddha's language, a dead language which cut him off from all communication with the world, except for a fly tied at the waist with a very fine thread and attached to the side-piece of his gla.s.ses, flitting around him with a constant buzzing sound. All reports confirm that he was always perfectly, worryingly calm, even when he was attacked by his teammates, who were common criminals, a band of devils, rapists, thieves, paedophiles and s.a.d.i.s.ts who homed in on him during their political meetings in the dormitory in the dark, punching him and taking pleasure in tearing the hairs growing back on his head and in more intimate places, "reactionary imperialist" hairs, to use their actual words, which weren't black like Chinese peoples, but red.

"Tears sprang from my eyes," Ma told Tumchooq, "before he'd even said the word 'French.' I couldn't say why, but those few red hairs made me cry like a baby, a blinding pain shot through my head, almost breaking it open; it felt like the same pain I had as a boy in that strangling cage when you tortured me, because you would do anything for information about him. That same Frenchman was suddenly so close to me, two or three hundred metres away, at the bottom of the black hole of a gem mine where he had already spent nearly twenty years, and during that time a huge underground network had spread in every direction, so complex he must have felt he would never get out."

Ma could no longer remember how the conversation started up again in that kitchen, but what the old warder told him left a dark image stamped on his memory, where he could see neither the Frenchman nor even a bamboo basket, but could just hear a fly buzzing in darkness. He was talking about the first time Hu Feng went down a mine shaft. Towards the end of the morning the candles that served as lighting as well oxygen detectors went out, and the prisoners raced for the wooden ladder up to the surface, stepping over anyone who fell, their panicked screams echoing through the tunnels, fighting to be first. Although conscious of the imminent danger of asphyxiation, Hu Feng, as he told his wife later, just sat motionless at the entrance of the gallery, convinced in his paranoid state that the whole scene was actually a plot devised against him and that, whatever happened, he would sooner or later be the victim of a murder disguised as an accident, so he might as well die straight away.

While he waited for death in total darkness he heard a buzzing sound approaching out of nowhere, coming from a winged creature, probably an angel, given the circ.u.mstances. The noise circled round him, constantly drawing closer, then pulling away, always to the same distance, making the surrounding silence feel all the more impenetrable, so he was startled to hear a man's voice close to him murmuring a strange word with an unfamiliar ring to it, and, although he didn't understand it, he guessed what it meant: fly Hu Feng struggled in vain to see the man in the darkness, and kept repeating the word, like a coded message, until all of a sudden that simple, gentle, airy syllable gave him confidence: he realised the candles had gone out because of the rising humidity and if the air had really been lacking in oxygen the fly wouldn't have been able to dance like an angel or a wandering soul, a dance as light as the sound of that unfamiliar name given to it by its master.

At the end of the day, once freed and back up on the surface, the Frenchman metamorphosed into a goldsmith, gently untying the fly from the fine, almost invisible thread with his dirty, blackened but magically adroit fingers, and orchestrating a silent symphony for his only spectator, his new fellow prisoner, as he released it beside the River Lu. Hu Feng watched it gently beat its wings as it gathered its wits before flitting away. Much later he came to understand the word the Frenchman said every day during this deliverance ceremony back up on the surface, thanking the insect for perfectly fulfilling its role as a guardian angel, or simply to celebrate their survival. Hu Feng was immediately filled with curiosity for the ancient language his teammate spoke, and this developed into an increasingly consuming pa.s.sion. He even proved surprisingly talented for a beginner in his ability to decipher the words the Frenchman said or wrote out on the clay walls of the mine shafts, words that acted on him like a cure for amnesia, miraculously anchoring in his brain as his memory began a slow resurrection. ("Each new word gives me an extraordinarily uplifting feeling," he later confided to his wife in the visiting room, according to a warders report.) In the s.p.a.ce of a year he acc.u.mulated a sufficiently rich vocabulary to be initiated in Tumchooq chess, which archaeologists had discovered shortly before the Frenchman's arrest. "All games were strictly forbidden and entailed an extension of your sentence," Chen explained, "but however closely the prison authorities looked into this case, there was little they could do against the two men, because they played chess mentally and orally without any pieces, without drawing out a board, and certainly not actually touching anything. Were they being provocative? Was this a kind of revolt, a display of their intellectual superiority? Or, in spite of their erudition and talent, were they just like a couple of children who wanted to play and made do with very little? Either way, they took things too far."

The aim of these bouts fought in the dark, as Hu Feng explained to his sister during a visit, completely escaped the authorities' vigilant eyes: it was nothing more or less than an exercise to reinforce the writer's resuscitated memory. They launched into the game at every opportunity, either in the dark underground pa.s.sages where they could be heard parrying words, which made other-worldly echoes in the depths of the mine; or in the dormitory against the howling wind, the piercing whistling from the mine shafts and the gurgling of the River Lu, which became quite a torrent during the thaw, making this probably the best time for them to indulge in their complicated game.

First one of them would announce the subtle move of a particular piece; his opponent considered it, smiled and retaliated with another word, which disguised a carefully elaborated and constantly changing strategy, and that was how they fought out each round, which went on indefinitely, sometimes right through until dawn. And when, without realising it, their concentration flagged and their thoughts and words lost their edge, the other prisoners in their group tried to interpret the expressions on their faces and the least nuance in their voices. Now it was the others whose blood was up, their eyes sharp, breathless and tense as they, too, were caught up in a game, the more clandestine prosaic game of betting on the winner of the next round, which the writer would announce on impulse-or perhaps because he had a generous nature. (In a camp where food was terribly restricted, bets consisted of a little sc.r.a.p of fat-which could usually be exchanged on the camp's black market for a new pair of trousers-or a slice of meat, a mouthful of soup, a piece of sugar or a few vegetable leaves; sometimes, though very rarely, the betting reached astronomical heights: a bowl of rice.) When someone lost a bet he naturally paid what he owed, whatever the price, but he could be so sickened by the loss that he harboured implacable hatred for the Frenchman or the writer. This is what happened with the team leader, the absolute master of the barrack room, even though no one ever dared claim the debt when he lost. When the chess player he had named as loser won the round it struck him like a physical blow, his face flushed red, his heart skipped a beat and he ordered his opponents to double the stakes for the next round, but the result often went against him once more. One evening his debt, which he never paid, multiplied so many times he suspected the two intellectuals were doing it on purpose to make fun of him. They didn't have to wait long for his revenge: in the morning the Frenchman and the writer were condemned to the harshest, filthiest, most dangerous work.

In one of his reports the team leader informed the authorities that the writer had wept tears of happiness as he performed the apparently ba.n.a.l gesture of picking up a sc.r.a.p of old newspaper, which acted as wallpaper in the dormitory. It had come away from the dusty wall and now lay crumpled and dirty on the ground. He picked it up, he later admitted hastily in Tumchooq, to record the rounds won and lost against his opponent. ("I suddenly realised what I was doing," he added. "It brought an end to my phobia of paper and writing. For that purely literary reason I couldn't hold back my tears of joy") Even though the writer tore the piece of newspaper into tiny shreds on the spot for fear of leaving any trace of their forbidden game, the team leader picked it up, pieced together this proof of their offence with the patience of a clockmaker and glued it to another piece of paper. The flautist's father still keeps this exhibit in a drawer, a page covered in indecipherable signs, "which looked like s.h.i.+t from the huge rats at the River Lu camp," he told Ma.

It was a dazzling victory-the first of a language over a phobia-and the writer confirmed this in a conversation with his wife in the visiting room. According to the transcript of the recording, Hu Feng felt he was "in a state of grace," "in love with the Tumchooq language," especially now the Frenchman had introduced him to a sacred Buddhist text written in the language and copied word for word onto the inside of the sheepskin jerkin he wore day in and day out, summer and winter. "Venerating a text like that," the writer confided to his wife, "being in permanent physical contact with it, touching his skin, is all the more astonis.h.i.+ng in a Frenchman who, apparently, ought to be the archetypal Cartesian. I've touched those words written on sheepskin with my own hands and they were as warm as living things. Some of the strokes have been distorted by the Frenchman's sweat and look like veins-sinuous, palpable, almost quivering. And over time some of the dots have turned into minute lotus flowers, reminding me, as it says in the text named after that flower, that the sutras are Buddha's relics."

The poor quality of the tape means some pa.s.sages are inaudible, but this was a more or less accurate account of Hu Feng's first contact with the text of the mutilated ma.n.u.script. The recorded doc.u.ment also includes a long description of his deciphering of the text in which some words, despite his staggering progress and mastery of basic vocabulary, were still unknown to him. His French instructor, as he called him, would sit on his bed in silence, patching up his gla.s.ses with wire and wiping the lenses with the rags wrapped around the side-pieces, lost in thought. Whereas he, stimulated as much by the mystery itself as by the hope of finding the key to it, felt like a child alone in a huge forest, overwhelmed with happiness at being reunited with particular trees, gra.s.ses and plants, as if he knew them intimately, calling each by name, touching them, stroking them, smelling them, while others, unfamiliar to him, loomed out of nowhere, coldly blocking his path so he had to flatten them and clear them aside, only to admit that, between the endless intermingling of truths and deceptive appearances, he was actually lost.

The writer compared himself to a sailor of old navigating a river in an unknown continent and coming across as yet unexplored stretches where rapids unleashed themselves over the riverbed, clutching a map with no place names attributed to the blank s.p.a.ces, just images of animals: lions, leopards, cobras, giraffes. Night after night Hu Feng explored those fabulous animals, carefully tracing them, tentatively p.r.o.nouncing