by Dai Sijie
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.”
I do not know how much money Tumchooq took from the State that first evening, and I am not sure he would have known himself. Something as concrete and down-to-earth as a figure would only have belittled this act of grand larceny; he knew that no sum could truly represent the scale of what they did. Nothing about this adventure, as he described it, really surprised me except for his strange identification with his invalid colleagues two or three times his age. It was not entirely a joke. Later he gave me a fairly convincing demonstration of his talents as a mimic. He could fake a limp perfectly: he came to a stop, put his good leg forward, twisted his other foot on the floor so that all his weight came down on his ankle, and bent over to pick up a coin. (I suspected he practised after work when he was alone in the shop, given that he lived there for a long time, because he was not only a salesman but also nightwatchman. In the evenings that desk on which everything inexorably converged became his bed; he covered it with a bamboo mat for a mattress, then a blanket and his apron, which he folded in four to act as a pillow for his big head, but it was always on the floor by morning, crumpled like a dirty rag.)
I only remembered Tumchooq’s fake limp recently after reading the memoirs of a Russian film director who died about ten years ago, yet whose films—which have sound but no dialogue—have such a pure beauty they bowl me over every time I see them. In his book he talks about the “stammering period” of his childhood, which had started as a game, imitating a friend with this handicap. He got into the habit of stuttering, struggling to find words and uttering snatches of unfinished sentences until he ended up stammering more than his friend and having to resort to singing at the top of his voice, like something from a comic film. “I’m grateful to my stammering friend because, thanks to him, I discovered not the misery of being unable to communicate but an even more significant trait: the vanity of the spoken word.”
“One day,” Tumchooq told me as he sat on the desk in the greengrocers with the lights out so that his eyes lit up to the red glow of his cigarette every time he took a drag on it, “I was looking for something to read on my mothers bookshelves. She’s the vice curator of the museum in the Forbidden City now, so you can imagine the sort of books she has. Anyway, I came across The History of Theatrical Presentation in the Court of the Qing Dynasty, written by Goo Ying and published by the Museum of History. There’s a paragraph I know by heart:
At the beginning of October in the Year of the Cockerel (1862), on the occasion of the one hundredth day since the birth of Zia Lan, better known as Seventy-one, the long-awaited first son of Prince Yi Lin, a celebration which coincided with victory for the Chinese army in a battle waged with the French on the Chinese-Vietnamese border, the Dowager Empress Cixi showed her gratitude to the Heavens for this double happiness by inviting every prince, minister, general and high dignitary in Peking to attend a huge performance laid on by troupes of singing eunuchs in the Pavilion of Pure Sound within the Forbidden City and lasting from morning till night for three whole days. Two pretexts [the book’s author comments] to demonstrate her power. Manifestly, she wanted it—this power—to be noticed, and for people to know that she was Her Majesty the New Master of China, Her Majesty the War Leader, a patriot and a nationalist—a very popular image two years after the fire in the Yuanmingyuan Palace. (This event was collectively perceived as bringing shame on a China defeated by eighteen thousand English and French troops who had marched into Peking and burnt the palace: “The smoke spread through the whole city,” wrote one English officer in his diary, “and the Yuanmingyuan Palace was so vast that flakes of black soot fell from the sky onto the city’s inhabitants for three whole weeks.”) That is how Seventy-one, so favoured by his great-aunt, the supreme regent, embarked on a fatal involvement with the anti-Western struggle from as early as his hundredth day. Unfortunately for him, this was the only time in his life his name was associated with a victory.”
The following day Tumchooq and I went to the Pavilion of Pure Sound. The sky was overcast, with low clouds drifting over the frozen sea of the Forbidden City’s golden roofs in the middle of which four buildings surrounded by red columns form an enormous square around the famous Pavilion of Pure Sound, its three stages set one above the other, rising several dozen metres into the air and thus, according to the museum brochure sold on site, allowing performances to take place in three different spaces simultaneously: Hell, the earthly world and Paradise. This same brochure indicates that the imperial palace actually has two theatres, a small one kept for romantic dramas and more intimate plays, and a large one, the Pavilion of Pure Sound, which, during Cixi’s fifty-year reign, was almost exclusively devoted to performances of her favourite production: Mulian Saves His Mother.
For the first performance, the scene was set and the audience watched the protagonists plural lives simultaneously on the triple stage: past, present and future, each occupying one level of the building and establishing its independence by ignoring the existence of the other two. The viewer was offered three different theatrical styles: tragic, comic and poetic. (On the first day, Tumchooq told me, the audience displayed general indifference to these tales they had known by heart since childhood; only visual pleasure triumphed, a pleasure due not to the magnificent sets or sumptuous costumes, but to the physical beauty of the performers, young eunuchs aged between fifteen and eighteen, dressed as men or women and some of whom had that gift beyond human perfection, beyond categories of male and female: the ravishing voice of a castrato.)
The next day the performance still took place on three separate stages: on the top level, seen from far below, the protagonist Mulian stood at the gates of Paradise, but his thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, were expressed by the sublime voice which guided the viewers gaze towards the earthly world where one could see his mother abandoning him as a child, then towards the infernal world where the mother was quite unrecognisable, transformed into a demon consumed by perpetual hunger and condemned to suffering cruel torture for all eternity. The mother’s and son’s voices seemed to answer each other, letting fly mutual accusations of sometimes extraordinary violence, from Heaven to Hell. Then came the reconciliation and their two voices crossed the earthly world to find each other, embrace and be united.
It was not until the third day that a vertical staging was laid on, celebrating the triumph of filial love, which lies at the heart of the Chinese moral code. The protagonist progressed from top to bottom using ladders and ropes camouflaged behind elements of the set, or taking perilous leaps to propel himself from one space to the next to save his famished mother. When the son succeeded in controlling his mother, who was trying to devour him, the performance reached its climax: to stop them from escaping, the Lord of the Underworld transformed the
lowest space into a gigantic inferno. The hero had to carry his mother on his back and climb up to the intermediary space, the earthly world, but floodwater from the Yellow River, drowning everything in its path, kept driving them back down to the Underworld, where they were swallowed up by flames. As they vanished, a light suddenly sprang up on the highest stage, ripping through the floorboards of the triple set so the hero could rise up with his mother, ascending vertically, climbing ever upwards, unhindered, to Heaven.
Following the map in the brochure, we entered Cixi’s private box: a low-slung building with a large opening facing the Pavilion of Pure Sound. There, from behind a wide, finely sculpted screen, she had enjoyed a panoramic view of the triple stage, sheltered from the gaze of her male guests, who were seated in two other buildings on either side of hers. The large room she used as a box was empty, there was nothing left—not her seat, the lacquered screen, any furniture or the great fan wafted by four indefatigable eunuchs silently re-creating the gentle breath of a soft summer breeze for her. In that Year of the Cockerel 1862 she would have been in mourning; her husband, the emperor Xianfeng, having died the previous year. Did her son, the child emperor Tongzhi, who was then four, ever come to this box? If so, where would he have sat? The brochure had nothing to say on the subject.
“I imagine,” Tumchooq said, “that in one of the many intervals Cixi would have had her great-nephew brought to her box, given that the celebrations for his first hundred days were theoretically the main reason for the festivities. As an amateur soothsayer, Her Majesty the Master of China had probably felt the baby’s still-soft skull, fingering its topography centimetre by centimetre, trying to find a sign of the nations destiny, some irregular protuberance announcing military talent or anti-Western feelings. In a thirteen-hundred-page book called An Anthology of Archives from the Intendant to the Court of the Qing Dynasty,” he went on, “I found a few lines indicating the sort of favours Cixi bestowed on her great-nephew: throughout his childhood the intendant’s department sent him birthday gifts on the orders of the dowager empress; never the silk cloth or ink made in the Court workshops that other children in the imperial family received, but silver stirrups, a Mongolian saddle, a miniature suit of armour, a soldiers helmet, a compass … always things imbued with virile, if not martial, aggressiveness, as if to proclaim: ‘Be a hero who will win the wars I wage.’ In 1874, for his twelfth birthday, the book records simply: twelve arrows.