Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “I confessed in order to bring the interrogation to an end, and because a hint of amnesia clouded my mind, but the cause and scope of that amnesia are still a mystery to me. So much happened in that exhibition hall for instruments of torture and death, but all I remember are sentences, or rather a few words, particularly his, and those words brought with them (and continued to do so with terrible clarity through the period of my punishment) a unique sense of disgust which eclipses everything else: confessions made to please the police, incarceration, depression …

  “In fact, it was Ma who instigated our game. He started by giving me a title, attributing it to me for the first and last time that evening: The Chairman. ‘Mister Chairman, would you have a look at this cage, which I’m not sure should be classified in the wood category. Naturally, you don’t remember my name, being such a busy man. Everyone calls me Old Deng. I’m the Assistant Security Manager. From Sichuan. If you’d like to watch, I’ll give you a little demonstration of how this cage works. I’ve got everything ready. First, a strong rope. Like this. Could someone tie me up like a condemned man? Thank you. Squeeze a little tighter, please, Mister Chairman. The prisoner’s in exactly this position with his hands and feet tied, inside the cage, held up entirely by his head, his neck clamped tightly between the bars at the top. Ouch! My Adam’s apple! Do you see? The victim then dies, slowly. Why? In my humble opinion, Mister Chairman, it’s intended to prolong his suffering. Look closely. My feet are on the wooden floor. But what a floor! A movable floor, which the executioner lowers one notch every day so our poor man dies of strangulation on the eighth, as the sign I’ve just read indicates. It’s the exact count: eight days for his vertebrae to snap under the weight of his own body hanging in the air. Would you like to have a go? Well done! Go ahead, Mister Chairman, and again, go down one more notch! Can you see my Adam’s apple going up and down? Your prisoner’s suffering at this very moment, Mister Chairman. No, despite all the respect I have for you, I can’t communicate any information about your father. I don’t know where he is. No one’s told me anything. Stop! Help! I’m … suffocating … can’t … breathe … Let me go … Fucking bastard, that hurt, I nearly died. You’re a cruel bastard like your father … I … I … He … Help! I’ll tell you everything I know. Your father married your mother in order to inherit a manuscript which belonged to Seventy-one, but the old man had already sold it to an exiled poet, who’d since died. The poet’s son agreed to sell the scroll to your father, but not for money, or a house, or land, just in exchange for your mother your mother your mother your mother your mother your mother your mother your mother … So what if you don’t want to hear any more, I’m the one who wants to keep going now. Go on, cry! Your father sold your mother with you inside her for the sake of a manuscript! He was condemned to twenty-five years in prison for trafficking a human being. It was your mother who denounced him, after she escaped from Manchuria, to drag him through the courts.’

  “I still remember Ma’s last scream. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to die! I let the wooden floor down to the last notch and ran off, leaving him to strangle himself on his own in the cage. A few hours later some policemen came to arrest me at the house of Mr. Liu, our old teacher. At reform school I heard that Ma was saved at the last minute by the museums curator; he regained consciousness in hospital and his mother came to take him away to live with her in the country.”

  4

  TIME HAS PASSED. I’VE COME SOME way but not as far as I would have liked in my research. Teaching Chinese has turned into a full-time job for me; I’ve been doing it for five years now in a private lycée in Nice. Day after day I swim through a sea of ideograms and—even though I claim not to have touched the floor of this ocean and have stayed quite close to the shore, watching, fascinated, as seagulls circle noisily overhead—I have reached the point where those seas have taken possession of me. I’m becoming more and more Chinese and, like all Chinese people, attach a great deal of importance to years of birth. Tumchooq was born in 1954, the Year of the Horse in the Chinese horoscope. I still remember the calendar for 1978, which he gave me when he was twenty-four, on the threshold of the third decade of his life; the Year of the Horse was illustrated on the front cover by a herd of horses stampeding towards me.

  The image of another horse also depicted in that calendar, on the page for the month of May, lights up in the shadows of my memory and glows like a torch floating in darkness. Unlike the horses drawn in Chinese ink illustrating other months, this one was a brightly coloured watercolour, which I instantly recognised as being by Father Castagnari, an Italian Jesuit missionary There was no signature or artists seal, only those of its successive owners, but I had already seen and studied in depth another of his watercolours at the Guimet Museum in Paris, the image of a Milu entitled David’s Deer. His astonishing virtuosity and a style so neutral it was impossible to know to what extent the painter-priest identified with his subject, these were etched on my memory as clearly as the appearance of this mythic hybrid.

  Father Castagnari, faithful to the traditions of previous generations of Jesuits committed to evangelising China since the sixteenth century, had adopted a Chinese name in order to facilitate his task (according to inquisitors in Rome, barbarous baptisms like this had a considerable effect on the Jesuits’ faith). His Chinese name, Lang Shi-Ling, meant “Peace of the World.” He arrived in China at the end of the seventeenth century and lived there for sixty years, appointed as official Court painter by three successive emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong), and became the only man, with the exception of the monarch himself, allowed to cross the line between the Outer Court and Inner Court, stepping into the enormous imperial harem, where he worked from morning till night painting portraits of countless concubines. The emperor used these portraits every evening to choose his partner, so exemplary were the objectivity, rigorous realism and detailed precision of the missionary painter’s work—enough to make a photographer blench with envy.

  These qualities all appeared in the picture of a horse chosen to illustrate the month of May. A less grandiose and expressive portrait than those on other pages, with no background of steppes, mountains and vast battlefields, no whiff of gunpowder or violence, befitting the artists Chinese name. No trace either of those distant landscapes at which Chinese artists excel, melting into a sort of hazy mist on the horizon. Castagnari’s picture has a plain, flat background in a very distinctive blue peculiar to him and a key part of his semi-European, semi-Chinese style, a hybrid of cultures that exudes a peacefulness, serenity and limpidity that only true sages can achieve.

  At first sight, his horse is like an illustration from a natural history textbook. But on closer inspection you can see that the saddle and stirrup (which is filigreed so as not to be cumbersome) shine with the gleam of pure gold, with unparalleled beauty, and seem to glow from inside. The muscles, which have the precision of anatomical drawings, are animated by a palpable energy, you can feel the blood beating through the invisible veins. The thick, black-grey hooves spattered with mud and grass, the forefeet slightly raised, shod with iron shoes nailed into place, the sheathed penis with its pattern of thick veins, the raised head, three-quarters turned, the eyes studying you, one less sparkling than the other, the dark pupil gleaming in a milky iris … nothing escapes the Italian Jesuit, not even the shadow on the soft, pink gums through the half-open jaw. The horse is whinnying through flared nostrils, while a fleeting wind ripples its sumptuous mane; the latter, a striking russet colour, is the most beautiful thing about it. Being a scrupulous observer, Father Castagnari presents us with every nuance of red to admire—glowing, dark and matt, or lighter—in the minute details of the long, waving hairs standing up along the neck and quivering in the wind, while others fall in a slow avalanche along its flanks, suspended in the air as if frozen for all eternity.

  Tumchooq handed me the calendar open on the page of that red horse, and said:

  “I’m going to write a dedication for you.”


  His slightly leaking quill formed a series of strokes in the white space above the horse; working from right to left, they slowly created strange, exquisitely sinuous shapes. Some signs appeared several times, like the letters of some alphabet I didn’t know, an enigmatic alphabet, abstract drawings rather like a cryptogram or a message made up only of the initial letters of each word.

  “What language is it in?” I asked.

  “That’s Tumchooq, the language I’m named after.”

  He smiled at me. When he had finished his dedication in Tumchooq, he read it out several times, syllable by syllable; his voice reverberated around the greengrocer’s shop and the sound of it reawakened the feeling I had the evening I first heard his name, beneath a veil of fine rain, bordering on mist. The words he murmured sounded like a secret formula full of unfamiliar sounds, producing a vertiginous dizziness in me, a sweet intoxication, like drifting grains of sand bathing all my senses.

  “I am a red-haired horse,” he then translated, “called Tumchooq.”

  By nature he always exaggerated a little, but he genuinely was different to his fellow Chinese, and when he took off his hallmark cap I saw, in among his black crew-cut hair, a considerable number of upright hairs that gleamed a pure, fiery red, just as on his ill-shaven cheeks some of the hairs were red; quite the self-portrait by van Gogh!

  But he didn’t talk about Paul d’Ampère that day, not yet. And certainly not about why some of his hairs were red.

  I need to go back to a family trip during my teenage years to dig up memories of my first contact with that prestigious name, which rings round the Ivory Tower of Oriental Studies: Paul d’Ampère. It was a grey day almost devoid of light and, travelling in a hire car driven alternately by my mother and father, we went to the chateau at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet in the heart of the western Pyrenees, about a hundred kilometres from Perpignan. I don’t remember much about the chateau itself, except that it was in the Romanesque style, was open to the public, had a collection of gloves in a glass display case and the pair I remember best was in white kid with masses of tiny buttons, and the estate was so vast that, to visit it, you had to take a little steam train, its trail of smoke describing a wide curve along a narrow gorge edged by a torrent plunging down from goodness knows where, while a man—who was at once driver, conductor and tour guide—recited through a microphone his inflated history of the previous owners, the d’Ampère family, their long and glorious past, and their connections and inter-marriages with other prestigious families of European aristocrats.

  My clearest memory of that visit was a hanging garden on the side of a cliff; you climbed down to it along a wooded, little-used path, and when I arrived the sun made a timid appearance, then swiftly tore through the clouds, building power until the garden glittered in the middle of dark green vegetation, like a desert island bathed in light. The garden had no plants or flowers, but was made up entirely of minute, slippery-smooth pebbles meticulously arranged to create the illusion of undulating waves, each driven forward by the next, so that I felt I could almost hear the sound of their jostling embrace, like the whisper of seas calling to each other. A tide frozen in time, overlooking the tops of huge trees, beech, pine, lime, spruce, birch and aspen, all quivering in the wind, answering its marine murmuring. Standing on a black rock, a solitary figure in the middle of those pebbles, like a pilot on a boat, I thought I heard a foghorn sound and felt the rock pitching beneath my feet as foaming waves broke over it. Then the sun dropped down, the pebbles darkened, the garden blended into the mountain and the mountain into the sky, waiting for the return of their creator, the last d’Ampère, the orientalist Paul, who—according to the sign—had left for China to devote himself to his research and become a Chinese citizen.

  Before leaving, he relinquished his inheritance and handed over his family’s entire legacy—which until then had been passed down from one generation to the next through the centuries—to the State. According to some accounts, that garden had once been the place where he meditated. (Did he sit on the black rock? Did he lie in the hammock still hanging between two trees like a net luggage rack on a train, listening for nights at a time as nocturnal birds conversed with crickets, bats, mosquitoes, lizards and tawny owls with astonishingly wide, staring eyes?) Some claimed he had copied the “sea of stones” from a Zen garden in Kyoto; others said the garden represented the graveyard of a long lineage and bore witness to the folly of an aristocratic young intellectual, spoiled by life and behaving extraordinarily irresponsibly.

  Years later, before I left for China, I went to the National Library in Paris to consult the monumentally extensive book of this Paul d’Ampère, whose chateau I had visited as a girl. As a third-year student of Chinese confronted with his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World, three volumes of one thousand five hundred pages published by the Sorbonne in 1952, 1953 and 1954, I was in turn seduced, dazzled, exhausted and, finally, literally crushed, as much by the enormity of his work as by the miracles or rather mirages Paul d’Ampère created on every page, almost every line. In places I felt I was walking through these mirages, initially made up of words in a particular language, then reconstituting themselves before my eyes in another language, then another, and yet another, all of them vanished centuries ago, some already dead in the days of Marco Polo, who had travelled all over those lands without knowing them. Reminiscences of Pali, Sanskrit, Tokharian, ancient Persian, Turkish, Chinese from before the time of Christ, all exhumed, resuscitated and contributing to his meticulous, endlessly patient investigations of the landscape, carried out one footstep at a time, year after year, for this erudite linguist was also an excellent topographer with a precise eye not devoid of humour.

  He was a genius capable of bringing back to life a vanished kingdom, a lost people, heroes and gods with the tip of his pen, just with his footnotes—some of which went on for two or three pages—with no emphasis or subjectivity, simply a scalpel’s precision. The illumination this author gave me was not that of great philosophers, nor of quick-witted intellectuals, but the low-angled light of a setting sun, revealing, for example, the upper part of a prodigiously beautiful golden stupa, looming from nowhere, rising up above other buildings, its base bathed in the round pond of a white marble fountain. A door opened for me and, quite without warning, words dropped all around me, stroking and kissing me like flowers in a Buddhist ceremony. But a curse fell on the town, and the stupa—Ta in Chinese—was struck by lightning on a stormy night and cleaved in two. The left half collapsed immediately, the right side survived another eight hundred years, then it, too, eventually collapsed shortly before Marco Polo’s arrival.

  Or he would show me palaces—more enchanting than Coleridge could have imagined under the effects of opium—built for Kublai Khan with gardens populated with stags, greenhouses of rare plants lit up at night, giant trees whose branches streamed with wine and the dark milk of mares with velvety names: Luyong, Limoo, Niya, Wiboor, Vivoor … Sometimes, halfway through my reading or as I closed the last page, I could no longer tell which of Marco Polo, Paul d’Ampère or myself had set out to those distant lands, stepped into such and such an oasis, come across a caravanserai laden with spices, precious stones and silks …

  All these kingdoms which once flourished along the Silk Route ended up, with no exceptions, buried under sand, where their fate was definitively sealed. Paul d’Ampère depicted the horrific death throes of these cultures, the desert, the Apocalypse, Hell—as suffered by the Tumchooq kingdom, that place shaped like a bird’s beak which touched me deep in my soul. Those waves of pebbles glittering deceptively, lulling me half to sleep, were eventually swallowed up by shadow. Death. Nothing left, except time immemorial.

  I had other literary encounters with Paul d’Ampère at the library in Peking beside the Northern Lake, in an encyclopaedia of linguistics published in Taiwan in 1975, which I eventually managed to lay my hands on. Even though he was not a pure linguist, part of the article on “Tumchoo
qology” was devoted to him under the title:

  THE PRECURSOR

  An exemplary career

  Born in France, at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet in the western Pyrenees, Paul d’Ampère left at a young age to live in Paris, where he studied Chinese at the Paris Institute of Oriental Languages. He then learned Sanskrit and other oriental languages at the University of Cologne under professor Thomas Müller. He arrived in China in 1945 and began travelling on foot, faithfully following Marco Polo’s itinerary. Two years later, so that he could have access to various places recorded in the Italian adventurers memoirs and closed to foreigners, he relinquished his French nationality and was naturalised as Chinese. This journey, a genuine single-handed desert crossing, took seven and a half years of his life. He was just thirty-five when he finished his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World, but was already ranked among the most respected scholars of his time. The kingdom of Tumchooq proved decisive for d’Ampère, who crowned his university career by deciphering the Tumchooq language, surpassing all previous attempts in the field.

  The discovery of a mutilated text

  In his colossal work, the kingdom of Tumchooq appears only in two footnotes and a scale map of the capital showing public squares, city walls, several temples (one of which was cupola-shaped and illuminated at night), as well as unidentified symbols apparently representing signs for small shops, the latter drawn by himself at the time that he exhumed and inspected the site.

  In 1952, during a trip to the Manchurian border, he met an exiled aristocrat more than one hundred years old who went by the nickname of Seventy-one, and at the old man’s home d’Ampère found a length of silk some forty centimetres by thirty, yellowed by time and, for reasons still unknown to this day, torn either by hand or with teeth, judging by the marks on the fabric. As for the story of its provenance, it smacks of a senile old man’s fanciful fabrication: it fell from the sky as an aeroplane flew overhead.