Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  When the main road from Chengdu to Tibet reaches Ya An it carries on climbing westwards for fifteen kilometres, and comes to the Pass 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 pass. 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 massive, 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 Pass 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 title 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 assailed 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 Pass 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 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 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 manuscript which, according to rumour, Hu Feng had secretly written during his long period in solitary confinement. It was called Storm on the River Lu, and some passages, for lack of ink, were written in blood pricked 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. Seen from above, the dormitories look like burnt matches, black carcasses 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 shimmered 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 shivering 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 assistant 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 shirt 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 snatches of words and icy breath, fading to moaning and mumbling—but never an obscenity or insult—until he was reduced to silence.