by Dai Sijie
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 space 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 glasses, 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 sadists 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 circumstances. 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 passion. 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 space of a year he accumulated 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 passages 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 scrap 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 banal gesture of picking up a scrap 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 shit 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 astonishing 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 passages are inaudible, but this was a more or less accurate account of Hu Feng’s first contact with the text of the mutilated manuscript. The recorded document 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 glasses 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, grasses 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 spaces, just images of animals: lions, leopards, cobras, giraffes. Night after night Hu Feng explored those fabulous animals, carefully tracing them, tentatively pronouncing their names, analysing them, dissecting them, performing morphological and phonetic autopsies on them, and comparing them to those he knew already. After a while he felt he had lived with them all his life, penetrating the thoughts of their creator, a faithful companion to their evolution.
In his dreams he sometimes saw himself on the platform of a small station with a dozen or so children he had delivered from a goods train whose wagons were locked with metal bars. But he had forgotten one poor child who was now setting off again in the train, and, still full of their successful escape, the saviour didn’t notice the spewing steam and the carriages beginning to move. The train drew slowly away, gathered speed and hurtled into a tunnel while Hu Feng started running after it, so nearly catching up … Then the orphan would appear to him as he truly was, as the ones he had saved were too: a word in Tumchooq—one he had struggled with for a long time without succeeding in deciphering—disguised as a child who wanted to escape with him. Much later, when the word was no longer an obstacle for him, when he knew all its derivatives, compounds and conjugations like the back of his hand, he would still remember the image from his dream every time he came across it, as if each stroke of that simple word carried within it the terror in an abandoned child’s eyes.
“Bit by bit the text emerged from the shadows,” he explained to his wife. “When I read it from beginning to end for the first time I felt as if I were in a plane—what unimaginable luxury for a prisoner—which had been delayed on the ground an unbearably long time, then lurched and slid along the runway, but was now taking off at last. I was slowly rising up to the silent heights of all the beauty that was Tumchooq. Overhead island clouds floated by, some dark grey others brilliant white, and here and there I could make out a patch of forest, a frozen pond, an area of rice paddy, and I started thinking, although the idea itself is ridiculous, I was gliding over islands of the languages I had landed on in the past: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, English. Then I recognised what they were: my own works in Chinese, their solid pedestrian prose constantly shackled by society, by banality and more particularly by [inaudible word] dictatorship. While my Chinese writing only very occasionally takes flight, Tumchooq prose, now that dances.”
History, in this instance the transcript of the recorded visit, does not elaborate on the reaction of the writers wife. It may well have been like that of a woman whose husband is missing and presumed dead but who still waits, watching out for the slightest sign of his possible return. Now that her husbands memory was resuscitated it would truly be a miracle if his writing—even in a language she didn’t understand at all—were also resuscitated, more powerful, more ethereal and more admired than ever. To her, Tumchooq was the Saviour, a God whose mythical power was further reinforced by these words from her husband: “I can’t allow myself to recite the text to you, not because it’s incomplete, but because the beauty of the language can’t be translated. It’s almost too beautiful to survive in this world. In my opinion, neither I nor any living Chinese writer would be able to convey half its charm, we could only translate it word for word, giving the bare bones without the flesh and life. It reminds me of my unfortunate experience translating Gogol: despite my best efforts and however much my work was praised, the beauty of the original slipped through my fingers. It hurt so much I wept, and I think of all those unfortunate people in the world—God knows how many of them there are—who don’t read Russian and will die some day without ever experiencing the beauty of Gogol’s prose. How appalling!”
The camp directors eventually made a collective decision to separate the Frenchman and Hu Feng after receiving a report denou
ncing these two thought criminals who, one Christmas Eve (this was confirmed using a Western calendar), went too far by treating themselves to a taunting, provocative celebration, which deftly insulted the camp’s food regulations and defied the rules of their incarceration. It was a windless night, the hundred mine shafts were silent and the inside of the barrack room was bitterly cold; during a pause between two rounds of chess played in the dark, the Frenchman carried on chatting to his opponent. No one knew whether this was totally improvised, a premeditated act or whether he was talking in his sleep, but the writer, whose voice had a very distinctive ring to it, was suddenly heard translating his partner’s words sentence by sentence. A peculiar dialogue, one speaking in Tumchooq, the other in Chinese, like a medium interpreting a barely audible, incomprehensible voice from another world in the shadowy hut.
“It’s a recipe from the western Pyrenees, the land of my glorious ancestors. I tasted it as a child but forgot all about it until I came across it in Marco Polo’s writings in a passage describing how to make a concoction which Europeans were still unfamiliar with in the Venetian’s days and which we now call by a name taken from Aztec: chocolate.”
As the word doesn’t exist in Tumchooq he said it in English, mouthing it so softly in that silent dormitory you could almost hear it melting on his tongue: it resonated in his fellow prisoners’ ears, but most if not all of them had no idea what chocolate was, and the writer, touched by their ignorance, paused for a long time as he delved into his distant memories to give them this explanation: