by Dai Sijie
16TH FEBRUARY
Where are you?
21ST FEBRUARY
Met Tumchooq’s mother at her house. Didn’t achieve much. Mutual mistrust.
5TH MARCH
In an envelope posted from a small town on the Chinese-Burmese border, I found this letter in Chinese:
Paul d’Ampère is dead. The pig-keeper is dead. The Frenchman is dead. My father is dead. The river is dead. The mountains are dead. China is dead. The sky is dead. The earth is dead. The world is dead. Everything’s dead.
On the 26th of January, two days before I reached the camp, some prisoners started a rumour that there was a newborn piglet with red hair. My father was accused of raping the sow, a completely aberrant fabrication, and he died in a scrum of frenetic prisoners descending upon him in a collective lynching.
I’m in mourning for him and will be for the rest of my life. I’ve sworn I’ll never go back to Peking, the capital of the country that assassinated my father—even to see you. Writing to you will be the last time I use the language of my father’s assassins. I will never utter another word of Chinese. I’d rather die. I’m not yet ready to give up on everything and resort to suicide in a final act of protest, but that’s mainly because the fable told by Buddha in Tumchooq on the scroll is incomplete. I’m prepared to travel all over Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal… because my father, who never succeeded in finding the text in the Chinese Buddhist canon, was convinced that the complete fable did exist in the canon of the Hinayana school of thought. Oh, Buddha! I long for this so achingly and sincerely! Only you can fulfil my wishes and grant my father gentle, peaceful rest as a final offering from his son.
I buried him beside the River Lu. I would have liked to build a vaulted tomb like a gothic cathedral, but his status as a prisoner and my pitiful greengrocer’s finances meant all I could do was add another ordinary gravestone to the ones already there, in a vast desolate necropolis stretching several kilometres along the river under the cliffs; a place covered in yellowing brambles, strewn with graves, which mostly have no stone and no name, a hotchpotch of rubble, half-buried under the earth.
For now, his grave still looks new, but soon it, too, will be overrun by weeds, Death’s timekeepers, and it, too, like all the others, will become part of the landscape. In a few years, if that part of China is opened to foreigners and if you want to make a pilgrimage there before it crumbles, don’t go in the rainy season but the dry season, when the waters that flood the graveyard have ebbed away. You’ll recognise my father’s grave; there’s nothing engraved on the stone, in keeping with his last wish, which he swore me to respect: nothing, not a word or his name or a date, just a rough, white stone and its wavering reflection on the surface of the water, along with the reflection of the clouds, the sky and the trees, like in a dream.
30TH MARCH
Weeks later Tumchooq’s letter still causes me pain, especially as his words are now associated with a smell of medicine, formalin, disinfectant, the gynaecologist’s and nurses’ breath, the smell of the hospital, where, after he’d left, I had an abortion, and during the operation, in between snatches of his letter, which I recited to myself, alongside the snap of rubber gloves, the clink of scissors, scalpels and other metallic instruments, I heard, or thought I heard, a whimper from the foetus—the endearing but contradictory excrescence of our dead love, ripped from my body Every time the memory of that whimper resurfaces I try to persuade myself it was pure hallucination, produced by the physical pain, but even though this soothing hypothesis is plausible and eases my suffering, some nights I still think I can hear that feeble cry.
Because of haemorrhaging, the gynaecologist kept me in hospital for a few days. I shared a room with seven Chinese women, all of whom had turbans tightly bound round their foreheads, and this, according to their customs, would protect them from the stealthy onset of evil postnatal energies, which could subject them to chronic incurable migraines for the rest of their lives. The door to the ward kept opening as the parents of newly delivered mothers came to visit; when they finally left, the door would swing open again, this time for the colleagues of another patient. I found these constant visits, punctuating our days until late in the evening, unbearably moving, not for the human warmth or family solidarity they demonstrated, but because I saw newborn babies being shown off, a scene endlessly repeated, as if on purpose, bringing tears to my eyes and making me shake with envy. Even if the baby wasn’t particularly beautiful or contented, it only had to look randomly in my direction to unleash a surge of vicious jealousy in me, a jealousy that neither Tumchooq nor any other man before or after him had ever or would ever ignite in me. I would have suffered less in a prison cell than in that ward where a demographic sample of married women, all of them at least ordinary if not downright stupid, already had a foothold in Heaven. That ward was their paradise, but it was Hell for me.
I remember an anecdote my father told me: for a long time he was troubled by a tumour on his prostate and the whole time he was ill he didn’t dream, but a week after his operation, which was more or less successful, he had a dream. I had the same beginnings of recovery on my third night in hospital when, for the first time since Tumchooq left, I had a dream. It was a dream I’d already had a few months earlier in the greengrocer’s shop on Little India Street, but I didn’t immediately recognise it. The mountain path was covered in thick fog through which I could barely make out a faltering glow of light, which grew gradually brighter as it drew closer, eventually turning out to be a torch made of bamboo canes, as in my previous dream. This time I was the one holding it. It was attracting a cloud of moths, invisible until they reached me, milling from all sides to dance about, captivated by that one splash of light in the mountains, describing thousands and thousands of trajectories around me. Some were enormous, the most extraordinary shapes, with stripes in such fantastic colours they blurred my sight, which was already struggling to make out the sides of the path through the mist. Even though I was edging forwards like a sleepwalker, I had a vague sense of déjà vu, a sort of recollection, like when you sit at a piano and play a Beethoven sonata you’ve heard someone else play. It amplifies the emotion, each note has a different ring to it under your fingers, putting you in a sort of trance. With this dream I knew the script, I knew there was a fall lying in wait for me, but all my vigilance and precautions proved pointless, I couldn’t avoid the inevitable: putting one foot wrong. I let go of the torch and clung to a tuft of wild grass by the side of the path to try to stop myself from crashing to the base of the cliff. The moths were invisible again now, humming around my ears, their wings flitting over my nose and skimming past my lips, as if trying to get inside my mouth. I can remember when I woke up feeling a kind of euphoria, like when a close friend you’ve almost forgotten because they’re so far away suddenly reappears. That torn roll of silk was the only thing Tumchooq had left me. At the time I felt an almost deeper affection for that fable, which had surrendered itself to me so entirely, than I did for Tumchooq, while the person who introduced me to its mystery had decided to distance himself and make it impossible for me to share in his suffering.
After that dream I walked out of the hospital ward and scuttled down the stairs like a fugitive. There was no one in the reception area for the gynaecology unit, but there was a cold smell of milk, an aggressive smell of nurseries, which made me reel in disgust.
I cut across the cycle park, then a huge deserted courtyard. The night watchman was asleep. I found myself out on a cold, dark, grey street. A road sweeper in blue uniform, armed with a long broom with a bamboo handle, was picking up rubbish and dead leaves. The icy wind made me shiver, and with every step I took I felt a slight pain deep inside, but I set off on a long solitary walk, driven partly by a tentative new energy, partly for other reasons I can’t explain.
All at once I understood from the distinctive smell of the street I was walking along that I was in the middle of the Muslim quarter of Peking. The shops were clos
ed, but the deserted street was permeated by a stale smell of mutton and beef. I walked past the mosque and along the perimeter wall of the Buddhist University which was once very famous—for instructing high-ranking monks—but had been closed since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and still was, even after Mao’s death. Through gaps in the crumbling wall I caught glimpses of buildings under construction, bamboo scaffolding, twinkling with frost in the glare of spotlights.
After the university I went past the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist Association, considered throughout the country as the supreme authority of this religion. It was still dark. There was something touching about that night-time walk, which plunged me into a state of melancholy: the cold of Peking, its gloomy half-light … soon I would be leaving them for ever, I knew that, out of love for Tumchooq. “I’ll do what he’s done”—that was the determined decision I’d made during the abortion.
There was a fragrance hanging in the air, exquisite yet light and one I couldn’t immediately identify, but eventually recognised: incense. Like a taste of what lay ahead, that delicate smell filling the streets steered me to the Temple of the “Source of Truth.” I hesitated outside the doors, guarded by two stone lions, but had hardly touched them before they swung open silently before me and I was instantly bathed in so much heat, so much candlelight, the smell of chrysanthemums and of incense, that I stayed on the doorstep for a long time, feeling as if a gentle blessing had touched my forehead with that waft of warm air.
A group of monks—how many of them were there? thirty? fifty?—came into the main hall, knelt down and began intoning a prayer chant so beautiful I started praying with them and singing, not in Chinese like them, but in French; first for my aborted baby’s soul or its ghost, then for its grandfather’s, Paul d’Ampère, for its father, Tumchooq, and also for myself.
To this day I don’t know whether at the time (things are so different and indefinable when you’re young), given the barbarous gang murder of Paul d’Ampère and Tumchooq’s irrevocable departure, whether there were any options other than the hasty decisions I made, which, like Tumchooq’s, were more a protest, a cry from the heart, than an actual choice: leaving the country and never speaking its language again. Did I consider for a moment that such a decisive act was a waste of long years of study and work intended to achieve a doctorate, and would arouse anger and disappointment in my family who financed my studies? I don’t remember. The only elements engraved on my memory were packing my bags and the terrible wrench of having to leave behind my books in Chinese, a condition of my commitment. I took a long time deciding what to do with them, stood gazing at them for hours, particularly the ones that Tumchooq and I had unearthed at the flea market in the “Pan Family Gardens” (a market only open at dawn, where treasure hunters rummaged through mountains of paper under the feeble halo of street lamps, a hazy, dreamy light filled with dancing motes of dust).
The courtyard outside my dormitory was silent and deserted. Like a thief, using just the tips of my fingers, I opened a book with a stitched cover, the once white thread now blackened with age, and leafed through it for the last time; it was a book of notes made by an erudite member of the Qing dynasty on ancient books he had read. The paper was thin, made of hemp, and the ideograms—printed in vertical lines not using lead characters as they are now, but from engraved wooden boards steeped in black ink—seemed to me to have a life of their own. Each page quivered in my fingers, as if the scholar had transmitted his very soul into the book. His words, I could tell, had jealously harboured this soul until that very moment and were now distilling it in me. On the brink of abandoning my radical decision to sever all links with Chinese, I bent closer to read what he had written, but, unbelievably, even though I perfectly understood the structure, punctuation, hidden meanings, syntactical subtleties, etc., I couldn’t pronounce a word out loud. My tongue froze, my lips refused to move, not a single sound came from my mouth. Disturbed by this perilous, almost nightmarish experience, I watched as the sentences dissolved before my eyes into isolated ideograms, unconnected signs in which all I could read were the insults and whoops of joy bellowed by the prisoners who had lynched Paul d’Ampère. Murderous words. Once again, imaginary or not, I heard the muffled cry of the foetus, filling me with shame and terror, which drove me on. In a hysterical outburst, shedding tears that were as uncontrollable as they were liberating, with brash, almost masculine movements amplified by the cold, I lit a fire in the deserted courtyard and threw all my books onto it. Licked by the flames, those precious works began to turn red, yellow, black, eventually reduced to cinders. Watching the flakes of black ash, light as goosedown, wafting up, hanging in the air, drifting off in the darkness and falling back down on my head, I realised just how much I loved and how closely I identified with Tumchooq. “I am Tumchooq,” I told myself.
PART TWO
WANDERINGS
1979 – 1990
1
IN APRIL 1373, ONE YEAR AND FOUR months after arriving in Peking—where I had acquired not only a perfect Chinese accent but also a rich vocabulary, including the city’s own vernacular with its distinct, palatalised sounds—I broke off with China (no, you can’t ever break off with China, only run away from it) and went back to Paris, to the Latin Quarter. I moved into Concordia, a student hall of residence close to the Rue Mouffetard.
Though typically French, this pedestrian street with medieval paving stones is not without similarities to Little India Street. It is just as narrow and slightly winding with a long, gentle slope edged with souvenir shops, perfumeries, chemists, a post office, Greek restaurants, bookshops, newspaper kiosks, butchers, cheesemongers, shops selling orthopaedic shoes, children’s clothes, leather bags and, where it crosses the Rue de l’Arbalète, a street market for fruit and vegetables which exhales the same odoriferous (a word Proust often used) smells as Tumchooq’s shop. Apart from two or three items from Africa, it sells more or less the same things, perhaps in better condition, in brighter, more commercial colours. The salesmen are mostly of Arab origin and as they holler the names of the vegetables and their prices they remind me of Tumchooq’s colleagues, lame and in poor health, shouting with little real energy, but who adopted me without any political prejudice, thinking of me as part of the shop’s family What I should have done, and I regret not doing, was to go and say goodbye to them or at least witness one last time the collective theft from the State’s tills in those few seconds of deliberate darkness.
In my frequent bouts of nostalgia I spent a lot of time in that market on the Rue Mouffetard, not buying anything, happy just to gaze at the vegetables, touch them, smell them. Sometimes my old friend White-Tuft—my Peking rabbit, another victim of assassination—popped into my mind and I remembered him nibbling my hand when I offered him the vegetables Tumchooq had given me. A few years later, when I moved to the Rue Daguerre, I found an almost identical market. Little India Street was definitely following me around.
Returning to Paris was a pleasure and I got back into the rhythm of more harmonious times. I was lucky to get a room at Concordia, once a delightful private home, now converted into a students’ hall of residence, with a huge reception room on the ground floor complete with domed ceiling, immaculately waxed parquet floor, an untuned grand piano and a pair of double doors opening onto the garden. To the right of the reception room was a cheap canteen, perfectly suited to my limited means—a loan from the Banque National de Paris, which I eventually finished paying off many years later. To the left was the television room, where we had a democratic vote every evening to decide which channel to watch, and the reading room, where every inch of wall space was covered in bookshelves laden with general encyclopaedias, Larousse dictionaries, every sort of language dictionary, etc. On the imposing marble-topped reading tables were porcelain lamps with green shades, giving a soft, pleasant light, which soothed my painful memories of China. I discovered almost the exact same lights in the library at my college (where we sat between the bookshelve
s), the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, where I enrolled in the first year to study Tibetan.
I decided to take this new tack in my university education with Tumchooq’s tacit agreement, at least that was what I imagined, hoping he hadn’t forgotten our past discussions about Tibet. In intellectual terms, Tumchooq was one of those Chinese (was he really and is he still?) who lived in a state of disillusion with his own culture for a long time and then, in the 1980s, hoped to find new inspiration from the Tibetans. In personal terms, in his search for the missing part of the sutra, Tibet fired his imagination, because its culture was so imbued with Buddhism he assumed that the integral text from the torn scroll should logically be somewhere among all the sacred works accumulated over the centuries by the Tibetans—at least a Tibetan version if not actually a Tumchooq one. Who knows? I once read a book by a German author that told the story of a scholar looking for the oldest map of Tibet: in a nomads tent in the middle of the Mongolian steppe he came across a hundred or so pages of text written in an unknown language, which the owner considered to be a “relic from Buddha,” refusing to let him have it whatever price and whatever terms he suggested. The German scholar only secured the right to photograph them. As the inside of the tent was too dark, the shots were taken outside in windy conditions and, despite their precautions and best efforts to keep the pages relatively if precariously still, when the photographs were developed on his return to Europe they all proved to be failures, out of focus, condemned without question to the dustbin. Learning Tibetan had been our common aim, for Tumchooq and me, and by doing this I felt I was involving myself in his late fathers unfinished undertaking.