Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  I actually still have your personal samghati—the rags you wrapped around the side-pieces of your glasses, the lenses and frame having been destroyed by your assassins—and I keep them like a precious relic.

  The ruins of Pagan fill me with joy because they remind me of the year 1975, when I first met you in the visiting room at your camp. The large hall divided in two by a wooden grille wasn’t yet there because not many prisoners had visitors. I was taken to an office, where I sat or rather perched on a wooden stool so tall my feet didn’t reach the ground, facing another stool, which was incredibly low—a fitting place for an enemy of the people—and that was where you had to sit and look up to me. I waited an eternity until the door was eventually opened and then, forgetting the visiting rules, I jumped down from the stool and made for the door, half in a dream and half in the real world, not even hearing the warders shouting at me to get back to my seat. You weren’t yet a pig-keeper at that point, and had just come up from the gem mines; you were so muddy, broken and drained that I mistook you for Chinese and almost confused you with the old plain-clothed screw escorting you. Instead of “Dad,” different words—“Mr. Liu”—popped out of my mouth and rang round the room, rooting the warders to the spot. The name Liu didn’t correspond to your Chinese name Baolo (a transcription of Paul in Chinese) or my mother’s name, and therefore mine, which is Zhong. At the time neither of us reacted. We each sat in our intended places, exchanged a bit of small talk about my journey and then, speaking in a perfect Sichuan dialect, you suddenly asked:

  “What did you call me?”

  You’d barely finished the question before we both burst out laughing so loudly, despite the warders’ intervention, that I fell off my stool—the one reserved for the population at large—unable to control myself. You laughed so much the dirty rags around your glasses came undone and dangled from the side-pieces, swaying with every move of your head while your cheeks were wet with tears.

  Tradition and respect for the hierarchy of generations meant I’d never dared ask Mum about the circumstances of your arrest, even less about the reasons for the life sentence to which China had condemned you, but on that day, during that first visit, I felt more doubtful than ever that the little man sitting facing me on his low stool could have traded his wife for a manuscript.

  And even if you could have loved a piece of text more than a woman, did you know at the time of the transaction that she was pregnant?

  Perhaps not. At least I hope not.

  It’s strange, but I followed in your footsteps, many years later; I too have left a woman I love for the sake of a text, the same text. Like father, like son? Two spectacular bastards?

  (One question smacks me in the face as I write this, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner: Didn’t I leave Peking at a time when … like you, perhaps without your knowing … I haven’t got the heart or the strength to formulate the question—about my offspring, another Tumchooq, another manuscript-hunter?)

  These notes, which followed on from Paul d’Ampère’s, were jotted down roughly in Chinese on the squared paper of a Burmese schoolbook, written in pen, its nib gliding from left to right and accelerating in places, as if chasing its own shadow, chasing fleeting memories or a scene that came to mind with no warning and had to be captured straight away without rereading. Were these few notes the beginnings of a book or just a sketchy introduction to the frequent internal conversations he held with the late Mr. Liu, a Freudian slip he maintained, as far as I know, all through the years when he regularly visited his father at the camp in Sichuan?

  I discovered that schoolbook when I arrived in Pagan, in among other books and papers strewn over a low table in the house of the superior at the printing press-monastery a two-storey bamboo building on stilts on the side of a steep hill, protected from behind by the towering Achan mountains and facing out onto the mirror-like surface of the Irrawaddy as it flowed across a plain, irrigating rice paddies and disappearing along the valley. The monastery superior was travelling abroad and the main room in his house—which acted as an office, reading room and bedroom—was spacious but empty of furniture; sober, even austere. Visitors took off their shoes before stepping onto the floor of plaited bamboo, a cool surface that moved backwards and forwards underfoot, and they sat on a rush mat on the floor to take tea. Hanging from the roof at the far end of the room was the superiors bed, a simple mat, clean but old with holes in places, repaired with pieces of faded blue fabric. Above this hung a white nightshirt and an ochre-coloured tunic with only one very long sleeve, which reached right down to the floor. Neither of these, according to the monastery’s deputy who welcomed me very courteously, was a samghati (the robe of rags), because the master had taken his with him.

  He added (his words translated by Min, a young Sino-Burmese girl acting as my interpreter) that, of all the masters who had presided over the monastery, the present one, although still young, had the greatest reputation for his tremendous erudition, and that monks and followers came from the four corners of the country to listen to his teachings. One day he was visited by a delegation of Japanese monks and they had been so impressed by him that, on their return, they invited him to Kyoto to preside over an international symposium, and this explained his absence.

  I put my glass of tea down on the low table and was about to ask him to show me the stele in four languages which had brought me to Pagan when, completely by chance and for no apparent reason, I thought of Tumchooq for the first time in a long while. As I waited for the deputy to finish praising his master, I leafed through a schoolbook on the table. You know the rest. Before I even grasped what I was reading, I was shaken to the core, the words dancing before my eyes, the pages quivering in my hands as I trembled from head to foot. What a journey I’ve been on, I thought, to reach this moment which finally gives some meaning to my life, to these long years of drifting between different languages and different continents! Thank goodness.

  6

  TUMCHOOQ ARRIVED IN PAGAN IN THE early 1980s, the monastery deputy explained, retracing his story for me. A real vagrant: no one knew where he was from, because he remained utterly silent and had neither a passport nor any other administrative papers. At first he was employed in the kitchens, where he chopped vegetables from morning till night, not talking to anyone, so that for a long time he was thought to be mute.

  A few years later, when the paper mill needed another worker, he was sent there, although no one expected great results, because the process of making paper for sacred books requires exhausting, monotonous work as well as exceptional attention to detail. But people soon realised that the paper pulp obeyed him better than anyone else, from ageing monks to young novices. For three whole years he worked in silence, his hands permanently in water as he made paper, sheet by sheet. Then he was sent to the xylography workshop, where he became an unusually good engraver of texts.

  It was here that people realised he understood Pali, had a phenomenal memory, remembered every text (even the most complicated) he engraved and was able to translate them into Burmese, as if born with a Pali-Burmese dictionary in his head. Then one day he finally spoke, expressing himself in elegant, literary Burmese with a rich vocabulary, but also a slight accent and the occasional mistake, which betrayed his foreign origins.

  He made his vows after a six-year probationary period spent in the kitchens, the paper mill and the xylography workshop, where he had felt his vocation while observing all the rules of the monastery. He chose Tumchooq as his monastic name, a name which, according to him, appears in one of Buddha’s sutras or jatakas. The magical circumstances that accompanied his recitation of “The Path to Purification” (a classical work of the Hinayana doctrine) before the assembled monks was enough to convince them altogether, and the master of the monastery entrusted him with the key to the Cave of Treasure, where they kept all the engraving plates ever made since the establishment began. He shut himself away in there for many years to record and list the five hundred thousand plates
and, according to more malicious sources, to look for the sutra that features his own name. A sutra that no one in the area had ever heard of. When the monastery’s patriarch embarked on his journey to the beyond, to everyone’s surprise, it was to Tumchooq that he handed over his ragged samghati and his alms bowl, asking him to preside over his funeral. And so Tumchooq became the new master of the monastery.

  7

  A FEW HOURS AFTER I ARRIVED, THE MONKS held a long meeting to consider my request to stay in the monastery until my “close friend” returned from Japan. Their votes fell in my favour, given that there was no hotel in Pagan (which had been reduced to the size of a small village since the earthquake); and two extra woven mats—one for my interpreter and one for myself—were laid down in Tumchooq’s house on stilts, a little way away from the monks’ dormitories. Before going to bed that night we went to wash beside a well. I untied the black silk belt securing my scarlet tongyi, a long piece of fabric which I wore around my waist like the Burmese women, and poured a bucket of water over my head. As the water ran over my hair and seeped into my angyi (a sort of blouse with a high neck and full sleeves), it billowed and filled and I thought I would finally experience the peace that Heaven had so far refused me. What if, I wondered, I end up like my interpreter, with silver bracelets all the way from my wrists to my elbows and a pretty ring, a “nose flower,” in my nose?

  As I climbed the stairs back to the house on stilts I fainted for the first time; scalding waves of heat washed over me, I shivered with cold, chilled to the bone by the draught coming up through the woven bamboo floor. My old demon was back again, but was no longer satisfied with drenching me in a cold sweat and making my whole body feel like a thawing pond; it had its eye on something else, although I didn’t know what. My repeated fainting fits worried me more than the fever. I couldn’t find these symptoms listed anywhere, not even in the most exhaustive medical manuals, and I was worried they were a warning that I was losing my memory.

  The following morning my interpreter went to the dispensary at the lacquer school but, apart from medicines for everyday illnesses, she found nothing that would ease my suffering. She was reduced to pushing my hair aside in sections so that she could massage my scalp, as well as my temples and nostrils, with Tiger Balm. Towards the end of the afternoon the monastery deputy arranged a healing session with my consent; it was held in Burmese and I don’t understand a single word of the language, but the ritual itself was so explicit I grasped its significance perfectly. I felt as if I were sliding into the abyss of time and becoming part of this scene described by Marco Polo:

  They have no doctors, but when they are ill they call for their magicians. These men can charm the devil and it is they who serve the idols. When the magicians arrive, the sick tell them what ails them. And the magi immediately begin beating their instruments, singing and dancing until one of the magicians falls over backwards on the ground, foaming at the mouth, looking dead, and this is because the devil is in his body. He remains in this state, as if dead. And when the other magicians, because there are several of them, see that one of their number has fallen as I have described, they start talking to him and asking what illness the sick man has …

  As Marco Polo’s words ran through my mind, providing a commentary for the action in which I was the passive—not to say paralysed—protagonist, I tried to remember whether Paul d’Ampère had written any notes about it. This attempt proved treacherous, for I was soon lost on a tide of words, French, Chinese and Tumchooq, clashing together, intermingling, forming and re-forming, glittering or going out like dead stars.

  A fragment of text surfaced from my memory, a short text I myself had written, not one of those countless projects I never saw through to the end, but a school essay, and the incongruity of its sentences struck me as even more grotesque than the scene with the magicians. The monks’ chanting lulled me until I sank into unconsciousness again. It was years since I’d slept as well as I did after that ceremony, and I spent two whole days immersed in cataleptic but peaceful sleep. When I finally woke my fever and listlessness had disappeared and I was quite overwhelmed with happiness at this resurrection. Feeling my way, I crept out of the house without waking my interpreter.

  8

  CLIMBING DOWN A WINDING PATH THROUGH the woods beside the monastery, I came across everlasting seedlings (which I recognised from the bird-like shape of their red and yellow flowers) as well as mango, orange and avocado trees with cocoa pods peeping from beneath them. As I cut across the wood my footsteps were, admittedly, still tentative but my energy gradually came back to me until, passing in front of a Saman, a rain tree, I clung to its great supple vines, although I wasn’t sure why, and swung through the air like a child.

  The monks’ dormitories were dotted about under these luxuriant trees, whitewashed wooden buildings, each comprising over a dozen rooms and, through their open doors, I could see the beds which consisted of planks of wood laid over vertical logs driven into the beaten earth of the floor. Outside the huts, the monks’ robes and tunics hung on washing lines, still wet and pegged close together. Behind the buildings, which apparently had no wells, I saw the monks doing their morning ablutions round barrels positioned under drainpipes that channelled water from the roofs. By way of toothpaste, they snapped off a branch from a tree I didn’t recognise, some sort of hibiscus, and crushed one end of it to polish their teeth. As soon as they saw me they seemed embarrassed and looked away.

  The mill where the paper for sacred books was made stood outside the confines of the monastery, in a loop in a river, probably a minor tributary of the Irrawaddy It was a timeless relic with massive wheels, which I didn’t see straight away because the morning fog was still thick, but I could hear their jumbled purring and then all at once they loomed out of the mist like giants made of massive moss-covered rocks, dripping with water and seeming to come to meet me, with an ancient, ponderous slowness, before becoming weightless, swallowed up by another, still thicker blanket of mist.

  The fog crawled over the ground, sprawling and occasionally hanging motionless, so that soon I couldn’t work out whether I was dreaming or had been struck down by the tropical fever again, particularly when I stepped over the threshold and made my way inside that mysterious, ghostly architecture, its structure blackened by the passage of time. I felt lost in the clouds. A few rays of morning sunlight probed through small high windows, and I saw two monks working away in the half-light, keeping an eye on the millstone, speaking to each other sometimes loudly, sometimes in hushed tones. As the millstone circled around, they emptied baskets of raw materials into it, bark from some sort of local tree, white on the inside. With its repeated turning, the millstone ground the bark, compressing it until immaculately white raw sap spilled from it. This was then mixed with water to form “Pagan paper pulp,” which, I was told, repelled insects.

  I crouched down and, with the tip of my finger, touched the warm, viscous fluid whose smell reminded me of Chinese medicines. Just as that thought came to me, I shuddered, thinking I could see him in the white fog. It’s him, I thought, it’s Tumchooq, right here, on the other side of the mill, the same stature, the same way of leaning towards a basin of water as I saw him bend over baskets of aubergines so many times. I came very close to calling out his name, at the risk of giving everyone doubts about my mental health. The illusion dissipated as I drew closer, but I was still disturbed by the resemblance between Tumchooq and that monk who stood stripped to the waist plunging a big wooden sieve loaded with wet paper pulp into a basin and, when the water was up to his elbows, freezing in that position with such concentration that the gesture, which lasted only a fraction of a second, seemed to go on for an eternity. He shook the sieve in the water, so gently the movement was almost imperceptible, then lifted it straight back out again: the shapeless lump of pulp had transformed itself into a sheet of virgin paper, as if he had wrested it from the depths of the void. All that remained was to dry the sheet outside. But when he looked up an
d recognised me his smile gave way to embarrassment mingled with a hint of fear.

  In the xylography workshop, on the other hand, complete silence reigned. From a distance I thought I saw little points of light gleaming like minute yellow halos over the heads of saints in religious frescoes, but as I came nearer I realised they were the shaven heads of twenty or so monks sitting side by side in a huge room, busy engraving wooden plates for printing sacred texts. Most of them had a magnifying glass clamped over their right eye, some over their left eye, and each of them worked under a lamp whose beam lit a specific area. I had to strain my ears to hear the wood creak under their engravers’ styles, sometimes a slight crack followed by a sigh. Perhaps because of their watchmakers glasses, I felt as if I were surrounded by the assorted ticking of clocks, alarm clocks, watches, every sort of timepiece of which xylography itself is a perfect example.

  First a sheet of paper bearing the text in manuscript is placed facedown on a wooden plate about the size of a book and stuck onto it until the ink seeps into it, leaving a clear imprint of the writing; then the paper is removed and the wooden plate (preferably made of a hardwood) is pared away little by little, millimetre by millimetre, until only the letters are left in relief. The chiselling work, line-engraving the letters, was so subtle that my eyes eventually clouded over while I watched, as if staring at an ant eating a grain of rice. Engraving just one letter took ten or twenty minutes, I could barely make out the progress of a single upstroke. I later learned that engravers can work only two lines of text a day, that it often takes them a good ten days to finish a page—a wooden plate—in Pali text of the teachings preached by Buddha two thousand five hundred years earlier; and just one seconds distraction, the slightest carelessness, can mean they have to start all over again.