Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  The sound of chisels, the fragmented light, the watchmaker’s glasses behind which their eyes were hidden, probably fixed, motionless, slightly protruding and perhaps very beautiful, a little cough, an engraver’s right hand sculpting the wood, a panoply of chisels in different sizes clamped in his left hand, mouths blowing softly over the plates raising a fine wood dust changed into powdered gold by the lamplight—it all constituted a separate world.

  Several monks were repairing old plates, some as much as a hundred and fifty years old with areas that needed reworking with a jigsaw, because the letters were so worn, a clear sign of an abundant print run. Here time was immutable, immutable as dogma, and I started trying to gauge the three years Tumchooq had spent here engraving—in relief or intaglio—two lines a day, not to mention the years he spent in the kitchens and the paper mill. He might never have launched himself on the same trail for which his father had already suffered so much, the pursuit of the integral version of the torn manuscript, if he had had the least idea of the patience this titanic Long March would require. I found it difficult, almost impossible, to imagine the look on Tumchooq’s face when he first engraved a whole plate, bringing it up to the light to check a few details, then taking off his watchmakers glasses to appreciate his work as a whole, the solemn letters, the exquisite widening of lanceolate forms, the contrast between the width of a vowel and the narrowness of a consonant, between thick vertical strokes and fine horizontal ones, the clarity of a small ligature, the assurance of the strokes, the accuracy of the diacritical symbols. No one is left indifferent by the beauty of a printing plate. Then he would deliver it to the printing workshop, a layer of ink was applied to the surface, a sheet of blank paper laid over it and, by lightly brushing over the back of the paper, the page was printed. It was removed straight away The letters in relief on the cut-away surface of plate appeared black, shining and still moist, on the white background of the paper. Only the chapter headings, whose letters are carved out of the wood, are printed in white on a black background.

  The sun was only just up, the meticulously swept path with not a single fallen leaf on it glittered beneath my bare feet, and each of my footsteps, I was aware, was an act of meditation. With its sand and its occasional stones positioned here and there, as if among the extinguished, collected, cooled ashes of our passions, without the least spark of an ember to reignite them, that little path was like the life of whoever walked along it. Perhaps its maker wanted it to remind us that our footprints, like the happy days of our lives, disappear with the first gust of wind, without leaving any trace at all. I suspected this path of sand had been made by Tumchooq himself, because it was so like the “sea of stones” at the chateau at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet that I visited as a teenager, a “sea” devised by Paul d’Ampère, who later described its soft lapping of waves to his son.

  That sandy track took me right to the entrance of the Cave of Treasure, where its keeper, an elderly monk, was cleaning an antique printing plate with sandalwood pulp. When I arrived he lit a cube of camphor on a copper dish and, gesticulating furiously to make himself understood, invited me to run the tips of my fingers through the flame and bring them up to my forehead. Then, without a word, he opened the door and let me in.

  The cave was enormous, unfathomably deep, and filled with shadow, if not complete darkness. Daylight barely reached inside, filtered through a single gap carved through the rock and half-covered with vegetation, but it went astray somewhere along the way and was swallowed up before reaching the floor. By this pale glow, which could be mistaken for moonlight, I made out the silhouette of a gigantic multi-tiered stupa standing in the middle of the cave: at the top of its prodigious height a gold roof twinkled.

  All of a sudden, as if hallucinating, I heard the click of an electric switch and the edifice, lit up from the inside by countless lamps, appeared in all its splendour. Its pyramid-shaped base and each of its eight levels borne on pillars were made of finely sculpted white marble, but the walls were of glass, affording glimpses of shelving, which went right up to the ceiling on each level and was laden with engraved plates, all tightly packed together, like thousands and thousands of hefty volumes of an encyclopaedia, the largest in the world, an encyclopaedia in raw wood, overrunning the eight levels of that stupa and its shelving, which carried on as far as the eye could see, into infinity for all anyone could tell. Its prison of rock cut it off from the outside world, erased the present, the past, seasons, rain and heat, making it barely possible to distinguish between day and night. Voices, the sound of footsteps, the least little cough produced a subtle echo like the diffuse hubbub of a river or the rumble of an underground tremor. Swallows, which I at first mistook for bats, flew to and fro through the air around me, skimming my hair with the tips of their wings, some coming very close to crashing into the glass walls, lit up like a palace of memories in that amphitheatre of eternal printing plates.

  It was only when I climbed the long, steep staircase at the centre of the stupa and reached the shelving up a bamboo ladder that I found the first personal touch from Tumchooq: numbers traced in curcuma formed a lustrous bronze embellishment to each sacred plate, probably an inventory system, numbers in a familiar hand, like those I saw long ago in the greengrocers written in chalk on the price boards, or in pencil in the shop’s accounts book. Seeing the particular care Tumchooq had taken over the top floor, I realised that this had been the focus of his attention, towards which all of his efforts—and even his suffering—had converged over the years. A filigreed wooden frame hung on the lintel over the doorway and written in golden capitals on a blue background was the word “Jataka”—the sacred works relating Buddha’s previous lives, which constitute one of the most significant bodies of sutras in the Pali language, and whose narrative style and content, according to Paul d’Ampère, come closest to the Tumchooq text on the torn scroll.

  There were very many engraved plates there, with labels indicating their titles and giving summaries in Pali and Burmese, which—to my great regret—I couldn’t decipher. Some of the labels were accompanied by a simple illustration (the archivist’s whim or instructions to illiterate monks?), often drawings of the animals in whose form the future Buddha was incarnated: buffalo, lion, elephant, ass, horse, camel, stag, tiger and lots of birds—partridge, blue tit, sparrow, dove, stork, turtledove, etc. The creator of these pictures seemed to have a predilection for the grey parrot, and I then remembered that his father had told him these birds were the most eminent living linguists on the planet: the silky grey of their plumage, their black beaks, the red tuft crowning their heads, and most of all the incredibly human look in their eyes; I knew he’d been thinking of his father as he drew those birds.

  As with the house, there was no furniture, except for a hammock in faded fabric hanging between the shelves, and its thick ropes had carved the furrows of passing time in the beam it was attached to. In places the worn rope held by only a few twisted, muddled, blackened fibres, while the woven rush matting over the floor had been flattened beneath the master’s feet. How many times did he walk up and down in one night of insomnia? Thousands? Inspired by a desire to know, I counted the engraved plates, first on that floor, then, going from one level to another, in the whole stupa: the total figure, insofar as my estimate could be accurate, was in the region of two hundred thousand, without counting the damaged plates, icons, matrices and wood engravings piled up in great sacks in the basement. Considering the average sutra comprises thirty pages, and therefore thirty engraved plates—a hypothesis reached after some deliberation—I reckoned Tumchooq must have examined seven thousand texts of the Buddhist canon through his watchmakers glasses. Day and night, summer and winter, year after year, his eyesight must have deteriorated, clouded, been ruined as he worked exhaustively through the monastery’s incalculable collection, probably without ever achieving the goal he had set himself eleven years earlier beside his fathers grave: to find the integral text of the torn scroll, in whatever language he could
.

  I felt intuitively that his trip to Japan was all part of this interminable quest, his unfinished project, like a step in a new direction, perhaps even the last. That sutra which was believed lost for ever could resurface out of nowhere at any moment and against all expectations—in the antique book markets of Kyoto, in the cellars of a Japanese military library or religious institution. I wondered whether, in his obsessive search for the sutra, this man who was used to living and managing on so little and who, like his father, was first and foremost an adventurer, I wondered whether he would resist the temptation to repeat his Burmese experience in Japan, to disappear only to roam far and wide with no identity or official papers, researching, learning the local language, researching further until he found another collection as priceless as the one at the Pagan monastery.

  The door to the cave opened and two black silhouettes, almost like shadows, appeared against the daylight, slipping silently inside: it was the monastery deputy and my interpreter coming to invite me to a major ceremony of exorcism and prayers to Buddha, asking him to bless and protect their superior, Tumchooq, who was threatened by the spectre of misfortune. I should have guessed there had been a dramatic development from the awkward way the monks behaved whenever I came near. The words uttered by those two shadows, still with the light behind them, reverberated around the cave and their echo lent them such an other-worldly quality that I had trouble understanding my translator, but I didn’t need her explanations to guess as my legs shook, my knees gave way and the stupa seemed about to crumble beneath my feet.

  The news had come two days earlier while I was laid low by fever. According to a telegram sent by the Kyoto Buddhists’ International Conference, Tumchooq had been arrested by the border police at Tokyo airport, and a Japanese monk who had come to greet him had witnessed the scene. Tumchooq was accused of being in possession of a false Laotian passport. (“It was the first passport he ever had,” the monastery deputy told me. “He bought it a few days before he left, through a man who specialises in that sort of transaction, in a slightly offhand, last-minute way. Unfortunately, instead of a Burmese passport, he was given a Laotian one. A false one.”) Despite his religious robes and the intervention of his Japanese co-disciple, Tumchooq was immediately deported to Laos and handed over to the judiciary, and this in a country where the sentence for identity fraud was liable to be life imprisonment.

  EPILOGUE

  PEKING

  OCTOBER 1990

  SURREAL, COMPLETELY SURREAL, THAT was how the sequence of events felt to me, and I can only describe them now in broad outline, because Tumchooq’s arrest and imprisonment so clouded my thoughts. The white mists engulfing my mind mingled with the bluer ones of the Irrawaddy which lapped at the foot of the walls around the monastery. I remember nothing of our leaving, nor of the boat that took us to Mandalay, still less of how we first approached the Burmese government on the subject of Tumchooq’s release, but the only thing I can be more or less sure of is that we very soon decided to wage the war on two fronts, Laotian and Chinese: the monastery deputy went straight to Laos to mobilise monks there and I took the first flight to Peking, where I was to find Tumchooq’s mother and obtain documents from the Public Records Office to establish her son’s identity.

  It had been eleven years since my flight from Peking. The light, which had been so distinctive in late afternoon, was no longer the same, nor the smell; there was a hundred times more traffic than before, so that, when my taxi came off the motorway between the airport and the city centre, it found itself trapped in an endless queue of cars, groaning and edging almost imperceptibly forward, only to grind to a halt again. The physiognomy of the cars and passers-by seemed to have changed, too. Their clothes were brighter, their faces darker and more strained, but it was the look in their eyes that really struck me. They looked at me without a glimmer of curiosity. They no longer had that probing policeman’s expression, but that of an experienced salesman who was absolutely meticulous in his accounting and gauged each customer as he came into the shop. A professional eye, looking after its own interests. Still, I recognised Peking by one detail: the taxi driver, irritated by the traffic jam, wound down his window, cleared his throat and spat forcefully into the road, proudly watching his spittle’s parabola until it landed bang in the middle of the street, and not even contemplating any kind of apology.

  I decided to stay at the Cui Min Zhuang Hotel, not for its proximity to Wang Fujing Street, which is a sort of Peking Champs-Élysées, but because it is close to the East Gate of the Forbidden City, a few hundred metres from the residence for museum employees where Tumchooq’s mother had two rooms in a brick-built house at street level, with a traditional courtyard in the middle of which, if memory serves, there was an exuberant kaki tree with deeply scored black bark and, in summer, leafy branches reaching beyond the walls and bowing under such a weight of fruit you expected them to crush the tiled roof. Not forgetting the tap for running water that Tumchooq had mentioned so many times, I felt I had already seen it.

  “One morning,” he had told me, “after a stormy night, I looked out of the window and saw my mother going out of the house. Her red boots marked out her footsteps in the glittering white blanket of snow, right to the middle of the courtyard, where she turned on the tap to wash some vegetables. She chopped white turnips into little cubes, put them in a basin and sprinkled them with a thin layer of salt as white as the snow. The basin was in white enamel and on the bottom it had a red peony with green leaves, and the enamel was chipped in places.”

  The sun had set some while ago, even though I hadn’t wasted any time in my fifteenth-floor hotel room with its view over a tide of giant modern buildings with flashing luminous signs on them. A few metres from the hotel the indistinct silhouette of a slender bridge spanning a major traffic artery appeared above the tiny, fine and mostly broken roof tiles of a few very old houses, all curved lines and low-slung frames. A white cat, perhaps a Persian, ran along the roofs, jumped, climbed up a sad single wall among the demolished houses to the thrumming of bulldozers that I could hear but not see. When I left the hotel and turned into the first side street, the headlights of the machines toing and froing across the demolition site lumbered towards me incredibly slowly, blinding me. There were a few traditional old houses left, waiting their turn to be demolished, and the lights still lit in their doorways looked like the pitiful flames of candles burnt almost right down, exhaling their last glow, their last breath of warmth, while the bulldozer headlights peered at them like monsters examining victims paralysed with fear, before pouncing.

  This part of the city had been my favourite place over a long period, not only because of the emotional connection with Tumchooq and its proximity to the Forbidden City, but because for two thousand years it had represented the real Peking, and Tumchooq had had a map of it on the wall of the greengrocers, so that, night after night, word by word, he could learn the Chinese characters most frequently used in daily life (and often the most beautiful): those that made up the names of the streets in the city The map was a lithograph representing a bird’s-eye-view panorama of the entire Imperial City (which surrounded the Forbidden City) with its four gates and Tiananmen in the middle. The tumultuous profusion of hutong, Peking’s narrow streets, were picked out as white lines on the black background of the map, forming a spider’s web so clear it was worthy of the very best engravings. The lines were often straight, cutting across each other, spreading east, west, north and south. Sometimes they changed into fluid ribbons snaking around lakes, white marks dotted here and there like whimsical drops of mother-of-pearl. In places the lines were cut by a bridge, a villa or an aristocrat’s residence, while in others they melted into marshland. Along each white line representing a hutong there was a name, in the writing of the day, carved with noble skill. Tumchooq made me read them out loud with him, road by road, quarter by quarter. Some of the names, the way their ideograms were combined, sparkled with exquisitely nuanced elegance; others captiv
ated me with the sound they made: subtle, sensual, occasionally exuberant, particularly when he said them, my Tumchooq with his attractive Peking accent. Even though the Tumchooq method was elementary from a pedagogic point of view, it was terribly effective: at the time I could find absolutely any street in the city centre, however small, and any footpath, however twisting and winding, as if Tumchooq had carved the map inside my head.

  I decided to go to Tumchooq’s mothers house on foot, but I should have guessed this decision would lead only to disappointment, if not a nightmare. The further I walked, the more struck I was by the complete absence of simple street pedlars when there used to be an endless stream of them from morning till night, their bicycles laden with heavy bags of food, which bulged over both sides of their luggage racks. Tumchooq could do a brilliant impression of the ones who sold grilled sweet potatoes, the yellow flesh with a hint of red, so much better than chestnuts; or those selling sweet or sour apricots, which made you drool in summer; or hot, crispy, deep-fried cakes; spicy, salted crabs; dried carrots covered in chilli; steamed dumplings; stinking soya cheese; or even those selling aphrodisiac plants reputed to make a man pee higher than an electricity pylon … I couldn’t hear anything except the rumble of bulldozers reverberating like thunder in the stifling night air and the long, irritable, aggressive toot of car horns.

  Fifty metres further on I stood for a moment under a spanking new streetlight casting its light over a metallic sign on which the name of the street was written, but where I expected it to say EAST GATE STREET, there was another, unfamiliar name, the name of some ghostly impostor calling itself JOY OF THE EAST STREET. Disconcerted by the change, which I initially put down to a slip of memory on my part, I asked a passer-by whether he knew East Gate Street, but he looked at me as if I were mad and walked off without answering. Despite all this, I set off down the street, but the little restaurants where I used to have a bowl of warm soya milk and a steamed dumpling for lunch had disappeared like the hutong, without a trace. The street had become smooth, impersonal and wide, edged with concrete buildings some ten or twenty storeys high, some of them still under construction. Next there was a no-man’s-land of luxury shops—Gucci, Dior, Chanel, Lacoste, L’Oréal—with flags by the door and brightly lit windows where Western-style mannequins adopted poses, blond women with green or blue eyes, beautiful black athletes with well-honed muscles, shiny, life-size photographs of Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo … and all at once I understood.