Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  The piece, which has been authenticated beyond question, was once the property of successive imperial dynasties, as confirmed by the constellation of red seals applied by its owners, all of whom were emperors. Among them was the seal of Huizong of the Song dynasty, himself a great painter and calligrapher, and that of the Hall of an Old Man’s Five Supreme Pleasures, the name of a collection belonging to Qianlong, known for his passion for antiquities and works of art. These imperial seals cover the upper part; beneath them is a six-line text written in black ink, noteworthy for the horizontal sequence of the writing, breaking away from the verticality of Chinese ideograms. The text is dotted with strange signs never before seen; they are slight, closely spaced, seeming to flow from the sure hand of some scribe, not deviating by one millimetre from such rigorous straight lines that they appear to have been traced along a ruler.

  D’Ampère knew intuitively that this was a lost ancient language, from the family of Indo-European alphabetical languages. A few months later he published the conclusions of his in-depth studies: these six lines were written in the official language of the kingdom buried beneath the sands towards the middle of the third century, the Tumchooq language.

  Its grammar invites parallels with Pali, an Indian dialect in which Buddha taught, dating back to before the era of common languages. This length of silk, which fell from the sky and was picked up by Seventy-one, was, evidently, a mutilated fragment of a sacred text. According to d’Ampère it was an allegory preached by Buddha himself. After long and arduous efforts of trial and error, he managed to decipher the six lines, but the allegory in its entirety remains a complete mystery since it does not feature in any official version of the Buddhist canon.

  The mysterious disappearance

  In the years following this discovery a considerable number of documents written in the Tumchooq language were found on archaeological excavations, and since the 1960s the language has become an important branch of orientalist studies. Nevertheless, d’Ampère’s deciphering of that short text still astonishes experts in the field for its accuracy and intelligence. As for d’Ampère himself, no one knows what happened to him or where he is. Another complete mystery.

  5

  PRIVATE DIARY

  JANUARY 1979

  17TH JANUARY

  I woke in almost complete darkness in the middle of a dream and for a split second couldn’t remember where I was. On the one hand, there was my body refusing to be roused from a sleep closer to death than to life, which I sank into moments after abandoning myself to the intense but fleeting pleasures of orgasm; on the other, there was my brain still holding on to traces of the dream which had visited me, its images, colours, sounds, smells and, especially, the cry that woke me and was still ringing in my ears. I didn’t know whether my body or my mind was further from reality. I didn’t know when it had started raining either. Raindrops were falling on the roof like grains of sand, and coming through the gaps in the unevenly spaced tiles, dripping in the darkness onto baskets of invisible vegetables or—to be more specific—onto big cucumbers next to the desk, the administrative and financial heart of the shop hastily transformed into a bed rather too narrow for two people, so I kept worrying I’d fall out right in the middle of the “meeting of the clouds and the rain,” to use the Chinese expression for the sexual act. I was also afraid the desk would collapse under our thrusting bodies, given the deafening creaking sounds it made, which eventually blurred into our heavy breathing in the icy air, there among the smells of beaten earth, vegetables and bodily secretions.

  The sound of a car suddenly woke Tumchooq. Neither of us said a word, but the panic gripping us was palpable, even in the dark. Police? Soldiers? Had someone seen me at midnight as I nipped from the deserted street into the shop? (How careless, I scolded myself, making us run a risk like that, knowing it was our last “meeting of the clouds and the rain” in the Year of the Horse, because Tumchooq was going away the following day to spend the new year with his father, who was serving out his sentence in a gem mine in Sichuan.) The sounds of the car drew nearer, as if it were slowing down, and I thought of a young Chinese painter who was arrested outside a foreign diplomats’ residence as she slipped out of her French lover’s apartment—he worked at the French embassy. She was condemned to two years in prison for dishonouring her country. I wondered which of us would be … The car didn’t stop, thank God, the engine sound faded, the noise of the rain grew all the louder and Tumchooq, relieved, took me in his arms, kissed me and went back to sleep.

  Then I saw him again, the man from my dream a few minutes earlier. In the blink of an eye, when I least expected him, he loomed out of the hazy darkness, slunk between the baskets of vegetables, walked silently past our improvised bed and disappeared behind the cucumbers with the fat raindrops smacking onto them in the dark. I’d never experienced hallucinations before, however brief, and this fleeting vision reminded me of every last detail of my interrupted dream: it was nighttime, as far as I can remember, but I didn’t know where I was and I took a while to understand that the silent waves which sometimes seemed clear-cut and sometimes more nebulous, and which I initially took to be the sea, were in fact clouds floating under the feet of a solitary, middle-aged man travelling far in the distance; he was more Western than Chinese and was toiling along a path lit by the beam of a bamboo torch in his hand.

  I recognised him, or rather guessed who he was, by two details: first his red hair, which highlighted his handsome face in the most unusual way; then his glasses, which Tumchooq mentions every time he talks about his early visits to the camp where his father is imprisoned. Those glasses matched his descriptions and fascinated me with their lenses, which picked up the yellow gleam of the flickering torch flame (I can still hear the soft crackle of the burning bamboo), and which were fixed onto the frames with pieces of thin wire. As for the side-pieces, every trace of the original material had disappeared; they were bound round with strips of cloth, dirty bits of rag, some of which were very long, hanging down behind his ears and fluttering in the mountain wind.

  At first sight, any resemblance to Tumchooq consisted chiefly in that inimitable walk, the body leaning forward slightly, oddly nimble, with big jerky strides so like Tumchooq’s you’d have thought it was him I saw in my dream, but twenty-five years older—two and a half decades the father spent in a prison camp and during which his son grew up without him. Paul d’Ampère.

  He stayed within view as far as the lie of the land allowed; from time to time he disappeared behind fronds of trees and I lost sight of him, then the feeble glow of his torch appeared again, further away on some rocks, beneath a thick fog; I kept my eyes wide open, pinned on that tiny dab of light in the darkness, which still glows before my eyes as I write these words. That dab of light reminds me of The Right into Egypt, a film I saw as a child, which begins with a very long stationary shot, all but black with this insubstantial glow hovering in the middle while a voice-over talks about the souls of the exiled, condemned to wandering in the desert. Later, I saw that same dab of light captured by a reporter at a refugee camp in a desert in black Africa; it was after a massacre, and dejected exiles—who would never be able to return to their native country and who reminded me of Conrad’s characters—told their story over and over again. I saw it again one evening beside Joyce’s tomb as I watched the shifting shadows of a tree projected by the last rays of dusk onto the statue of the writer, thin as a skeleton, his elbow resting on one knee, his legs crossed, his huge long head in one hand … until there was just one last dab of light on the glasses of that voluntary exile who had fled his own country, like Paul d’Ampère.

  The solitary traveller slowed down and started to walk along a path, or rather to advance along it almost on all fours, while his last bamboo stick was consumed by the flames without which he could go no further, growing steadily smaller, one centimetre at a time, heralding the onset of complete darkness. It was a long path, not dug into the rock but formed by a landslip which made
the going very dangerous and provoked the eminent intellectual to swear in French: “Shit! Shitting Hell!” The path was barely thirty centimetres wide but seemed to go on for ever, at least fifty metres, every centimetre of the way fraught with risk, because there was nothing to either side, apart from the terrifying drop of the cliffs, the unfathomable abyss, darkness, death.

  The small flame of his torch, now reduced to one twig, flickered, a few sparks flew and every glimmer of light went out. As if struck blind, Paul d’Ampère stood still on the path, unable to see anything, defenceless, in all that darkness, which grew bigger and more dense and swallowed him up. I couldn’t see him now but guessed his reflex action in the dark: he automatically took off his glasses, breathed over the lenses and, unseeing, cleaned them with the dirty rags wrapped round the side-pieces. He reminded me of his son Tumchooq, who, on the rare occasions that we argue, sits on one of the benches in the shop, runs his hand over his face in an atavistic gesture, irritably rubs his forehead and eyes, seeming to have aged ten years in a flash, and—just like his father—launches into meticulously cleaning his glasses with the end of his shirt or his T-shirt, which may be just as dirty and impregnated with sweat as his fathers rags; I’m quite sure he’s happy he can’t see me any more and, for one furtive moment, has managed to make the filthy outside world disappear.

  Low, heavy cloud spreads across the mountain, impenetrable mists crawl over the rocks and along the path where, suddenly, after the sound of several matches being struck, a dazzling flash lights up as Paul d’Ampère’s shirt burns; he now stands stripped to the waist, holding this improvised and short-lived torch and entrusting himself to it, not sure where it might take him. Who cares? He wasn’t crawling now, as if no longer afraid of falling, as if he couldn’t care less, he was hurrying along that path barely the width of two hands, lit by his shirt, which burned like a sheet of paper. Ashes fluttered away, butterflies of black silk so light they floated in the air around Paul d’Ampère, who talked to himself as he hurried on; a flood of words poured from his mouth, sometimes streams of furious syllables, sometimes a fluid melody or an overflowing torrent of eloquence which carried me along with it even though I didn’t catch a single word. Was this an epic in ancient Persian? One of Plato’s speeches in ancient Greek? Or a sacred writing in Tumchooq?

  All of a sudden I was struck by three words in Chinese, “Cao ta ma!,” their long echo ringing round the mountain, endlessly repeated and merging into one. Not that I was surprised to hear him pronounce them without a shadow of an accent, but those three words that millions of Chinese utter every day, and I do too from time to time, were none other than a synonym for the swearing he had hurled out in French a few minutes earlier: “Shit! Shitting Hell!” Then I understood: he’d just shouted out the expression in every language—Asian, Indo-European, living, dead or dialectal—that he knew, an impetuous river of swear words pouring out in great roaring waves, beating against the rocks, crossing frontiers, roaming across continents, passing through Russia, Germany, Italy, detouring through Spain and Portugal, going back to his native country, taking in Corsican, Breton, Basque and the patois of the western Pyrenees … meanwhile, after his shirt, he held his trousers aloft and they burned with a feeble, flickering bluish flame just enough to probe the thick mist and light the other end of the path about twenty metres away, where a dark tree loomed and a bird, perhaps an eagle, called out, promising relief and deliverance.

  Submerged by this flood of words, I wondered whether, during the course of his interminable prison sentence, Paul d’Ampère had toyed with the idea of creating a dictionary of swear words, listing them by country and region with phonetic variations, historical origins, linguistic mutations and degrees of vehemence, constituting a sort of “J’accuse” against all the injustices and tortures suffered in his long years of detention.

  Then the filthy verbal diarrhoea came to an abrupt stop; I couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of a fall, nothing but total silence in which his still-blazing trousers flew away, hovered for a moment, then went out completely, unleashing such a strong feeling of vertigo and terror in me that I felt I’d fallen off the edge of the cliff myself.

  My eyes peered through the darkness, but to no avail, because they were clouded with tears. Then it started snowing in the mountains and I could already picture Paul d’Ampère being found by chance decades later, sleeping naked at the foot of the cliff, a pile of frozen, fractured bones and a pair of glasses with lenses held on by wire, and side-pieces once wrapped in dirty rags long since gone. I can’t think of another event in my life which provoked such emotion. There were tears streaming down my cheeks when I suddenly heard him swear again in French and saw him hanging on the edge of the cliff where his hands had managed, in the briefest fraction of a second during his fatal fall, to grab a tuft of grass rooted deeply in the ground. He didn’t dare move, afraid the least movement would make the grass give way, sending him into the unfathomable depths. He didn’t move but gave a cry, perhaps his last, which woke me from my dream …

  The greengrocer’s shop was steeped in almost complete darkness, with the exception of a ray of bluish shadow between the bottom of the metal shutter and the threshold. It was still raining, outside and inside, dripping on the cucumbers, pumpkins and sweet potatoes with a duller echo than the noise it made on the spinach leaves, chives, chervil, dill and celery fronds, interrupted occasionally by the sound of Paul d’Ampère’s harrowing cry, which continued turning inside my head. Still, it wasn’t difficult overcoming my initial fear, because the image of that fall, I realised to my own astonishment, was merely the matching piece to another image, the one on a slide that Tumchooq had projected on one of the shop’s walls a few weeks earlier, using a projector borrowed from his old teacher, the frustrated painter who had converted to amateur photography. Tumchooq hadn’t given me any warning, but I’d known for a long time he had a photo which meant more to him than life itself and which I suspected was a portrait of his father.

  I listened intently to the soft purring of the projector; a dazzling beam of light blazed rather theatrically, making motes of dust appear and dance in its path, while the wall with its dirty marks, nail holes and remnants of propaganda posters started to glow, its uneven surface lighting up in the dark like a screen. My heart beat anxiously, I was worried there would be a power cut, which happened quite frequently in Peking and always when you least expected it. I could tell Tumchooq was moved in spite of himself, seeing that image, the only picture he had of the famous mutilated scroll, of which only half remains. The photograph must have been taken around midday, judging by how overexposed it was, unless that was an illusion on my part, lending it a slightly hazy, fantastical quality like a mirage, particularly as the image wobbled a little because the electric current was inconsistent or under the effects of an imperceptible gust of wind, a breeze rippling the roll of silk. The scroll, Tumchooq informed me, was held up by one of the curators at the Forbidden City, in other words by the hands of the State, the new owners of this Chinese treasure, this legacy of successive dynasties, torn by Puyi, then the property of Seventy-one, who was by then blind, only to end up causing the downfall of a Frenchman who traded in his own wife for it … Or was the image shaky simply because Tumchooq’s heart quivered as he pressed the shutter, confronted with his own fate—which strikes me as the most appropriate word to describe the artefact.

  As if not wanting to swamp the near-sacred atmosphere of the projection with unnecessary detail, he spared me the account of how she—the curator—succumbed to his supplications and demonstrated exceptional courage in allowing him to take a photograph, within the confines of the Forbidden City, of a scroll that had not seen the light of day since the State acquired it; in other words, since Paul d’Ampère was imprisoned. Tumchooq’s dark shadow moved across the beam of light as the letters of that language which gave him his name appeared on the wall-screen, and as he read them syllable by syllable, in a soft voice, a murmur, utterly transf
ormed, almost ecstatic, in a state of veneration, as if presiding over my initiation to some religious rite, or revealing a secret buried beneath the earth for centuries, a favour that would unite us for ever. Behind his glasses his eyes were ablaze with a beatific light I had never seen in them before. He read the text his father had deciphered first in its original version, then in its Chinese translation; each word pierced my heart, and I in turn translated the words to engrave them onto my memory:

  ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT A LONE MAN IS TRAVELLING IN THE DARK WHEN HE COMES ACROSS A LONG PATH THAT MERGES INTO THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MOUNTAIN INTO THE SKY, BUT HALFWAY ALONG, AT A TURN IN THE PATH, HE STUMBLES. AS HE FALLS, HE CLUTCHES AT A TUFT OF GRASS, WHICH BRIEFLY DELAYS A FATAL OUTCOME, BUT SOON HIS HANDS CAN HOLD HIM NO LONGER AND, LIKE A CONDEMNED MAN IN HIS FINAL HOUR, HE CASTS ONE LAST GLANCE BELOW, WHERE HE CAN SEE ONLY THE DARKNESS OF THOSE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS …

  18TH JANUARY

  Every couple of months Tumchooq makes the most of the general anarchy at the greengrocer’s shop and does what no other son would do in his shoes: he takes the train, often without a ticket, and travels in the “hard-seat” class for three days and two nights to visit his father at his work camp in Sichuan, five thousand kilometres from Peking. While he’s there he stays with a camp employee nicknamed the “poetess” (a former prisoner of indeterminate age and marital status), and for the five or six days of his stay he goes to the visiting room where Paul d’Ampère has the right, for twenty minutes at a time, to talk through the double wooden grille and initiate him in the ancient language of Tumchooq, its pronunciation, spelling and syntax, although not actually encouraging him to share in his obstinate search for the missing part of the sutra, a search which for many years has maintained—more existentially than physically—his contact with this world from which he could so easily withdraw altogether. It’s a secret garden he has kept hidden throughout his long sentence, except once when he mentioned it in an offhand way, almost as a joke. It was in the winter of 1977, right after the Great Helmsman’s funeral, which marked the beginning of a new era. The first sign that spring had arrived, the first crack in the great Proletarian Dictatorship, was a change in the university system. Until then universities had selected their students exclusively on the recommendations of the Party, but now they opened their doors to anyone under the age of thirty who succeeded in competitive exams in mathematics, literature, physics, chemistry, foreign languages, history and politics. Overnight, a great whirlwind blew across the entire nation, a whole generation found new hope and buckled down to preparing for those exams … except Tumchooq, whose condemnation to three years at reform school blotted his record. Not that it stood in the way of his profession as a greengrocer, but it cruelly forbade him from enrolling for the competitive exams along with the blind, deaf-mutes, the lame and the infirm all over the country.