Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “When I was a student in the late 1920s, partly because I was short of money but also because of the exuberant cultural scene there, I rented a room in the heart of the French concession in Shanghai. There was a Belgian chocolatier on my street and every time I went past the shop I would close my eyes and run, even if just for a second, drowning in the hot fragrant exhalation from inside. I could hear the last few coins, which I was meant to use for my one meal of the day or my rent, clinking in my pocket, begging to be let out, because those wafts of milk, sugar and grilled cocoa smelt so good, pursuing me right to the end of the street, sometimes even into my dreams as I tossed and turned on my stifling bed. More than once I woke in the middle of the night and went down into the deserted street, and, even though the chocolatier had closed up shop hours ago, the magic still hung in the air, the atmosphere seemed thickened by the daytime smell of a country that would never be accessible to someone like me with no money, and I would stand there fascinated by the brightly lit window display filled with lions, eagles, doves, tigers, fish, chickens, rabbits and eggs, all in chocolate, alongside silver cups and saucers, teaspoons, porcelain butter dishes and still more chocolate in boxes piled up in pyramids tied with silver and gold bows …”

  The Belgian chocolatier’s shop with its glittering interior was making the listeners salivate, and when the Frenchman started talking again they were dazzled by Marco Polo’s description of Kublai Khan’s palace, which seemed to suspend them in mid-air, ready to take flight. Refusing to tell the story in his own words, he recited the Italian’s text so fluently that his faithful translator marvelled as much at the clarity of the words as at his friend’s phenomenal memory. In places he wondered whether the Venetian adventurer himself had come to the camp with news of his friend Kublai Khan or whether the Frenchman was simply his reincarnation.

  “The Great Khan does indeed have a stud of stallions and mares as white as snow and countless in number: more than ten thousand mares. No one dares drink the milk of these white mares unless they are of the emperor’s lineage, the Great Khan’s lineage. It is true that another kind of person may drink it: these are called the Horiat, and this honour was granted to them by Genghis Khan for a great victory they won with him.

  “In the middle of a vast hall where the Great Khan sups there is a magnificent, tall, ornate pedestal shaped like a square chest, each side three feet long, intricately worked with very beautiful gilded sculptures of animals. It is hollow and inside it is a precious vessel, shaped like a large pitcher, made of fine gold and filled with white mares’ milk. From this milk a delicacy that the Great Khan considers his favourite sweetmeat is made in the following way: ten portions of milk to one portion of musk, some sugar, myrtles, mastic gum, lavender, thyme and so on, slowly caramelised in the little pitcher …”

  The criminal who wrote the report doesn’t remember at what stage he stood up. His hands were clenched, he had never felt so overwrought: it was the Frenchman’s words and voice, he felt sure. Some sentences had made the image of his wife appear to him from nowhere—a fleeting image of her hips rocking and her dark vagina welcoming a glistening bar of chocolate flitted across his mind several times, making him forget his status as absolute master of the barrack room, where just one word from him would have been enough to end it all and have the Frenchman punished without his lifting so much as his little finger. The ground grew softer, elastic, seemed to dilate beneath his weight as if he were walking on cheese, a familiar sensation which reminded him of that distant night when he killed his wife, whose dark staring eyes were now more beautiful than ever, mingling with Marco Polo’s words, creating a hypnotic effect, an inaccessible world which was a concentration of all the fine things of this earth, everything man has found to be great and beautiful and which he would never be able to enjoy. He resented the Frenchman for giving him a glimpse of that universe and, had he had a knife, would have slit his throat to silence him.

  “You should also know that those who served this delicacy to the Great Khan were themselves barons. And I can tell you that their mouths and noses were veiled with beautiful silk and gold cloth, so that their smell and breath should not reach the food and drink and this wonderful …”

  The Frenchman was heard screaming in the dormitory, a scream of terror followed by silence and a few gurgling noises from his throat, throttled between the leaders iron hands. Long afterwards the latter remembered hearing a man bellowing in his ear, clutching at him to tear the Frenchman from his strangulating grasp: it was Hu Feng. The leader struck him in the pit of his concave chest, he swayed and fell to the ground. Someone lit a bulb, which swung overhead, spreading a harsh light in which the leader appeared as a dark shape getting back up to his feet. Picturing his wife again, dead from his knife thrusts, he spat in the Frenchman’s face, making him squirm as he groaned on his straw mattress. He spat several more times, aiming at the Westerners nose, but missing his target so that the nauseating, viscous filth fell on his victims cheeks, eyes, mouth and the high forehead topped with its shock of red hair.

  The flautists father drove Ma to a lorry parked in the middle of the River Lu’s dry bed, close to a mine shaft, and asked the uniformed driver to take this “great violinist of the future from Ya An region,” his son’s friend, back home to Chengdu. The warder nodded, still keeping an eye on a horde of ghostly figures, exhausted, half-naked and covered in mud, loading a huge blue-grey stone onto the lorry; it must have weighed at least a ton and was shaped like a wart torn from a monsters back. They dragged it centimetre by centimetre, cried out as they heaved it up with the help of ropes and thick wooden poles, but mainly with their bare hands, shoulders, backs and arms, so that their bodies bore the stigmata of vicious scratches, black bruising and deep cuts, hideous tattoos left by the cruel, harsh rock.

  Ma went up to one face, then to another without finding the Frenchman or the writer, whom he had already seen in a photograph on the cover of a collection of short stories bought on the black market. The former must have been down in the depths of a shaft. As for Hu Feng, his host told him that after the incident at Christmas the directors had moved him to another group, because they wanted to cut off all contact between him and his mentor.

  “In my long career as a warder,” he added, “I have never seen or heard anyone describe a more difficult separation. I wonder whether Hu Feng suffered as much when he was arrested in front of his wife of several decades. This time, he was destroyed. Every journey down into the mine shafts without the little fly attached to his friends glasses to watch over his safety unleashed hideous fits of hysteria in him, and these so terrified his teammates that he had to be kept in the infirmary, where, on the strength of his notoriety, they summoned an important psychiatrist from the University of Medicine of Western China, Dr. Lin. The doctor made his diagnosis and prescribed electric-shock treatment, a hundred or so sessions over several weeks, a therapy aimed at progressively eradicating the ancient Tumchooq language—the source of his mental disturbances—from his brain.

  “At the cost of terrible pain and at the risk of causing total amnesia or the loss of his entire personality this eradication of Tumchooq was meant to mark the first step towards normality a sort of docile state first indicated by an infallible sign: thinking in Chinese. Hu Feng was sent away in an ambulance, tied to the stretcher like a dead prisoner ready to be thrown into the river. He left with an enthusiast in the use of electrodes, a specialist in bodily convulsions and grimaces of pain, in other words an advocate of torture. He was never seen again.”

  CONTINUATION OF MY PRIVATE DIARY

  FEBRUARY-MARCH 1979

  8TH FEBRUARY

  Even as a child, bent over my schoolbooks with a perfectly sharpened soft-leaded pencil, I liked bringing things back to life—people, lives, stories I had read or heard—in my private diary or my notebook, which I guarded jealously in a locked drawer. I delighted in watching as the curved shaving of wood coiling around the pencil grew longer, hung in the air and eventually sp
iralled down onto a sheet of white paper next to a tiny pyramid of glinting black dust. It was my private ritual. My daily prayer, a sort of confession.

  To make this humble exercise even more sacred I set myself a rule: finishing that day’s writing when the pencil was no longer useable, and never sharpening it a second time, come what may. Many years later, when my school-books were replaced by diaries, I continued to apply my childhood rule to the letter, faithful to my brief, fragmentary sketches, captured in haste, brought to an end as much by the state of my pencil as a sort of weariness. This is the first time I’ve written so many pages at once and I can’t get over how many of them there are.

  I don’t want to read through these fragments of notes, not for fear of their tremendous length, but of rediscovering the distress hidden behind the words, the distress of a girl barely twenty years old who noticed the first signs of pregnancy the day after Tumchooq left, shortly before writing these notes. It was still dark when I was woken by a reflux of slightly stinging acid rising in my throat. A power cut turned my confusion into panic. I was soon up, fumbling in the dark for the few candles I always kept as a precaution.

  Resisting the urge to be sick, I took out my diary and started writing (even though I was not at first sure what about) by the flickering light of the candles, which kept stubbornly falling over. Eventually one of them fell on the floor, and as I picked it up I felt a hot torrent rushing through me, ready to burst from my mouth; it was so violent that all the candles flickered and went out one after the other. I was on my knees, as good as blinded, gripping onto the table, clearing my throat till I saw stars, but, oddly, I wasn’t sick. The surge of acid had subsided; just a warning. But it left such a horrible sensation that, in order to get rid of it, I had the ridiculous idea of throwing myself body and soul into writing down memories, and these soon turned into an endless stream, a great succession of French words as soft as my mother’s breath. I didn’t dare stop, even to smoke, for fear of being assailed by the mysterious acid reflux again, or having to face reality. Acting on this impulse, I made sure not to miss a single detail and looked up from my writing only to sharpen my pencils, worn down at impressive speed as the pages went by.

  For two weeks the terrifying symptom didn’t re-offend. I carried on writing, interrupting my work only to eat a mouthful or sleep for a while, so that I could stay in Tumchooq’s world, maintain contact with him—he’s been gone three weeks, that’s twenty-one days with no news—and keep him company day and night, wherever he may be.

  On the 28th of last month, the day before Chinese New Year (which Tumchooq celebrated with his father, who, since Mao’s death, has been promoted to the rank of pig-keeper and finally freed from working in the depths of the gem mines), for reasons I don’t understand, I declined invitations to parties organised by my university and the French embassy, and spent the New Year alone in the company of my private diary, locked in my room out of mute solidarity with this “devoted son.” Bent over my paper, writing about him, his father and his prison colony, I felt I was with them in that part of China banned to foreigners.

  Pig-keeper! How ironic for the eminent Western scholar, who should have had a chair at the College de France or been elected to the Académie frangaçise long ago. I think Paul d’Ampère would have preferred to be appointed a shepherd (after all, we call the evening star the “shepherd’s star” in French, but, as far as I know, no pig-keeper’s star shines in the firmament). There’s none of that nobility of pastoral care, sovereignty or leading the flock about the term “pig-keeper;” instead it conjures an image of a poor, skinny little child darting between hunks of wobbling flesh as his pigs sprawl in the mud with their small, mistrustful eyes. That same child hoping to steal a share of the dirty, fetid food they bury their muddied snouts in, grunting; he swallows it straight down, only too happy to find anything to cheat the appalling hunger that grips his innards.

  In comparison with a prisoner digging in the mines, though, pig-keeper is the most sought-after position after working in the canteen, given its food-related benefits. Should we read into this the effects of his faith in Buddhism, which respects all creatures, or his joy at leaving his previous team, synonymous as they were with the Underworld if not with death itself? But, according to Tumchooq, even the most jealous of his new fellow prisoners acknowledge that Paul d’Ampère is the best pig-keeper the River Lu camp has ever had.

  At break of day he stands dreamily chopping grass with a knife, setting a regular, unchanging rhythm like a monk beating a stone instrument. Then he lights a wood fire and boils up the chopped grass with bran in a huge cast-iron pot. Meanwhile he cleans the floor of the pigsty, centimetre by centimetre, using water drawn from the River Lu; then he calls one of the pigs by the Tumchooq name he has given it, and the animal grunts and nudges through its companions, making its way towards the gate like an obedient soldier coming to his commander. Paul d’Ampère cleans the animal so competently he might have been doing it all his life. He pours water on its skin and brushes it until it gleams like black silk. He gives them all the same treatment, and last of all comes the queen, a solid, no-nonsense, magnificently fat sow with dark silk patches on her back and lighter ones on her belly, and teats that fill out when she has piglets—which the directors hand out to the warders’ families. Waddling, reluctant, she has the privilege of a bath in the River Lu, and she buries her short legs in the mud and flicks her snout to splash herself with water before coming back to the pig-keeper for her morning wash, snuffling and gurgling, her whole body seeming to swell with voluptuous abandon.

  Paul d’Ampère is genuinely distraught in the lead-up to a celebration, when one or several of the pigs have to be killed for the warders’ feast. As soon as he sees the canteen director with a dozen prisoners-turned-butchers coming over to the pigsties, he wants to run away, to hide as far from there as possible to avoid witnessing the scene. But he has to stay and watch the creatures, who seem to hold their breath, not grunting or making a sound, to hear what the visitors are saying. And when the director points out the victim, it backs away of its own accord, right to the far end of the pigsty, as if guessing its fate from what the man has said. Then the butchers head over to the corner, hauling out the animal as it digs its pointed trotters into the mud and gives great long squeals, almost like the cries of a dying man, wails that go on and on endlessly, until the poor pig-keeper’s eardrums are fit to burst. The squealing becomes even more frantic when its throat is slit, which is often done in the canteen kitchen.

  “Perhaps I’ve never really been sensitive to sounds, except for the human voice,” Paul d’Ampère confided to his son, “but from their first cry I feel I can hear them begging me in Tumchooq to help them. My whole chest constricts with pain and I can’t tell whether the butcher’s knife is going into one of my pigs’ throats or my own.”

  10TH FEBRUARY

  Yesterday I was overwhelmed by mounting anxiety or rather a premonition. It’s more than ten days since New Year now and a week has passed since Tumchooq was due back. I went out, not sure where to go, walking so heavily that, at one point, I realised I was trundling along the street hunched over like an old lady under the weight of that premonition. It was dark but I recognised Little India Street, which seemed to have turned into a never-ending tunnel. The shop signs were still lit up and I thought—though it was just an illusion—they said the names of the towns along Tumchooq’s route to the River Lu: Chengdu, Xin Jin, Qiong Le, Ya An, Yong Jin and the last part of the journey, the Pass of the Immortal Steering Wheel, ghostly ideograms spinning before my eyes and seeping into my mind, even after the shops had closed, lowering their metal shutters one after another.

  The last shop left open was the traditional pharmacy. A man of about sixty sat next to a porcelain lamp, bathed in mellow light and a distinctive smell, milling dried herbs and tree bark. I hesitated for almost ten minutes before asking whether he could tell fortunes, as most of his colleagues can, and whether I could ask him about Tumc
hooq, whose name I changed, of course, because the pharmacist is bound to know him, given how close their shops are to each other. I watched him mixing the plant powder with alcohol, grinding it and blending it, as if hoping to find some good omen in those slow, meticulous gestures.

  As he picked up a paintbrush and prepared some ink, probably to write out the name of the medicine on a label, he looked up and stared at me with apparent astonishment. In that fraction of a second I thought I could see in his eyes—would I have imagined something like this?—that he knew my fate and Tumchooq’s and that of the embryo deep inside my womb. But I left before we’d exchanged a single word, partly because I was too shy to confide in him and partly for fear that, even with one little word, he might confirm my premonition.

  I came very close to losing my mind outside the greengrocer’s, which had been closed for a while, kicking the rusted metal shutter so hard I hurt my toes, each kick giving off a dull, listless echo. Next I launched myself at the rubbish baskets, tipping them over in the street, spilling their fill of rotting, unsellable cabbage leaves, pumpkins, aubergines, marrows, chicories, carrots and cucumbers. Then I saw a man with a cart coming round the corner of the street and heading towards me; he was a pedlar selling grilled sparrows, something I know Tumchooq loves, they have a distinctive taste, thanks to the nutmeg which forms the basis of their diet. I bought everything left on the cart, hoping Tumchooq would make a miraculous reappearance in the middle of the night. Then I headed back to the campus and waited on my bed till dawn, quite incapable of closing my eyes.

  Would our child—if the Heavens granted us one, to use a Chinese expression—have red hair? The question buzzed around inside my head as I half slept. When I got up to make some tea the wooden floor creaked slightly beneath me and, for the first time in a long while, the dawn light skimmed over my teapot, as it does in a poem by Du Fu, my favourite poet, also from Sichuan. For no apparent reason and without warning, tears streamed from my eyes and I was properly sick, twice, in quick succession.