Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  When I made this resolution a suspicion I had harboured for some time floated to the forefront of my mind: Was I deluding myself that this was love? I was trying to give so much to Tumchooq, unbeknown to him, but would he give me any sign of gratitude or affection in return? The fact that he had excluded me from his suffering was a bitter pill I swallowed out of solidarity and unconditional love. But it still tormented me so much I felt I was swallowing it all over again each time I woke alone in bed with sheets drenched with sweat. I swore that if life helped me find him again I would allow myself the satisfaction of establishing—out of a simple desire to know the truth—whether or not he thought of me on the day that he decided never to speak Chinese again and to leave his country.

  What is left now of those three years of arduous study and constant enthusiasm? Tibetan words often crop up in my mind without warning, and from time to time I find myself coming out with unexpectedly beautiful sentences, and they have a ring to them which reminds me of the Tumchooq language. Sentences like that, sometimes even single words with no more significance than any other, delighted me back in the days when I was learning them. Sitting in the classroom, I thought for a few seconds I could see them glittering like a cloud of pollen, grains of fine sand, equipped with special Tumchooqian powers, borne on the breeze to my tutorial group, where they fell on me like gentle rain, especially when they were spoken by Mr. Tarakesa, who taught us Buddhism. He was a blind Tibetan monk, tall, thin and in his sixties, with a face like a medieval ascetic and an ability to recite sutras from memory, which gave him near legendary status among the students (by an ironic twist of fate, the first four letters of his name, tara, meant eye in Sanskrit and Tumchooq). He started his course with this sentence, which I like to think is still engraved on all his students’ memories: “The scope of sacred Buddhist books, called sutras, is as vast as an ocean on which each of us is a small boat edging forwards, losing its way, then edging forwards again.”

  One day in mid-October, after asking us to read extracts from Tantric texts, he handed out photocopies of the last chapter of the Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra in both Tibetan and French. I started to read the Tibetan version but, struggling with a word, glanced at the French. My eyes then fell on a text with such distinctive syntax that I immediately felt only one person could have written it—because no one else wrote like that. I had read all his books and his articles published in scholarly reviews and I recognised his inflexions, his very individual tone, his style, the unique way he constructed a sentence like a silkworm drawing a longer and longer thread produced from its own juices, weaving that thread, forming a structure and eventually a cocoon in which to take refuge, protected from the outside world, his long sentences characterised by terse, unexpectedly enlightening conclusions, which alter the meaning of the words that have gone before. (The only work of his to escape this rule is his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World, in which his style is more neutral, less individual.) I asked the professor whether Paul d’Ampère was the translator of the text. Mr. Tarakesa confirmed that he was and showed me the book: Teachings of the Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra, translated and annotated by Paul d’Ampère, University of Louvain, Institute of Oriental Studies, 1962.

  The last chapter of this sutra relates the eventful travels of an intelligent and modest novice monk who roamed the world in search of fifty-eight “bodhisattva”—his fifty-eight instructors who each adopted a deceptive appearance as a monk, a nun, a tribal patriarch, a doctor, a monarch, a sailor, an immortal, a heretic, a beggar, a thief, a prostitute, etc. Drawing on their experience of all human passions, they reinforced their own sanctity; those whose lives were full of sin relied on their vices to uncover the profound inanity of existence, thereby establishing a universal moral rule. It was Mr. Tarakesa’s favourite sutra and his lesson would turn into a theatrical performance where, by altering his voice, he acted out the discussions between the novice and his good teachers disguised behind their different masks, sketching in the setting, adding descriptions of their social background, their clothes (probably only from his own imagination), offering philological analyses worthy of a linguist, making comparisons between the Tibetan and French versions, and emphasising the subtlety of their choice of words.

  If only Paul d’Ampère could hear this from beyond the grave, I thought, could hear his translation recited from memory by this erudite, blind scholar whose eyes, covered with a translucent white film, shimmered on the days the sun appeared through the window, but turned a hazy, pearly grey and closed altogether when he lost himself in one of his recitations, chanting the text non-stop and giving a running commentary, as if in a dream. The more I heard Mr. Tarakesa delivering Paul d’Ampères French text—he spent two months teaching us that sutra—the more I felt his words were secretly linking me to d’Ampère’s son. The French translation cast a spell like an enchanted island; it was a steamboat stripped of all its weight, gliding silently round the room, so that none of my fellow students suspected it was there, looming out of nowhere, tall, majestic, with me as its only passenger, the happy, chosen stowaway whose privileged status no one else could guess. In those few moments how much I regretted having that abortion, not being able to keep our child and bring it up on my own to perpetuate the ancestral genius of the d’Ampères, or at least, as a grandmother might say, to carry on their name. When Tumchooq and I no longer exist, there would still have been a d’Ampère in the world to embody our affection for Paul, and to love him.

  Mr. Tarakesa was quick to become an ally after I sent him a long letter in which I gave him a two-page resume of d’Ampères life and confessed I was searching for a sutra, half of which he had translated. He couldn’t remember being aware of this sutra and spent sleepless nights pacing up and down his studio, gazing out of the window for hours, trying to prise from his memory—which was a living library—any recollection of a similar parable in an Indian sutra or an analogous allegory that Buddha might have used in his frequent teachings, but in vain. He promised he would ask other Tibetan scholars, exiled—as he was—in various corners of the world, and specialists he knew in Cambridge, Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, Stanford, etc.

  This investigation went on for almost all of my second year of Tibetan study. It was led, with great generosity, by Mr. Tarakesa, and from time to time it opened up leads which at first seemed interesting, but which proved on closer inspection to be false. None of his colleagues’ suggestions escaped the law by which each new possibility eradicates its predecessor, and none of them unearthed anything definitive about the sutra itself. The documents coming in from the four corners of the world, each more valuable than the last, were mostly about the Tumchooq kingdom, where recent archaeological finds had revealed its origins, its silk production and its totem-pole-based religion prior to its conversion to Buddhism.

  To mark my gratitude I offered to go to Mr. Tarakesa’s house once a week and read to him, either in Tibetan or French. He accepted, to my considerable surprise.

  “I would like to hear,” he said, “the language which Paul d’Ampère was first to decipher and of which I don’t understand a blessed word.”

  I couldn’t refuse him this pleasure even though I was aware that my knowledge of Tumchooq, in which I had been initiated by a greengrocer, would not match his expectations. And so our weekly trips to the kingdom of Tumchooq began. On Saturday mornings I would go to his studio in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, a place which in many ways was like a hermitage, perched on the seventh floor (the red stair carpet stopped at the sixth), a former maid’s room under the eaves, transformed into a sort of sanctuary, with the tray and plastic curtain for an electric shower plonked crookedly across one corner. There was hardly any furniture, but a statue of Buddha had pride of place on a purely decorative mantelpiece and above it hung a large mirror in which, on each of my visits, I watched my reflection prostrate itself before the golden statue, while my prayers were accompanied by a rhythm beaten out on a ritual wooden instrument by Mr. Tarakesa, in ceremo
nial dress beside me. Then he took off his robes and, in his shirt sleeves, lit the gas stove to make Tibetan tea; the nozzles made a soft whistling sound, the bluish flames flickered over the Buddha’s face … and I started reading extracts of Tumchooq texts, most of them published in historical and archaeological reviews and orientalists’ monographs, which I had read and reread over the course of the week, until I achieved a degree of fluency.

  I still don’t know what frame of mind he was in as he listened to me reading. Did he let those unfamiliar words carry him away on a sort of cloud, taking him on a journey back through time until he heard the voice of a loved one in that foreign language? Did he see it as a kind of meditation echoing a higher state, which allowed him to pray and bless all humanity, if not actually to save it, a meditation undermined by my poor pronunciation and strong French accent? I kept wanting to ask him whether the world was as empty, as pointless and as incomprehensible as the words I spoke. I sometimes even suspected he was simply reliving Paul d’Ampère’s life, one episode at a time; the oval of his cheek would stretch obliquely, filling out with the intensity of his emotions as he let slip a barely perceptible, knowing smile. Occasionally, without any apparent connection to what I was reading, his face would tense, his features harden, screwing themselves up and then relaxing again, and no alteration to the rhythm or resonance of my voice could do anything to change what he was feeling. Who was inspiring these feelings in him? The French orientalist? It was as if he had known him, as if they had been the greatest friends in the world. Quite often, after a couple of hours’ reading, we would go out to have some lunch, almost without exception in a Vietnamese restaurant on the corner of the Rue du Cherche-Midi and the Boulevard de Montparnasse, where he would sit in his usual place behind a huge aquarium of goldfish and always eat the same dish, a vegetarian noodle soup, even though the Tibetan school of Diamond Way Buddhism—which states that anyone can achieve enlightenment and become Buddha—allows its monks to consume meat in moderation, the Tibetan climate making it a necessity.

  After our meal we went and had coffee in the little café opposite called Le Chien qui Fume, then he would go home and I would catch a metro from Duroc station to get back to the Latin Quarter. I never allowed myself to insist on seeing him back to his studio, for he loathed being an object of pity, except when he suggested I read to him in the afternoon. Those afternoons sometimes went right on until the light failed, both of us enjoying a sense of calm and delight as we bathed in the charm of the Tumchooq language. I felt at peace with myself at last, as if nothing could threaten my newfound equilibrium. Well, almost.

  A curvaceous young woman, who lived in the building opposite in a studio also under the eaves on the seventh floor facing the one belonging to the Tibetan monk, appeared in the window at regular intervals and undertook a shameless seduction scene intended for my instructor’s neighbour—a young Greek doctor doing time as a houseman in Paris—who was also at his window. Separated from each other by the street, they embarked on an aerial conversation, clearly discernible as it batted back and forth. Their exchanges, which became more provocative with every passing minute and were delicious in their simplicity, grew increasingly audible as my weary reading voice feebly mumbling Tumchooq words eventually constituted nothing more than background noise to their vaudeville performance, and we were reduced to the status of privileged spectators in the front row of the stalls. At some point the question was settled, the young woman left her window and the action moved to the future Greek surgeons studio on the other side of a party wall thinner than a sheet of cardboard, plunging my tutor and me into a state of appalling embarrassment, defenceless against an auditory onslaught of excited laughter, undressing noises, exclamations and female comments about the size of the Hellenic medical students member, encouragements, filthy words, creaking bedsprings, groans of ecstasy—my God, it went on, every second felt like an eternity! Their moans came through the wall without any loss of intensity, taking the statue of Buddha by storm, coagulating in the air between the Tibetan monk and me, smothering my voice so that, in spite of the heroic stoicism I displayed, my sentences in Tumchooq lost their resonance, their musicality their rhythm, becoming as bleak and monotonous as bare mountains, bare beaches, a bare horizon in that bare studio, ready to collapse when the two neighbours’ cries accelerated faster and faster until they eventually exploded into Greek monosyllables that the Olympian hero hurled in our faces in all their enormity as his exploits reached their climax.

  Of all the Tumchooq texts I had laid hands on, Mr. Tarakesa delighted most in the one from the mutilated scroll and would regularly begin a morning session by asking me to read and reread it; and, if he wanted me to carry on reading in the afternoon, it was always to devote the time to that text, either in the original language or in the French translation, or even in the Tibetan version that he himself had established and dictated to me. That portion of text was his chosen one, it seemed to be part of his furniture, on a par with his gas stove or his teapot. He accumulated different commentaries on it, frequently making comparisons with The Jatakas, accounts of Buddha’s previous lives, which form an important part of the Buddhist canon in Pali and which he knew by heart. I sensed that he secretly hoped to bring his learning to bear on the unknown and, in his meditations, to find the end of the fable, even if its conclusion turned out to be just a single sentence.

  Our weekly sessions carried on for nearly a year with a few interruptions during school holidays, then Mr. Tarakesa left for New York, where the Dalai Lama had entrusted him with an important responsibility. It was a Thursday when I learnt from another tutor that he had resigned from the Institute of Oriental Languages. I couldn’t wait until that Saturday morning’s session, our last, and went to see him the same evening. He welcomed me in, surprised to see me. I had barely sat down, while he—as usual—prepared the tea, before I burst into tears. I knew he was embarrassed by my outburst, but I found it impossible to contain, overwhelmed by the sorrow of separation from the last person who connected me to everything I loved, to the Tumchooq language and, therefore, to Tumchooq himself. I was filled with fierce depression and a feeling of loneliness; until then I had been bolstered, sustained and brightened by the hope that I would one day see the mutilated scroll completed by Mr. Tarakesa, a hope he was now burying for ever. I recovered my composure as best I could, and when he started talking it was to ask me, as if he, too, were obsessed by the missing part of the manuscript, to let him know if the other fragment of the scroll or the integral text of the sutra were ever found. He himself, he admitted as much, had tried to imagine the ending, but in vain, even though the character in the fable—the man hanging on the edge of the cliff—had often appeared to him in his little studio, suspended in mid-air, a few inches above the floorboards, for longer than the laws of gravity allowed, but each time the image had vanished almost the moment he saw it.

  “What I need,” he told me with a sigh, “is a pair of those golden wings like founders of religions, great philosophers, Buddha himself and some of his disciples, wings that allowed them to ‘take off’ and fly over the world. Without them, a mere mortal like you or me can never hope to be up to the task.”

  “Even Paul d’Ampère?” I asked him.

  He looked embarrassed by the question, repeated Paul d’Ampère’s name several times, then, after a long silence, said:

  “I know him only from his work and from what you’ve told me about him. An individual as exceptional as him—erudite, sensitive and with his experience of suffering—would probably have acquired those wings and been able to fly. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had found the end of the parable, except that he was a Westerner.”

  “I don’t see the connection.” My voice had a slightly shaky quality.

  “Our imagination is dictated by who we are. It seems to me that finding the end of a teaching like that requires an entirely oriental mind, far beyond dissertations on the outside world, explorations of human conscience and ea
rthly passions, beyond the unpredictable beauty of an isolated sentence or image …”

  I brought an abrupt end to the visit, not even letting him finish what he was saying. I even ran to get away, because I was so exasperated by the way he talked about Paul d’Ampère. Whatever we do, we’re still just “Westerners” to them! Among themselves they can have hatred, wars and massacres, but they know each other, understand each other and never think of each other as foreigners.

  I can’t remember whether I slammed the door or how I got out onto the street, but I do know my whole body was shaking, on the brink of hysteria, and I had to sit down at the bottom of the steps for God knows how long. Then I went home on foot, dragging my feet beneath icy rain, which reminded me of that sad night coming out of hospital in Peking when I wandered like a sleepwalker in a state of immense loneliness. When I reached Concordia, tortured by an appalling migraine, I locked myself in my room and stayed in bed for three days, more dead than alive. Since that day I’ve never set foot in the Tibetan department again. At a stroke, I sloughed off the three languages (Chinese, Tumchooq and Tibetan) that I had learnt for the sake of someone I loved, someone who had disappeared in the meantime; languages which had come to be—and would remain—prisons in which I shut myself away.

  My renunciation of three Asian languages began a slow eradication of my memories of Tumchooq, perhaps even a decline in my love for him. The fact that he was not with me hurt less: my heartache was abating. The only thing that survived was my pleasure in learning languages. That is why, in late September 1983, with what was left of my bank loan, I went back to the Institute of Oriental Languages, this time to enrol in the African Studies department, where I started learning Bambara, a perfect contradiction not only of my parents’ expectations for my future life but also of my own.