Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  2

  TO BE HONEST, AT THE TIME I HAD NO concept of what an African language might be, even less of the workings of humanitarian organisations, but I signed up as a volunteer to one barely a year after I began studying Bambara. Out in the field I threw myself wholeheartedly into a project to build a school in northern Mali, three hundred kilometres from Bamako, near the former capital of the Songhai Empire.

  With a naivety which now brings a smile to my lips, I could already see myself as a schoolteacher surrounded by dozens of orphans of all ages, staying on after lessons to take them down to the Niger and watch them have fun, jump, swim and play hide-and-seek while the great red disc of the sun dropped slowly into the river, where bare-breasted washerwomen stood waist-deep in the water, singing and laughing as they beat wet clothes over stones with wooden sticks that made a dull, slightly muffled thud. I myself would bathe the youngest children (Would I have known how to? Is being born a woman enough for that skill?), supporting the toddlers streaming back with one hand and soaping him with the other. Then I would tell him to wriggle his arms and legs in every direction in time to the washerwomen’s jubilant song, or do a slight variation on this the way African mothers do: bunching the child’s arms and legs over his tummy, then suddenly letting them go and smothering his silky soft naked body with kisses, as if he were my own baby, my child from Peking who, as he grew up, had changed skin colour—a frequent phenomenon in dreams, where physical appearances go unnoticed, can be modified and are often interchangeable. As I cared for my little orphans I would wash myself of the last stains I felt still deep inside me and which still hurt. I imagined they would dissolve like refracted prisms in the Niger.

  Because most people live with constant anxiety about finding their place in society, few can afford the luxury of healing a broken heart in Africa. I was exceptionally lucky, I realised that. I was a chosen one, greeted each new day by this preferential treatment, which smiled down on me like the sun above the mists of the African bush. By coming in contact with life in its raw state (absent in Western societies so well organised they have frozen rigid), the hitherto inconceivable idea that love isn’t eternal and can die no longer frightened me. On the contrary, I discovered to my stupefaction all the beauty of a lost love, a melancholy liberating beauty, a sort of macabre dance in which I twirled and spun like a madwoman. I threw myself at strangers, meeting my one-night stands in the bush and Bamako’s kitsch restaurants, and eventually they all looked like a familiar ghost, Tumchooq.

  The experiences I had then were salutary. Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers—from the first to the last, including the most fleeting—part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character’s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc.). I imagine that if they met they would each apologise for stepping onto the shared stage too soon.

  Perhaps it’s in my nature, but in Mali I had no more success than anywhere else in forging peaceable relationships with my compatriots within the humanitarian family. It really was stronger than me, I couldn’t help giving my opinion about everything going on around me, saying what I liked and what I found shocking: for example, the colossal amount our organisation spent on communication, which matched what was spent on work in the field; the difference in wages between white “managers” and black employees; the fierce competition—worthy of privately owned companies—between different organisations, etc. I therefore had a feeling of relief, almost of deliverance, when I could finally spend my time in a dug-out canoe on the river Niger. This started in June 1985, when the first delivery of school equipment arrived after my long campaign to acquire it through repeated letters and endless intercontinental calls to French establishments. The equipment was intended for Ansongo in the Gao region, where I had been trying for several months to set up a school for the Songhais. The railway does not go beyond Bamako, so wood, animal fodder, cooking pots, dried fish and every imaginable sort of produce is transported along the Niger in large hand-built boats. I had mine constructed as follows: an impressively thick beam ten metres long and five wide was hoisted and fixed onto several canoes connected together to form a sort of platform, and equipped with an old engine, which could be heard banging and spluttering several kilometres away, worse than a pneumatic drill.

  I recruited two crew members, a retired boatman and his wife, who would work as our cook, and I had the equipment, sent from goodness knows what prehistoric hangar, loaded on: desks and benches which looked pre-war if not from colonial days, two or three blackboards with flaking paint, and boxes of exercise books, chalk, pencils and pens. I called my vessel Tumchooq, and in black ink in the mysterious letters of that ancient language—despite the waning spell they had over my heart, I still thought them beautiful and irreplaceable—I wrote the name on a yellow flag, which I attached in the middle of a pile of desks to the bridge of my African craft. When anyone asked what my banner meant and I replied that it was the name of the greatest greengrocer in Peking, people eyed me suspiciously as if I’d gone quite mad.

  Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness and like Conrad himself, both of whom travelled up the Congo on a small steamboat, I went down the smaller Niger on board the Tumchooq, from the clear waters at Bamako, through a series of rapids at Sa-tuba, across the Mandingo Plateaux, taking four days to cross the vast Macina plain with its network of tributaries, lakes and swamps. At times my boat, its engine screaming, toiled through putrefying weeds that undulated below the surface like hair. My boatman stood at the prow, prodding the riverbed with a pole, while I held the tiller, which left a wake through the mud and weeds, stirring up a swampy stench and prodigious quantities of mosquitoes. But none of this dampened my mood and, after that difficult stretch, we came back onto the winding but clearly defined main channel.

  I turned off the engine and everything was quiet again; all we could hear was the sound of the water, as old as the world. The exhausted boatman drank some dolo and fell asleep, blind drunk, over the rudder, and Tumchooq drifted. It was such a pleasure seeing the boat abandon itself to the whims of the current that night, where, just like in the mutilated scroll deciphered by Paul d’Ampère, the moon, masked by dark, low clouds, did not appear. The boat was no longer navigating but gliding over that ebony surface, occasionally bumping into the bank and setting off again in the right direction.

  After midnight the moon appeared, illuminating a few meagre huts along the way, dark, silent family homes. In places there were nameless aquatic plants with purple flowers, their stalks and roots mixed in with wide flat leaves and slender reeds. Further on, small islands of flowers floated on the water, paler, more grainy and crumpled. Overwhelmed by sleep, I climbed up onto the cases of stationery, lay down on a desk, perhaps the very one my grandparents used, and fell asleep, just like that.

  I was woken by a noise: swaying and lurching, the old boatman was making his way towards the back of our square vessel. Moving almost with the virtuosity of an acrobat and the slow stealth of a sleepwalker, he climbed down to the rudder, the upper blade of which was half submerged in the water. Once there, he paused, took down his trousers, squatted and stayed motionless in that position for as long as the procedure took. I couldn’t help laughing out loud when he almost lost his precarious balance and fell into the river as he bent right down to water level to wash his buttocks.

  After Mopti, a major trading centre with a fishing port where the Niger is joined by the Bani, one of its main tributaries, Tumchooq set off across the limestone and sandstone plateaux of the Bandiagara region in Dogon Country. Villages became increasingly scarce and we could travel for ho
urs without glimpsing a human presence as far as the eye could see, apart from columns of smoke rising in the distance over the vast bush. Towards midday we suddenly heard the sound of an engine in the sky and, apparently swooping out of nowhere, a drumming helicopter appeared overhead, extraordinarily low and slow-moving, its powerful draft flattening the weeds along the banks and making our bodies vibrate so much they felt drained of all substance. Painted in yellow on the cockpit door beneath the blades were the words: EMBASSY OF USA. Tumchooq was paralysed, quivering in every limb, and its flag flew off in the air when the mechanical monster whirred away, gleaming in the blinding sunlight.

  Three hours later we came across it again in a Dogon village, with a team from the American embassy, Malian soldiers and local policemen who had come by jeep. They were outside tall, round straw huts with thatched roofs and were surrounded by naked children and the silent intensity of a crowd of locals in rags. The body of an American missionary, with hair so dusty it looked like an albinos, was carried to the helicopter on a handcart. The body had been found in the bush, about ten kilometres from the village. According to the Malian policeman I spoke to, it was going to be difficult to identify the perpetrator of this appalling crime, because the wounds and marks found on the missionary were unusual, and the body was in an advanced state of decay. The local Dogons claimed the culprit was a bull giraffe roaming the area, a solitary creature six metres tall (a whole metre above average) and known for his violence during the rutting season.

  We continued on our way and, two days later, reached the Timbuktu region, the starting point for Saharan caravans where the river, which until then is angled from south-west to north-east, begins a long eastward curve, forming a pretty loop, narrowing through the gorge at Tosaye and curving out towards the south-east at Bourem. We finally arrived in Gao, the former capital of the Songhai empire, crossed the Tilemsi Valley and made our way down to the Ansongo Valley through a series of rapids.

  Savouring a moment of relaxation, I looked at my surroundings with the eye of a schoolteacher who would spend the rest of her life there: a quiet valley where they grew rice, cotton, groundnuts, millet, sorghum, etc. Tumchooq was warmly welcomed by the Songhais; the school equipment was unloaded, admired and transported to one of the major villages, where it was put into attractive buildings with domed roofs. After resting for two days I set off again on my African boat, heading back upriver for a second delivery of equipment from France due to arrive in Bamako.

  Although released from the weight of the equipment, Tumchooq suffered more on the return journey, finding it harder to resist the rivers assaults: water seeped into the canoes supporting the platform of my unusual-shaped vessel; we had to bail constantly, with calabashes, only rarely exchanging the odd word. I decided to stop off in the Dogon village where we had seen the American embassy helicopter, because it started raining and the menacing black clouds indicated a violent downpour. As I ran through the rain I caught sight of a strange object attached to the top of a post at the entrance to the village. From a distance this thing, which appeared hazy through the raindrops, looked about the size of a small box of sweets dangling on the end of a rod; swaying beneath the box, fragile as a ribbon, was an endlessly long thin shape, which fell right to the ground. As I drew closer the box grew bigger until it overflowed my field of vision: it was a wooden cage with a head imprisoned behind its bars, not a man’s head as in Heart of Darkness, but a giraffes. I had to touch the ribbon hanging beneath the cage with my own fingers to grasp that it was the gigantic animal’s spine.

  A villager who spoke Bambara told me that after the American helicopter left, Dogons from all over the region set out to hunt down the giraffe rightly or wrongly accused of the missionary’s death.

  “A white man’s life is priceless,” he told me. The hunt seemed vital to the villagers, who were afraid of the Americans—although the embassy had formulated no concrete demands on the subject—and whose regional governor had threatened to withhold all international aid if the culprit went unpunished. The hunt had mobilised about a hundred men and two police jeeps. The scapegoat, pursued across the bush for two whole days, took refuge in the mountains, but in the end, hounded on all sides by men shouting and firing shots as they drew ever closer, it was so exhausted a breath of wind would have mown it down. In the small hours of the morning it was found dying at the foot of a white limestone cliff. It was then transported to the village, where a witch doctor finished it off.

  The region had seen no rainfall for two years and Dogon children stayed out in the rain, letting it whip their naked bodies as they expressed their happiness with whoops of joy. They paddled in the mud, jumped, played, laughed and danced. One of them ran towards the post bearing the cage, but he slipped and fell in a puddle halfway. He picked himself up and, I don’t know what made him do this, threw a nasty look at the cage, picked up a handful of mud, shaped it into a huge ball, which he moulded with great care and then threw with all his strength, his muscles quivering with childish glee. The soft, heavy projectile rose up through the air straight towards the giraffe’s head, but missed its target. Rain streamed over the pelt of the decapitated head with its distinctive markings, dripped from the animal’s long ears, filled its pinnae, ran over its forehead where a perfect tuft of hair conferred grace and nobility on its features, which looked as innocent as a newborn baby’s.

  Soaked from head to foot myself, I retraced my steps to Tumchooq and set off again. I regretted coming to that village. I regretted it bitterly, because a feeling of guilt, which had been lulled to sleep by my long stay in China, woke and descended on me with thunderous force. For the first time in my life I felt guilty for being white, or even guilty for being human, guilty for my presence in that village, or even on that continent. I now understood that I could go to impossible lengths, set up a hundred more schools for the Songhais, Dogons, Malinkes, Bambaras, Bozos, Sarkoles, Khassokes, Senoufos, Bobos, Fulanis, Tuaregs or the Maures, but I would never be free of that guilt. These thoughts churned round inside my head as Tumchooq toiled back up the Niger, its engine sound deadened by the rain.

  It was difficult to see much. The swampy, sparsely populated plain stretching from Mopti to Segu seemed even emptier, even more desolate than on the way down. We could see nothing in the river waters (we were covering under three kilometres an hour) except, here and there, a circular eddy, a vortex, a grassy islet.

  At nightfall the rain stopped at last and Tumchooq, struggling with the counter-current, cut through the banks of aquatic plants we came across on the way down, the ones that seemed so magnificent, but now felt hostile. They skidded swiftly towards us, cruelly barring the way to our vessel, and, in order to make any progress, we had to battle constantly, pushing them aside with our long poles. I was at the end of my strength when a swarming black cloud of mosquitoes—they seemed to have multiplied now that the rain had stopped—surged out of the darkness, attacking me from every direction, surrounding me so that I almost couldn’t breathe. Real kamikazes, greedy and mindless, homing in like arrows on the tiniest patch of exposed skin. I killed quite a lot of them, and for a moment the others would abandon my veins to suck the blood-filled corpses of their companions, stuck to my skin like one large viscous scab.

  By the following morning I was suffering from a terrible fever, my body on fire, blazing. As my temperature soared, my eyelids grew heavier and heavier and my ears buzzed, even though the mosquitoes had disappeared at dawn. Confused ideas collided inside my head. Huddled in a corner and racked with icy shivering, I wondered whether I was going to die. The fever still burned me from the inside like poison and spread into the hollow of my left hand, where it formed a concentration of sharper, more intense pain, while my left leg stiffened, then the whole left side of my body, with a sort of cramp which I tried to release by changing position.

  From one end of that plateau to the other I ambled like the giraffe I saw as a child under the big top of a circus; fired up by the music, it danced around the
ring under a garland of coloured lights. In my feverish agitation, that distant memory marked the beginning of a transference which came to a head when the boatman brought me a bowl of a dark-coloured drink, probably a decoction of medicinal herbs, and I thought I heard an animal squeal coming from my own bitter mouth. It wasn’t me crying out, but the giraffe dying at the foot of the cliff, sacrificed by the Dogons, who then put its head on a pillory; unless it was the cry of the man in the sutra who, once on a moonless night, fell from a cliff.

  Niger, never-ending Niger! My African boat was deteriorating as pitifully as my own physical and moral state with every metre of the river it covered. I didn’t get up for a whole week, staring at the sky and constantly reciting the text from the Tumchooq manuscript. Its simple words—strange, tender, often monosyllabic—resonated like a gentle incantation, giving me the illusion that I was flying up to the clouds, diving into the water, sliding between the aquatic plants, where my body dissolved and my flesh fell away. From time to time the old boatman intoned a Malian song, our voices overlapping, our two ancient languages in harmony. He tended me with his traditional infusions, with varying degrees of success, until we reached Segu, where he took me to a hospital, which immediately transferred me to Bamako, and from there I was repatriated to France, bringing an end to my short-lived humanitarian career. Perhaps that was written in my fate.

  3

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SORT OF TROPIcal disease I’d contracted and the doctors had no clearer idea. My recovery was as swift as it was mysterious, and its only after-effect was a long period of depression following my hospitalisation in Paris.