Once on a Moonless Night (16 page)

In one of his reports the team leader informed the authorities that the writer had wept tears of happiness as he performed the apparently banal gesture of picking up a scrap of old newspaper, which acted as wallpaper in the dormitory. It had come away from the dusty wall and now lay crumpled and dirty on the ground. He picked it up, he later admitted hastily in Tumchooq, to record the rounds won and lost against his opponent. (“I suddenly realised what I was doing,” he added. “It brought an end to my phobia of paper and writing. For that purely literary reason I couldn’t hold back my tears of joy”)

Even though the writer tore the piece of newspaper into tiny shreds on the spot for fear of leaving any trace of their forbidden game, the team leader picked it up, pieced together this proof of their offence with the patience of a clockmaker and glued it to another piece of paper. The flautist’s father still keeps this exhibit in a drawer, a page covered in indecipherable signs, “which looked like shit from the huge rats at the River Lu camp,” he told Ma.

It was a dazzling victory—the first of a language over a phobia—and the writer confirmed this in a conversation with his wife in the visiting room. According to the transcript of the recording, Hu Feng felt he was “in a state of grace,” “in love with the Tumchooq language,” especially now the Frenchman had introduced him to a sacred Buddhist text written in the language and copied word for word onto the inside of the sheepskin jerkin he wore day in and day out, summer and winter. “Venerating a text like that,” the writer confided to his wife, “being in permanent physical contact with it, touching his skin, is all the more astonishing in a Frenchman who, apparently, ought to be the archetypal Cartesian. I’ve touched those words written on sheepskin with my own hands and they were as warm as living things. Some of the strokes have been distorted by the Frenchman’s sweat and look like veins—sinuous, palpable, almost quivering. And over time some of the dots have turned into minute lotus flowers, reminding me, as it says in the text named after that flower, that the sutras are Buddha’s relics.”

The poor quality of the tape means some passages are inaudible, but this was a more or less accurate account of Hu Feng’s first contact with the text of the mutilated manuscript. The recorded document also includes a long description of his deciphering of the text in which some words, despite his staggering progress and mastery of basic vocabulary, were still unknown to him. His French instructor, as he called him, would sit on his bed in silence, patching up his glasses with wire and wiping the lenses with the rags wrapped around the side-pieces, lost in thought. Whereas he, stimulated as much by the mystery itself as by the hope of finding the key to it, felt like a child alone in a huge forest, overwhelmed with happiness at being reunited with particular trees, grasses and plants, as if he knew them intimately, calling each by name, touching them, stroking them, smelling them, while others, unfamiliar to him, loomed out of nowhere, coldly blocking his path so he had to flatten them and clear them aside, only to admit that, between the endless intermingling of truths and deceptive appearances, he was actually lost.

The writer compared himself to a sailor of old navigating a river in an unknown continent and coming across as yet unexplored stretches where rapids unleashed themselves over the riverbed, clutching a map with no place names attributed to the blank spaces, just images of animals: lions, leopards, cobras, giraffes. Night after night Hu Feng explored those fabulous animals, carefully tracing them, tentatively pronouncing their names, analysing them, dissecting them, performing morphological and phonetic autopsies on them, and comparing them to those he knew already. After a while he felt he had lived with them all his life, penetrating the thoughts of their creator, a faithful companion to their evolution.

In his dreams he sometimes saw himself on the platform of a small station with a dozen or so children he had delivered from a goods train whose wagons were locked with metal bars. But he had forgotten one poor child who was now setting off again in the train, and, still full of their successful escape, the saviour didn’t notice the spewing steam and the carriages beginning to move. The train drew slowly away, gathered speed and hurtled into a tunnel while Hu Feng started running after it, so nearly catching up … Then the orphan would appear to him as he truly was, as the ones he had saved were too: a word in Tumchooq—one he had struggled with for a long time without succeeding in deciphering—disguised as a child who wanted to escape with him. Much later, when the word was no longer an obstacle for him, when he knew all its derivatives, compounds and conjugations like the back of his hand, he would still remember the image from his dream every time he came across it, as if each stroke of that simple word carried within it the terror in an abandoned child’s eyes.

“Bit by bit the text emerged from the shadows,” he explained to his wife. “When I read it from beginning to end for the first time I felt as if I were in a plane—what unimaginable luxury for a prisoner—which had been delayed on the ground an unbearably long time, then lurched and slid along the runway, but was now taking off at last. I was slowly rising up to the silent heights of all the beauty that was Tumchooq. Overhead island clouds floated by, some dark grey others brilliant white, and here and there I could make out a patch of forest, a frozen pond, an area of rice paddy, and I started thinking, although the idea itself is ridiculous, I was gliding over islands of the languages I had landed on in the past: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, English. Then I recognised what they were: my own works in Chinese, their solid pedestrian prose constantly shackled by society, by banality and more particularly by [inaudible word] dictatorship. While my Chinese writing only very occasionally takes flight, Tumchooq prose, now that dances.”

History, in this instance the transcript of the recorded visit, does not elaborate on the reaction of the writers wife. It may well have been like that of a woman whose husband is missing and presumed dead but who still waits, watching out for the slightest sign of his possible return. Now that her husbands memory was resuscitated it would truly be a miracle if his writing—even in a language she didn’t understand at all—were also resuscitated, more powerful, more ethereal and more admired than ever. To her, Tumchooq was the Saviour, a God whose mythical power was further reinforced by these words from her husband: “I can’t allow myself to recite the text to you, not because it’s incomplete, but because the beauty of the language can’t be translated. It’s almost too beautiful to survive in this world. In my opinion, neither I nor any living Chinese writer would be able to convey half its charm, we could only translate it word for word, giving the bare bones without the flesh and life. It reminds me of my unfortunate experience translating Gogol: despite my best efforts and however much my work was praised, the beauty of the original slipped through my fingers. It hurt so much I wept, and I think of all those unfortunate people in the world—God knows how many of them there are—who don’t read Russian and will die some day without ever experiencing the beauty of Gogol’s prose. How appalling!”

The camp directors eventually made a collective decision to separate the Frenchman and Hu Feng after receiving a report denouncing these two thought criminals who, one Christmas Eve (this was confirmed using a Western calendar), went too far by treating themselves to a taunting, provocative celebration, which deftly insulted the camp’s food regulations and defied the rules of their incarceration. It was a windless night, the hundred mine shafts were silent and the inside of the barrack room was bitterly cold; during a pause between two rounds of chess played in the dark, the Frenchman carried on chatting to his opponent. No one knew whether this was totally improvised, a premeditated act or whether he was talking in his sleep, but the writer, whose voice had a very distinctive ring to it, was suddenly heard translating his partner’s words sentence by sentence. A peculiar dialogue, one speaking in Tumchooq, the other in Chinese, like a medium interpreting a barely audible, incomprehensible voice from another world in the shadowy hut.

“It’s a recipe from the western Pyrenees, the land of my glorious ancestors. I tasted it as a child but forgot all about it until I came across it in Marco Polo’s writings in a passage describing how to make a concoction which Europeans were still unfamiliar with in the Venetian’s days and which we now call by a name taken from Aztec: chocolate.”

As the word doesn’t exist in Tumchooq he said it in English, mouthing it so softly in that silent dormitory you could almost hear it melting on his tongue: it resonated in his fellow prisoners’ ears, but most if not all of them had no idea what chocolate was, and the writer, touched by their ignorance, paused for a long time as he delved into his distant memories to give them this explanation:

“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.