Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (22 page)

Night had begun. Wu was tossing out a greasy ladle. The basket by the door — as always at this time — overflowed with similar
utensils. Suddenly there was a quiet knock.

With a glass stick slightly flattened at one end, Wu scooped up some red porridge. Then he closed his eyes. He had heard the knocking, but still did not react. It had been many years since anyone visited him at night, and there was no reason suddenly to start believing in ghosts.

Carefully, he wiped the porridge onto the middle and, a second later, onto the tip of his tongue. For a moment he stood with his tongue stuck straight out at attention and imbibed the waves of his breath, then began sibilantly to roll them back up. Just as the taste poured over his upper palate like a carpet of sparkling colors, someone banged on the door again.

Freeze, Wu thought. Freeze like a lizard on a greensward. There's no one I want to see. No one has the right to take away my final night.

Quietly he rinsed out his mouth and, with a hunter's concentration, set off on the trail of the taste still quivering on his palate. He had often done this. Mornings would find him walking from wall to wall, mouth agape like a gargoyle, flicking his tongue to dispell the last impression, which often slipped to the very edge of pain.

He knew himself exceptionally well. The monastery had given him a thorough and — except for a couple of insignificant trifles — an anatomically correct understanding of his body, but he knew the worn honeycomb of his tongue best of all. He and his tongue, in fact, had embarked on a strange dual relationship, as when the ego distances itself from one of its parts to be able to experience it better — even at the price of having that part abuse its deceptive autonomy and take on its own life. It was a relationship that could take over one's soul or nature, a relationship full of emotions, naive guardianship, anger, and lack of understanding.

There might have been happier moments in Wu's life, but none were more fulfilling than these minutes spent between shimmering shadows, when he stood in taut concentration, scraping his tongue against his eager gums, trying with all his might to
understand. To feel, distinguish, know, assimilate. And again he would set out on his usual route from wall to stove, his fiery tongue flicking out of his mouth like some frenzied divinity.

“Wu?” said a hesitant voice from the darkness. And then again: “Wu?”

Wu froze. Something in his saurian stillness moved slightly. In the whole court, in the whole palace and the whole wide empire, there was no one aside from the shades of the dead who was allowed to call him by name alone. As he raised the latch, he sucked back his sharp saliva with a hiss.

“I knew,” said his guest, making a gesture of greeting with one narrow palm, “that I would find you here at this time, Wu.”

Wu stood silently, his hands in his sleeves, watching the empire's Head Censor fold up the material of his robe with precise, academically spare movements and then sit down facing him. For a few minutes both old men remained silent.

Outside an angry beak squawked. In the darkness there were many sounds Wu did not recognize. The sentence the censor had just spoken was the first one between them in thirty-three years.

“Wu,” the censor eventually said — impersonally, as if relaying an unclear message — “tomorrow your nephew will be executed.”

The role of this imperial censor in the history of the empire's poetry — and, in a way, of the whole world's poetry — was far from insignificant. In his fertile years he ruled his language's marketplace. History traditionally pigeonholes him as “a co-founder of subjective poetry,” but that “co-” is deceptive, for the others who co-founded it missed our censor by hundreds of miles and dozens of years.

Now the censor slowly slipped his hand underneath his robe. He drew out a sheet of paper.

“He entered this in the emperor's birthday contest.”

His face was in its way perfect — so perfect that it is hard
to report what sort of face it was. It was so cultivated as to be a sort of abstraction: not degenerate or decadent, but an ineffable harmony of features, a small hollow of silence at the very summit of its consummation.

Wu took the sheet from the censor. It was scribbled from margin to margin in a familiar hand — careless but without lightness, illegible without grace. He raised the paper to his eyes and felt ashamed, with the preposterous vanity of old men who have not grown old together. He saw instantly that it was some sort of trick. The first stanza ran as follows:

The Emperor

is an emperor

is an emperor

is an emperor.

The second:

The Emperor

is like an emperor

who is like an emperor

who is like an emperor

that is emperor.

The third stanza is more or less untranslatable, for the construction governing the words
emperor
and
emperor
can be translated either as
nothing but
or
precisely such
or also
most highly similar
and a few other variants. In older translations we sometimes find the possibility
… he and only he!
and in the contemporary form of the language (in what is left of these etymological seeds) this construction confirms the complete identity of two mathematical elements.

The fourth stanza is the most chaotic and can only be understood in a logical and linguistic trance. It says, roughly:

If the Emperor,

who is emperor

and likewise is like an emperor

and is nothing but an emperor

(he and only he!)

were not emperor

who is like an emperor

and nothing else

than emperor himself,

there would be no emperor.

“What is it supposed to mean?” Wu said without even raising his eyes. “Has he gone mad?”

“Oh no … I do not think it is exactly that,” the censor replied in that featureless tone that never conveyed more than he wished.

“Then why bring it to me?” Wu burst out in annoyance, fixing his eyes on the censor. Even the censor did not know about Wu's poor vision; he did not realize that the gaze fixed so directly on him saw only an indistinct outline, and that it was this which gave Wu such a firm sense of security. Wu was aware of the secret power of the nearsighted: this was how he stared at the servants when the bowls weren't hot enough, and at the princess when she tasted her food.

The other old man responded with a shapely curve of his fingers, which in the language of gestures meant
I defer to you,
as if indicating that he could certainly answer, but was giving Wu a chance to come to it himself. Wu knew this maneuver all too well from years past. Two ancient tricks dissolved mutely into one another, and for a while there was quiet. When they finally spoke, their words came together.

“The emperor is most ungracious just now,” the censor said.

And Wu: “Does my nephew know?”

The censor shook his head. Then he added unexpectedly:

“That's why I'm here. Explain it to me.”

“Me? What's there for me to explain?” Wu tossed the paper onto the floor. His eyebrows bristled like blades of grass. Without even knowing why he was so furious, he felt his old anger welling up inside.

“Why me?”

“I hoped,” the censor said soothingly, “I hoped you'd know something about it. That's the only reason I dared disturb you.”

“I don't know anything!” Wu snapped. Acrid smoke rose, burning, through a crack in his memory. “It's mishmash, no head or tail. It's nonsense!”

“I do not recommend executions,” the censor replied, his laconic gesture of release indicating utter resignation, “and it is not in my power to overturn the sentence. But I would like to understand for myself something so … so…” He hesitated and then added tentatively:

“Something so … exceptional?”

As to the censor's role in the history of poetry, he is among those who are, as they say, a step ahead of their time. The censor achieved this in a very strange way. He stepped ahead of his time without that time even noticing it was being stepped over. The censor's genius lay in the inconspicuousness of his actions. His adroit strategy tamed the world's vicissitudes and inconspicuously overturned the course of an era.

The poetry of the temporally bounded enclave that spanned the old men's birth consisted of purely objective military epics. A more diligent analysis than ours would reveal its song-like format, its stereotypical plot schemes and, most of all, its marked poverty. The same heroic fragments predominate time after time, and the poems are as alike as two peas in a pod. For generations no individual spirit had come forth.

It would not be precisely true to say that the censor played the same role in his time as Sappho did in Greece, for he formed a channel from one style into another and was king in both. He established himself in official poetry, even as a young man imposing on it a certain pervasive lightness without distinguishing himself
from it in any special way. Only when he had made his name, when he had become a significant participant in the imperial Word, did an unheard-of note begin to creep into his work: private life and emotion.

At first it mimicked existing traditions so precisely that no one even noticed it. Its quantity increased only gradually, with a diplomacy usually reserved for altering word order in government documents — but suddenly, without that generation's ever expecting it, they found the censor's
tone
had become the voice of the century.

Today, when, through none of our own doing, we understand better, we know that the censor was truly a great poet, and prefigured an age in poetry probably fifty times longer than the age he himself attained — which was quite advanced. His poems, especially those of his
midday mountain,
are widely read and critiqued to this day. Even now the best of them can, in their depth and fervency, stand up to the highest achievements of all future times, and placed next to them even a nineteenth-century
poète maudit
seems a bit too heavily starched.

But the most wonderful part was that the censor's contemporaries did not know about it; the censor did not disturb or insult them, as such harbingers tend to do. The change from the monotonous racket of military campaigns to hysterical confessional trembling is so leisurely that the enlightened modern reader studying the censor's work cannot avoid the impression of a clear plan and exceptionally adroit staging. A historian of our time, a young Swede, aptly called it “ecstasy by flowchart.”

“Wu, speak, please — if you can, of course,” the censor gently pleaded.

At fifty the poet in him had fallen silent; he obtained a government post and the track of his poetry suddenly disappears with no explanation.

The birdcalls grew louder; outside it was deepest night. Midnight flared down from the heavens in a twinkling of lights. Laboriously and against his own will, Wu dug from his memory snippets of their absurd conversation.

“Did the boy visit you today?” the censor asked, but it did not sound very much like a question.

“Why do you ask if you already know?”

“I haven't had you watched, I'm thinking it through. Wu, there's not much time before dawn. The execution will be secret, so as not to disturb the celebration. Did the boy tell you anything about his poem?”

In a tremor of anger Wu felt himself nodding to the censor. He tried to prevent it; he did not want to comply, and he hated the feeling that the censor was concealing something from him. Arrogance, peremptory pride — once again he knows best! It was always thus, always — and thirty-three years hadn't changed anything at all.

“He's gotten it into his head that the emperor will disappear,” Wu snorted. The censor's placid face immediately tensed.

“Disappear? Why?”