Once on a Moonless Night (21 page)

4

I
N A LUMBERING YELLOW BUS GROANING
with chickens, pigs and human passengers, some of whom clung in clusters to the door like dark caterpillars on the skin of a ripe mango, I made my way to Prome, where a scooter taxi took me on to Maungun. From there I continued on foot with a local guide. It had rained the night before and my dainty ankle boots sank pitifully into the muddy path between fields of sugarcane. Later, when we cut through a crop of maize, most of which had been harvested, the boots became so bogged down in the soil that I had to keep making jerking movements with my whole body to heave myself out as, step by difficult step, I drew closer to the last vestiges of the capital. Everything had disappeared: temples, stupas, walls, moats and palaces. All that remained of the entire city was the huge raw hunk of rock rising up in the middle of the fields, a block of pink sandstone of the most magnificent shape and colour, forming an alcove two and a half metres tall by ten wide in which a Buddha carved from the rock lay resting. It was a representation of what Buddhists call “Total Extinction,” the last of the four miracles of his final earthly existence (after “Birth,” “Awakening” and the “First Vow”).

The Buddha’s profile stood out against a delicately carved background, and I was struck not only by how beautiful he was, but by the breath of life which seemed to emanate from that resting body, a good proportion of which, perhaps a quarter, was already buried in the ground, having sunk lower and lower over the centuries. His clothing exposed his right shoulder, and where the cloth draped over his left arm it was carved in a series of folds, spaced apart to afford glimpses of his palpably supple, recumbent body. Life quivered in every fluid contour of his body right up to his head as it rested on his right elbow. His round face with its closed eyes expressed a contemplative serenity, while a tuft of hair between his eyebrows appeared to ripple in the breeze. His mouth had the barely perceptible hint of a smile and, like so many other details, I recognised the bulge on his head, where flames seemed to spring up between the flat coils of hair (according to legend, Buddha had two brains). Lastly I found a dozen or so ancient letters carved onto a background of clouds. They were so close to the Buddha’s left hand that, in his dreamlike state, he seemed to want to touch them.

I started to photograph them, but they wavered slightly in my viewfinder. All at once, in the blink of an eye, I thought I saw the Buddha’s left hand move, as if giving me a sign, but there were too few of those archaic words in Pyu for me to form any sort of opinion, least of all on the subject of an assassination which dated back all of fifteen centuries.

Once back in Rangoon I carried on with my investigations for a few more days, taking rickshaws through streets and neighbourhoods in search of traces of old trading links with Ceylon or legends about monks who translated sutras. One day when I was waiting for some administrative documents in the foyer of the French Embassy, I happened to go into the library and leaf through Auguste Pavie’s memoirs, although I was not sure what I hoped to find there. Granted, this telegrapher who became a hero for single-handedly and peacefully conquering what is now known as Laos warranted attention, but I found little of interest in his writing and was about to close the book when a passage leapt out at me and it felt as if clouds were breaking open to allow the sun’s beams down onto me:

In 1907 negotiations to determine the borders between Laos, Burma and Thailand brought together delegations from the three countries in Mandalay, the largest city in Upper Burma. In the pause between two exhausting sittings, I tried to go down the Irrawaddy by boat. Lo this day the rivers name alone conjures the sheer size of its muddy bulk. We stopped off at Pagan, a town accessible only by boat. This former capital of Burma, which prospered between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, is indisputably the most impressive site for Buddhist temples after Angkor, though they are all already in ruins. There is a printing house run by monks for sutras in Pagan, and I vied at length to buy a particular stele; I desperately wanted to take such a treasure back to France, where, I was quite sure, it would have delighted our museum curators, for it bore an inscription of a long text in Pyu, Mon, Pali and Burmese, relating, according to the translation I was given, a grim assassination committed in the fifth century. The victim was one of the most famous Buddhist scholars of the time. But the head of the monastery proved intransigent and refused to let me have it, whatever my price.

The name Irrawaddy may have made the adventurous telegraphers ears ring to the sound of the river sweeping through high mountains, but that of Mandalay had been charming—even fascinating—pilgrims through the ages. From the nineteenth century onwards, Mandalay had the same effect on English writers and poets who covered the length and breadth of the British Empire, under the spell of its name. I myself took the Mandalay Express and, sitting on a narrow seat between sleeping passengers, I read Somerset Maugham’s
The Gentleman in the Parlour
. Maugham travelled across Burma on a pony between 1922 and 1923. Mandalay, he wrote, is above all a name. There are towns like this whose names have their own magic. He thought that a man might be wise not to visit such places for fear of disappointment: like Trebizond, which might be just a miserable village but whose name carries the weight of an empire, or Samarkand—the word alone makes the pulse race and fills one with a sense of unquenchable longing.

Even before Somerset Maugham, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Kipling himself had written a poem called “Mandalay” in his collection
Barrack-Room Ballads
, earning him comparisons with Byron from the critics of his day. Although Kipling wrote it after his one brief stopover in Burma, and his talent as a poet doesn’t match his abilities as a short-story writer, the fascination exerted by Mandalay is here, conjuring its nervous energy as it quickens the heart:

“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.”

    No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else

    But them spicy garlic smells,

An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;

    On the road to Mandalay …

For me, personally, the road to Mandalay, the very name Mandalay, is more inclined to evoke the gloomy apprehension that gripped me when the tropical fever—which I’d congratulated myself for avoiding for more than five years—suddenly took hold again without any warning in a carriage on the Mandalay Express after seven hours of travelling, when I was still only halfway there. I stayed pinned to my seat by the hefty threat implied by this gratuitous recurrence. Scalding hot flushes, each hotter than the last, then bouts of icy shivering, each colder than the last, swept over me, growing more powerful, more furious, overwhelming me when I was already dazed by the constant stream of local music spewing from loudspeakers.

As the train began to climb an incline I felt myself descending into a sort of trance and, unable to bear the music another second, I opened the carriage window; a cloud of white mist blew in and through it I could see neat lines of crosses in a military cemetery, stretching as far as the eye could see, probably the graves of soldiers who fell in the battle of Mandalay in 1945. I saw ghosts looming out of the fog and glimpsed scattered bones from skeletons, strangely clear but swallowed up immediately by the dark night. I couldn’t say how long the hallucination lasted. A minute? Thirty seconds? I was afraid this fleeting moment was only the prelude to an even more violent attack, an imminent catastrophe, but nothing disastrous happened.

We stopped briefly in a small station before crossing the viaduct at Goktek and, in an effort to shake off my torpor and return to reality, I gazed at the gigantic arches of the bridge rising up from the shadowy gorge cloaked in jungle. I noticed, although I didn’t really believe it, that my temperature was stabilising. The train swayed, juddering over some points; the hammering of the wheels changed cadence and accelerated. When we crossed the only bridge built by the Americans in the days of the British Empire I cried, not because I was moved by the beautiful scenery, but because I noticed to my surprise that my temperature had returned to normal. My body was no longer burning, I had stopped shaking with cold or with terror, even though I still felt weightless. Light from street lamps filing slowly past outside reached into the carriage, lingering over me, scrutinising my ashen face and my hands gripping the seat, then disappeared. I sat beside the window, which gleamed in the dark, with tears rolling down my cheeks, though less from relief than a sort of homesickness, a searing feeling of exhaustion, loneliness and general disappointment that settled over me. If this is what freedom has to offer, I thought to myself, then it’s horrible, dismal even.

At various points in our lives, or on a quest, and for reasons that often remain obscure, we are driven to make decisions which prove with hindsight to be loaded with meaning. The moment I arrived in Mandalay I hailed a taxi, but—instead of looking for a hospital or hotel or going and visiting the palace with its seven hundred stupas, its statues and markets—I asked to be taken straight to the port, where I caught the first boat for Pagan.

5
MARCO POLO
THE BOOK OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD
CXXVI, THE CITY OF MIEN

Now it should be known that after travelling on horseback across far-flung places for the two weeks I have recounted above, one comes to a city called Mien, a very large and noble place, which is the capital of the kingdom. Its people are idolatrous and have a language all their own. They are subjects of the Great Khan.

NOTES MADE BY PAUL D’AMPÈRE:
Mien is the Pagan of today, a village on the banks of the Irrawaddy It has a school of lacquer-work famous throughout the region, and a printing press-monastery It has been the capital of Burma since the ninth century (It is not without significance that, shortly after its independence in 1950, the country rejected the name Burma given to it by the British colonial administration and called itself Myanmar, a name derived from the ancient city of Mien, which, although less familiar to us than Burma, is the name by which it is now officially recognised worldwide.)

Pagan is first referred to in 1106 in a work regarded in China as authoritative,
Archival Studies
Volume 332:

In the fifth year of Xi Lin of the Song dynasty Pagan sent an ambassadorship with a tribute for the imperial court. These were the instructions given by the emperor: “Pagan is now an important kingdom and no longer a dependent state. It deserves the courtesy granted to Arabia, Tonkin, etc. Henceforth, all imperial missives addressed to its king should be written on a sheet of white paper backed with gold paper, printed with flowers, sealed in a wooden coffer covered in gold plate, locked with a silver padlock and wrapped in silk and satin cloth.

Contrary to accepted wisdom about the
Book of the Wonders of the World
(by which I mean that it is considered to be more or less a collection of the Venetians personal memories), what he tells us about the road that apparently took him to Mien was not based on his own experience; he must have heard or read it somewhere without ever setting foot in Burma. One sentence alone betrays him: the fact that, according to him, he had to ride for a fortnight to reach Mien-Pagan, when the only access to it—to this day and from whichever direction—is along the Irrawaddy River.

A careful reading of the preceding chapters, where he claims to have stayed in Yunnan very close to the Chinese-Burmese border, proves the even more regrettable fact that he never crossed that border nor saw the Irrawaddy with his own eyes, even though in his writings he describes the river as magnificent and unforgettable. The name might be famous the world over, but at least Marco Polo could have left us a first-hand account describing the rivers course, which would have equipped us to respond to theories put forward by some English geologists who claim it used to flow into the valley of the Sittang, another much wider river that flows from central to southern Burma. If that were the case, then its major western tributary, the Chindwin, and the upper Irrawaddy itself would have been the outlet for the Brahmaputra, and the history of Tibet, China, Burma, India and Bengal—all of which the Brahmaputra flows through—would probably need rewriting.

NOTES MADE BY TUMCHOOQ:
It’s so hard to know how to start! Not because these are notes about notes but because I don’t know what name to give the author of these notes, a man whose surname—with its seven letters, its apostrophe and its accent—could have been my own. (I remember the first time I ever saw that name. I was twelve and living in the reform school I’d been sent to after the incident in the Forbidden City when I nearly killed my best friend in that strangling cage. A guard took me to an office, where my mother was allowed to visit me. She wrote the name on a piece of paper without a word. I was just a child at the time, and I gazed for several minutes at those unfamiliar, foreign letters with their graphic signs above the vowels, and, even though I would have had no idea how to pronounce them, like the letters of a dead language, I still knew they made up your name. She tried to pronounce it, several times, and did succeed, although her voice was almost stifled by sobs. The word was barely audible, uttered so tentatively, like a distant echo, and I was bowled over, not only by the strange sound of it but also by its dramatic, not to say tragic, quality.)

Now, as I try to write these notes with my thoughts going round in circles and my pen still hesitating, a text from the Satyasiddhi-Sutra has come back to me. It’s a fourth-century text published by the printing press-monastery in Pagan around the twelfth century; fragments of it in Pali were found in the vestiges of a stupa in Pagan and were carefully preserved, like a saints sacred bones, or his teeth, his coat or his alms bowl, for which a king would pay an astronomical price only to put them in a reliquary, bury that deep underground and build a stupa as extraordinary as a pyramid over the top of it. I’ve often thought about the theory put forward by Harivarman, the author of the Satyasiddhi-Sutra, who was a Brahman before his conversion to Buddhism, a theory which can essentially be summed up in this sentence: “All that it takes to achieve Nirvana is to recognise the unreality of things and the unreality of self.”

Being an old Buddhist, as you have been for decades, I would be surprised if you hadn’t read this text in its original Sanskrit version, and probably in the Pali version. You are also likely to know the Chinese version with which I wanted to make a comparative reading and which is infinitely longer because it’s interspersed with the personal interpretations of its eminent translator, Kumarajiva, who introduced the Mahayana doctrine to China and translated some forty sutras from that school of thought. The fact that he worked on a Hinayana text shortly before his death, and the miracle of his tongue resisting incineration, helped increase the fame of this magisterial work. Here is his translation:

Things do not really exist, neither do knowledge, the possession of things, physical form, the body, nor the representation of an individual, but what does have a real existence is the name denoting its abstract unity, for a name is, in fact, the absolute that exists in the intimate heart of man, as it is at the centre of the universe. And all that it takes to find salvation is to recognise that fact. Anyone who, understanding this, turns for support to the extreme intelligence of the Bodhisattvas is then freed from his name and, from that moment on, is delivered not only of his own body, but also from the order of time. He attains total annihilation and is therefore, so to speak, a Buddha in a state of utter “Awakening.”

This reminds me of your last wish, a sort of farewell that you dictated to me when you were gripped by a final surge of energy and suddenly emerged from the deep coma you had been in, following your lynching at the hands of the camp prisoners. “Listen,” you said, “I don’t want anything on my grave; nothing but a blank space, a gap, not my name or any dates.”

Why that denial of your name? It strikes me as much as a sign of protest as a philosophical principle, which meant you were already rejecting the world you were leaving behind. The world was reduced to what was left of your memory; in other words a name, yours, the last pale reflection of a process that had come full term; and, by erasing it, as the Chinese version of the Satyasiddhi-Sutra states, you were putting yourself beyond the past and, eventually, beyond the order of time altogether.

To get back to writing these notes, in the academic sense of the word, the thing that encourages me to take this liberty is the fact that there indisputably is a printing press-monastery (and that’s a term you must have coined for the purpose, given that the establishment calls itself a “temple where the monks print Buddhist sutras”) in Pagan. They’ve been printing books there since the eleventh century as indicated by the date of completion on the cover of the Satyasiddhi-Sutra: fifth year of the reign of King Anawratha (Aniruddha). I’d also like to point out that the reliquary in which the work was found, the one cited and commented on above, is in lacquered wood which has been extremely well preserved, and that the tradition of this particular kind of lacquer-work goes back at least as far as King Anawratha’s reign.

I would like to say a few words about the lacquer, because I feel an irresistible rush of pride to think that, unless I’m wrong, I’m the only person to know of the secret love you felt for a Chinese lacquered box sculpted with figures and landscapes that your grandmother gave you for Christmas when you were ten. You yourself told me about it when I visited you in the camp: you couldn’t take your eyes off this newfound friend and the tiniest scratch on it would have broken your heart. Then you recited a Rimbaud poem that you’d translated into Tumchooq, although you were so disappointed with the translation you said it spoiled the precious memory you’d just shared with me. Then you left. That memory returned to me recently when I came across the same poem, “The Orphans’ New Year’s Gift,” while teaching myself French from a book I was given:

—
Ah! what a beautiful morning, this New Year’s morning! During the night each had dreamt of his dear ones

In some strange dream when you saw toys,

Candies dressed in gold, sparkling jewels,

Whirling and dancing a sonorous dance …

Buddha teaches us that everything is as if it were nothing, or rather as if it were pure non-being, not that this means an individual’s actions are in the least way subject to chance. Quite the opposite, they are laid down as part of a grand design from which, I believe, even your predilection for Chinese lacquer isn’t exempt. It was a sort of sign from destiny, which deals out the cards: it only remained for you to use them. Zhuangzi was the first to compare a scholar’s life to that of the lacquer tree,
Rhus vernicifera
, an elegant tree some twenty metres high, but which, from the age of eight to forty (the twilight of its life), is exploited, incised and regularly bled of its precious fragrant sap, thick and white as curdled milk, oozing gently from the monstrous open wound on its trunk. It is collected, filtered, purified, dyed and applied layer after layer onto wood or another background, to become a work of art, a symbol of refinement.

The Pagan reliquary in question bears a long inscription which gives the names of the craftsmen and workshop managers, and the date it was made as well as testifying to the time and application taken to turn a simple object into a unique treasure: lacquer was painted on in thin layers, each one dried and sanded before the next was applied. As this exquisite substance coagulates only in humid conditions, the drying process was carried out on the Irrawaddy in a boat taken onto the water a total of fifty times, the exact number of layers of lacquer needed to create this one item. Then the scene of Buddha’s Extinction—depicted in three different tableaux—was sculpted on it, carved through the thickness of the layers: first there is an atmosphere of fear as the pyre built by the Mallas refuses to catch light until Kasyapa, his most faithful disciple, has come to kiss his masters feet one last time; then, in a mood of intense emotion, Kasyapa almost swoons with grief and has to be supported by another disciple to say his final farewell to Buddha; lastly, Kasyapa presides over the funeral ceremony and the pyre catches light of its own accord. Every time I think of those scenes carved in lacquer, another funeral scene comes to mind: yours, beside the River Lu, whose murmurings still reverberate in my ears; a misty, almost insubstantial image, except for your feet, which I touched with my forehead and kissed, as a reflex action, not because I knew the Buddhist tradition. I seem to think they were still warm.

CONTINUATION OF MARCO POLO’S BOOK: In this city there is a noble thing I shall describe to you. For in this city there was once a rich and powerful king. When he was about to die, he ordered that on his tomb or, to be precise, on his monument two towers should be built, one in gold, the other in silver, in a way that I shall describe. One of the towers was made of beautiful gems that were then covered in gold, and the gold was at least a fingers thickness, and the tower was so well covered with it that it appeared to be made entirely of gold. It was a good ten paces high and as wide as befitted its height. It was rounded on the outside and all about its curving surface it was covered with small golden bells, which rang every time the wind blew between them. And the other tower I spoke of above, made of silver and in every way like the golden tower, was made of the same materials and to the same height and in the same way And, similarly, the tomb was partly covered with gold leaf and partly with silver leaf. And the king had this built for his grandeur and for his soul. And, I shall tell you this much, to see them was to see the most beautiful towers in the world, of immense value. And when the sun touches them, they are resplendent and can be seen from far, far away.