Once on a Moonless Night (22 page)

NOTES MADE BY PAUL D’AMPÈRE:
Constructor kings like this run through Pagans history between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, right up to the Mongol invasion. Anawratha, its founder, and the next two generations are reputed to have built Buddhist monuments of titanic proportions, and Pagan still has more than eight hundred of them over a stretch of about four hundred kilometres, not to mention those that have fallen in ruins, making it a gigantic sacred city, which has nothing to envy Angkor in Khmer country The famous Temple of Ananda, to take just one example, is a vertiginously positioned shrine shaped like a long-handled bell, perched on a huge tiered pyramid which looks like a perfectly white hill, a great glittering mass, surrounded by two cloisters and topped with a dazzling, almost frighteningly tall point, rising higher and higher, so far into the sky it disappears in the clouds. This monument borders on the fabulous, but, in the end, my investigations served only to highlight a fundamental and widely known truth, which is that Marco Polo never came to Burma and, therefore, couldn’t know that in a sacred Buddhist city like Pagan there isn’t a single non-religious edifice, far less a royal tomb. Take, for example, what’s known as the Shwedagon Pagoda, commissioned by the first king, Anawratha, in 1509 and completed by his son (or the man recognised as such) King Kyanzittha: it is a vast plinth made up of a succession of platforms, rising in tiers from a square base with inverted corners; mounted on it is a rounded silver tower with, on top of that, another tower, this one in gold and shaped like a bell, with a roof which, it was claimed, was covered with genuine diamonds, and—if the colonial archives are to be believed—these stones ended up in the coffers of the Bank of England. This stupa and not a royal tomb, as the Venetian thought, plays an important role in the country and is to this day the national shrine of Burma, for it was here that a replica of the famous Buddha’s tooth was placed, the tooth preserved at Kandy and sent by the king of Ceylon, Vijayabahu (1059-1114).

NOTES MADE BY TUMCHOOQ:
In 1975, the year of the monkey, Pagan was struck by the worst earthquake in its history. The edifices mentioned above, those truly ancient architectural masterpieces bordering on the fabulous, were now a spectacle of total devastation: Shwedagon’s stupa crumbled and still lies by the banks of the Irrawaddy today; others, half-buried in the ground or submerged underwater, still exude the grim confusion of a field of ruins the morning after a bombing. All at once their star was no longer a lucky one, a cruel setback inflicted by history. The famous Temple of Ananda, which you described in all its beauty in your note above and which was once fifty-six metres high and sixty wide, is now just a handful of dust, a stretch of wasteland where, in among a few vestiges of bricks barely suggesting the niche that sheltered him for almost eight hundred years, stands the decapitated statue of Sanakavasa, Ananda’s giant disciple.

Peculiarly, in this ghostly setting, the nine-metre-high sandalwood torso of the statue has remained intact; only the ochre colour of the monk’s robes has disappeared over the years, but in places you can still see the artist’s careful work in trying to represent realistically what is known in Sanskrit as a
samghati
, the ragged, dirty hemp robes that were the prescribed clothing for a monk visiting a king’s palace, begging in the street or preaching before an audience. According to legend, Sanakavasa was born with a disproportionately large body, already wrapped in a length of cloth, which grew longer as he developed into a true giant, eventually becoming a
samghati
after his conversion by Ananda. When the moment of his Annihilation came, he announced his wish that his dishevelled robes should remain in this world as a reminder of the miraculous power of his faith, and should turn to dust only when Buddha’s law no longer served a purpose on earth.

I actually still have your personal
samghati
—the rags you wrapped around the side-pieces of your glasses, the lenses and frame having been destroyed by your assassins—and I keep them like a precious relic.

The ruins of Pagan fill me with joy because they remind me of the year 1975, when I first met you in the visiting room at your camp. The large hall divided in two by a wooden grille wasn’t yet there because not many prisoners had visitors. I was taken to an office, where I sat or rather perched on a wooden stool so tall my feet didn’t reach the ground, facing another stool, which was incredibly low—a fitting place for an enemy of the people—and that was where you had to sit and look up to me. I waited an eternity until the door was eventually opened and then, forgetting the visiting rules, I jumped down from the stool and made for the door, half in a dream and half in the real world, not even hearing the warders shouting at me to get back to my seat. You weren’t yet a pig-keeper at that point, and had just come up from the gem mines; you were so muddy, broken and drained that I mistook you for Chinese and almost confused you with the old plain-clothed screw escorting you. Instead of “Dad,” different words—“Mr. Liu”—popped out of my mouth and rang round the room, rooting the warders to the spot. The name Liu didn’t correspond to your Chinese name Baolo (a transcription of Paul in Chinese) or my mother’s name, and therefore mine, which is Zhong. At the time neither of us reacted. We each sat in our intended places, exchanged a bit of small talk about my journey and then, speaking in a perfect Sichuan dialect, you suddenly asked:

“What did you call me?”

You’d barely finished the question before we both burst out laughing so loudly, despite the warders’ intervention, that I fell off my stool—the one reserved for the population at large—unable to control myself. You laughed so much the dirty rags around your glasses came undone and dangled from the side-pieces, swaying with every move of your head while your cheeks were wet with tears.

Tradition and respect for the hierarchy of generations meant I’d never dared ask Mum about the circumstances of your arrest, even less about the reasons for the life sentence to which China had condemned you, but on that day, during that first visit, I felt more doubtful than ever that the little man sitting facing me on his low stool could have traded his wife for a manuscript.

And even if you could have loved a piece of text more than a woman, did you know at the time of the transaction that she was pregnant?

Perhaps not. At least I hope not.

It’s strange, but I followed in your footsteps, many years later; I too have left a woman I love for the sake of a text, the same text. Like father, like son? Two spectacular bastards?

(One question smacks me in the face as I write this, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner: Didn’t I leave Peking at a time when … like you, perhaps without your knowing … I haven’t got the heart or the strength to formulate the question—about my offspring, another Tumchooq, another manuscript-hunter?)

These notes, which followed on from Paul d’Ampère’s, were jotted down roughly in Chinese on the squared paper of a Burmese schoolbook, written in pen, its nib gliding from left to right and accelerating in places, as if chasing its own shadow, chasing fleeting memories or a scene that came to mind with no warning and had to be captured straight away without rereading. Were these few notes the beginnings of a book or just a sketchy introduction to the frequent internal conversations he held with the late Mr. Liu, a Freudian slip he maintained, as far as I know, all through the years when he regularly visited his father at the camp in Sichuan?

I discovered that schoolbook when I arrived in Pagan, in among other books and papers strewn over a low table in the house of the superior at the printing press-monastery a two-storey bamboo building on stilts on the side of a steep hill, protected from behind by the towering Achan mountains and facing out onto the mirror-like surface of the Irrawaddy as it flowed across a plain, irrigating rice paddies and disappearing along the valley. The monastery superior was travelling abroad and the main room in his house—which acted as an office, reading room and bedroom—was spacious but empty of furniture; sober, even austere. Visitors took off their shoes before stepping onto the floor of plaited bamboo, a cool surface that moved backwards and forwards underfoot, and they sat on a rush mat on the floor to take tea. Hanging from the roof at the far end of the room was the superiors bed, a simple mat, clean but old with holes in places, repaired with pieces of faded blue fabric. Above this hung a white nightshirt and an ochre-coloured tunic with only one very long sleeve, which reached right down to the floor. Neither of these, according to the monastery’s deputy who welcomed me very courteously, was a
samghati
(the robe of rags), because the master had taken his with him.

He added (his words translated by Min, a young Sino-Burmese girl acting as my interpreter) that, of all the masters who had presided over the monastery, the present one, although still young, had the greatest reputation for his tremendous erudition, and that monks and followers came from the four corners of the country to listen to his teachings. One day he was visited by a delegation of Japanese monks and they had been so impressed by him that, on their return, they invited him to Kyoto to preside over an international symposium, and this explained his absence.

I put my glass of tea down on the low table and was about to ask him to show me the stele in four languages which had brought me to Pagan when, completely by chance and for no apparent reason, I thought of Tumchooq for the first time in a long while. As I waited for the deputy to finish praising his master, I leafed through a schoolbook on the table. You know the rest. Before I even grasped what I was reading, I was shaken to the core, the words dancing before my eyes, the pages quivering in my hands as I trembled from head to foot. What a journey I’ve been on, I thought, to reach this moment which finally gives some meaning to my life, to these long years of drifting between different languages and different continents! Thank goodness.

6

T
UMCHOOQ ARRIVED IN PAGAN IN THE
early 1980s, the monastery deputy explained, retracing his story for me. A real vagrant: no one knew where he was from, because he remained utterly silent and had neither a passport nor any other administrative papers. At first he was employed in the kitchens, where he chopped vegetables from morning till night, not talking to anyone, so that for a long time he was thought to be mute.

A few years later, when the paper mill needed another worker, he was sent there, although no one expected great results, because the process of making paper for sacred books requires exhausting, monotonous work as well as exceptional attention to detail. But people soon realised that the paper pulp obeyed him better than anyone else, from ageing monks to young novices. For three whole years he worked in silence, his hands permanently in water as he made paper, sheet by sheet. Then he was sent to the xylography workshop, where he became an unusually good engraver of texts.

It was here that people realised he understood Pali, had a phenomenal memory, remembered every text (even the most complicated) he engraved and was able to translate them into Burmese, as if born with a Pali-Burmese dictionary in his head. Then one day he finally spoke, expressing himself in elegant, literary Burmese with a rich vocabulary, but also a slight accent and the occasional mistake, which betrayed his foreign origins.

He made his vows after a six-year probationary period spent in the kitchens, the paper mill and the xylography workshop, where he had felt his vocation while observing all the rules of the monastery. He chose Tumchooq as his monastic name, a name which, according to him, appears in one of Buddha’s sutras or
jatakas
. The magical circumstances that accompanied his recitation of “The Path to Purification” (a classical work of the Hinayana doctrine) before the assembled monks was enough to convince them altogether, and the master of the monastery entrusted him with the key to the Cave of Treasure, where they kept all the engraving plates ever made since the establishment began. He shut himself away in there for many years to record and list the five hundred thousand plates and, according to more malicious sources, to look for the sutra that features his own name. A sutra that no one in the area had ever heard of. When the monastery’s patriarch embarked on his journey to the beyond, to everyone’s surprise, it was to Tumchooq that he handed over his ragged
samghati
and his alms bowl, asking him to preside over his funeral. And so Tumchooq became the new master of the monastery.