Once on a Moonless Night (9 page)

“The author of these portraits, our teacher, never failed to remind us how lucky we were to be in that classroom, so envied by pupils in other classes. He even went so far as to imply we had privileged status as protégés chosen by the five great men who watched our every move from above the blackboard. When he came down from his raised desk to walk among us you’d have thought he was an archangel stepping down from the altar. He saw himself as guardian to the pantheon of those five revolutionary gods, and whenever he mentioned enemies of the proletariat who attacked them, his face twisted with loathing and his eyes burned with anger, such anger that he literally ground his teeth. In that silent classroom, if you held your breath, you could hear the extraordinarily brutal sound of his teeth grinding the bones of the imaginary Enemy.

“Every now and then, particularly early in the morning, at daybreak, he would go over all the mistakes we had made the day before, turning towards the portraits, looking up, waving his arms, telling them what an onerous task it was being a teacher, and begging them to help him … until the day when plain-clothed policemen turned up at school to arrest him only an hour after he’d chaired a meeting with pupils’ parents. According to rumours circulating the next day, someone’s father had denounced him. Uniformed policemen swarmed into our classroom, interrupting our lesson, and took photos of the five portraits from various distances and different angles. One of them stood on the desk and, with his gloved hands, took down the picture of the sullen, bearded Engels. He carefully slipped it into a cellophane bag, which he sealed with black tape as you would a piece of evidence in a criminal enquiry. They left without a single word to help us unravel the mystery.

“A few days later, Mr. Liu was released. He came into the classroom behind the headmaster, completely transformed, stripped of his pride; in a barely audible voice he read a long, self-critical tract, accusing himself of the unforgivable crime of painting—under the influence of alcohol—an inaccurate portrait of Engels, having taken as his model a photograph of another bearded man, Professor Ivan P. Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, who had been on the front cover of a scientific review at the time. (As far as I could see, Mr. Liu’s mistake was a very interesting Freudian slip: Professor Pavlov’s name is associated with his discovery of conditioned reflexes, a theory which greatly inspired the concept of brainwashing and was, therefore, just as important to tyrants and the populations they bullied as Engels’s theories, if not more so.)

“That was the last time Mr. Liu set foot in our classroom. Even though we were young and didn’t understand the facts, his long, self-accusatory speech rang in our ears like a farewell lament. He was demoted to the rank of workman, sweeping the floor and carrying hot water for the teaching staff to which he no longer belonged, working in the outhouses that housed the coal boiler, behind the main building. Some mornings when I arrived at school before dawn for athletics training, I heard him sweeping the cement surface of the playground outside the classrooms. I couldn’t see him, but listened to his invisible, rasping brushstrokes reverberating as he gathered dead leaves from the plane trees and cleaned the ground with such stubborn insistence you’d have thought he was scratching out a stain. Along with the white smoke coming from the chimney of the outhouses, those rather slow sounds punctuated my early-morning arrivals in the dark, sometimes in the rain and often in temperatures so cold not a single moth fluttered around the lampposts.

“Mr. Liu’s disgrace marked the end of a clandestine collaboration, a secret exchange set up by two boys on the same bench—Ma and me—which had worked a treat until then.

“Do you remember Ma? Yes, the one who gave me
The Secret Biography of Cixi
. His parents were both doctors in Chengdu and in 1964 they were sent to a very remote region of Sichuan on the border with Tibet. Ma was nine at the time and he came to live in Peking with an uncle who worked at the Forbidden City with my mother, first as a night watchman, then as Assistant Security Manager. When Ma joined us, the dunce of the class—that was me—was put next to him because he was the arithmetic champion in his province and brilliant at writing; full of naive hope, Mr. Liu gave him the weighty task of helping me improve.

“I was immediately struck by the size of his head. He was a weedy little boy with such narrow shoulders that, as one of our Pekinese sayings goes, they were in a straight line with his feet. But his head was more than big: enormous. When he bent over to write, it covered almost half his desk, hiding it from the prying eye of his dunce of a neighbour, cruelly dashing attempts at the espionage and cribbing that would have been his salvation. Nothing. Especially as this genius suffered from myopia, which grew worse at an astonishing rate all through our schooling, forcing him to lean closer and closer to the desk.

“Witnessing the rapid decline in his eyesight, I asked out of curiosity why he didn’t talk to his uncle about it. He replied that he was worried his mother would be too painfully disappointed, and made me promise not to say a word to anyone. During the first term that we shared a bench, numbers and ideograms on the blackboard became a little more blurred for him every day. At the end of term, on the day of our arithmetic exam, I knew he couldn’t possibly read the five problems our master had written out. (At the time we didn’t have photocopies of the questions, probably to save money.) So I copied them out on a sheet of paper, folded it several times and passed it to him under the table. He read it discreetly, his face impassive, and set to work. Barely a quarter of an hour later, making the most of the fact that the teacher was looking away, he dug me in the ribs and, with a wink, he in turn passed me the piece of paper, folded in the same way Confused, I unfolded it and, in among my scribblings, I saw his writing, firm and upright, though it had been jotted at speed and was slightly large and uneven, but there it was solving each problem, step by step, right down to the final solution. I could have copied them out in their entirety but, in order to maintain credibility in the teachers eyes, I settled for copying three and improvising solutions, which were bound to be wrong, for the others, narrowly escaping yet more academic dishonour.

“Throughout Mr. Liu’s reign we never knew whether our monarch—whose eye, a portrait painters most precious organ, always shone with a glint of drink and madness—had noticed our strategy, but didn’t want to say so. He regularly cited us as models of cooperation, and for two successive years we shared the same bench near the window through which we twice saw the spring buds of an elm tree transform into clouds of cool green that took up a considerable portion of sky and shaded us from the sun. Now we exchanged not only schoolwork but also marbles, kaleidoscopes, penknives, comics, stamps, solid wooden tops that we spun with a whip and hollow German tops that hummed as they spun, danced across the sky and zig-zagged through the air with a long whine …

“At the height of our friendship we pooled our pocket money to set up a fund, with Ma as treasurer. Full of heroic aspirations, we promised ourselves we would increase our capital without spending any of it until it could eventually finance a long trip to Manchuria, where my great-grandfather, a former aristocrat nicknamed Seventy-one, lived in exile. But at the end of the first fortnight we gave in at the sight of some glazed duck with glossy, red translucent skin, hanging in a restaurant window We bought it and, not daring to sit down, had it cut up and put into a paper bag. Out in the street we savoured a few mouthfuls and it tasted so divine we thought we’d been transported to Heaven; the trees of Peking seemed to float around us and adults swam through the air like famished sharks, launching themselves at us, their noses homing in on our paper bag. We wandered through the streets eating it, no, devouring it, piece by piece, licking the last drops of its exquisite fat trickling down our fingers, before realising our Manchurian dream had gone up in smoke.

“Mr. Liu was succeeded by a strapping young woman who wore a red scarf—the official sign of the young revolutionary elite—round her neck, and a new era, hers, began with a radical reorganisation of our classroom with Ma and myself as the major victims. It was the middle of winter, a few weeks before the end-of-year exams, the worst time to separate us. In her triumphant opera singers voice she condemned Ma to irrevocable exile on the other side of the classroom. I still remember the moment she passed sentence: we huddled together on the bench, in the black shadows of the bare elm, its branches darkening our desk as well as Ma’s enormous head, eclipsing his entire body. He stood up briskly, took his satchel without looking at me, or anyone else, crossed the room with his head lowered and slumped onto the new bench he was sharing with a girl.

“Now Ma could no longer help inflicting the disappointment he so feared on his mother. Once summoned, she came by train from her distant province for a meeting in the headmaster’s office, and through the open doorway I saw her—crushed, as if struck with a mallet. The headmaster was talking, she was crying. That image, captured by the photographic lenses that were my adolescent eyes, was imprinted on my retinas for such a long time that I still find it easy to describe now: in the distance, far in the background, through the window and beyond the dark branches of thuya and cypress trees (the headmasters office was two floors above our classroom), beyond the school fence, beyond 4th May Boulevard, stand the high walls of the Forbidden City, ringed by the blue-grey of the frozen moat on which the minute figures of skaters flit about like crazed wasps, bending, fluttering, glittering, ‘so small they play tricks with your eyes,’ as the old poem goes. And in the foreground a woman crying silently. She fascinated me at the time, not for that mute eruption of her maternal heart, but for her brutal metamorphosis: she became ugly! Ugly and old. What a contrast compared to my mother, the most beautiful woman in the museum, if not the whole of Peking.

“My mother’s first name, as she herself delights in saying, is made up of just one proud, insolent syllable, a single vowel which refuses alliance with any of its vocalised peers and certainly not with a consonant, giving it a strong ring of protest: E. There are few words in our language with the same pronunciation. My mother’s E means ‘Mulberry Bombyx,’ the silkworm moth, and is made up of two ideograms, the one on the right meaning ‘worm’ and the one on the left meaning ‘me.’ She often says, ‘I do wonder which one of our ancestors invented my name.’ A name like a moth, first a silkworm, a velvety brown caterpillar with antennae straight out of science fiction, which moults repeatedly, becoming lighter and lighter, transparent, spewing out a thread several kilometres long to build a cocoon to wrap around itself. What a perceptive choice of signs, using ‘me’ to mean ‘cocoon.’ That egocentric, narcissistic caterpillar never dies. It lives for days and days in the tomb it has built for itself, hermetically sealed, without air or moisture, then metamorphoses one last time into a butterfly, which escapes the cocoon and flies away gracefully, all of which strikes me as something of a miracle. The delicate colours of its wings with their speckled geometric patterns and fanciful stripes … Oh! the worm and me …

“My mother was such a prisoner of her own work, a slave to daily chores, locked away in endless widowhood, that for a long time she knew nothing about the work I threw myself into heart and soul: constructing a small palace. Near our house, on the edge of the Forbidden City’s moat, there was a building site with countless little mounds of pink bricks. I selected one of these mounds for its height and size, then—with Ma as foreman and myself as engineer—we first dug a tiny provisional hole in it, but it grew every day, turning into a narrow berth, which in turn became wider and deeper, brick by brick, centimetre by centimetre, until it was a really gratifying piece of work, a comfortable and spacious shelter with a round opening carefully covered in a mixture of dried grass, rotten planks and branches, which let the sun’s silvery rays filter and sift through rather hazily. The light also came through the holes made straight into the walls like spyholes in a real blockhouse. We would have liked to line the floor with a carpet of Bodhi leaves, but the only Bodhi tree in Peking was outside my mother’s office, so we abandoned the idea and settled for leaves from the less sacred ginkgo tree in Ma’s uncle’s courtyard. Leaves in a washed-out green, sometimes pale yellow, their edges browned or sulphurous, slightly irregular but attractively jagged, shaped like four-winged butterflies or birds or the moon, and they scrunched when we lay down on them like old bedsprings, giving off a deliciously soft, earthy smell.

“Ma told me about being separated from his parents and the horror of the first night he spent in an unfamiliar house in a spanking-new wooden bed with bars on it, smelling so strongly of paint it stung his nose. It was right next to the double bed of an elderly couple, two cold, strict creatures who didn’t exchange three words during the day but snored together all through the night in perfect synchronicity until it drove Ma mad. He was tortured by the impression, or rather the suspicion, that he had been abandoned, trapped, especially as he was afraid the couple wanted to adopt him. It wouldn’t have taken much, that first night, for him to burst into tears. What a concerto that would have been if a Sichuanese boy’s crying had snaked its way under the deep, threatening and possibly simulated snoring of the old couple! We didn’t realise it at the time, but we both had the same obscure thought: he was being punished because his parents had been punished.

“Oh, our little palace! That was where we first compared the hairs just starting to sprout under our armpits; in that peculiar light he didn’t immediately notice, or rather I didn’t, that one of my hairs was red. I had to get right up to a source of light to check this intriguing, absurd and touching detail, so exotic it could mean I was unique among my six hundred million compatriots who, with the exception of a few rare albinos, were characterised by their utterly black hair. This clear sign immediately became central to our very existence. Where did this red hair originate? I thought of the two or three things I knew about family history, of my mothers resistance ever since my childhood to discuss memories, of her tacit refusal to answer the question which constantly buzzed round my head and burned my lips but which I never succeeded in formulating: who’s my father? … Ma was still lying down, looking at something else, showing no sign of surprise, making no comment, as if he already knew (Who’d told him? His uncle, the museum’s Assistant Security Manager?) that flowing through my veins was the blood of a red-headed foreigner, a Westerner—a word which at the time was synonymous with an enemy capable of annihilating the Chinese people, a thousand times more dangerous than the provincial doctors who were his own parents. That red hair was like a mark of infamy stuck to my skin till the end of my days, an unspeakable crime blotting my police record and penalising me in everything I ever undertook.