Shadow of the Silk Road (6 page)

Then, almost casually, as if in afterthought, the smuggler lifted something heavy from a nest of paper and set it on the counter. ‘Tang dynasty. Only four thousand dollars.’

I stared at it in shock. In the sordid secrecy of his shop, locked in that yellow light and silence, it was beautiful. A head of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, almost life size. Under the commotion of her coiffured hair and flower-studded headdress, the face was stilled into an abstract peace. The deep double curve of the brows above the near-closed eyes imposed a geometric severity. In this stone diagram the delicate nose and mouth made no disturbance. Carved from the white local granite, she might have been sleeping.

The man sensed my quickened interest. ‘I can put you in touch with someone in Hong Kong…’

I gazed at the face in a turmoil of indecision. It was in Tang dynasty China that the mustachioed Indian Bodhisattva, who ushered souls to paradise, underwent a sex change and became the goddess Guanyin. Perhaps those serenely androgynous features recorded the moment of transition. If genuine, the head was all but priceless. But I had no way to know, no way to save it. I glanced back at the smuggler. I wanted to despise him. But he looked clouded, abstract. Beneath his drift of boyish hair shone a scholar’s forehead, polished like eggshell. I wondered vaguely: if I denounced him, would he be executed? A life for a statue.

Perhaps it was to save myself, or him, that I began to decide the head was fake. It was surely too smooth, too perfect? Where was its body? And why did he value it less than the tomb guardian? If it was a forgery, I concluded in bewilderment, it was pure kitsch. I stared at it again, in frustration. The face was a radiant blank: a receptacle for people’s dreams. Gently I put it back in its paper nest, and covered it over.

For a while the smuggler talked of other, exculpating things: the
rash of urban unemployment, the hardships of peasant life. Then his interest faded. He sensed me slipping away. A few minutes later the iron gate rattled down and he was gone, leaving Huang and me in the unlit alley.

For an hour or two I put the goddess’s head out of my mind. Only afterwards, over several days, I wondered in misery if perhaps it were not genuine. Then I would stray into daydream. I imagined myself years hence, wandering the Chinese galleries of the Metropolitan or the British Museum, and coming across a cabinet of new acquisitions. There, chastened, I would gaze into its face in recognition: ‘Head of Avalokitesvara (Guanyin). Tang dynasty, 8th century
AD
. Provenance unknown.’

In the glare of the restaurant, under his black helmet of hair, Huang’s eyes were burning with their own frustration. For a long time the sweet-and-sour pork lay untouched between his hands, while his words stammered out like firecrackers. He had just given in his notice.

The catalyst had been a casual e-mail from the Brazilian lawyer; then Huang’s impatience had grown unbearable. ‘My friend write me from Brazil: “Mr Huang, you can work in business for a Brazilian company.” This sentence very important to my heart. Now what does this mean, do you think? “You can work in business for…”’ He repeated it like a spell, as if the words contained something they would not yield up. What was their true essence? “‘You can work…” ’

I felt fear for him again. What would he do? He knew no word of Portuguese. And what would the lawyer feel when Mr Huang turned up on his doorstep?

‘My father was very angry,’ he said. ‘Because my job is good, powerful. Many people want such a job. But he knows that since I grew up I have had this big dream. I tell him: I will be all right, I have some English and a clever heart. Then my father understand.’

‘You must try to find a Chinese trading company,’ I said, ‘somewhere you can use your Mandarin.’

‘Trading? How is that spelt?’ He took out his notepad. ‘T…r…a…’

‘But what about your wife and daughter?’

His eyes sank to his meal. ‘Oh, this is my big problem.’ He poked at the sweet-and-sour. ‘First time I tell my wife she’s very angry. One week, don’t touch me! Don’t even speak with me! I understand her thought. But later I explain everything to her mother, who knows that my heart and my dream are very big, and that I will develop good business. So at last my wife says okay, okay, I understand you.’ But he looked rueful. ‘You know our women are very strong, too strong. Seventy per cent, I’d say, are stronger than their men…’

‘Will your wife come with you?’

‘The first year I am alone. Then when I’ve made a good life, my wife come over to find job. My daughter will go to my mother, maybe to my wife’s mother. Sometimes here, sometimes there–no problem! They all love her, they all want her.’

‘Is this good for her, do you think?’ My mind was crammed with Western notions of childhood. ‘So many people?’

He grimaced suddenly. ‘I think not so good. But I have to do this. Later she will follow me.’

As he talked about work permits and aeroplane tickets, his spirits revived. He gulped down his doubts with the pork, then grew a little maudlin, because this was our last evening. He wondered if we would meet again. My journey was dangerous to him, more dangerous than his. Here in Xian things were all right, he said, but in those north-west lands…He shuddered visibly. His was the old Chinese fear of inner Asia lapping at the Great Wall, the emptiness beyond the Celestial Kingdom. And I had not even mentioned Afghanistan…

‘I like talking with you,’ he said. ‘I will miss you. We Chinese just make chicken-talk, just surface things, joking. You are different.’

We got up to go. Would he return to China? I wondered. In old age, at least, the first generation of emigrants often came back, to build prestigious houses and die where they were born. But Huang said no. He would not come back to any village. Others would tend his parents’ graves. ‘After death there is nothing. I believe only in knowledge.’

Out in the street a light rain was falling. He took no notice of it.

Something else was bothering him, small but insistent. He said: ‘We have a tomb-sweeping day, you know, when we burn paper money for the dead. For two years now, just before this day, my dead grandparents have come to me in dreams…’

But this coincidence was all he knew of faith, and the thought dwindled away with the rain. He took my hand. He was afraid for me, he said. Then, with an incongruous sweetness, he became reluctant to say goodbye. He thought of me as his father, he said depressingly. I was so old and my health wasn’t good (I had a cold). And the railway stations were dangerous. I must never talk to anyone in a station. They were full of drifters and criminals. ‘And you must not go out at night. Here’s my mobile number…you must ring me if you ever have trouble…’

But as he drifted away from me, perpetually turning to wave, turning again until the rain and the dark subsumed him, it was his own journey that I wondered at–the self-exile of millions of his countrymen. That night I tried to picture him succeeding. I surprised myself by badly wanting this. I almost telephoned him. In the hotel’s quiet it became uncomfortable, then painful, to envisage the alternatives: Huang scraping a pittance in some crime-ridden barrio, while his dream faded away.

I closed my eyes, imagining a distant, changed time. This other fantasy developed pleasurably as I fell asleep. In some unknown future, needing financial help–a loan perhaps, to support my old age–I would find myself in a grand banker’s office wavering down a gauntlet of secretaries and assistant managers; and there at the end, his hedgehog hair flecked discreetly with grey, proffering his gold-ringed hand from behind the director’s desk, would be my old friend.

Through the cold halls of the Confucian temple, 2,300 stone stelae rise in ranks higher than a man. Sacred texts, imperial edicts, early poems: this imperishable library accumulated for a thousand years, after the Roman-era Han dynasty. Some stand isolated on the backs of stone tortoises, symbols of longevity, topped by a
twirl of dragons; others stretch in seamless walls of black granite, eight feet high. Ancient classics–the Book of Rites, the Book of Odes, the Book of Changes–become avenues of stone you walk through. The core texts alone cover the surface of 114 giant stones. There are laws about fields and canals, records of peasant uprisings and the removal of ancestral graves, even the killing of missionaries, copybooks of calligraphy, maps, and a single six-foot-high character, ‘Harmony’, carved on its own stele. You are walking through the memory-trace of a whole people. You have no power to turn a page or unfurl a scroll. The words might be the voice of the stone. Incorruptible, they have been proof against the Chinese whispers of generations of scribes.

Their redundancy was majestic now. The neat, incised characters in their vertical columns struck me like a chilly magic. I had learnt to speak Mandarin only through the
pinyin
system which Romanises the characters. I could not read them. But each character, I knew, was discrete, inflexible. The language had no developed past or future, no gender, no singular or plural. In these dank halls it suddenly seemed less a living organism than a wondrous monument. Locked in a changeless system of notating history, the near and the distant past might seem to co-exist. Duration was recorded by the reign of emperors, or in sixty-year cycles. There was no trajectory to the future, no opening-out of the centuries, no last day. Instead, sometimes, there was the illusion of perfect equilibrium.

This gloomy power followed me through hall after hall of granite memory. I went in fascinated alienation, as if tramping between tombstones. The characters were filing up and down their stelae like worker ants. The word had become immortal, and dead. The tortoises groaned under their loads.

Once, where the Book of Odes moved in a curtain of interlocked slabs, I heard a subdued noise. The stones seemed to be mewing. Round the corner was a young woman tracing a passage with her finger, and trying to sing.

‘I can’t sing it, I was just experimenting.’ She covered her mouth. ‘Even by the twelfth century they couldn’t remember how to sing the songs of the Tang. They pronounced the words differently too, and we can’t tell how. Every poem was written to be sung. But now we have the words only.’ She was copying the ode from the stone into a notebook. ‘I love these. But everybody seems to have forgotten them. People don’t know what our ancestors left us. I feel sorry for them.’

Sorry for her ancestors or contemporaries, I did not know. But the words were beautiful, weren’t they? She did not have a husband (she was only twenty-two) and nor had she returned. But the words were already potent, although even the meaning of many was controversial, I knew. One translator went so far as to say: ‘
There is not one single word in these ancient poems whose precise significance we understand
.’ You could wander their interpretations for ever. I left her alone with her notebook, thinking, and soon afterwards the stones were mewing again.

The stele I was hunting was quite another. The dragons that crested it writhed around a flaming pearl and a vivid superscription. Along its base and sides, running like light cavalry round the Chinese columns, was a cursive script which turned out to be Syriac. The carved inscription read: ‘Record of the Transmission of the Western Religion of Pure Light through China’. And it was crowned by a Christian cross.

Raised in
AD
781, the stone recorded the arrival of the priest Aloban from the West a century and a half earlier. He ‘came on azure clouds bearing the true scriptures’, and the emperor Taizong received him, indulging the translation of his books in the imperial library, and even founding a monastery. ‘If we carefully examine the meaning of the teaching it is mysterious, wonderful, full of repose,’ the emperor decreed astonishingly. ‘It is right that it should have free course under the sky.’ The stone goes on–drenched in Buddhist and Taoist imagery–to celebrate the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and Christ’s Ascension. But the
Crucifixion is only cryptically remembered, and the Resurrection not at all.

I scrutinised the Syriac as if I might decipher it. Who on earth were these Christians?

It happened like this. In
AD
431 the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, maintained with half the eastern Church that the nature of Christ was not indissolubly divine, but dual–that he was a man sometimes visited by divinity–so that Mary could not rightly be called the Mother of God. ‘I cannot imagine God as a little boy,’ he said. The heresy split Christendom. Within a few years the Nestorians were taking refuge in the Persian empire, and spreading east along the Silk Road, and perhaps it was for this that their great stele describes how at the Nativity the light-dazzled Magi came with their gifts from Persia.

But in the Chinese heartland the Nestorians dwindled as suddenly as they had arrived, persecuted as the Tang dynasty declined, their monasteries in ruins. No authenticated trace of their churches has ever been detected here. If the Xian stele did not exist, you could imagine their coming a myth.

Yet five years ago, fifty miles south of the city, a British Sinologist rediscovered an obscure site named Da Qin, ‘Roman empire’ or ‘the West’, the name by which Nestorian communities were known. It was located eerily in the Taoist precincts most sacred to the emperors, the forgotten Vatican of the Tang, where the Qinling mountains open northwards on the road to the West.

The Sinologist’s agent was a careful, silent man. He had been born in a peasant village, but his studious intelligence had lifted him to another life. He wanted to be called Peter. Southward beyond the smog and detritus of Xian, we drove together towards mountains we could not see. It was early April and the foxglove trees were in lilac bloom along the fields. In the villages the cottage walls were stacked with last year’s maize, and New Year posters still dangled from their doors. Once we came behind a truckload of mourners, their heads bound in white bands, who threw out symbolic money to blow like blossom over the road. Beyond them, we found
ourselves traversing empty fields and patches of scrubland alive with sand-coloured marmots.