Once on a Moonless Night (26 page)

Authors: Dai Sijie

Tags: #General, #French, #Fiction - General, #Fiction, #Historical, #Literary, #Foreign Language Study, #Romance

A few decades later Thum-suk Blung became the first sovereign of that part of the world and baptised his kingdom with his own name, omitting the word “fog” to keep only the attractive “beak of a bird,” which was gradually palatalised and transformed into Tumchooq. His reign, which encouraged and developed silkworm breeding, produced wondrous silk and satin fabrics so beautiful they rivalled bird plumage and the fine scales on butterfly wings. The story of this first sovereign also gave rise to an entrenched custom, respected by every inhabitant, that a mother should baptise her child by the name of the first thing she saw after she was delivered.

Beyond a room filled with artefacts found during archaeological excavations, I ended up in the last part of the exhibition, a very small conference room with three rows of pink plastic chairs. A silent ghost—a middle-aged man, wearing the dark grey overall of a museum employee—turned off the light and closed the curtains, plunging the room into darkness. The torn scroll, known as the “Tumchooq Sutra,” was so precious and in such bad condition that visitors could only view slides of it, and these slides soon made their timid appearance in a beam of light, quivering slightly on the screen stretched over a wooden frame, while the projector, handled by the employee in the grey overall, started to purr like a cat on someone’s lap. The scroll, at once familiar and unknown, first appeared in its entirety, already restored, with no visible trace of the tear, at least not on the photograph. The writing was too minute for me to read. I had to wait for the successive appearance of several closer shots to see the scroll as it had been for eight decades, mutilated, amputated, before the other part, believed missing in 1932, resurfaced; some of the letters were almost erased and could only just be made out. One of the pictures was reminiscent of a photograph of the Turin Shroud, taken a century earlier, on which the barely legible imprint of a body appeared.

While these professional, detailed, impeccably focused images were projected onto the screen, I pictured the wavering image Tumchooq showed me of it in the greengrocer’s shop when he initiated me into the sacred text, and I couldn’t help myself speaking aloud his father’s deciphering of the text, word for word as he had done:

ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT A LONE MAN IS TRAVELLING IN THE DARK WHEN HE COMES ACROSS A LONG PATH THAT MERGES INTO THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MOUNTAIN INTO THE SKY, BUT HALFWAY ALONG, AT A TURN IN THE PATH, HE STUMBLES. AS HE FALLS, HE CLUTCHES AT A TUFT OF GRASS, WHICH BRIEFLY DELAYS A FATAL OUTCOME, BUT SOON HIS HANDS CAN HOLD HIM NO LONGER AND, LIKE A CONDEMNED MAN IN HIS FINAL HOUR, HE CASTS ONE LAST GLANCE BELOW, WHERE HE CAN SEE ONLY THE DARKNESS OF THOSE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS …

After a pause of a few seconds, which felt like an eternity to me, the projector lit up again, shimmering motes of dust hovered in the beam of light, and the missing part of the scroll which I was there to see appeared in close-up. I shook like a leaf, because I had such a strong sense of the dead being brought back to life. Without realising what I was doing, I stood up and walked towards the screen, where my own shadow swayed, about to fall, moved closer and came to a standstill. With tears in my eyes, I touched the letters one after the other, stroking the grain of the screen, which reminded me of Tumchooq’s monk’s robe and the rags hanging from the side-pieces of Paul d’Ampère’s glasses, while the purring of the projector awakened an auditory memory which was as indistinct as it was distant, the song of the sand dunes that Tumchooq had described to me.

“At first it’s a dull, hazy, distant murmur like the buzzing of an army of invisible mosquitoes trapped somewhere and looking for a way out. The murmur of a river beneath the sand, the soft whispering of a mythical source. The private rumble of a river carving its bed through the dunes. Then the buzzing draws nearer, a buzzing of bees, or rather a furious, swirling swarm of savage wasps and bluebottles. And then it stops. Scarcely an echo to be heard. A few seconds’ pause, after which the buzzing starts again, intensifies, becomes a menacing vibration, as if ancestral spirits were beating drums beneath our feet and singing mantras; and the vibration swells until it sounds like the thrumming of a plane in the air, the roar of thunder low on the ground.

“ ‘That’s the song of the dunes that you once heard in Manchuria,’ Mum told me. ‘Not all Manchurian dunes sing, only a few, outside the West Gate of the small town where your grandfather, Seventy-one, was exiled. Every year on New Year’s Day, everyone went there, men, women, children, the elderly, rich or poor, all dressed in their best clothes. The only time I took you to my birthplace you were four years old. It was your first big ceremony. You’d been excited since the day before. You were frightened of being forgotten, or late. We got up at five o’clock in the morning, without having breakfast, but we took food with us. I dressed you up like a real Prince. Do you remember your robes with the peonies? No? In quilted, aubergine-coloured satin, lined with silk and embroidered with peonies, the New Year flower, with big petals in red, white and blue, green leaves and Tumchooq butterflies fluttering over the flowers in twos or small groups, so delicately embroidered that each of them had different-coloured eyes. The robe fastened on the right, true to the old imperial style, with a long opening at the side, edged with pearl-grey brocade, running straight up as far as the waist and cutting diagonally across to the round collar decorated with three blue silk ribbons, embroidered with little signs meaning
happiness
. It had wide sleeves, very wide, in black satin, as short as T-shirt sleeves, and coming out from underneath them were the yellow sleeves of your quilted jacket. It was really beautiful and you were so proud of it. We all were. And your silk boots, do you remember them? You looked so gorgeous, walking through the sand! The soles were white silk, the uppers dark blue silk and the legs yellow silk, a bright luminous yellow with pretty damask designs of clouds, in keeping with our rank as a family, the same ones your great-grandfather wore. The top of the boots was curved and the edge was decorated with braid in blue brocade, embroidered with golden dragons dancing in multicoloured waves. You refused to be carried by servants. You skipped about and climbed to the top of a steep dune with the others. The day was only just dawning, the sun was hiding behind the clouds, but there were already masses of people. We sat on the sand and ate sesame fritters. People were sliding down the sides of the dunes, with lots of shouting and laughter; some ran at the sand and ended up knee-deep in it. Others rolled down the slopes. Yes, you have to move and push and shove, or the dunes stay silent. And then the sun shone with a thousand needles of gold, and the dune moved with the shifting of the sand. It gave way. In the first avalanche, blocks of sand broke away, tumbling down the side of the dune where people had been playing. Slabs of sand, at first fairly compact ones, broke away, gathered speed, crumbled, and sprawled in every direction, raising clouds of dust, and from them came strange buzzing sounds, and everyone held their breath and listened. The same phenomenon was happening on neighbouring dunes. The sound produced by the avalanches of sand grew louder and louder and eventually an explosion rang out like a clap of thunder. You were so frightened you cried
Mummy! Mummy!
and blocked your ears with your fingers.’”

That song of the sands is what I thought I heard, too, as I deciphered the text of the missing part of the scroll, the end of the sutra:

“LET GO,” RINGS A VOICE IN HIS EARS. “THE GROUND IS THERE, BENEATH YOUR FEET.” THE TRAVELLER, TRUSTINGLY, DOES SO AND LANDS SAFE AND SOUND ON A PATH RUNNING JUST A SHORT DROP BELOW HIM
.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker and novelist. He left China in 1984 for France, where he now lives and works. He is the author of the international best seller
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
(short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in the United Kingdom and made into a film) and of
Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch
(winner of the Prix Femina).

This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in France as
Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée
by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Dai Sijie and Éditions Gallimard. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, the Random House Group Ltd., London.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to The University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Orphans’ Gifts” from
Complete Works, Selected Letters
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wallace Fowler, copyright © 1966, 2005 by The University of Chicago.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dai, Sijie, [date]
[Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée. English]
Once on a moonless night / by Dai Sijie, translated from the French
by Adriana Hunter.
p. cm.
I. Hunter, Adriana. II. Title.
PQ2664.A437P3713 2008
843′.92—dc22 2008041089

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-27203-4

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