Once on a Moonless Night (6 page)

I do not know how much money Tumchooq took from the State that first evening, and I am not sure he would have known himself. Something as concrete and down-to-earth as a figure would only have belittled this act of grand larceny; he knew that no sum could truly represent the scale of what they did. Nothing about this adventure, as he described it, really surprised me except for his strange identification with his invalid colleagues two or three times his age. It was not entirely a joke. Later he gave me a fairly convincing demonstration of his talents as a mimic. He could fake a limp perfectly: he came to a stop, put his good leg forward, twisted his other foot on the floor so that all his weight came down on his ankle, and bent over to pick up a coin. (I suspected he practised after work when he was alone in the shop, given that he lived there for a long time, because he was not only a salesman but also nightwatchman. In the evenings that desk on which everything inexorably converged became his bed; he covered it with a bamboo mat for a mattress, then a blanket and his apron, which he folded in four to act as a pillow for his big head, but it was always on the floor by morning, crumpled like a dirty rag.)

I only remembered Tumchooq’s fake limp recently after reading the memoirs of a Russian film director who died about ten years ago, yet whose films—which have sound but no dialogue—have such a pure beauty they bowl me over every time I see them. In his book he talks about the “stammering period” of his childhood, which had started as a game, imitating a friend with this handicap. He got into the habit of stuttering, struggling to find words and uttering snatches of unfinished sentences until he ended up stammering more than his friend and having to resort to singing at the top of his voice, like something from a comic film. “I’m grateful to my stammering friend because, thanks to him, I discovered not the misery of being unable to communicate but an even more significant trait: the vanity of the spoken word.”

“One day,” Tumchooq told me as he sat on the desk in the greengrocers with the lights out so that his eyes lit up to the red glow of his cigarette every time he took a drag on it, “I was looking for something to read on my mothers bookshelves. She’s the vice curator of the museum in the Forbidden City now, so you can imagine the sort of books she has. Anyway, I came across
The History of Theatrical Presentation in the Court of the Qing Dynasty
, written by Goo Ying and published by the Museum of History. There’s a paragraph I know by heart:

At the beginning of October in the Year of the Cockerel (1862), on the occasion of the one hundredth day since the birth of Zia Lan, better known as Seventy-one, the long-awaited first son of Prince Yi Lin, a celebration which coincided with victory for the Chinese army in a battle waged with the French on the Chinese-Vietnamese border, the Dowager Empress Cixi showed her gratitude to the Heavens for this double happiness by inviting every prince, minister, general and high dignitary in Peking to attend a huge performance laid on by troupes of singing eunuchs in the Pavilion of Pure Sound within the Forbidden City and lasting from morning till night for three whole days. Two pretexts [the book’s author comments] to demonstrate her power. Manifestly, she wanted it—this power—to be noticed, and for people to know that she was Her Majesty the New Master of China, Her Majesty the War Leader, a patriot and a nationalist—a very popular image two years after the fire in the Yuanmingyuan Palace. (This event was collectively perceived as bringing shame on a China defeated by eighteen thousand English and French troops who had marched into Peking and burnt the palace: “The smoke spread through the whole city,” wrote one English officer in his diary, “and the Yuanmingyuan Palace was so vast that flakes of black soot fell from the sky onto the city’s inhabitants for three whole weeks.”) That is how Seventy-one, so favoured by his great-aunt, the supreme regent, embarked on a fatal involvement with the anti-Western struggle from as early as his hundredth day. Unfortunately for him, this was the only time in his life his name was associated with a victory.”

The following day Tumchooq and I went to the Pavilion of Pure Sound. The sky was overcast, with low clouds drifting over the frozen sea of the Forbidden City’s golden roofs in the middle of which four buildings surrounded by red columns form an enormous square around the famous Pavilion of Pure Sound, its three stages set one above the other, rising several dozen metres into the air and thus, according to the museum brochure sold on site, allowing performances to take place in three different spaces simultaneously: Hell, the earthly world and Paradise. This same brochure indicates that the imperial palace actually has two theatres, a small one kept for romantic dramas and more intimate plays, and a large one, the Pavilion of Pure Sound, which, during Cixi’s fifty-year reign, was almost exclusively devoted to performances of her favourite production:
Mulian Saves His Mother
.

For the first performance, the scene was set and the audience watched the protagonists plural lives simultaneously on the triple stage: past, present and future, each occupying one level of the building and establishing its independence by ignoring the existence of the other two. The viewer was offered three different theatrical styles: tragic, comic and poetic. (On the first day, Tumchooq told me, the audience displayed general indifference to these tales they had known by heart since childhood; only visual pleasure triumphed, a pleasure due not to the magnificent sets or sumptuous costumes, but to the physical beauty of the performers, young eunuchs aged between fifteen and eighteen, dressed as men or women and some of whom had that gift beyond human perfection, beyond categories of male and female: the ravishing voice of a castrato.)

The next day the performance still took place on three separate stages: on the top level, seen from far below, the protagonist Mulian stood at the gates of Paradise, but his thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, were expressed by the sublime voice which guided the viewers gaze towards the earthly world where one could see his mother abandoning him as a child, then towards the infernal world where the mother was quite unrecognisable, transformed into a demon consumed by perpetual hunger and condemned to suffering cruel torture for all eternity. The mother’s and son’s voices seemed to answer each other, letting fly mutual accusations of sometimes extraordinary violence, from Heaven to Hell. Then came the reconciliation and their two voices crossed the earthly world to find each other, embrace and be united.

It was not until the third day that a vertical staging was laid on, celebrating the triumph of filial love, which lies at the heart of the Chinese moral code. The protagonist progressed from top to bottom using ladders and ropes camouflaged behind elements of the set, or taking perilous leaps to propel himself from one space to the next to save his famished mother. When the son succeeded in controlling his mother, who was trying to devour him, the performance reached its climax: to stop them from escaping, the Lord of the Underworld transformed the lowest space into a gigantic inferno. The hero had to carry his mother on his back and climb up to the intermediary space, the earthly world, but floodwater from the Yellow River, drowning everything in its path, kept driving them back down to the Underworld, where they were swallowed up by flames. As they vanished, a light suddenly sprang up on the highest stage, ripping through the floorboards of the triple set so the hero could rise up with his mother, ascending vertically, climbing ever upwards, unhindered, to Heaven.

Following the map in the brochure, we entered Cixi’s private box: a low-slung building with a large opening facing the Pavilion of Pure Sound. There, from behind a wide, finely sculpted screen, she had enjoyed a panoramic view of the triple stage, sheltered from the gaze of her male guests, who were seated in two other buildings on either side of hers. The large room she used as a box was empty, there was nothing left—not her seat, the lacquered screen, any furniture or the great fan wafted by four indefatigable eunuchs silently re-creating the gentle breath of a soft summer breeze for her. In that Year of the Cockerel 1862 she would have been in mourning; her husband, the emperor Xianfeng, having died the previous year. Did her son, the child emperor Tongzhi, who was then four, ever come to this box? If so, where would he have sat? The brochure had nothing to say on the subject.

“I imagine,” Tumchooq said, “that in one of the many intervals Cixi would have had her great-nephew brought to her box, given that the celebrations for his first hundred days were theoretically the main reason for the festivities. As an amateur soothsayer, Her Majesty the Master of China had probably felt the baby’s still-soft skull, fingering its topography centimetre by centimetre, trying to find a sign of the nations destiny, some irregular protuberance announcing military talent or anti-Western feelings. In a thirteen-hundred-page book called
An Anthology of Archives from the Intendant to the Court of the Qing Dynasty,”
he went on, “I found a few lines indicating the sort of favours Cixi bestowed on her great-nephew: throughout his childhood the intendant’s department sent him birthday gifts on the orders of the dowager empress; never the silk cloth or ink made in the Court workshops that other children in the imperial family received, but silver stirrups, a Mongolian saddle, a miniature suit of armour, a soldiers helmet, a compass … always things imbued with virile, if not martial, aggressiveness, as if to proclaim: ‘Be a hero who will win the wars I wage.’ In 1874, for his twelfth birthday, the book records simply: twelve arrows.

“I remember seeing one of those arrows,” Tumchooq adds, “at the bottom of a metal box that my mother always kept padlocked; in among her jewellery, some old stamps, official family documents and ration tickets for rice and oil, wrapped in blue brocade decorated with little pearls and tied with a thin yellow silk ribbon was a sheath made of rhinoceros horn, also tied round with yellow silk ribbon. It housed a wooden arrow thirty centimetres long, which, unusually, was painted white; one end was tapered and black, fitted with a rusted iron head, the other still had the vestiges of fletching with balding feathers, and it had a small whistle attached to it: an ancient Chinese invention which dates back several centuries, a sort of flute shaped like a tiny gourd, as thin and light as an empty eggshell; and, if you looked with a magnifying glass, you could see Chinese characters engraved on it: Cixi’s name and title in stylised form. Long ago these were known as coded whistle-arrows. When a general received one of these, falling from the sky, sent by Her Majesty, he had to act immediately on the instructions secretly implied by the arrow, its secret so closely guarded that the sender would not allow herself to write it down or have it transmitted by word of mouth.”

Tumchooq and I were now heading towards the communal living quarters for the employees of the Forbidden City, where his mother lived; although, he claimed, she had gone to work, even though it was Sunday.

“Eighteen seventy-four saw a key event in Cixi’s life,” he went on. “After thirteen years as regent she had to restore imperial authority to her son, Tongzhi, the child emperor who had now grown up and reached the age of maturity: eighteen. The law of the Empire requiring Cixi to renounce all power would deprive her of the only pleasure she had known in widowhood. Like a pre-programmed death. Soon she would be the subject of monstrous slander, accused of causing the downfall of the Empire, bringing disaster on the entire country and having blood on her hands. Her victims’ families would testify to her cruelty and perversity, making a tally of the dead and clamouring for her head. I think those twelve arrows asked her favourite great-nephew to avenge her or save her from Hell.”

When Tumchooq lifted the lid on the box that belonged to his mother I stood for a long time looking at that fascinating arrow, its slender, pointed end made of lead pocked with greenish rust, which I feel I can still see gleaming before my eyes to this day. I couldn’t help bringing it up to my mouth and was tempted to dab it with the tip of my tongue to see whether it was poisoned, when I had an idea: Had Cixi ordered her great-nephew to carry out an assassination? Did she simply want to hear this arrow whistling through the air or did she, in fact, want to see it piercing the chest—the very heart—of the son who had driven her from the throne?

Neither
Mulian Saves His Mother
nor
The White Arrow
was played out on the stage of history, but the pages written then were worthy of the darkest noir fiction: Emperor Tongzhi had barely assumed power and started presiding single-handed over Court audiences in the Palace of Eternal Peace, when he was struck down by a violent illness—smallpox, according to the diagnosis of Court doctors—and died the following year, 1875, at the age of nineteen. Shortly afterwards an official announcement stated that his wife, who was pregnant, had brought an end to two lives, hers and that of the future hereditary prince she carried in her belly a suicide called into question by most historians, some of whom even suspect Cixi was so incapable of renouncing power that she assassinated her son, daughter-in-law and unborn grandson. In any event, Cixi, Her Majesty the Master of China, still bearing the title of dowager empress, installed her nephew Guangxu on the throne, another child emperor who was just four, descended from the same lineage and of the same generation as his predecessor, Tongzhi.

It was the most contested succession in Chinas history. Cixi was trampling a sacred protocol which had seen the Empire perpetuated for two thousand years: when an emperor died without an heir, his succession had to be secured by a child from the imperial family, but from a different lineage and of the previous generation. Any breach of this Confucian law risked the collapse of the Empire. Cixi’s method for silencing protests proved simple, efficient and irrevocable: any ministers or courtiers who confronted her were condemned to decapitation, with the exception of just one or two who were each granted the favour of being sent a long, sturdy silk belt embroidered with celestial landscapes and graciously offered by the merciful dowager empress for them to hang themselves and, therefore, have the privilege of arriving in the afterlife with their bodies intact.