Once on a Moonless Night - By Dai Sijie Page 0,100

in the evening, at the end of a long day’s work; most of the offices were closed when one of the guards from the Great Gate brought a young Manchurian of about twenty into Mr. Xu’s office. He introduced himself as a school leaver who had been accepted by a highly reputed university in Shanghai, but his lack of funds to pursue his studies was forcing him to sell a collection of antique paintings, which had been in his family for generations. The acquisitions department of the museum was closed and he was in a hurry to catch the train to Shanghai, because he didn’t have enough money to pay for a night in a hotel, which was why the guard had brought him to the master’s office.

The latter smiled and entrusted his apprentices with the task of valuing the works. There were about thirty of them, tied up with string, relatively recent calligraphies and paintings of no great value, except for one which attracted the experts attention. It was one half of a torn roll of silk, the silk itself very old, probably from the Han dynasty, yellowing raw silk covered in the seals of several emperors’ collections, notably that of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, although the red colour had blackened with the passage of time.

At that point the voice stopped and the sound of a toilet flushing thundered somewhere in the hotel. I held my breath, not daring to open my eyes, as if moving one centimetre would shatter the dream, if that’s what it was, and interrupt what this man was saying, when I didn’t want to miss a single word. The writing on the fragment of scroll was not Chinese but rather the unfamiliar signs of an unknown language, two horizontal lines written from right to left.

Strange though this may seem, Mr. Xu skimmed his fingers briefly over all the pieces, not lingering for a second over the torn scroll, as if it had no more value than the others. He wore the same polite little smile he had his entire life, no more, and the young student was already preparing to leave again with his property. But that is not what happened. The master asked the young man to follow him to the accounts department, where he told them to give him a sum of money which still seems astronomical today: twenty thousand yuan for all the pieces, way beyond the boy’s expectations.

“The moment he left the accounts department,” the voice went on, “the master asked me to go to the station with the boy on the pretence that it was on my way home, to try to find out his address in Shanghai and, most importantly, where the piece of torn silk came from. In the Number 113 bus, heading for the station, the young man told me that one day in the 1930s his grandfather, who was a Manchurian peasant and the only man in his village with a bit of education, was working in the red sorghum fields when a Japanese military aeroplane flew overhead. A piece of silk fell from the plane, gliding through the air in the dazzling rays of sunlight, and landed about a hundred metres from him. When I reported this back to the master he was overcome with joy and disbelief. ‘That’s what I wanted to hear, a piece of silk falling from the sky!’ He said that three times with tears in his eyes and explained that he hadn’t dared offer more money to the boy for fear of awakening any suspicions in him that might have threatened the sale. ‘It’s impossible to put a value on this half scroll,’ he added. Tomorrow I’ll arrange for the museum to pay him another hundred thousand yuan as a mark of my gratitude. I’ll also ask for the guard to be given a reward of fifty thousand yuan, because without him the opportunity to acquire this treasure would have slipped past the door and disappeared for ever. This is the most precious acquisition in our museum for fifty years, because, if memory serves, we already own the other half, which was obtained at the time by less scrupulous means, because its owner—a Frenchman granted Chinese citizenship—was condemned to life imprisonment so he would never be in a position to claim back his property’”

It was only towards the end of this story that I looked at the television, but the screen was a blur. Broadcasting must have