Once on a Moonless Night - By Dai Sijie Page 0,102
her weight, and there, looking indescribably sensual, she challenged her son to try to reach her, punctuating an entire Sunday morning with her laughter.
Thirty-odd years had passed since the days when they came to glean fruit from the Bodhi tree, and the windfall I picked up was such a charming thing, with fine gold stripes on its skin, that I put it in my bag and decided to take it all the way to the prison in Laos where Tumchooq was being held.
In the area for “Heritage Exhibitions,” next to the great hall dedicated to Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, I found the “Tumchooq” room, a more modest space exhibiting “Renat’s maps,” which were forgotten in an archive for two centuries and discovered by Strindberg, who, before becoming a playwright, worked at the Royal Library in Stockholm, where he studied Chinese in order to make an inventory of a collection of books in that language.
Sergeant Johan Gustav Renat of the Swedish artillery was made a prisoner of war by the Russians after their defeat of Sweden at Poltava in 1709. He spent seven years in Siberia, near the Chinese border, before being captured by a group of Kalmouks, the Djoungars, whose sovereign, Tse-wang Raddan (1665-1727)—known for his violence and his ambition to create a vast Mongol empire between Russia and China—was delighted with this gift from heaven: an artilleryman who knew the secret of building cannons. Over the course of ten years a turbulent relationship developed between the tyrant and the Western captive, a combination of death threats, mutual mistrust and peculiar friendship. Renat returned to Sweden after the death of Tse-wang Raddan, who had given him two geographical maps, one drawn by his own hand on thick, yellowing paper with an uneven grain. Its easy flowing images depicted mountains in green, lakes in blue, his own residence with its scarlet columns and his spotless tents with their red doors, inscriptions in Kalmouk, and the vast territories of Hi and western Mongolia, not forgetting the Gobi Desert, coloured in light brown. In the middle of the desert a blue-green oasis by the name of Tumchooq was indicated beneath a Tibetan-style temple with a flat roof on which three silver tridents were positioned to ward off evil spirits. It was the only temple on the map. According to Strindberg’s biographers, the young librarian and future great playwright pored over this map for hours on end, fascinated by the Tumchooq temple: Why had Tse-wang Raddan drawn it? Some raised the possibility of a pilgrimage, made by Renat, in an attempt to obtain spiritual protection for his son, the fruit of his love for one of the sovereigns daughters, for the child was an albino, a sign of bad luck in the natives’ eyes, and therefore at risk of assassination at any time.
After this geographical display the exhibition was devoted to the origins of the Tumchooq kingdom, notably with a presentation of an entire page from a Tibetan manuscript discovered in cave 1656 at Dunhuang, preserved at the Peking Library, and in which Kanghan Zanbu, a twelfth-century pilgrim, explains the origins of this kingdom, which, in his time, was already buried under the sand: one day, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, the chief of a nomadic tribe met a goddess who had come down from heaven, and he married her. Shortly after their wedding he went off to war, and while he was away his wife had an affair with a foreign traveller; she became pregnant, but managed to conceal her condition and hid the child she bore under a tree, as agreed with her lover. When he came to collect the child, on a starless night, his burning torch was assailed by every moth in the woods, dancing, flitting, jostling each other and forming a thick cloud around him. Some, nudged forwards by the others, burnt their wings and perished. This strange procession went on all night. The baby woke the following morning with a beautiful butterfly stuck to his forehead, a variety called Thum-suk, because of the colourful markings, in the shape of a bird’s beak, on its wings. And so the father called his son Thum-suk Blung (blung meaning “fog” in Mongol).
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