But he didn’t get in straight away. He stayed where he was, speechless, possibly humiliated because I hadn’t recognised him. A temporary lapse, but its intensity terrified him because he knew from experience that memory loss often heralded death. To avoid dirtying the gangway, even though it was well rusted, he took off his sandals and climbed up the steps, which rocked beneath his weight. Once again I couldn’t resist the urge to laugh as I saw his bare feet coming towards me, shrunken like two expertly sculpted miniatures, held in a single drop of rain as it fell on the steps, and that wading sound, psh psh psh, echoing round … I suddenly realised the significance of the situation: those raindrops were tears shed by Heaven for the last seconds of the last emperor of China, a farewell; so I reached my arms outside, and the drops splashed thrillingly over my hands, laden with a sadness that chilled me to the bone.
INTERROGATOR B: Superstitious nonsense! Listen to me, prisoner, make an effort to confess your crimes without any of your propaganda for reactionary superstitions! All that’s been wiped out by the great Chinese people.
PRISONER: I acknowledge my crime, comrade interrogator, and I swear I will not re-offend.
INTERROGATOR A: In your opinion, was this hallucination you’ve described the symptom of an illness such as schizophrenia, or the effect of a drug, opium, for example?
PRISONER: I’m not an opium addict, sir.
INTERROGATOR A: Perhaps the Japanese drugged you? Gave you an injection claiming it would calm you down? Or some pill for travel sickness? Tell the truth. This detail could mitigate your guilt.
PRISONER: No injections … or pills … Wait, I do remember something. I can see an officer handing me a bottle. It was in the car on the way to the airfield.
INTERROGATOR A: What sort of bottle?
PRISONER: The glass was matt, very opaque, with a white vapour inside, which I breathed through a straw as if drinking it.
INTERROGATOR A: Probably “ice” as the Americans call it, “crystal.” The more fanatical doctors in the Japanese army gave astronomical amounts of it to kamikaze pilots at the end of the war before they crashed themselves into American ships. Go on.
PRISONER: The rain stopped shortly before we took off. We reached a certain altitude, but the pilot couldn’t get the plane to go any higher; it was shaking so much I thought it would explode, and I held on to the sumo’s arm as I looked down through the window at the town of Tianjin, which I was probably seeing for the last time in my life. I told myself all those tiny black dots milling about in every direction, smaller than ants, that they were Chinese people who were my enemies now. Then we flew parallel to the coast of the Eastern Sea before cutting northwards. Ships, fishing boats, a couple of little islands appeared, framed by the window, then vanished. Then we were wrapped in thick fog, which looked as if it had come from the depths of the sea. Despite our low altitude I could hardly see anything now, except the dark silhouettes of a funeral procession. I couldn’t make out the musicians, but the music drifted up to me in snatches and tears of nostalgia clouded my eyes. When the fog dispersed, I saw the faint outline of a river mouth beneath us and the riverbed flooded by the high tide, with the funeral procession winding its way along it, crossing a bridge so insubstantial it almost wasn’t there, ephemeral, ready to vanish into thin air at any minute. The sight of it revived memories of my thwarted experiences as an artist, because painting would have meant that, with a few swift brushstrokes, I could have captured this devastating image of death, this burial of my Chinese identity, which was apparently being celebrated before my eyes. Long after it disappeared, the funeral tune—a strident, almost vulgar air—stayed with me like a melancholy obsession, so insistent that, when the sumo opened the chests and I looked through the purest masterpieces in the imperial collection—I’m sorry, in my collection—which were going to travel all the way to Manchuria with me, all I could see was the funeral procession with its black and white banners rippling in the wind, shrouded in autumn mists. Most of the rolls were not very large and I personally opened a work by Huizong chosen at random, unrolling it a section at a time. One by one