birds spread their wings before my eyes, but, all of a sudden, the roll slipped from my hand and fell. Not that the jolting of the plane was too violent, or that the roll was weighed down by the tears I couldn’t help shedding. No. But a long, long snake had sprung from the depths of the clouds and smacked against the misted window in mid-air. I wanted to get a closer look at it, but it melted away and it was only when the sun broke through the low cloud that I saw it again, stretched out beneath us, dead, or nearly, its black dragon’s jaws opened to the shimmering sea, paralysed in its final agony, swept away by the tide. I watched that snake in terror; its heart had stopped beating but the body still displayed all its arching beauty in the sinuous trajectory winding through the mountains, or rather in a thousand and one trajectories, in arcs and spirals, sometimes in loops, until together they formed the biggest and most mysterious question mark in the world: The Great Wall of China. The contours of the wall quivered slightly, making it look as if it were squirming, suffering, a reptile smeared with saliva, unable to sleep until it was sated. That was when I picked up a roll of manuscript, written in an unknown language; I went over to the sliding door and opened it. A gust of wind snatched my glasses. My hands were so weak I had to tear the roll with my teeth, into two pieces initially, but before I could tear it further I saw the reptile, its rings paler than before, springing once more from the depths of a cloud, and I threw the two halves of the manuscript at it. Just as it raised its hideous head to take this sacred food in its gaping jaws, I noticed its uneven grey teeth, some long and pointed, others as small as the teeth of a saw. The monster hurled itself at me, wrapped itself round me from head to foot, squeezing me so tightly that its icy scales punctured my skin. When I regained consciousness, I don’t know how much later, I was lying on my seat, still shaking from the experience. Under the implacable watchful eyes of the two officers, the sumo was picking up what was left of the mutilated roll, in other words the strip of silk bearing the colophon written by Huizong, and the valuable shafts it was rolled on, made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory.”
2
THE PERIPATETIC EXISTENCE OF THIS mutilated scroll, although captivating, would have remained insurmountably removed from me, like the earth from the sky, had I not met Tumchooq a few months earlier in a certain Little India Street. This street, which had nothing Indian about it, partly justified its name: it really was very little, barely six metres wide. Every time two lorries crossed they toyed with catastrophe: there were horn-blowing duels, exchanges of cursing and insults, but mostly a test of each drivers determination with neither prepared to yield a whisker. Little India Street was to the west of my university, running alongside the grey bricks of the campus, sketching a gentle slope and lined with small shops: a grocer, a baker, the Zhang sisters’ haberdashery, a tailor, a traditional pharmacy, which wafted aniseedy smells of bark, dried herbs, cinnamon and musk and which had big glass jars on the counter with snakes coiled inside them bathed in greenish alcohol, ophidians imprisoned in the land-locked sea of those jars, the geometric patterns of their faded skins almost completely lost. At the top of the slope, in once white stone blackened by smoke and dust, was a statue of Mao in a raincoat that flapped in the east wind to symbolise political storms, while, perched limply on his head, was a Lenin hat with a visor in proportion to the size of his head, so large that one day a nest of straw and twigs caked in saliva and gastric juices appeared on it, complete with a swallow on a clutch of eggs. From the full height of its twelve metres the statue overlooked a clump of ugly single-storey administrative buildings: a police station from which the occasional isolated cry of despair could be heard as if from a psychiatric asylum; a post office where my grant arrived at the end of each month, a postal order for a pitiful sum; a small hospital;