French songs for him. When we went back out we found his bicycle knocked over, sprawled on the ground; the caps from the valves on his tyres had disappeared; stolen, we felt, as a warning. Condemned to pushing his bicycle, Tumchooq walked off into the night, laughing and whistling out of tune. On another of his visits the bell disappeared, then it was the grips on the handlebars and their red bandaging, and finally the saddle, which meant from then on he had to pedal standing up, proud of his calf muscles and his love. With me on the luggage rack, the pair of us must have made the most spectacular sight on a bicycle in Little India Street, because we couldn’t find the spare parts anywhere, as East Germany had broken off all trade with China.
Only White-Tuft’s death brought an end to his visits: we came in one evening and found my little rabbit assassinated in his hutch, blood still trickling over his flattened ears and dripping to the ground, testifying to the cruelty of the attack, his body still warm as it lay there on his vegetable leaves. His heart stopped beating in my hands.
In the days immediately after that sordid event, Tumchooq continued his visits to demonstrate our determination to whoever had taken out the contract on the assassination but, once in my room, nothing was the same; there was a strange atmosphere because White-Tuft’s presence was still so tangible, not to say all-pervasive. My cassettes of French songs sounded like funeral marches and, anyway, they kept getting stuck in the tape player, introducing long silences in which we felt we could still hear the soft regular noises of our late friend chewing his cabbage leaves. The coffee didn’t taste the same either, and we had lost the knack for concentrating with childish innocence on my Chinese grammar. To avoid descending into a prolonged period of mourning, Tumchooq suggested I go home with him to do my homework in the shop, where he slept on a bamboo mat that he laid out on the desk in the evening, then rolled back up in the morning and hid behind crates of vegetables, leaving all sorts of rubbish, peelings and dust behind on the table that served as his bed.
“I love money so much,” he joked, “I sleep on the desk so I can hear coins rolling around in the till when I move.”
That was how the greengrocer’s shop definitively took possession of me. Every day after lectures, at closing time (my favourite time), I would run over there like a little girl, carrying our supper, which I had bought at the university canteen, in two bowls covered with lids. Tumchooq often told me stories—they were my addiction, but his too—after we’d eaten. Occasionally, he gave me a brief glimpse of his childhood as he drained a glass of sixty-degree-proof maize spirit, but sometimes he would get carried away, drunk on his storytelling, and expand on a myriad different details until late into the night. As I listened, trying to picture him as a toddler or a schoolboy, another image came to mind, Marlow in Heart of Darkness, lying on the bridge of an old boat under a sky littered with stars, and I could no longer tell whether the words I was listening to came from Marlow or Tumchooq as he, too, related events of crushing, inhuman enormity in a slow, slightly cracked voice, which wrapped itself round you, lulled your senses, paralysed your limbs, made your head spin and swallowed you up.
“They were nothing earthly now …,” says Marlow. “I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees.”
White-Tuft’s death was never far from my thoughts, and the slightest noise outside—a stray dog barking, a screech of car brakes, a pigeon cooing feebly—made me sit up sharply, terrified, as if it had been a policeman’s boot kicking at the metal shutter.
“Mr. Liu,” Tumchooq began, “was my class teacher, but was also in charge of drawing lessons for the whole school. He was thirty-five, a very happy, enthusiastic man with a slight weakness for alcohol, not that he was ever drunk in lessons. His life’s work, and he’d clearly given himself to it heart and soul, was a portrait of each of the world’s five Great Revolutionaries, using models in Tiananmen Square, where Karl Marx had pride of place surrounded by the other four: Friedrich Engels, his close collaborator and faithful financier with a beard just