any official version of the Buddhist canon.
The mysterious disappearance
In the years following this discovery a considerable number of documents written in the Tumchooq language were found on archaeological excavations, and since the 1960s the language has become an important branch of orientalist studies. Nevertheless, d’Ampère’s deciphering of that short text still astonishes experts in the field for its accuracy and intelligence. As for d’Ampère himself, no one knows what happened to him or where he is. Another complete mystery.
5
PRIVATE DIARY
JANUARY 1979
17TH JANUARY
I woke in almost complete darkness in the middle of a dream and for a split second couldn’t remember where I was. On the one hand, there was my body refusing to be roused from a sleep closer to death than to life, which I sank into moments after abandoning myself to the intense but fleeting pleasures of orgasm; on the other, there was my brain still holding on to traces of the dream which had visited me, its images, colours, sounds, smells and, especially, the cry that woke me and was still ringing in my ears. I didn’t know whether my body or my mind was further from reality. I didn’t know when it had started raining either. Raindrops were falling on the roof like grains of sand, and coming through the gaps in the unevenly spaced tiles, dripping in the darkness onto baskets of invisible vegetables or—to be more specific—onto big cucumbers next to the desk, the administrative and financial heart of the shop hastily transformed into a bed rather too narrow for two people, so I kept worrying I’d fall out right in the middle of the “meeting of the clouds and the rain,” to use the Chinese expression for the sexual act. I was also afraid the desk would collapse under our thrusting bodies, given the deafening creaking sounds it made, which eventually blurred into our heavy breathing in the icy air, there among the smells of beaten earth, vegetables and bodily secretions.
The sound of a car suddenly woke Tumchooq. Neither of us said a word, but the panic gripping us was palpable, even in the dark. Police? Soldiers? Had someone seen me at midnight as I nipped from the deserted street into the shop? (How careless, I scolded myself, making us run a risk like that, knowing it was our last “meeting of the clouds and the rain” in the Year of the Horse, because Tumchooq was going away the following day to spend the new year with his father, who was serving out his sentence in a gem mine in Sichuan.) The sounds of the car drew nearer, as if it were slowing down, and I thought of a young Chinese painter who was arrested outside a foreign diplomats’ residence as she slipped out of her French lover’s apartment—he worked at the French embassy. She was condemned to two years in prison for dishonouring her country. I wondered which of us would be … The car didn’t stop, thank God, the engine sound faded, the noise of the rain grew all the louder and Tumchooq, relieved, took me in his arms, kissed me and went back to sleep.
Then I saw him again, the man from my dream a few minutes earlier. In the blink of an eye, when I least expected him, he loomed out of the hazy darkness, slunk between the baskets of vegetables, walked silently past our improvised bed and disappeared behind the cucumbers with the fat raindrops smacking onto them in the dark. I’d never experienced hallucinations before, however brief, and this fleeting vision reminded me of every last detail of my interrupted dream: it was nighttime, as far as I can remember, but I didn’t know where I was and I took a while to understand that the silent waves which sometimes seemed clear-cut and sometimes more nebulous, and which I initially took to be the sea, were in fact clouds floating under the feet of a solitary, middle-aged man travelling far in the distance; he was more Western than Chinese and was toiling along a path lit by the beam of a bamboo torch in his hand.
I recognised him, or rather guessed who he was, by two details: first his red hair, which highlighted his handsome face in the most unusual way; then his glasses, which Tumchooq mentions every time he talks about his early visits to the camp where his father is imprisoned. Those glasses matched his descriptions and fascinated me with their lenses, which picked up