to my own astonishment, was merely the matching piece to another image, the one on a slide that Tumchooq had projected on one of the shop’s walls a few weeks earlier, using a projector borrowed from his old teacher, the frustrated painter who had converted to amateur photography. Tumchooq hadn’t given me any warning, but I’d known for a long time he had a photo which meant more to him than life itself and which I suspected was a portrait of his father.
I listened intently to the soft purring of the projector; a dazzling beam of light blazed rather theatrically, making motes of dust appear and dance in its path, while the wall with its dirty marks, nail holes and remnants of propaganda posters started to glow, its uneven surface lighting up in the dark like a screen. My heart beat anxiously, I was worried there would be a power cut, which happened quite frequently in Peking and always when you least expected it. I could tell Tumchooq was moved in spite of himself, seeing that image, the only picture he had of the famous mutilated scroll, of which only half remains. The photograph must have been taken around midday, judging by how overexposed it was, unless that was an illusion on my part, lending it a slightly hazy, fantastical quality like a mirage, particularly as the image wobbled a little because the electric current was inconsistent or under the effects of an imperceptible gust of wind, a breeze rippling the roll of silk. The scroll, Tumchooq informed me, was held up by one of the curators at the Forbidden City, in other words by the hands of the State, the new owners of this Chinese treasure, this legacy of successive dynasties, torn by Puyi, then the property of Seventy-one, who was by then blind, only to end up causing the downfall of a Frenchman who traded in his own wife for it … Or was the image shaky simply because Tumchooq’s heart quivered as he pressed the shutter, confronted with his own fate—which strikes me as the most appropriate word to describe the artefact.
As if not wanting to swamp the near-sacred atmosphere of the projection with unnecessary detail, he spared me the account of how she—the curator—succumbed to his supplications and demonstrated exceptional courage in allowing him to take a photograph, within the confines of the Forbidden City, of a scroll that had not seen the light of day since the State acquired it; in other words, since Paul d’Ampère was imprisoned. Tumchooq’s dark shadow moved across the beam of light as the letters of that language which gave him his name appeared on the wall-screen, and as he read them syllable by syllable, in a soft voice, a murmur, utterly transformed, almost ecstatic, in a state of veneration, as if presiding over my initiation to some religious rite, or revealing a secret buried beneath the earth for centuries, a favour that would unite us for ever. Behind his glasses his eyes were ablaze with a beatific light I had never seen in them before. He read the text his father had deciphered first in its original version, then in its Chinese translation; each word pierced my heart, and I in turn translated the words to engrave them onto my memory:
ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT A LONE MAN IS TRAVELLING IN THE DARK WHEN HE COMES ACROSS A LONG PATH THAT MERGES INTO THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MOUNTAIN INTO THE SKY, BUT HALFWAY ALONG, AT A TURN IN THE PATH, HE STUMBLES. AS HE FALLS, HE CLUTCHES AT A TUFT OF GRASS, WHICH BRIEFLY DELAYS A FATAL OUTCOME, BUT SOON HIS HANDS CAN HOLD HIM NO LONGER AND, LIKE A CONDEMNED MAN IN HIS FINAL HOUR, HE CASTS ONE LAST GLANCE BELOW, WHERE HE CAN SEE ONLY THE DARKNESS OF THOSE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS …
18TH JANUARY
Every couple of months Tumchooq makes the most of the general anarchy at the greengrocer’s shop and does what no other son would do in his shoes: he takes the train, often without a ticket, and travels in the “hard-seat” class for three days and two nights to visit his father at his work camp in Sichuan, five thousand kilometres from Peking. While he’s there he stays with a camp employee nicknamed the “poetess” (a former prisoner of indeterminate age and marital status), and for the five or six days of his stay he goes to the visiting room where Paul d’Ampère has the right,