for twenty minutes at a time, to talk through the double wooden grille and initiate him in the ancient language of Tumchooq, its pronunciation, spelling and syntax, although not actually encouraging him to share in his obstinate search for the missing part of the sutra, a search which for many years has maintained—more existentially than physically—his contact with this world from which he could so easily withdraw altogether. It’s a secret garden he has kept hidden throughout his long sentence, except once when he mentioned it in an offhand way, almost as a joke. It was in the winter of 1977, right after the Great Helmsman’s funeral, which marked the beginning of a new era. The first sign that spring had arrived, the first crack in the great Proletarian Dictatorship, was a change in the university system. Until then universities had selected their students exclusively on the recommendations of the Party, but now they opened their doors to anyone under the age of thirty who succeeded in competitive exams in mathematics, literature, physics, chemistry, foreign languages, history and politics. Overnight, a great whirlwind blew across the entire nation, a whole generation found new hope and buckled down to preparing for those exams … except Tumchooq, whose condemnation to three years at reform school blotted his record. Not that it stood in the way of his profession as a greengrocer, but it cruelly forbade him from enrolling for the competitive exams along with the blind, deaf-mutes, the lame and the infirm all over the country.
“The week after I got the letter of rejection,” Tumchooq told me, “I felt a mark of infamy, shame and sorrow weighing on me; I hid all day long in a little tea-house mulling over this destructive, not to say fatal, failure which had struck me down before I even went into combat, and I looked my future in the face with a terrible feeling of impotence at the prospect of being condemned, excluded from society, you could say, for my whole life. I shut myself away in silence. Talking—even to say one word, a simple ‘hello’—took superhuman effort. Sometimes I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out. At the end of the sixth day it was the evening before my birthday; I was on the brink of my twenty-third year. At ten o’clock in the evening, with a bottle of cheap booze in my freezing hand, slugging it straight from the bottle, I skated like a drunken madman over the frozen moats at the foot of the imposing walls around the Forbidden City, in the area where I’d spent my childhood. Commercial skates were way beyond my means, so I made do with some holey old trainers onto which I’d attached some metal rods, the way they did in the ancient kingdom of Tumchooq, according to Marco Polo’s accounts. This meant I could more or less glide over the ice, like a wandering ghost, pursued by the rather pitiful sparks flying from my Tumchooqian skates on the dirty surface, and tracing two black grooves, one deeper than the other. Those sparks sprayed and scattered, filling my flared trousers, dazzling me like fireworks marking the feast day of a Tumchooq prince, which, I knew perfectly well, bore no relation to my lifelong status as a seller of vegetables. My mind was left far behind by my body as it ran and jumped and danced, carried away as much by speed as by alcohol. For the first time in days I started quoting Holden Caulfield, my favourite hero, talking to a cab driver in The Catcher in the Rye, one of the first American novels translated into Chinese and which conquered an entire generation. It was the part where Holden talks about the ducks on the lake in Central Park, wondering what they did in winter. Did they fly away or were they picked up and taken somewhere? But the cab driver thinks it’s a stupid thing to wonder about.
“I must have seemed just as stupid, but I didn’t come across anyone to talk to apart from invisible fish breathing in that icy water. When the huge clock on the Telegram Centre struck eleven I went under the Bridge of the Divine Army, turned towards the Beach of Sands and arrived beside the National Library, where countless table lamps still glowed, casting an extraordinarily dreamy light through the misty condensation on its tall windows, so that the whole sumptuous edifice with its Western columns and Chinese