roofs stood out clearly against the dark sky, conjuring in my mind Kublai Khan’s palace as it appeared to Coleridge in an opium-induced vision, a sparkling, glittering palace floating over the ice, while inside guests in the same drunken state as myself drank a mixture of alcohol and fermented mare’s milk flowing copiously from artificial trees in which Kublai Khan had hidden his soldiers, just as my father described in his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World.
“It suddenly struck me with enough force to leave no room for doubt that living without taking university entrance exams wasn’t a handicap but rather an advantage, and I could take the academic authorities’ refusal as a lucky turning point, a new departure giving me an opportunity to realise a plan I’d been nurturing for some time: to annotate Marco Polo’s book using Chinese documentation, doing it in my own way, quite distinct from my father’s version.
“I still wonder, if all those circumstances hadn’t come together, if the lights in the library hadn’t been on, how that night of drink, loneliness and misery might have ended. I don’t know how long or in what sort of state I skated, or which way I went—a tram on route 103 or a bus on route 330?—to get back to Little India Street and my greengrocer’s shop at dawn.
“That revelation, which was so salutary for me, provoked absolutely no reaction in my father when, in the visiting room a few days later, I told him what had happened from my receiving the rejection letter from the university right up to my final inspiration. He sat there on the far side of the double grille. His hair, which he’d been allowed to grow since being appointed the camp’s pig-keeper, was all tangled, full of filth and mud from the pigsty, a thick red mane standing up on his head in haphazard tufts. He was wearing a worn pair of trousers and a sheepskin jacket, another privilege he owed to his new status, as he no longer had to wear a prisoner’s uniform. He listened attentively to my story, took off his glasses all patched with bits of wire and, using the dirty rags wound round the side-pieces, meticulously wiped the lenses, without looking at me or saying a word. When he did eventually open his mouth it was, as with all my visits, to teach me some Tumchooq vocabulary.
“I can hardly remember us talking once about anything personal; Tumchooq has been his only means of escape for two whole decades and I get the impression that—except in Tumchooq—he’s forgotten everyday words, and every aspect of real and personal life that goes with them is buried deep inside his memory. He never asks anything about my mother, her circumstances or her life, no more than about mine. I’ve got used to the enormous barrier he’s built out of a dead language, and I carry on erecting it around him, always frightened the truth about his personal feelings might escape through some crack; and yet everyone recognises that, in camps, prisoners tend to cling to their loved ones, and want to know everything that’s going on in their lives … but not him.
“Our language lessons in the visiting room arouse palpable, virtually universal hostility, judging by the muttering and sideways glances from the other prisoners—most of them common criminals—and their families sitting in the neighbouring booths. Far from being frightened, I take comfort from this hostility, not to say disgust, because it makes me feel not only that my father has his own value but that I too, a humble greengrocer, have mine, and that he’s raised it with those Tumchooq words reverberating around that pitiful room, words whose resonant rise and fall the others perceive as mere modulations belched by a solitary camel in the middle of a desert. I pity them, because they’re not equipped to admire this language, half angel music, half siren song, even if, when my father speaks it, with his head resting against the wall and his eyes blank, he always looks as if he’s suffering some appalling and incurable pain, and his face never shows any trace of the verbal pleasure described by the camp’s director, but rather two decades of accumulated unhappiness in each of his craggy features.
“That particular day, because most of the visit was taken up with my story about entrance exams, we had barely ten minutes left to devote to studying Tumchooq and he