Tumchooq, who’s gone to spend them with his father, and I gauged what an infinitely long time it takes for a week to go by in his absence. Outside the shop the only feeling I had was of emptiness, of missing him; I should have bought lotus roots, sweet potatoes and red-hearted turnips to eat raw this evening, chomping into them as I sit alone in the courtyard listening to the firecrackers that will be going off, but all I could think about was slinking away.
I associate Tumchooq less with sexual pleasure than with the taste of the various vegetables he’s taught me to eat raw; the first steps towards a radical re-conversion for someone like me, who grew up with boiled green beans and mashed potatoes. It started, if I remember right, one Sunday in the middle of summer when the two of us set off by bike to visit a temple on the outskirts of Peking, which was once very famous but is now in ruins. On the way back, the sun, like a vibrating ball of lead setting the rhythm for Tumchooq’s pedalling and our beating hearts, was so hot it had melted the tarmac; in other words, we were pedalling through an oven with our throats on fire, so we made a beeline for an isolated house by the side of the road where Tumchooq succeeded in making a friend—a natural gift for him, he’s equally at home with princes and beggars. In this instance it was a farm labourer of about forty, a thin man with very tanned skin and one arm missing so his shirt sleeve flapped limply, who took us to a well in an inner courtyard, beneath a large ginkgo. Using his one arm, with a deftness and grace all his own, he lowered a bucket on a long rope into the depths of the well. We heard a dull impact right at the bottom and the muffled echo of the bucket smacking the water, sinking into it and filling up. The man tugged sharply on the rope, the bucket came back up, he grabbed it by the handle and, without a word, poured it over Tumchooq. Gasps of surprise, laughter. Then he lowered the bucket back down and it sank into the water again and came back up; when I screamed, half the bucketful was already streaming over my hair, shoulders and body—pure, cold, refreshing water; I took a big gulp of it, shuddering with pleasure while the other half of the bucket gushed down inside my T-shirt and my trousers, and I felt them billowing out around my waist, stomach and legs.
After this restorative shower, Tumchooq took some long lotus roots (probably stolen from the shop the day before) from his rucksack, washed them assiduously with help from our new friend, who filled the bucket again and slooshed the roots to remove the mud from them, revealing fragrant, creamy, almond-coloured skin. Like the two of them, I picked up a long root and bit into it: it turned out to be so juicy, fresh and crisp that it later became my favourite vegetable, always associated with our “meetings of the clouds and the rain,” either as a prelude, or at the end.
As for Tumchooq, he knows no greater pleasure than biting into a turnip from the Zhangjiakou region: the skin on the bottom half buried in the ground is the colour of jade, an almost transparent green, on the top half it’s ivory-coloured; the flesh is white as snow, with a pattern of purple veins shot through with a ruby-red thread. Holding a turnip in his hand, Tumchooq likes imitating street vendors, bellowing a sing-song “Zhangjiakou turnips, better than Guangzhou pears …” Then he throws it on the ground, the turnip splits into pieces and he bites into one, chews it, then passes it to me, mouth to mouth, like feeding a baby bird. The sugary, exquisitely refreshing juice pours over my tongue and down my throat, and spreads through my whole body for an immeasurable length of time; it sometimes feels as if the taste will stay with me till the end of my days.
Tumchooq left a week ago and after three days on the train—“listening to the hammering of the wheels,” as a popular song goes—he must have arrived in Chengdu on Monday evening, set off for Ya An on Tuesday morning, that’s the day before yesterday, and spent another whole day on the bus on a rutted