bow his head, incline his body and plead with the invisible Great Helmsman, quite unaware that the rain was beating down ever harder, his shirt clinging to him, his trousers flapping in the wind and water streaming over his hair (which he was allowed to wear long at the time because of his privileged status), running over his face and into his eyes, mingling with his tears and filling his mouth, which went on emitting snatches of words and icy breath, fading to moaning and mumbling—but never an obscenity or insult—until he was reduced to silence.
During this period people noticed an increasingly rapid decline in his memory, as if his brain were somehow ossifying. He could no longer remember recent events—clean clothes, for example, the meagre meals he ate alone or the nurses name—then he stopped recognising the warders and the camp director until the day, during one of her rare authorised visits, when his wife wondered whether he even recognised her. She begged him to say her name and wept when she realised he could not, his ravaged brain was just a space filled with shadowy mists and shapeless, nameless monsters; she broke down on the spot, for no one knew better than she how phenomenal her husbands near-legendary memory was. One thing is sure: at that point, in spite of his youth, the writer was closer to descending into senile dementia than to writing a novel; he no longer had the physical or intellectual means to do so.
No one ever knew whether it was a surge of pride, a lucid moment, a way of escaping the isolated house which had become his tomb, or an accident in a fit of hysteria that made him hit out at one of the guards, resulting in his expulsion: his head was shaved, he was moved to a communal barrack, slept on creaking wooden planks and began life as a common prisoner, taken to the gem mines like all the others in the morning, and climbing down into them, never knowing whether he would come back out safely. In the depths of a mine shaft he crossed paths with a man who was, in some senses, as mad as himself and who from his first day at the River Lu camp had never spoken in anything but Buddha’s language, a dead language which cut him off from all communication with the world, except for a fly tied at the waist with a very fine thread and attached to the side-piece of his glasses, flitting around him with a constant buzzing sound. All reports confirm that he was always perfectly, worryingly calm, even when he was attacked by his teammates, who were common criminals, a band of devils, rapists, thieves, paedophiles and sadists who homed in on him during their political meetings in the dormitory in the dark, punching him and taking pleasure in tearing the hairs growing back on his head and in more intimate places, “reactionary imperialist” hairs, to use their actual words, which weren’t black like Chinese peoples, but red.
“Tears sprang from my eyes,” Ma told Tumchooq, “before he’d even said the word ‘French.’ I couldn’t say why, but those few red hairs made me cry like a baby, a blinding pain shot through my head, almost breaking it open; it felt like the same pain I had as a boy in that strangling cage when you tortured me, because you would do anything for information about him. That same Frenchman was suddenly so close to me, two or three hundred metres away, at the bottom of the black hole of a gem mine where he had already spent nearly twenty years, and during that time a huge underground network had spread in every direction, so complex he must have felt he would never get out.”
Ma could no longer remember how the conversation started up again in that kitchen, but what the old warder told him left a dark image stamped on his memory, where he could see neither the Frenchman nor even a bamboo basket, but could just hear a fly buzzing in darkness. He was talking about the first time Hu Feng went down a mine shaft. Towards the end of the morning the candles that served as lighting as well oxygen detectors went out, and the prisoners raced for the wooden ladder up to the surface, stepping over anyone who fell, their panicked screams echoing through the tunnels, fighting to be first. Although conscious of the imminent