to him. His French instructor, as he called him, would sit on his bed in silence, patching up his glasses with wire and wiping the lenses with the rags wrapped around the side-pieces, lost in thought. Whereas he, stimulated as much by the mystery itself as by the hope of finding the key to it, felt like a child alone in a huge forest, overwhelmed with happiness at being reunited with particular trees, grasses and plants, as if he knew them intimately, calling each by name, touching them, stroking them, smelling them, while others, unfamiliar to him, loomed out of nowhere, coldly blocking his path so he had to flatten them and clear them aside, only to admit that, between the endless intermingling of truths and deceptive appearances, he was actually lost.
The writer compared himself to a sailor of old navigating a river in an unknown continent and coming across as yet unexplored stretches where rapids unleashed themselves over the riverbed, clutching a map with no place names attributed to the blank spaces, just images of animals: lions, leopards, cobras, giraffes. Night after night Hu Feng explored those fabulous animals, carefully tracing them, tentatively pronouncing their names, analysing them, dissecting them, performing morphological and phonetic autopsies on them, and comparing them to those he knew already. After a while he felt he had lived with them all his life, penetrating the thoughts of their creator, a faithful companion to their evolution.
In his dreams he sometimes saw himself on the platform of a small station with a dozen or so children he had delivered from a goods train whose wagons were locked with metal bars. But he had forgotten one poor child who was now setting off again in the train, and, still full of their successful escape, the saviour didn’t notice the spewing steam and the carriages beginning to move. The train drew slowly away, gathered speed and hurtled into a tunnel while Hu Feng started running after it, so nearly catching up … Then the orphan would appear to him as he truly was, as the ones he had saved were too: a word in Tumchooq—one he had struggled with for a long time without succeeding in deciphering—disguised as a child who wanted to escape with him. Much later, when the word was no longer an obstacle for him, when he knew all its derivatives, compounds and conjugations like the back of his hand, he would still remember the image from his dream every time he came across it, as if each stroke of that simple word carried within it the terror in an abandoned child’s eyes.
“Bit by bit the text emerged from the shadows,” he explained to his wife. “When I read it from beginning to end for the first time I felt as if I were in a plane—what unimaginable luxury for a prisoner—which had been delayed on the ground an unbearably long time, then lurched and slid along the runway, but was now taking off at last. I was slowly rising up to the silent heights of all the beauty that was Tumchooq. Overhead island clouds floated by, some dark grey others brilliant white, and here and there I could make out a patch of forest, a frozen pond, an area of rice paddy, and I started thinking, although the idea itself is ridiculous, I was gliding over islands of the languages I had landed on in the past: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, English. Then I recognised what they were: my own works in Chinese, their solid pedestrian prose constantly shackled by society, by banality and more particularly by [inaudible word] dictatorship. While my Chinese writing only very occasionally takes flight, Tumchooq prose, now that dances.”
History, in this instance the transcript of the recorded visit, does not elaborate on the reaction of the writers wife. It may well have been like that of a woman whose husband is missing and presumed dead but who still waits, watching out for the slightest sign of his possible return. Now that her husbands memory was resuscitated it would truly be a miracle if his writing—even in a language she didn’t understand at all—were also resuscitated, more powerful, more ethereal and more admired than ever. To her, Tumchooq was the Saviour, a God whose mythical power was further reinforced by these words from her husband: “I can’t allow myself to recite the text to you, not because it’s incomplete, but because the beauty of the language can’t be translated. It’s