that dream I walked out of the hospital ward and scuttled down the stairs like a fugitive. There was no one in the reception area for the gynaecology unit, but there was a cold smell of milk, an aggressive smell of nurseries, which made me reel in disgust.
I cut across the cycle park, then a huge deserted courtyard. The night watchman was asleep. I found myself out on a cold, dark, grey street. A road sweeper in blue uniform, armed with a long broom with a bamboo handle, was picking up rubbish and dead leaves. The icy wind made me shiver, and with every step I took I felt a slight pain deep inside, but I set off on a long solitary walk, driven partly by a tentative new energy, partly for other reasons I can’t explain.
All at once I understood from the distinctive smell of the street I was walking along that I was in the middle of the Muslim quarter of Peking. The shops were closed, but the deserted street was permeated by a stale smell of mutton and beef. I walked past the mosque and along the perimeter wall of the Buddhist University which was once very famous—for instructing high-ranking monks—but had been closed since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and still was, even after Mao’s death. Through gaps in the crumbling wall I caught glimpses of buildings under construction, bamboo scaffolding, twinkling with frost in the glare of spotlights.
After the university I went past the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist Association, considered throughout the country as the supreme authority of this religion. It was still dark. There was something touching about that night-time walk, which plunged me into a state of melancholy: the cold of Peking, its gloomy half-light … soon I would be leaving them for ever, I knew that, out of love for Tumchooq. “I’ll do what he’s done”—that was the determined decision I’d made during the abortion.
There was a fragrance hanging in the air, exquisite yet light and one I couldn’t immediately identify, but eventually recognised: incense. Like a taste of what lay ahead, that delicate smell filling the streets steered me to the Temple of the “Source of Truth.” I hesitated outside the doors, guarded by two stone lions, but had hardly touched them before they swung open silently before me and I was instantly bathed in so much heat, so much candlelight, the smell of chrysanthemums and of incense, that I stayed on the doorstep for a long time, feeling as if a gentle blessing had touched my forehead with that waft of warm air.
A group of monks—how many of them were there? thirty? fifty?—came into the main hall, knelt down and began intoning a prayer chant so beautiful I started praying with them and singing, not in Chinese like them, but in French; first for my aborted baby’s soul or its ghost, then for its grandfather’s, Paul d’Ampère, for its father, Tumchooq, and also for myself.
To this day I don’t know whether at the time (things are so different and indefinable when you’re young), given the barbarous gang murder of Paul d’Ampère and Tumchooq’s irrevocable departure, whether there were any options other than the hasty decisions I made, which, like Tumchooq’s, were more a protest, a cry from the heart, than an actual choice: leaving the country and never speaking its language again. Did I consider for a moment that such a decisive act was a waste of long years of study and work intended to achieve a doctorate, and would arouse anger and disappointment in my family who financed my studies? I don’t remember. The only elements engraved on my memory were packing my bags and the terrible wrench of having to leave behind my books in Chinese, a condition of my commitment. I took a long time deciding what to do with them, stood gazing at them for hours, particularly the ones that Tumchooq and I had unearthed at the flea market in the “Pan Family Gardens” (a market only open at dawn, where treasure hunters rummaged through mountains of paper under the feeble halo of street lamps, a hazy, dreamy light filled with dancing motes of dust).
The courtyard outside my dormitory was silent and deserted. Like a thief, using just the tips of my fingers, I opened a book with a stitched cover, the once white thread now blackened with age, and leafed through it for the last time; it was a book of notes made