by an erudite member of the Qing dynasty on ancient books he had read. The paper was thin, made of hemp, and the ideograms—printed in vertical lines not using lead characters as they are now, but from engraved wooden boards steeped in black ink—seemed to me to have a life of their own. Each page quivered in my fingers, as if the scholar had transmitted his very soul into the book. His words, I could tell, had jealously harboured this soul until that very moment and were now distilling it in me. On the brink of abandoning my radical decision to sever all links with Chinese, I bent closer to read what he had written, but, unbelievably, even though I perfectly understood the structure, punctuation, hidden meanings, syntactical subtleties, etc., I couldn’t pronounce a word out loud. My tongue froze, my lips refused to move, not a single sound came from my mouth. Disturbed by this perilous, almost nightmarish experience, I watched as the sentences dissolved before my eyes into isolated ideograms, unconnected signs in which all I could read were the insults and whoops of joy bellowed by the prisoners who had lynched Paul d’Ampère. Murderous words. Once again, imaginary or not, I heard the muffled cry of the foetus, filling me with shame and terror, which drove me on. In a hysterical outburst, shedding tears that were as uncontrollable as they were liberating, with brash, almost masculine movements amplified by the cold, I lit a fire in the deserted courtyard and threw all my books onto it. Licked by the flames, those precious works began to turn red, yellow, black, eventually reduced to cinders. Watching the flakes of black ash, light as goosedown, wafting up, hanging in the air, drifting off in the darkness and falling back down on my head, I realised just how much I loved and how closely I identified with Tumchooq. “I am Tumchooq,” I told myself.
PART TWO
WANDERINGS
1979 – 1990
1
IN APRIL 1373, ONE YEAR AND FOUR months after arriving in Peking—where I had acquired not only a perfect Chinese accent but also a rich vocabulary, including the city’s own vernacular with its distinct, palatalised sounds—I broke off with China (no, you can’t ever break off with China, only run away from it) and went back to Paris, to the Latin Quarter. I moved into Concordia, a student hall of residence close to the Rue Mouffetard.
Though typically French, this pedestrian street with medieval paving stones is not without similarities to Little India Street. It is just as narrow and slightly winding with a long, gentle slope edged with souvenir shops, perfumeries, chemists, a post office, Greek restaurants, bookshops, newspaper kiosks, butchers, cheesemongers, shops selling orthopaedic shoes, children’s clothes, leather bags and, where it crosses the Rue de l’Arbalète, a street market for fruit and vegetables which exhales the same odoriferous (a word Proust often used) smells as Tumchooq’s shop. Apart from two or three items from Africa, it sells more or less the same things, perhaps in better condition, in brighter, more commercial colours. The salesmen are mostly of Arab origin and as they holler the names of the vegetables and their prices they remind me of Tumchooq’s colleagues, lame and in poor health, shouting with little real energy, but who adopted me without any political prejudice, thinking of me as part of the shop’s family What I should have done, and I regret not doing, was to go and say goodbye to them or at least witness one last time the collective theft from the State’s tills in those few seconds of deliberate darkness.
In my frequent bouts of nostalgia I spent a lot of time in that market on the Rue Mouffetard, not buying anything, happy just to gaze at the vegetables, touch them, smell them. Sometimes my old friend White-Tuft—my Peking rabbit, another victim of assassination—popped into my mind and I remembered him nibbling my hand when I offered him the vegetables Tumchooq had given me. A few years later, when I moved to the Rue Daguerre, I found an almost identical market. Little India Street was definitely following me around.
Returning to Paris was a pleasure and I got back into the rhythm of more harmonious times. I was lucky to get a room at Concordia, once a delightful private home, now converted into a students’ hall of residence, with a huge reception room on the ground floor complete with domed ceiling, immaculately waxed parquet floor, an untuned grand piano and a pair