of double doors opening onto the garden. To the right of the reception room was a cheap canteen, perfectly suited to my limited means—a loan from the Banque National de Paris, which I eventually finished paying off many years later. To the left was the television room, where we had a democratic vote every evening to decide which channel to watch, and the reading room, where every inch of wall space was covered in bookshelves laden with general encyclopaedias, Larousse dictionaries, every sort of language dictionary, etc. On the imposing marble-topped reading tables were porcelain lamps with green shades, giving a soft, pleasant light, which soothed my painful memories of China. I discovered almost the exact same lights in the library at my college (where we sat between the bookshelves), the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, where I enrolled in the first year to study Tibetan.
I decided to take this new tack in my university education with Tumchooq’s tacit agreement, at least that was what I imagined, hoping he hadn’t forgotten our past discussions about Tibet. In intellectual terms, Tumchooq was one of those Chinese (was he really and is he still?) who lived in a state of disillusion with his own culture for a long time and then, in the 1980s, hoped to find new inspiration from the Tibetans. In personal terms, in his search for the missing part of the sutra, Tibet fired his imagination, because its culture was so imbued with Buddhism he assumed that the integral text from the torn scroll should logically be somewhere among all the sacred works accumulated over the centuries by the Tibetans—at least a Tibetan version if not actually a Tumchooq one. Who knows? I once read a book by a German author that told the story of a scholar looking for the oldest map of Tibet: in a nomads tent in the middle of the Mongolian steppe he came across a hundred or so pages of text written in an unknown language, which the owner considered to be a “relic from Buddha,” refusing to let him have it whatever price and whatever terms he suggested. The German scholar only secured the right to photograph them. As the inside of the tent was too dark, the shots were taken outside in windy conditions and, despite their precautions and best efforts to keep the pages relatively if precariously still, when the photographs were developed on his return to Europe they all proved to be failures, out of focus, condemned without question to the dustbin. Learning Tibetan had been our common aim, for Tumchooq and me, and by doing this I felt I was involving myself in his late fathers unfinished undertaking.
When I made this resolution a suspicion I had harboured for some time floated to the forefront of my mind: Was I deluding myself that this was love? I was trying to give so much to Tumchooq, unbeknown to him, but would he give me any sign of gratitude or affection in return? The fact that he had excluded me from his suffering was a bitter pill I swallowed out of solidarity and unconditional love. But it still tormented me so much I felt I was swallowing it all over again each time I woke alone in bed with sheets drenched with sweat. I swore that if life helped me find him again I would allow myself the satisfaction of establishing—out of a simple desire to know the truth—whether or not he thought of me on the day that he decided never to speak Chinese again and to leave his country.
What is left now of those three years of arduous study and constant enthusiasm? Tibetan words often crop up in my mind without warning, and from time to time I find myself coming out with unexpectedly beautiful sentences, and they have a ring to them which reminds me of the Tumchooq language. Sentences like that, sometimes even single words with no more significance than any other, delighted me back in the days when I was learning them. Sitting in the classroom, I thought for a few seconds I could see them glittering like a cloud of pollen, grains of fine sand, equipped with special Tumchooqian powers, borne on the breeze to my tutorial group, where they fell on me like gentle rain, especially when they were spoken by Mr. Tarakesa, who taught us Buddhism. He was a blind Tibetan monk, tall, thin and in his sixties, with a face like