a woman I love for the sake of a text, the same text. Like father, like son? Two spectacular bastards?
(One question smacks me in the face as I write this, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner: Didn’t I leave Peking at a time when … like you, perhaps without your knowing … I haven’t got the heart or the strength to formulate the question—about my offspring, another Tumchooq, another manuscript-hunter?)
These notes, which followed on from Paul d’Ampère’s, were jotted down roughly in Chinese on the squared paper of a Burmese schoolbook, written in pen, its nib gliding from left to right and accelerating in places, as if chasing its own shadow, chasing fleeting memories or a scene that came to mind with no warning and had to be captured straight away without rereading. Were these few notes the beginnings of a book or just a sketchy introduction to the frequent internal conversations he held with the late Mr. Liu, a Freudian slip he maintained, as far as I know, all through the years when he regularly visited his father at the camp in Sichuan?
I discovered that schoolbook when I arrived in Pagan, in among other books and papers strewn over a low table in the house of the superior at the printing press-monastery a two-storey bamboo building on stilts on the side of a steep hill, protected from behind by the towering Achan mountains and facing out onto the mirror-like surface of the Irrawaddy as it flowed across a plain, irrigating rice paddies and disappearing along the valley. The monastery superior was travelling abroad and the main room in his house—which acted as an office, reading room and bedroom—was spacious but empty of furniture; sober, even austere. Visitors took off their shoes before stepping onto the floor of plaited bamboo, a cool surface that moved backwards and forwards underfoot, and they sat on a rush mat on the floor to take tea. Hanging from the roof at the far end of the room was the superiors bed, a simple mat, clean but old with holes in places, repaired with pieces of faded blue fabric. Above this hung a white nightshirt and an ochre-coloured tunic with only one very long sleeve, which reached right down to the floor. Neither of these, according to the monastery’s deputy who welcomed me very courteously, was a samghati (the robe of rags), because the master had taken his with him.
He added (his words translated by Min, a young Sino-Burmese girl acting as my interpreter) that, of all the masters who had presided over the monastery, the present one, although still young, had the greatest reputation for his tremendous erudition, and that monks and followers came from the four corners of the country to listen to his teachings. One day he was visited by a delegation of Japanese monks and they had been so impressed by him that, on their return, they invited him to Kyoto to preside over an international symposium, and this explained his absence.
I put my glass of tea down on the low table and was about to ask him to show me the stele in four languages which had brought me to Pagan when, completely by chance and for no apparent reason, I thought of Tumchooq for the first time in a long while. As I waited for the deputy to finish praising his master, I leafed through a schoolbook on the table. You know the rest. Before I even grasped what I was reading, I was shaken to the core, the words dancing before my eyes, the pages quivering in my hands as I trembled from head to foot. What a journey I’ve been on, I thought, to reach this moment which finally gives some meaning to my life, to these long years of drifting between different languages and different continents! Thank goodness.
6
TUMCHOOQ ARRIVED IN PAGAN IN THE early 1980s, the monastery deputy explained, retracing his story for me. A real vagrant: no one knew where he was from, because he remained utterly silent and had neither a passport nor any other administrative papers. At first he was employed in the kitchens, where he chopped vegetables from morning till night, not talking to anyone, so that for a long time he was thought to be mute.
A few years later, when the paper mill needed another worker, he was sent there, although no one expected great results, because the process of making paper for sacred books requires exhausting,