wondered whether he would resist the temptation to repeat his Burmese experience in Japan, to disappear only to roam far and wide with no identity or official papers, researching, learning the local language, researching further until he found another collection as priceless as the one at the Pagan monastery.
The door to the cave opened and two black silhouettes, almost like shadows, appeared against the daylight, slipping silently inside: it was the monastery deputy and my interpreter coming to invite me to a major ceremony of exorcism and prayers to Buddha, asking him to bless and protect their superior, Tumchooq, who was threatened by the spectre of misfortune. I should have guessed there had been a dramatic development from the awkward way the monks behaved whenever I came near. The words uttered by those two shadows, still with the light behind them, reverberated around the cave and their echo lent them such an other-worldly quality that I had trouble understanding my translator, but I didn’t need her explanations to guess as my legs shook, my knees gave way and the stupa seemed about to crumble beneath my feet.
The news had come two days earlier while I was laid low by fever. According to a telegram sent by the Kyoto Buddhists’ International Conference, Tumchooq had been arrested by the border police at Tokyo airport, and a Japanese monk who had come to greet him had witnessed the scene. Tumchooq was accused of being in possession of a false Laotian passport. (“It was the first passport he ever had,” the monastery deputy told me. “He bought it a few days before he left, through a man who specialises in that sort of transaction, in a slightly offhand, last-minute way. Unfortunately, instead of a Burmese passport, he was given a Laotian one. A false one.”) Despite his religious robes and the intervention of his Japanese co-disciple, Tumchooq was immediately deported to Laos and handed over to the judiciary, and this in a country where the sentence for identity fraud was liable to be life imprisonment.
EPILOGUE
PEKING
OCTOBER 1990
SURREAL, COMPLETELY SURREAL, THAT was how the sequence of events felt to me, and I can only describe them now in broad outline, because Tumchooq’s arrest and imprisonment so clouded my thoughts. The white mists engulfing my mind mingled with the bluer ones of the Irrawaddy which lapped at the foot of the walls around the monastery. I remember nothing of our leaving, nor of the boat that took us to Mandalay, still less of how we first approached the Burmese government on the subject of Tumchooq’s release, but the only thing I can be more or less sure of is that we very soon decided to wage the war on two fronts, Laotian and Chinese: the monastery deputy went straight to Laos to mobilise monks there and I took the first flight to Peking, where I was to find Tumchooq’s mother and obtain documents from the Public Records Office to establish her son’s identity.
It had been eleven years since my flight from Peking. The light, which had been so distinctive in late afternoon, was no longer the same, nor the smell; there was a hundred times more traffic than before, so that, when my taxi came off the motorway between the airport and the city centre, it found itself trapped in an endless queue of cars, groaning and edging almost imperceptibly forward, only to grind to a halt again. The physiognomy of the cars and passers-by seemed to have changed, too. Their clothes were brighter, their faces darker and more strained, but it was the look in their eyes that really struck me. They looked at me without a glimmer of curiosity. They no longer had that probing policeman’s expression, but that of an experienced salesman who was absolutely meticulous in his accounting and gauged each customer as he came into the shop. A professional eye, looking after its own interests. Still, I recognised Peking by one detail: the taxi driver, irritated by the traffic jam, wound down his window, cleared his throat and spat forcefully into the road, proudly watching his spittle’s parabola until it landed bang in the middle of the street, and not even contemplating any kind of apology.
I decided to stay at the Cui Min Zhuang Hotel, not for its proximity to Wang Fujing Street, which is a sort of Peking Champs-Élysées, but because it is close to the East Gate of the Forbidden City, a few hundred metres from the residence for museum