employees where Tumchooq’s mother had two rooms in a brick-built house at street level, with a traditional courtyard in the middle of which, if memory serves, there was an exuberant kaki tree with deeply scored black bark and, in summer, leafy branches reaching beyond the walls and bowing under such a weight of fruit you expected them to crush the tiled roof. Not forgetting the tap for running water that Tumchooq had mentioned so many times, I felt I had already seen it.
“One morning,” he had told me, “after a stormy night, I looked out of the window and saw my mother going out of the house. Her red boots marked out her footsteps in the glittering white blanket of snow, right to the middle of the courtyard, where she turned on the tap to wash some vegetables. She chopped white turnips into little cubes, put them in a basin and sprinkled them with a thin layer of salt as white as the snow. The basin was in white enamel and on the bottom it had a red peony with green leaves, and the enamel was chipped in places.”
The sun had set some while ago, even though I hadn’t wasted any time in my fifteenth-floor hotel room with its view over a tide of giant modern buildings with flashing luminous signs on them. A few metres from the hotel the indistinct silhouette of a slender bridge spanning a major traffic artery appeared above the tiny, fine and mostly broken roof tiles of a few very old houses, all curved lines and low-slung frames. A white cat, perhaps a Persian, ran along the roofs, jumped, climbed up a sad single wall among the demolished houses to the thrumming of bulldozers that I could hear but not see. When I left the hotel and turned into the first side street, the headlights of the machines toing and froing across the demolition site lumbered towards me incredibly slowly, blinding me. There were a few traditional old houses left, waiting their turn to be demolished, and the lights still lit in their doorways looked like the pitiful flames of candles burnt almost right down, exhaling their last glow, their last breath of warmth, while the bulldozer headlights peered at them like monsters examining victims paralysed with fear, before pouncing.
This part of the city had been my favourite place over a long period, not only because of the emotional connection with Tumchooq and its proximity to the Forbidden City, but because for two thousand years it had represented the real Peking, and Tumchooq had had a map of it on the wall of the greengrocers, so that, night after night, word by word, he could learn the Chinese characters most frequently used in daily life (and often the most beautiful): those that made up the names of the streets in the city The map was a lithograph representing a bird’s-eye-view panorama of the entire Imperial City (which surrounded the Forbidden City) with its four gates and Tiananmen in the middle. The tumultuous profusion of hutong, Peking’s narrow streets, were picked out as white lines on the black background of the map, forming a spider’s web so clear it was worthy of the very best engravings. The lines were often straight, cutting across each other, spreading east, west, north and south. Sometimes they changed into fluid ribbons snaking around lakes, white marks dotted here and there like whimsical drops of mother-of-pearl. In places the lines were cut by a bridge, a villa or an aristocrat’s residence, while in others they melted into marshland. Along each white line representing a hutong there was a name, in the writing of the day, carved with noble skill. Tumchooq made me read them out loud with him, road by road, quarter by quarter. Some of the names, the way their ideograms were combined, sparkled with exquisitely nuanced elegance; others captivated me with the sound they made: subtle, sensual, occasionally exuberant, particularly when he said them, my Tumchooq with his attractive Peking accent. Even though the Tumchooq method was elementary from a pedagogic point of view, it was terribly effective: at the time I could find absolutely any street in the city centre, however small, and any footpath, however twisting and winding, as if Tumchooq had carved the map inside my head.
I decided to go to Tumchooq’s mothers house on foot, but I should have guessed this decision would lead only to disappointment, if not a nightmare. The further I walked,