reached South Pond Street. That, too, had disappeared, struck off the map. So had “lover’s paradise,” a discreet strip of wooded land along the moat from the North Gate right the way down to the beginning of the Hutong of Figs, a place that had been the secret haven of love for more than three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. There had been no streetlights. Every evening when the last glimmers of dusk had disappeared from the dark surface of the moat, couples would arrive from all over Peking, men and women, boys and girls, unmarried people who lived in collective dormitories, walking deep into the thickets, sheltered under the exuberant foliage to exchange a first kiss in the shadows, a fleeting embrace, rapturous fondling, in fact, the whole panoply of sensual pleasures provided by a lovers touch. This earthly paradise had had no more luck escaping sudden death: it had been replaced by a sanitised park with dodgems.
Back at Cui Min Zhuang, my hotel, I managed as best I could to get some rest after an eventful shower in a tub protected by a torn plastic curtain, with taps that needed constant adjustments, because the temperature of the water was so capricious and unpredictable. One minute I was screaming as it scalded me, the next dying of cold under its icy flow, because another customer had turned on a furred-up tap above, below or on the same floor as me. That shower was such a test of my nerves that I emerged from it completely dazed. I fell asleep as soon as I lay down and didn’t even have the strength to turn out the light.
Despite the establishments promising appearance, despite the pretty emerald tint to the tiles covering roofs all the way to the outer wall and even though, in the distant past, the building had been the secondary residence of Mei Lanfang, the best singer of all time at the Peking Opera, the rooms had absolutely no soundproofing, but nothing could have drawn me back from that sleep as my body gave itself up for dead, not the noises from the room next door, nor those from the one above, where the water gurgled through the pipes and a man sang in his shower.
In the middle of the night, perhaps towards dawn, a toilet flush thundered directly above me like a waterfall storming down a cliff face, so loudly that it woke me. The old cracks on the ceiling shuddered, widened and turned into gaping wounds with debris flying out of them, crumbling whitewash, dust, spiders’ webs, soot, etc. The noise really is appalling at Cui Min Zhuang, I thought to myself, but, before I had even finished the sentence, my body drifted back to sleep. My mind, however, did not, since I could hear voices: at first I thought they were coming from the television, which I’d probably forgotten to switch off, because I thought I could hear the crackle of its speaker, like fine sand running down the walls. I was so overwhelmed by sleep it was impossible to get up and switch it off.
The voices were low to start with, but suddenly became very distinct, a change I put down to the television set, which was likely to be just as unpredictable as the hotel’s plumbing. As if in a dream, I could hear two men talking. The first was telling the other what had happened at the museum in the Forbidden City while he was on a poorly paid but instructive and eventful placement as an expert in ancient painting; all this reported in a voice devoid of involvement or emphasis, bordering on curtness but very precise.
The incident had happened two years earlier in Mr. Xu’s office; he was the last leading light in valuations and, although he was already seventy-two, the Forbidden City gave him a considerable salary every month to delay his retirement. For several years he had been passing on his knowledge to young colleagues from various museums in the four corners of China. A single sentence from the master about calligraphy or a painting was priceless. His practised eye, familiarity with the works and phenomenal memory earned him a supreme position in China and international renown, because—as anyone who has read essays on Chinese art will have gathered—Western scientific methods are incapable of dating a work accurately and even less of identifying its author.
The scene took place in the second half of August, towards half past six