Once on a Moonless Night (10 page)

“Until then the only Western children we had seen with our own eyes were some pupils our age whom we occasionally came across after school on the outskirts of the Forbidden City. They weren’t studying at the First of October School (ours, which was solemnly named after the date of the Chinese national holiday) but at the one named after the First of August (a day that celebrated the People’s Liberation Army), a primary school close to the Drum Pavilion. They passed our school on a shortcut, which was how we had come across them. There were about ten of them, more boys than girls, nice-looking really with such a variety of colour in their skin, eyes, hair and clothes that dazzled passers-by slowed down to watch them. Some were blond with curly, bobbed hair with little waves rippling in the wind; you wouldn’t dare guess whether they were girls or boys. The extraordinary thing was, even in the middle of winter when it was fifteen degrees below zero, they always wore shorts with knee-length socks, as if they were from another planet and the cold didn’t affect them. I was fascinated by their socks, wondering whether they would have kept slipping down on my scrawny calves. We were also amazed by their mastery of Chinese, pure Pekinese without a trace of accent, which seemed miraculous to Ma, who was from Sichuan and never achieved correct Pekinese pronunciation the whole time he was in the capital.

“One day we witnessed an argument between the little Westerners and their Chinese classmates, on the path that ran alongside the Forbidden City. We didn’t know how or why the row started, but I would never have guessed that those foreign children could muster such insolence and prowess: first they hurled deft acerbic taunts, then a few verbal attacks, before reaching the conclusive phase of insults proper. It was a performance to take your breath away: they called their Chinese opponents every name under the sun in impeccable Pekinese; then the pace quickened, the rate of counterattacks accelerated, the tension cranked up a notch and a flood of swear words in pure Pekinese slang issued from their mouths, always hitting home and each more virulent than the last. Their vocabulary was so extensive that they took malicious delight in varying the constructions and syntax to make their insults all the more striking. Some of their expressions, although vulgar, were so funny and surprising they made us fall about laughing. Those coarse words pronounced by different-coloured children, ringing through the middle of Peking, beneath the walls of the Forbidden City, seemed less ugly than usual, as if their filth, nastiness and mediocrity had evaporated. I’d never heard the language of the capital (which, according to some historians, is simply the product of politics) expressed with such vivacity and charm.

“I also remember a Children’s Day celebration organised by our local academy where the little Westerners performed a piece called
The Just War:
dressed as Chinese soldiers, with clothes and caps which mimicked military uniforms, they each had a long stick representing a bayonet. One of them (the leader) shouted ‘One, two, three, four!’ and they all marched forward, leaping in unison. They jumped right up and, while they were suspended in the air, drove their bayonets into an imaginary enemy’s throat, chorusing ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ Their shouting and the sound of their feet thudding back down on the stage were so powerful that the spotlights hanging from beams overhead swung, making the lights flicker and sending a shiver down our spines. Then they trampled on their first victims’ invisible bodies in a simple but powerfully aggressive choreography before leaping again on their leaders orders, shouting out and killing more enemies … They were unquestionably victorious. The performance was a triumph. After a standing ovation and thunderous applause, they each introduced themselves to the audience, announcing their nationality and pointing into the audience at their parents, who stood up. They were diplomats’ children from Russia, Romania, Poland, Albania—all Eastern European countries.

“As well as my red hair, Ma, son of exiled provincial doctors that he was, found another important thing about me, one that corresponded to Western physiognomy: the depth of my skull. At that celebration of Children’s Day, seeing those little Chinese soldiers played by Westerners, he had a feeling something wasn’t quite right, although he couldn’t say what. Then he got it: the caps! The child-size Chinese military caps, which were very much the fashion at the time, didn’t sit properly on the Western children’s heads, threatening to fly off and ruin the party at any moment and with every leap. He then grasped that their skulls were differently proportioned to ours. When a Chinese cap was wide enough for a Western head it was bound to be too shallow. And if they chose a cap that was deep enough, it was inevitably too wide. He let me in on this discovery, which, although modest, earned my admiration. I remembered the trouble my mother had endured, trailing me round every shop in Peking, large and small, to find a hat or cap to fit me. With earnest scientific precision we measured the length, breadth and depth of our respective skulls and then, after a series of meticulous calculations, he put his hand on my head like a great patriarch laying his hand on the forehead of an innocent baby, and announced: ‘Clearly a product of interbreeding.’ But that was all he said; perhaps, I felt, so as not to betray his old communist uncle, who could have driven him out of his house.

“That evening my mother was doing the washing in the courtyard surrounded by single-storey houses, where a tap served a dozen or so families, none of whom had running water at home. Lit by a bare bulb hanging from a gutter, she did battle with a pile of clothes, sheets and blankets soaking in a big tub; sleeves rolled up, she washed each item on a wooden board with a piece of soap, which kept slipping into the water. I had my sentence ready to attack her, I had prepared it, recited it, gone over it again and again. I said, ‘Mum,’ and she looked up, but I was so gripped by nerves that I stuttered: ‘Mum, tell-tell-tell-tell-me, I know-know-who-who-he—’ She interrupted me: ‘Who?’ But my tongue betrayed me: the word ‘Dad’ stayed stuck in my throat. She asked me again who I meant and I could feel my tears welling up, I tried to stammer but it was no good, impossible to come up with even incoherent babbling like a newborn baby. I laughed stupidly, not sure why, and she said she didn’t find my stuttering amusing and went back to her washing.

“Noticing her shoes were wet, I ran to the house and took her green rubber boots from under her bed and, as I carried them out to her, I decided to get round the problem of pronouncing the word ‘Dad’ by simply asking: ‘Am I the son of a red-headed foreigner?’ But when I reached her, my tongue, mouth and lips clammed up all over again and I stood there like an idiot, gazing at the long black shadow I cast on the ground. A door or a window was banging in a draught. She suddenly noticed me there, holding her boots, and was surprised, touched even. She finished rinsing a sheet in the tub and asked me to help her wring it out. We twisted that poor sheet like in a tug-of-war; the ground around the tap was slippery with foam and I almost fell, which made her laugh, so I ran to my room and lay on my bed in the dark, furiously angry with myself, crying to think I would never manage to say the word ‘Dad,’ or learn his identity from E. For the first time in my life I committed the blasphemy of referring to my mother by her first name.

“At the beginning of spring, as the moat of the Forbidden City thawed and swallows came back to sit on telegraph wires, I was offered a distraction: looking through the attic for swifts’ nests, a magic remedy for pneumonia, which Ma’s uncle suffered from. The dark corner I’m referring to isn’t a real attic like in films where resistance fighters, fugitives in danger or illegal immigrants hide, but just a space under the roof trusses, between the sloping tiles and the ceiling of the top floor (in my case, there was only a ground floor), a space that couldn’t be used in any way, because it was so low that the two skinny lads we were at the time could barely crawl in on all fours, guided by the beam of a pocket torch, and even in the middle, under the rooftop, a boy of ten wouldn’t have been able to stand up. There was a suffocating smell in there: a smell of mouldering wood, damp and bat droppings, peculiarly reminiscent of an old cellar. Even without moving, I could feel the plywood ceiling—barely thicker than the layer of droppings covering it—shifting and creaking beneath our weight. Here and there a bright ray of light filtered between the sheets of plywood, warning us of possible collapse.

“The only route we could crawl along was a wooden beam five centimetres wide, rotting in places and eaten away by termites. We couldn’t see the bats, but could hear their squeaks and their wings flapping as they launched into the air like projectiles in response to our intrusion; the tips of their furless wings skimmed past our ears and noses, sending shivers down our spines.

“A few metres further on, like something looming out of the depths of Hell, the torch picked out a nest built in a corner between the tiles and the ceiling: a small pile of straw and twigs which looked like back-combed hair. Ma took out two eggs and handed them to me. They were almost spherical, slippery and dotted with wet clay. Were they swift’s eggs, or another bird’s? While we discussed it, I made an arc of light through the dark with my torch, only to reveal a shapeless heap about ten metres further on. I was holding the eggs, so Ma summoned his courage and crawled softly over to it with the torch clamped between his teeth; the beam of light zig-zagged through the darkness, wandering haphazardly over panicking bats and crazed insects.

“Eventually he was close enough to touch the lump; he lifted a cover and was instantly surrounded by a cloud of dust, which seemed to hang in the air around him. He picked something up and its shadow was projected onto the sloping roof, something curved, like an upside-down tortoiseshell with two dragons’ heads: a musical instrument with a resonance chamber and pegs for strings. My friend plucked one of the strings and it gave a long, melodious note, a strange, deep sound like the moan of an injured crane. Then he strummed the strings and the crane took flight in the half-light of that attic, its wings beating against the tiles. The sound was so opaque, its echo filling the roof space, that it made me shudder. It vibrated for several seconds. My friend announced that it was a
pipa
, and I said my mother had never known how to play one.

“With hardly any light to go by, I wriggled over to him. With the eggs in my hand, my progress was more difficult. I could hear the old wooden beam and the whole roof structure creaking. When I still had about three metres to go to reach him, the torch flickered several times, then its intermittent beam shrank, before going out altogether. The only reaction I could hear from my friend was lengthy muttering, a sort of monologue, during which he mentioned my father, a French scholar (according to his uncle) who, while crossing Manchuria on foot, passed a camp for former political exiles where my mother, E, the granddaughter of a deposed prince nicknamed Seventy-one, excelled in the art of
pipa
-playing. At the camp there was an annual festival for
pipa
players which drew thousands of young girls, and my mother was usually the winner, but that year she was knocked off her throne by the Frenchman dressed as a girl, a man who played the instrument even more beautifully than she did. That was the beginning of a devastating passion (to use the words of my friends uncle) which led to my mothers marriage …

“All of a sudden part of the plywood ceiling gave way beneath my weight and there was an avalanche. A deafening collapse. A searing pain shot through my groin, making me scream. It felt as if my testicles had exploded. A light sprang up at my feet, white, harsh, blinding, like a powerful spotlight theatrically picking out the scene revealed by the gaping hole in the plywood: an aerial view of my kitchen. I was about to fall straight into the cooking pot (which had already swallowed up several chunks of plywood and where our evening rice soup bubbled and steamed, having simmered quietly since lunchtime—one of my mothers special recipes) when, luckily for me, the fatally pointed end of the broken beam which had cut through my trousers and injured my sexual organs succeeded in burying itself in my left thigh, holding me suspended in the air, like a miraculous exhibit in the middle of the hole. Startled and terrified, my friend stopped what he was saying and never wanted to go back to the subject, however much I begged and whatever pressure I put on him.

“I haven’t thought about that incident for a long time and it’s reminded me of something else buried deep in my memory, an escapade which radically altered my adolescence and cost me dearly: three years of reform school.

“One evening a few weeks after my aerial castration (as I called the incident in the attic), Ma and I went into the Forbidden City by the Noon Gate, which is the main entrance. Along with a few museum employees and the emperors themselves (who were once the only representatives of the male sex in a place peopled by thousands of women and eunuchs), Ma and I became members of the elite club of nocturnal visitors, setting foot beyond the city’s wall after sundown.

“I’ve mentioned Ma’s uncle, the Assistant Security Manager. He was nicknamed Old Deng and was just as small as the other Deng who became the Chinese leader twenty years later, and he, too, was from Sichuan, spoke with the same Sichuan accent and professed the same passion for chillies, cigarettes, opera and bridge. One evening as he came out of the palace, he spotted us playing ball on a poorly lit square outside the main entrance. He came over to us and I told him we were waiting for my mother, who was late coming out, probably kept in by her work. I had forgotten my key, so couldn’t go home. Old Deng kindly took us to the gate house and asked the night watchman to let us in.

“Even if we’d been good, timid little boys it would have been impossible to go straight to the building where my mother worked and not take advantage of that heaven-sent opportunity for a detour … How many children over the centuries had savoured the pleasure of an evening walk in that place, crossing the vast square paved with age-old stones, hearing the hollow ring of their footsteps on the uneven paving, climbing onto the white marble dais in all its crushing, funereal beauty, where a row of crows on the rail greeted us with their cawing? All at once the biggest building in the palace—if not in all of ancient China—loomed before us: the Hall of Supreme Harmony, which housed the imperial throne and where a few carpenters were still working, perched on stepladders repairing something or other by the feeble glimmer of a few temporary light bulbs. They knew the Assistant Security Managers nephew and let him sit on the emperors throne, which made my friend so happy he started spouting nonsense, as if presiding over an important meeting. Meanwhile, I took a couple of sticks and beat out a rhythm on ritualistic musical instruments, punctuating every pronouncement made by the little usurper and accompanying his speeches. It was a set of sixteen gleaming metal bells by the entrance to the hall, under awnings hanging from a portico which had the head of a
Milu
—a sort of mythical stag which was once the imperial emblem—carved on every side with ropes in five different colours between their teeth. Some of the bells had a mysterious muted ring, others a pure, crystalline, more musical vibration, a light, luminous sound like silvery gauze. As I struck them with my sticks, those bronze bells slowly but steadily, note by note, played the tune of a popular Chinese song. Under the spell of this music, the whole vast courtyard became an echo chamber for a melody I had heard my mother hum.