Once On A Moonless Night Part 3

Because of haemorrhaging, the gynaecologist kept me in hospital for a few days. I shared a room with seven Chinese women, all of whom had turbans tightly bound round their foreheads, and this, according to their customs, would protect them from the stealthy onset of evil postnatal energies, which could subject them to chronic incurable migraines for the rest of their lives. The door to the ward kept opening as the parents of newly delivered mothers came to visit; when they finally left, the door would swing open again, this time for the colleagues of another patient. I found these constant visits, punctuating our days until late in the evening, unbearably moving, not for the human warmth or family solidarity they demonstrated, but because I saw newborn babies being shown off, a scene endlessly repeated, as if on purpose, bringing tears to my eyes and making me shake with envy. Even if the baby wasn't particularly beautiful or contented, it only had to look randomly in my direction to unleash a surge of vicious jealousy in me, a jealousy that neither Tumchooq nor any other man before or after him had ever or would ever ignite in me. I would have suffered less in a prison cell than in that ward where a demographic sample of married women, all of them at least ordinary if not downright stupid, already had a foothold in Heaven. That ward was their paradise, but it was h.e.l.l for me.

I remember an anecdote my father told me: for a long time he was troubled by a tumour on his prostate and the whole time he was ill he didn't dream, but a week after his operation, which was more or less successful, he had a dream. I had the same beginnings of recovery on my third night in hospital when, for the first time since Tumchooq left, I had a dream. It was a dream I'd already had a few months earlier in the greengrocer's shop on Little India Street, but I didn't immediately recognise it. The mountain path was covered in thick fog through which I could barely make out a faltering glow of light, which grew gradually brighter as it drew closer, eventually turning out to be a torch made of bamboo canes, as in my previous dream. This time I was the one holding it. It was attracting a cloud of moths, invisible until they reached me, milling from all sides to dance about, captivated by that one splash of light in the mountains, describing thousands and thousands of trajectories around me. Some were enormous, the most extraordinary shapes, with stripes in such fantastic colours they blurred my sight, which was already struggling to make out the sides of the path through the mist. Even though I was edging forwards like a sleepwalker, I had a vague sense of deja vu, a sort of recollection, like when you sit at a piano and play a Beethoven sonata you've heard someone else play. It amplifies the emotion, each note has a different ring to it under your fingers, putting you in a sort of trance. With this dream I knew the script, I knew there was a fall lying in wait for me, but all my vigilance and precautions proved pointless, I couldn't avoid the inevitable: putting one foot wrong. I let go of the torch and clung to a tuft of wild gra.s.s by the side of the path to try to stop myself from cras.h.i.+ng to the base of the cliff. The moths were invisible again now, humming around my ears, their wings flitting over my nose and skimming past my lips, as if trying to get inside my mouth. I can remember when I woke up feeling a kind of euphoria, like when a close friend you've almost forgotten because they're so far away suddenly reappears. That torn roll of silk was the only thing Tumchooq had left me. At the time I felt an almost deeper affection for that fable, which had surrendered itself to me so entirely, than I did for Tumchooq, while the person who introduced me to its mystery had decided to distance himself and make it impossible for me to share in his suffering.

After that dream I walked out of the hospital ward and scuttled down the stairs like a fugitive. There was no one in the reception area for the gynaecology unit, but there was a cold smell of milk, an aggressive smell of nurseries, which made me reel in disgust.

I cut across the cycle park, then a huge deserted courtyard. The night watchman was asleep. I found myself out on a cold, dark, grey street. A road sweeper in blue uniform, armed with a long broom with a bamboo handle, was picking up rubbish and dead leaves. The icy wind made me s.h.i.+ver, and with every step I took I felt a slight pain deep inside, but I set off on a long solitary walk, driven partly by a tentative new energy, partly for other reasons I can't explain.

All at once I understood from the distinctive smell of the street I was walking along that I was in the middle of the Muslim quarter of Peking. The shops were closed, but the deserted street was permeated by a stale smell of mutton and beef. I walked past the mosque and along the perimeter wall of the Buddhist University which was once very famous-for instructing high-ranking monks-but had been closed since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and still was, even after Mao's death. Through gaps in the crumbling wall I caught glimpses of buildings under construction, bamboo scaffolding, twinkling with frost in the glare of spotlights.

After the university I went past the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist a.s.sociation, considered throughout the country as the supreme authority of this religion. It was still dark. There was something touching about that night-time walk, which plunged me into a state of melancholy: the cold of Peking, its gloomy half-light ... soon I would be leaving them for ever, I knew that, out of love for Tumchooq. "I'll do what he's done"-that was the determined decision I'd made during the abortion.

There was a fragrance hanging in the air, exquisite yet light and one I couldn't immediately identify, but eventually recognised: incense. Like a taste of what lay ahead, that delicate smell filling the streets steered me to the Temple of the "Source of Truth." I hesitated outside the doors, guarded by two stone lions, but had hardly touched them before they swung open silently before me and I was instantly bathed in so much heat, so much candlelight, the smell of chrysanthemums and of incense, that I stayed on the doorstep for a long time, feeling as if a gentle blessing had touched my forehead with that waft of warm air.

A group of monks-how many of them were there? thirty? fifty?-came into the main hall, knelt down and began intoning a prayer chant so beautiful I started praying with them and singing, not in Chinese like them, but in French; first for my aborted baby's soul or its ghost, then for its grandfather's, Paul d'Ampere, for its father, Tumchooq, and also for myself.

To this day I don't know whether at the time (things are so different and indefinable when you're young), given the barbarous gang murder of Paul d'Ampere and Tumchooq's irrevocable departure, whether there were any options other than the hasty decisions I made, which, like Tumchooq's, were more a protest, a cry from the heart, than an actual choice: leaving the country and never speaking its language again. Did I consider for a moment that such a decisive act was a waste of long years of study and work intended to achieve a doctorate, and would arouse anger and disappointment in my family who financed my studies? I don't remember. The only elements engraved on my memory were packing my bags and the terrible wrench of having to leave behind my books in Chinese, a condition of my commitment. I took a long time deciding what to do with them, stood gazing at them for hours, particularly the ones that Tumchooq and I had unearthed at the flea market in the "Pan Family Gardens" (a market only open at dawn, where treasure hunters rummaged through mountains of paper under the feeble halo of street lamps, a hazy, dreamy light filled with dancing motes of dust).

The courtyard outside my dormitory was silent and deserted. Like a thief, using just the tips of my fingers, I opened a book with a st.i.tched cover, the once white thread now blackened with age, and leafed through it for the last time; it was a book of notes made by an erudite member of the Qing dynasty on ancient books he had read. The paper was thin, made of hemp, and the ideograms-printed in vertical lines not using lead characters as they are now, but from engraved wooden boards steeped in black ink-seemed to me to have a life of their own. Each page quivered in my fingers, as if the scholar had transmitted his very soul into the book. His words, I could tell, had jealously harboured this soul until that very moment and were now distilling it in me. On the brink of abandoning my radical decision to sever all links with Chinese, I bent closer to read what he had written, but, unbelievably, even though I perfectly understood the structure, punctuation, hidden meanings, syntactical subtleties, etc., I couldn't p.r.o.nounce a word out loud. My tongue froze, my lips refused to move, not a single sound came from my mouth. Disturbed by this perilous, almost nightmarish experience, I watched as the sentences dissolved before my eyes into isolated ideograms, unconnected signs in which all I could read were the insults and whoops of joy bellowed by the prisoners who had lynched Paul d'Ampere. Murderous words. Once again, imaginary or not, I heard the m.u.f.fled cry of the foetus, filling me with shame and terror, which drove me on. In a hysterical outburst, shedding tears that were as uncontrollable as they were liberating, with brash, almost masculine movements amplified by the cold, I lit a fire in the deserted courtyard and threw all my books onto it. Licked by the flames, those precious works began to turn red, yellow, black, eventually reduced to cinders. Watching the flakes of black ash, light as goosedown, wafting up, hanging in the air, drifting off in the darkness and falling back down on my head, I realised just how much I loved and how closely I identified with Tumchooq. "I am Tumchooq," I told myself.

PART TWO.

WANDERINGS.

1979 1990

1.

IN APRIL 1373, ONE YEAR AND FOUR months after arriving in Peking-where I had acquired not only a perfect Chinese accent but also a rich vocabulary, including the city's own vernacular with its distinct, palatalised sounds-I broke off with China (no, you can't ever break off with China, only run away from it) and went back to Paris, to the Latin Quarter. I moved into Concordia, a student hall of residence close to the Rue Mouffetard. months after arriving in Peking-where I had acquired not only a perfect Chinese accent but also a rich vocabulary, including the city's own vernacular with its distinct, palatalised sounds-I broke off with China (no, you can't ever break off with China, only run away from it) and went back to Paris, to the Latin Quarter. I moved into Concordia, a student hall of residence close to the Rue Mouffetard.

Though typically French, this pedestrian street with medieval paving stones is not without similarities to Little India Street. It is just as narrow and slightly winding with a long, gentle slope edged with souvenir shops, perfumeries, chemists, a post office, Greek restaurants, bookshops, newspaper kiosks, butchers, cheesemongers, shops selling orthopaedic shoes, children's clothes, leather bags and, where it crosses the Rue de l'Arbalete, a street market for fruit and vegetables which exhales the same odoriferous (a word Proust often used) smells as Tumchooq's shop. Apart from two or three items from Africa, it sells more or less the same things, perhaps in better condition, in brighter, more commercial colours. The salesmen are mostly of Arab origin and as they holler the names of the vegetables and their prices they remind me of Tumchooq's colleagues, lame and in poor health, shouting with little real energy, but who adopted me without any political prejudice, thinking of me as part of the shop's family What I should have done, and I regret not doing, was to go and say goodbye to them or at least witness one last time the collective theft from the State's tills in those few seconds of deliberate darkness.

In my frequent bouts of nostalgia I spent a lot of time in that market on the Rue Mouffetard, not buying anything, happy just to gaze at the vegetables, touch them, smell them. Sometimes my old friend White-Tuft-my Peking rabbit, another victim of a.s.sa.s.sination-popped into my mind and I remembered him nibbling my hand when I offered him the vegetables Tumchooq had given me. A few years later, when I moved to the Rue Daguerre, I found an almost identical market. Little India Street was definitely following me around.

Returning to Paris was a pleasure and I got back into the rhythm of more harmonious times. I was lucky to get a room at Concordia, once a delightful private home, now converted into a students' hall of residence, with a huge reception room on the ground floor complete with domed ceiling, immaculately waxed parquet floor, an untuned grand piano and a pair of double doors opening onto the garden. To the right of the reception room was a cheap canteen, perfectly suited to my limited means-a loan from the Banque National de Paris, which I eventually finished paying off many years later. To the left was the television room, where we had a democratic vote every evening to decide which channel to watch, and the reading room, where every inch of wall s.p.a.ce was covered in bookshelves laden with general encyclopaedias, Larousse dictionaries, every sort of language dictionary, etc. On the imposing marble-topped reading tables were porcelain lamps with green shades, giving a soft, pleasant light, which soothed my painful memories of China. I discovered almost the exact same lights in the library at my college (where we sat between the bookshelves), the National Inst.i.tute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, where I enrolled in the first year to study Tibetan.

I decided to take this new tack in my university education with Tumchooq's tacit agreement, at least that was what I imagined, hoping he hadn't forgotten our past discussions about Tibet. In intellectual terms, Tumchooq was one of those Chinese (was he really and is he still?) who lived in a state of disillusion with his own culture for a long time and then, in the 1980s, hoped to find new inspiration from the Tibetans. In personal terms, in his search for the missing part of the sutra, Tibet fired his imagination, because its culture was so imbued with Buddhism he a.s.sumed that the integral text from the torn scroll should logically be somewhere among all the sacred works acc.u.mulated over the centuries by the Tibetans-at least a Tibetan version if not actually a Tumchooq one. Who knows? I once read a book by a German author that told the story of a scholar looking for the oldest map of Tibet: in a nomads tent in the middle of the Mongolian steppe he came across a hundred or so pages of text written in an unknown language, which the owner considered to be a "relic from Buddha," refusing to let him have it whatever price and whatever terms he suggested. The German scholar only secured the right to photograph them. As the inside of the tent was too dark, the shots were taken outside in windy conditions and, despite their precautions and best efforts to keep the pages relatively if precariously still, when the photographs were developed on his return to Europe they all proved to be failures, out of focus, condemned without question to the dustbin. Learning Tibetan had been our common aim, for Tumchooq and me, and by doing this I felt I was involving myself in his late fathers unfinished undertaking.

When I made this resolution a suspicion I had harboured for some time floated to the forefront of my mind: Was I deluding myself that this was love? I was trying to give so much to Tumchooq, unbeknown to him, but would he give me any sign of grat.i.tude or affection in return? The fact that he had excluded me from his suffering was a bitter pill I swallowed out of solidarity and unconditional love. But it still tormented me so much I felt I was swallowing it all over again each time I woke alone in bed with sheets drenched with sweat. I swore that if life helped me find him again I would allow myself the satisfaction of establis.h.i.+ng-out of a simple desire to know the truth-whether or not he thought of me on the day that he decided never to speak Chinese again and to leave his country.

What is left now of those three years of arduous study and constant enthusiasm? Tibetan words often crop up in my mind without warning, and from time to time I find myself coming out with unexpectedly beautiful sentences, and they have a ring to them which reminds me of the Tumchooq language. Sentences like that, sometimes even single words with no more significance than any other, delighted me back in the days when I was learning them. Sitting in the cla.s.sroom, I thought for a few seconds I could see them glittering like a cloud of pollen, grains of fine sand, equipped with special Tumchooqian powers, borne on the breeze to my tutorial group, where they fell on me like gentle rain, especially when they were spoken by Mr. Tarakesa, who taught us Buddhism. He was a blind Tibetan monk, tall, thin and in his sixties, with a face like a medieval ascetic and an ability to recite sutras from memory, which gave him near legendary status among the students (by an ironic twist of fate, the first four letters of his name, tara tara, meant eye eye in Sanskrit and Tumchooq). He started his course with this sentence, which I like to think is still engraved on all his students' memories: "The scope of sacred Buddhist books, called sutras, is as vast as an ocean on which each of us is a small boat edging forwards, losing its way, then edging forwards again." in Sanskrit and Tumchooq). He started his course with this sentence, which I like to think is still engraved on all his students' memories: "The scope of sacred Buddhist books, called sutras, is as vast as an ocean on which each of us is a small boat edging forwards, losing its way, then edging forwards again."

One day in mid-October, after asking us to read extracts from Tantric texts, he handed out photocopies of the last chapter of the Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra in both Tibetan and French. I started to read the Tibetan version but, struggling with a word, glanced at the French. My eyes then fell on a text with such distinctive syntax that I immediately felt only one person could have written it-because no one else wrote like that. I had read all his books and his articles published in scholarly reviews and I recognised his inflexions, his very individual tone, his style, the unique way he constructed a sentence like a silkworm drawing a longer and longer thread produced from its own juices, weaving that thread, forming a structure and eventually a coc.o.o.n in which to take refuge, protected from the outside world, his long sentences characterised by terse, unexpectedly enlightening conclusions, which alter the meaning of the words that have gone before. (The only work of his to escape this rule is his in both Tibetan and French. I started to read the Tibetan version but, struggling with a word, glanced at the French. My eyes then fell on a text with such distinctive syntax that I immediately felt only one person could have written it-because no one else wrote like that. I had read all his books and his articles published in scholarly reviews and I recognised his inflexions, his very individual tone, his style, the unique way he constructed a sentence like a silkworm drawing a longer and longer thread produced from its own juices, weaving that thread, forming a structure and eventually a coc.o.o.n in which to take refuge, protected from the outside world, his long sentences characterised by terse, unexpectedly enlightening conclusions, which alter the meaning of the words that have gone before. (The only work of his to escape this rule is his Notes on Marco Notes on Marco Polo's Book of the Wonders of the World Polo's Book of the Wonders of the World, in which his style is more neutral, less individual.) I asked the professor whether Paul d'Ampere was the translator of the text. Mr. Tarakesa confirmed that he was and showed me the book: Teachings of the Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra Teachings of the Gtandavyuhasi-Sutra, translated and annotated by Paul d'Ampere, University of Louvain, Inst.i.tute of Oriental Studies, 1962.

The last chapter of this sutra relates the eventful travels of an intelligent and modest novice monk who roamed the world in search of fifty-eight "bodhisattva"-his fifty-eight instructors who each adopted a deceptive appearance as a monk, a nun, a tribal patriarch, a doctor, a monarch, a sailor, an immortal, a heretic, a beggar, a thief, a prost.i.tute, etc. Drawing on their experience of all human pa.s.sions, they reinforced their own sanct.i.ty; those whose lives were full of sin relied on their vices to uncover the profound inanity of existence, thereby establis.h.i.+ng a universal moral rule. It was Mr. Tarakesa's favourite sutra and his lesson would turn into a theatrical performance where, by altering his voice, he acted out the discussions between the novice and his good teachers disguised behind their different masks, sketching in the setting, adding descriptions of their social background, their clothes (probably only from his own imagination), offering philological a.n.a.lyses worthy of a linguist, making comparisons between the Tibetan and French versions, and emphasising the subtlety of their choice of words.

If only Paul d'Ampere could hear this from beyond the grave, I thought, could hear his translation recited from memory by this erudite, blind scholar whose eyes, covered with a translucent white film, s.h.i.+mmered on the days the sun appeared through the window, but turned a hazy, pearly grey and closed altogether when he lost himself in one of his recitations, chanting the text non-stop and giving a running commentary, as if in a dream. The more I heard Mr. Tarakesa delivering Paul d'Amperes French text-he spent two months teaching us that sutra-the more I felt his words were secretly linking me to d'Ampere's son. The French translation cast a spell like an enchanted island; it was a steamboat stripped of all its weight, gliding silently round the room, so that none of my fellow students suspected it was there, looming out of nowhere, tall, majestic, with me as its only pa.s.senger, the happy, chosen stowaway whose privileged status no one else could guess. In those few moments how much I regretted having that abortion, not being able to keep our child and bring it up on my own to perpetuate the ancestral genius of the d'Amperes, or at least, as a grandmother might say, to carry on their name. When Tumchooq and I no longer exist, there would still have been a d'Ampere in the world to embody our affection for Paul, and to love him.

Mr. Tarakesa was quick to become an ally after I sent him a long letter in which I gave him a two-page resume of d'Amperes life and confessed I was searching for a sutra, half of which he had translated. He couldn't remember being aware of this sutra and spent sleepless nights pacing up and down his studio, gazing out of the window for hours, trying to prise from his memory-which was a living library-any recollection of a similar parable in an Indian sutra or an a.n.a.logous allegory that Buddha might have used in his frequent teachings, but in vain. He promised he would ask other Tibetan scholars, exiled-as he was-in various corners of the world, and specialists he knew in Cambridge, Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, Stanford, etc.

This investigation went on for almost all of my second year of Tibetan study. It was led, with great generosity, by Mr. Tarakesa, and from time to time it opened up leads which at first seemed interesting, but which proved on closer inspection to be false. None of his colleagues' suggestions escaped the law by which each new possibility eradicates its predecessor, and none of them unearthed anything definitive about the sutra itself. The doc.u.ments coming in from the four corners of the world, each more valuable than the last, were mostly about the Tumchooq kingdom, where recent archaeological finds had revealed its origins, its silk production and its totem-pole-based religion prior to its conversion to Buddhism.

To mark my grat.i.tude I offered to go to Mr. Tarakesa's house once a week and read to him, either in Tibetan or French. He accepted, to my considerable surprise.

"I would like to hear," he said, "the language which Paul d'Ampere was first to decipher and of which I don't understand a blessed word."

I couldn't refuse him this pleasure even though I was aware that my knowledge of Tumchooq, in which I had been initiated by a greengrocer, would not match his expectations. And so our weekly trips to the kingdom of Tumchooq began. On Sat.u.r.day mornings I would go to his studio in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, a place which in many ways was like a hermitage, perched on the seventh floor (the red stair carpet stopped at the sixth), a former maid's room under the eaves, transformed into a sort of sanctuary, with the tray and plastic curtain for an electric shower plonked crookedly across one corner. There was hardly any furniture, but a statue of Buddha had pride of place on a purely decorative mantelpiece and above it hung a large mirror in which, on each of my visits, I watched my reflection prostrate itself before the golden statue, while my prayers were accompanied by a rhythm beaten out on a ritual wooden instrument by Mr. Tarakesa, in ceremonial dress beside me. Then he took off his robes and, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, lit the gas stove to make Tibetan tea; the nozzles made a soft whistling sound, the bluish flames flickered over the Buddha's face ... and I started reading extracts of Tumchooq texts, most of them published in historical and archaeological reviews and orientalists' monographs, which I had read and reread over the course of the week, until I achieved a degree of fluency.

I still don't know what frame of mind he was in as he listened to me reading. Did he let those unfamiliar words carry him away on a sort of cloud, taking him on a journey back through time until he heard the voice of a loved one in that foreign language? Did he see it as a kind of meditation echoing a higher state, which allowed him to pray and bless all humanity, if not actually to save it, a meditation undermined by my poor p.r.o.nunciation and strong French accent? I kept wanting to ask him whether the world was as empty, as pointless and as incomprehensible as the words I spoke. I sometimes even suspected he was simply reliving Paul d'Ampere's life, one episode at a time; the oval of his cheek would stretch obliquely, filling out with the intensity of his emotions as he let slip a barely perceptible, knowing smile. Occasionally, without any apparent connection to what I was reading, his face would tense, his features harden, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g themselves up and then relaxing again, and no alteration to the rhythm or resonance of my voice could do anything to change what he was feeling. Who was inspiring these feelings in him? The French orientalist? It was as if he had known him, as if they had been the greatest friends in the world. Quite often, after a couple of hours' reading, we would go out to have some lunch, almost without exception in a Vietnamese restaurant on the corner of the Rue du Cherche-Midi and the Boulevard de Montparna.s.se, where he would sit in his usual place behind a huge aquarium of goldfish and always eat the same dish, a vegetarian noodle soup, even though the Tibetan school of Diamond Way Buddhism-which states that anyone can achieve enlightenment and become Buddha-allows its monks to consume meat in moderation, the Tibetan climate making it a necessity.

After our meal we went and had coffee in the little cafe opposite called Le Chien qui Fume, then he would go home and I would catch a metro from Duroc station to get back to the Latin Quarter. I never allowed myself to insist on seeing him back to his studio, for he loathed being an object of pity, except when he suggested I read to him in the afternoon. Those afternoons sometimes went right on until the light failed, both of us enjoying a sense of calm and delight as we bathed in the charm of the Tumchooq language. I felt at peace with myself at last, as if nothing could threaten my newfound equilibrium. Well, almost.

A curvaceous young woman, who lived in the building opposite in a studio also under the eaves on the seventh floor facing the one belonging to the Tibetan monk, appeared in the window at regular intervals and undertook a shameless seduction scene intended for my instructor's neighbour-a young Greek doctor doing time as a houseman in Paris-who was also at his window. Separated from each other by the street, they embarked on an aerial conversation, clearly discernible as it batted back and forth. Their exchanges, which became more provocative with every pa.s.sing minute and were delicious in their simplicity, grew increasingly audible as my weary reading voice feebly mumbling Tumchooq words eventually const.i.tuted nothing more than background noise to their vaudeville performance, and we were reduced to the status of privileged spectators in the front row of the stalls. At some point the question was settled, the young woman left her window and the action moved to the future Greek surgeons studio on the other side of a party wall thinner than a sheet of cardboard, plunging my tutor and me into a state of appalling embarra.s.sment, defenceless against an auditory onslaught of excited laughter, undressing noises, exclamations and female comments about the size of the h.e.l.lenic medical students member, encouragements, filthy words, creaking bedsprings, groans of ecstasy-my G.o.d, it went on, every second felt like an eternity! Their moans came through the wall without any loss of intensity, taking the statue of Buddha by storm, coagulating in the air between the Tibetan monk and me, smothering my voice so that, in spite of the heroic stoicism I displayed, my sentences in Tumchooq lost their resonance, their musicality their rhythm, becoming as bleak and monotonous as bare mountains, bare beaches, a bare horizon in that bare studio, ready to collapse when the two neighbours' cries accelerated faster and faster until they eventually exploded into Greek monosyllables that the Olympian hero hurled in our faces in all their enormity as his exploits reached their climax.

Of all the Tumchooq texts I had laid hands on, Mr. Tarakesa delighted most in the one from the mutilated scroll and would regularly begin a morning session by asking me to read and reread it; and, if he wanted me to carry on reading in the afternoon, it was always to devote the time to that text, either in the original language or in the French translation, or even in the Tibetan version that he himself had established and dictated to me. That portion of text was his chosen one, it seemed to be part of his furniture, on a par with his gas stove or his teapot. He acc.u.mulated different commentaries on it, frequently making comparisons with The Jatakas The Jatakas, accounts of Buddha's previous lives, which form an important part of the Buddhist canon in Pali and which he knew by heart. I sensed that he secretly hoped to bring his learning to bear on the unknown and, in his meditations, to find the end of the fable, even if its conclusion turned out to be just a single sentence.

Our weekly sessions carried on for nearly a year with a few interruptions during school holidays, then Mr. Tarakesa left for New York, where the Dalai Lama had entrusted him with an important responsibility. It was a Thursday when I learnt from another tutor that he had resigned from the Inst.i.tute of Oriental Languages. I couldn't wait until that Sat.u.r.day morning's session, our last, and went to see him the same evening. He welcomed me in, surprised to see me. I had barely sat down, while he-as usual-prepared the tea, before I burst into tears. I knew he was embarra.s.sed by my outburst, but I found it impossible to contain, overwhelmed by the sorrow of separation from the last person who connected me to everything I loved, to the Tumchooq language and, therefore, to Tumchooq himself. I was filled with fierce depression and a feeling of loneliness; until then I had been bolstered, sustained and brightened by the hope that I would one day see the mutilated scroll completed by Mr. Tarakesa, a hope he was now burying for ever. I recovered my composure as best I could, and when he started talking it was to ask me, as if he, too, were obsessed by the missing part of the ma.n.u.script, to let him know if the other fragment of the scroll or the integral text of the sutra were ever found. He himself, he admitted as much, had tried to imagine the ending, but in vain, even though the character in the fable-the man hanging on the edge of the cliff-had often appeared to him in his little studio, suspended in mid-air, a few inches above the floorboards, for longer than the laws of gravity allowed, but each time the image had vanished almost the moment he saw it.

"What I need," he told me with a sigh, "is a pair of those golden wings like founders of religions, great philosophers, Buddha himself and some of his disciples, wings that allowed them to 'take off' and fly over the world. Without them, a mere mortal like you or me can never hope to be up to the task."

"Even Paul d'Ampere?" I asked him.

He looked embarra.s.sed by the question, repeated Paul d'Ampere's name several times, then, after a long silence, said: "I know him only from his work and from what you've told me about him. An individual as exceptional as him-erudite, sensitive and with his experience of suffering-would probably have acquired those wings and been able to fly. And I wouldn't have been surprised if he had found the end of the parable, except that he was a Westerner."

"I don't see the connection." My voice had a slightly shaky quality.

"Our imagination is dictated by who we are. It seems to me that finding the end of a teaching like that requires an entirely oriental mind, far beyond dissertations on the outside world, explorations of human conscience and earthly pa.s.sions, beyond the unpredictable beauty of an isolated sentence or image ..."

I brought an abrupt end to the visit, not even letting him finish what he was saying. I even ran to get away, because I was so exasperated by the way he talked about Paul d'Ampere. Whatever we do, we're still just "Westerners" to them! Among themselves they can have hatred, wars and ma.s.sacres, but they know each other, understand each other and never think of each other as foreigners.

I can't remember whether I slammed the door or how I got out onto the street, but I do know my whole body was shaking, on the brink of hysteria, and I had to sit down at the bottom of the steps for G.o.d knows how long. Then I went home on foot, dragging my feet beneath icy rain, which reminded me of that sad night coming out of hospital in Peking when I wandered like a sleepwalker in a state of immense loneliness. When I reached Concordia, tortured by an appalling migraine, I locked myself in my room and stayed in bed for three days, more dead than alive. Since that day I've never set foot in the Tibetan department again. At a stroke, I sloughed off the three languages (Chinese, Tumchooq and Tibetan) that I had learnt for the sake of someone I loved, someone who had disappeared in the meantime; languages which had come to be-and would remain-prisons in which I shut myself away.

My renunciation of three Asian languages began a slow eradication of my memories of Tumchooq, perhaps even a decline in my love for him. The fact that he was not with me hurt less: my heartache was abating. The only thing that survived was my pleasure in learning languages. That is why, in late September 1983, with what was left of my bank loan, I went back to the Inst.i.tute of Oriental Languages, this time to enrol in the African Studies department, where I started learning Bambara, a perfect contradiction not only of my parents' expectations for my future life but also of my own.

2.

TO BE HONEST, AT THE TIME I HAD NO concept of what an African language might be, even less of the workings of humanitarian organisations, but I signed up as a volunteer to one barely a year after I began studying Bambara. Out in the field I threw myself wholeheartedly into a project to build a school in northern Mali, three hundred kilometres from Bamako, near the former capital of the Songhai Empire. concept of what an African language might be, even less of the workings of humanitarian organisations, but I signed up as a volunteer to one barely a year after I began studying Bambara. Out in the field I threw myself wholeheartedly into a project to build a school in northern Mali, three hundred kilometres from Bamako, near the former capital of the Songhai Empire.

With a naivety which now brings a smile to my lips, I could already see myself as a schoolteacher surrounded by dozens of orphans of all ages, staying on after lessons to take them down to the Niger and watch them have fun, jump, swim and play hide-and-seek while the great red disc of the sun dropped slowly into the river, where bare-breasted washerwomen stood waist-deep in the water, singing and laughing as they beat wet clothes over stones with wooden sticks that made a dull, slightly m.u.f.fled thud. I myself would bathe the youngest children (Would I have known how to? Is being born a woman enough for that skill?), supporting the toddlers streaming back with one hand and soaping him with the other. Then I would tell him to wriggle his arms and legs in every direction in time to the washerwomen's jubilant song, or do a slight variation on this the way African mothers do: bunching the child's arms and legs over his tummy, then suddenly letting them go and smothering his silky soft naked body with kisses, as if he were my own baby, my child from Peking who, as he grew up, had changed skin colour-a frequent phenomenon in dreams, where physical appearances go unnoticed, can be modified and are often interchangeable. As I cared for my little orphans I would wash myself of the last stains I felt still deep inside me and which still hurt. I imagined they would dissolve like refracted prisms in the Niger.

Because most people live with constant anxiety about finding their place in society, few can afford the luxury of healing a broken heart in Africa. I was exceptionally lucky, I realised that. I was a chosen one, greeted each new day by this preferential treatment, which smiled down on me like the sun above the mists of the African bush. By coming in contact with life in its raw state (absent in Western societies so well organised they have frozen rigid), the hitherto inconceivable idea that love isn't eternal and can die no longer frightened me. On the contrary, I discovered to my stupefaction all the beauty of a lost love, a melancholy liberating beauty, a sort of macabre dance in which I twirled and spun like a madwoman. I threw myself at strangers, meeting my one-night stands in the bush and Bamako's kitsch restaurants, and eventually they all looked like a familiar ghost, Tumchooq.

The experiences I had then were salutary. Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers-from the first to the last, including the most fleeting-part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character's head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc.). I imagine that if they met they would each apologise for stepping onto the shared stage too soon.

Perhaps it's in my nature, but in Mali I had no more success than anywhere else in forging peaceable relations.h.i.+ps with my compatriots within the humanitarian family. It really was stronger than me, I couldn't help giving my opinion about everything going on around me, saying what I liked and what I found shocking: for example, the colossal amount our organisation spent on communication, which matched what was spent on work in the field; the difference in wages between white "managers" and black employees; the fierce compet.i.tion-worthy of privately owned companies-between different organisations, etc. I therefore had a feeling of relief, almost of deliverance, when I could finally spend my time in a dug-out canoe on the river Niger. This started in June 1985, when the first delivery of school equipment arrived after my long campaign to acquire it through repeated letters and endless intercontinental calls to French establishments. The equipment was intended for Ansongo in the Gao region, where I had been trying for several months to set up a school for the Songhais. The railway does not go beyond Bamako, so wood, animal fodder, cooking pots, dried fish and every imaginable sort of produce is transported along the Niger in large hand-built boats. I had mine constructed as follows: an impressively thick beam ten metres long and five wide was hoisted and fixed onto several canoes connected together to form a sort of platform, and equipped with an old engine, which could be heard banging and spluttering several kilometres away, worse than a pneumatic drill.

I recruited two crew members, a retired boatman and his wife, who would work as our cook, and I had the equipment, sent from goodness knows what prehistoric hangar, loaded on: desks and benches which looked pre-war if not from colonial days, two or three blackboards with flaking paint, and boxes of exercise books, chalk, pencils and pens. I called my vessel Tumchooq Tumchooq, and in black ink in the mysterious letters of that ancient language-despite the waning spell they had over my heart, I still thought them beautiful and irreplaceable-I wrote the name on a yellow flag, which I attached in the middle of a pile of desks to the bridge of my African craft. When anyone asked what my banner meant and I replied that it was the name of the greatest greengrocer in Peking, people eyed me suspiciously as if I'd gone quite mad.

Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness and like Conrad himself, both of whom travelled up the Congo on a small steamboat, I went down the smaller Niger on board the and like Conrad himself, both of whom travelled up the Congo on a small steamboat, I went down the smaller Niger on board the Tumchooq Tumchooq, from the clear waters at Bamako, through a series of rapids at Sa-tuba, across the Mandingo Plateaux, taking four days to cross the vast Macina plain with its network of tributaries, lakes and swamps. At times my boat, its engine screaming, toiled through putrefying weeds that undulated below the surface like hair. My boatman stood at the prow, prodding the riverbed with a pole, while I held the tiller, which left a wake through the mud and weeds, stirring up a swampy stench and prodigious quant.i.ties of mosquitoes. But none of this dampened my mood and, after that difficult stretch, we came back onto the winding but clearly defined main channel.

I turned off the engine and everything was quiet again; all we could hear was the sound of the water, as old as the world. The exhausted boatman drank some dolo and fell asleep, blind drunk, over the rudder, and Tumchooq Tumchooq drifted. It was such a pleasure seeing the boat abandon itself to the whims of the current that night, where, just like in the mutilated scroll deciphered by Paul d'Ampere, the moon, masked by dark, low clouds, did not appear. The boat was no longer navigating but gliding over that ebony surface, occasionally b.u.mping into the bank and setting off again in the right direction. drifted. It was such a pleasure seeing the boat abandon itself to the whims of the current that night, where, just like in the mutilated scroll deciphered by Paul d'Ampere, the moon, masked by dark, low clouds, did not appear. The boat was no longer navigating but gliding over that ebony surface, occasionally b.u.mping into the bank and setting off again in the right direction.

After midnight the moon appeared, illuminating a few meagre huts along the way, dark, silent family homes. In places there were nameless aquatic plants with purple flowers, their stalks and roots mixed in with wide flat leaves and slender reeds. Further on, small islands of flowers floated on the water, paler, more grainy and crumpled. Overwhelmed by sleep, I climbed up onto the cases of stationery, lay down on a desk, perhaps the very one my grandparents used, and fell asleep, just like that.

I was woken by a noise: swaying and lurching, the old boatman was making his way towards the back of our square vessel. Moving almost with the virtuosity of an acrobat and the slow stealth of a sleepwalker, he climbed down to the rudder, the upper blade of which was half submerged in the water. Once there, he paused, took down his trousers, squatted and stayed motionless in that position for as long as the procedure took. I couldn't help laughing out loud when he almost lost his precarious balance and fell into the river as he bent right down to water level to wash his b.u.t.tocks.

After Mopti, a major trading centre with a fis.h.i.+ng port where the Niger is joined by the Bani, one of its main tributaries, Tumchooq Tumchooq set off across the limestone and sandstone plateaux of the Bandiagara region in Dogon Country. Villages became increasingly scarce and we could travel for hours without glimpsing a human presence as far as the eye could see, apart from columns of smoke rising in the distance over the vast bush. Towards midday we suddenly heard the sound of an engine in the sky and, apparently swooping out of nowhere, a drumming helicopter appeared overhead, extraordinarily low and slow-moving, its powerful draft flattening the weeds along the banks and making our bodies vibrate so much they felt drained of all substance. Painted in yellow on the c.o.c.kpit door beneath the blades were the words: set off across the limestone and sandstone plateaux of the Bandiagara region in Dogon Country. Villages became increasingly scarce and we could travel for hours without glimpsing a human presence as far as the eye could see, apart from columns of smoke rising in the distance over the vast bush. Towards midday we suddenly heard the sound of an engine in the sky and, apparently swooping out of nowhere, a drumming helicopter appeared overhead, extraordinarily low and slow-moving, its powerful draft flattening the weeds along the banks and making our bodies vibrate so much they felt drained of all substance. Painted in yellow on the c.o.c.kpit door beneath the blades were the words: EMBa.s.sY OF USA EMBa.s.sY OF USA. Tumchooq Tumchooq was paralysed, quivering in every limb, and its flag flew off in the air when the mechanical monster whirred away, gleaming in the blinding sunlight. was paralysed, quivering in every limb, and its flag flew off in the air when the mechanical monster whirred away, gleaming in the blinding sunlight.

Three hours later we came across it again in a Dogon village, with a team from the American emba.s.sy, Malian soldiers and local policemen who had come by jeep. They were outside tall, round straw huts with thatched roofs and were surrounded by naked children and the silent intensity of a crowd of locals in rags. The body of an American missionary, with hair so dusty it looked like an albinos, was carried to the helicopter on a handcart. The body had been found in the bush, about ten kilometres from the village. According to the Malian policeman I spoke to, it was going to be difficult to identify the perpetrator of this appalling crime, because the wounds and marks found on the missionary were unusual, and the body was in an advanced state of decay. The local Dogons claimed the culprit was a bull giraffe roaming the area, a solitary creature six metres tall (a whole metre above average) and known for his violence during the rutting season.

We continued on our way and, two days later, reached the Timbuktu region, the starting point for Saharan caravans where the river, which until then is angled from south-west to north-east, begins a long eastward curve, forming a pretty loop, narrowing through the gorge at Tosaye and curving out towards the south-east at Bourem. We finally arrived in Gao, the former capital of the Songhai empire, crossed the Tilemsi Valley and made our way down to the Ansongo Valley through a series of rapids.

Savouring a moment of relaxation, I looked at my surroundings with the eye of a schoolteacher who would spend the rest of her life there: a quiet valley where they grew rice, cotton, groundnuts, millet, sorghum, etc. Tumchooq Tumchooq was warmly welcomed by the Songhais; the school equipment was unloaded, admired and transported to one of the major villages, where it was put into attractive buildings with domed roofs. After resting for two days I set off again on my African boat, heading back upriver for a second delivery of equipment from France due to arrive in Bamako. was warmly welcomed by the Songhais; the school equipment was unloaded, admired and transported to one of the major villages, where it was put into attractive buildings with domed roofs. After resting for two days I set off again on my African boat, heading back upriver for a second delivery of equipment from France due to arrive in Bamako.

Although released from the weight of the equipment, Tumchooq Tumchooq suffered more on the return journey, finding it harder to resist the rivers a.s.saults: water seeped into the canoes supporting the platform of my unusual-shaped vessel; we had to bail constantly, with calabashes, only rarely exchanging the odd word. I decided to stop off in the Dogon village where we had seen the American emba.s.sy helicopter, because it started raining and the menacing black clouds indicated a violent downpour. As I ran through the rain I caught sight of a strange object attached to the top of a post at the entrance to the village. From a distance this thing, which appeared hazy through the raindrops, looked about the size of a small box of sweets dangling on the end of a rod; swaying beneath the box, fragile as a ribbon, was an endlessly long thin shape, which fell right to the ground. As I drew closer the box grew bigger until it overflowed my field of vision: it was a wooden cage with a head imprisoned behind its bars, not a man's head as in suffered more on the return journey, finding it harder to resist the rivers a.s.saults: water seeped into the canoes supporting the platform of my unusual-shaped vessel; we had to bail constantly, with calabashes, only rarely exchanging the odd word. I decided to stop off in the Dogon village where we had seen the American emba.s.sy helicopter, because it started raining and the menacing black clouds indicated a violent downpour. As I ran through the rain I caught sight of a strange object attached to the top of a post at the entrance to the village. From a distance this thing, which appeared hazy through the raindrops, looked about the size of a small box of sweets dangling on the end of a rod; swaying beneath the box, fragile as a ribbon, was an endlessly long thin shape, which fell right to the ground. As I drew closer the box grew bigger until it overflowed my field of vision: it was a wooden cage with a head imprisoned behind its bars, not a man's head as in Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness, but a giraffes. I had to touch the ribbon hanging beneath the cage with my own fingers to grasp that it was the gigantic animal's spine.

A villager who spoke Bambara told me that after the American helicopter left, Dogons from all over the region set out to hunt down the giraffe rightly or wrongly accused of the missionary's death.

"A white man's life is priceless," he told me. The hunt seemed vital to the villagers, who were afraid of the Americans-although the emba.s.sy had formulated no concrete demands on the subject-and whose regional governor had threatened to withhold all international aid if the culprit went unpunished. The hunt had mobilised about a hundred men and two police jeeps. The scapegoat, pursued across the bush for two whole days, took refuge in the mountains, but in the end, hounded on all sides by men shouting and firing shots as they drew ever closer, it was so exhausted a breath of wind would have mown it down. In the small hours of the morning it was found dying at the foot of a white limestone cliff. It was then transported to the village, where a witch doctor finished it off.

The region had seen no rainfall for two years and Dogon children stayed out in the rain, letting it whip their naked bodies as they expressed their happiness with whoops of joy. They paddled in the mud, jumped, played, laughed and danced. One of them ran towards the post bearing the cage, but he slipped and fell in a puddle halfway. He picked himself up and, I don't know what made him do this, threw a nasty look at the cage, picked up a handful of mud, shaped it into a huge ball, which he moulded with great care and then threw with all his strength, his muscles quivering with childish glee. The soft, heavy projectile rose up through the air straight towards the giraffe's head, but missed its target. Rain streamed over the pelt of the decapitated head with its distinctive markings, dripped from the animal's long ears, filled its pinnae, ran over its forehead where a perfect tuft of hair conferred grace and n.o.bility on its features, which looked as innocent as a newborn baby's.

Soaked from head to foot myself, I retraced my steps to Tumchooq Tumchooq and set off again. I regretted coming to that village. I regretted it bitterly, because a feeling of guilt, which had been lulled to sleep by my long stay in China, woke and descended on me with thunderous force. For the first time in my life I felt guilty for being white, or even guilty for being human, guilty for my presence in that village, or even on that continent. I now understood that I could go to impossible lengths, set up a hundred more schools for the Songhais, Dogons, Malinkes, Bambaras, Bozos, Sarkoles, Kha.s.sokes, Senoufos, Bobos, Fulanis, Tuaregs or the Maures, but I would never be free of that guilt. These thoughts churned round inside my head as and set off again. I regretted coming to that village. I regretted it bitterly, because a feeling of guilt, which had been lulled to sleep by my long stay in China, woke and descended on me with thunderous force. For the first time in my life I felt guilty for being white, or even guilty for being human, guilty for my presence in that village, or even on that continent. I now understood that I could go to impossible lengths, set up a hundred more schools for the Songhais, Dogons, Malinkes, Bambaras, Bozos, Sarkoles, Kha.s.sokes, Senoufos, Bobos, Fulanis, Tuaregs or the Maures, but I would never be free of that guilt. These thoughts churned round inside my head as Tumchooq Tumchooq toiled back up the Niger, its engine sound deadened by the rain. toiled back up the Niger, its engine sound deadened by the rain.

It was difficult to see much. The swampy, spa.r.s.ely populated plain stretching from Mopti to Segu seemed even emptier, even more desolate than on the way down. We could see nothing in the river waters (we were covering under three kilometres an hour) except, here and there, a circular eddy, a vortex, a gra.s.sy islet.

At nightfall the rain stopped at last and Tumchooq Tumchooq, struggling with the counter-current, cut through the banks of aquatic plants we came across on the way down, the ones that seemed so magnificent, but now felt hostile. They skidded swiftly towards us, cruelly barring the way to our vessel, and, in order to make any progress, we had to battle constantly, pus.h.i.+ng them aside with our long poles. I was at the end of my strength when a swarming black cloud of mosquitoes-they seemed to have multiplied now that the rain had stopped-surged out of the darkness, attacking me from every direction, surrounding me so that I almost couldn't breathe. Real kamikazes, greedy and mindless, homing in like arrows on the tiniest patch of exposed skin. I killed quite a lot of them, and for a moment the others would abandon my veins to suck the blood-filled corpses of their companions, stuck to my skin like one large viscous scab.

By the following morning I was suffering from a terrible fever, my body on fire, blazing. As my temperature soared, my eyelids grew heavier and heavier and my ears buzzed, even though the mosquitoes had disappeared at dawn. Confused ideas collided inside my head. Huddled in a corner and racked with icy s.h.i.+vering, I wondered whether I was going to die. The fever still burned me from the inside like poison and spread into the hollow of my left hand, where it formed a concentration of sharper, more intense pain, while my left leg stiffened, then the whole left side of my body, with a sort of cramp which I tried to release by changing position.

From one end of that plateau to the other I ambled like the giraffe I saw as a child under the big top of a circus; fired up by the music, it danced around the ring under a garland of coloured lights. In my feverish agitation, that distant memory marked the beginning of a transference which came to a head when the boatman brought me a bowl of a dark-coloured drink, probably a decoction of medicinal herbs, and I thought I heard an animal squeal coming from my own bitter mouth. It wasn't me crying out, but the giraffe dying at the foot of the cliff, sacrificed by the Dogons, who then put its head on a pillory; unless it was the cry of the man in the sutra who, once on a moonless night, fell from a cliff.

Niger, never-ending Niger! My African boat was deteriorating as pitifully as my own physical and moral state with every metre of the river it covered. I didn't get up for a whole week, staring at the sky and constantly reciting the text from the Tumchooq ma.n.u.script. Its simple words-strange, tender, often monosyllabic-resonated like a gentle incantation, giving me the illusion that I was flying up to the clouds, diving into the water, sliding between the aquatic plants, where my body dissolved and my flesh fell away. From time to time the old boatman intoned a Malian song, our voices overlapping, our two ancient languages in harmony. He tended me with his traditional infusions, with varying degrees of success, until we reached Segu, where he took me to a hospital, which immediately transferred me to Bamako, and from there I was repatriated to France, bringing an end to my short-lived humanitarian career. Perhaps that was written in my fate.

3.

I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF TROPI DIDN'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF TROPIcal disease I'd contracted and the doctors had no clearer idea. My recovery was as swift as it was mysterious, and its only after-effect was a long period of depression following my hospitalisation in Paris.

Still this phase was punctuated by various achievements and broken up by bouts of enthusiasm, but the depression was always latent and reared back up from time to time, as regular as the breathing of the unknown demon that inhabited me, paralysing me for days on end. I was pinned to my bed, shut away in my "gla.s.s menagerie," as I called my modest one-bedroom apartment, whose walls I had entirely covered with gilt-framed mirrors. (Buying a flat would have dispelled my constant anxiety about eventually dying on the street, but property owners.h.i.+p was far beyond my means and I had to make do with renting.) My own diagnosis was that my depressive state was due just as much to my unfortunate experiences, one in China and one in Mali, as to my obtaining the highly compet.i.tive agregation agregation teaching qualification and being given a job at a lycee in Nice, two events I felt, more or less consciously, were betrayals of Tumchooq. teaching qualification and being given a job at a lycee in Nice, two events I felt, more or less consciously, were betrayals of Tumchooq.

By now I was thirty-two and could already see what I would be like at sixty, or even on the eve of my death: shrivelled, fragile, toothless, almost bald, surrounded by shoe boxes full of payment slips from social security, tax invoices, pension statements, insurance certificates, bills for the phone, electricity, plumbers and travel agencies, rent receipts, bank statements, warranties and guarantees, all neatly sorted and filed in chronological order. My ossified life was set to the rhythm of weekly phone calls from my family, disastrous Christmases, unsuccessful presents, weekly shopping, constantly postponed pay rises, arguments with colleagues or neighbours, in a word all the complications of human relations.h.i.+ps. My gla.s.s menagerie was on the Rue des Terres au Cure (a bleak name evoking an impecunious curates measly plot of land), and I saw its apparently anodyne number, 77, as a premonition of the venerable age I would reach before breathing my last.

My windows overlooked a fish market and every morning the rumble of delivery lorries, the vendors' cries and above all the fetid stench of the sea infiltrated my bedroom, where the countless mirrors in their gold filigreed frames flashed and shone in silent compet.i.tion, bouncing back multiple images of me, huddled in my bed, small and inanimate as the puppets hanging on the walls: puppets on strings representing Chinese emperors and empresses, courtiers, scholars and concubines, their long sleeves wafting in the air, swaying slightly on the end of strings connecting their shoulders and hands to two crossed rods; two or three Indonesian glove puppets, their wooden heads attached to golden costumes with hands also made of wood at the ends of the sleeves; a few traditional French guignol guignol puppets, a policeman, a baker and the like. I felt like them, connected to the world by a few invisible threads, my morning cup of coffee, my work and most of all the two volumes of my Hebrew dictionary, which I had had specially bound: a silk cover lined with moire, decorated with a clasp and corners in gold. Ever since my return to France I experienced voluptuous pleasure in touching them, handling them, turning them over, opening them and closing them. Giving in to my natural tendencies, I had set my heart on these volumes which, for a couple of hours each day, helped me in my semi-autodidactic quest to conquer those unfamiliar words, to step over the sacred threshold into the temple, to embark on a new journey of indeterminate length and to an unknown destination. The peculiar need-that I experienced several times a day and sometimes even at night-to touch the dictionary, the need I had already felt several times in my life to cling to a foreign language, proved the most effective anti-depressant. I felt genuine love for the Hebrew language. Its right-to-left writing, its words written only in consonants, the vowels staying buried inside the readers head like a family secret ... it all inevitably reminded me of the ma.n.u.script on the Tumchooq sutra, whose opening sentence, "Once on a moonless night," still occasionally echoed around inside my head. puppets, a policeman, a baker and the like. I felt like them, connected to the world by a few invisible threads, my morning cup of coffee, my work and most of all the two volumes of my Hebrew dictionary, which I had had specially bound: a silk cover lined with moire, decorated with a clasp and corners in gold. Ever since my return to France I experienced voluptuous pleasure in touching them, handling them, turning them over, opening them and closing them. Giving in to my natural tendencies, I had set my heart on these volumes which, for a couple of hours each day, helped me in my semi-autodidactic quest to conquer those unfamiliar words, to step over the sacred threshold into the temple, to embark on a new journey of indeterminate length and to an unknown destination. The peculiar need-that I experienced several times a day and sometimes even at night-to touch the dictionary, the need I had already felt several times in my life to cling to a foreign language, proved the most effective anti-depressant. I felt genuine love for the Hebrew language. Its right-to-left writing, its words written only in consonants, the vowels staying buried inside the readers head like a family secret ... it all inevitably reminded me of the ma.n.u.script on the Tumchooq sutra, whose opening sentence, "Once on a moonless nig