Inspector Shung
Barbarians always go back over in the end. My deputy sighed as he spoke those words. I guess he was staring into the far distance, where their horses could just be seen.
For my part, I was reflecting on the fact that nowhere in the vast expanse of China – not in its small towns, not in its large cities, not in its capital either, although people there do know more than provincials – nowhere in China can you find a soul who fails to comment, when nomads come over the Wall (even nomads that come as part of an official delegation), that Barbarians always go back over in the end, while releasing a sigh of the sort usually sighed in response to events you imagine you’ll eventually look back on with fond sadness.
It’s been as quiet as the grave around here for decades. That fact does not stop our imperial subjects from imagining an unending brutal conflict, with the Wall on one side and the northern nomads on the other, both forever hurling spears and hot pitch at each other and tearing out eyes, masonry and hair.
But that no longer surprises me very much, when you think that people don’t just bedeck the Wall with false laurels of valour but envision the rest of it – its structure, even its height – quite differently from the way it really is. They can’t bring themselves to see that though there are places where the Wall is quite high – indeed, sometimes so high that if you look down from the top, as we could do right now from where we’re standing, you go quite dizzy – along most of its length, on the other hand, the Wall’s dismal state of repair is a pity to behold. Because it has been so long abandoned, because its stones have been taken away by local people, the Wall has shrunk: it barely tops a horse and rider now, and in one sector it’s a wall only in name, just lumps of masonry scattered round like the remains of a project that got dropped for God knows what reason. It’s in that kind of shape, like a snake you can hardly make out as it slithers through the mud, that the Wall reaches the edge of the Gobi desert – which promptly swallows it up.
My deputy’s eyes were blank, like the eyes of someone required to stare into the far distance.
‘We now stand in wait of an order,’ I said, before he could ask me what we ought to do next. It was obvious that the result of the negotiations with the official delegation of nomads would determine what that order would be – if any decision of the kind ever got taken at all.
We stood in wait of the order all summer long, then until the end of the summer-house season, when the Emperor and his ministers were supposed to be back in the capital. The autumn winds came, then the snow-flecked drizzle of winter, but still no decision reached us.
As always happens in cases of that kind, the order, or rather its reverberation, arrived just when everybody had stopped thinking about it. I call it a reverberation because long before the Imperial mail reached us we learned of the government’s decision from the people living in the villages and camps strung out along the line of fortifications. They deserted their homes and resettled themselves in the caves in the nearby hills, as they did every time news reached them, by means entirely mysterious, ahead of our being informed of impending repair work on the Great Wall.
It was probably a wise move on their part, since, by making off to the hills, they would spare themselves the officials’ whip, at the very least, not to mention many other punishments of every kind. I’ve never understood why they constantly take masonry from the Wall to build their hovels and yards, while knowing full well that they always have to bring it back to rebuild the Wall.
The process, so they tell me, has been going on for hundreds of years. Like the skein of wool used to make a scarf – which is then unpicked to knit a sweater, which is then undone to knit another scarf, and so on – the Wall’s great stones have made the return trip many times from peasant hovel to Wall and back again. In some places on them you can still see streaks of soot, which predictably fire the fantasies of tourists and foreign plenipotentiaries, who can’t imagine that the marks are not traces of some heroic clash, but only smoke-stains from hearths where for many a long year some nameless yokel cooked his thin and tasteless gruel.
So when we heard this afternoon that the peasants had abandoned their dwellings, we guessed that the whole of China had already heard news of the call to rebuild the Wall.
Although they were a symptom of heightened tension, the repair works did not yet add up to war. Unlike armed conflict, rebuilding was such a frequent occurrence that the Great Wall’s middle name could have easily been: Rebuilt. In truth, and in general, it was less a wall in any proper sense than an infinite succession of patches. People went so far as to say that it was in just such a manner that the Wall had come into being in the first place – as a repair job on an older wall, which was itself the remaking of another, even older wall, and so on. The suggestion was even made that at the very beginning the original wall stood at the centre of the state; but from one repair to another, it had gradually moved ever closer to the border, where, like a tree that’s finally been replanted in the right soil, it grew to such a monstrous size as to terrify the rest of the world. Even people who could not imagine the Wall without the nomads sometimes wondered whether it was their presence that had led to the building of the Wall, or whether it was the Wall rising up all along the border that had conjured up the nomads.
If we had not seen the coming of the barbarian delegation with our own eyes, and then seen it going again, we might have been among the few who attributed this rise in tension (like most previous events of this kind) to the disagreements which frequently flare up inside the country, even at the very centre of the state. Smugly content to know a truth lost in an ocean of lies, we would have spent long evenings constructing hypotheses about what would happen next and about the plots that could have been hatched in the Palace, plots with such secret and intricate workings that even their instigators would have had a hard time explaining them, or attached to jealousies so powerful that people said they could shatter ladies’ mirrors at dusk, and so on and so forth.
But it had all happened under our noses: the nomads had come and gone beneath our very feet. We could still remember the many-coloured borders of their tunics and the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves – not forgetting the expression Barbarians always go back over in the end uttered by my deputy along with his sighs, and his blank stare.
In any other circumstance we could have felt, or at least feigned, a degree of doubt, but this time we realized that there were no grounds at all for such an attitude. However tiresome winter evenings may be, we could find better ways of filling them than fabricating alternative reasons for the state’s anxiety apart from the coming of the Barbarians.
A vague apprehension is coming down to us from the Northlands. Right now the issue is not whether this state of heightened tension derives from the existence of a real external threat. From now on, and this is more than obvious, the only real question is whether there really will be war.
The first stonemasons have arrived, but most of them are still on the road. Some people claim that that there are 40,000 of them on their way, others give an even higher figure. This is definitely going to be the most important rebuilding effort of the last few centuries.
The call of the wild goose awakes the immensity of the void . . . Yesterday, as I was looking out over the wastes to the north, this line from a poet whose name I forget came back to me. For some time now, fear of the void has been by far the greatest form of apprehension that I feel . . . They say the nomads now have a single leader, a successor to Genghis Khan, and that amidst the swirling confusion and dust that is the Barbarians’ lot, he is trying to set up a state. For the time being we have no details about the leader except that he is lame. All that has reached us here, even before the man’s name, is his limp.
These last few days nomads have been emerging from the mist like flocks of jackdaws and then vanishing again. It’s clear that they’re keeping an eye on the repair work. I am convinced that the Wall, without which we could not imagine how to survive, is for them an impossible concept, and that it must disturb them as deeply as the northern emptiness troubles us.
Nomad Kutluk
I’ve been told to gallop and gallop and never stop watching over it, but it’s endless and always the same, stone on stone, stone under stone, stone to the left, stone to the right, all bound in mortar, however much I gallop, the stones never change, always the same, just like that damn snow that was always the same when we chased Toktamish across Siberia at the end of the Year of the Dog, when Timur, our Khan kuturdilar, told us: ‘Hold on in there, men, because it’s only snow, it’s only pretending to be cold like a conceited bitch, but just you wait, it’ll go soft and wet before long.’ But this army of stones is much more harmful, it won’t flake or melt, and it’s in my way, I don’t understand why the Khan doesn’t give us the order to attack that pile of rubble and take it down, like we did at Chubukabad when we laid our hands on the Sultan Bayazed Yaldrem and the Khan sent us this yarlik: ‘Honour to you who have captured Thunder, no matter that you have not yet handcuffed the heavens entire, but that’ll come’; and like at Akshehir during the Year of the Tiger, when we buried our prisoners alive, all bent double as in their mothers’ womb, and the Khan kuturdilar told us: ‘If they’re innocent, as Qatshi the Magician believes, then mother earth, whose womb is more generous that that of a woman, will give them a second birth.’ Oh! those were the good times, but our Khan hasn’t sent any more yarliks asking us to raze things to the ground, and the chiefs, when they assemble to hold a palaver in the kurultai, claim that what people call towns are only coffins we must be careful never to enter, because once you’re in you can never get out, that’s what they say, but the yarlik of destruction keeps on failing to come, all I get is that never-ending order going on again and again just like the accursed stones: ‘Nomad, keep watch!’
Inspector Shung
Repair work is apparently proceeding along the entire north-western stretch of the Wall. Every week parties of masons arrive, gaily flaunting the many-coloured flags and banners from their province (the regions of the Empire compete with each other to send the largest work-detail to the Wall), but nowhere can any troop movements be seen. Nomad look-outs flit across the horizon as before, but because the fog has thickened in the winter season, we often cannot make them out very clearly, neither the rider nor the horse, so that they look less like horsemen than mutilated body-parts from who-knows-which battlefield whipped by wild gusts of wind into a flying swarm.
What is happening is like a puzzle. At first sight you might think it a mere manoeuvre, each camp trying to show its strength by displaying contempt for the other. But if you consider matters with a clear mind, you can see they contain perfectly illogical elements. I believe it is the first time there has ever been such a gap between the Wall and the capital. I had always imagined they were indissolubly connected, and that was not only when I was working in the capital, but even before then, when I was a mere minor official in the remotest valleys of Tibet. I always knew they tugged on each other the way they say the moon does on the tide. What I learned when I came here was that while the Wall is able to move the capital – in other words, that it can draw it towards itself or else push it further away – the capital has no power to shift the Wall. At most, it can try to move away, like a fly trying to avoid the spider’s web, or else come right up close so as to nestle in its bosom, like a person quaking with fear; but that’s all it can do.
In my view, the Wall’s forces of attraction and repulsion are what explain the movements of the capital of China over the last two centuries – its shift to the south of the country, when it went to Nanking, as far away from the Wall as possible, and then its return to the north, to the closest possible location, when it came back to Beijing, which for the third time assumed its role as China’s capital city.
I have been wracking my brains these last few days trying to find a more accurate explanation for what is going on at the moment. Sometimes I think the wobble, if I can use that word, results directly from the proximity of the capital. Orders can be countermanded more easily than if the capital were, say, four or five months away – when the second carriage bearing news of the cancellation of the order either fails to catch up with the first carriage or else, because of its speed or its driver’s anxiety, tips over, or else the first one crashes, or else they both do, and so on.
Yesterday evening, as we were chatting away (it was one of those exquisitely relaxed conversations such as often arise after time spent hidden from the view of others and which thus seem all the more precious), my deputy declared that if not only the capital, but China herself, were to move, the Wall would not budge an inch. ‘And what’s more,’ he added casually, ‘there is proof of what I say.’ Indeed, we could both easily recall that in the one thousand or so years that have elapsed since the building of the Wall, China has more than once spilled out over its borders, leaving the Wall all alone and without meaning in the midst of the grey steppe, and that it has shrunk back inside the same number of times.
I remembered one of my aunts who in childhood had had a bracelet put on her arm, a bangle which got forgotten and left in place. As she grew plumper, the bracelet became almost buried in her flesh. It seemed to me that something of the same kind had happened to China. The Wall had alternately squeezed her tight, and slackened off. For some years now it had seemed about right for her size. As for the future, who could say . . . Each time I saw my aunt, I recalled the story of her bangle which continued to obsess me, I really don’t know why, because in spite of myself I could not stop thinking of what would have happened if the bangle had not been taken off in time, and, taking things to their limit, I could hear it jangling incessantly after her death, hanging all too loosely on the wrist of her skeleton . . . I lay my head in my hands, embarrassed at having imagined China herself decomposing with a trivial adornment around her wrist . . .
It was a starless night, but the moonlight gave off such a strong sense of indolence that you could believe that in the morning everyone would abandon all activity – that nomads, birds, and even states would lie flat out, exhausted, as lifeless as corpses laid out beside each other, as we two then were . . .
We have at last learned the name of the nomad chief: he is called Timur i Leng, which means Timur the Lame. He is said to have waged a fearsome war against the Ottomans, and after having captured their king – called Thunder – he had him paraded him from one end of the vast steppes to the other.
It seems he’ll soon be after us. Now it is all becoming clearer – the order for the rebuilding of the Wall, as well as the temporary calm which we all hastened to describe as a ‘puzzle’ as we do for anything we can’t understand in the workings of the state. While he was dealing with the Turks, the one-legged terror did not constitute a threat. But now . . .
A returning messenger who stopped here last night brought us disturbing news. In the western marches of our Empire, right opposite our Wall and barely a thousand feet from it, the Barbarians had built a kind of tower, made not from stone but from severed heads. The edifice as it was described to us was not tall – about as high as two men – and from a military point of view it was no threat at all to the Wall, but the terror those heads exude is more effective than a hundred fortresses. Despite the meetings with soldiers and masons where it was explained that the pile was, in comparison to our Wall, no more significant than a scarecrow (the crows that nonetheless swarmed around it had actually suggested the comparison), everyone, soldiers included, felt the wind of panic pass through them. ‘I’ve never had so many letters to take to the capital,’ the messenger declared as he patted his leather saddlebag. He said most of them had been penned by officers’ wives, writing to their aristocratic lady-friends to report intolerable migraines and so forth, which was a way of asking them to please see if they could get their husbands transferred to another posting.
The messenger also said that the pestilential air that the head-heap exhaled was so unbearable that for the first time in its existence the Wall had apparently contracted, and the messenger had prayed to God that the rebuilding work which had been launched at such an opportune moment should be completed as quickly as possible.
The messenger’s tale left us all utterly depressed. Without admitting it to ourselves we were aware that we would henceforth cast a quite different eye on the Wall’s damaged parts, on its cracks and crumbly patches. Our minds obstinately kept turning towards the pile of severed heads. Once the messenger had left, my deputy pointed out that the wise old saying ‘skull on stone breaks nothing but bone’ – a phrase whose brushstrokes we mastered at primary school thanks to our teachers’ liberal use of the rod – had become obsolete. The way things looked now, heads seemed more likely than anything else to be the weapon of choice against the Wall.
Still no troop movements on the border. A brutal earthquake has shaken everything save the Wall, which has long known how to cope with tremors. The silence that reigned after the last shock subsided seemed deeper than ever . . . I have the impression that the rebuilding work is being done carelessly and just for show. The day before the quake, the building used as a watchtower, on our right, collapsed again, after being rebuilt once before. It all leads me to think that treason has crept into the Imperial Palace. My deputy has a different view. He has long been convinced that people in the capital are so deeply sunk in pleasure and debauchery that few of them ever think of the existence of nomads and frontiers. Only yesterday he was telling me that he’d heard people say that a new kind of mirror has been invented – mirrors that more than double the size of a man’s penis. Ladies take them into their bedchambers to arouse themselves before making love.
Our only comfort is that there doesn’t seem to be the slightest movement on the other side of the Wall, except for a few scouts who flash past on horseback now and then, and sometimes we also see small groups of ragged Turkish soldiers. When the Turks first appeared, toward the end of summer, our look-outs were alarmed. Our first thought was that they might be attack units disguised as defeated Turks, but then we got reports from spies who had been infiltrated among them that in fact they were the remnants of the Ottoman army Timur had routed at Chubukabad. They’ve been wandering up and down the frontier for a long time now. Most of them are old men, and, when evening comes, their thoughts go back to those distant lands with fearsome names where they fought, and also presumably to their Sultan Bayazed, whose memory they trail with them across the steppe like a dead flash of lightning.
More than once they have asked for work on the Wall rebuilding project; after the repeated collapses of the right-hand tower, one of them, who was so persistent that he actually got to see me personally, told me in bad Chinese that he’d once seen in a far distant land a bridge in one of whose piers a man had been walled up. He pointed to his eye as he swore that he had really seen it, and even asked for a scrap of cardboard so he could draw the shape of the bridge for me. It was only a small bridge, he said, but to stop it collapsing a sacrifice had had to be made. How then could this huge Wall of China stay standing without an offering of the same kind?
He came back to see me a few days later and told the same story once more, but this time he made a lavishly detailed drawing of the bridge.
When I asked him why he’d pictured it upside down, he went pale. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘but perhaps it is because that is the way it looks in the water . . . Anyway, the night before last, that’s how I saw it in my dream. Top down.’ After he had left we took some time to look at the bizarre sketch he had made. He explained that the symbol † marked the place of the sacrifice. After I stared at it hard for a long while, I thought I could see the bridge beginning to quiver. Or was that because the Turk had told me that he remembered the bridge’s reflection in the river better than the bridge itself? If I may say so, it was a way of seeing things from an aquatic point of view – a perspective, the Turk had explained, thought to diverge completely from a human point of view, for instance, or from a so-to-speak terran perspective. It was the waters that had demanded the sacrifice of immurement (at least, that’s what the legend said) – that is to say, sentencing a man to death.
Late that night, slant beams of moonlight falling on masonry made human shapes appear here and there on the side of the Wall. ‘Accursed Turk!’ I swore under my breath, believing it was he who had stirred up such morbid images in my mind. It then struck me that the upturned bridge was perhaps the very model of the way tidings good and bad move around our sublunar world. It was very likely that nations did indeed pass messages to each other in that way – signals announcing the coming of their official delegations, with their letters sealed with black wax, a few hundred or a few thousand years in advance.
Nomad Kutluk
The chiefs have gathered at the kurultai, and Khan Timur’s yarlik has come: ‘Never venture over the other side,’ it says, ‘for that way lies your perdition.’ But the more I’m told not to, the more I want to step over and see the cities and the women who are doubled in burnished glass, wearing nothing but a gauze they call mend-afsh (silk), women with a pleasure-slit sweeter than honey, but this damned rock-heap won’t let me, it obstructs me, it oppresses me, and I would like to strike it down with my dagger, though I know steel has no power over it, for it even withstood the earthquake but two days ago. When the shudder and the masonry wrestled each other, I screamed aloud to the tremor: ‘You alone may bring it down!’ But it made no difference, the Wall had the better of it, it smothered the quake and I wept as I watched the earthquake’s last spasms, like a bull who’s had its throat cut, until, alas, I saw it expire, and my God did I feel sad, as sad as that other time in the plain of Bek-Pek-Dala, when I said to Commander Abaga, ‘I don’t know why, but I feel like screaming,’ and he said, ‘This steppe is called Bek-Pek-Dala, the steppe of hunger, and if you don’t feel your own hunger, you’ll feel the hunger of others, so spur your steed, my son.’ That’s what they all tell me: spur your steed, never let it stop, son of the steppe, but this lump of stone is stopping me, it’s in my way, it’s rubbing up against my horse, it’s calling to its bones, and I myself feel drawn in to its funereal mortar, I don’t know how but it’s made my face go ashen, it’s making me melt and blanch, aaah . . .
Inspector Shung
The days drag themselves along as wearily as if they had been broken by old age. We haven’t yet managed to recuperate from the shock we had at the end of this week.
Ever since a man in a chariot halted at our tower and said, ‘I am from Number 22 Department of Music,’ I have felt a foreboding of evil, or something very much like it. When I asked him what the role of his department was and whether he really meant to put on concerts or operatic pieces for the soldiers and workers on the Wall rebuilding project, he laughed out long and loud: ‘Our Department hasn’t been involved in that sort of thing for ages!’ What he then explained to us was so astounding that at one point my deputy interrupted him with a plaintive query: ‘Is all that really true, or is this a joke?’
We had of course heard that, over the years, some departments and sections of the celestial hierarchy, while retaining their traditional names, had seen their functions entirely transformed – but to learn that things had gone so far as to make supplying the Emperor with aphrodisiacs the main job of the navy’s top brass while the management of the fleet was now in the hands of the Palace’s head eunuch, well, nobody could get his mind around that. But that’s not the whole story, he said. ‘Do you know who’s now in charge of the copper mines and the foundries? Or who’s the brains behind foreign policy these days? Or the man in charge of public works?’
Our jaws dropped as, with smug satisfaction at his listeners’ bewilderment, he answered some of his own questions as if he was throwing old bones to hungry dogs. Lowering his voice, he confided that the institution now responsible for castrating eunuchs and for running the secret service was the National Library. Leaving us no time at all to catch our breath, he went on to reveal that in recent times the clan of the eunuchs at the Imperial Palace had seized an untold amount of power. In his view they would soon be in complete control of government, and then China might no longer be called the Celestial Empire, or the Middle Empire, but could easily come to be known as the Empire of Celestial Castration . . .
He guffawed for a while, then his face darkened. ‘You may well laugh,’ he said, ‘but you don’t realize what horrors that would bring in its wake.’ Far from smiling, let alone laughing, our expressions had turned as black as pitch. Despite which, he carried on prefacing all his remarks with, ‘You may well laugh, but . . .’ In his mind we were laughing without realizing the calamity that would come of it. Because we did not know that emasculation multiplies a man’s thirst for power ten-fold, and so on.
As the evening wore on, and as he drank ever more copiously, especially toward the end, the pleasure of lording it over us and his pride in coming from the capital pushed him on to revealing ever more frightful secrets. He probably said too much, but even so, none of his words was without weight, for you could sense that they gave a faithful representation of reality. When we broached the threat from the North, he snorted with laughter as thunderously as ever before. ‘War with the nomads? How can you be so naive, my poor dear civil servants, as to believe in such nonsense? The Wall rebuilding project? It’s got nothing to do with the prospect of battle! On the contrary, it’s the first article of the secret pact with the Barbarians. Why are you looking at me with the glassy stare of a boiled cod? Yes, that’s right, the repair work was one of the Barbarians’ demands.’
‘Oh no!’ my deputy groaned as he put his head between his hands.
Our visitor went on in a more measured manner. To be sure, China had raised the Wall to protect itself from the nomadic hordes, but so much time had passed since then that things had undergone a profound change.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘things have changed a heap. It’s true China was afraid of the Barbarians for many a long year, and at some future time she may well have reason to fear them again. But there have also been periods when the Barbarians were afraid of China. We’re in one such period right now. The Barbarians are afraid of China. And that’s why they asked, quite firmly, for the Wall to be rebuilt.’
‘But that’s crazy!’ my deputy said. ‘To be fearful of a state and at the same time to ask it to strengthen its defences makes no sense at all!’
‘Heavens above!’ our visitor exclaimed. ‘Why are you so impatient? Let me finish my explanation . . . You stare at me with your big eyes, you interrupt me like a flock of geese, all because you do not know what’s at the bottom of it. The key to the puzzle is called: fear. Or to be more precise, it is the nature of that fear . . . Now, listen carefully, and get it into your heads: China’s fear and the Barbarians’ fear, though they are both called fear in Chinese, are not the same thing at all. China fears the destructive power of the Barbarians; the Barbarians fear the softening effects of China. Its palaces, its women, its silk. All of that in their eyes spells death, just as the lances and dust of the nomads spell the end for China. That’s how this strange Wall, which rises up as an obstacle between them, has sometimes served the interests of one side, and sometimes the other. Right now it’s the nomads’ turn . . .’
The thought of insulting him to his face or calling him an impostor, a clown, or a bullshitter, left my mind for good. Like everything he’d said so far, this had to be true. I had a vague memory of Genghis Khan’s conquest of China. He overthrew our Emperors and put his own men in their place, then turned on those same men because they had apparently gone soft. Hadn’t Yan Jey, one of our ministers, been convicted a few years back for having asserted, one evening after dinner, that the last four generations of the Ming dynasty, if not its entire ascendance as well, was basically Mongol?
So the repairs to the Wall had been requested by the Barbarians. Timur, more foresighted than his predecessors, had reckoned that invading China was not only pointless, but impossible. What China loses by the sword it retakes by silk. So Timur had chosen to have the border closed, instead of attacking. That is what explains the calm which settled over both sides of the Wall as soon as the delegation came over. What the rest of us had ascribed so unthinkingly to an enigma, to frivolousness, even to a hallucination engendered by penis-enlarging mirrors, was actually the straightforward outcome of a bilateral accord.
That night a swarm of thoughts buzzed around in my head. States are always either wiser or more foolish than we think they are. Snatches of conversation with officials who had been posted on the other side came back to my mind, but I now saw them in a different light. The ghost of Genghis Khan has weakened, I used to hear from people who’d carried out espionage in the Northlands. But we heard them without paying much attention, as we reckoned that these were just tales of the Barbarians: they’ve gone softer, they’ve got harder, and taking that sort of thing seriously was like trying to interpret the shapes made in the sky by flights of storks. But that was not right at all. Something really was going on out there in the grey steppes, and the more I thought about it, the more important it seemed to be. A great change was taking hold of the world. Nomadism was on its last legs, and Timur, the man whom the Heavens had had the whimsy to make lame, was there to establish a new balance of power. He had brought a whole multitude of peoples to follow a single religion, Islam, and now he was trying to settle them on a territory that could be made into a state. The numerous incursions of these different nations, which had previously seemed incomprehensible, would now probably come to a halt on the surface of the earth, though it was not at all clear whether that was a good thing or a bad one, since you can never be sure whether a barbarian contained is more dangerous than one let loose . . . I imagined Timur standing like a pikestaff at the very heart of Asia and all around him nomadic peoples barely responding to his exhortations to stop their wild forays . . .
From the high battlements I could see a whole section of the Wall which the moonlight seemed to split open all the way along. I tried to imagine what Timur could have thought when he had first been shown a sketch of it. He must surely have thought: I’ll knock it down, raze it to the ground, plant grass over it so its line can never be recovered; then, pondering on how to protect his monastically strict kingdom from the softening wind of permissiveness, he must have realized that Heaven itself could not have presented him with a gift more precious than that Wall.
Next day, before dawn, when our visitor mounted his chariot to be on his way, I was tempted to ask him just what the Number 22 Department of Music was, but for reasons I’m unsure of, I felt embarrassed to do so. Not so much politeness, I guess, as the fear of hearing some new abomination. ‘May you break your damn neck!’ my deputy cursed as the four-in-hand clattered noisily away between two heaps of rubble. Feeling vanquished, we looked out over a landscape which, despite having sated our eyes for years on end, now looked quite different. We had cursed our guest by wishing his chariot to turn end over end, but in fact it was he who had already taken his revenge by turning our minds upside down.
So the Wall was not what we had thought it was. Apparently frozen in time and immovable in place while all beneath it shifted with the wind – borders, times, alliances, even eternal China herself – the Wall was actually quite the opposite. It was the Wall which moved. More faithless than a woman, more changeable than the clouds in the sky, it stretched its stony body out over thousands of leagues to hide the fact that it was an empty shell, a wrap round an inner void.
Each day that passed was ever more wearisome, and we came to realize to what degree we had become part and parcel of the Wall. We cursed it as we felt, now that it had betrayed us, how much more suffering it was bringing us. Our visitor’s prediction that the Wall would one day serve China again was a meagre consolation, as was that other view which held that the Wall’s inner changes were perhaps what constituted its real strength, for without them it would have been nothing more than a lifeless corpse
When I looked at it all covered with frost in the early mornings, I was overcome with gloomy thoughts. It would certainly survive us all. It would look just the same – greyish and mysterious – even when all humanity had disappeared. It would rust on humanity’s cadaver, like the bangle on my aunt who had been rotting six feet under for years.
The death of a nomad scout at the foot of the Wall woke us from our torpor. We had seen him now and again galloping ever closer to the Wall, as if he had been trying to stick to it, until he finally crashed straight into it like a sightless bird.
We did not wait for any instruction but prepared ourselves to provide an account of the event to a commission of inquiry, from our own side or else from the Barbarians’. As we examined the bloodstains streaked along the Wall over fifty feet and more (it seems that even after injuring himself the rider spurred his horse ever on), my mind ran back to that far-off bridge which had been said to demand a sacrifice. Good Lord, I thought, can they have been in contact with each other so quickly?
I also mused about the distance that such a portent can cover, about the migration of forebodings and also, of course, about the mystery surrounding the image of the upturned bridge. It was one among the hundreds of misleading images this world provides us with and which can only ever be seen back to front.
The Ghost of Nomad Kutluk
Now that I am on this side and no longer need a steed or any kind of bird to get around, since a breath of wind or even, on calm nights, a pale moonbeam will do the job for me – now that I am in the beyond I am no longer astounded by the thick-headedness of the folk down below or by their infuriating narrow-mindedness.
That narrowness must surely lie at the root of their superficial judgement of all things, as is notably the case (to take only one instance of the stupid blunders that I was unfortunate enough to encounter) of the Great Wall of China, to which people down below on earth attribute huge importance, whereas it is in reality only a ridiculous fence, especially when you compare it to a real barrier like the true Wall, the Mother-Wall, the one which makes all others pale into the insignificance of feeble copies, or, to call it, as many do, that bourn from where no traveller returns – the wall that comes between life and death.
So of course I no longer need a horse; similarly, foreign languages, learning and all the other things understood to be part of civilization, are of no use to me now. Souls manage to communicate perfectly well without, them.
That horrible fall into the abyss, which came just after I thrashed my feeble body like a rag on the curbstone of China, was enough to make me realize things which it would have taken me thousands of years to understand down there. The knowledge taught by fear is incomparably superior to the product of all civilizations and academies put together, and I think that’s the main if not the sole reason why we are forbidden to return, even for a day. It is probably thought that we would need barely a few weeks to become masters of the planet, and that would clearly not be to the taste of the gods.
Strange to say, although we spirits smile wryly as we talk of our mistakes, resentments, clashes and conflicts of yore, most of us up here would still like to go back, even if for only the briefest sojourn. Some can’t wait to denounce their murderers, others want to leak state secrets or to elucidate mysteries they took with them to the grave, but for most of us, it’s plain nostalgia. Of course, our desire to see our nearest and dearest is also shot through with the wish to tell but the tiniest part of the wonders we have seen from this side.
Every ten or fifteen thousand years the rumour goes around that home visits are going to be allowed. The great mass of ghosts starts to hurry toward the Wall. But then we see it looming before us, a great sinister mass in the darkness of the night. The look-outs are blind, so it is said. Crossings happen in one direction only, from there to here . . . never from here to there.
Buoyed by the whisper that one day there will be two-way travel through the Wall, we carry on hoping all the same. Some cannot hold back their tears. They claim they’ve been expected for all eternity by beings who are dear to them, or by temples where they would try to pour balm on wounded minds, or even by whole nations that are dying to see them return. They say they have invitations, which they wave like banners from afar, certificates from people who say they’re prepared to give them board and lodging and who will even stand surety for their safe return. They parade academic insignia topped by royal crowns, and other sacred stamps, occasionally of dubious origin. But the gates never open, not for anyone.
Spirits get angry, start to protest, and make a racket that can be heard at the top of the watchtowers. They yell that it’s the same old story as on earth, that nothing has changed, that it’s just as strict, just as inhuman . . .
Since it is another case of crossing a boundary, we who have experience of walls and other kinds of barriers cherish the hope that we may be granted special favour. Sometimes we gather among ourselves: some show off the scars from the spears and bullets that went through them, others show the tears made in their skin by barbed wire, or the holes made in their chests by the tips of embassy railings. We imagine those wounds will suffice to soften the hearts of the guardians of the gate. But we soon realize those are just vain hopes and that no one will be granted a laissez-passer.
When the others see how we are being treated, they lose all hope. Small, defeated groups straggle away, reckoning that the laws will be relaxed one fine day, and they start to listen out once again for a new rumour to cheer them up.
Last time, in the waiting crowd, someone pointed out a fellow called Jesus Christ . . . They’ve been making every imaginable special case for him for all eternity, they even sing hymns in his honour. What’s more, his emblem shining from the roofs of cathedrals shows that of us all over here, he is certainly the one most expected back on earth.
As a matter of fact, even he is not optimistic. He comes and goes at the base of the Wall, displaying from afar the marks of the nails with which they crucified him, but the guardians pretend not to see them. Unless, as we have long suspected, the guardians are truly eyeless.
Image © photomanm
