Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page A

oscillations of the light bulb. As if unaware of the interlude, they picked up the scene in the same place: the money was piled carefully on the table again and the young man with glasses started counting it. Impossible to tell the colour of his eyes, because of the distance. (Although I did see him closer to in different circumstances, the colour of his eyes, which altered according to the light, was always a mystery to me. Most of the time it hovered between deep black and a bright, intelligent brown, but sometimes the thick coating of grease accumulated on his glasses had a capricious and even rather fanciful way of altering his eyes, giving them different nuances: the green of a jealous lover, the grey of gentle fog, the list could go on and on, but never blue.)
    From the far side of the street I could hear him murmuring numbers and, even at that distance, his voice seemed spellbinding, somewhere between a teachers and a sorcerer’s, but with a hint of self-mockery I was amazed by his prominent chin, the strange shape of his head, which was not as wide as his companions’, but most of all by his name, which one of them used, a name with a gently exotic ring to it, like birdsong, like a grain of sand in the far-off Gobi Desert or the northern steppes, whipped up by the wind, carried by storms, swirling through the sky, travelling, crossing whole countries without knowing quite how, and ending up in the crook of my ear. Incredible though this may seem, jealousy was my instant reaction, jealousy for the beauty of that bespectacled young man’s name: Tumchooq.
    My instinct was not wrong.
Tumchooq: Toomsuk in Pali, the language in which Buddha preached; Toomsuk in Sanskrit; Doomchook in Mongol—all meaning “bird beak.” This was the name given to an ancient kingdom because of its very small size and the shape of its territory. In 817, when it had been in existence for some ten centuries, Tumchooq, which had resisted wars, invasions, coups and droughts, was completely buried by a sandstorm.
Paul d’Ampère, Notes on Marco Polo’s
Book of the Wonders of the World
(Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne)
    “Not one centimetre of our vast territory evades the State,” ran a slogan at the time, and the modest vegetable shop huddled at the end of Little India Street demonstrated to everyone that these were not empty words. No gain was too small to feed the greed of our all-powerful State, and it never recognised the limits of its own power, even when confronted with vegetables, disobedient, anarchic, often mad vegetables … occasionally even vengeful. Take cabbages, for example, they simply could not be sold on some days, but, depending on plans made in an anonymous office, industrial quantities of the things might descend on the unfortunate little shop, even though it had nowhere to store or preserve them; at times like this, mountains of cabbages piled up everywhere, swamping the pavement and encroaching into the road, rotting, oozing, mingling with filth, metamorphosing into trails of mould on which passers-by slipped and fell. At other times Little India Street was viciously struck by long shortages of cabbages, not a leaf was seen for weeks, whole seasons even, until people forgot what they tasted like. Sometimes a decision-maker would suddenly come up with the idea that that year, instead of cabbages, the population should be eating turnips, and waves of turnips would instantly stream into the shop, flooding it for weeks even though they could not sell half of them.
    I often find myself thinking of that shop; I can still see it now: a basic, single-storey building with just one long narrow room, its brick walls painted with greying, flaking whitewash and lined with shelves made from cardboard or plywood which, under the weight of unsaleable goods, had lost their original colour and horizontal form; curving, undulating shelves that shook and looked ready to snap with the very next crate but had not actually collapsed for