Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page B

years, even though they were far beyond any acceptable level of deterioration. There was no ceiling. Chinks of sky filtered through gaps between the roof tiles along with dead insects, raindrops …
    When I think of that shop, more than its smell, it is rather the state of the floor that comes to mind: the rest of the room was so drab I could barely take my eyes off it, they were glued to it. It was made of beaten earth. I just have to close my eyes to picture those arabesques worthy of a Rubens or a Matisse formed by thousands of fine, sinuous grooves creating images that were bold in places, more delicate in others, like a lip or ridged like vertebrae. A floor worn down with use, its bumps encrusted with filth and scraps of vegetable; I felt I could read in it the sophisticated, labyrinthine finger-prints of time, furrowed by countless forking and intersecting paths, and the footprints the salesman had made in it day after day, month after month, year after year with their daily comings and goings, especially as six of them (a good majority of the staff) were lame, including a former general and two ex-colonels of Guomindang’s army, men who had once been enemies of communism and were now prisoners of their physical infirmity as well as their shameful past. What heavy footsteps they had, those political cripples living a form of penitence in that greengrocer’s shop.
    In theory, every sale, which often represented only a few pennies, had to be recorded in minute detail (name of the vegetables, quantity, time of the transaction, price per kilo, price paid, etc.) in the beautiful upstrokes and downstrokes of the ex-officers’ handwriting in a booklet which was meant to hang on the wall but often drifted about on the floor, evidence of the Government’s impotence. One feature of vegetables, in comparison to other State merchandise, is how they vary in weight depending on the time of day: a hundred kilos of celery in the morning becomes eighty at noon and seventy by evening, with no external intervention; like a piece of cloth washed for the first time, vegetables shrink, they dry out of their own free will, refusing to collaborate, showing utter contempt for figures and evading any system of control. On top of that, it was always possible to claim they had rotted, victims of some blight or other, and a large proportion of them had had to be thrown away to avoid contaminating the rest of the stock. The relativity of their turnover was, therefore, a source of delight to the salesmen. Still, only those closest to them would ever know the truth about the ritual they performed every evening when the light went out between the lowering and the raising of the metal shutter.
    “I was nineteen when I had that fantastic, intoxicating experience for the first time,” Tumchooq once told me. “The exhilaration! I shook with fear and excitement. My glasses slipped off and I don’t know where they landed. Before I even knew what I was doing, my hands were in there with all the others, blindly raiding what was on the desk: the States money, the day’s takings. We were so violent I thought the desk would tip over and I heard the drawer sliding open. The masks were off, we’d thrown off any simulation of obedience or admission of guilt; the good socialist workforce had disappeared; in the dark we were stripped bare like worms, like animals hungering, thirsting, greedy for money. The little shop had turned into a sort of lair: we couldn’t see the others, but we could feel their breath, our hot animal breathing.
    “When the light came on and I put my glasses back on I felt a bit dizzy; the bulb hanging from the ceiling seemed higher up than usual, not so bright, not so harsh, wobbling slightly, in slow motion. I thought I could see specks of dust suspended above our heads. I looked, one by one, at the faces of the colleagues I thought I knew so well; I knew exactly who hated whom, who had borrowed money from whom and never paid him