Read Online Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie - Free Book Online

back, who had denounced whom, who suspected he had been denounced by whom, etc., and there they were now, pretending to count the coins left on the desk, as calm, impassive and serious as real accountants. I was touched by the trust they showed in initiating me into their game. We were accomplices now, old friends, fellow soldiers who had fought the same battles. In fact, the thought did cross my mind: Were they all from the same regiment, had they known each other since the war? I was so happy it wouldn’t have taken much for me to start imitating the lame ones and join the halting ranks of that shadowy army of one-legged veterans as if a communist bullet had struck me in the leg long ago, happy to be part of the collective alibi and of this perfect crime where no one could give anyone else away, because no one could see a thing in that hellish moment of darkness.”
    I do not know how much money Tumchooq took from the State that first evening, and I am not sure he would have known himself. Something as concrete and down-to-earth as a figure would only have belittled this act of grand larceny; he knew that no sum could truly represent the scale of what they did. Nothing about this adventure, as he described it, really surprised me except for his strange identification with his invalid colleagues two or three times his age. It was not entirely a joke. Later he gave me a fairly convincing demonstration of his talents as a mimic. He could fake a limp perfectly: he came to a stop, put his good leg forward, twisted his other foot on the floor so that all his weight came down on his ankle, and bent over to pick up a coin. (I suspected he practised after work when he was alone in the shop, given that he lived there for a long time, because he was not only a salesman but also nightwatchman. In the evenings that desk on which everything inexorably converged became his bed; he covered it with a bamboo mat for a mattress, then a blanket and his apron, which he folded in four to act as a pillow for his big head, but it was always on the floor by morning, crumpled like a dirty rag.)
    I only remembered Tumchooq’s fake limp recently after reading the memoirs of a Russian film director who died about ten years ago, yet whose films—which have sound but no dialogue—have such a pure beauty they bowl me over every time I see them. In his book he talks about the “stammering period” of his childhood, which had started as a game, imitating a friend with this handicap. He got into the habit of stuttering, struggling to find words and uttering snatches of unfinished sentences until he ended up stammering more than his friend and having to resort to singing at the top of his voice, like something from a comic film. “I’m grateful to my stammering friend because, thanks to him, I discovered not the misery of being unable to communicate but an even more significant trait: the vanity of the spoken word.”
    “One day,” Tumchooq told me as he sat on the desk in the greengrocers with the lights out so that his eyes lit up to the red glow of his cigarette every time he took a drag on it, “I was looking for something to read on my mothers bookshelves. She’s the vice curator of the museum in the Forbidden City now, so you can imagine the sort of books she has. Anyway, I came across The History of Theatrical Presentation in the Court of the Qing Dynasty , written by Goo Ying and published by the Museum of History. There’s a paragraph I know by heart:
At the beginning of October in the Year of the Cockerel (1862), on the occasion of the one hundredth day since the birth of Zia Lan, better known as Seventy-one, the long-awaited first son of Prince Yi Lin, a celebration which coincided with victory for the Chinese army in a battle waged with the French on the Chinese-Vietnamese border, the Dowager Empress Cixi showed her gratitude to the Heavens for this double happiness by inviting every prince, minister, general and high dignitary in