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

camouflaged behind elements of the set, or taking perilous leaps to propel himself from one space to the next to save his famished mother. When the son succeeded in controlling his mother, who was trying to devour him, the performance reached its climax: to stop them from escaping, the Lord of the Underworld transformed the lowest space into a gigantic inferno. The hero had to carry his mother on his back and climb up to the intermediary space, the earthly world, but floodwater from the Yellow River, drowning everything in its path, kept driving them back down to the Underworld, where they were swallowed up by flames. As they vanished, a light suddenly sprang up on the highest stage, ripping through the floorboards of the triple set so the hero could rise up with his mother, ascending vertically, climbing ever upwards, unhindered, to Heaven.
    Following the map in the brochure, we entered Cixi’s private box: a low-slung building with a large opening facing the Pavilion of Pure Sound. There, from behind a wide, finely sculpted screen, she had enjoyed a panoramic view of the triple stage, sheltered from the gaze of her male guests, who were seated in two other buildings on either side of hers. The large room she used as a box was empty, there was nothing left—not her seat, the lacquered screen, any furniture or the great fan wafted by four indefatigable eunuchs silently re-creating the gentle breath of a soft summer breeze for her. In that Year of the Cockerel 1862 she would have been in mourning; her husband, the emperor Xianfeng, having died the previous year. Did her son, the child emperor Tongzhi, who was then four, ever come to this box? If so, where would he have sat? The brochure had nothing to say on the subject.
    “I imagine,” Tumchooq said, “that in one of the many intervals Cixi would have had her great-nephew brought to her box, given that the celebrations for his first hundred days were theoretically the main reason for the festivities. As an amateur soothsayer, Her Majesty the Master of China had probably felt the baby’s still-soft skull, fingering its topography centimetre by centimetre, trying to find a sign of the nations destiny, some irregular protuberance announcing military talent or anti-Western feelings. In a thirteen-hundred-page book called An Anthology of Archives from the Intendant to the Court of the Qing Dynasty,” he went on, “I found a few lines indicating the sort of favours Cixi bestowed on her great-nephew: throughout his childhood the intendant’s department sent him birthday gifts on the orders of the dowager empress; never the silk cloth or ink made in the Court workshops that other children in the imperial family received, but silver stirrups, a Mongolian saddle, a miniature suit of armour, a soldiers helmet, a compass … always things imbued with virile, if not martial, aggressiveness, as if to proclaim: ‘Be a hero who will win the wars I wage.’ In 1874, for his twelfth birthday, the book records simply: twelve arrows.
    “I remember seeing one of those arrows,” Tumchooq adds, “at the bottom of a metal box that my mother always kept padlocked; in among her jewellery, some old stamps, official family documents and ration tickets for rice and oil, wrapped in blue brocade decorated with little pearls and tied with a thin yellow silk ribbon was a sheath made of rhinoceros horn, also tied round with yellow silk ribbon. It housed a wooden arrow thirty centimetres long, which, unusually, was painted white; one end was tapered and black, fitted with a rusted iron head, the other still had the vestiges of fletching with balding feathers, and it had a small whistle attached to it: an ancient Chinese invention which dates back several centuries, a sort of flute shaped like a tiny gourd, as thin and light as an empty eggshell; and, if you looked with a magnifying glass, you could see Chinese characters engraved on it: Cixi’s name and title in stylised form. Long ago these were