Agamemnon's Daughter (19 page)

From the high battlements, I could see a whole section of the Wall that the moonlight seemed to split open throughout its length. I tried to imagine Timur’s reaction when he was first shown a sketch of it. Surely he must have thought:
I’ll knock it down, raze it, plant grass over it so its line can never be recovered.
Then, pondering how to protect his monastically strict kingdom from the softening wind of permissiveness, he must have said to himself 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 that, despite having sated our eyes for years on end, now looked quite different. We had cursed our guest by wishing his chariot would 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 unmovable 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 that moved. More faithless than a woman, more changeable than the clouds in the sky, it stretched its stony body over thousands of leagues to hide that it was an empty shell, a wrap around 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 meager consolation, as was the other view, namely 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 in the early mornings, all covered with frost, I was overcome with gloomy thoughts. It would certainly survive us all. It would look just the same — gray 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 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 had spurred his horse faster and more furiously) my mind turned back to that far-off bridge that 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 upside-down bridge. It was one among the hundreds of misleading images this world provides us with, which can only ever be seen in hindsight.

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 people down below or by their infuriating narrow-mindedness.

That narrowness must surely lie at the root of their superficial judgment of all things, as is notably the case (to take only one instance of the stupid blunders I was unfortunate enough to encounter) of the Great Wall of China, to which people down 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 that makes all others pale into the insignificance of feeble copies, or, to call it, as many do, that bourne from where no traveler 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 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 is 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 a brief time. 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 rumor goes round that home visits are going to be allowed. The great mass of ghosts then 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 lookouts 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 favor. Sometimes we get together 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 rumor 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 honor. 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.

Paris, Winter 1993