Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie

slight weakness for alcohol, not that he was ever drunk in lessons. His life’s work, and he’d clearly given himself to it heart and soul, was a portrait of each of the world’s five Great Revolutionaries, using models in Tiananmen Square, where Karl Marx had pride of place surrounded by the other four: Friedrich Engels, his close collaborator and faithful financier with a beard just as exuberant and tightly curled as his own (he’s not so famous in the West, but very popular in communist countries, where he’s seen as a co-founder of the proletarian revolutionary movement), Lenin, Stalin and Mao, the only one without a beard. (It was the late 1950s and China, still passionately in love with the USSR and only just flirting with Maoist idolatry, still respected chronological precedence, so Mao was positioned behind his bearded precursors, two Europeans and two Russian ‘big brothers.’ Mao never lost his infallible respect for the first two. Towards the end of his life, whenever he mentioned his imminent death, he talked as if it were an appointment with Marx and Engels.)
    “Those five portraits painted by our teacher—with real paint which gave off exquisite wafts of turpentine for a whole academic year—were a source of great pride to our class for a long time. If you looked at them closely which is what pupils from other classes who came to admire them did, all you could see was a swampy delta of colours you would never have guessed were there, throbbing, swirling, mingling and clotting into countless tiny mounds, uniting together with one aim—complying with the artist. Everyone agreed on one thing: these five ‘saviours of humanity’ looked more real than on the printed posters hanging on the walls of other classrooms. The nuances of his work (products of his tipsy state, who knows?) translated as clearer lines, more natural colouring and particularly as more real, personal expressions on their faces, transforming those serious, feverish ‘helmsmen’ into smiling, sympathetic individuals, and this was a lesson we would never forget (his only failure was Engels, the great German theorist, who seemed sullen, with a less confident and determined look in his eye, betraying the sort of anxiety rarely attributed to political figures).
    “The author of these portraits, our teacher, never failed to remind us how lucky we were to be in that classroom, so envied by pupils in other classes. He even went so far as to imply we had privileged status as protégés chosen by the five great men who watched our every move from above the blackboard. When he came down from his raised desk to walk among us you’d have thought he was an archangel stepping down from the altar. He saw himself as guardian to the pantheon of those five revolutionary gods, and whenever he mentioned enemies of the proletariat who attacked them, his face twisted with loathing and his eyes burned with anger, such anger that he literally ground his teeth. In that silent classroom, if you held your breath, you could hear the extraordinarily brutal sound of his teeth grinding the bones of the imaginary Enemy.
    “Every now and then, particularly early in the morning, at daybreak, he would go over all the mistakes we had made the day before, turning towards the portraits, looking up, waving his arms, telling them what an onerous task it was being a teacher, and begging them to help him … until the day when plain-clothed policemen turned up at school to arrest him only an hour after he’d chaired a meeting with pupils’ parents. According to rumours circulating the next day, someone’s father had denounced him. Uniformed policemen swarmed into our classroom, interrupting our lesson, and took photos of the five portraits from various distances and different angles. One of them stood on the desk and, with his gloved hands, took down the picture of the sullen, bearded Engels. He carefully slipped it into a cellophane bag, which he sealed with black tape