Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page A

as you would a piece of evidence in a criminal enquiry. They left without a single word to help us unravel the mystery.
    “A few days later, Mr. Liu was released. He came into the classroom behind the headmaster, completely transformed, stripped of his pride; in a barely audible voice he read a long, self-critical tract, accusing himself of the unforgivable crime of painting—under the influence of alcohol—an inaccurate portrait of Engels, having taken as his model a photograph of another bearded man, Professor Ivan P. Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, who had been on the front cover of a scientific review at the time. (As far as I could see, Mr. Liu’s mistake was a very interesting Freudian slip: Professor Pavlov’s name is associated with his discovery of conditioned reflexes, a theory which greatly inspired the concept of brainwashing and was, therefore, just as important to tyrants and the populations they bullied as Engels’s theories, if not more so.)
    “That was the last time Mr. Liu set foot in our classroom. Even though we were young and didn’t understand the facts, his long, self-accusatory speech rang in our ears like a farewell lament. He was demoted to the rank of workman, sweeping the floor and carrying hot water for the teaching staff to which he no longer belonged, working in the outhouses that housed the coal boiler, behind the main building. Some mornings when I arrived at school before dawn for athletics training, I heard him sweeping the cement surface of the playground outside the classrooms. I couldn’t see him, but listened to his invisible, rasping brushstrokes reverberating as he gathered dead leaves from the plane trees and cleaned the ground with such stubborn insistence you’d have thought he was scratching out a stain. Along with the white smoke coming from the chimney of the outhouses, those rather slow sounds punctuated my early-morning arrivals in the dark, sometimes in the rain and often in temperatures so cold not a single moth fluttered around the lampposts.
    “Mr. Liu’s disgrace marked the end of a clandestine collaboration, a secret exchange set up by two boys on the same bench—Ma and me—which had worked a treat until then.
    “Do you remember Ma? Yes, the one who gave me The Secret Biography of Cixi . His parents were both doctors in Chengdu and in 1964 they were sent to a very remote region of Sichuan on the border with Tibet. Ma was nine at the time and he came to live in Peking with an uncle who worked at the Forbidden City with my mother, first as a night watchman, then as Assistant Security Manager. When Ma joined us, the dunce of the class—that was me—was put next to him because he was the arithmetic champion in his province and brilliant at writing; full of naive hope, Mr. Liu gave him the weighty task of helping me improve.
    “I was immediately struck by the size of his head. He was a weedy little boy with such narrow shoulders that, as one of our Pekinese sayings goes, they were in a straight line with his feet. But his head was more than big: enormous. When he bent over to write, it covered almost half his desk, hiding it from the prying eye of his dunce of a neighbour, cruelly dashing attempts at the espionage and cribbing that would have been his salvation. Nothing. Especially as this genius suffered from myopia, which grew worse at an astonishing rate all through our schooling, forcing him to lean closer and closer to the desk.
    “Witnessing the rapid decline in his eyesight, I asked out of curiosity why he didn’t talk to his uncle about it. He replied that he was worried his mother would be too painfully disappointed, and made me promise not to say a word to anyone. During the first term that we shared a bench, numbers and ideograms on the blackboard became a little more blurred for him every day. At the end of term, on the day of our arithmetic exam, I knew he couldn’t possibly read the five problems our master had written out. (At the