Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page B

time we didn’t have photocopies of the questions, probably to save money.) So I copied them out on a sheet of paper, folded it several times and passed it to him under the table. He read it discreetly, his face impassive, and set to work. Barely a quarter of an hour later, making the most of the fact that the teacher was looking away, he dug me in the ribs and, with a wink, he in turn passed me the piece of paper, folded in the same way Confused, I unfolded it and, in among my scribblings, I saw his writing, firm and upright, though it had been jotted at speed and was slightly large and uneven, but there it was solving each problem, step by step, right down to the final solution. I could have copied them out in their entirety but, in order to maintain credibility in the teachers eyes, I settled for copying three and improvising solutions, which were bound to be wrong, for the others, narrowly escaping yet more academic dishonour.
    “Throughout Mr. Liu’s reign we never knew whether our monarch—whose eye, a portrait painters most precious organ, always shone with a glint of drink and madness—had noticed our strategy, but didn’t want to say so. He regularly cited us as models of cooperation, and for two successive years we shared the same bench near the window through which we twice saw the spring buds of an elm tree transform into clouds of cool green that took up a considerable portion of sky and shaded us from the sun. Now we exchanged not only schoolwork but also marbles, kaleidoscopes, penknives, comics, stamps, solid wooden tops that we spun with a whip and hollow German tops that hummed as they spun, danced across the sky and zig-zagged through the air with a long whine …
    “At the height of our friendship we pooled our pocket money to set up a fund, with Ma as treasurer. Full of heroic aspirations, we promised ourselves we would increase our capital without spending any of it until it could eventually finance a long trip to Manchuria, where my great-grandfather, a former aristocrat nicknamed Seventy-one, lived in exile. But at the end of the first fortnight we gave in at the sight of some glazed duck with glossy, red translucent skin, hanging in a restaurant window We bought it and, not daring to sit down, had it cut up and put into a paper bag. Out in the street we savoured a few mouthfuls and it tasted so divine we thought we’d been transported to Heaven; the trees of Peking seemed to float around us and adults swam through the air like famished sharks, launching themselves at us, their noses homing in on our paper bag. We wandered through the streets eating it, no, devouring it, piece by piece, licking the last drops of its exquisite fat trickling down our fingers, before realising our Manchurian dream had gone up in smoke.
    “Mr. Liu was succeeded by a strapping young woman who wore a red scarf—the official sign of the young revolutionary elite—round her neck, and a new era, hers, began with a radical reorganisation of our classroom with Ma and myself as the major victims. It was the middle of winter, a few weeks before the end-of-year exams, the worst time to separate us. In her triumphant opera singers voice she condemned Ma to irrevocable exile on the other side of the classroom. I still remember the moment she passed sentence: we huddled together on the bench, in the black shadows of the bare elm, its branches darkening our desk as well as Ma’s enormous head, eclipsing his entire body. He stood up briskly, took his satchel without looking at me, or anyone else, crossed the room with his head lowered and slumped onto the new bench he was sharing with a girl.
    “Now Ma could no longer help inflicting the disappointment he so feared on his mother. Once summoned, she came by train from her distant province for a meeting in the headmaster’s office, and through the open doorway I saw her—crushed, as if struck with a mallet. The headmaster was talking, she was crying. That image, captured by