The following day he was told he’d only been spared because of his dedication to his studies. If this ever happened again – out he’d go!
It never happened again. He bit his lip. He didn’t respond to the white boys’ jeers and taunts. He walked past the freckled boy without looking him in the face. But he didn’t let anyone copy his homework again. He didn’t take any croissant. And they didn’t try to offer him any. They kept their distance.
A year passed.
One day, right out of the blue, Father Paphnutius announced from the teacher’s desk: “The people of China have overthrown the emperor. From here on, the Chinese state will be a republic.”
On the streets it was as though nothing had changed. The trams rushed by as they always had, cars howled, sweaty rickshaw drivers sped past in a flash of heels, pulling after them carts with corpulent white gentlemen. In the gymnasium, the lessons dragged on, the Lazarist monks recorded marks in the grade books, and during the recesses drank strong, aromatic tea and nibbled bread and butter. How could this be? The Chinese people had overthrown the emperor and everything was business as usual. The white people weren’t fleeing the country, quite the opposite: with every passing month there seemed to be more of them, and they spoke calmly of the coup, with approval, as if it were a shrewd business transaction. Clearly the emperor had nothing to do with the situation. So who was it then? Chow-Lin had also mentioned the Mandarins. P’an wasn’t sure if the Mandarins had kept their old positions, and he had no one to ask, but it seemed as if they’d stayed put. In any case, the rich people and the merchants in their opulently embroidered gabardines were still around. There must have been some mistake. Dethroning the emperor clearly was not enough, the people in embroidered dresses also needed to be overthrown, and those people they had forgotten. How could this have happened?
P’an didn’t understand it, he couldn’t understand it, there was no one to explain it to him, and without this explanation life became incomprehensible and senseless.
But little P’an’s doubts were not reflected in his studies. He conscientiously devoted himself to his studies just as before, as if in the difficult mathematical problems he might find the solution to the riddle that plagued him. He had to learn everything the white people knew, and then everything would become simple, comprehensible, clear.
Months went by.
Years went by. Long, laborious, exhausting years that passed leaving no trace in the memory, a void, not because they somehow lacked the singular, remarkable events that fill every day of boyhood – it was as if a hole had formed in the crammed sack of memory, and all the contents had trickled out. A man looks over his shoulder, starts to reminisce, he can summon some years, practically day by day, in the most precise detail, and suddenly a blank crops up. A year, two, three – he digs, searches, but nothing remains. Generalities: I was going to school, I was working in a factory. Doing this and that. Then a stop. From the soupy fog of non-existence emerges a small and insignificant episode: a lost wallet, a word overheard somewhere, an image – a tree, a bench, a house – and then it all dissolves like so much steam. How many of these blanks were there, where did they come from, who could say? And isn’t it a hundred times stranger to think that all those tiny trinkets of odd, half-aged feelings come from memory’s neglected, ransacked drawer, forever confirming that the small freckled urchin, feverishly playing bottle caps and up to all sorts of pranks, and you – a mature, staid, reasonable fellow – are two links of one and the same chain, bound with the dubious glue of a surname on a certificate?
There was a sizable library in three long hallways on the third floor of the Lazarist fathers’ gymnasium. Strong oak shelves stacked with the spines of solid, leather-bound volumes stretched from floor to ceiling. It was like wandering through a forest with not a single clearing to be found. The pathways and hidden roads were known to one man only, the librarian, Father Ignatz. Students were only admitted to this seclusion from sixth form on, and the visitors could easily be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most were intimidated by the impenetrable thicket of books.
When P’an arrived here for the first time, at sixteen years of age, his heart sank. So many books – and he had to read them all? Would there be enough time? He soon took heart. At first there seemed no way to get a handle on them all, but the numbers gradually began to diminish. Others had come to grips with them, why couldn’t he? Above all, there was no time to waste. He could get by with less sleep. Six hours a day was enough. That was already two extra hours. He decided to begin at one end and systematically work his way through all the shelves. He soon started to be a bit more selective. He could pretty much skip all the Jesus folklore. The shelves slowly began to thin out.
Amid the treatises, the dissertations of saintly fathers, he stumbled across a book that interested him more than the others. A pious “father” was exposing a contemporary heresy that went by the name of “Socialism.”
He read the book carefully, and when he finished, he began all over.
There are people, a cult, who want to measure everything by work. The principle was straight out of St. Pauclass="underline" “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” Take the riches away from the rich and turn it into public property. Do away with private property and divvy it up among everybody according to their work.
He considered this for a long time. Then he began diligently searching for more detailed information. He combed the whole library. He found nothing. By chance, in the notes inside a bulky volume, he came across another mention of the mysterious cult. The author quoted bits from a work that was clearly written by the ringleader and founder of this dangerous heresy. His name was Marx.
He decided to find the book at any cost. He flipped through the entire card catalogue himself. The author quoted was missing. For a long time he debated whether to ask the librarian. Finally, he plucked up the courage. He asked. Father Ignatz flapped his arms:
“It’s a sin to ask for such books! All that is the devil’s work. Say more prayers and don’t forget to fast!”
That was all he found out.
He decided to ask around in bookstores. Easier said than done. He had no money. Nor anywhere to get some. He had nothing to sell – he didn’t own anything. What to do? He thought for a long time, but couldn’t come up with anything. Then he got up and went into a corner, toward some dusty shelves that even Father Ignatz never browsed through. The shelves were piled high with messes of thick folios in old, musty bindings. He took down the first book in Old Chinese and weighed it in his hand. He smiled to himself. Theft? Some witty Romans in a hostile land had once called it “acquiring fodder.” It would be interesting to know the history of the book, how it got there. One might assume the methods were not entirely Christian. A smile on his face, he tucked the book under his shirt and slipped downstairs.
The half-dark room of the secondhand bookseller’s in the remote Chinese district reeked of mildew and centuries of decay, and the dust on the potbellied porcelain vases lay piled in layers, as befits dust, until you could read the genealogy of the centuries in the number of layers, like the rings of a felled tree. The bespectacled, myopic bookseller scrutinized the book for a long time, running his nose across it, as if judging its antiquity by its smell. He paid three taels and carried the book off to his lair.
P’an ran with the money to the European bookstores. But the book was nowhere to be found. Feeling discouraged, he wandered deep into the Chinese district to search for it. In one of the Chinese bookstores that sold European titles, the bookseller said: