It was probably a wise move on their part, since by making off to the hills, they would spare themselves the officials’ whip, at the very least, not to mention many other punishments of every kind. I’d never understood why they constantly take masonry from the Wall to build their hovels and yards, knowing full well that they would have to bring it back to rebuild the Wall.
The process, they tell me, has been going on for hundreds of years. Like the skein of wool used to make a scarf — which is then unpicked to knit a sweater, which is then undone to knit another scarf, and so on — the Wall’s great stones have made the return trip many times from peasant hovel to Wall and back again. In some places, you can still see streaks of soot, which predictably fire the fantasies of tourists and foreign plenipotentiaries, who can’t imagine that the marks are not the trace of some heroic clash but only smoke stains from hearths where, for many a long year, some nameless yokel cooked his thin and tasteless gruel.
So when we heard this afternoon that the peasants had abandoned their dwellings, we guessed that the whole of China had already heard news of the call to rebuild the Wall.
Although it was a symptom of heightened tension, the repair work did not yet add up to war. Unlike armed conflict, rebuilding was such a frequent occurrence that the Great Wall’s middle name could have easily been: Rebuilt. Generally speaking, it was less a wall in any proper sense than an infinite succession of patches. People went so far as to pretend that it was in just such a manner the Wall had come into being in the first place — as a repair job on an older wall, which was itself the remaking of another, even older, wall, and so on. The suggestion was even made that at the very beginning the original wall stood at the center of the state; but from one repair to another, it had gradually moved ever closer to the border, where, like a tree that’s finally been replanted in the right soil, it grew to such a monstrous size it terrified the rest of the world. Even people who could not imagine the Wall without the nomads sometimes wondered whether it was their presence that had led to the building of the Wall, or whether it was the Wall rising up all along the border that had conjured up the nomads.
If we had not seen the coming of the Barbarian delegation with our own eyes, and then seen it going again, we might have been among the few who would have attributed this rise in tension (like most previous events of this kind) to the disagreements that frequently flare up inside the country, even at the very center of the state. Smugly content to know a truth lost in an ocean of lies, we would have spent long evenings constructing all kinds of hypotheses about what would happen next and about the plots that could have been hatched in the palace, plots with such secret and intricate workings that even their instigators would have had a hard time explaining them, or emanating from jealousies so powerful that people said they could shatter ladies’ mirrors at dusk, and so on and so forth.
But it had all happened under our noses: the nomads had come and gone beneath our very feet. We could still recall the polychrome borders of their tunics and the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves — not forgetting the expression “Barbarians always go back over in the end” uttered by my deputy, along with his sighs and his blank stare.
In any other circumstance we could have felt, or at least feigned, a degree of doubt, but this time we realized there were no grounds for such an attitude. However tiresome winter evenings may be, we could find better ways of filling them than fabricating alternative reasons for the state’s anxiety apart from the coming of the Barbarians.
A vague feeling of apprehension is coming down to us from the northlands. Right now the issue is not whether this state of heightened tension derives from the existence of a real external threat. From now on, and this is more than obvious, the only real question is whether there really will be war.
The first stonemasons have arrived, but most of them are still on the road. Some people claim forty thousand of them are on their way; others give an even higher figure. This is definitely going to be the most important restoration of the last few centuries.
The call of the wild goose awakes the immensity of the void. Yesterday, as I was looking out over the wastes to the north, this line from a poet whose name I forget came back to me. For some time now, fear of the void has been by far the greatest form of apprehension I feel. They say the nomads now have a single leader, a successor to Genghis Khan, and that amid the swirling confusion and dust that is the Barbarians’ lot, he is trying to set up a state. For the time being we have no details about the leader except that he is lame. All that has reached us here, even before the man’s name, is his limp.
These last few days, nomads have been emerging from the mist like flocks of jackdaws and then vanishing again. It’s clear that they’re keeping an eye on the repair work. I am convinced that the Wall, without which we could not imagine how to survive, is for them an impossible concept, and that it must disturb them as deeply as the northern emptiness troubles us.
I’ve been told to gallop and gallop and never stop watching over it, but it’s endless and always the same, stone on stone, stone under stone, stone to the left, stone to the right, all bound in mortar, however much I gallop, the stones never change, always the same, just like that damn snow that was always the same when we chased Toktamish across Siberia at the end of the Year of the Dog, when Timur, our Khan kuturdi-lar, told us: “Hold on in there, men, because it’s only snow, it’s only pretending to be cold like a conceited bitch, but just you wait, it’ll turn soft and wet before long.” But this army of stones is much more harmful, it won’t flake or melt, and it’s in my way, I don’t understand why the Khan doesn’t give us the order to attack that pile of rubble and take it down, the way we did at Chubukabad when we laid our hands on the Sultan Bayazed Yaldrem and the Khan sent us this yarlik: “Honor to you who have captured Thunder, no matter that you have not yet handcuffed the heavens entire, but that will come”; then, like at Akshehir during the Year of the Tiger when we buried our prisoners alive, all bent double as in their mothers’ wombs, the Khan kuturdilar told us: “If they’re innocent, as Qatshi the Magician believes, then Mother Earth, whose womb is more generous that that of a woman, will give them a second birth.” Oh! those were the good times, but our Khan hasn’t sent any more yarliks asking us to raze everything to the ground, and the chiefs, when they assemble to hold a palaver in the kurultai, claim that what people call towns are only coffins we must be careful never to enter, because once you’re in you can never get out, that’s what they say, but still the yarlik of destruction keeps on failing to come, all I get is that never-ending order over and over again just like the accursed stones: “Nomad, keep watch!”
Repair work is apparently proceeding along the entire northwestern stretch of the Wall. Every week parties of stonemasons arrive, gaily flaunting the many-colored flags and banners from their province (the regions of the Empire compete with each other to send the largest work detail to the Wall), but nowhere can any troop movements be seen. Nomad lookouts flit across the horizon as before, but because the fog has thickened in the winter season, we often cannot make them out very clearly, neither the rider nor the horse, so that they look less like horsemen than mutilated body parts from who-knows-which battlefield whipped by wild gusts of wind into a flying swarm.