What is happening is like a puzzle. At first sight, you might think it a mere maneuver, each camp trying to show its strength by displaying contempt for the other. But if you consider matters with a clear mind, you can see they contain perfectly illogical elements. I do believe it is the first time there has ever been such a gap between the Wall and the capital. I had always imagined they were indissolubly connected, and that was not only when I was working in the capital, but even before then, when I was a mere minor official in the remotest valleys of Tibet. I always knew they had tugged on each other the way they say the moon does on the tide. What I learned when I came here was that while the Wall is able to move the capital — in other words, it can draw it toward itself or else push it farther away — the capital has no power to shift the Wall. At most, it can try to move away, like a fly trying to avoid the spider’s web, or else come right up close so as to nestle in its bosom, like a person quaking with fear; but that’s all it can do.
In my view, the Wall’s forces of attraction and repulsion are what explain the movements of the capital of China over the last two centuries — its shift to the south of the country, when it went to Nanking, as far away from the Wall as possible, and then its return to the north, to the closest possible location, when it came back to Beijing, which for the third time assumed its role as China’s capital city.
I have been racking my brains these last few days trying to find a more accurate explanation for what is going on at the moment. Sometimes I think the wobble, if I can use that word, results directly from the proximity of the capital Orders can be countermanded more easily than if the capital were, say, four or five months away — when the second carriage bearing news of the cancellation of the order either fails to catch up with the first carriage or, because of excessive speed or its driver’s anxiety, the carriage tips over, or else the first one crashes, or they both do, and so on.
Yesterday evening, as we were chatting away (it was one of those exquisitely relaxed conversations that often arise after time spent hidden from the view of others and thus seem all the more precious), my deputy declared that if not only the capital but China herself were to move, the Wall would not budge an inch. “And what’s more,” he added casually, “there is proof of what I say.” Indeed, we could both easily recall that in the one thousand or so years that have elapsed since the Wall was built, China has more than once spilled out over its borders, leaving the Wall all alone and without meaning in the midst of the gray steppe, and it has shrunk back inside the same number of times.
I remembered an aunt who in childhood had had a bracelet put on her arm, a bangle. As she grew plumper, the bracelet, forgotten but left in place, became almost buried in her flesh. It seemed to me that something of the same kind had happened to China. The Wall had alternately squeezed her tight, and loosened its grip. For some years now, it had seemed about right for her size. As for the future, who could say? Each time I saw my aunt, I recalled the story of her bangle, which continued to obsess me. I really don’t know why I could not stop thinking of what would have happened if the bangle had not been taken off in time, and, taking things to their limit, I could hear it jangling incessantly after her death, hanging all too loosely on the wrist of her skeleton. . I lay my head in my hands, embarrassed at having imagined China herself decomposing with a trivial adornment around her wrist.
It was a starless night, but the moonlight gave off such a strong sense of indolence that you could believe that in the morning everyone would abandon all activity — that nomads, birds, and even states would lie flat out, exhausted, as lifeless as corpses laid out beside each other, as we two then were.
We have at last learned the name of the nomad chief: he is called Timur i Leng, which means Timur the Lame. He is said to have waged a fearsome war against the Ottomans, and after having captured their king — called Thunder — had him paraded from one end of the vast steppes to the other.
Apparently, before long he’ll be going after us next. Now it is all becoming clearer — the order for the rebuilding of the Wall, as well as the temporary calm which we all hastened to describe as a “puzzle,” as we do for anything we can’t understand in the workings of the state. While he was dealing with the Turks, the one-legged terror did not constitute a threat. But now. .
A returning messenger who stopped here last night brought us disturbing news. In the western marches of our Empire, right opposite our Wall and barely a thousand feet from it, the Barbarians had built a kind of tower, made not from stone but from severed heads. The edifice as it was described to us was not tall — about as high as two men — and from a military point of view it was no threat at all to the Wall, but the terror those heads exude is more effective than a hundred fortresses. Despite the meetings with soldiers and stonemasons, where it was explained that the pile was, in comparison to our Wall, no more significant than a scarecrow (the crows that nonetheless swarmed around it had actually suggested the comparison), everyone, soldiers included, felt the wind of panic pass through them. “I’ve never had so many letters to take to the capital,” the messenger declared as he patted his leather saddlebag. He said most of the epistles had been penned by officers’ wives, writing to their aristocratic lady friends to report intolerable migraines and so forth, which was a way of asking them to please see if they could get their husbands transferred to another posting.
The messenger also said that the pestilential air that this pile of heads exhaled was so unbearable that for the first time in its existence the Wall had apparently contracted, and the messenger had prayed to God that the rebuilding work which had been launched at such an opportune moment should be completed as quickly as possible.
The messenger’s tale left us all utterly depressed. Without admitting it to ourselves, we were aware that we would henceforth cast a quite different eye on the Wall’s damaged parts, on its cracks and crumbly patches. Our minds obstinately kept turning toward the pile of severed heads. Once the messenger had left, my deputy pointed out that the wise old saying “Skull on stone breaks nothing but bone” — a phrase whose brushstrokes we mastered at primary school thanks to our teacher’s liberal use of the rod — had become obsolete. The way things looked now, heads seemed more likely than anything else to be the weapon of choice against the Wall.
No troop movements on the border. A brutal earthquake has shaken everything except the Wall, which has long known how to cope with seismic disturbances. The silence that reigned after that last shock subsided seemed deeper than ever. . I have the impression that the rebuilding work is being done none too carefully and just for show. The day before the quake, the building used as a watchtower, on our right, collapsed again, after having already been erected twice. It all leads me to think that treason has crept into the imperial palace. My deputy has a different view. He has long been convinced that people in the capital are so deeply immersed in pleasure and debauchery that few of them ever think of the existence of nomads and frontiers. Only yesterday he was telling me that he’d heard people say that a new kind of mirror has been invented — mirrors that more than double the size of a man’s penis. Ladies take them into their bedchambers to arouse themselves before making love.