As the evening wore on, and as he drank ever more copiously, especially toward the end, the pleasure of lording it over us and his pride in coming from the capital pushed him to reveal ever more frightful secrets. He probably said too much, but even so none of his words was without weight, for you could sense that they gave a faithful representation of reality. When we broached the threat from the north, he snorted with laughter as thunderously as ever before. “War with the nomads? How can you be so naÏve, my poor dear civil servants, as to believe in such nonsense? The Wall rebuilding project? It’s got nothing to do with the prospect of battle! On the contrary, it’s the first article of the secret pact with the Barbarians. Why are you looking at me with the glassy stare of a boiled cod? Yes, that’s right, the repair work was one of the Barbarians’ demands.”
“Oh, no!” my deputy groaned, as he put his head between his hands.
Our visitor went on in more measured manner. To be sure, China had raised the Wall to protect itself from the nomadic hordes, but so much time had passed since then that things had undergone a profound change.
“Yes,” he said, “things have changed a lot. It’s true China was afraid of the Barbarians for many a long year, and at some future time she may well have reason to fear them again. But there have also been periods when the Barbarians were afraid of China. We’re in one such period right now. The Barbarians are afraid of China. And that’s why they asked, quite firmly, for the Wall to be rebuilt.”
“But that’s crazy!” my deputy said. “To be afraid of a state and at the same time ask it to strengthen its defenses makes no sense at all!”
“Heavens above!” our visitor exclaimed. “Why are you so impatient? Let me finish my explanation. . You stare at me with your big eyes, you interrupt me like a flock of geese, all because you don’t know what’s at the bottom of it. The key to the puzzle is called: fear. Or to be more precise, it is the nature of that fear. . Now, listen carefully, and get it into your heads: China’s fear and the Barbarians’ fear, though they are both called fear in Chinese, are not the same thing at all. China fears the destructive power of the Barbarians; the Barbarians fear the softening effects of China. Its palaces, its women, its silk. All of that in their eyes spells death, just as the lances and dust of the nomads spell the end for China. That’s how this strange Wall, which rises up as an obstacle between them, has sometimes served the interests of one side, and sometimes the other. Right now it’s the nomads’ turn.”
The thought of insulting him to his face or calling him an impostor, a clown, and a bullshitter, left my mind for good. Like everything else he’d said so far, this had to be true. I had a vague memory of Genghis Khan’s conquest of China. He overthrew our emperors and put his own men in their place, then turned on those same men because they had apparently gone soft. Had Yan Jey, one of our ministers, not been convicted a few years back for having asserted, one evening after dinner, that the last four generations of the Ming dynasty, if not its entire ascendance as well, were basically Mongol?
So the repairs to the Wall had been requested by the Barbarians. Timur, with more foresight than his predecessors, had decided that invading China was not only pointless but impossible. What China loses by the sword it retakes by silk. So Timur had chosen to have the border closed, instead of attacking. This is what explains the calm that settled over both sides of the Wall as soon as the delegation came over. What the rest of us had ascribed so unthinkingly to an enigma, to frivolousness, even to a hallucination engendered by penis-enlarging mirrors, was actually the straightforward outcome of a bilateral accord.
That night a swarm of thoughts buzzed in my head. States are always either wiser or more foolish than we think they are. Snatches of conversation with officials who had been posted on the other side came back to me, but I now saw them in a different light. The ghost of Genghis Khan has weakened, I used to hear from people who’d carried out espionage in the northlands. But we heard them without paying much attention, telling ourselves: These are just tales of the Barbarians. They’ve gone softer, then become hardened again, and taking that sort of thing seriously is like trying to interpret the shapes made by flights of storks in the sky. But that was not right at all. Something really was going on out there on the gray steppe, and the more I thought about it the more important it seemed. A great change was taking hold of the world. Nomadism was on its last legs, and Timur, the man whom the heavens had had the whimsy to make lame, was there to establish a new balance of power. He had brought a whole multitude of peoples to follow a single religion, Islam, and now he was trying to settle them in a territory that could be made into a state. The numerous incursions of these different nations, which had previously seemed incomprehensible, would now probably come to a halt on the surface of the earth, though it was not at all clear whether that was a good thing or bad, since you can never be sure whether a Barbarian contained is more dangerous than one let loose. . I imagined Timur standing like a pikestaff at the very heart of Asia and all around him nomadic peoples barely responding to his exhortations to stop their wild forays. .
From the high battlements, I could see a whole section of the Wall that the moonlight seemed to split open throughout its length. I tried to imagine Timur’s reaction when he was first shown a sketch of it. Surely he must have thought: I’ll knock it down, raze it, plant grass over it so its line can never be recovered. Then, pondering how to protect his monastically strict kingdom from the softening wind of permissiveness, he must have said to himself that Heaven itself could not have presented him with a gift more precious than that Wall. .
Next day, before dawn, when our visitor mounted his chariot to be on his way, I was tempted to ask him just what the Number 22 Department of Music was, but for reasons I’m unsure of I felt embarrassed to do so. Not so much politeness, I guess, as the fear of hearing some new abomination. “May you break your damn neck!” my deputy cursed as the four-in-hand clattered noisily away between two heaps of rubble. Feeling vanquished, we looked out over a landscape that, despite having sated our eyes for years on end, now looked quite different. We had cursed our guest by wishing his chariot would turn end over end, but in fact it was he who had already taken his revenge by turning our minds upside down.
So the Wall was not what we had thought it was. Apparently frozen in time and unmovable in place while all beneath it shifted with the wind — borders, times, alliances, even eternal China herself — the Wall was actually quite the opposite. It was the Wall that moved. More faithless than a woman, more changeable than the clouds in the sky, it stretched its stony body over thousands of leagues to hide that it was an empty shell, a wrap around an inner void.
Each day that passed was ever more wearisome, and we came to realize to what degree we had become part and parcel of the Wall. We cursed it as we felt, now that it had betrayed us, how much more suffering it was bringing us. Our visitor’s prediction that the Wall would one day serve China again was a meager consolation, as was the other view, namely that the Wall’s inner changes were perhaps what constituted its real strength, for without them it would have been nothing more than a lifeless corpse.
When I looked at it in the early mornings, all covered with frost, I was overcome with gloomy thoughts. It would certainly survive us all. It would look just the same — gray and mysterious — even when all humanity had disappeared. It would rust on humanity’s cadaver, like the bangle on my aunt who had been rotting six feet under for years.