传言

Eighth of May, 2038, a Saturday, ten in the morning, Tarim township, Kuqa. The two apricot trees hung with green fruit, some like fingernails, some like pigeons' eggs; the vines on the trellis putting out new shoots, the leaves still glossy. Yiming lay in the inner room, the bed moved under the window so he could see the yard table and the folded white cloth weighted with a stone. Thinner: cheekbones against skin, hands on the quilt veined like vine; a thin tube under his nose to a humming oxygen machine. Kamil on a stool at the head of the bed, one ear almost at his father's mouth, hearing each sentence two or three times. Eli back overnight from Aksu, where he'd been helping Luo Jianguo mend the scale platform; on his knees the notebook, the brass-barrelled blue pen and a stub of pencil. On the bedside table a palm-sized black recorder, red light on, bought in town because I asked: "Whatever you can't translate, someone later can." Yiming opened his eyes, found me, and the corner of his mouth moved: "You've come. The cells are waiting." Then a long sentence broken by breath: "Fifty-two cells you all know. There's one you don't. Not on the shelves. In the wall."

At the gate a handcart: on its straw mat an old man, all bones, his white beard to his chest; pulling it, a sweating middle-aged woman in coarse cloth. He spoke as though through a mouthful of water; she put her ear to his mouth and said for him: "My father says you're passing words on in there too." Master Fu, of Jinan; "I'm Xi'e. He speaks, I pass it on." Inside, Kamil had his ear to his father's mouth: the same posture exactly. Her father kept an ancient book of the old kings, of floods and calendars; when books could not be kept he walled it up; when the wars were over he opened the wall: insects and damp had taken most, a hundred chapters down to twenty-nine. The court sent a young archivist to receive it from a man of ninety with no teeth; she relayed; "our Qi speech and his Yingchuan speech were far apart; two or three parts in ten he didn't understand." And those? Her father, urgently: "He guessed. Read on by what he took to be the sense, and wrote it down."

Yiming wouldn't be carried; he directed by video from bed: seventh block in from the door, third course up. The mud round that brick was paler, thinner, applied later. Behind it a foot-deep hole; in it a cloth bag rotted to grey flakes; Eli slid both hands under it and inched it out onto the white cloth, where its bottom gave way: raisins dried to pebbles, some to dust, and a folded paper, yellow, brittle, insect-holed. Old-style Uyghur script, half illegible. A long silence from the phone, a long cough, then: "This is my father's. In 1984, at nineteen, my father gave me a house to hang myself; I sealed a handful, the first cell in this room. I didn't know that year he sealed a handful too and walled it in. Before he died in the summer of 1999 he told me: there's a bag in the wall, mine, sealed with your first. Open it when you're old. I never opened it. I always felt I wasn't old enough yet." Thirty-nine years beside that wall, and he never touched the brick. — M.

Memo to file. Kuqa, 8 May 2038. What gets lost in the passing.

1. The relay. Yiming speaks; Kamil, ear at his mouth, hears it twice or three times and translates; Eli writes. A recorder runs on the bedside table, at my request: "Whatever you can't translate, someone later can."

2. The fifty-third. "Fifty-two cells you know. One you don't. Not on the shelves. In the wall."

3. The precedent. Master Fu walled up an ancient text when books could not be kept; after years of war, dozens of chapters were gone; twenty-nine survived. At ninety-odd, toothless, he taught it to a court archivist through his daughter: "two or three parts in ten he didn't understand, and he construed them by guessing the sense." Father and daughter at the gate, in exactly Kamil's posture.

4. The wall. By video from bed: seventh block from the door, third course up. Paler, thinner mud. A foot-deep niche; a bag rotted to grey flakes; on the white cloth the bottom gave way: raisins like pebbles, some dust, and a brittle insect-holed paper in old Uyghur script.

5. Whose. Yiming's father, 1984: the year his son, nineteen, first hung a house alone and sealed the room's first cell, the father sealed a handful too and walled it in, telling no one until just before his death in the summer of 1999: "Open it when you're old." "I never opened it. I always felt I wasn't old enough." Thirty-nine years.

6. The word. Line three: a word Kamil couldn't translate even after his father explained, coughing: "an old word for something in the drying house used when hanging; I think my grandfather said it; nobody calls it that now." Eli: write it roughly, "some tool for hanging"? No. "Write: one word here not understood; Kamil: an old name for something used for hanging in the drying house; original in the recording at minute eleven. Write what you don't know, not what you guess." He switched from pencil to blue.

7. Master Fu's verdict. Through Xi'e: "If someone had said that to Chao Cuo! What he guessed, later people read as my father's words for two thousand years; some right, some not; nobody can tell which were my father's and which were his guesses." "What the relay can't carry over is no shame. The shame is filling it with your own guess so well that it looks real, and those after can never find the original again."

8. The text (seven lines; three insect holes, one word not understood). "My son's first year's hanging will be sour. (insect hole, two characters missing) afraid. My first year's was sour too. The second year (one word not understood, see recording minute 11) move it up a little and the sun (insect hole, one character) . This bag: open it when he is old. When he opens it he will know his father was sour once too. (insect hole, half a line missing). My hands are thirty years older than his. His hands will be better than mine one day."

9. After. Kamil put the phone down at the last line and crouched by the wall with his face in his hands. Eli didn't move. Yiming said no more; later Kamil found him asleep, the corners of his mouth turned up.

10. The taste. Eli pinched one unbroken raisin from the wall bag; hard as stone; held in his mouth a long time before he could chew. "Bitter first. Then a little sweet. Not sour any more. Fifty-four years; the sourness has all gone out of it."

11. Copies. Xi'e at the gate: "That box that records is good; if we'd had one, the two or three in ten wouldn't have been lost." At midnight Kamil copied the day's recording to his phone and sent copies to me and to Eli: "One each. It can't be lost now." My notes: each pair of hands loses a little; write "not understood" and the minute, never "roughly"; insect holes recorded as missing characters, as Mao Jin said: filled in looks better, left blank is honest.

12. Next. Two days later, Chengdu. My landlady of ten years, Mrs Qian: "The flat's up at the end of June. The building's being renovated next year; we won't renew. Please move your things out by month's end." Twelve square metres, a bed, a table, a shelf, a Qingshen basket on top; in the cupboard ten years of notebooks, nearly a foot high.

"Of what was said, two or three parts in ten he did not understand, and he simply construed it by guessing the sense."
When the Han court went looking for someone who could still teach the Book of Documents, they found Master Fu of Jinan, over ninety, who had walled up his copy during a time of persecution and recovered only twenty-nine chapters after years of war. Too old to travel and unable to speak clearly, he taught the text to a court archivist through his daughter. A later preface records the cost: the two dialects differed, the archivist missed two or three parts in ten, and he filled the gaps with his own reading of the sense.
Every handover of knowledge loses something at each pair of hands, especially when the last person who knows is old, ill, or speaks a vocabulary no one else uses. The loss itself is unavoidable. What makes it permanent is the confident guess written into the record as though it were the original.
The disciplined alternative is simple and unglamorous: mark what was not understood, keep the original (a recording, a damaged page) where a later reader with more knowledge can return to it, and record physical gaps as gaps.
"Filling it with your own guess so well that it looks real means those after can never find the original again."