The Girl Who Played Go (16 page)

Min’s mother faints.

Min doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t look at anyone. For him there is nothing except for the rustling of the grass, the quiet song of the insects and the breeze on the back of his neck.

Is he thinking about me-his child inside me?

The soldiers load their rifles.

Min turns his head and stares hungrily at the person to his left. I eventually realize that it is Tang! They smile at each other. Min leans painfully towards her and manages to put his lips to the young girl’s mouth.

The shots crackle loudly.

My ears buzz and I can smell rust mingled with sweat. Is that the smell of death? I sway as my stomach contracts and I bend forward to vomit.

Orchid, my Manchurian prostitute, is slumped in her chair, sulking.

“You’ve changed,” she says.

I lie down on her bed, but instead of undressing me, as she usually does, she waves her handkerchief.

“You used to come to see me every two or three days, but you haven’t been here for almost two weeks. Have you met someone new?”

“I haven’t seen anyone except you since I’ve been garrisoned here,” I try to reason, though there are hardly any grounds for her to be jealous.

In fact her charms have had no effect on me for a while. I find her skin coarse, her flesh flaccid and our couplings more and more boring.

“I don’t believe you,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I love you and you love someone else.”

“You’re being stupid. I could leave tomorrow and never set foot in this town again. I’ll be killed one day. Why do you love me? You shouldn’t get attached to someone who’s just passing through. Love someone who can marry you. Forget about me.”

She cries all the more bitterly and I find her tears arousing. I push her onto the bed and take off her dress.

As she lies beneath me, Orchid’s face begins to flush and she shudders and gasps between her sobs. I ejaculate, but the climax no longer has the intensity it once did.

Orchid lies next to me smoking and waving a fan with her free hand. I too light a cigarette.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks me gloomily.

I do not answer. The white cigarette smoke, dispersed by the fan, rises slowly towards the ceiling in a series of scrolled waves.

“Is she Chinese or Japanese?” she insists.

I jump to my feet.

As I wander the streets, my whole body is stiff with horror.

“Go home,” says Huong.

“Leave me alone.”

“Please, go home.”

“I hate my home.”

“Well, cry then. Let it all out, please,” she begs me.

“I don’t have any tears.”

She buys some stuffed rolls from a peddler and says, “Well, eat then!”

“They smell horrible.”

“What makes you say that? They smell good.”

“They’re rotten. Can’t you smell the vegetables are bitter? It’s like blood. Oh, please throw them away or…” My stomach lurches and I am sick. Terrified, Huong throws the rolls to some cats stalking nearby.

I curl up on myself and hear Huong saying, “Jing is alive.” But this good news is not enough for me.

“I’m carrying a dead man’s baby. I’ll have to kill myself.”

“You’ve gone mad!” she says, shaking me by my shoulders. “You’re mad! Tell me you’re delirious!”

I don’t answer.

“Well then, hang yourself,” she says, hiding her face in her hands, “no one can save you.” Then after a long silence she adds, “Have you seen a doctor? It could be nothing.”

“I don’t trust anyone,” I say.

“I’ll find you a doctor.”

“What’s the point? Min’s betrayed me. I have to die.”

The Chinese girl arrived before me and she has put the stones out on the board. Her eyes are swollen and they have dark shadows under them; she has not combed her hair but rolled it haphazardly into a simple chignon. She has slippers on her feet. She looks ill, like a patient just escaped from a hospital.

As I play she stares at the branches of a willow tree; the look in her eye is disturbing. Then she takes her handkerchief out and puts it over her mouth and nose as if she is feeling sick.

Being so obsessive about cleanliness I am tortured to think that I smell and that this is what is bothering her. I breathe in deeply: all I can smell is the rotting grass, a sign that rain is on the way.

Can she smell Orchid’s perfume on me? The prostitute uses so much, perhaps trying to leave her mark on me.

The sky has darkened and a clammy wind whisks up the leaves. The players pack their stones noisily, but the Chinese girl is lost in thought and does not move. When I point out that we are the only players left on the square, she says nothing but makes a note of our new positions on her sheet of paper, and leaves without saying good-bye.

Her strange behavior arouses my suspicion and so I get up, hail a rickshaw and, hiding under its awning, tell the boy to follow her. She walks down the dusky market streets: traders taking down their stands, women bringing in their washing and pedestrians jostling past each other. Swallows under the canopies give out their little cries of distress. The sky is black, and fat raindrops begin to fall to the ground. Soon torrents of water are beating down on us, accompanied by thunderclaps.

The Chinese girl stops on the edge of a wood. I get out of the rickshaw and hide behind a tree as she dives into the green mist, her slender silhouette occasionally lit by the flashes of lightning. There is a silvery ribbon snaking through the branches, a river, swollen with rainwater, flowing east in a series of tiny whirlpools and brief sparkling reflections. On the horizon it becomes a wide expanse of black, which forges into the cleft of the sky.

The Chinese girl slips through the trees to the seething waters, and I launch myself after her. Then she stops suddenly and I must grind to a halt and throw myself on the ground.

The young girl’s stillness challenges the seething, effervescent river. In quick succession nearly a dozen thunderclaps rumble overhead. The trees bend in the fierce wind; a branch snaps and tears the trunk as it falls.

Scenes of the earthquake come back to me.

The smell of blood has insinuated itself into my body. It burrows under my tongue and streams out of my nose as I exhale. It follows me to bed.

I wash in a basin of water, soaping my face, my neck and my hands, all impregnated with the fetid smell of death. Outside it is raining. Why do the gods shed so many tears on our world? Are they weeping for me? Why don’t these torrents from the skies wash away our suffering and our impurity?

I drop down onto my bed. The halting breath of the wind is like the whisper of ghosts as they rise up and recede. Could it be Min with Tang roaring with laughter?

Were they shut in the same cell? Did they hold hands as they watched their lives flowing like a river into the abyss? Had they kissed before I met Min? Had they made love? When she was free she probably wouldn’t have given herself to him, but on their last night did they not couple, cheek to cheek, forehead to forehead, wound to wound as the guard looked on?

She took him into her belly and into her soul. He penetrated her on his knees, in penitence, he held her to him with all his might… his seed flowed, their blood mingled. She gave herself to him and he gave her deliverance.

I jump to my feet.

Min betrayed me, I must kill myself.

The Chinese girl turns around.

She walks like a ghost away from the river and out of the woods. All the deserted streets look the same under the driving rain; still the girl walks on-sometimes steady and upright, sometimes small and hunched-drawing me towards another world.

Suddenly she disappears and I rush backwards and forwards looking for her… in vain.

A rickshaw emerges from the mist and agrees to take me to the Chidori restaurant. Captain Nakamura is waiting for me in a private room, and he suggests we drink a toast to our glorious Emperor. After three glasses of sake and a few mouthfuls of raw fish, I stand up and bow deeply before announcing, “Captain, I have failed in the mission you have entrusted to me. May I ask that you punish me severely for this failure.”

A smile plays in the corners of his mouth.

“Captain,” I go on, “I am quite incapable of telling the difference between a spy and a peaceful citizen. I sit about on the Square of a Thousand Winds, forgetting my duties and playing go!”

He empties his glass of
sake.
He looks me in the eye and says very slowly and deliberately, “Zhuang Zi
^[17]
says, ‘When you lose a horse, you never know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.’ An intelligent man never wastes his time.” Then he pauses briefly before adding, “Did you know, Lieutenant, I was once in love with a Chinese girl?”

I flush, wondering why he has made this strange confession.

“I came to China fifteen years ago, to Tian Jing, where I was taken on to work in a Japanese restaurant run by a couple from Kobe. I did the washing-up, the cleaning, a bit of waiting at tables, and I was given bed and board in a tiny room. In what little spare time I had, I would sit at the window. On the other side of the street there was a Chinese restaurant famous for its stuffed dumplings. A young girl used to go in at dawn carrying provisions and she came back out late in the evening, carrying the dustbins. I was near-sighted, so I could barely make out her slim shape and the long plait down her back. She wore red-it was like watching a walking pillar of fire. When she stopped I always felt she turned to look up at me, and through the haze I thought I could make out a smile-which made my heart beat faster.”

The Captain stops to refill my glass and drinks his own down in one. His face is getting steadily redder.

“One day,” he carries on, “I found the courage to go into the restaurant pretending that I wanted to order one of their specialties. She was behind the counter and as I approached her I discovered her face, slowly, one feature at a time. She had thick eyebrows and black eyes. I asked her for some stuffed dumplings but, as she didn’t understand Japanese, I had to draw them on a piece of paper. She leaned over my shoulder to look and her plait slipped forward, brushing past my cheek.”

Another bottle is brought to the table, it is our fifth. The wind has died outside and the thunder has fallen silent, but we can still hear the regular patter of the rain.

“She couldn’t even write her own name in Chinese,” he continued. “We had no means of communication, but we spent our days catching each other’s eye across the road, which seemed so wide to us, and we never tired of it. I could only make out the red of her clothes and the black of her plait, I had to reconstruct her face in my mind, having only glimpsed it. I was poor and the only gifts I could offer her were little bunches of wildflowers picked along the edge of the road, which I threw under the window of the restaurant. In the evening she would give me stuffed dumplings fresh from the oven. I couldn’t bring myself to bite into these delicacies crafted by her hands, so I would keep them until they rotted.

“One day it rained all afternoon, as it has today. Lots of customers had taken refuge in the restaurant, to eat warm noodles. It was after midnight when I got outside, and someone threw their arms round my neck-it was her. Goodness knows how long the Chinese girl had been waiting for me in that dark corner; her face was frozen, so were her lips. She was shivering from head to foot and, because of the rain, I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying. Weighed down by her, I leaned against the wall. As we kissed we whispered words of love to each other, each in his own language, and the rain drowned out what we were saying. I forgot the cold, the dark and the weather.”

The Captain sinks into a long silence, then looks up angrily to order another bottle. His hand shakes as he fills our glasses, and the sake spills over his clothes, but he doesn’t notice. I can feel the blood hammering in my temples; I follow the Captain’s story with all the unrestrained fascination of a drunkard. And he is struggling to speak… What terrible tragedy struck this man who now lives alone?

“The next day I went to a Japanese shop with all my savings in my pocket. I didn’t have enough to buy a kimono-a beautiful obi
^[18]
had to do. Without realizing it, I was pouring poison onto our love with this present. Our relationship was soon discovered and a month later the Chinese girl disappeared without a trace.”

A painful silence weighs down on our table.

“Later, after I joined the army, I found out what had happened to her. The restaurant had closed years before and the owners, who turned out to be Chinese spies, had disappeared into thin air. When they’d found out that their servant was involved with a Japanese man, they’d condemned her to death…

The moon is no more

Only I, I alone

he recites. And then he weeps.

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?

After class Huong drags me over to a quiet corner.

“I’ve found you a doctor,” she says, “come with me.”

“Who is it? How did you find him?”

She looks round but the room is empty, we are the last to leave, so she whispers in my ear, “Do you remember the matron in my dormitory who let me slip over the wall? Yesterday I told her that I was pregnant and looking for a doctor.”

“You’re mad! If she starts gossiping, you’ll be expelled and your father will make you shave your head and send you away to the temple!”

“Don’t worry, I also told her that if she talked I would report her to the police for living off immoral earnings. I would tell the police that, to get money from the girls at school, she drove them into prostitution. Not only would she lose her job, but she would be hanged in public. I gave the old bat such a fright that she didn’t waste any time finding me the discreetest of doctors.”