The Girl Who Played Go (21 page)

So, here I am facing the board and my stranger.

He looks so ordinary in his slightly outdated tunic, his hat and his glasses, but there is something about him that betrays a change in him. Though he has shaved carefully, the powerful growth of his stubble gives his tanned cheeks a bluish shadow. Nestled between his thick black eyelashes gleam two diamonds with thin ellipses of purple under these sparkling eyes. I remember Min’s eyes held the same fire after he had climaxed inside me.

Embarrassed, I look away. The other tables on the Square of a Thousand Winds are deserted. My countless games of go are rushing back to me: almost forgotten faces merge together in the mask of my opponent’s face. He has the nobility of a man who prefers the turnings of the mind to the barbarities of life.

If I leave with Jing I would be entrusting my new life to him. But I am no longer attracted to him. His dark face used to fire my imagination. His jealousy intoxicated me. The tips of my fingers still recall the smooth, firm feel of his skin that day he gave me a lift on his bicycle. Now he is nothing but a beggar plaguing me.

The convoluted spell that bound Min, Jing and me has been broken. I was fascinated by a hero with two heads: Jing is nothing without Min, and Min wouldn’t have meant anything without Jing. The love of a survivor would stifle me with its weight. How can I explain to him all that remains between us is a nostalgia for a lost happiness and a bit of affectionate pity?

But if I don’t run away today, my mother will force me to see the doctor and he will surely find me out. Huong has chosen to sell herself, but I refuse to see her wearing expensive clothes and an affable little smile. Min is dead and Jing has been struck down, diminished forever. This town is a graveyard. What is there to keep me here?

My opponent leans towards me and whispers, “I’m sorry, I have to go. Can we meet again tomorrow?”

I am devastated by these terribly ordinary words. The game of go has made it possible for me to overcome my pain; one move at a time I have come back to life. If I leave the game now I would be betraying the one man who has remained faithful to me.

Night is falling, reminding me that I have a barracks to get back to and a meeting with Captain Nakamura. The Chinese girl carries on playing in the dark. I am already late, but the thought of being alone with her under a starry sky inspires a breezy whim: “I’m sorry, Captain, you’ll just have to wait.”

Eventually, conscience and self-discipline make up my mind for me to leave. But the girl holds me back.

She lowers her eyes slowly, her eyelids fluttering to the rhythm of her breath, like tiny moths.

“Now that we are alone,” she says, “no one can hear us but the wind. Now, with my eyes closed, here with you in the darkness, I can ask you something that I wouldn’t dare ask you with my eyes open. Tell me, who are you?”

The Chinese girl’s question sets my pulse racing, blood beating against my temples. It feels as if I have been awaiting this deliverance for an eternity. Does she know my secret? Does she just want to know my name and something about me? I am choked with so many different emotions that I cannot speak.

“I have never wondered who my opponents were,” she goes on. “The men who used to sit where you are now have all merged together, and all I can remember is one game of go versus another. Yesterday on that hillside I saw you for the first time. Through your eyes I recognized the land in which you were born: an endless field of snow where trees burn and the flames spread in the wind. The fierceness of the snow and the fire have turned you into an itinerant magician. You heal others by holding their hands between yours, you make them forget the cold, hunger, sickness and war.”

I close my eyes… I am inside my Chinese girl’s body and yet so far away from her. A sadness shivers through me: I do not deserve this love. I am a spy, an assassin!

She has stopped talking. The moon rises in the silence between us. I can hear the trees crying and my own icy voice.

“You are wrong, I am just someone passing through who has been captivated by your intelligence. I am like all the other men who have sat down before you and then disappeared. Forgive me if I went too far yesterday afternoon. I can assure you that it was the first time and it will be the last. I respect you. Please forget what you have just said… you are too young to judge strangers.”

Her mocking laughter comes as a surprise.

“When we started this game your strategies struck me as strange. I was so intrigued that I decided to slip inside your thoughts. Helped by the sheet of paper on which I took note of the moves, I cheated. I would read it over and over in the rickshaw on the way home. It wasn’t to beat you, I wanted to discover you. I have visited your soul, found corners you wouldn’t suspect were there, I have become you and come to understand that you aren’t really yourself.”

I sigh: a few days ago I guessed what she has just admitted to me, and since then winning has meant nothing. The game has become a pretext for seeing my opponent, a lie to justify my weakness.

She is right, I am incapable of being myself, I am just a succession of masks.

“Now that you know what I have done,” she says, “you can stop the game. You can despise me and stop seeing me. Or you could challenge me to a new game. It’s up to you.”

“Up to me?”

“I will do whatever you want.”

I open my eyes wide with amazement and the girl, this girl who plays go, stares at me intently. The anxious look in her eyes reminds me of how Sunlight looked when she invited me to deflower her.

I am suffocating in the heat, drawing labored breath.

“I will soon be leaving for the inner territories. You can’t depend on me anymore.”

“I have to leave town too,” she says in a trembling voice, “I want to go to Peking. Please help me!”

I have to make a decision: she is asking of me the impossible, and yet it would take only a few simple actions. I would just have to raise my arms, take hold of her hands and draw her to me. We could leave for somewhere else.

I do not know how much time has passed. I am still sitting on my chair, paralyzed. The night is so dark that I can hardly see. The darkness erases my shame and incites me to be irrational, but I do not have the courage to challenge the power of fate.

I hear myself in a hard, hoarse voice, a flat intonation that makes my chest explode with pain.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

A long time later I hear the rustling of her dress: she gets up and moves away.

It is strange to look round your own room and wonder which are the most precious things in your life. At sixteen I have brushes for calligraphy, paper and vials of very rare ink given to me by my grandmother. Every year my parents had four dresses made for me. I also have coats, cloaks, muffs, embroidered shoes, patent-leather shoes, bracelets, earrings, brooches and necklaces. I have school uniforms, sports clothes, boxes of crayons, pens and erasers. I have toys, hand puppets, shadow puppets and porcelain animals that I would cry over if I lost one; and books I loved so much I wanted to take them with me to the grave.

There are valuable pieces of furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a screen covered with embroidered silk, an antique canopied bed and a bonsai tree from Cousin Lu. There are mirrors, little boxes of tweezers and manicure kits, a bag of toiletries, antique vases and the calligraphies of my ancestors. There are needles, colored threads, tins of tea, glasses that still bear the imprint of my lips, sheets impregnated with my smell and pillows that cradled my thoughts. There are the frames around the windows that I used to lean against, and the plants in the garden that I caressed with my idle gaze.

Moon Pearl comes up to tell me that supper is ready. She has grown thinner and her face has lost all its expression. I ask her to stay for a while; she sits down at my dressing table without a word and the tears begin to fall.

My last supper at home is sadly ominous: no one speaks. My parents eat without looking at each other, both nursing their guilt over Moon Pearl’s condition. The cook, completely overcome, drops a pair of chopsticks, and the clatter reawakens my sister’s tears. I can easily imagine the evenings after I have left: a gloomy table at which my place will continue to be set (a custom meant to bring back those who are missing); the food that no one touches; my parents’ silence; my sister drowning in her own tears.

I stuff a few things into my bag: some pieces of jewelry to sell, two dresses and some cotton wool to absorb the blood that still trickles between my legs.

I put the two pots of stones down on my table. I want to take one white stone and one black stone with me… Then I decide that I shouldn’t be so sentimental.

I won’t be returning to the Square of a Thousand Winds.

I hardly eat anymore, and I subject my body to ever more demanding training, but still it resists exhaustion. There has not been a drop of rain for days and the relentless bronze sun is driving me insane. My love has been transformed into bestial desire, and in the long, sleepless nights I am like a man slaking his thirst with imaginary water; it sometimes seems that I really am touching her skin, I have imagined it so many times. I draw her face endlessly in my mind’s eye, her neck, her shoulders, her hands… and I invent her breasts, her hips, her buttocks and her open thighs. I imagine the thousand different positions in which I would clasp her to me, each more wild than the last. I touch myself, but my member taunts my aching desire, refusing to release me from my pain.

Soon this nocturnal obsession grips the daytime: I have erections while we go for a run, my voice cracks when I give orders, and the hoarse break at the back of my throat conjures the pleasure that the Chinese girl would have given me. To feel the tightness of her sex around my member would have been the most violently ecstatic form of suffering I could ever experience.

One morning, unable to find any peace, I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds. It is five o’clock and the trees are whispering in a strong breeze, as if a thousand different drafts and breezes had agreed to meet there at the break of day.

The first player appears, with a birdcage in his hand. As he cleans the table and puts down the pots of stones, another man comes over to sit down opposite him.

My heart sinks.

That evening, after getting drunk with the Captain, I knock on Orchid’s door. She has already forgotten all her resentment and slips off her dress at once. It has been a long time since I have touched a woman. Seeing in her the Chinese girl’s nakedness, I discharge into her as violently as emptying the chamber of a gun.

As I wander the streets in the hope of seeing her, this tiny town suddenly seems vast. I try a different brothel, but none of the girls parading past moves me. Still, I go up to Peony’s room with her. Her smile reveals one golden tooth. Her body is fat and very white, and she cries out exuberantly.

At four in the morning a White Russian girl agrees to be slapped as I sit astride her. My belt leaves purple streaks across her skin.

Dawn is breaking, the new day just like any other. I shake a rickshaw boy awake and he takes me to the foot of the Hill of the Seven Ruins. Up the hill the tree under which she slept is clothed in rays of purple light, and it remains true to my memory, but the rest of the scene has lost all its poetry. In the middle of the clearing the grass has grown too high and is beginning to dry out.

Back at the barracks I have forgotten how to harangue my soldiers, how to stand up, even how to sit down. My mind is somewhere else, and nowhere.

That night I am woken by piercing whistles. I open my eyes. My deliverance is at hand.

The locomotive stands by the platform billowing columns of steam. I shove my men, barking at them to hurry, then I get in and pull the door closed behind me. I suddenly realize that I have forgotten to say good-bye to Captain Nakamura.

Peking, a city of dust.

Jing comes back with the newspapers under his arms, but every day his face is a little darker: negotiations with the Japanese army have broken down and war is very near. Chiang Kai-shek’s central government is calling upon the Chinese nation to resist the foreign invasion. In the streets the exodus has already started, thousands streaming towards the south with whatever can be carried.

Ever since we arrived in Peking, Jing has forbidden me to leave the hotel room. When he is here, I refuse to get up. He keeps blaming himself for dragging me nearer to danger and death, and guilt makes him irritable. He is becoming disgusting, uglier by the day. His hair has grown too long; he bites his fingernails and eats like an animal.

Lying in a sheet wound round me like a shroud, I argue with him over anything: the overly warm noodles, the bitter tea, the noise of the mosquitoes. The terrible heat eggs me on. Most of the time he responds with contemptuous silence, but sometimes a rage comes over his face, his whole body shakes and he lunges as if to strangle me.

“Go on, kill me!” I scream. “Just like you killed your friends!”

His face contorts into a snarl and I see Min’s ghost flit through his eyes.

I end up giving him my cousin’s address, and ask him to bring Lu to me. Jing is angry at first, but when I tell him that Lu is married he quite happily goes off to find him.

Once he has left I can breathe at last. Without Jing the room feels airy and full of light. I get up, wash my face and comb my hair by the open window.

Our hotel is a large single-story building with rooms arranged around a square courtyard in the middle of which a jujube tree is growing. On the other side of the wall, out in the street, there are children chattering in pure Pekingese. In their intonations I pick out the same accent as the man who played go. His was slightly different: instead of rolling his
r
’s, he pronounced them with his lips. My thoughts go back to the Hill of the Seven Ruins where he watched over me as I slept. On the Square of a Thousand Winds he would sometimes open out his fan, but not to cool himself, more so that the gentle breeze would waft onto my face. I feel my heart constrict at the memory. I still don’t understand why he said no. Why do we want to run away when we recognize our own happiness?