by Shan Sa
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 Zi17 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 obi18 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
The spring is no more
The spring it once was!
Only I, I alone
Am what I once was!19
he recites. And then he weeps.
Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?
71
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.”
I follow Huong up to her dormitory, where she makes me dress as she thinks a woman of thirty would look.
The rickshaw goes through the flea market where the pavements are piled high with furniture, crockery, fabrics, knickknacks, jewelry and scrolls of yellowed, mildewed, moth-eaten paintings. The vendors are Manchurian aristocrats dressed in rags, who traffic in the spoils of a bygone era hoping to trade a jade snuffbox or an antique vase for an hour’s escape in an opium house. There are just a few Japanese officers walking up and down, avidly examining their wares.
As a precaution, Huong asks the rickshaw to stop at the end of the street, and we walk the rest of the way, some 200 meters before climbing a crumbled flight of steps through a front door that leads us into a labyrinth of sheets, trousers and diapers drying on the line. I lurch forward to retch before I can even register the savage stench of urine and rotting eggs.
At the far end of this corridor we can see a row of rooms crouching under a sharply sloping roof. Each family has set up its cooking oven outside and there are clouds of flies spiraling around them.
“Hello-o,” Huong starts to call, “Doctor Huang Pu.”
A disheveled woman appears on the doorstep and eyes us with contempt.
“Over there, at the end on the right,” she says.
On the door we find a sign written in faded ink:
DOCTOR FAMED OVER THE FOUR SEAS FOR HIS HEAVENLY
GIFT FOR BRINGING BACK THE SPRINGTIME OF YOUR LIFE.
SPECIALIST IN CHANCRE, SYPHILIS AND GONORRHEA.
We knock at the door and a woman with permed hair and a face ravaged by makeup appears. She looks us up and down and then walks away, clicking her heels. Huong pushes me from behind and I stumble into a dark room. There a girl is huddled in a corner; she looks dead. Next to her a man is smoking and he examines us closely.
“Which house?” he asks.
We take refuge in a corner. Now the bitter smell of medicinal infusions and other indecipherable stenches suddenly hits me.
I don’t know how long we wait before it is my turn to see the doctor. Doctor Huang Pu has white hair and there is so little of it that the Manchurian plait hanging down his back is narrow as a pig’s tail. He sits behind a black table, in front of an empty bookcase, stroking his little beard.
“Which house?” he asks.
“Liberal,” Huong answers for me.
“How old?”
“Twenty,” she says.
“What is the problem?”
“My friend’s period is three weeks late.”
“Oh well,” he sighs. “Open your mouth, stick out your tongue. Right, get undressed.”
I hesitate, and he says it again: “Get undressed.”
Huong looks away. I hate myself and, with tears welling up, I start to unbutton my dress.
“Lie down over there,” he says, pointing to a board covered with a dirty sheet. “Spread your legs.”
I think I am going to die. I clench my fists to stop myself crying. The old man comes over with a light in his hand. He looks, palpates, takes his time.
“Right,” he says, standing back up. “No putrefaction. Get dressed.”
He asks me to put my right hand on the table, and he puts his first two fingers over my wrist. His yellow nails are more than five centimeters long and they curl at the end.
“The pulse is very irregular, I can sense your condition in it: you are pregnant.”
“Are you sure, Doctor?” I hear myself asking in a feeble whisper.
“Absolutely sure,” he says, taking the pulse on my left hand.
Huong gets to her feet behind me.
“You must have a remedy, Doctor?” she asks.
“Criminal, criminal,” says the old man, shaking his head.
Huong laughs nervously.
“Give us the prescription!” she says, throwing the huge golden bracelet that she wears down onto the table. The old Manchurian thinks for a moment, eyeing the bracelet, then he picks up his calligraphy brush.
Huong sees me back home.
“Tomorrow, after lessons, I’ll bring back the infusions and the whole thing can be forgotten,” she tells me.
“Don’t go to so much trouble,” I say. “The only way I can save my honor is to die. Look, take this jade bracelet. I don’t want you to pay for me, I don’t deserve it.”
But she puts it back on my arm.
“What use is something beautiful like that going to be to me? Tomorrow you’ll drink your infusion and you’ll be rid of this burden, but in a year’s time I’ll be married to a stranger and raped by him.”
72
The day after the storm, a beautiful sky.
At this time of year jasmine sellers badger everyone in the streets. I cannot resist their pleading and, thinking about the Chinese girl’s tanned wrists, I buy a bracelet of the flowers.
When I see her on the Square of a Thousand Winds, I remember the strange figure she cut the day before as she stood by the river in the rain. What was she doing there? What was she thinking? Yesterday she wandered through the town like a madwoman with slippers on her feet, but today her hair is swept off her forehead and smoothed into a heavy plait, and she is playing coldly and shrewdly again.
Something about her has changed in the last twenty-four hours. Or am I no longer looking at her in the same way? Beneath a drab dress her breasts have swollen, her body has shaken off its childish stiffness and is now vigorous and supple. Despite her frown and the hard look in her eye, her gentle pink mouth cannot help but be attractive. Still, there is a gloominess about her and she toys nervously with the end of her plait; as though it pains her somehow that she is blossoming with new life.
She moves a piece.
“Well played!” cries a man moving over towards our table.
On the Square of a Thousand Winds there are always passersby, stopping to look and occasionally taking the liberty of giving advice. This man is barely twenty years old, with oiled hair and wearing far too much perfume—he annoys me.
I make my move.
“What a mistake! You should have put it there!” cries the young know-all, pointing to the board with his fine, pink hand sporting a white jade ring. Then he turns to the Chinese girl and says, “I am a friend of Lu’s. I’m from the New Capital.”
She looks up and, after a brief, polite exchange, she leads him away from the go table.
The wind carries their voices over to me: an easy familiarity has been established between them and they are already using the familiar form of address with each other. The Chinese language has five different tonalities; it is like music, and this conversation is an opera I find unbearable. In my pique, I shove my hand into my pocket and crush the jasmine flowers.
Since I have been coming to the Square of a Thousand Winds the game of go has made me forget that I am Japanese. I thought I was one of them, but now I have been forced to remember that the Chinese are another race, from another world. We are separated by a thousand years of history.
In 1880 my grandfather took part in Emperor Meiji’s reforms while their ancestors were serving Ci Xi, the Dowager Empress. In 1600 mine had lost in battle and were slashing their own bellies open, while theirs took power in Peking. In the Middle Ages, when the women in my family wore kimonos with long trains, shaved their eyebrows and dyed their teeth black, their mothers and sisters were piling their hair into buns atop their heads. They were already binding their feet. A Chinese man and a Chinese girl understand each other before they even open their mouths. They are bearers of the same culture, which exerts a magnetism between them. How could a Japanese man and a Chinese girl ever love each other, having nothing in common?
The girl stays away a long time. As it mingles and disappears among the trees, her green dress—which just moments ago seemed to express her desolation—suddenly seems to exude her freshness. Is that the image of China, the object of my passion and my hatred? When I am close to her, I am disappointed by her misery, but when she is farther away I am obsessed by her charms.
She does not once look in my direction. I get up and leave.
73
Chen tells me that Cousin Lu is now teaching go in Peking.
“And he’s married, too,” he says, watching my reaction, but the news leaves me cold.
Chen lives in the New Capital and claims to be my cousin’s best friend. He says that he presented Lu to the Emperor. To hear him you would think he was the most powerful man in Manchuria.
He is a Minister’s son and insufferably pleased with himself and with his carefree life. The past comes back to me in little snatches; it feels as if it was a hundred years ago: life was sweet. We were like him, my cousin and I: we thought we were the best players in the world. It was before my sister was married and we were both virgins; she would come and interrupt our games, bringing us tea and little cakes. The twilight would take its time, slowly weaving its crimson net across the sky. I knew nothing about betrayal.
Chen returns that day to the New Capital. He leaves me a perfumed card with Cousin Lu’s new address on it, and promises that he will be back soon to challenge me to a game of go.
I return to my chair, but the table is deserted, my opponent has gone without leaving a note. I am so exhausted that I don’t even feel angry. People come and go on this earth—each has his time.
I put the stones away as the sun lingers in the west and the clouds trail across the sky like long, cursive strokes. Who can decode these words that predict my fate?
I pick up one of the black stones, its shiny surface reflecting the sinking light. I envy its stony heart and icy purity.
Cousin Lu has fled from his disappointment into a new love, and I am glad that he has found happiness again so quickly. The Stranger has walked away from our game; I suppose that for him, go is just a distraction. Men don’t live for
passion, they overcome periods of emotional turbulence quite comfortably and casually. Min proved that to me. The core of their lives is somewhere else altogether.
My rickshaw comes to an abrupt stop. There is a man bowing down to the ground in the middle of the road: it is the Stranger. He asks me to forgive him and begs me to carry on with our game the following afternoon. I nod vaguely at him and tell the rickshaw boy to carry on.
I have to leave him there, on his way.
74
“In this world we walk upon the roof of hell and contemplate the flowers.”20
Only looking upon beauty can turn a soldier’s mind from his stubborn determination. But flowers care nothing for those who admire them; they flourish so briefly, only to die.
The latest dispatches have provoked a great excitement in the barracks: having inflicted a series of defeats on the Chinese, our divisions have advanced to the outskirts of Peking. Song Zheyuan and Zhang Zizhong’s armies are now isolated and weakened, and they are more afraid of Chiang Kai-shek than of the Japanese. The generals fear that Chiang Kaishek’s troops will head north again to annex their territories, so they are refusing offers of Chinese reinforcements and suing for peace.
At the Chidori restaurant the anger builds from one table to the next. The most hawkish of the officers maintain that Peking should be conquered, while the more cautious are fearful that the Soviet Union will intervene, and recommend first and foremost that the Japanese presence in Manchuria be reinforced.
I did not go to see Orchid today so my body still feels fresh and supple, and I have not eaten much so my head is light and lucid. I do not allow myself to be dragged into the heated discussions, and I try in vain to stop my fellow officers from fighting.
The commotion goes on late into the evening and even back into some of their quarters. A few fanatical lieutenants open their shirts and swear that they will commit seppuku if the imperial army negotiates a peace with Peking, and this mention of blood fires the men up all the more.