by Shan Sa
82
A woman is bathing in thermal springs, her body glistening under the water where it writhes and twists like a slender leaf. Beside the pool a blue cotton kimono hangs from a branch, fluttering delicately in the breeze.
The strident wail of the bugle pierces my dream, and I reach mechanically for the folded clothes on top of my shoes at the foot of the bed. I heave on my backpack and hurry outside.
As the troops file in, orders whistle from every direction. The regiment sets off, then from the head of the formation comes the command to run. The barrack gates draw open and the guards salute us. Then the gates of the town open and the chill, gloomy air of the countryside whips my face.
I am already drenched with sweat, but instead of diving into the woods as we have done on our previous exercises, we continue along the main road. I choke with apprehension when I realize: we are heading for Peking.
When the sun appears on the horizon we are already far from the town. I struggle to ready myself, to see myself in battle. I call on Death to give me strength. Curiously, instead of fortifying me as it always has before, the prayer makes me only more nervous.
The warm, easy months I have spent in the garrison evaporate in a flash. Did the town of A Thousand Winds really exist? And what about the girl who played go, was she only the heroine in some wonderful vision? Life seems an infernal loop in which the day before yesterday has joined with today, and yesterday has been jettisoned. We think we move forward in time, but we are always prisoners of the past. To leave . . . that is always a good thing: to have remained in the Square of a Thousand Winds would be to court destruction by the most tenacious of instincts: to love, to live, to bring forth children.
I hear the whistle signal to halt the march, and our platoon bunches together like an accordion as we stop to catch our breath. I take my flask off my pack and pour the sun-warmed water down my throat.
A new order comes through: about face, the rear formation becomes the head of the column. We are going back to the town. Cries of joy run up along the line as we set off again. I abandon myself, carried along on this wave.
83
In class Huong is nervously digging her nails into the desk. I pass her a note: “Stop it! You’re driving me crazy with your scratching.”
“Please don’t be hard on me,” she replies in a careful hand, “I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“Jing has asked me to go to Peking with him. Come with us! He’ll get you a passport and a ticket, and we’ll be free there!”
“You can never trust a coward,” she scrawls. “You should pity him, but don’t go with him.”
“Jing’s not like the others.”
“A traitor is a traitor. Be careful!”
“If you go back to the country with your father and you marry the stranger,” I write more slowly, “you’ll only betray yourself, then you’ll know how it feels to be a coward.”
“Leave me alone, I’ve made my choice, and I’m not taking a chance in Peking. You can’t run away from reality, you can’t run away from life. Stay here!” she begs. “War is about to break out here in the homeland. No one’s going to escape the horror.”
“Now you sound like a married woman. Has your father brainwashed you?”
“I’ve been thinking. All I want is a man in my life. That’s all.”
Huong seems different today, she seems strange.
“We’ve been tricked by fiction,” she writes. “Love and passion are just monstrous creations dreamed up by writers. Why would I dream of freedom if it isn’t the way to love? If love doesn’t exist, why not be at least a happy prisoner of life? Suffering’s inevitable, so why shouldn’t it be rewarded by the pleasures of clothes and jewelry.”
“Have you gone mad? Why are you coming out with all this rubbish?”
A long time passes before Huong replies, her pen scratching squeakily on the scrap of paper: “I’ve never admitted this to you, but I met a banker two years ago and I became his mistress yesterday. He will come collect me from school later and he’ll set me up in one of his houses. He will pay my father a substantial sum and I won’t have to see the old man again.”
As I wonder which of the two of us has lost her senses, our frantic correspondence is interrupted by the bell. I put my things in my bag and leave the room without saying a word to Huong.
“You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?” she says, stopping me in the street.
I shake my head and start to move away from her quickly. She throws herself after me.
“Please,” she begs, “don’t abandon me! Don’t go to Peking! I can feel something terrible will happen to you there. Swear to me that you won’t see Jing again. Swear to me that you’ll stay! I’ll tell your parents. They’ll shut you in . . .”
As I barge past her she trips and falls. I immediately regret knocking her down, but I can’t find it in myself to hold out a hand to help her up, and I run away.
84
Orchid is surprised and obviously very happy to see me. In no time she has slipped out of her dress and taken off my uniform. I let myself be manipulated. Her nakedness gives me an erection and the pleasure I experience as I penetrate her is as confusing as the half-day that has preceded it. The Manchurian girl screams, and her cries give me a headache. When suddenly she loosens her grip and tries to push me away, I do not retreat until I have reached a violent climax. She writhes on the bed, hiding her crotch with her hands and sobbing. I cannot believe it. This madwoman is still jealous!
Sitting on a chair I gulp down a cup of tea. With her still sniveling, I wash myself meticulously and dress to leave.
“Go away!” she shrieks in a cracked voice. “Go away, and don’t come back again.”
I head for the door, but she throws herself at me, showering my boots with her tears.
“Forgive me,” she moans, “don’t leave me . . .”
I push her aside with my foot.
As I head for the Square of a Thousand Winds I realize that I am the most pitiful man in the world—something in me has broken. It’s the same feeling I had as a child after the earthquake: an inescapable emptiness and a constant buzzing in my ears. Reason tells me I should not return to the go table, but my legs carry me there all the same. Though I want to run away from what I am losing, I rush headlong towards disaster.
The Chinese girl is already there, wearing a new dress. Her stiff collar, held tightly closed by two covered buttons, gives her face a dignity I haven’t seen before. My heart beats painfully fast and my face burns. Keeping my eyes fixed on the stones, I bow to her and sit down.
The checkered board is a violent sea with white and black waves chasing and crashing into each other. Towards the four shores they draw back, spin round and head for the skies. But where they mingle, they clash and come together in a fierce embrace.
As usual, she says nothing—silence is an impenetrable mystery of all women, but hers particularly stifles me. What is she thinking about? Why does she not talk to me? They say women have no memory . . . Has she forgotten everything already?
It is true that yesterday evening as we walked down the hill I lacked the courage to take her in my arms. She expected from me the love that a Chinese man would show a Chinese woman. But how could I open my heart without betraying my country? How could I tell her that we are separated by a looking glass, going round in circles, each in a world hostile to the other’s?
Her stones are soaring now. Her moves come faster and faster. Her varied stratagems multiply, filling me with awe.
Suddenly her rhythm slows.
85
Each move sees my sinking soul take another step downwards. I have always loved the game of go for its labyrinths. Each stone’s position evolves as you move the others around it. As the relationships among them grow more and more complex, the transformations never quite tally with what you had conceived. Go makes nonsense of your calculations, and defies your imagination. Each new formation is as unpredictable as the choreography
of the clouds, a betrayal of what might have been. There is no rest, you’re always on the alert, always faster, heading for some part of yourself that is slyer and freer, but also colder, more calculating and more deadly. Go is a game of lies; you surround the enemy with monstrous traps for the sake of the only truth—which is death.
Rather than go home, where Mother is waiting to take me to the doctor, I have resolved to brave the game’s crushing authority.
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.
86
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.
87
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 w
indows 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.
88
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.