54

The Chinese girl looks pale after lunch, her features altered. When she reaches for a stone her hand shakes. She is silent, forbidding me to comfort her. I affect indifference so as not to distress her; she would not want to be pitied.

She seems to have aged several years in the space of a few hours. Her cheekbones are heightened by the shadows carved across her cheeks. Her face looks longer, her chin more angular.

For a moment I glimpse the terrible pain of a child whose pride has been wounded. Has she had a row with a brother? Fallen out with one of her girlfriends? She will get over it, I should not worry about her. Girls’ moods change very quickly and she will soon be smiling again.

During the previous session she struck me as a quick and spontaneous player, but today she is deliberating for hours. With her eyes lowered and her lips clamped into a hard line, she could serve as a model for the mask of a ghost woman in the theater of Noh.

She looks exhausted sitting there with her elbows on the edge of the table and her head resting in her palms. I wonder whether she is really thinking about the game. The stones betray our thoughts. One more intersection to the east and her strike would have been more substantial.

My black stone falls in alongside her. By responding aggressively I am hoping to break through her vigilance. She looks up. I think she is going to cry, but she smiles.

“Well played! Let’s meet up again tomorrow afternoon.”

I would like to carry on now, but as a matter of principle I never argue with a woman.

She makes a note of our latest moves on her piece of paper. If a game has to be interrupted during tournaments in Japan, the judge makes a note of the positions and, in front of everyone, puts this note carefully into a locked safe.

“Would you like it?” she asks me.

“No, keep it, please.”

She looks at me for a long time, and puts her stones away.

55

Min is clearly silhouetted against the sky at the far end of the street. I have been waiting at the crossroads for hours and now, as he finally cycles towards me, he greets me with a nod. I can’t take my eyes off him. His face is smooth and doesn’t betray any sign of suffering. The sweat gleams on his forehead as he smiles at me and cycles on.

I must find Jing! I get through the cordon of Japanese soldiers and go into his house. Inside its crumbling walls the house is riddled with bullet holes, and in the garden only the crimson dahlias still hold their heads high. Jing is lying on a chaise longue playing with his bird.

“I thought you were in prison.”

He looks up, his eyes filled with hate and desire.

“You are my prison.”

I wake up.

From daybreak the crossroads in front of the temple is full of traders, people out for a morning walk and Taoist monks. I sit in front of a stall and force myself to have some wonton soup. Through the steam rising from the boiling pot, I watch for Min.

People wander past, rickshaw boys wear themselves out. Where are they going? Do they have sons and brothers who have been taken prisoner by the Japanese? I envy the Taoist monks their detachment, the tiny children their ignorance and the beggars their uncomplicated misery. When a bicycle appears on the horizon I get up anxiously. For the first time I understand why people talk about keeping their eyes “peeled.”

Soon the sun is three-quarters of the way up its celestial trajectory, and I slip under a willow tree. There are Japanese soldiers marching over the crossroads with flags fixed to their bayonets. I can make out their cruel young faces under their helmets. Short and stocky with deep slits for eyes and squashed noses above their mustaches, they are the very incarnation of their insular people who, according to legend, are descended from our own. I find them disgusting.

At eleven o’clock I decide to go to school. Huong tells me that our literature teacher noticed I wasn’t there and made a note of my name.

“Why are you late?” she asks, and I tell her what has happened.

She thinks about it and then says, “You should disappear for a while. You saw a lot of Min and Jing-the Japanese could take an interest in you.”

She makes me laugh.

“If they come to look for me,” I say, “I’d gladly give myself up. Where can I hide? If I run away my parents will be sent to prison instead of me. Let them arrest me if that’s what they want!”

Huong begs me not to do anything stupid.

“I won’t do anything. I’m too sensible and too weak. I’m never going to go and set fire to the Japanese barracks to save my friends. They’re true heroes. They know how to fire a pistol, throw grenades and set dynamite to explode. They know how to risk their lives for something they believe in. But I’ve never even touched a weapon. I don’t know what they feel like or how they work. I didn’t even recognize members of the Resistance when I met them. I’m just so ordinary.”

56

Captain Nakamura sees spies everywhere, even within our own army. Unsure how accurate the Chinese interpreters are, he begs me to attend the interrogations of our new prisoners.

The cells are in a courtyard in the middle of the barracks, hidden under tall plane trees. I have scarcely set foot through the door when I am hit by the same stench as a battlefield the day after combat.

I am welcomed with open arms by Lieutenant Oka, whom Captain Nakamura has already introduced to me at dinner once in town. His uniform is made to measure, his mustache impeccable; this is a man who attaches excessive importance to his appearance.

He takes me over to a second courtyard where a Chinese man is hanging from the branch of a tree by his feet. His naked body is crisscrossed with black marks. As we move closer a cloud of flies rises to reveal his flesh, which looks as if it has been plowed like a field.

“After I whipped him, I used a white-hot iron on him,” commented the Lieutenant.

The smell of decomposition intensifies inside the building, but Lieutenant Oka seems unperturbed and I force myself to ignore it too. He offers me a guided tour, and he shows me the cells along a long, dark corridor with all the relaxed confidence of a doctor proud of his model hospital. Through the bars I can make out mutilated bodies slumped on the ground. The Lieutenant explains that his first act when he arrived was to have the ceilings lowered so that the criminals could not stand upright; then he cut their food rations.

I am suffocated by the smell of excrement and blood and, while noticing my discomfort, my guide still manages to sound like a conscientious civil servant: “I’m so sorry, Lieutenant, when we hit these pigs with sticks they go and get diarrhea.”

Seeing these men dying in agony makes my skin crawl with goose pimples, but the Lieutenant’s serene and attentive expression forces me to hide my disgust. I must not show any lack of respect for his work and, afraid that he might mock my weak stomach, I choke back the bile rising in my throat and make a few complimentary remarks. He seems satisfied and smiles shyly.

The torture rooms are at the end of the corridor; the Lieutenant put them there deliberately so that the cries of the prisoners could ring throughout the entire building. Keen to show off his expertise, he tells his adjutant to carry on with an interrogation.

I hear a woman screaming.

“They’ve just put salt in the Communist’s wounds,” the Lieutenant explains. “When I was in training our instructors would often say that under torture women show more resistance than men. This one is especially stubborn.”

He pushes a door open: in the middle of the room a fire is blazing in a bronze basin, heating pokers to a red glow. The heat is unbearable. Two torturers with great hairy arms throw a bucket of water over a woman lying naked on the floor.