66

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.

67

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.”

68

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.

69

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.