70
The Chinese girl turns around.
She walks like a ghost away from the river and out of the woods. All the deserted streets look the same under the driving rain; still the girl walks on-sometimes steady and upright, sometimes small and hunched-drawing me towards another world.
Suddenly she disappears and I rush backwards and forwards looking for her… in vain.
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 Zi [17] 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 obi [18] 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
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.