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He looks so ordinary in his slightly outdated tunic, his hat and his glasses, but there is something about him that betrays a change in him.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.