“Well, I am here as well as there. I depart, but I don’t leave. I am part of this room and that garden.”
“And me, Nikko? Are you part of me too?”
Nicholai shook his head. “There are no animals in my rest place. I am the only thing that sees. I see for us all, for the sunlight, for the grass.”
“I see. And how can you play your stones without looking at the board? How do you know where the lines cross? How do you know where I placed my last stone?”
Nicholai shrugged. It was too obvious to explain. “I am part of everything, Teacher. I share… no… I flow with everything. The Gô ban, the stones. The board and I are amongst one another. How could I not know the patterns of play?”
“You see from within the board then?”
“Within and without are the same thing. But ‘see’ isn’t exactly right either. If one is everyplace, he doesn’t have to ‘see.’” Nicholai shook his head. “I can’t explain.”
Otake-san pressed Nikko’s arm lightly, then withdrew his hand. “I won’t question you further. I confess that I envy the mystic peace you find. I envy most of all your gift for finding it so naturally—without the concentration and exercise that even holy men must apply in search of it. But while I envy it, I also feel some fear on your behalf. If the mystic ecstasy has become—as I suspect it has—a natural and necessary part of your inner life, then what will become of you, should this gift fade, should these experiences be denied you?”
“I cannot imagine that happening, Teacher.”
“I know. But my reading has revealed to me that these gifts can fade; the paths to inner peace can be lost. Something can happen that fills you with constant and unrelenting hate or fear, and then it would be gone.”
The thought of losing the most natural and most important psychic activity of his life disturbed Nicholai. With a brief rush of panic, he realized that fear of losing it might be fear enough to cause him to lose it. He wanted to be away from this conversation, from these new and incredible doubts. His eyes lowered to the Gô ban, he considered his reaction to such a loss.
“What would you do, Nikko?” Otake-san repeated after a moment of silence.
Nicholai looked up from the board, his green eyes calm and expressionless. “If someone took my rest times from me, I would kill him.”
This was said with a fatalistic calm that made Otake-san know it was not anger, only a simple truth. It was the quiet assurance of the statement that disturbed Otake-san most.
“But, Nikko. Let us say it was not a man who took this gift from you. Let us say it was a situation, an event, a condition of life. What would you do then?”
“I would seek to destroy it, whatever it was. I would punish it.”
“Would that bring the path to rest back?”
“I don’t know, Teacher. But it would be the least vengeance I could exact for so great a loss.”
Otake-san sighed, part in regret for Nikko’s particular vulnerability, part in sympathy for whoever might happen to be the agent of the loss of his gift. He had no doubt at all that the young man would do what he said. Nowhere is a man’s personality so clearly revealed as in his Gô game, if his play be read by one with the experience and intelligence to interpret it. And Nicholai’s play, brilliant and audacious as it was, bore the aesthetic blemishes of frigidity and almost inhuman concentration of purpose. From his reading of Nicholai’s game, Otake-san knew that his star pupil might achieve greatness, might become the first non-Japanese to rise to the higher dans; but he knew also that the boy would never know peace or happiness in the smaller game of life. It was a blessed compensation that Nikko possessed the gift of retirement into mystic transport. But a gift with a poisoned core.
Otake-san sighed again and considered the pattern of stones. The game was about a third played out. “Do you mind, Nikko, if we do not finish? My nagging old stomach is bothering me. And the development is sufficiently classic that the seeds of the outcome have already taken root. I don’t anticipate either of us making a serious error, do you?”
“No, sir.” Nicholai was glad to leave the board, and to leave this small room where he had learned for the first time that his mystic retreats were vulnerable… that something could happen to deny him an essential part of his life. “At all events, Teacher, I think you would have won by seven or eight stones.”
Otake-san glanced at the board again. “So many? I would have thought only five or six.” He smiled at Nikko. It was their kind of joke.
In fact, Otake-san would have won by at least a dozen stones, and they both knew it.
The years passed, and the seasons turned easily in the Otake household where traditional roles, fealties, hard work, and study were balanced against play, devilment, and affection, this last no less sincere for being largely tacit.
Even in their small mountain village, where the dominant chords of life vibrated in sympathy with the cycle of the crops, the war was a constant tone in the background. Young men whom everybody knew left to join the army, some never to return. Austerity and harder work became their lot. There was great excitement when news came of the attack at Pearl Harbor on the eighth of December 1941; knowledgeable men agreed that the war would not last more than a year. Victory after victory was announced by enthusiastic voices over the radio as the army swept European imperialism from the Pacific.
But still, some farmers grumbled privately as almost impossible production quotas were placed on them, and they felt the pressures of decreasing consumer goods. Otake-san turned more to writing commentaries, as the number of Gô tournaments was restricted as a patriotic gesture in the general austerity. Occasionally the war touched the Otake household more directly. One winter evening, the middle son of the Otake family came home from school crushed and ashamed because he had been ridiculed by his classmates as a yowamushi, a weak worm, because he wore mittens on his sensitive bands during the bruising afternoon calisthenics when all the boys exercised on the snow-covered courtyard, stripped to the waist to demonstrate physical toughness and “samurai spirit.”
And from time to time Nicholai overheard himself described as a foreigner, a gaijin, a “redhead,” in tones of mistrust that reflected the xenophobia preached by jingoistic schoolteachers. But he did not really suffer from his status as an outsider. General Kishikawa had been careful that his identity papers designated his mother as a Russian (a neutral) and his father as a German (an ally). Too, Nicholai was protected by the great respect in which the village held Otake-san, the famed player of Gô who brought honor to their village by choosing to live there.
When Nicholai’s game had improved sufficiently that he was allowed to play preliminary matches and accompany Otake-san as a disciple to the great championship games held in out-of-the-way resorts where the players could be “sealed in” away from the distractions of the world, he had opportunities to see at first hand the spirit with which Japan went to war. At railroad stations there were noisy send-offs for recruits, and large banners reading:
FELICITATIONS ON YOUR CALL TO COLORS and WE PRAY FOR YOUR LASTING MILITARY FORTUNE.
He heard of a boy from the neighboring village who, failing his physical examination, begged to be accepted in any role, rather than face the unspeakable haji of being unworthy to serve. His pleas were ignored, and he was sent home by train. He stood staring out the window, muttering again and again to himself, “Haji desu, haji desu.” Two days later, his body was found along the tracks. He had chosen not to face the disgrace of returning to the relatives and friends who had sent him off with such joy and celebration.