The Girl Who Played Go

45

Min loathes games, he thinks they’re a waste of time, but this afternoon, after prolonged pleading, I have managed to make him change his mind. He agrees to play cards on condition that we stay in bed and my stomach serves as the table. For him, every pleasure is ultimately related to erotic gratification. He is quite incapable of working out his opponent’s strategy and loses gloriously, rushing to throw his cards down between my breasts. I find his laziness and his flippant attitude exasperating and, to punish him, I leave the room on some flimsy pretext and head off to the Square of a Thousand Winds.

The players are sitting there meditating and snoozing. Having failed to find a partner, I sit myself down at a table and wait for an amateur to come past. With my head resting on one hand, I lay out the stones and start an imaginary game against Min. A shadow falls over me and I look up. A stranger, with a panama hat pulled right down over his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, inclines his head slightly. I reply with a nod and gesture towards the chair opposite me. The Stranger doesn’t seem to understand and makes as if to move away, but I stop him.

“Do you know how to play go?”

He still doesn’t speak.

“Come on, you look like a connoisseur. Sit down, let’s play.”

“May I ask at what level you play?” the lump asks me with a terrible Peking accent.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want to play without some knowledge of your handicap.”

“Let’s start a game. I’ll give you a little demonstration!”

He hesitates for a moment and eventually sits down. It’s obvious that this stranger has no idea of my reputation. Like many stupid people, he is deceived by my appearance.

I push the black stones towards him noisily.

“Over to you.” [16]

He puts his first stone down in the northwest corner. His pretentious behavior earlier is still niggling at me and I decide to play a nasty trick on him. I reply by sticking a white stone alongside it. You never start the battle with such close combat. That is one of the golden rules of the game.

Disconcerted, he looks up at me and sinks into thought for a long time.

The stones fight over the 361 intersections formed by the nineteen horizontal lines and the nineteen vertical lines on the square board. The two players divide up this virgin land and, at the end, compare the extent of their occupied territories. I prefer go to chess because it is so much freer: in chess the two kingdoms with their armored warriors confront each other across the board, but the agile, twirling stones in a game of go spiral round each other, setting traps-daring and imagination are the qualities that lead to victory.

Instead of establishing my frontiers, I attack my opponent head-on. My white number four lures him into a duel. He stops to think again.

My number six is blocking his black number five, and rallies with the others to surround his number one.

In extremis, he parries by placing his number seven.

I smile. The joke is over, now I am constructing my game.

The Stranger’s play is infinitely slow. I am surprised by his convoluted deliberations: each of his moves translates a desire for harmony within the whole. His stones make a subtle, airborne sort of progress like the dance of the cranes. I didn’t know that there was a school in Peking where elegance had the edge over violence. Now it is my turn to be perplexed, and I let myself be carried away by his rhythm.

The Stranger suddenly interrupts the game just when it is becoming really exciting.

“I have a meeting,” he says gruffly.

A little put out and wanting to resume the game as soon as possible, I say, “Come back at ten o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Through his glasses I can see that there still isn’t a glimmer of enthusiasm in his eyes.

“Never mind, then,” I say, standing up.

“All right,” he agrees eventually.

I make a note of the positions of the stones on a piece of paper and gratify the Stranger with a smile. Having used it on Cousin Lu, Min and Jing, I know my weapon well.

And he does indeed look away.