The Girl Who Played Go

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.