The Girl Who Played Go

76

I have been waiting an hour for the Chinese girl.

When I was still a regular soldier, I loved guard duty. Standing with my gun clasped to my breast, I would spend the night listening for the least sound. When it rained, I had a hood that cut me off from the outside world, and I became a fetus floating in its own world. When it snowed, the soft, fat flakes swirled down like so many syllables, white ink on black paper. As I stood there motionless, I felt as if I were turning into a bird or a tree; I was a part of nature in all its immutability.

The Chinese girl appears at last, sketching a smile by way of a greeting. I stand and bow. She is slightly hunched, her eyelids swollen and her face like that of one just woken from a long, deep sleep. There are heavy lines at the corners of her mouth, and the hair that has strayed from her plait has been clawed behind her ears. She looks absent, dreamy, the way my mother used to look when she folded my kimonos.

She invites me to start. After the two hundredth move, the black and white stones now form a series of intertangled traps where those that lay siege are themselves besieged. We are battling for narrow corridors, cramped corners of territory. The Chinese girl answers my move after a few minutes, her stone shattering the silence between us.

I am surprised at how little time she gives herself to think. I have such unpleasant memories of my anxiety the last time we played that I have steeled myself to resist any form of external influence. I allow myself half an hour of meditation before I respond. Three minutes later the white stone has been played. Amazed by this brutality, I look up.

She quickly shifts her eyes and pretends to watch the other players over my shoulder. My heart beats faster, but I look down and try to concentrate. Incredibly, when I stare at the black and white pattern on the board I see the image of my own face!

I have hardly moved my black stone before her white one takes over a neighboring intersection. She has never reacted so quickly and yet the move itself is irreproachable. I look up again, our eyes meet and she stares at me. A shiver runs through me and, to hide my uneasiness, I pretend to be thinking.

She carries on staring at me; I can feel my forehead burning under her gaze. Then suddenly her voice rings out: “Would you do me a favor?”

“How could I be of use to you?”

“Let’s leave this place, I’ll explain.”

I help her make a note of our positions and put the stones away in their pots. When she has put everything away in her bag, she asks me to follow her. She walks ahead, and I follow behind. She takes small steps and a few strands of her hair beat the rhythm in the air as she walks on.

My heart feels heavy and a strange feeling of anguish comes over me. Where is she taking me? The trees part before her slender form and close in again behind me. The roads weave a vast labyrinth, and I am lost.

Sometimes she looks round and smiles; the coolness in her eye has gone. She lifts her arm to hail a rickshaw, and tells me to sit down next to her.

“The Hill of the Seven Ruins, please.”

The sunlight streaming through the blind throws a golden veil over her face. Tiny motes of dust fall twinkling from the ceiling and come to rest on the ends of her eyelashes. I try desperately to keep to the far end of the narrow bench seat, but even so when we come to a bend in the road my arm brushes against hers. Her icy skin leaves its imprint on mine as if I have been bitten. She pretends not to notice. The distinctive fragrance of a young girl wafts from her neck, a blend of green tea and soap. The rickshaw trundles over a pebble and my thigh presses against hers.

I am strangled by my feelings of arousal and shame.

I so much want to hold her it is killing me! Since I cannot put my arm around her shoulders and rest her head on my chest, I would be content just to brush my hand over her fingers. I watch her face carefully out of the corner of my eye, ready to surrender myself like a moth drawn to a light. But the Chinese girl’s face remains closed. She sits there with her brows knitted, watching the back of the rickshaw boy as he runs.

I keep my hands clamped on my knees.

The rickshaw stops and we get out. I throw my head back and my eyes climb up a wooded hillside. At the top, lost in the sunlight, I can just make out a pagoda overlooking the exuberant vegetation.

In front of us a slate path snakes between shrubs and tall grasses, and disappears as it climbs upwards through the shade of the trees and the reeds.