The Girl Who Played Go

91

A campfire crackling, Jing dozes fitfully, and all around me hundreds of other refugees are sleeping. We are like herds of deer fleeing a drought, we are thin and sick, our sleep as heavy as our bundles.

I take a pair of scissors from my bag and cut my hair as short as the strength in my arms permits. I tie my two plaits together with a ribbon and lay them next to Jing, then I climb over ten sleeping bodies and disappear into the night.

In a wood I take off my dress and slip on the clothes I have stolen from Jing. Behind the trees the dawn casts its pale light over the Peking plain. I walk in the direction opposite the flow of the refugees who have been on the move since daybreak. The women, weighed down by their bundles, drag a child with one hand and a goat with the other. From time to time the unmistakable cry of a newborn rings out. There are men carrying an elderly parent on their backs; luckier ones draw the old folks in a rickshaw. A woman who seems to be a hundred clutches a chicken in her arms as she teeters forwards on her bound feet.

My heart has been torn by a succession of such scenes ever since we fled Peking. I don’t regret following Jing into this upheaval; thanks to him, I have witnessed the strength of our people driven from their own land. The tenacious march south is like a silent protest against death. In this tidal wave of men and women a hatred mingles with hope. And this furious force of will that has infected me too will carry me to the very end of my own lonely progress.

I am like them-I want life. I want to go back to Manchuria, to find my house and my go table. I will return to the Square of a Thousand Winds and wait for my Stranger. I know he will come… one afternoon… as he did that first time.

At midday I sit under a tree by the side of the road eating a three-day-old piece of bread one crumb at a time. The silent column advances steadily past, indifferent to the droning of the airplanes and the distant explosions.

Within that human river the first Chinese soldiers appear. In their blood-splattered uniforms, their faces darkened with smoke, they remind me of the soldiers who invaded our house in 1931 after fleeing the Japanese: their eyes betray their exhaustion and the peculiar coldness of those who have left their fellows to the slaughter.

“ Peking has fallen! Hurry up, we must flee.”

“The Japanese are coming! The demons are coming!”

Amid an eruption of screaming and crying, I catch sight of Jing running with his halting limp against the flow of the refugees, and I hide behind a tree. He passes a stone’s throw from me and I hear him asking a woman whether she has seen a pale young girl with her hair cut short and dressed as a boy. His voice cracks and, holding my plaits in his hand, he spits on the ground and curses me as he calls my name.

His words cut through me but still I hide: “How could you make me suffer like this, I have been to hell and back already!”

Eventually he moves away.

An airplane that has been circling overhead for some time drops one bomb, and then another. The explosions knock me to the ground. When I come to, people are running in every direction like ants from a campfire.

When I get up I notice that my arm is bleeding. The roar of the engines in the sky grows louder and louder: more planes are coming! I take cover in a nearby field.

The Japanese bomb the road. I wander through the fields not knowing where to hide, my head is spinning and my injured arm dangles heavily by my side. When am I going to wake up from this nightmare?

Before nightfall I make out a village on the horizon and I hurry towards it. When I get there it is eerily silent. In the darkness I can just see the doors hanging open and broken pieces of furniture strewn across the streets. A little farther on I come across some bodies: four peasants skewered with bayonets. Inside the houses there is not one living thing, not one grain of rice, not one piece of straw to fuel an oven. After the massacre the Japanese army must have stripped everything.

I don’t have the strength to carry on any farther, so I go into one of the cottages. Remembering a remedy of my mother’s, I cover my wound with cold ashes before binding it with some cloth torn from my hem. I huddle against the cold, dark stove and burst into tears.

In the morning I am woken by a terrible racket, then I hear men shouting at each other in some incomprehensible language.

I open my eyes.

Soldiers have their guns trained at me.