The Girl Who Played Go (3 page)

The wounded man rolls on the ground, howling in pain, and his two terrified companions fall away from me. Having recovered from the initial shock, I yell at the soldier, “You bloody fool, you could have injured me.”

Another burst of laughter from the spectators.

The cruelty of our troops is fed by our harsh upbringing: slaps, punches and insults are daily reprimands for children. As a way of cultivating submission and humility in the army, officers beat the lower ranking officers and soldiers until they bleed, or they slash their cheeks with specially sharpened bamboo rulers.

I find it repulsive to torture innocent people, and I feel sorry for these Chinese peasants who live in ignorance, poverty and squalor. They would scarcely care whether they had to obey a Manchurian emperor, a Chinese warlord or a Japanese emperor so long as their bellies were filled every day.

I order my soldiers to bandage the wounded man and to take the threesome back to their homes. We search their houses and take all their provisions, down to the last pinch of flour. I promise to return everything if they tell us where the terrorists are hiding.

The next day, before dawn, someone comes to wake us.

Hunger has loosened his tongue. We do not wait for the sun to rise before setting off into the snowstorm.

Ten days later I receive a letter from Lu. He tells me he has obtained a passport for the inner territories,
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and that by the time I read his letter he will have left for Peking. I feel strangely sad as I decipher his words. I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds, where the players, unperturbed, abandon themselves to their accustomed passion.

As a little girl I used to follow my cousin wherever he played. Once he was so much consumed by a fever that he passed out on the go-board, and I won the tournament for him, a victory by which I became the only woman to be admitted into the exclusive society of true enthusiasts.

Years have passed and now I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.

Lu doesn’t understand. He wants me to join him in the adult world, but he doesn’t realize that I think it is a sad place full of vanity, and it frightens me.

New orders have reached us. We have to burn the stores in all the villages so that the terrorists will have no source of supplies.

A village we have ransacked seems as forlorn as a grave. The wind’s howl mingles with the weeping of the peasants as they prostrate themselves before the ocher flames and black smoke.

For three months now the snow-clad forest has cut us off from the outside world. There is more and more violence among my men, who spend their time getting drunk and quarreling. The white, the gray, the reflected light and the endless marching are all slowly driving us mad. The day before yesterday a corporal took all his clothes off and fled. He was found unconscious in a ravine, and now we have to tie him up and pull him along by a rope round his neck. I can hear in his curses and his piercing laughter the echo of many of the ideas spinning round and round in my own head like a refrain.

We have to keep on advancing, through the snow, towards the snow.

I am bored at my girls’ school.

Our national education system churns out laughably affected “young ladies,” and one day my classmates will be irreproachable society women. The prettiest of them is called Huong. Her eyebrows are carefully plucked to form two perfect crescent moons above her eyes. She draws them together, screws them up, smooths them out again. But these gestures, like her mannered laugh, can’t completely disguise the uneasiness of her changing body.

The ugliest of them, although she does in fact have the longest hair in class, is called Zhou. Her unfortunate face frees her to judge things with as much scorn and bitterness as she pleases, and that is her charm. Apparently her mother, a woman built like a Mongol wrestler and the niece of a very high-ranking officer, has lost no time throwing her weight about in the capital.

Between lessons the girls talk about film stars, dresses, jewelry, marriage and the Empress’s secret affairs. No one reads any of the new literature, which venomously attacks our crumbling society; no one mentions the latest political events, which are more devastating every day. Romantic novels handed from one girl to the next elicit easy tears. In independent Manchuria we are cut off from the rest of China. It is like a silk factory, producing something so soft and wonderful, but the silkworms themselves die in a boiling bath once they have woven their delicate cocoons.

After lessons, I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds. Everything about the game of go propels me towards the world where things move and evolve. The constantly changing faces help me to forget the false certainties of my everyday life.

The girls at school have nicknamed me the “foreigner.” To them, my passion for go is like some exotic madness. The players themselves, to their credit, tend to be indulgent, so they tolerate my extravagant enthusiasm.

Twenty years ago, after he was married, Father persuaded Grandfather to send him to England to study. When he returned a year later, Father was changed and abandoned tradition: entrusting my sister, Moon Pearl, to his mother, he took my mother with him to share his troubled life in the West. This caused a great scandal in Peking, where both families were living. Maternal Grandfather, a retired court dignitary, broke off relations with Paternal Grandfather, who still held an honorable position at court. I was born in the mists of London, and it would be said that the evils of this displaced birth were soon manifested in the willfulness of my troubled soul. Sadly, I don’t have any memories of my early childhood. When the Empire collapsed, the two old men were reconciled, united in their loathing of the republicans, and they died within days of each other. My parents came back for the period of mourning and they obeyed my grandmother’s orders by leaving Peking and coming here, where my ancestors had built their hunting lodge.

Grandmother, who dreamed of peace, died the day after the war of September 18, 1931. When Chinese soldiers took refuge in our town five days after their defeat, they broke our door down, occupied the house and installed their wounded in it.

The Japanese besieged us, and the shelling went on for three days. A bomb exploded on our house and a great deal of our precious furniture served to feed the triumphant flames. The Chinese army capitulated and we never saw the soldiers again. According to the rumors, 3,000 men were taken outside the town and shot.

After Grandmother died, our life gradually resumed its normal course. The Japanese appointed a new mayor, the barricades disappeared, enemy flags flew above the roofs, Japanese shops opened and, in restaurants, the traditional white-cotton door blind was replaced with one printed with Japanese writing. Japanese women with their tall, glossy, lacquered chignons walked along our streets. Constrained by their narrow kimonos, they took tiny little steps, clacking their clogs on the cobblestones.

We had to build a new house, but inflation had made us poor. Mother dismissed her chambermaids, and kept only the cook and one maid. The ruined aristocracy was replaced by the nouveaux riches, who brought a sort of pompous gaiety to the town. Hotels, luxurious shops and elegant restaurants opened-the avenues of our town had never been so prosperous.

My parents each found their own way of escaping reality: Father toiled over the translation of an anthology of English poetry; Mother busied herself copying out his manuscript, replacing his over-hurried words with her careful calligraphy.

Mother sealed her overseas memories in a chest. When she is away I take the opportunity to steal the key, which she keeps in a vase. Photographs, clothes, letters and printed fabrics in extraordinary designs that exude a bewitching smell… not musk, or cedar, or sandalwood; not the flowers we have in our garden, the trees we have in our towns; but a perfume that transports me to another world.

Dreaming only deepens my sadness.

At last! After a month of arduous tracking through the mountains, we have trapped the terrorists. We have cornered them on the edge of a precipice, with no escape unless they can fly.

We finished the bulk of our provisions a long time ago, and while we waited for new supplies, we shared what little we had. We can each count on the fingers of one hand the biscuits that have been handed out, and which we eat with mouthfuls of snow.

Yesterday at noon, with all our ammunition spent, we decided to charge straight on at the Chinese with fixed bayonets.

This morning a strange feeling of calm has settled on the mountain. There is not a breath of wind and only the cries of pheasants stand out against the silence. I am writing my will-the words of farewell calm my nerves.

I slowly draw the saber from its sheath, and wipe the blade with my handkerchief. This steel forged at the beginning of the sixteenth century has never shined so bright. In the past it has sliced off countless heads in the service of my ancestors. Today it is a mirror, reflecting the menacing purity of death.

Suddenly a bugle sounds. I bound out of the trench and hurl myself towards the enemy with a fierce war cry. Up on the mountaintop nothing moves: not one shadow, not a single man. The terrorists have flown away! A soldier is waving to us from the edge of the precipice. About a hundred meters below, the snow is dotted with bodies. The gunmen must have thrown down their weapons, their dead and their wounded, before hurling themselves over the edge. Now I understand why at about midday yesterday, after a violent exchange of fire, their guns fell silent.

The ammunition in both camps ran out at the same time, but neither knew of the other’s plight. We were all on the verge of collapse.

The Japanese had chosen to be glorious in their action, and the Chinese in their deaths. The pathetic heroism of their collective suicide is tainted by a sad irony: killing yourself too soon is a shameful form of surrender. The Chinese civilization is several thousand years old and has produced untold philosophers, thinkers and poets. But not one of them has grasped the irreplaceable energy of death.

Our more modest civilization is the only one that has grappled with this essential truth: to act is to die; to die is to act.

One custom that we have imported from the West is that the New Year marks the beginning of the season for parties.

My sister dresses me in one of her European dresses, then she parts my hair on one side and waxes it thoroughly before opening her makeup box. In just one hour I have become unrecognizable even to myself. My face is as white as over-soaped linen, my eyelids are darker than a moth’s wings, and the fluttering false eyelashes make me look winsomely tearful.

On the square in front of the town hall the garlands are vying for attention with the stars. Carriages and cars glide over the snow and spew out “gentlemen” fingering gold-handled canes, and women in furs, their hair curled and cigarettes at the end of ivory filters held nonchalantly between their lips.

A wood of fir trees sparkling in the snow lies between the Imperial Hotel and the rest of the world. A path swept clear at the beginning of the evening zigzags between the shadows and the wavering torchlight. The hotel porters in their red capes are sharply silhouetted against the glassy clarity of the windows.

A revolving door projects me into a huge room, where red lacquered columns reach up towards a domed ceiling hung with crystal chandeliers like bouquets of fireworks. Mountains, forests and seas undulate around the walls, and the sun contemplates the moon as storks fly off towards the clouds.

My sister drags me over to a table and orders me a café au lait, a fashionable sort of drink to have in a place like this. The band accompanies a singer in a sequined dress that gleams as her body moves like a charmed snake, while her milky-white throat produces a moody, plaintive voice.

Soon my brother-in-law asks my sister to dance. Looking into each other’s eyes and holding hands, they look beautiful and elegant as they move rhythmically backwards and forwards, round and round. The music speeds up and my sister smiles and flushes as she lets herself be carried away. When the waltz ends amid general applause, my brother-in-law kisses her gently on the shoulder and I feel a constriction grip my heart: who could guess how much he makes her suffer?

I look round the tables and see Huong, who must have been watching me for a while. My classmate greets me with a little nod, and I would like to be swallowed up by the ground to hide my horrible makeup. What will she tell them tomorrow? I’m going to be a laughingstock.

As I struggle with my embarrassment, she waves to invite me over to her table. I get up slowly and, as I reach her, I can see the thick powder on her own cheeks. She is wearing a completely backless dress, and I find this extravagance reassuring. I am not the only one who looks like a caricature.

A man offers me his place and goes to find a chair. Huong introduces me to her friends, who seem a lot older. She is very friendly towards me and for the first time I can see how gracious her carefully chosen words are. Now that any animosity between us has evaporated, I can admit to her how hostile I feel towards this stuffy, hypocritical society.

She looks at me for a long time and then raises her glass towards me.

“You must drink. Otherwise you’ll always be an outsider.”

The champagne fizzes in my throat and makes me cough. I am won over by the gaiety of the evening and, encouraged by Huong, I dare to look up and meet male eyes. A man asks me to dance and I feel like a bear walking beside him. When I come back to Huong, her hysterical laughter is contagious: this girl I have never liked is suddenly my accomplice, my friend.

As we leave the hotel, still drunk, I insist that we go back to the car on foot. My sister scolds me, but it isn’t long before the idea appeals to her: I need to sober up before we get home.