Shan Sa - The Girl Who Played Go

The spring it once was!

Only I, I alone

Am what I once was! [19]

he recites. And then he weeps.

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?

After class Huong drags me over to a quiet corner.

“I’ve found you a doctor,” she says, “come with me.”

“Who is it? How did you find him?”

She looks round but the room is empty, we are the last to leave, so she whispers in my ear, “Do you remember the matron in my dormitory who let me slip over the wall? Yesterday I told her that I was pregnant and looking for a doctor.”

“You’re mad! If she starts gossiping, you’ll be expelled and your father will make you shave your head and send you away to the temple!”

“Don’t worry, I also told her that if she talked I would report her to the police for living off immoral earnings. I would tell the police that, to get money from the girls at school, she drove them into prostitution. Not only would she lose her job, but she would be hanged in public. I gave the old bat such a fright that she didn’t waste any time finding me the discreetest of doctors.”

I follow Huong up to her dormitory, where she makes me dress as she thinks a woman of thirty would look.

The rickshaw goes through the flea market where the pavements are piled high with furniture, crockery, fabrics, knickknacks, jewelry and scrolls of yellowed, mildewed, moth-eaten paintings. The vendors are Manchurian aristocrats dressed in rags, who traffic in the spoils of a bygone era hoping to trade a jade snuffbox or an antique vase for an hour’s escape in an opium house. There are just a few Japanese officers walking up and down, avidly examining their wares.

As a precaution, Huong asks the rickshaw to stop at the end of the street, and we walk the rest of the way, some 200 meters before climbing a crumbled flight of steps through a front door that leads us into a labyrinth of sheets, trousers and diapers drying on the line. I lurch forward to retch before I can even register the savage stench of urine and rotting eggs.

At the far end of this corridor we can see a row of rooms crouching under a sharply sloping roof. Each family has set up its cooking oven outside and there are clouds of flies spiraling around them.

“Hello-o,” Huong starts to call, “Doctor Huang Pu.”

A disheveled woman appears on the doorstep and eyes us with contempt.

“Over there, at the end on the right,” she says.

On the door we find a sign written in faded ink:

DOCTOR FAMED OVER THE FOUR SEAS FOR HIS HEAVENLY

GIFT FOR BRINGING BACK THE SPRINGTIME OF YOUR LIFE.

SPECIALIST IN CHANCRE, SYPHILIS AND GONORRHEA.

We knock at the door and a woman with permed hair and a face ravaged by makeup appears. She looks us up and down and then walks away, clicking her heels. Huong pushes me from behind and I stumble into a dark room. There a girl is huddled in a corner; she looks dead. Next to her a man is smoking and he examines us closely.

“Which house?” he asks.

We take refuge in a corner. Now the bitter smell of medicinal infusions and other indecipherable stenches suddenly hits me.

I don’t know how long we wait before it is my turn to see the doctor. Doctor Huang Pu has white hair and there is so little of it that the Manchurian plait hanging down his back is narrow as a pig’s tail. He sits behind a black table, in front of an empty bookcase, stroking his little beard.

“Which house?” he asks.

“Liberal,” Huong answers for me.

“How old?”

“Twenty,” she says.

“What is the problem?”

“My friend’s period is three weeks late.”

“Oh well,” he sighs. “Open your mouth, stick out your tongue. Right, get undressed.”

I hesitate, and he says it again: “Get undressed.”

Huong looks away. I hate myself and, with tears welling up, I start to unbutton my dress.

“Lie down over there,” he says, pointing to a board covered with a dirty sheet. “Spread your legs.”

I think I am going to die. I clench my fists to stop myself crying. The old man comes over with a light in his hand. He looks, palpates, takes his time.

“Right,” he says, standing back up. “No putrefaction. Get dressed.”

He asks me to put my right hand on the table, and he puts his first two fingers over my wrist. His yellow nails are more than five centimeters long and they curl at the end.

“The pulse is very irregular, I can sense your condition in it: you are pregnant.”

“Are you sure, Doctor?” I hear myself asking in a feeble whisper.

“Absolutely sure,” he says, taking the pulse on my left hand.

Huong gets to her feet behind me.

“You must have a remedy, Doctor?” she asks.

“Criminal, criminal,” says the old man, shaking his head.

Huong laughs nervously.

“Give us the prescription!” she says, throwing the huge golden bracelet that she wears down onto the table. The old Manchurian thinks for a moment, eyeing the bracelet, then he picks up his calligraphy brush.

Huong sees me back home.

“Tomorrow, after lessons, I’ll bring back the infusions and the whole thing can be forgotten,” she tells me.

“Don’t go to so much trouble,” I say. “The only way I can save my honor is to die. Look, take this jade bracelet. I don’t want you to pay for me, I don’t deserve it.”

But she puts it back on my arm.

“What use is something beautiful like that going to be to me? Tomorrow you’ll drink your infusion and you’ll be rid of this burden, but in a year’s time I’ll be married to a stranger and raped by him.”

The day after the storm, a beautiful sky.

At this time of year jasmine sellers badger everyone in the streets. I cannot resist their pleading and, thinking about the Chinese girl’s tanned wrists, I buy a bracelet of the flowers.

When I see her on the Square of a Thousand Winds, I remember the strange figure she cut the day before as she stood by the river in the rain. What was she doing there? What was she thinking? Yesterday she wandered through the town like a madwoman with slippers on her feet, but today her hair is swept off her forehead and smoothed into a heavy plait, and she is playing coldly and shrewdly again.

Something about her has changed in the last twenty-four hours. Or am I no longer looking at her in the same way? Beneath a drab dress her breasts have swollen, her body has shaken off its childish stiffness and is now vigorous and supple. Despite her frown and the hard look in her eye, her gentle pink mouth cannot help but be attractive. Still, there is a gloominess about her and she toys nervously with the end of her plait; as though it pains her somehow that she is blossoming with new life.

She moves a piece.

“Well played!” cries a man moving over towards our table.

On the Square of a Thousand Winds there are always passersby, stopping to look and occasionally taking the liberty of giving advice. This man is barely twenty years old, with oiled hair and wearing far too much perfume-he annoys me.

I make my move.

“What a mistake! You should have put it there!” cries the young know-all, pointing to the board with his fine, pink hand sporting a white jade ring. Then he turns to the Chinese girl and says, “I am a friend of Lu’s. I’m from the New Capital.”

She looks up and, after a brief, polite exchange, she leads him away from the go table.

The wind carries their voices over to me: an easy familiarity has been established between them and they are already using the familiar form of address with each other. The Chinese language has five different tonalities; it is like music, and this conversation is an opera I find unbearable. In my pique, I shove my hand into my pocket and crush the jasmine flowers.