Shan Sa - The Girl Who Played Go

Her mocking laughter comes as a surprise.

“When we started this game your strategies struck me as strange. I was so intrigued that I decided to slip inside your thoughts. Helped by the sheet of paper on which I took note of the moves, I cheated. I would read it over and over in the rickshaw on the way home. It wasn’t to beat you, I wanted to discover you. I have visited your soul, found corners you wouldn’t suspect were there, I have become you and come to understand that you aren’t really yourself.”

I sigh: a few days ago I guessed what she has just admitted to me, and since then winning has meant nothing. The game has become a pretext for seeing my opponent, a lie to justify my weakness.

She is right, I am incapable of being myself, I am just a succession of masks.

“Now that you know what I have done,” she says, “you can stop the game. You can despise me and stop seeing me. Or you could challenge me to a new game. It’s up to you.”

“Up to me?”

“I will do whatever you want.”

I open my eyes wide with amazement and the girl, this girl who plays go, stares at me intently. The anxious look in her eyes reminds me of how Sunlight looked when she invited me to deflower her.

I am suffocating in the heat, drawing labored breath.

“I will soon be leaving for the inner territories. You can’t depend on me anymore.”

“I have to leave town too,” she says in a trembling voice, “I want to go to Peking. Please help me!”

I have to make a decision: she is asking of me the impossible, and yet it would take only a few simple actions. I would just have to raise my arms, take hold of her hands and draw her to me. We could leave for somewhere else.

I do not know how much time has passed. I am still sitting on my chair, paralyzed. The night is so dark that I can hardly see. The darkness erases my shame and incites me to be irrational, but I do not have the courage to challenge the power of fate.

I hear myself in a hard, hoarse voice, a flat intonation that makes my chest explode with pain.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

A long time later I hear the rustling of her dress: she gets up and moves away.

It is strange to look round your own room and wonder which are the most precious things in your life. At sixteen I have brushes for calligraphy, paper and vials of very rare ink given to me by my grandmother. Every year my parents had four dresses made for me. I also have coats, cloaks, muffs, embroidered shoes, patent-leather shoes, bracelets, earrings, brooches and necklaces. I have school uniforms, sports clothes, boxes of crayons, pens and erasers. I have toys, hand puppets, shadow puppets and porcelain animals that I would cry over if I lost one; and books I loved so much I wanted to take them with me to the grave.

There are valuable pieces of furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a screen covered with embroidered silk, an antique canopied bed and a bonsai tree from Cousin Lu. There are mirrors, little boxes of tweezers and manicure kits, a bag of toiletries, antique vases and the calligraphies of my ancestors. There are needles, colored threads, tins of tea, glasses that still bear the imprint of my lips, sheets impregnated with my smell and pillows that cradled my thoughts. There are the frames around the windows that I used to lean against, and the plants in the garden that I caressed with my idle gaze.

Moon Pearl comes up to tell me that supper is ready. She has grown thinner and her face has lost all its expression. I ask her to stay for a while; she sits down at my dressing table without a word and the tears begin to fall.

My last supper at home is sadly ominous: no one speaks. My parents eat without looking at each other, both nursing their guilt over Moon Pearl’s condition. The cook, completely overcome, drops a pair of chopsticks, and the clatter reawakens my sister’s tears. I can easily imagine the evenings after I have left: a gloomy table at which my place will continue to be set (a custom meant to bring back those who are missing); the food that no one touches; my parents’ silence; my sister drowning in her own tears.

I stuff a few things into my bag: some pieces of jewelry to sell, two dresses and some cotton wool to absorb the blood that still trickles between my legs.

I put the two pots of stones down on my table. I want to take one white stone and one black stone with me… Then I decide that I shouldn’t be so sentimental.

I won’t be returning to the Square of a Thousand Winds.

I hardly eat anymore, and I subject my body to ever more demanding training, but still it resists exhaustion. There has not been a drop of rain for days and the relentless bronze sun is driving me insane. My love has been transformed into bestial desire, and in the long, sleepless nights I am like a man slaking his thirst with imaginary water; it sometimes seems that I really am touching her skin, I have imagined it so many times. I draw her face endlessly in my mind’s eye, her neck, her shoulders, her hands… and I invent her breasts, her hips, her buttocks and her open thighs. I imagine the thousand different positions in which I would clasp her to me, each more wild than the last. I touch myself, but my member taunts my aching desire, refusing to release me from my pain.

Soon this nocturnal obsession grips the daytime: I have erections while we go for a run, my voice cracks when I give orders, and the hoarse break at the back of my throat conjures the pleasure that the Chinese girl would have given me. To feel the tightness of her sex around my member would have been the most violently ecstatic form of suffering I could ever experience.

One morning, unable to find any peace, I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds. It is five o’clock and the trees are whispering in a strong breeze, as if a thousand different drafts and breezes had agreed to meet there at the break of day.

The first player appears, with a birdcage in his hand. As he cleans the table and puts down the pots of stones, another man comes over to sit down opposite him.

My heart sinks.

That evening, after getting drunk with the Captain, I knock on Orchid’s door. She has already forgotten all her resentment and slips off her dress at once. It has been a long time since I have touched a woman. Seeing in her the Chinese girl’s nakedness, I discharge into her as violently as emptying the chamber of a gun.

As I wander the streets in the hope of seeing her, this tiny town suddenly seems vast. I try a different brothel, but none of the girls parading past moves me. Still, I go up to Peony’s room with her. Her smile reveals one golden tooth. Her body is fat and very white, and she cries out exuberantly.

At four in the morning a White Russian girl agrees to be slapped as I sit astride her. My belt leaves purple streaks across her skin.

Dawn is breaking, the new day just like any other. I shake a rickshaw boy awake and he takes me to the foot of the Hill of the Seven Ruins. Up the hill the tree under which she slept is clothed in rays of purple light, and it remains true to my memory, but the rest of the scene has lost all its poetry. In the middle of the clearing the grass has grown too high and is beginning to dry out.

Back at the barracks I have forgotten how to harangue my soldiers, how to stand up, even how to sit down. My mind is somewhere else, and nowhere.

That night I am woken by piercing whistles. I open my eyes. My deliverance is at hand.

The locomotive stands by the platform billowing columns of steam. I shove my men, barking at them to hurry, then I get in and pull the door closed behind me. I suddenly realize that I have forgotten to say good-bye to Captain Nakamura.