I Am a Cat (70 page)

Singleman tugs at his daft goatee. “In my experience,” he murmurs,

“to play for gain, for food or filthy lucre, cheapens this noble pastime. It maims the mind to burden its cells with thoughts of loss or profit.

Betting’s a scruffy business. I feel, don’t you, that the true value of a game encounter is only really appreciated in an atmosphere of leisurely calm where, all considerations of success or failure set aside, one lets things run their own sweet, natural course. Then, and only then, can the finer points of the game be properly savored by its connoisseurs.”

“There you go again. Harping away on the same old metaphysical drivel. It’s really quite impossible to have any sort of sensible game with a man who carries on as if he’d stepped from the pages of some ancient Chinese tome recording the maunderings of the scholar-hermits of remote antiquity.”

“If I harp at all,” says Singleman with quite surprising spirit, “it is, as Yüan Ming so neatly put it, that I play on a harp that has no strings.”

“Ah,” says Waverhouse dryly, “like wiring messages on wireless sets, I suppose.”

“Now then, Waverhouse, you can do better than that. But please don’t try. Let’s get on with the game.”

“Will you be black or white?”

“Suit yourself. Either.”

“As one might expect of a hermit, you are transcendentally generous.

If you’ll take white, I’m necessarily black. Right. Let’s get cracking.

Now then, off you go. Place your first piece anywhere you like.”

“The rule is that black starts.”

“Really? Is that so? Very well, being a modest fellow, my opening gambit shall be a black piece somewhere around here.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s against the rules.”

“Never mind them. It’s a brand new opening gambit, one I’ve just invented.”

Since I know so little of the world outside my master’s house, it was only recently that I first clapped eyes on a
go
board. It’s a weird contraption, something no sensible cat would ever think up. It’s a smallish square divided into myriad smaller squares on which the players position black and white stones in so higgledy-piggledy a human fashion that one’s eyes go askew to watch them. Thereafter, the devotees of this strange cult work themselves up into a muck-sweat, excitedly shouting that this or that ridiculous little object is in danger, has escaped, has been captured, killed, rescued, or whatever. And all this over a bare square foot of board where the mildest tap with my right, front paw would wreak irreparable havoc. As Singleman might quote from his compendium of Zen sermons, one gathers grasses and with their thatch creates a hermitage only to find the same old field when the thatch is blown away.

You set the pieces out and then you take them off. A silly occupation.

Why don’t the players keep their hands in the folds of their kimonos and simply stare at an empty board? In the earlier stages of the game, with only thirty or forty pieces in place, one could not honestly describe the effect as an eyesore, but as things move to a climax, the scrimmage of black and white becomes an offense to the civilized mind. The black and white pieces are so crammed together that they squeak and grate in a jostle of stones. The ones at the edges seem bound to be pushed clean off the board. No piece can get its neighbors to make room. None has the right to order those in front to offer gangway to the crush behind.

All they can do is to crouch down where they are and, without stirring, resign themselves to their fate.
Go
is a product of the mind of man and, just as human taste is accurately mirrored in this ever-more-restrictive game, so one may see in the cramping of the pieces an image of the human urge to be jammed up tight together. In that ugly crowding one may fairly read man’s mean antipathy to openness, his deliberate squeezing and diminishment of the very universe, his passion for territorial limitation within such dwarfish boundaries that he rarely steps beyond his own immediate shadow. He wallows in the rigors of constriction, in the painful inhibitions of his choice. He is, in short, a masochist.

Heaven knows why the flippant minded Waverhouse and his Zen besotted friend have chosen today for their game, but chosen it they have. They dug the board out from some dusty cupboard, found the necessary playing stones and eventually settled down to the crass fatuity of
go
. As might be expected of them, they began by playing almost skittishly, plonking down their blacks and whites in a random scatter across the board. But the board has only just so many squares and it wasn’t long before flippancy and otherworldliness found themselves in conflict. As the pressure increased, so did the verbal exchanges, spiced, as is their wont, with scarcely relevant quotations from the minor Chinese classics.

“Waverhouse, your play is simply awful. Can’t you see it’s crazy to place your piece there? Take it away and try it somewhere else.”

“A mere Zen zealot may choose to think it crazy, but I learned that ploy from studying the practice of the great
go
master Hon’imbō. You must learn to live with greatness.”

“But the piece will be slaughtered.”

“Did not the noble Hankai accept not only death for the sake of his lord but even pork on a poignard? Consider me no less sporting. Fair enough? Right then, that’s my move.”

“So that’s your decision. All right. It soothes my troubled brow. As the poet said, ‘A balmy breeze has blown in from the south and the palace grows a shade more cool.’ Now,” says Singleman, “if I link my chain of pieces with another piece, just here, lo and behold, I’m safe.”

“Aha, so you’ve linked them. My, what a clever old thing you are. I never thought you’d see that one. But there you go, quick as a flash, bang, bang, and you think I’m dead. I’d hoped you’d be guided by the good old folk song ‘Don’t Bang Bells at the Hachiman Shrine.’ So what do I do now?” Waverhouse sought to look crafty. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll put one here. And what will poor pussy do next?”

“Poor pussy will next do something both simple and daring, like this.

Which blocks your line like ‘a sword that points up sharply at the sky.’”

“Steady on, old man. If you do that, I’ve had it. Hang on a moment, now. Really, that’s not funny.”

“I warned yon not to make that move.”

“I offer my abject apologies. You were quite right, and I’ll take that move back. So, while I ponder, take your white off, will you?”

“What! Is this another of your sorry-I-wasn’t-really-ready gambits?”

“And while you’re at it, you might remove the piece right next to it, too.”

“You’ve got a damn nerve.”

“You couldn’t be suggesting that I’m cheating, eh? Oh, come on, Singleman, what’s a stone or two between friends? Don’t act so stuffy.

Just be a good chap and take the damn things off. It could hardly matter to a lofty soul like you, but to me it’s a matter of life and death. Like that moment of supreme crisis in Kabuki plays when some character comes bounding on stage with shouts of ‘Hang on, hold it.’”

“I fail to see the similarity.”

“Never mind what you see or don’t see. Just be a decent fellow and take those pieces off the board.”

“This is the sixth time you’ve asked to have your move back.”

“What a remarkable memory you have. When we play next, I’ll double it up to a good, round dozen. Anyway, all I’m asking now is that yon should remove a couple of miserable stones, and I must say you’re being pretty stubborn about it. I would have thought that, with all your years of contemplating your navel, you’d have learnt by now to show a bit more give.”

“But if I let you off, that daring risk I took just now will stack the odds against me.”

“I thought I heard you prating that you pay no heed to such mundane considerations as winning or losing.”

“I certainly don’t mind losing, but I don’t want you to win.”

“Singleman, you dazzle me with the sophistication of your spiritual enlightenment. I positively gawp at this further manifestation of your gift for cutting through lightning by ‘dashing your sword at the winds of spring.’”

“You’ve got that wrong. It should be the other way around —cutting through the spring winds with a sword flash sharp as lightning.”

“Indeed, indeed, a laughable mistake. Only I somehow feel my version sounds the better of the two. I see myself as the last of the great diaskenasts. But let that pass. ‘That passed,’ the poet said, ‘so may this too.’ Since I see you’ve still got all your wits about you, it looks as though I’m done for on this part of the board, so I’d best give up the ghost.”

“We have it from the patriarchs that, sharply different as they are, in ultimate reality there’s little to differentiate the quick from the dead. I think you’re dead, and you’d be wise to be quick to accept it.”

“Amen,” says Waverhouse, slapping down with a savage clack the piece in his hand on a different part of the board.

While Waverhouse and Singleman are thus slugging it out in front of the alcove, Coldmoon and Beauchamp are sitting side-by-side near the entrance to the room. My wretched master with his yellow face sits with them. Neatly lined up on the matting of the floor, just in front of Coldmoon and eyeing him fishily, three dried bonitos present an extraordinary spectacle. He’d brought them around in the breast of his kimono and, though now exposed in all their nakedness, they still look warm from their walk. Beauchamp and my master were sitting staring at them with a finely balanced mixture of repulsion and curiosity when Coldmoon finally opened his mouth. “As a matter of fact, I got back to Tokyo from my visit home about four days ago, but I’ve been so rushed off my feet with this and that that I couldn’t call around sooner.”

“There was no need to hurry here,” observes my master with his usual lack of any social grace.

“I wouldn’t have hurried, but for my anxiety to give you these fish as quickly as possible.”

“But, they’re properly dried, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes indeed! Dried bonitos are the speciality of my hometown.”

“A speciality?” says my master. “But I fancy one may find excellent dried bonito right here in Tokyo.” He lifts the largest fish and, bending slightly, sniffs it.

“One cannot judge the quality of a dried bonito by smelling it.”

“Are they special because they’re that much bigger?”

“Eat one and see.”

“Certainly I shall eat one. But this one here seems to have an edge chipped off.”

“That’s precisely why I was in a hurry to get them to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, actually it was slightly gnawed by rats.”

“But that’s dangerous! Anyone eating that could blacken with the plague.”

“Not at all, it’s perfectly safe. Such modest gnawings, mere nips and nibbles, never hurt anyone.”

“How on earth did the rats get at it?”

“On board ship.”

“Ship? What ship? How?”

“I took passage here from home and, having nothing in which to carry your dried bonitos, I popped them into my violin’s cloth carrier-bag.

And it was there, that night, that the damage was done. Frankly, I’d not have cared if the rats had kept to the fish but unfortunately, perhaps mistaking it for another dried bonito, they also gnawed away at the frame of my precious instrument.”

“What idiotic creatures! Perhaps the life at sea blunts their sense of taste. All that salt, you know: the coarseness of the sea-gone soul.”

Having delivered himself of these odd remarks, my master sat and stared, fish-eyed and ictrine, at Coldmoon’s wrinkled gift.

“It’s in the nature of rats, wherever they may happen to be living, not to discriminate in their rapacity. Hence, even when I’d gotten the dried fish to my Tokyo lodgings, I worried for their safety. It kept me awake at night. So in the end I took them into my bed and slept with them.”

“How revolting. Surely a danger to health?”

“Yes, I agree. You’d better wash them thoroughly before you eat them.”

“I doubt if just washing will do.”

“Perhaps you should soak them in lye and then, for good measure and to restore the color, polish them up a bit.”

“Aside from sleeping with ratty fish, did you also take your violin to bed?”

“The violin’s too bulky to sleep with in one’s arms and. . .”

At this point the conversation was interrupted from the other side of the room by delighted shouts from Waverhouse. “Do you mean you’ve been to bed with a violin? How truly romantic! I recall a little poem from the past:

The spring is passing. Arms can feel

The weight of the lute

Becoming real.

“That, of course, is just an old-fashioned
haiku
. If he wants to outdo the ancients, the bright young man of today has no choice but to sleep with a violin in his arms. Beauchamp, lend me your ears. How about this for a modern variation on the theme?

Beneath this quilted coverlet,

Warm to one’s skin,