“My father is very rich, but I have to beg him for money. He gets angry, and he ends up giving me only half what I need, throwing it down onto the table at me.” Then she goes on, “I’ll marry an older man who’ll know how to pamper me.”
A few days later she leads me to understand that she has fallen for someone.
“You see,” she says, “a real man is different, not like the boys with mustaches who lurk outside our school. He can guess what you’re thinking, anticipate what will make you happy. When you’re with a man, you’re no longer a girl but a goddess, a sage, an ancient soul who has lived in every era, a wonder that he contemplates with all the intense curiosity of a newborn baby.”
Even though Huong has become my best friend, I never quite understand what she is saying. Her convoluted soul is divided between light and darkness, she is both blatant and discreet, and her life is full of mysteries despite everything she confesses to me. This Monday morning she has come to school exhausted and on edge. Although her hair is plaited, I can see evidence that it has been curled and then straightened. She is intoxicated with some joy that only she understands.
“The best demonstration of love a man can give,” she tells me, “is his patience as he watches a virgin maturing.”
I flush and find I can’t utter a word. She doesn’t seem at all embarrassed to be talking about something so intimate, and yet there is a grandeur, a heroism to her indiscreet confessions. There is a realm of life that I haven’t yet grasped. I feel like a blind person who has never seen the splendor of the sun.
“How can I get out of this darkness around us?” I ask Huong.
She pretends not to understand.
“How can I become a woman?”
She opens her eyes wide and cries, “You’re mad. Leave it as late as possible!”
20
Back to the civilized world.
The town of Ha Rebin is in the northern extremity of Manchuria, a strategic place in the Sino-Russian conflict. Our warships are challenging the Russian navy on the River Love, which is several kilometers wide.
When twilight falls on this noisy, bustling town, the domes of all the mosques, the crosses and virgins on the churches, and the sloping roofs of the Buddhist temples are all silhouetted against the bloodied brilliance of the sky. Russians, Jews, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, English, Germans and Americans live side by side in this cosmopolitan metropolis. Each of these peoples has found a way of recreating its own landscape and living according to its own culture.
Yesterday I slept among bales of straw, lulled by the howling wolves and the moaning wind. I drank melted snow. My uniform was burned, full of holes and ingrained with sweat and filth. Today I am in a clean uniform and back in a bed with a woolen blanket in a heated room. I am off to visit the prostitutes with a few of the other officers. I blow my savings by choosing a Japanese girl.
Masayo, a young prostitute originally from Toyama, pours me a drink. Her makeup is unremarkable, her perfume bland, her kimono garish and the way she handles the bottle is a bit clumsy, but still she manages to dazzle me. When I catch hold of her hand, the touch of a woman’s skin has the same effect as an electric shock. I pull her to me violently and she falls into my arms. I rip open her loosely tied kimono and tear her underwear. Two white breasts spring out.
The pink of her nipples is more than I can bear. After months of solitude, I want to expire in a woman’s body. I knead her breasts with my hand and straddle her, despite her protests. My sex finds hers and I have scarcely penetrated her before a luxuriant pain sweeps over me and gently turns me inside out.
Back in the street, I walk with a spring in my step, both emptied and full of new energy. The prostitute has injected me with the human warmth that I had lost.
21
The square in front of the town hall is seething with people, and with my basket over my arm I drag Moon Pearl through the crowds. She complains about being jostled, about the price of grain, about how little game there is for sale. She is unusually talkative and strangely jumpy as she criticizes everything we buy. I am exasperated by her constant moaning, and I can’t wait to be rid of her.
In the last three years her life has changed into a great river of despair. I so miss my bright, cheerful sister with her dark plaited hair tied with fiery colored ribbons. She used to be constantly on the move, spinning round, sitting down only to get straight back up again. She persecuted us with that explosive laugh of hers.
Today a few wisps of wavy hair straggle from under her hood and float limply on her pale cheeks. Her hair has lost its shine, a metaphor for her entire being, dulled and subdued.
I shake her by the arm.
“Why don’t you divorce him then!”
She stares at me, opening her beautiful slanting eyes wide. Tears stream over her face.
“He loved me, Little Sister…! He swore I would be the only woman in his life…! I don’t think he’s forgotten his promise. It’s stronger than him… Yesterday evening I followed him… he went to the theater with some loose woman, a depraved creature who let him fondle her in his theater box…”
I don’t know what to say to her. Our new customs have condemned polygamy, but this hasn’t stopped men being fickle, or released women from their suffering. My parents are very enlightened, they encouraged my sister to marry the man of her choice-a marriage of love that has caused pain and unhappiness.
People are glancing at us and turning to listen, but Moon Pearl is too convulsed by her tears to realize how ridiculous she looks. Luckily a rickshaw comes past; I stop it, put my sister on the seat and ask the man to take her home. She is so intoxicated by her pain that she doesn’t even try to resist.
I carry on buying the things Mother has asked me to find. The local farmers and hunters come here every Sunday, traveling overnight to stand shivering outside the city gates, waiting for them to be opened. I finish my shopping as the sun reaches its zenith; the snow has melted this morning and there is an icy slush underfoot as I head for a tearoom. They have set up a stove by the door, so I sit down beside the stall and order an almond and hazelnut tea. The boy serves me quickly: a thin stream of scorching water flows from the spout of a giant kettle decorated with dragons, and lands in a bowl a good meter away. Behind me someone starts to sing:
A shiver runs through the crowd: the song has been banned. Anyone who dares sing it risks being sent to prison. I see people looking round in astonishment with pale, anxious faces. Just ten paces from me the brave individual starts again, and he is soon joined by other voices. More and more people join in the chorus and the song spreads through the whole market.
Policemen blow whistles to sound the alarm. Shots are fired. Rallied by the gunfire, a peasant who had been crouching beside his basket of eggs gets to his feet, clutching a gun in his hand. Some distance away another takes rifles from on top of some straw bales and hands them out. These armed men head towards the town hall, jostling passersby as they go. The tea stall collapses, making a terrible noise, and I am carried away by the crowd.