The Girl Who Played Go Read Online Free PDF

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