For three months now the snow-clad forest has cut us off from the outside world. There is more and more violence among my men, who spend their time getting drunk and quarreling. The white, the gray, the reflected light and the endless marching are all slowly driving us mad. The day before yesterday a corporal took all his clothes off and fled. He was found unconscious in a ravine, and now we have to tie him up and pull him along by a rope round his neck. I can hear in his curses and his piercing laughter the echo of many of the ideas spinning round and round in my own head like a refrain.
We have to keep on advancing, through the snow, towards the snow.
13
I am bored at my girls’ school.
Our national education system churns out laughably affected “young ladies,” and one day my classmates will be irreproachable society women. The prettiest of them is called Huong. Her eyebrows are carefully plucked to form two perfect crescent moons above her eyes. She draws them together, screws them up, smooths them out again. But these gestures, like her mannered laugh, can’t completely disguise the uneasiness of her changing body.
The ugliest of them, although she does in fact have the longest hair in class, is called Zhou. Her unfortunate face frees her to judge things with as much scorn and bitterness as she pleases, and that is her charm. Apparently her mother, a woman built like a Mongol wrestler and the niece of a very high-ranking officer, has lost no time throwing her weight about in the capital.
Between lessons the girls talk about film stars, dresses, jewelry, marriage and the Empress’s secret affairs. No one reads any of the new literature, which venomously attacks our crumbling society; no one mentions the latest political events, which are more devastating every day. Romantic novels handed from one girl to the next elicit easy tears. In independent Manchuria we are cut off from the rest of China. It is like a silk factory, producing something so soft and wonderful, but the silkworms themselves die in a boiling bath once they have woven their delicate cocoons.