Duong Huong - The Zenith

Bending his head to look thoughtlessly at his fingers, Vu sees that his nails are long and untrimmed; he clicks one with another.

Le Phuong looks at the gesture, smiles, and continues: “Now you understand why we choose to be playboys, satisfied with a small life and its tiny pleasures. It is also the way that the old folks called ‘to live while hiding.’ Because right after the liberation of the capital, we knew that the ‘Great Task’ had been wrongly done; that the love boat had foundered; and that dreams had been illusions. The day we started on the road of resistance, all had the same dream. A revolution for a backward society or a people in slavery is to be a great cleansing — like a storm that sweeps away all the garbage and brings after it a new life of fortitude. For that reason, people accept death on its behalf. To be precise: people will die for their mountains and rivers because of a brighter future. All real revolutions always liberate productive forces and expand the space of freedom. But this revolution, aside from what it did to emancipate the people, neither brought freedom nor expanded productive capacity; on the contrary, it totally destroyed all the valuable culture that had made our nation, while also destroying its productive capacity. The land reform was actually a systematic and organized slaughter of all talented and effective people in the rural areas. Thus, from the social point of view, this revolution accomplished only a disgusting dredging up of layers of mud from the bottom of the pond to pollute its surface. With that mud came the dead bodies of frogs and toads along with junk and weeds.”

He stops talking. Vu feels as if he has been slapped by someone; a strong blow. But the fellow had not taken aim at him personally. He had only announced a truth. A truth that is the price to be paid for putting one’s neck in a noose when young; a price paid by so many other young men who had died without justice following a hallucination. When the writer spoke about this, his eyes were so sad; the pronounced wrinkles on his face deepen when he does not smile. Are his lighthearted and silly stories really a way to disguise a huge disappointment? A disappointment for an entire people!

All three of them fall silent. The other customers had left long before; there are now only three waitresses, busy plucking their eyebrows.

Tran Phu comments: “Those three girls must have just come from the countryside. If we stay here longer, they will take off their shirts to pluck the hair under their arms.”

“Yes, don’t rule out that possibility. Because they have no need to pretty up or play coy for three old men.”

“Have we really turned into some torn rags?”

“Not quite, if we look at it more objectively. The merchandise can still be used if it meets up with ladies in their thirties and forties. But these ones are very young and fresh, about sixteen or seventeen at the most — the age of our own children and grandchildren.”

“Oh, old age! Old age sneaking up behind our backs. Hey, Brother Vu, what is your take on old age?”

“I embrace it and live with it peacefully, to the extent I can.”

“That’s a smartly masterful reaction,” Tran Phu says, then he stands up. “Well, it’s almost time for supper, the patient must now return to his room. Le Phuong, will you accompany Vu back to the treatment ward? I will settle the bill and catch up with you.”

As Vu and the writer step out to the yard, they hear Tran Phu loudly call out to the girls: “Hey, if you want to groom yourselves, you should find an appropriate place. This is not the place to display womanly utensils.”

Hearing no one reply, Tran Phu suspects the girls are afraid to answer. A little later he catches up to the other two. They leisurely return to the building reserved for high-ranking cadres then part ways at the foot of the stairs.

“We wish you, Great Brother, a speedy recovery. Today, meeting a hero, I am completely satisfied,” says the writer to Vu.

When Vu gets to his room, he sees a group of nurses surrounding the doctor, a mature woman in her fifties. They had carried in an artificial breathing machine for the patient in the bed opposite his. His face is all pale; his eyes are shut tight; his lips are compressed, leaving only a dark line. Vu steps in just as the nurse puts the oxygen mask on the patient. He quietly walks behind them to his bed.

It rains again, the shy rain of spring.

The drops fall singly, dropping lightly on the ground without bravado. Then it stops. The wind from the Eastern Sea rolls in and chases the wandering clouds across the deserted sky. Clouds the color of eggplant, reminding him of the garden in his birthplace, a home village that seems so faint and distant that no more than some delicate and mysterious memories remain. The purple reminds him also of the fields in Provence where people grow the fragrant herb called lavender to make perfumes and soaps. The first time he had ever stood before such a vast and purple field, his soul had frozen still before the beauty of the foreign land. And he had then cried silently in his heart:

“Oh, when will our local fields and the vast and sunburned hills of central Vietnam be covered by such an exquisite blanket? Oh, when will the peasant farmers of my country walk in their fields with the tranquil faces of those in this country? Oh, when will the kids who watch cattle in our country be dressed properly like those kids here who leisurely walk their cattle in the shadow of poplars lining the roads? When and when?”

For many months and years, his heart raged over these questions. For many months and years, he was obsessed by a parallel image — a comparison that was painful and that could not be forgotten: the leather shoes and warm socks of French farmers seen next to feet that were cracked, with muddy black nails, with toes that were crooked because for a thousand years they had had to take hold in the muddy fields. That pair of images had followed him like a shadow, appearing to him during noontime dreams or when he was tossing and turning in the middle of the night; when he was sitting in jail as well as when perched honorably on a dais. His suffering people. The hard fate reserved for them by the Creator. So many tears he had shed over that bitter destiny. Everything he had tried to do had been in the brave hope of changing their condition.

“I love my people so much. Why don’t they love me? Why can’t they give me just a tiny bit of happiness, the same as in other, ordinary lives?”

“Oh, the people: it’s an abstract concept, a formless crowd, a cacophony of the sea breathing, the pounding knocks of the waves of time. Those who have prevented you from living as a true human should are your very close comrades, but most of all it was my own fault because I took up the role of a saint.”

“But my nation is small and weak. To have stimulated their trust and courage, could I have acted differently?”

“You chose the easier path, one most appropriate for your people’s intellectual capacity. That is why you have had to pay a price. The game of playing the saint is not a new one in human history. What altar has not been decorated with fake flowers, even though, in the past, it was made from silver or brass or, today, of pliable plastic and synthetic diamonds? Every game has its price. In this life, nothing is given free.”

The one in dialogue with him has the last word, with a teasing smile on his lips. Then he disappears with the wind; a warm and wet wind that leaves him cold, making him shiver. He casts his eyes as if he could follow the unfortunate fellow, as if he had come from the left side of the temple, crossing the yard and the cherry blossom garden. Then he had disappeared in the same direction. That fellow looked exactly like him, but with a complexion greenish like a banana leaf and a look full of contempt.