Duong Huong - The Zenith

“That expression, Mr. President, implies that they are entitled to the highest level of privileges. They have the same rice ration book as the rest of us but it’s for fragrant rice coming from the most recent crop; the common people, however, are reduced to eating moldy rice because the government sells them only rice that has been kept in storage bins for five or six crops. Likewise with pork: they take for themselves the best cuts, leaving the belly cuts, the lard, and the head of the pig to sell to the people. If you don’t belong to the privileged group, you have to put up with lots of shameful belittlement before you can get a piece of real meat — just as if you were someone condemned to quarry stone. My eldest brother works at the National Library; he is a leading cadre and therefore is entitled to buy five hundred grams of meat per month. Once a month, his wife has to get up at three in the morning to go get in line at the Hom market. Every time, though, she ends up with pieces of pig’s head or pork belly because those in the government store smuggle the good pieces to their own folk and to those government offices that have something to trade: for instance, stores selling rice or fabric, sugar and milk, or some other necessities. It’s only once they have satisfied these privileged exchanges that they look after the people.”

“How come the leading cadres of the government are not aware of this?”

The driver was at a loss as to what to say. He briefly eyed the president, both to guess what he meant and to check for some ulterior motive. Then the president realized that he had uttered an extremely stupid question.

“Maybe they know it but they haven’t had time to report it upstairs.”

He had answered his own question. And the driver was quick to respond.

“Yes, Mr. President, it must be so.”

That night, he sat watching the moon. His quandary made it impossible for him to sleep. It was a crescent moon, looking as deceptive as a rice stalk’s leaf, and reflecting no light. He looked at the moon and thought of the inevitable decline of everything.

“Life is an insistent, endless turning; a mulberry field can transform itself into a seashore, while people come from nothingness to return to nothingness. Why, then, am I so depressed? Is it because that dying moon is somehow secretly linked to the country’s destiny? And is it an omen for the collapse — sooner or later — of the regime, a finality that must come to pass?”

That thought felt like a sharp sword that an executioner had placed against his neck. Suddenly he felt a terrible chill run down his spine. In front of him once again there appeared a mass of thirsty and hungry people crowding in a shameful mass in front of a counter distributing rice. He saw arms raised, clawing and pushing at one another; eyes showing only the whites and necks stretched out toward the barred window with all the crazy focus of wild animals lunging after their prey in their gnawing hunger. God, these are his own compatriots, citizens in the society that he gave birth to; people for whom he had nurtured the dream of liberation. Was this an illusion or a reality? Could it be that all his efforts had been mistaken or that what he had dreamed of was only the reflection of a palace upon the waters of a phantom river? He asked but dared not answer. A terror enveloped his mind. The faces that he had seen that morning were like a herd of ill-treated animals tortured by lack of food, no more than beasts in a stall waiting for the hour when they could put their heads in the manger. For if people could still feel outrage, they must no doubt nurture hatred, waiting for the opportune moment to cut the heads off those who guarded the prison, those who kept them in this beastly life.

Alas, could it be that the regime that he had done his best to build was, in the end, no more than an immense sheep pen? Or was it, more correctly, a gigantic prison, one that kept people down at the lowest level of their material needs? A place over which the most extreme mass self-shaming ruled; a school for cows that they might lower themselves before clumps of grass; or worse, a school for training robbers and thieves, for educating disturbed or schizophrenic people? For no other conclusion was possible. And if there was no other explanation, the present society must then constitute an unimaginable regression, even when compared with the misery of years ago.

Oh, dear gods, how many people have sacrificed themselves, how much wealth has been expended and destroyed, how many ups and downs have his people endured, only to end up with this barbaric life? If that were the case, then this revolution was the most dicey of all life’s possible undertakings. And if that were the case, then his life must be accounted a tragic failure without equal.

Now in the Lan Vu temple, he feels goose bumps all over. Chills running down his spine are such that he cannot help but cry out loud, which brings the guards on duty and the doctor rushing in. He has to come up with an imagined physical pain so as to deceive them.

At the Politburo meeting that had followed his first glimpse of the people’s misery, he had asked that the economic policy be reversed so as to find a way to save the situation. He stressed the meaning of the word “happiness.” Liberation is meaningless if it does not make people happier. All revolutions are crazy and cruel games should they fail to bring freedom and a worthy life. It is the same with independence. Independence is valueless if the people of an independent country do not find themselves able to stand on their own two feet as far as the most essential necessities are concerned.

No one had contradicted him.

But no one had listened to him either, even though all thirteen of them (including himself) sat around a huge table. He understood this as he had looked at their inattentive eyes, at their fingers as they indefatigably flicked the ashes from them. Yesterday, they had still been comrades fighting for an ideal. Now they were sitting there thinking of other schemes. The war of yesterday was over. Today was when the generals divided up the war booty in the palace. Yesterday in the woods they had all received the usual portions of rice and water from the springs, there being nothing to envy or to scheme for. Today, things were different. The social rank of each one sitting there needed to be accompanied by thousands of measurable and immeasurable rights. They were no longer concerned with the things that concerned him, because personal interests are always closest to us and seduce us the most effectively. The things that bothered him that day, to them had become tasteless or even incomprehensible. A whole machine was now serving their own persons or their families irrespective of time or limitations. They lived absolutely in accordance with the golden principle of communism. And that golden principle was meant for only one group of people and excluded the rest of the nation, a nation of sheep and cows that were jostling with one another, waiting to be let out onto the grass.

He had repeated what he had to say twice, three times. No one had objected. No one had responded either. No one had felt the need to dispute his ideas. Then came a break for refreshments, after which another topic had come up, which had more real, more concrete urgency, than the shame and suffering of the people. For other people’s suffering is always immaterial and difficult to internalize, and the suffering of the people is even fuzzier and harder to feel. For the people are very abstract, formless, having no feet with which to run, no wings with which to fly, not even beaks with which to sing. Independence was then no longer the great aspiration of a slavish and suffering nation, it had become a concrete war booty, somewhat like a boar that has been brought down by the lance of a hunter. With such meat, there is only enough for those who know how to handle spears and halberds; as for the masses who stand apart, they are merely bystanders or gossips. When necessary, he had realized, people can easily become deaf and dumb. Likewise, they can easily become heartless. Yes, those who crowded around him, who had divided up the meat of the freshly killed boar…they had become estranged from him. And he had become difficult for them to understand. The continent had ruptured; he stood on one side and they on the other. That had been the first time he had understood the breakup of relationships among those who had once called one another “Comrade” or even “Brother,” associations that had been woven over decades or even longer. The cutting asunder could happen in a moment once the sword of power had been brought down. Before that blade, all past associations, simply, would be fragile spiderwebs.