Duong Huong - The Zenith

“I should have understood this since then. I should have changed my game after that day. But I was not fast enough, so now I am washed away in floodwaters.

“Oh, they are much too many while I am one, by myself. It’s terrible to think that I consented to go along with them, believing that compromise would save the great work. I thought that, if I sacrificed for them, then — out of respect for what was greatly righteous — they would forget their personal ambitions. That was my stupidity. The chess game moved toward mate. They took advantage of that compromise to push me into the back rooms.

“But where does it lie, the root of my failure? Was it my stupidity or was it only fate’s twisted road? I journeyed in the same ship with them but when we reached the other side of the ocean, how could it be that only I was left behind on a forsaken island? Could it be that I am fated to be a lone wolf that can’t survive long in any gathering?”

Was it fate or wasn’t it?

These questions go around and around unceasingly in his head. His old, tired heart palpitates.

The clouds still roll unceasingly on top of Lan Vu Mountain. The snowy season of Paris and reflections of a youth long past also float by. His brain is racked by suspicions. Then his melancholy heart suddenly turns back to a Western city, a place known forever as one for love and short-lived love affairs. Only his soul remains behind like an orphan left on a deserted beach after the noisy days of a summer with lots of visitors. Paris! Strange that after leaving it, he had looked back as if it were no more than an inn; yet now that city appears in his heart as a port of last resort, very much inviting to a traveler. He misses an absent child because, after he left the apartment in the alley right next to Rue St-Jean, a baby girl had seen the day. A baby girl with a name extremely popular in France — Louise. He did not suspect that the nights spent with the seamstress had left a forbidden fruit. It was dumb negligence on his part. It was not until seven years later, on a chance encounter with the mother, that he had learned of this. He realized that it was simply the unexpected result of bodily urges. Nonetheless, the child still carries his blood, his very own blood. He had always meant to go back to the old alley and find the seamstress and Louise, but he did not have enough money in his pocket to buy her a proper gift. Then the tornado of revolution carried him away. In the end, he never bought for his daughter a single skirt or a pair of shoes. He has yet to hold her in his arms and look into her eyes.

“By now, she must have become a grown woman, for sure. She must be married with children. Does she ever, I wonder, search for the image of her absent father? Does she ever entertain, I wonder, the idea of going to Vietnam, a faraway tropical land, to watch an alien people who somehow are still related to her by blood? Or has she simply forgotten all about me even before getting to know me, deliberately so?”

This last thought makes him feel numb. He touches the teapot; he wants to take a sip but the tea is already cold. His face is reflected clearly in the mirrorlike surface of the table. He leans down to take a look at his silhouette. In silence. And a whisper is heard in his mind:

“This man is the worst possible father on earth. One of these days, you will have to come face-to-face with loved ones in the supreme court of your heart. The Autumn Revolution of 1945 will eventually be lost in the on-flowing river of history, just like any other revolution. Like the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the volcanic eruptions. Time will efface all traces. In time, all the crowns on earth will be shredded. All illusions of glory will be shattered. But the supreme court of the heart will always be there on the grounds of a secular world and that court will also be there on the other side of the river of illusions, where the souls of the dead are crowded together on boats made from ashes and dust, with empty eye sockets and three pennies placed on their silent tongues.”

An invisible net closes on the president, nearly asphyxiating him.

His head feels ice cold but his entrails are burning. He thinks this must be his own private suffering, only his. For he is a materialist, he does not believe in telepathy. From the beginning, he only knew the visible world, only considered real things that impacted the six senses, like most people.

Yet the president’s suffering is precisely the result of sympathy with other people’s sufferings. For on this earth there is another person in exile. An anonymous person. A person whose name he no longer remembers; whose face he does not know. A shadow of nothingness. Yet that shadow is still and always a living being in the flesh. That other being never stops thinking of him. That unfortunate person is linked to him because of an unusual destiny, a constant suffering, and a tragic chase. But the irony of fate makes it so that all the things happening to that other person must remain in the dark, beyond his understanding and imagination.

According to an announcement from division staff, the entertainment that evening would not start until 7:00 p.m. But dinner had been moved up from 4:00 to 3:30. After eating, the soldiers gather in large numbers in front of the stage, noisily chatting, with all the excitement of men who haven’t seen women in a long time. Some greedy fellows still have in hand a big chunk of burned rice, which they crunch while expectantly looking up at the curtains as if they would like to find behind those garish veils their “dream princesses.” Actually, those princesses are still having dreams in the trenches of the command post, partly because of fatigue after the long trip, partly because they all have a pale complexion and white lips due to malaria and thus they have no interest in showing themselves to people without makeup. They all sleep rolled up with one another like silkworms hanging on a board, trying to catch a few more hours before they have to appear onstage. The division command promises to wake them up at 5:30. But well before five, the soldiers outside are already yelling:

“Fairy ladies, why are you sleeping so much? You haven’t been to see us for several years, how can you have the heart to go on sleeping?”

“Little ones, wake up. We have been waiting and waiting for this day.”

“Where are you, princesses? Let us have a glimpse of your beauty.”

All these calls and shouts, the teasing and joking, get so loud that the women cannot go on sleeping, so they get up. Every one of them keeps yawning so hugely that their jaws nearly go out of joint. The assistant to the division commander clears his throat several times before putting his head inside the trench:

“Please be understanding, the soldiers haven’t seen even the shadow of a woman in a long while now. More than three years have gone by without a troupe coming here.”

The deputy head of the troupe responds, “It’s the same wherever we go, you don’t have to worry. The battlefronts are too far apart and there are not enough troupes to entertain them.”

“Thank you, the division is lucky to have you. Now the cooks are bringing you dinner so that you can have something before you put on your makeup.”

“Where is the troupe leader?”

“She has eaten with the commanding officers out there. So have the male actors.”

The deputy head of the troupe turns back and yells, “You see? We were privileged to go on sleeping. Everyone else has eaten and is setting up the stage. Anyone who wants to yawn, go ahead and yawn, then we will get ready for dinner.”