Duong Huong - The Zenith

Another gust blows by from the sky. The yellow leaves that it catches are spinning around the patio. It seems the air has turned colder; or is it the misty clouds surrounding the temple that make him shiver? The sunlight has muted into a weak yellow. It is very possible that a spring rain will pour down in a few minutes.

“You’d better get down the mountain, I am afraid it will rain.”

“Yes, I must go, as a lot of work awaits. Besides, the plane is only booked for today.”

He then looks straight at the president. “Elder Brother, please take it easy and rest. Everything is as usual. Although he lives in a distant place, the little one is an excellent student. He just won the Marie Curie math award in the all-city high school competition.”

“Thank you, brother.”

“There is another thing I need to tell you truthfully.”

“I am listening.”

“Trung is reaching the age of thinking for himself. To spare him pain, I told him that he is my own son, out of wedlock.”

“What you did was correct. A child out of wedlock is a thousand times happier than a child without a mother and a father.”

They both stand. One looks down at the old tiles of the temple floor, and the other looks out at the layers of clouds forming a white wall.

That night the president goes to bed really early.

When the doctor arrives to take his pulse, he finds the door closed and the lights off. The two guards who are on watch all night stand in front of the veranda. The watch lights illuminate half the temple patio and the trees at the garden’s edge. Not daring to sing and disturb his sleep, the doctor returns to his office, gets some cards, and asks the guards to play.

“Remember not to laugh loudly or shout. If you get too happy, keep your lips tight and cover your mouth if you want to laugh. The loser will have a mustache drawn on his face with soot, but must absolutely remain silent, OK?”

“Absolutely, Doc, whatever you say; we are under your command.”

In the room, the president hears the whispering, the shuffling of furniture, and the doctor’s footsteps crossing the patio to the kitchen area of the temple. Most likely he is fetching a pot to use its soot for drawing the mustache on the loser. When all has been arranged, the group sits down, pleased with their harmless game of luck, and the cards are dealt. From that point on, he hears no sound other than the screaming of his own soul:

“My child; oh, my own child! My own son!”

Tears on both of his temples are wet and cold. He presses the pillow down on his face to suppress the sobbing:

“Why am I crying like an ordinary woman from a most ordinary family? When did this ridiculous thing start to happen? It must be old age, which brings changes to a person, making one act in this silly way.”

He scolds himself, but a few seconds later, his heart starts crying out again:

“Oh, my child, my own son!”

Simultaneously a burning longing to see the little boy’s face tortures his abdomen:

“Is he taller than the son of the woodcutter, or the same size? And what does his face look like now? I only remember him when he was three months old. Nobody thought that would be the last encounter.”

He remembers the loft in an old street. One had to walk a long corridor to reach the entrance, where there were always three guards dressed as civilians. The corridor was narrow and very dark alongside a thick wall, and served as a divider with another house, that of a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper had a storefront on the street level, and lived upstairs with an older sister. A huge spiral staircase with a wooden balustrade rose from the dark corridor to the upper floor, to a high and aerated room painted in light blue. For a short time that room was to have been his warm love nest; a nest, however, that had had no time to warm up before it was destroyed by a windy vortex…Like the transit of a shooting star, happiness had passed him by. He hadn’t even had a good look, and it was gone. Happiness: only sand grains in the palm of his hand. Before he could grab them, they had slipped through his fingers.…

Even with all that, it had been happiness.…

He thought he had forgotten, but it returned. The vision of an ancient spring day. For an instant, the brightness brought forth the scene of a past paradise — the old room; the old bed. The little one kicking wildly in the white diapers. The baby had smiled at him. Its red lips curled up, trying to say something. And her! She sat at the end of the bed, her fingers rolling up red yarn. All around were small skeins in many colors. What did she do with all that yarn?

Now he remembers: she had rolled up the yarn to make new dolls to hang around the bassinet for the baby boy to play with. The old doll had been damaged by his older sister a couple of weeks before. She had told him so, because every two or three weeks he could visit the mother and her child.

While listening to her chat, he asked where his daughter was. She said she went to sleep with Auntie Dong. He didn’t ask of her further, and she pouted that he loved the boy Trung more than the girl Nghia, that he respected men and disparaged women, still living by feudal values. He smiled because she had repeated to him the exact propaganda lesson taught her by the cadres. And he himself had taught them:

“The revolution will establish a new society, in which everyone will be equal before the law, with no distinction based on ethnicity, religion, or gender.”

He didn’t listen to what she said, for he was attentively looking at her young pouting lips, recalling the pair of doe’s eyes staring at him through the fire in the forest night. He smiled while she was lecturing him, while the little one wildly kicked in the white diapers. Intensely he looked at the baby, realizing that the boy had inherited the best traits of both him and her:

“He will be really handsome. He will become an elegant and stylish young man.”

She was certain of his bias and one more time reminded him:

“Mr. President, you must love them both equally.”

“Oh, of course. Each one is our child…” he replied to please her.

In reality, he cared for Nghia very much, as the girl resembled the older sister he liked best of all in his family. They were as two sickles made from the same mold. Because Nghia carried his very own image, she had to bear misfortune. In the little boy he saw her resemblance, his beloved.

Now she was no more. No one left to pout about his impartiality, a bias that he recognized in himself.

“I have two children, a girl and a boy; one is only a year older. Why do I remember only the boy? I, who always taught people about equality between men and women?

“But danger hovers over the boy more than the girl. Thus, probably, my sin through him is proportionately larger. Thus, this constant obsession about him,” he reasons to himself.

Even if his rationalization is extremely weak, he does not go deeper to question what is in his heart. It would be useless. All the paths in his rationalizing always return him to the old resting point. He misses the boy like crazy. After ten years he thought he could forget, but suddenly memories return and become a permanent pain, a gaping tear in his heart. The dream of being oblivious had dissipated like a cloud before the sun, leaving now only a burning longing:

“How is my son doing now? Does he worry about where he comes from? Or does he live safely under the protection of his ‘uncle’ Vu, believing that he is the son of some unknown person, an out-of-wedlock child living with an adoptive father? He will believe that. Believing so will provide an anchor for him. An out-of-wedlock child? Fate must have predestined it, because his affair with her had been outside the law. That kind of illegal affair would naturally produce children out of wedlock. Pity all of us, all victims of an unjust game. Now what is happening to my out-of-wedlock child? Does he look like me or her; does he keep intact all those features he had at three months? Is his complexion fair like that of his mother? Is there a Mongolian birth mark on his back like the one on mine, because older sister Thanh said that the mark appeared only when I was ten years old…”