Duong Huong - The Zenith

“Careful, don’t get your clothes wet. It’s still a bit cold.”

“Yes, I know…”

Her response contains some unhappiness but he doesn’t pay any attention because he is busy watching the children on the other side of the river. There are more than a hundred of them, of elementary school age, every single one of them wearing a hat made of hay, with a backpack or a handbag. They cling to one another on a barge. Perhaps students of some school evacuated out here:

“If the planes come, where can they take shelter?”

He is fully aware that the shelters, whether personal or communal, have no real value other than that of a sedative drug. A pad of reinforced cement not bigger than a large bamboo tray covers the opening of a trench not deeper than eighty centimeters. It might shield you from grenade shrapnel, but how could it protect you from heavy bombs dropped from airplanes? But nevertheless people need the shelters to provide some sense of security. War is like a game. A terrible game in which the first victims are ordinary people like those children across the river. Squinting his eyes to see better, he gazes at all the straw hats dotting the morning sunlight, the tiny backpacks and the handbags inside which he knew mothers had packed their own monthly food ration. They had to scrape together the last grains of sugar, save the last of the dry food to give their children a chance to survive at the far-distant destination; a high sacrifice for people living with privation. The endless suffering of a history bespattered with war. Is this the fate of his people? It’s like they are people who are skinned and then made to face tearing winds or searing flames.

He hears her warning and remembers that she is sitting next to him. They are out here so that they can talk more easily:

“Perhaps Elder Brother is right; this country is ours. Even if we want to deny it, we can’t. We belong to a people who have been skinned open, therefore we have to endure all the pain that comes to those who have been skinned; to each his or her own measure. Now we have to go back to our torment!”

Smiling, he says: “I let you go first.”

“No. You are the man.”

“In our time, man and woman are equal.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You did. Everything that happens in our household shows not only that you believe women are equal to men, but also that women can influence men with their feminine ways.”

“I only act exactly as other women do.”

“But I married you and I didn’t marry the others. And this we agreed with each other before we got married…have you forgotten?”

She is quiet because she has not forgotten. With all the months and years of living together, and especially after they had a son together, why is he absolutely not conceding?

“I have not forgotten. But I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Why is a father so indifferent to his own child, then so affectionate with one of another?”

“One of another?”

He turns around and looks straight into her eyes for an answer. Unable to avoid his gaze, she replies slowly:

“Suppose he is the Old Man’s son. It’s still not like having your own natural son, one who carries your family name, one who will carry a stick and roll on the ground during your funeral and mine, one who will light incense at our altar as well as those of the other ancestors, on both paternal and maternal sides. Is that what you want? Your adopted child doesn’t have the Tran family name; the blood that runs in his veins is not Tran family blood.”

Now he understands: pride is the most powerful feeling in life. Any child is a very important product in which one can place all hopes and surround them with so many deep emotions. Any child, no matter how he turns out, is a sacred idol for a father and a mother. Because he no longer accepts this blinding conviction, he has hurt her sense of pride. This is what makes her angry. She can’t forgive him or the unfortunate child either.

He recalls an old verse that his high school teacher had read during a discussion at the end of one week: A person’s self-centered heart is a wild animal, a cruel and blind animal. No proper consideration can stand steady before such a beast. No breath of conscience can make a dent because such a beast has no heart. That skinny teacher with eyeglasses thick like the bottoms of glass cups had imparted so many useful things. The older he grew, the more he missed his old teacher as the fisherman misses the lighthouse.

Seeing him silent, she continues: “Do you think I’m missing the truth?”

She looks at him intensely, not hiding her sense of victory.

Then he turns around:

“Do you believe that our son will live up to all his responsibilities as you hope? Just take his uncle as a mirror and you’ll see a true reflection. Please try to look straight at the truth, at least this once. Though you hope that Vinh will be better than his uncle Tung, can he not become a duplicate of your younger brother, and so another reflection of your mother?”

Immediately her face reddens brightly, the red spreading to the roots of her hair by her ears and on her temples. He knows that he has hit the target, that she cannot deny that their son is the exact duplicate of his uncle, a kind of unintelligent urban playboy, selfish and without scruples. Many times he has had to embarrass himself to intervene so that her incompetent and lazy brother could have a place to live. For sure, in a not too distant future, their son, too, will have to hide in his father’s shadow to find a place to stay. This eventuality even the neighbors already know. But she cannot accept defeat. A mother’s pride is stronger than wild animals. Standing up, she shouts in his face:

“Even then, he would still be your son, your very own son. He is the eldest son, who will carry on the Tran lineage!”

“This is your last card, right?” he asks in a calm manner, a bit exasperated.

That calm is what she dreads the most. His eyes look to the river’s far side, where the sunlight spreads brilliantly all along the sandy shore and on the rows of leaning houses that stand beside the ferry.

“First you should sit down because I do not want to see you behave like that vulgar seller of fish sauce, Tu.”

She sits down, in tired fashion. Her face turns a darker shade. And while he does not have any anger in his voice, his soul has changed its tenor. What’s left there is an indescribable pain. Without looking at her, he says:

“I am like other fathers, I long for a son to carry the family name. I have tossed and turned and have been torn for many years watching our son grow. I also dreamed up so many hopes. The more I despaired, the more I dug in to build up more new hopes. Maybe men are different from women; their love always has limitations when it comes up against the truth. A man’s love cannot, all of a sudden, become unconditional. At some point it must break down when it hits a wall of reality. Then people speak of ‘broken dreams,’ or ‘illusions.’ In general, one must have broken dreams to grow wise. When a dream breaks, one can’t just close one’s eyes and walk into the muddy pond. They have to open their eyes to see the path clearly and avoid falling into the slimy mud to die there a stupid death. I have no more hope for our son. From the day he first screamed at Trung in the middle of a meal and in front of everybody, that he had a right to hold a bowl only when he had handed over his ticket, I understood that my son and your son does not carry any Tran blood, but only that of the Phams. I have no hope that he can bear my family’s name.