Duong Huong - The Zenith

With glassy eyes he looks at the familiar face as it changes, all its features growing thin, breaking, quivering, and wonders if it is real or a dream. What is happening before his eyes?

“What is it, what is it that has happened to our lives?” he wants to ask, but his lips won’t open. His hands and feet can’t move either, though in a second he would have raised his hand to violently hit his wife. He freezes comatose in his emotions. Like a living corpse. Completely like that. Because he has a clear intention about his own survival.

At that moment, she recovers just in time. After pouring out all that had accumulated like a volcano, she has deflated like a beach ball, like a tire losing its air. She looks at him staring down, grasping that her words had come out of unconscious jealousy. Now it is her time to fear. She stands up and heads toward the dike.

He stands there for a while, absentminded, unaware that the sun is becoming very bright. On the river, the barge suddenly blows its whistle. The strident sound brings him back to the present. The numbness slowly dissipates and he can feel his legs and arms and warmth on his face. The wind from the river brings the smell of grass and the water, mixed with the warm and organic smell of trash decomposing in the waves that push against the banks.

A tickling feeling makes his throat itch. As his hand touches it, he gets hold of a praying mantis. The little creature waves its swords like mad. Even after he catches it in his hand, it does not stop moving its thorny legs in the air:

“You are pretty wild — a young horse fond of kicking, a young praying mantis fond of fencing, a young dog fond of barking, a young cat fond of scratching…What are you fond of doing?”

Next to his ears, he suddenly hears a children’s song that he used to sing when he was six, on those summer days in the countryside when he followed the village kids to ride water buffalo and fly kites. It has been sixty years. One’s life is like a dream. Instinctively he bends down and looks at his shadow on the corn rows:

“How many more springs will I see this shadow?”

The question just popped up in his mind, the reply already bouncing back with a sad laugh:

“Oh, of what importance is that? The longer you live, the more shame you endure, it was said of old.”

Lifting the mantis, he observes it for a last time before throwing it in the cornfield. The tiny insect disappears among the rows of green leaves that wave without tiring. His nape again erupts with an itch. This time it’s not because of a mantis or a grasshopper on him but the heat. The roots of his hair also start to sweat. Vu takes the soft hat, puts it on his head, and then returns to the Yen Phu dike.

The road is deserted, so he can see right through the entire little town. People shouldering goods in baskets quickly walk by. Smoke from electric generators blows out black dust that turns part of the town dark. To the other side is West Lake, a huge expanse of water behind rows of purple flowers along the Co Ngu road. A little farther on, he can see the Tran Quoc pagoda with little buildings unevenly arranged close to the water. A boat bobbles in the distance, most likely belonging to a fisherman, because every now and then a net is thrown in the sunlight.

“Where am I going now, home?” he asks himself, but he knows he can’t return at this time, even though he briefly thought of that blue curtain as his last refuge where he could recover his balance. She holds the key to the motorcycle; for sure she had driven home first. And right now she has changed clothes and is getting ready for lunch, unconcerned as if nothing had happened. He knows this clearly. He knows well that women recover rather quickly after every tormenting crisis, that their ability to fend for themselves in these emotional outbursts outdoes that of men. Maybe their hormonal disposition provides them with sufficient capacity to overcome such stormy episodes, such extreme emotional pain, and this ability creates for them a gendered reflex to emotional and spiritual chaos. Another cause might be that their skill in thoughtful consideration has limits, therefore they are less prone to the feelings that nag away at men. In each woman survives a part of primal humanity, quite powerful in the ability to sidestep the conscience. Their broodings as well as their regrets normally pass like a summer rain. Therefore they can stand more pain than men:

“Women are the strong ones, not men. This is the Creator’s biggest mistake.” He visualizes the calm face of his wife, at times stubborn, whenever she is scheming something. Tears always accompany some small objective, such as when to defend her younger brother’s mistakes, to run around trying to correct his misdeeds, or to justify her son’s academic incompetence, and when to paint new hopes for the one who will carry on the family name. He is familiar with all her tactics and campaigns even if he appears not to be paying any attention. In reality, all such maneuvers by women seek only to protect those who are close and to protect their own interests: “Mine, where is mine?”

There is the number one focus of all women.

Not only women, but all of humanity. Selfishness, a basic instinct, sits deep within all living things.

When he is tired of his wife’s petty tricks, he usually thinks:

“Rats, life is like that! She is just a woman, an ordinary woman among thousands of women, born that way among thousands of beings.”

Besides, he knows that living in any family demands negotiation. Without compromise, no community is possible. But he knows for sure that he cannot live with a woman who lacks morality. An ordinary woman with all the ordinary shortcomings would be acceptable. But an immoral or cruel woman, that would be another story. Like this side of the river or that side.

Today’s conversation has pushed him over to the other side. The danger is obvious. Already he can see the roof of his home torn off and its walls cracked open.

“No one can measure the depths of a woman’s heart. No one knows for sure what thoughts are buried in their minds, what feelings hide in the deep, secret recesses of their hearts. And I have lived with her for more than thirty years.”

Decades; so many ups and downs; so many warm memories; so much shared sadness. How can he count all the times at his wife’s bedside during her many miscarriages? How many paths had they walked; how many forests and streams had they crossed? Under how many temporary roofs during nine years of unsettled living in the resistance, with the sky as a tent and the dirt as a mat? How many times had he boiled water with herbs for her to wash herself and her hair? How much rice soup had he cooked for her when she was ill? How many days and how many nights?

He finds it so vast — all those eventful years, that stretch of a life now gone forever. He feels a lump in his throat as he thinks of the path ahead: a lonely life, like a desert spread far to the horizon, with no shelter, no shade trees. An invisible and shapeless desert that leads straight to the grave.

“From where and since when did this venal jealousy arise? It can’t have been an ugly feeling that developed from disappointment in the son, an obvious failure of a mother. It can’t be that simple. So if this cause makes no sense, then this jealousy has been nurtured for a while, since those days before the resistance was victorious, and all that had to have happened in the Viet Bac resistance zone.”

All these wandering thoughts bring him to the intersection where the road forks: to the left is the road that leads to Quang Ba; to the right is the curve of the Yen Phu dike leading all the way to the northern part of the city. In the middle of the fork, a group of concrete pillars has been erected to support gigantic panels that display the government’s strategic slogans. Striking red letters shine on a white canvas that is stretched on a steel frame a little higher than ten meters. One has to bend over backward to be able to read them. He knows by heart all those sorcerer’s sentences. In truth, he had imprinted them in his heart and mind with a frightening determination: