Duong Huong - The Zenith

First, Quy had to ally with his youngest brother, because every struggle turns on force. The stronger the force, the quicker the victory. In this struggle, the most trusted allies have to be your close relatives. “Brothers are like arms and legs; husband and wife are like shirts you take on and off.” In the past, Quy and Quynh had not been close, partly because there was a big gap in their ages, partly because Quy had felt that his parents had favored their youngest son over him. And Quy ran the risk of not inheriting a large portion of the family assets if his naive and flirtatious brother was preferred. According to the common rule, a youngest child has a right to inherit if both parents agree and the oldest son has flawed abilities and attitudes, or has a congenital mental deficiency. The chairman does not feel threatened as to lack of ability, but that very clever mind of his might prove to be a double-edged sword when one’s capacities turn around to “kill their owner.” But now, the appearance of “a cheap broad from nowhere wearing a green blouse” provided an opportunity to test his youngest brother’s heart, to win him over and turn him into an effective right hand, something he had done with almost all of his opponents in Woodcutters’ Hamlet since he had become village chairman.

As for Quynh, everything was the opposite. The youngest brother was spoiled, still at a romantic age and more concerned with having a good time than worrying about life. Sometimes, if he were asked, “Who will get the big house?” Quynh would smile and reply: “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all belong to my father.”

They would probe a little more: “Do you mean to say that Mr. and Mrs. Quang do not plan to write a will?”

He would turn red and retort: “My parents can still wrestle water buffalo; they don’t need to worry about a will.”

After that, nobody could get a word out of his mouth. To be fair, Quynh was a good one, liking only to play and not work. From his birth until his mother’s death, Quynh had not thought about anything. Everything had been provided for him by others. Even when his mother had died on the roadside while he had been away, sleeping over at the neighboring hamlet, he was not like others who would have felt torn apart, with remorse so haunting that you can’t eat or sleep. But Quynh had not felt a bit shocked. When the family had scolded him, he felt sad for a few hours until mealtime, when with a full stomach his concerns would disappear. At night, he slept like a toddler; just like a three-year-old child. The relatives grew tired of talking, of complaining, to Mr. Quang, who only smiled and said:

“Parents give birth to children, but heaven gives them character! What can I do? In my family, only the twins are concerned about work and think about what comes first and what comes later. But they both enlisted on the same day.”

Then Mr. Quang would sigh, sadness filling his eyes; only families with enlisted children would understand him.

“During wartime, tears drop as a waterfall. Weeds grow in the gardens; no ferries cross the deserted river.”

These couplets echo his thoughts:

“My family situation is similar; the smart ones leave for war, the stupid and the awkward stay behind.”

“It’s not just us! Everywhere it’s like that. The nation is the same for all. The war comes; the wind blows open every door.”

People considered Mr. Quang to be a forgiving and easygoing father. They also concluded that Master Quynh was big but not wise; maybe not that frivolous, but surely not mature enough to know how to be frugal, how to meet family expectations and be polite in general. Especially in his schooling he had made his mother unhappy more than once.

Thus, one could not understand why this awkward, heartless, and silly boy left his home the first day his young stepmother appeared. Perhaps this was the biggest question for the neighbors, and most of all for the chairman. He trundled down to the lower section to find out why. It didn’t take long to discover the reason. Just two days later, the village people knew that Master Quynh was in love with his stepmother. At the very moment Miss Ngan set foot in his home, the young man had been stricken by the blinding beauty of the young woman in the green blouse. In his mind he had thought she was the wife that heaven had sent him, because together he and Miss Ngan fit the golden formula for marriage, “a girl older by two; a boy by one,” a formula that had been tested for thousands of years. This dream had come in a wink and then had crumbled away the very next instant. The whole drama played out in the young man’s heart in less than half a day; from the morning when Mr. Quang’s horse carriage brought the new bride to the village to the disappearing of the sun, when Quynh had quietly left home for the lower hamlet.

In the past, cases of sons falling in love with their fathers’ new brides were not rare. In such instances, usually the woman had been condemned for being “loose” or a whore—“those immoral ones who seduce both father and son.” Insulting the woman is so very easy; it satisfies the public mind, even when a majority are themselves women. And yet, in Quynh’s case, the villagers dared not fault “an immoral city whore who wants to sleep with both father and son.” First, because, even if Miss Ngan were “loose,” she had been in the community for only half a day with no time to practice her trade of seduction. Second, and this consideration was more important, Mr. Quang stood militantly by her side. Whether the thought was ever spoken or unspoken, everybody knew that this canny old man never feared anyone.

That is why when the chairman put it about all over the village that his youngest brother, Quynh, was in love with Miss Ngan, the story took effect only with a handful of people who needed the hamlet seal on their official résumés or certificates of birth, marriage, and death. And even with these people, they dared to suck up only in order to get their way; afterward they avoided Quy.

“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business! Messing around will get your head broken.”

The people in Woodcutters’ Hamlet told one another to sew up their lips with thread. But in life, everything that they “tell each other” or “keep to themselves” doesn’t really avoid or remove the reality. Like children who are afraid of ghosts but love to hear ghost stories or people who appear indifferent but actually burn inside with curiosity and resentment. Their self-restraint lasts no more than twenty-four hours. Then they would blurt out to each other precisely how many times the chairman had come to look for his youngest brother. They told one another everything, how in the end the oldest brother branded his youngest brother as “stupid, a lowlife, someone who would not eat rice, but only shit…”

People said the youngest son was rather of a sweet and playful disposition, fearful of his father and ashamed at falling for his stepmother. Therefore when his oldest brother urged him on to do this or that, he only shook his head:

“I will not do it. Heaven will kill me if I do that!”

Therefore Quy’s stratagem to make an alliance completely failed. From then on, this existential struggle had only himself on the front lines.

At that time, the old year drew to its last days; every household was preparing to celebrate a new year. This year, the Tet festivities would probably be lavish because the previous year had been so cold and devoid of any joyful feeling of celebration. Everybody was waiting for heaven’s reparations so that they could have an occasion to gather and be merry. The open ground at the tip of the upper section was cleaned up, holes were dug for poles in preparation for the flag contest. Next to the holes, people prepared for games of cock fighting and releasing doves. This year, the hamlet had a registration for buffalo fighting. Many people from the mountains would come down to attend. Even though Chairman Quy was burning from anger, he still had to go and get the opera group to perform on New Year’s Eve, because providing such spiritual refreshment was one of the important criteria that people used to evaluate the ability of hamlet officials. Two days before the New Year, early in the morning, the chairman asked Miss Vui to go to the district town with him to help organize the evening celebration. When there, he assigned the secretary to “investigate the background of that slut Ngan; everything else I’ll handle myself.”