Duong Huong - The Zenith

“Relocate where?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but for sure somewhere up along the frontier. Up there, he was assigned to a nowhere place, teaching new recruits in a noncommissioned officers’ training school. Schools that train high-level officers are usually near big cities, but training schools for NCOs are always tucked away in areas where dogs eat stones and chickens eat gravel. There, even watercress is hard to find. All year long the only food is dried fish and shrimp paste.”

“Serves the dirty old man right! What goes around quite rightly comes around. He had enjoyed the gift of virginity, had tasted the body of a girl whose skin is like peeled cooked egg, then for the rest of his life he has to suck on dried fish, that’s fair.”

“If I were young Ngan’s father, I too would take a knife and give him a slash. That was the end of a girl’s life! A sad fate for a beauty!”

“You’d give him a slash, then you’d have to sit in jail and peel the calendar day by day. It takes two to tango; it took the two of them…why slash him?”

“You are really stupid. By law, eighteen years make you an adult. Ngan is only sixteen. To sleep with her, only the guy breaks the law. That crime is called seduction of a minor. Actually, he should have been indicted and sent to jail for at least four years. But his father’s older brother is a judge in the provincial court. For that reason he got no prison time.”

“Really, I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t read the law?”

“Where’s the time for reading law? I work two shifts, sometimes three nonstop. Six days a week. Sometimes on Sunday I must also make some sacrifices for socialism. When I get home, the only thing I want to do is sleep. I’m too tired to climb on top of my wife, so much for reading law!”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Twelve.”

“You should read the law now. If you sleep, just close one eye, the other should be left open to look around. If you don’t, there might be some guy your age that would like to call you father-in-law.”

“You bastard! Why do you have such a toxic mouth? You wish me misfortune like the teacher in Khoai Hamlet, don’t you?”

“I don’t wish you any such misery as that. But if you worry about what might come from afar, you can avoid misfortunes closer at hand.”

When Miss Ngan’s fetus was just into its fourth month, though it was already rather late, her school gave her a letter of introduction to the district clinic, asking that the fetus be removed due to an “accident of morality.” Ngan’s mother took her to the clinic at night; each covered her face with a cloth, showing only her eyes with a hat pulled down to the eyebrows. Ngan’s father announced publicly that she had been disowned and banished from the family, telling his wife, “It would have been better if she had put a knife to my heart rather than put me in this situation. From this day on, under this roof, if she is here, then I am not, and vice versa. It’s up to you to choose.”

His wife dared not choose, because both the husband and child were immediate family. After taking Ngan to the clinic to have the fetus scraped out, she turned her daughter over to her own mother. There, Ngan lived with her uncle and aunt and her maternal grandmother. A year later, Ngan’s uncle, a skilled mason, found her a job as a painter for Public Works.

When Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan decided to unite their lives, they planned to legalize their life as a couple. In her family situation, Miss Ngan did not want a lavish wedding as others do. First, she did not want to stir up waters that were settling. The wound to her father was surely not yet healed. Hamlet people still talked about the goings on when he had left his class and rice fields for a month, how he had smashed all his tools with which to harvest and fish in the river. Night after night, he walked like a madman along hamlet paths, sometimes tilting his neck and howling like a wolf calling for his pack. His uncle, the village chairman, had to pay money to bring a doctor down from the provincial capital to give him a shot. Everyone believed that, sooner or later, he would pack up a sack and enter an asylum. Thanks to the good karma coming down from his ancestors and the skill of the provincial doctor, he seemed to recover his senses, but still, once in a while, he used incomprehensible gestures or words. The daughter had indeed been the glorious dream of the father. That dream had shattered like a mirror smashed into small pieces. The hamlet teacher did not want to accept that painful reality. He found ways to erase all traces of time past, when the dream had been alive. Anything connected with Ngan, he removed to burn or throw into the river: all the beautiful photos that once hung everywhere in the house, her trunks of clothes, her sewing kit from when she had taken home economics, the cloth dolls she had made herself, all her school notebooks.

Mr. Quang had been a father. He understood how wounded pride could drive a person to one kind of hell or another. All these years of struggling here and there in so many places, pushing along so many strange roads, had taught him how to be emphatic and patient. His fortunate happiness must in the end run up against a challenge. He would be the one to carry the burden and not Miss Ngan. After much reflection, he decided to ask Ngan’s uncle to invite her mother to the construction site for a visit. On the first night, the girl’s mother heard how she had come to fall in love with a man forty-three years her elder but appearing as an ancient hero reborn to protect and save her. On the second day, Miss Ngan took her mom to town to buy for the family all those things that make people’s eyes brighten like streetlights. On the third day was the official meal between the girl’s mother and the future son-in-law, who was twenty-four years older than she. Then was discovered a coincidence that increased the awkwardness on both sides: Ngan’s father had been born in the same month and year as Mr. Quang’s oldest son, Quy; only the day of birth was different.

Ngan’s mother was a practical person. She understood that her daughter had missed her main chance and could never recover that lost opportunity. It must be her destiny that she could only find happiness with older men. No one can defy heaven’s rules and regulations. From Teacher Tuong to Mr. Quang, her life’s plan could be found drawn in the lines on the palms of her hands. Ngan’s mother sighed deeply but accepted everything she couldn’t change. Besides, for residents of Khoai Hamlet, material goods were held in very high regard. Ngan’s future husband would well provide her with the material side of life. And that was the compensation provided her by destiny.

On the fourth day, her mother returned to her hamlet with two heavy trunks. She did not say anything to her husband about her visit to their daughter; she quietly put things away and said:

“In a few days the uncle of that Ngan will bring workers here to build a house. Down there, he has saved quite a bit of money.”

“I told you: don’t ever remind me of her name to my face.”

“Oh, I forgot. From now on I only talk about her uncle. Next month he will help us fix the house.”

“Do whatever you want. This house is always under your authority,” the teacher replied slowly, and with his hand behind his back, went out.

Two weeks later, her brother brought a group of eight workers to Khoai Hamlet. With them came three truckloads of timber, bricks, cement, and other supplies. The villagers gathered to observe, just like children who run out to look at the turning shadow lamps during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Khoai Hamlet had never had a tiled roof. Throughout the hamlet there was only one style of roof: thatched with straw or leaves. Walls were made of the sides of vats, broken little ones bought from the next hamlet. The Khoai people were used to the odd looks of houses built with rejected materials. But if a wandering adventuresome guest ever stopped there, he would be startled with fright at the sight of walls that were twisted, with bumps, sometimes extended like a big belly, sometimes deflated like the inner cavity of a ball. Such houses evoke in one a fearful hesitation. With their odd forms, they look like caves for bears, horses, or tigers, but not houses intended for humans. For that reason, houses that were straight, pretty, with red roofs, was the ultimate aspiration of people there. Therefore, it is easily understood why people crowded around to see the trucks bringing all the materials and the city workers down to the hamlet, just like visitors to a museum.