Duong Huong - The Zenith

“My love…Where are you now?”

Word follows word; the light sounds fly like a twirling kite in the summer skies. That faraway summer…That summer, the wind from Laos blew through the western mountains, wildly hissing on the dry and cracked plains, where large cracks turned into huge ones, zigzagging like the veins of unfortunate mountain gods. Thirsty birds had stopped singing, but, in exchange, kites flew up in flocks. Wheat-colored ones, green ones, and yellow ones; the colors of the spring butterflies…Those kites danced close to one another in the skies, like intersecting dreams, like fires of moral purpose burning in the very last seconds for a warrior falling into the abyss.

“My love…”

The smooth voice takes him to another summer, with the cool shade of trees and the sounds of flowing streams. To sunsets in the fields shining into the house…

“Where are you now?

“Our love is from a distance, but our hearts miss each other…”

The night is now calm because the wind has stopped blowing. There is no moon. Not even stars. Only a mysterious black color. The mountains, the waterfalls, the forest, the gardens, the woodcutters’ village down below, and the faraway fields are all submerged in the silence of the thick night. A vast, suffocating, black space. In this still time, each word of the song spreads like the dissemination of ringing bells.

The president lights a cigarette so he can hear the song more clearly:

“My love…When are we going to see each other?…”

Now he hears sobbing from right behind his neck. This well-known sobbing makes him sit dead still. He dares not turn around. Three times he deeply inhales the cigarette smoke, believing the smoke will clear his mind, chasing away all fancies and confusing visions. He is wrong. The sobbing does not disappear but resonates clearly by his ears to the point where he can hear panting as well. A face all wet with tears leans against his cheeks. A flood of tears; freezing tears. He lights his second cigarette, then a third, letting out the smoke continuously, but he still feels the cold tears.

“Oh, my love…”

The singing voice still rises. But no, it is not the singing, but his own calling out. However, he dares not say the words out loud, so all they are is a singing in silence.

“Please, little one, forgive me…please, little one…”

His eyes are burning. In a dreamy moment, a faint warmth crosses his eyelashes. The cigarette smoke is dispersing with a flicker; it rolls out like clouds in a stormy wind at dusk; the fading smoke spreads like fog over pond water in the spring. Is his life nothing but ethereal mist, the movement of clouds and whirling wind? Is his authority no more than the fleeting enchantment thrown by opera-house lanterns?

“Please, little one, forgive me…” He speaks with bowed head, not knowing that the doctor is at the door.

“Mr. President…”

He looks up and it takes him a second to recover.

“Why aren’t you singing? I really like your singing. You have a fantastic voice. You could be a professional singer.”

“Mr. President, you are too kind.”

“I am not being diplomatic with you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Why did you return?”

“I was told that you didn’t smoke just one or two cigarettes, but many…It’s extremely dangerous to your health.”

He looks down at the pack of cigarettes and realizes he has smoked half of it. Thick smoke still fills the room. The doctor stares at his face. Maybe he sees the stains of the tears. The president takes a handkerchief, wipes his face, then clears his voice: “I indeed smoked too much. The smoke burns my eyes.”

“Mr. President.”

“It does not matter. I will stop right now.” He squishes out the cigarette in the tray right in front of the doctor. Then he stands up, stretches, covers his mouth with his hands as if he is yawning:

“Now I have to do tai chi if I want to fall asleep.”

Vu returns home precisely at noon.

He just wants to dunk his head in a bucket of water to cool off and then go to sleep. The weather is cold but his rage is boiling; his face feels so hot it might have been fried in oil. Even though he has drunk two pots of tea, on top of one morning cup of coffee, he does not feel hungry at all. He keeps thinking of the bed in the corner of the room, behind the curtain with a pale blue flower design. In just a few minutes, he will roll onto it, in the silence closing his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see anyone, and give those extremely tense threads in the mind an opportunity to unwind. At this instant he realizes how much he is attached to his room with its old-fashioned bed and its old flowered curtain. Many times his wife had wanted to replace the faded cloth curtain with a fancy lace one, but he had firmly objected. Perhaps because we are human, we all have our personal preferences, sometimes strange, weird, or utterly illogical. In his spacious house everything had been changed. From the color of the walls to the furniture, to clothing and food, to pots for plants, paintings, the clothes rack, the box of medals…Only the old curtain remained, surviving as if lost in its new surroundings. It is made of plain cloth, the inexpensive kind, of which the long days and months have whittled down its threads to their core and have faded its color to the point that the tiny wild grass flowers now float like blue dots crowding in upon one another. But Vu likes this curtain. Its presence offers him some consolation. Its blue color brings him a feeling of peace. He cannot explain this to his wife, except to sum it up as follows:

“This curtain is really unattractive, but it was hung on the occasion of our third wedding anniversary. Don’t you remember that the liaison courier who brought this curtain up to the maquis later died that winter on his way back to Hanoi to get more news?”

“Yes, I remember. But all things only last for a time. There is a saying: ‘One life of ours is much longer than the lives of a million things.’”

“If anything brings ease to those who use it, then it should endure. We aren’t forced to follow the crowd. Don’t put too much emphasis on stuff. You are educated; you’re not like that low-class Tu.”

“You dare compare me with that broad Tu, the fishmonger?” his wife cried out in anger.

He waited until he could have the last word: “I don’t compare you with those kinds of people. But don’t forget that only those people care a lot about things. They don’t know what to do other than boast about their wealth.”

His wife went quiet, her face turning red. From that day on, she let him be. Perhaps more out of pride than from a real understanding of the meaning of things. Whatever the reason, he won that round and the curtain remained. For him it was more than a simple souvenir; it was a life-saving talisman. It brought him calm during times of danger. It brought him necessary clarity in times of confusion. It soothed his soul. Whenever he was sad, in pain, he locked the door to his room, lay on the bed, and pulled the curtain all the way over to the far wall to hide everything, leaving in view only the blue that calms. It was a faded color, but it was the color of his youth. It echoed the years and months of the past, but those sounds carried a vitality that could revive his tired soul. That was the vestige of a season that had closed. A trace only, but one strong enough to re-create thousands of worn footpaths in the old forest. As that, it allowed him to find again the vision of himself, regaining the strength he used to have, the courage and the victories he used to be so proud of, the happiness mingled with danger he had enjoyed.