Duong Huong - The Zenith

All of a sudden a car’s repeated honking bursts out loudly. Vu steps out of the stall and looks. A convoy of military trucks has been blocked by a train of carts carrying quicklime left standing in the center of the road. The haulers had stopped at some tea stalls to warm themselves. Hearing the honking, they now all hurriedly step out to push the carts up onto the sidewalks. Instants later, the liberated trucks, covered with camouflage tarps, zip noisily by.

The stall owner, looking at the dust flying on the street, tells Vu and his wife, “Sir and madame, the two of you should not stay here longer; the place is going to be very noisy and dusty. In a little bit, a flock of construction workers, carpenters, will stop by. It’s better if I move the hot teapot and the stove to the back room. I don’t have a lot of money but my property is fairly large.”

“You are most sensitive and considerate. We do not know how to express our thanks.”

“Please don’t stand on such ceremony! I don’t have much opportunity to meet people I can talk to openly from my heart.”

The old man stands up briskly and with an agility belying his age. After the tray of tea is prepared, he takes his dear guests to the rear, explaining, “My parents left me a garden over a thousand square meters, thinking I would have lots of children and grandchildren and so later I could build more houses. They did not expect my fate was to be single; it is already tiresome to look after some of the houses they left behind.”

He leads them across a patio made of leaf-pattern tiles with three houses on the shore of Ho Tay Lake. This house is only for drinking tea or contemplating the view. The middle house has a pond with goldfish; the inner one a rock garden with bonsai landscapes.

“Oh my; the patio is so large, why don’t you put the fish pond outside?” Vu says.

The old man replies, “I know that putting the pond outside would give it the right look, but the neighbors have a ghost cat. Anyone with a pond outside would find the goldfish all eaten up.”

Vu has never heard of cats eating pond fish before, but he dares not ask more. The stall owner puts the tray on the low table, between two armchairs.

“Why don’t you two sit here, you can drink tea and chat. Here it is shielded from the wind, but I will bring out a little stove because it is cold. At the stall I have a bigger one to heat water for tea.”

The old man turns around and leaves; he later returns with a little stove with red hot coals that he lays in front of them.

“In two hours, there will be a street vendor with sweet rice cakes and pressed sticky rice. Do you want to call her in here?”

“Yes, thank you, sir. This is more than enough. Later if we are hungry we will call for more,” Vu replies.

The old man smiles with satisfaction while with his hand he scratches his beard, grown long down to his chest.

After he leaves, Vu tells his wife: “Now is a time for us. In such an idyllic spot it would be regrettable to speak of what is sad.”

Van is silent; she is giddy in the oversized armchair. Finally, she finds a blanket that she rolls up and puts against the back of the chair, and then she leans on it. Vu glances at the dark circles under his wife’s eyes.

“What is so urgent that you had to look for me in this cold weather?”

“I am your wife, isn’t that enough?” she retorts in a taunting manner.

He does not answer but looks out to the lake. Since their discussion near the cornfield along the Red River, they no longer shared a bed. He had moved down to the first floor; he now worked in the living room and slept in the children’s room, for they no longer lived at home. But one time, seeing him asleep in Trung’s bed and not in their son’s, she had screamed:

“I know why you sleep in that bed. What can you say about a father who does not choose the warmth of his own son?”

He had coldly replied, “Because there is no warmth but only a bad smell!”

It was true — Vinh has bromidrosis, a genetic condition passed from Mrs. Tuyet Bong and Master Tung down to their son. Not just in his armpits but all over; if he goes even one day without a bath, all the creases of his shirt smell rancid and grow black with stains. Thus, to avoid further issue with her sickening jealousy, Vu had brought into the house a low, foldable bed, which he slept in at night in a corner of the living room, with an old green curtain surrounding it. His sleeping area was simple, like the overnight accommodation given a guest from the countryside or a soldier on emergency leave.

Left to herself, Van had hung a beautiful Ukrainian lace curtain in place of the blue one. She replaced the old lights with a most sumptuous chandelier from Moscow. She acquired a living room set just like the one in the living room of the Russian Embassy. She had obtained a Rigonda phonograph, with all the records that the sophisticated have. Then she acquired a new glass cupboard to display all her Bohemian crystal glasses and cups and all her Chinese tea sets of paper-thin porcelain. Opposite that cupboard was placed an impressive buffet, in which were stored all kinds of cookies and candies along with many foreign wines brought by hand from Moscow, Prague, and Budapest, the places most favored by officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These were — undeniably — objects of the utmost luxury for the tens of millions of little people who daily lined up to get their rations of mildewed rice. Her bedroom could not store everything, so she took over his old office for that purpose; her bedroom was no longer a place for sleeping but an extravagant living room, full of light and very inviting. Nightly she turns on the three-tier chandelier, the lamp of the wealthy, to admire her looks as they are reflected in the glass windows. Or she turns up the volume of the record player to lie in bed and cover her ears so that her eardrums will not burst. But when she sees the neighbors poking their heads out their windows and looking toward her house with inhibited contempt, she hurriedly turns it off out of fear. All these things she does to taunt him are ineffective. Maybe the love he had for her has died. It drowned in the Red River. Now it is only a ghostly corpse, decaying at the bottom of the abyss. On the other hand, she is not able to love him, or more accurately, she cannot stop loving him despite the mismatch and differences between them. Maybe because of those contradictions she loves him more, which makes her miss him more. Such a tormented marriage is a misfortune, because at the dawn of old age, everyone should live with a spouse in harmonious affection, tightly spun out of all the preceding years and months.

Many a time, she had told herself, “I have everything. Only one thing I have not dared. Maybe I should and see what happens.”

Just the thought made her face burn hot from shame. What she had wanted to try is exactly what she had often spoken of with contempt.

Thus, she did not expect that he who had stood indifferent to all the tricks she had deployed would be the first one to bring the subject up. At lunch one day, as they sat silently eating, each looking in different directions as they had done at all meals since they had slept separately, he suddenly told her: “You have done everything. What about the last one, why don’t you do it to make the circle whole?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I am not a nosy one, but, because I left a book in a drawer near the bed I was forced to go up to get it. I see that you have a living room that is identical to that of Fishmonger Tu. As to the last trick, why don’t you do it?”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?” she screamed.

Calmly he replied, “In this life, no one can humiliate another. One can only humiliate himself or herself.”