Duong Huong - The Zenith

“What you are trying to say? Really, we seem not to have a common language anymore. Strange. Will you please explain?”

“Don’t pretend!” she says, her voice rising again.

He turns to look back as a signal that the stall owner can clearly hear their argument.

She stops and finishes the cold cup of tea to regain her calm. Then she continues: “At the front line, everybody agreed with the choice of Miss Minh Thu for the president. You were the only one who vehemently objected all the way to the end. You alone cast a vote for Miss Thanh Tu. Do you recall the journey to recruit soldiers in the cities in the lower plains? It was Sau who gave that order so that everything could go smoothly.”

“I remember. I understood that, back then, that people purposely pushed me away so they could do as they wished.”

“But that was the responsibility of the organization, for the Old Man. How was it your personal responsibility?”

He looks at his wife, as if he were looking at some strange woman from another land, from the Sahara Desert or from the Antilles Islands. And she turns red at his glance. She repeats, with less confidence:

“That was the organization’s task. How can it be wrong for me to say that?”

He slowly asks, “Van: If I were one-eyed, buck-toothed, and only three feet tall like a circus midget, would you nevertheless have loved me and married me?”

She remains quiet.

He looks at her attentively and continues: “Or if I were an albino, or had rickets or six fingers and toes, would you have married me?”

She does not answer and turns away to look at the west lake.

He continues his line of argument: “I remember the first time I met you, the hamlet high school girl, leaning her back against the door, with dreamy eyes, holding in her hands The Hunchback of Notre Dame . Perhaps I fell in love with you out of that vision. Now I ask you: If I were Quasimodo, the hunchback, would the beauty To Van agree to take me as her husband, or would she not?”

She continues to look at the lake and not answer.

Then he keeps on, asking, “Those things you don’t want, why do you force them on others? Why did you impose your cruel wish on someone as decent to you as the Old Man was? Was it you who gave the idea to the association chairwoman to send Miss Minh Thu with her sleeping gear to the big house?”

Van turns around, looks at her husband, and says, with a natural manner mixed with some surprise, “Because Brother Sau asked for my opinion; because everyone agreed with my idea; because the Old Man was not normal. Why can’t you see that?”

“The Old Man was the nation’s president. He was the soul of the revolution. Anything else?”

“The Old Man is the Father of the Nation…you forgot that title.”

“So?”

“Your question is silly. As the Father of the Nation, the Old Man cannot live like ordinary people. If you are full of rice, you have to stop eating meat. You are a learned and intelligent man, how can you not understand this small fact? Brother Sau and many others asked me that.”

“Ah, ah, ah…”

Thunder rings in his head, not once but many times. The string of thunderclaps mimics the peals and clangs of fate that will explode on Doomsday. Vu feels that thousands of strings of mines have been placed in his brain, and now the first one has exploded, triggering a second one and making for a chain reaction.

In a storm, lightning always flashes before the thunder. That sequence happens to him in reverse. The thunder explodes first before bundles of bright lights arrive. All things appear so clear down to the very smallest details, as mountains appear in the horizon of a clear autumn, as gardens appear when fog evaporates away under the brilliant sun of June.

“I begin to understand people’s logic; when you are full of rice, then you must give up meat. When you are made a saint, or the Father of the Nation, you are not entitled to ordinary happiness. That is why they forced upon him an old woman, one that had many times been offered in marriage from one unit to another, like a charitable donation, and no one wanted to take her. An old maid, of eighty-four pounds and thirty-four years.

“Why didn’t they think of the Old Man as a king? A king in the old days had the right to fulfill all his sexual desires, no matter how brutal or immoral. If the Old Man had a young wife, that would have been only a very humble consideration.

“Why didn’t they think that if the Old Man enjoyed a little happiness, he would have been more whole both physically and mentally, and thus could have done more for the nation?

“How could they have given themselves the right to unanimously torture the one that they hid behind to seek popular support as well as power?

“When you are full of rice, you have to forgo meat…

“It is with such logic that the cruelty of humanity manifests itself. A pleasure that hides discrimination and envy.”

A concern suddenly rises. He turns to look into her eyes.

“Now I understand everything. In those days I truly believed that you would also go out to the mountains to do assigned tasks while I was away at the front. Now I know you didn’t go anywhere. You stayed to assume the role of an assistant, to push at all costs for Miss Minh Thu to go over to the Old Man’s big house. If you had not taken the opportunity to get everyone in that position, they would probably have assigned Miss Thanh Tu.”

She does not answer, but her look reveals that this was true.

He asks again, “When did you learn how not to tell the truth?”

She turns her head away.

He continues: “In summary, how many times have you lied in your life? How many times since you grew up? How many times since we became husband and wife?”

“…”

“Now I understand that I am stupid. But that’s not all. Besides me there is another one as stupid; so stupid as to trust and admire someone as mean as you. Tonight I will call the Old Man and tell him this: ‘Dear Eldest Brother: don’t think you are ever so clever and proper. You don’t know how stupid you are, and in a big way.’”

Van bows her head, her cheeks pale. Then tears start rolling down her once beautiful but now wilted face. Wrinkles have appeared around her eyes. Her lips, once vibrant red, now are pale even under her dark plum lipstick.

As for Vu, he buttons tight the two panels of his vest; clearly a mental shock is accompanied by a physical one. Suddenly waves of pain course through his chest and all the upper part of his body. Clutching his stomach, he recalls the look on his mother’s face when he first fell in love with Van. His father had seemed calmer, while his mother appeared really upset. He had caught them whispering to each other. Those exchanges stopped when he appeared. Then, a few months later, his mother had confided to him with carefully chosen words:

“Dear son, it is taught, ‘When you take a wife look at her family environment; when you take a husband consider his genes.’ Miss To Van is indeed pretty, she looks like Teacher Luong but we do not know her character. The raising of the children in a family is mainly by the mother. The father’s role is like a big pole to hold the roof up firmly. A woman like Mrs. Tuyet Bong is not likely to produce a nice girl. I am not the only one to notice that To Van does not socialize with other pretty girls. Anytime her cousin Hien Trang, who is both pretty and gifted, gets near her, she becomes uneasy and moves on. Miss Hien Trang tells people that To Van said that she only likes to be with people who are uglier and more stupid than she is. It is as if she is looking for a setting in which to stand out. If, at her young age, she is that self-conscious, she is cruel.”