Duong Huong - The Zenith

After the meal, Tran Phu returns with a basket full of fresh fruit. He arranges them nicely on the cupboard at the head of the bed, saying, “You have started to eat savory porridge. That means you can eat all of these fruits. No more restrictions. Here are flan and the madeleine made by my sister. You can have them when you drink your milk or hot tea.”

“Thank you. I feel bad that you have spent so much time on me.”

“Not as much as you thought. All is prepared by my younger sister. I have been spoiled since I was young, even though there were many mouths in the family. Go take a nap; we will see each other again tomorrow.”

“Let me see you out, so I can exercise a bit.”

“Agreed.”

When they reach the stairs, Vu whispers in Tran Phu’s ear, “Why do the people around my bed look at you with strange eyes. Why is that?”

“Why?” Tran Phu asks with surprise. “You do not know the simple explanation?”

“I admit, I don’t know. I cannot pretend that I do as my heart is full of quandaries. Please forgive me.”

Tran Phu turns to look at him attentively, perhaps puzzled, perhaps moved. Then he lowers his voice: “If someone else were to ask this question I would think he is acting up like ‘the lost old deer.’ But with you, I believe your question is genuine. Perhaps this naïveté governs your persona, and perhaps that is why we love you, you who are the last hero of the epoch.”

“No.”

Now it’s Vu’s turn to be puzzled. He is not used to hearing people voice their feelings so directly.

Tran Phu continues to look at him intensely as if gazing at a painting in a gallery, then says, “You don’t know that our society is intensely and savagely divided into classes, even though it is regularly advertised as being egalitarian, free, and democratic? Even here, people still distinguish class from class, and watch one another from the standpoint of rank. Those in your room are all professional experts in grades eight and nine, which are at the bottom of the hierarchy for professionals and experts. Meanwhile, I am only an assistant grade six, just high enough to gain admission for treatment here. That is why they despise me. While they flaunt their rank, from the human point of view, they are only zombies. Have you noticed the way they stir their bowls of porridge with a spoon or pick up each grain of rice and put it in their mouth?”

“Not yet. I haven’t dared look at them or chat with them much at all.”

“Because of my presence. And because they look with unfriendly eyes. Thus you learned that they cannot empathize with you.”

Vu smiles instead of agreeing.

Immediately Tran Phu laughs loudly: “I am right! You are kind of accommodating. Your personality is more educated and polite than mine — even though I am from Hanoi and you are from Bac Giang. But inside me there is always someone carefree, provocative. I look at nutty people like them as puppets made of paper. I crush their conceit, making them die choking in the mud of jealousy. Look here…”

Tran Vu rolls up the sleeves of his shirt to show his arms still full of muscle.

“No matter how many grades higher than me, their legs are not much bigger than my arms. We might have been born in the same year, but their teeth are now all fake while I have only lost tooth number eight. In the morning, I quickly finish a bowl of pho with two drumsticks while they stir a bowl of thin porridge with their spoons. At lunch I eat two bowls full of rice with homemade braised fish while they chew nonstop on the hospital’s stir-fry of tough beef. There: those are the reasons they look at me with those jealous eyes, if you don’t want to say it straight — those enraged eyes. People have been like that for generations, even as they stand on the edge of their graves. Don’t worry yourself about it. Now: go to your room to rest. I’ll come tomorrow.”

Tran Phu raises his hand in farewell then goes down the stairs. Vu hears Phu’s footsteps treading lightly on the stairs, and with those steps, hears him softly singing:

“Then the waves will erase all on the sand beach—

The footsteps of couples and lovers…”

A song from the 1940s: dreamy students and slender girls in flowing white ao dai dresses. Ah, his youth. Phantoms from that era return with the old song. But he drives them out because a fear suffocates his feelings.

“No! No! No…”

He hurries to his room, gets into bed, hoping to find some sleep, but sleep does not come. Finally he tosses off the blanket and sits up.

The patient across from him opens his eyes: “You give up, Uncle? Can’t sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. No one wins over old age.”

“Yes.”

“That handsome friend of yours, is he coming to visit you tonight?”

“No. He said tomorrow.”

“He does not remember me, but I know him well.”

“Is that true?”

“Before, I had the same rank when he was in command of 507.”

“Then how long after that did you change your branch?”

“I didn’t. I am still in the military.”

“Oh, really?”

“You want to ask, Uncle, why I am lost in here and am not being treated in the 108 hospital, right? I am here like a horse lost in a goat pen.”

He closes his eyes. His dry and dark lips expand and contract in a grinning and bitter smile.

“Because the director of that hospital is my mortal enemy. I will not take my body there so they can slaughter me as they would a chicken.”

Vu keeps quiet, not knowing what else to say.

The grin stays on the other patient’s lips, making his face look like a wax mask. His breathing is fast and comes with strong husky noises, which at times sound like a ghostly hissing wind.

“Everything leads to some end. Each turn of the road will lead to that last destination. But in the journey toward death, people still live with all their grudges, all their entanglements which they cannot undo.” So Vu thinks to himself while looking at the pitiful person in the bed next to his. Then he gently gets up to go out. At that moment, the patient speaks even though his eyes are shut tight.

“Uncle, will you tell Tran Phu that he is a smart and lucky guy? He knows how to live life his own way.”

“Yes, I will tell him.”

“Don’t tell anything about me…Just say an officer of his rank said so.”

“Yes.”

“That I wish him the older he gets, the more cheerful he will be.”

“Yes.”

“I…also wish you, Uncle, the same…”

“Thank you. I am not lucky to have such an uneventful life as my friend.”

“I know. I know, Uncle…who you are,” he says before stopping to catch his breath.

Later he adds: “Nonetheless…I still wish you, Uncle…happiness.”

A grinning and bitter smile appears again on his dark purple lips. It worries Vu. He asks: “Uncle, do you want me to call the duty doctor?”

“Thank you. I know my illness. Go out, Uncle, take a stroll and relax. Go, go!”

Not knowing what to do, Vu steps out into the hall in a hurry and makes his way downstairs to the hospital yard, where he stands like a statue, his eyes glued to the shadow of the trees, looking for a shelter for his trembling state of mind. Fear is after him.

“Well, a few days earlier, was I that deplorable? Did I have a face that was gray like dirty beeswax? Was my mouth wide open like the mouth of the dead fish in a market basket? Was I drooling like those lying in the same room? Oh, heaven: how horrible is one’s incarnation in this life!”

The thought starts him shivering like when you catch a cold or listen to ghost stories.

“I need a healthy and useful life. And later, when heaven is not hospitable, I will seek death in a calm manner. That will be the ideal liberation.”