by Ho Anh Thai
Please ignore these rumors. I was there. Now I sit here writing as if this were a clarification. And now it’s too late.
I took the wheel for most of the drive back to Hanoi. At first Phũ drove; he’s the smoothest driver in the group. But after a while he slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a screeching halt. Cốc’s corpse, lying right across Bóp’s and my laps, bounced up. The car had come to a stop on the side of an empty road. Phũ bent his face over the steering wheel and rested his forehead in his hands.
“Cốc was a good swimmer; he was used to the water,” he muttered.
I didn’t push him to keep driving. We would certainly get back to Hanoi that night, but I understood that Phũ simply couldn’t drive any more. He was tormented by the memories of his friend who had just died. Once, when he and Cốc were young and had gone swimming together in the Red River, Phũ got trapped beneath a big coal barge and Cốc pulled him out. Phũ remembered the nights when Cốc had sung in his shows, when he’d performed in the beauty contests. Phũ had been the driver for the group. They were proud of each other—happy to work and play together, to see themselves as a gang.
Then it was Bóp’s turn to reminisce. Taciturn by nature, speaking with his actions more than with his words, he surprised me when he began to talk. Just as I was about to tell him to take Phũ’s place at the wheel. Bóp recalled a story Cốc had told him the night before, when they shared a room. Two months before he had taken a calendar model back to his place and, after an easy conquest, he’d gone to the bathroom. He saw that her bra had fallen onto the bathroom floor. He’d picked it up and flung it onto the water heater. Then he forgot about it instantly. When his lady friend was struggling, bare-breasted, to get dressed so she could leave, Cốc looked frantically around the room, but he couldn’t find the bra anywhere. He went over to look in Phũ’s room, thinking that maybe Phũ had snuck in to steal it. In the end, his date had had to go home braless, her chest bared to the four winds like a disputed border region without a buffer zone. It wasn’t until last night, lying in the same room near the beach at Bình Sơn, far from Hanoi, that Cốc suddenly remembered what he’d done that day, that careless toss. He was sure that her “two-sided fortress” was still exactly where it had landed, up on the water heater—that is, unless Bóp had discovered it and hidden it away for his own purposes. Of course Bóp didn’t know a thing about it. The two of them had bet a bottle of cognac that when they returned to Hanoi, they’d find the bra still in the bathroom. They were housemates, though actually that meant only that Bóp lived in Cốc’s house—his family was in Saigon, and Cốc’s parents lived in France, having left the house to him.
“I’m going to look on the water heater,” Bóp said to me, listlessly.
It was clear that he was unable to take the wheel from Phũ. If I hadn’t been there, the two of them would still have been able to drive back to Hanoi. But for them to drive in their condition was extremely dangerous. I had to do it.
Phũ got out to switch places with me, and then got into the back seat to help Bóp hold Cốc’s body. The car’s overhead light glared sharply off Cốc’s eyelids. They were covered with fine grains of sand, tiny as pinpricks. Phũ couldn’t handle it. He opened the trunk of the car, grabbed a plastic bucket, and walked over to a nearby drainage ditch.
The sky was totally dark now. The road unnaturally deserted. We carried Cốc’s body out of the car and laid it down off side the road. I poured the water while Phũ used his hands to clean out the glittering crystalline sand from Cốc’s eyes. Tenderly, Phũ washed the head of the dead man, and then carefully dried it with a towel as if it were part of a living man.
Once this was done, he was okay with my driving on to the city.
When we were just outside Bình Sơn, we telephoned Hanoi. In the ensuing chaos, my older brother Thế (who is Phũ’s father) had the presence of mind to make sure everyone knew what to do. Bóp wanted to take Cốc back home, but Phũ wanted to take him to the Apocalypse Hotel. Thế told them that they were both out of their minds; we needed to take him straight to the hospital. “But don’t,” he insisted, “request an autopsy. Clearly he’d died at the scene from drowning. I’ll call the hospital. I’ll also call Cốc’s parents in Paris right away.”
So we drove to the back gate of the hospital, the main exit for those patients who were past any hope of recovery, the point of entry for temporarily visiting corpses like Cốc’s. Thế had set up everything beforehand. In his forty-eight years he’d had to deal with many dead bodies and many injuries, make many arrangements, and request many favors. It would be hard to find someone with his degree of personal experience, and it looked now as if all that experience had been just lying in wait for a time like this. First, he called Cốc’s dad, who told him that he had to go to the south of France the next day for business. “Please don’t tell my wife,” his dad said. “She’s had symptoms of a heart condition for the past few months, and the doctor has ordered that she absolutely cannot be upset. Please give me a minute to gather myself. I’ll call you back later.” Click.
Much later, the phone rang again. “Is this Thế?” Cốc’s father asked. “We’re not going to be able to come back. It’s just too painful. We must count on you to arrange the funeral and cremation. We’ll come home for the first-month ceremony,” the father said, flustered, naming the ceremony for a newborn baby. “No, no,” he mumbled, “I mean the death observance ceremony, forty-nine days from today.” A bit later, Thế called the cemetery and arranged for a cremation.
“You understand that cremation means you can never hold a séance with the dead man’s spirit afterward,” the man from the cemetery said. “Maybe you should arrange to bury him?”
“No, a burial is too complicated; we don’t want that.”
“Well, maybe we should ask Cốc’s little brother for his opinion.”
Cốc’s younger brother was only twelve years old, in the sixth grade, and lived with his parents. Thế abruptly cut off the cemetery spokesman. “Now you listen to me. Cốc’s parents live far away and aren’t coming home any time soon. Cốc was like a brother to Phũ, so we’re going to be taking his parents’ place in making sure that his spirit is at rest. I’ve decided on cremation, and right now I’m the person making decisions; his parents aren’t listening to anyone.” Click.
Throughout all of the arrangements Thế stayed cool, composed, and clear-sighted. He pushed straight ahead and assigned tasks carefully, making sure every detail was taken care of thoroughly. Only after Cốc’s body had gone to the morgue did Thế reveal the true feelings he’d kept hidden under his indifferent exterior: “I feel bad for the guy. And I’d been planning to rename the hotel after him.”
Our car followed right behind Thế ’s all the way back to the city. The streets were busier than usual for a Sunday night. After a day of fun to compensate for a week of work, people weren’t ready to settle back down yet. They were exhausted, but still caught up in the momentum of excitement. I often felt that I didn’t have enough patience to avoid the other vehicles; I just wanted to floor the accelerator and plow into the half-dozen motorbikes ahead of us.
Phũ was sitting next to me, beating his palms on my legs.
“Uncle Đông, let’s go back to the hospital for a moment.”
I didn’t ask any questions. I turned the car onto a small street that veered in the direction of the hospital. When I glanced at Phũ, I saw his eyes were glowing and his face intent. He was now completely focused and had lost the dull expression he’d had a few minutes before.
The security guard didn’t want to let us into the morgue. Phũ gave him a 20,000-đồng note, told him to keep a lookout, and not to let anyone else in while we were there. The three of us ran across the dark courtyard, hopping over the flowerbeds in front of the mortuary building. A memorial made of flowers had been erected for the deceased in the courtyard. The entire long alley was lit by only one flickering neon lamp. A gigantic rat rushed through the
alley like a wild pig. In my childhood I once followed a group of friends through the back gate of a hospital. As soon as we’d entered, we came across a throng of people who’d gathered around a spectral old man. After taking a coin from each person, he opened the lid of a box and let everyone look inside. People gasped, held their noses, screamed aloud, shuddered, and quivered with nausea. In the box there was a rat the size of a dog; it weighed around fifteen kilos. The man had waited in ambush throughout the previous night before finally killing the rat that he called “the husband.” “The wife,” who was a bit smaller, had run away with their offspring. The man managed to collect money from a few dozen people before the police showed up and he chucked the box in his effort to elude capture, leaving behind a rat with a crushed head as free entertainment for later onlookers.
We opened the door of the morgue and stepped inside, knowing that we were about to have to do something difficult. None of us had been with the guy who’d taken Cốc down to the morgue, so we had no idea where to find his body. There were a few dozen caskets covered with iron lids to keep a very sanitary feast of corpses away from the morgue rats. It was unclear just how those rodents earned their living. The three of us spread out, each of us going alongside one row and opening up every one of the covers to look inside. The smell of disinfectant drowned out the cold, foul odor of death. One person looked as if he were just contentedly asleep, having passed away after a sudden flush of satisfaction. Another’s eyebrows were arched in surprise, as if he were permanently astonished at the strangeness of death. One person in pain, another in peace. One relaxed, one anxious. One gentle and dumb. Another evil, so evil that his face was hard, even in death.
“I see him.”
I tossed aside the lid covering the body of a young woman, and ran toward the table from which Phũ had just called out. He had pushed the cover to the side and was fumbling at the corpse’s zipper. Finally he managed to pull the pants all the way off. The poor rooster that had been so driven by its unbridled appetite for hens was now drooping like a waterlogged length of rope. Phũ reached out and touched the lower part of the abdomen, around the area of the rooster. He jumped back and cursed someone’s mother, then pointed his chin at Bóp and me, indicating that he wanted us to touch that part also. The flesh all around was soft, but the heap of testicles was rigid and hard as a rock. Only that poor emaciated length of rope was flaccid. Looking carefully, you could see that the whole mass was bruised much more darkly than the surrounding area.
“Motherfucker,” Phũ cursed through gritted teeth. “It was really her.”
“Who?” I asked.
“What?” Bóp asked.
Phũ again let out a string of curses. I won’t repeat his rich use of the Vietnamese vernacular. Bóp, now quite stunned, and trying to remember, mumbled, “Damn, you’re right.” It was clear to both of them that the culprit behind Cốc’s death was the girl that Cốc had groped underwater. Also, Bóp now recalled, the night before, when we all first met the girl on the deserted road, she had used some sort of strange weapon, like a syringe of anesthetic or poison to attack Cốc. Then, on the beach, during the panic and confusion of grief, everyone thought that Cốc had been caught by a bad wind or had had a heart attack while in the throes of ecstasy. That crafty girl had seized the opportunity to escape, and must have been the one to spread the rumor about a young lady who had had to pay the tax of death to the spirit of the ocean.
TWO
On the day of Cốc’s funeral there happened to be four beauty pageants going on in town: The Summer Pageant, the Elegance Pageant, the Sports Pageant, and the Fashion Pageant. At the same time there were also dozens of sold-out concerts. The singers were run ragged from show to show and the fans didn’t have enough energy to take flowers to all the beauty queens, former beauty queens, and former and present superstars. So it was that Cốc’s funeral was unattended by friends or fans. There was likewise an absence in the newspapers of any mention of a girl that jumped to her death from an upper floor. It’s foolish to die immediately after a superstar in this era of superstardom. A few friends who weren’t totally heartless sent some white flowers. Neither senders nor receivers were sure if the flowers were suitable, since white bouquets should be given only to virgins. According to our traditions, it’s customary to give white flowers only to those who die in the fullness of youth, before they’re married. When the young die they have healthy ghosts; when the old die they have feeble ghosts. People are still fearful that the ghosts of the young, full of unfulfilled desires, will return to haunt us.
The funeral was deserted and orderly. First came the wooden coffin. Then came the urn. Bóp couldn’t stand to leave the urn with the ashes in the display niche at the cemetery. He took the urn home; he was staying in Cốc’s house and he didn’t want to be separated from his friend. He still couldn’t believe Cốc was dead.
I headed back to the Apocalypse Hotel. At the far end of the second floor I kept a nice room—on the door I’d hung a sign that read, “The Captain’s Studio.” Foreign writing in a hotel always creates a strong impression, especially on the Vietnamese. Although I call it a room, the Captain’s Studio was actually an apartment of three rooms, the largest of which was the foyer. In this room I’d hung some paintings I’d done of the ocean. Round porthole-type windows and a wooden helm next to the door fully evoked a captain’s quarters. This was all done on my own initiative. When Thế had the hotel built, I designed this room myself so I could keep the artwork I’d done during my days drifting on the sea. Although I’d come ashore and left the captain’s life behind, I wanted to be able to recreate that atmosphere of solitude, just myself face to face with the ocean. The Captain’s Studio was usually left with its door open so that the guests staying at the hotel could go in and see it; Thế used it as a way to attract customers. It even had its name on the card listing hotel facilities in front of the check-in desk. Many Mr. Westerners and Mrs. Westerners asked to purchase the artwork, but I never sold any. Many people wanted to rent the room and, if it coincided with the times I was absent from Hanoi, they were able to have their way for eighty dollars a day—twice the rate for the regular rooms.
The door was locked. Usually it’s open from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. I didn’t worry about it, though. Having to take care of so many things for the funeral, one has to put aside all the small details of life: the quarrels, the office intrigue, the status rivalries, and the desire for riches. I burst into bitter laughter as this thought crossed through my mind. I laughed because if this thought proved right it would mean the old men in charge of the funeral ceremonies, the ritual officials of the offices, were the most enlightened and the most selfless individuals in this life.
I unlocked the door and let myself in with my own key. Suddenly I pulled back. A woman was hiding behind the door; she clasped a high-heeled shoe in her hand and was prepared to do battle.
“What are you doing in my room?” she screamed.
My confusion and mental mistiness suddenly dissolved. Awareness suddenly flamed up like a pillar of fire. The people at reception had rented out the room and hadn’t let me know yet. Probably all the other rooms had been rented out and the front-desk guys thought I’d left the city.
“Sorry, Madam, the Captain’s Studio is my private room. But if the reception desk accidentally gave it to you, go ahead and make yourself at home.” I started to leave.
“Wait a minute.” The woman sighed with relief and let the stiletto-heeled shoe drop from her hand. “What do you mean this is your private room?”
I politely explained in a few sentences.
“So, then, you’re a captain? And you did these paintings? Then I want to ask you a couple of questions about the artwork. Here, for instance—this painting Sea Life.”
Anyone, after spending so much time at a funeral, would look for the opportunity to sit by himself and look thoughtfully out at the ocean. The ocean, the deep blue of life. The immense and natural ocean. The impassive ocean that witness
es all the thunderstorms and the ships, the stupid ships that drown themselves and those that proudly push on through the waves.
The woman asked about the other paintings. After Cốc’s funeral, I had even greater need to use my sea paintings to keep myself calm. I agreed to act as her tour guide in my gallery. The ocean is always easily recognized, although occasionally it’s only an expanse of abstract blues. But in one painting the sea is “screaming its head off,” surging up and engulfing a tiny insignificant boat. I had painted it during a time of despair and hopelessness following some family tragedies. I skimmed over this piece to come back to the side where the ship’s helm was.
“Now I feel like a captain, too.” She spun the wheel. “I understand the ocean better.”
“I hope you have a nice few days here in the Captain’s Studio.”
I shook her hand and suddenly I felt as if I’d recognized someone I knew.
“It seems like we’ve met before, right?”
She shuddered slightly. Her long, budlike, curled hair rippled like it was shaking with suspense also.
“I don’t think so. Thank you; I’m sorry that I won’t be here longer. I’ll be leaving tonight.”
At this point I suddenly noticed that she was a beautiful woman behind the pancake makeup that masked her features. But this beauty was coming to me precisely at a time when I felt absolutely no desire. She looked like someone I had known before, someone I’d lived with so many years before, in a port where I’d stopped for a short time.
I went to the foot of the staircase, and bumped into Bóp, who was on his way up. Dark glasses with big frames. A dark black T-shirt. Red shorts. A real-life Tarzan wild man, 185 centimeters tall and weighing 88 kilos. He had a bottle of cognac in his hand. In his other hand he was carrying a package wrapped up in paper. He told me he was going up to my room. “It’s been rented out,” I said. So we headed down to Phũ’s room in the administrative office. Phũ didn’t wear a shirt and tie like a normal administrator. He was also in a black T-shirt. My nephew was 178 centimeters tall. His back and chest were broad and buff. When he and his two buddies had just begun to study martial arts they used to practice their beginners’ lessons under my guidance. Then I’d gone out to sea and been away from home for a long time and they went to study with another teacher. Now the gang was one fewer—down to two.