by Ho Anh Thai
Immediately after the disaster I’d waved over a cyclo to take Phũ’s body to the hospital. Luckily the roads were relatively empty; the motorized working girls had fled in fear, lest they be forcibly called as witnesses. There weren’t any police on the street, either; it was as if they’d had a previous arrangement to leave the prostitutes alone. Only on the street was there still any trace of the accident. That night Thế had called the hospital and the hospital had arranged everything. Even after his son’s death, he still had his special perks. Although the airline didn’t want to carry the body, it had no choice in the end. Two corpses in the space of a week.
So it was that everyone still held the same rank in death as they did in life. Some people had privileges. Some had absolutely none.
FOUR
“Okay, you tell me and I’ll listen. What happened to Phủ? What happened to all three of them?”
Thế’s desperation was clearly revealed in the way he asked this question. Usually he was so at ease with everything. He rarely asked questions; generally he was someone who knew absolutely everything, who would anticipate everything beforehand. He had translated and participated in the secret meetings between international leaders, and had gotten along with men and women from the full gamut of the social spectrum. Politicians, scientists, artists, and laborers—all of them were his friends. When he needed something, they would flock together to come to his aid. Now he’d actually asked me something that anyone, absolutely anyone, could answer. But he was confused by the truth that he was incapable of believing.
We two brothers were sitting across from each other in the coffee shop of the Apocalypse Hotel. The waiter still brought us our two cups of coffee, just as if we were newly arrived guests. It had been three days since Phủ’s funeral. My sister-in-law was nearly catatonic. Phũ had been their only son, their only child; there were no brothers or sisters. Cốc and Bóp were also the precious sons of their families. And, of course, even if they hadn’t been the only sons, even if it hadn’t all been so sudden, what parent wouldn’t have been deeply pained when faced with such a loss?
“Cốc died because he caught a chill under the water. Bóp hanged himself for some reason. And Phũ crashed his bike while he was driving full speed.”
I understood right away that Thế didn’t believe it. This string of deaths, occurring one after another, had totally wiped out a group of three friends within two weeks. But he did still believe that Phũ’s wild motorbike racing had led him to disaster. Thế had bought him a car at the same time the hotel opened. A car—on the disorderly streets of bicycles, motorbikes, cyclos, and Lambrettas—he felt would help Phũ stay calmer and be more careful. Many people thought this was the best thing to do with young kids who raced motorbikes. Some even thought a racetrack should be constructed, so those kids who were so intoxicated with speed would have a place where they could race. They didn’t understand that a racetrack was too controlled an environment to meet the young people’s need for rule breaking, risk, and destruction. Even after he’d gotten the car, at times Phũ would take his bike out to race around the city streets, just like before.
But I still didn’t want to tell Thế about the girl. Just like the three guys who’d died, I believed that this was something we had to deal with ourselves. It was not a matter for the security services, the authorities, forensic scientists, or jurors to get involved in. Revenge is a cause-and-effect chain. Death demands payment with more death. I remembered the words of the Buddhist works that I’d pondered and read from cover to cover. They explain that everything dear to us—every last thing—would change, will come to nothing, and, thus, clinging to our possessions only leads to more suffering. They also teach that our loved ones are mortal. These teachings seemed reasonable to me. But one would surely be a weakling just to sit back and watch as his friends were exterminated one by one, and to pray for forgiveness for the murderer. Words in a book belonged in the book. But I had to act according to the need for justice that was blazing up in my veins.
“Having money, one still suffers,” Thế said. “Having passion, one suffers more. Having a well-known name, one suffers the most. So I have renounced all these things and only chose to suffer less. But I have not been able to predict such a tragic denouement.”
Was it really Thế saying these things? I had been able to face the truth much earlier than Thế. Faced with one story, he was still caught up in another story. I sipped a mouthful of coffee. Extremely bitter. Dark black. The color of the sewer waters submerging the body of Phũ. The wicked girl eventually escaping. Her blouse-skirt ensemble identical to that of the girl with the permed hair . . . I suddenly jerked up. I ran over to the reception desk and asked for the guest register to check something.
Date,
Date,
Date,
In the Captain’s Studio . . .
Here we are. Staying in the Captain’s Studio that day was . . . my heart bounced hard like a ball had rebounded inside my chest. A line of writing in the customer’s own hand: “Mai Trừng, Wild Rose LLP, Hanoi.” Written clearly. Signed clearly.
The woman in the Captain’s Studio that day hadn’t been able to hide a beautiful face under all the smeared-on makeup and lipstick. At the time I had suspected that she had enlisted the aid of the makeup to hide her true identity for some reason. And now I quickly understood everything. That permed hair, looking like instant noodles, was a wig. That woman and the girl named Mai Trừng were one and the same.
She had hidden in the hotel the day after Cốc’s burial, then had left five days before Bóp’s death. I was afraid to go back to the coffee table where Thế was sitting; I felt like my face had turned to iron.
Thế put his hands on mine and pressed them into fists on top of the table. “It’s up to you; you’ll say it when you want to. I just want you to remember one thing: I just have myself and you left. We two brothers are the only men left in this family.”
How could I not remember? When my parents had been lost during the war Thế had been forced to rush into marriage so he could create a family for his younger brother at home, while he’d gone off to serve the country in distant France. He raised me like a father, the person who’d planned out my life and who was partly responsible for producing such an unfinished and imperfect work.
I still remember how, after he’d returned from his years abroad, he suddenly appeared in our house, which had been blessed with two wonders. The first wonder was the chubby little guy babbling in baby talk. The second wonder was the young man of twelve years who had painted nearly a hundred watercolors. Peaceful color paintings of scenery and skies, graceful lines resonating with deep feelings. He quickly came to the conclusion that this youngster, painting scenes of such profound tranquility, had promise. In our small apartment, still sparsely decorated, he’d hung my paintings on all the bare spaces. When his friends came over he became engrossed in guiding them through the forest of serene images, analyzing the lines in detail, the outlines, the shades, as if revering the works of famous painters. He asked a friend of his who’d gone on a business trip overseas to bring me back some tubes of oil paint. I was convinced that my life’s only consuming pastime would be painting, nothing but painting.
But as soon as I turned fifteen, Thế forcibly gave me over to an old martial arts trainer. I was a small, awkward kid, who until then would just sit in the corner of the house painting all day. I had a shy and bashful character and he hoped that the old master would make me more self-confident and vigorous. I followed my instructor reluctantly. I learned fast and I could move concisely and accurately, but I just studied to get it over with, without passion. My favorite time was just after these lessons when I would rush back to the empty apartment, and could sit by myself in my shadowed room. There I wouldn’t have to force anything; my heart was still racing from the exercise, the blood still pounding in my veins, and all of my cells seemed to tingle. At that moment, sitting quietly, I could think deeply about things and often inspira
tions for new paintings would jump in my head.
I never doubted that those martial arts lessons that Thế had arranged was part of his long-term plan for my life. But a sharp knife can’t cut its own hilt.1 Later, with Phũ, he didn’t make the same kind of arrangements he had for me. He simply intervened when the situation changed. He moved Phũ from Russian into English, and that was that. But, in my case, Thế schemed to divert me from my passion for painting and to reroute me onto the shortest road to riches. That road, he knew, would never be open to someone with such a sensitive and emotional heart. A sentimental heart could only be fixed with martial arts.
In autumn of the next year, when I was starting my final year of high school, Thế sat down to hold “bilateral talks” with me. I told him I was planning on taking the test to enter the fine arts university. Thế told me to keep painting; that no matter what career I chose, I could always paint, but that I shouldn’t try to make it my career. He told me to look, for example, at all the old men who had been my art instructors; they were skilled and talented, but lived in sickly, squalid conditions, in houses with crumbling walls, their standard of living even lower than that of cyclo drivers. He wanted me to go into foreign relations, foreign trade, or navigation—careers worthy of the dreams of months and years in the real world of economic life. He told me straight out that he’d already decided that I would study navigation, that it would suit my way of studying well, and that after that I would go work as a captain on a long-haul ocean liner. I went into a rage. I screamed that I hated long-haul ocean liner captains; all they knew how to do was to shit into the ocean for the fish to eat, until finally their whole bodies would also turn into specialties for the fish to consume. Thế slapped me; he could not control his unexpected anger. I stomped out of the house. I stayed over at my friend’s house for two days until Thế tracked me down and brought me home. He slapped me on the cheek again. Then, with tears in his eyes, he apologized. Nobody mentioned anything else about which school I’d take the exams for.
But I now understood, for the first time, that Thế had lived in a political atmosphere for such a long time that he’d even taken on the persona of an old-time politician. The next day he invited the editor-in-chief of a newspaper, a man he’d been friends with for a long time, over for dinner. This editor also wrote literature, though with some anxiety, as each writing was like a record of past crimes. He’d been promoted in the manner in which people still promote managing officials in places like the state motor pool, the post office, or the freshwater fish industry. He’d become famous because his ten-year-old daughter had written more than five hundred poems, and whenever he’d meet anyone—even the lady who sold water spinach on the sidewalk—the editor would become absorbed with reading his daughter’s poems as if they were his own. Any kid that had sat down for a moment could have vomited out heaps of poems like this little girl’s, normal stuff like “Mr. Moon up above, come down here to let me pinch you once, / Closing your eyes and squealing like a frog, come play with me again, / Play with me and you can go back up to watch me from above.”
When the editor and his poetic child prodigy stepped into our house, Thế introduced them and everyone sat down to eat. The prodigious poetess suddenly changed her countenance as she was wolfing down her food, and then asked me for some paper. I assumed that the ten-year-old had some kind of digestive problem, so I gave her a piece of old newspaper and told her I’d show her where the restroom was so she could do her business. She didn’t understand what I meant by doing business, and had to look up at me and ask me why I was giving her the piece of newspaper.
“In our house everyone uses this paper.”
“For writing?”
“Oh, you wanted it to write on? What do you want to write?”
“A poem, right here and right now.” The child pushed aside the plates of food and assumed the face of a genius poet. Silent, profound.
I almost smashed the face of the kid poet who was trying to come off like a celebrity. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thế’s crafty sneer.
The next day I decided to take the entrance exam for the navigation university. I didn’t want to become a child prodigy like that cerebral little kid. Thế had succeeded by bringing me face to face with an artist who, for years to come, I would still find creepy.
But I didn’t feel at home in school, either, among my fellow maritime students who seemed to spend all of their free time speculating which were the most attractive long-haul routes, the most attractive domestic routes, or the most attractive ports to work in. They would sneak into the sailor’s club to practice a few sentences of some foreign language they’d just learned or to ape the mannerisms of a sailor. The whole first year, I felt like some kind of reclusive artist, isolated from my assorted harebrained classmates. They admired me for the signs I made or the posters I painted for class. The hooligans respected my large frame and my black belt in karate, and basically just left me alone because of my morose manner. My classmates had no idea that I was mournful partly because of a young beauty queen in my class who would walk past me every day without even knowing I existed. This beauty was in another major, two years ahead of me. I had the fantasy that she was exactly the kind of ideal woman I’d placed in my paintings. She had a pure and maternal face that would never catch the dust of this world. Her beauty was my consolation for the environment in which I was living. Youth—and older people that refuse to grow up—often find it hard to live if they can’t create such an icon for themselves.
The beauty queen lived in the girls’ dorm and I lived in the boys’. We would pass each other many times throughout each busy day. But I didn’t dare to look at her. And she didn’t have any interest in looking at me. She didn’t lack for admirers, for people fussing over her, chasing after her. I even risked my life multiple times by standing high up on the roof looking down on the girls’ bathrooms—a few of them had had their roofs torn off—trying to see if any of the figures down below could be seen clearly or not.
Then I saw her perfect nude body in another place, in another situation. After the second-year finals were over a bunch of guys showed their goodwill by admitting me into their club, and then invited me over to one of their houses to celebrate. I was confused to see that the beauty queen that I worshiped was also there, eating meat and drinking booze like one of the guys, not caring about being the only girl in the group of men. After she’d eaten and drunk her fill, she announced that they’d entertained her and now it was her turn to entertain them. The guys followed her into the owner’s bedroom. All by herself, she contended naked with three young men and still had enough energy for two more. Me and another guy sat outside the room, waiting. More accurately, we sat watching their four forms moving into each other (without thought and with total energy), intertwining and clinging to each other. It was clear that it was the girl who was taking the initiative in the entertainment as she satisfied all three of them, but to me it still seemed like she was being forced down and tormented against her will. I couldn’t stand the scene: a beauty queen with the face of a virgin, having these three coarse guys moving up and down, in and out of her. I ran out of the room. The three guys finished. The fourth guy also finished. The four of them left the room and called me over, shouting that it was my turn now. I stepped into the room like a machine, carefully closing the door, not wanting to give those guys a free color TV for their own entertainment. She lay indecently spread-eagled on the bed, with an exhausted and satisfied smile. “You’re the last one, right? Oh, so handsome; why so quiet?” I imagined that she’d been attacked and tortured by the guys. I shuddered, tears welling in my eyes. Unable to hold it back, I burst out crying. I wept for the suffering of a virgin body. I wept for an innocent face that had suddenly become lascivious and unintentionally crafty.
She pulled my head down to kiss me, then immediately pushed it back away. My tears fell down onto her face. “Forget it, get out of here, go. I hate men’s tears. I loathe seeing men cry.” She burst in
to laughter, a cackling laugh, still not moving to sit up or get dressed. I opened the door, walked out of the room, and silently left for home.
Just a few days later, some girls in the same major as the girl called me a homosexual. I knew that the beautiful flower had given me this nickname. I had no idea if she’d told her friends the story of what I hadn’t done, or that I’d cried all over her, or both. But she’d told them for sure. No doubt she’d wanted to pay back the tallest and most handsome guy in the school for refusing to penetrate her.
After I left I wandered around and then sat down to watch the foreign boats that had just come into the harbor, the sailors disembarking and heading off to try and find girls. I watched a guy of indeterminate nationality, with a bushy beard and blue eyes, come ashore. He made an obscene gesture with his fingers, signaling for me to help him find a woman. Maybe my face looked like a pimp’s. I didn’t say anything back, just turned quietly around. I wandered through the dingy streets of the Chinese quarter. I wandered along the riverbank like a vulture. People in port cities all have something of the ocean’s waves and wind about them, and are all infected by a need for short-term gains and the lawlessness of sailors.
I spent a full month of summer vacation in Hanoi, sitting and painting the ancient, decrepit Chinese streets, painting my somber impressions of the port area. I painted the virginal faces that had been cracked and broken and smashed to pieces, that had been through hardships and fragmented into cubist art. At the end of summer I still couldn’t bring myself to return to school. I had no friends there. When I was there all I could think about was the beauty queen, now with hatred, now with desire.
Thế could rarely stand giving into anyone, especially not a wayward, melancholy young man. He tore into me, drove me straight down to Hải Phòng, and returned me to school. He guided me also into the tutelage of an old Chinese martial arts master. Soft, weak young men like me could only have their personalities repaired by the truest kind of martial arts. Looking back on it now, I think his educational philosophy was misguided. Great martial artists almost never get to use what they’ve practiced. The most skilled martial artists are like the deity Arjuna, who froze stock-still when he saw a bow, not understanding what that thing was.