by Ho Anh Thai
Later that girl had to move to another school. It is probable that from that time on, her moods normalized. But Mai Trừng couldn’t forget the terrified expression she’d seen when the girl fell down and writhed fiercely. She couldn’t understand what was in her that made the girl hate her so much. That event in her primary-school class shadowed a part of Mai Trừng’s memory even up to now.
A widowed electrical company official lived on the same street. He would often express his interest in Miên by bringing her coupons for extra rations when she needed them the most: a bag of rice here, a bit of sugar or kerosene there. Sentiments expressed in the form of such basic necessities during an era of widespread privations are effective, indeed. Nonetheless, Miên never dared to accept his offers. She feared being in debt, and especially being in debt to a man. She’d just turned thirty-three. And that, in itself, was a flaw. Being unmarried was her second flaw. Having a prosthetic leg was a third. Raising a child (and who knew if Mai Trừng was really her niece . . .) was a fourth. Yet knowing that she had all of these failings, the official still pursued her. She didn’t dare believe that he liked her. But neither did she ever dare believe that he had obscure, dark intentions. Of course, he had no dark intentions because every time there was a rolling blackout, he left only Miên’s building with power. The other units in her building were able to benefit from the special favor meant for Miên. For the powerful, the planned economy was a bonanza of special favors and the manipulation of human needs for self-interest.
One night, the whole street suddenly went black. Even Miên’s building was plunged into darkness. Just as she lit an oil lamp, the official arrived. He clasped his hands behind his rump, nodding repeatedly. “Let me tell some of the workers to restore the light.”
But before the workers had time to get back the light, he tried to blow out the light of the oil lamp. He missed. The official was no ace gunner who could get one hundred bull’s-eyes in one hundred shots. Miên rushed to grab the lamp, placing it beyond his reach. He gave up for a moment. Just forget the flickering oil lamp. Then he aimed at the main target. He rushed forward, easily lifting Miên, and fell with her down into the bed. Miên was horrified. To tell the truth, if he’d been sweet and gentle, she probably would have gone along with it. Normally, she felt he was an O.K. guy. But now he was bubbling and seething like a rabid buffalo ramming into a grave. His mouth was full of saliva and reeked of onions and garlic. Disgusted, she thrashed at him, struggling to get free. At that moment young Mai Trừng rushed into the room. The meeting of the children of the street had been about to begin when the power had gone out, and they’d all headed back home. She jumped into the fray and yanked the official by his hair. At the same time the lights blazed back to life. The group of electrical workers who’d cut the power hadn’t correctly calculated to give their boss enough time to do his business.
The official struggled back into his clothes as he walked back out into the hallway. The people on the floor below were rushing up the stairs. He flashed a quivering smile at them and told them that when that kind of old spinster gets all worked up, a man must “struggle decisively” to preserve human dignity.2 “She overpowered me,” he explained. “Pulled everything off at once, yanked off her pants and fake leg in one move . . .”
“Beat it, old man!” little Mai Trừng screamed out. She burst out from the house, her eyes scowling up at him. They were the eyes of a young woman who’d been offended, not those of a seven-year-old child. Wise people looked into those eyes and beat a careful retreat.
But the official was another kind of man. His lust unsatisfied, he became as caddish, petty, and quarrelsome as a fishmonger. He turned around and smiled at the outraged little girl. “Hey, kid, you’re no niece; you’re just her bastard child.”
“Shut up!” Mai Trừng shrieked. He’d meant the insult for Miên, but it had struck the poor child deeply.
But there was no longer any need for her to order him to be quiet. Before he could finish his insults, his mouth suddenly stiffened, as if his teeth and gums had turned to stone. He had completely lost his power of speech.
He clutched at his tortured mouth and staggered down the staircase. For days afterwards, he lay motionless in his house. And only after more days, enough time for some real remorse, did he finally start to recover.
Some years later another incident occurred. This time it was the result of some next-door neighbors’ belligerence. The family, for years, appropriated the shared space of the hallway by dumping their stuff in it. They transformed the wood-floored corridor into a private kitchen, washed their rice there, and even entertained guests on cloth-backed chairs they’d placed along the walls. On the day of the Lunar New Year, they even cooked bánh chưng3 in the hallway, and nearly burned the shiny black wooden floor that had been there since the French period.
But even that wasn’t enough for them. One day they unilaterally announced to Miên’s family that, starting tomorrow, they were going take over the whole hallway for their own personal use. When someone got to the top of the staircase, they would be stepping straight into their house. “But don’t worry, Ms. Miên,” they said. “You and your family can just go on as usual; you have our permission to go through our new addition to get to your apartment.”
Both Miên and her husband were teachers. They were both gentle and non-confrontational by nature. It was ridiculous, it was inconvenient, but neither of them lost their temper. The next day, four of the neighbor boys brought home a pile of bamboo dowels and a roll of wallpaper and chicken wire and began to turn the shared hallway into a private room. Seeing them begin their construction, Mai Trừng couldn’t bear it any longer. When the boys’ father joined them—when four turned into five—and they started to use the bamboo stakes to build a frame for their new room, Mai Trừng ran out into the hall. She stood dead center in the heart of the gang’s construction. She announced that she wasn’t moving until they stopped.
One of the boys grabbed her by the hand and yanked her back. She immediately moved back into place. Another elbowed her in the back, shoving her into her own door. She pushed her way back out. One of the boys started cursing at her, then snatched her sleeve and, straining, dragged her off to the side. Mai Trừng pulled away and doggedly reclaimed her place once again.
The four boys were furious. How could they accept defeat by a fifteen-year-old girl? They seized the bamboo branches at the same time to beat her into submission once and for all.
The weapons fell from their hands immediately. One of the branches bounced up high, arched down, and smacked one of the guys on the head. Another dowel, one end whittled to a sharp point, spun itself around and skewered the thigh of another boy. The other two boys fell down to the ground, convulsing as if invaded by a sudden chilling wind. The four large boys shook the building with their howls of pain. The neighbors had to rush out of their apartments and run upstairs to rescue them. They bandaged the injured and expelled the bad wind from the sick.4 Maybe, the neighbors speculated, heaven was punishing them for their incredible lack of common courtesy.
In the end, the family had to quietly abandon their scheme to monopolize the hallway.
Yet this collective accident made Mai Trừng stop and think. Why was it that, from childhood, anyone who intended her harm met with some kind of unexpected and violent affliction? Once was strange. Twice was a coincidence. But all four boys suddenly struck down like that was beyond comprehension. She could sense something hidden within her, something mysterious and unusual.
But her Auntie Miên wouldn’t acknowledge anything of the sort. She believed in people and never thought ill of humanity. She even went to visit the mute electric company official and took a bottle of warming ointment and basket of fruits to the boys next door.
As she got older, Mai Trừng understood more and more that she carried within her a current of lethal human-electrical power that reacted against people with evil intentions. Once, reading about electric stingrays, she shivered sudde
nly. She’d come to understand that she herself held something akin to that ability to give an electric shock.
Nobody—whether they were students, intellectuals, or businessmen—ever suspected anything. They were like moths flying into the flame, only to be punished. Then one day, Miên told Mai Trừng how her parents had died. She also recalled her mother’s words when she’d named Mai Trừng: when her newborn daughter grew up, she would punish the world for its sins and exterminate the wicked to avenge her parents’ cruel fate. If there weren’t people whose only purpose in life was to exterminate the wicked, then evil would subsume and overwhelm this entire world. Iniquity would dominate an entire people, exterminate an entire race, massacre families, and violate women.
There must be someone whose mission was to punish the wicked.
Yet Mai Trừng felt cursed that she had been chosen to carry out this work. She never dared tell Miên that her mother’s vow, her mother’s wish, had become reality. She knew Miên would abhor this sort of retribution even more than Mai Trừng did. She would not believe that humanity had reached the point where it required such suffering as punishment. Despite everything, she believed, mankind could be influenced and reformed through education.
Around half a year ago, Mai Trừng almost fell into the trap of one of Hồng Hoang Company’s competitors. This person bore a grudge against Quốc Đài for stealing a handful of profitable contracts out from under him. He hated him even more because Quốc Đài was a former employee. When he quit to start his own company, Quốc Đài took with him a list of high-potential clients and some important documents, including the blueprints for some technological innovations that only his former company had managed to acquire. The competitor secretly contacted Mai Trừng. Unable to use a female temptress to pull off his trick, he figured to use himself, an attractive gentleman, to seduce her into doing what he wanted. He changed his company’s name to something neutral and then prepared a large, lucrative contract that seemingly would push Hồng Hoang to the top of the industry. In reality, it would beat Hồng Hoang all the way into bankruptcy. The bank would drag Quốc Đài and Mai Trừng into court to account for a colossal debt they’d be unable to repay.
Quốc Đài weighed everything very carefully. He investigated every detail and bit of information he could find about the other company and decided to sign his name to the contract. In the end everything about it seemed to be on the up and up. Mai Trừng just had to discuss a few of the final details with the other guy, and the legal copy of the contract would be in his hands within a few days. His plans within reach, a thought flashed through the competitor’s mind. Instantaneously, as if following on the heels of this stray thought, a dazzling flash of electricity surged into his brain. He was sitting at a table and eating when he suddenly twitched and collapsed face down into a bowl of shrimp paste. His junior employees, jumping out of their seats in panic, rushed him to the hospital.
He’d suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The hemorrhage of a wicked plot being broken apart. One side of his body was paralyzed, and as soon as he regained consciousness, his first weakly sputtered words were an order for employees to back out of the contract with Hồng Hoang.
After the events at Bình Sơn Beach, returning to Hanoi, Mai Trừng had decided to head to Saigon for two weeks to work with a new partner. She left immediately. That way she’d also be able to hide from Cốc’s friends, who, she was sure, were at that very moment hunting her down. In Saigon she met up with Duy, a young Saigonese man she knew. She liked to listen to his adorable Saigon accent, just like southern girls like to listen to the adorable accents of Hanoi boys. What she also liked about Duy was that he never invited her out to clubs, karaoke parlors, or any other such loud places filled with people with expressions that seem to have been all cast from the same mold. Instead, he took her to Đầm Sen Park,5 where he bought them tickets to sit and fish. It was entertaining and they could sit all day, a refreshing time of peaceful meditation in the midst of this tumultuous era. After their meditation, they decided to enact a universal pardon for their prisoners, dumped their buckets of fish into the lake, and clambered onto the Ferris wheel. For a moment, the whole world was just the two of them and their cage-like chair. They screamed and laughed with abandon. And every time they reached highest point of the cycle, and they could far look out over the city, Mai Trừng would hold Duy tight, and they would suddenly plunge back down, as if to burrow into the depths of the earth.
Every time Mai Trừng went down to Saigon, there was one thing in particular that Duy would take her to see. “I like the Water Puppet show,” he’d tell her. “But I only like to see it with you.”
“Why?”
“They move me,” Duy answered, simply and directly.
“So go ahead, go watch them.”
“I will, of course, but I’ll wait until the next time you come down here or I go up to Hanoi.”
This one-of-a-kind folk art, this unique product of the northern rice paddy delta culture had finally made it to the South. And it had been southernized in a charming, natural way. The puppets pulled in their nets to southern folk music instead of northern cheo music. It was charming, even adorable. Adorable, like the southern boy laughing heartily at the frolicking puppets. Adorable, like the time Duy led her around back behind the stage to watch the artists tidying up the puppets after the show. He asked how the puppets managed to pop out from the water so quickly, and how they could float on the surface and move around in so lifelike a manner.
Later that night, Duy took Mai Trừng back to her room at the hotel. They lay holding each other, just talking. They spoke neither of the future nor any concrete plans. Yet at the bottom of his heart, Duy really wanted to talk about exactly those things. Both of them understood that they needed each other. They understood that they both had to remove everything standing between them for them to come together with total abandon.
So all the barriers between the two of them dissolved into nothingness. “I need you in my life,” Duy said simply. He didn’t say anything about love. The word love is so easily said, and so often shamelessly squandered, that it’s become barren. It’s a sterile word that no longer moves even the most sensitive of hearts.
“I need you, too,” Mai Trừng said simply. They cuddled up together softly. Lips found lips, flesh found flesh, hot breath found hot breath. They mingled, becoming a single temperature, a single rhythm of breathing, a single body.
But.
They never reached the final step, the real intermingling, the real dissolution. Duy suddenly sprang up as if something inside of him had been torn asunder. His body arched and contorted, as if he were torn fiercely from her. Then he curled up in the shape of a shrimp. Horrified, Mai Trừng bounded up and flicked on the light at the head of the bed. It revealed the naked, sturdy body of a young man convulsed with agony.
Duy didn’t scream; he didn’t moan. He ground his teeth and bore the agony. His eyes filled with tears of pain he couldn’t suppress.
“It’s my fault. It’s because of me. It doesn’t have anything to do with you . . .”
Mai Trừng couldn’t hold back her tears, either. She almost never cried. And when she did cry, she cried without tears. This was the first time she’d shed tears. She cried for her lover who wasn’t allowed to love. He couldn’t act on his love, and he thought it was his fault. And she knew if he continued to try and pursue this love, it would only mean more pain, suffering, and failure.
She couldn’t explain it to him so that he would understand.
She couldn’t handle the thought of leaving him.
And with these thoughts, she left Saigon. She couldn’t keep living in these cities to witness, day after day, people writhing in pain right in front of her face. She decided to retreat from a world that only spread disaster upon her, and which, in turn, forced her to spread nothing but disaster in return.
And what about people like Duy? She did not understand why a man like him should be included among t
hose that had to face punishment.
EIGHT
I stayed in a hotel that served the tourists who came to Cửa Lớn to swim at the beach. I didn’t come here to swim. But it seemed I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do. Indifferently, I watched the people in swimsuits holding onto their little inner tubes and running in and out of the water. They were jumping up and down, capering in the waves like clusters of seaweed being washed up onshore. Maybe I would cast myself out onto the sea on a long-haul ship again. Those kids splashing around down there could never, in their wildest dreams, imagine that kind of long journey, that kind of adventure.
The truth is that I didn’t want to go home yet. Something was clinging to my legs. The next morning I climbed back up the mountain back to the Bảo Sơn Pagoda, where Mai Trừng took me to meet the old venerable nun. “Please let me introduce Đông, my friend who came down from Hanoi to visit.” The feeble-eyed venerable simply replied with a “Na Mô A Di Đa Phật;1 very good, very good,” and then gave Mai Trừng permission to show me around the rest of the temple’s grounds.
We went to sit back down on the big fairy chessboard rock.
“I had the dream again last night,” Mai Trừng said.
She’d told me about this dream before. During her time here, she’d repeatedly dreamt of a shadowy figure that came to lead her away. It led her along a long wide road before it turned down a small path into the forest and led her through thorny, clinging underbrush. Then she flew over a lush green forest in which there were still some clumps of tree trunks that had been burned bare from the war. Arriving at a dried-out streambed, the shadowy guide disappeared. And Mai Trừng would awaken disoriented, her heart pounding in anticipation. She felt as if there were a supernatural premonition about the dream, but she couldn’t be sure.