by Bao Ninh
Is this the author who avoids reading anything about any war, the Vietnam war or any other great wars? The one who is frightened by war stories? Yet who himself cannot stop writing war stories, stories of rifles firing, bombs dropping, enemies and comrades, wet and dry seasons in battle. In fact, the one who can’t write about anything else?
The author who will later have to give all credit for his unique writing style and story-telling fame to those war stories?
When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a post-war plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering team, those about-to-be-demobilised soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.
But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly re-stoking his horrible furnace of war memories.
He could have written about the macabre, or about cruel brutality without writing about the war. He could also have written about his childhood which was both painful and happy.
He could have written: ‘I was born and grew up… My late parents…’ and so on. And why not write of his father’s life and his generation? That was a generation both great and tragic, a generation bursting at the seams with ambitious Utopians, people of elegant spiritual and emotional qualities, sadly now long forgotten by Kien’s generation.
But when thinking of his childhood or his father, Kien becomes depressed. He feels that as a son he had not sufficiently loved or respected his father. He had not understood his father’s life and remembered almost nothing about his family tragedy. He still doesn’t know why his parents separated and knows even less about his mother. So it is strange that he remembers his mother’s second husband so clearly.
His mother’s second husband was a pre-war poet who had gone into hiding to escape the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the state ideologies that came with Communism.
Kien had visited him just once in an old house in the Hanoi suburb of Chem, on the edge of the Red River. There was a small window facing the northern dyke. Kien remembered the scene clearly. His real father had just died, five years after his mother, who had left him and remarried, to the poet, who became his stepfather. Kien decided he should visit his stepfather to say farewell before going away with the army. He was seventeen at the time and the visit left an indelible impression.
The house was old and greyish, surrounded by a sad, unkempt winter garden which itself was ringed by wispy eucalypts that rustled in the light breeze.
The entire scene reflected his stepfather’s extreme poverty. On a dusty family altar his mother’s photo rested in a frame with broken glass. The bed in the same room was limp and bedraggled. A writing table was a mess of books, papers and glasses. The atmosphere was depressing. Yet in sharp contrast his stepfather lived in a style which belied his conditions. His thinning white hair was neatly combed back, disguising some scars, his beard was well shaven and tidy, and his clothes were clean and pressed.
He treated Kien warmly and politely and with the correct intimacy for the occasion, making him hot tea and inviting him to smoke and generally feel at home.
Kien noticed that his eyes were blurred and his scraggy and frail old hands trembled.
He looked over to Kien and said gently, ‘So, you’re off to the war? Not that I can prevent you. I’m old, you are young. I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to. I just want you to understand me when I say that a human being’s duty on this earth is to live, not to kill,’ he said. ‘Taste all manner of life. Try everything. Be curious and inquire for yourself. Don’t turn your back on life.’
Kien was surprised by the integrity of his stepfather’s words and he listened intently.
‘I want you to guard against all those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but for you not to die uselessly for the needs of others. You are all we have left, your mother, your father and me. I hope you live through the war and return home to Hanoi, for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?’
Surprised, and far from agreeing with him, Kien nevertheless trusted his stepfather’s words, feeling an affinity with his sentiments. He saw in the old man a wise multi-faceted intelligence with a warm, romantic heart that seemed to belong to another era, a sentimental era with all its sweet dreams and heightened awareness, alien to Kien, but attractive nonetheless.
He understood then why his mother had left his father and come to live with this wise, kind-hearted man.
For the entire afternoon he sat with his stepfather in the room in which his mother had lived her last years, and where she had died. And that winter afternoon became his only memory of his mother, a memory of warmth and a special atmosphere conjured up by his stepfather as he read old love poems he had composed for her when he was young. He took a guitar down from the wall and started singing in a deep voice a song by Van Cao, a song his mother had loved. It was a slow, melancholy song recalling loved ones who were forever gone, decrying life’s unhappiness yet with a strain of underlying hope:
Don’t lament, don’t bathe in the sorrows, look up and live on…
After joining the army, Kien had written to his stepfather, but had no reply. After the war, ten years after his visit that afternoon, Kien returned again to find him.
But when he arrived neighbours told him his stepfather had died many years earlier. Even the house had gone. It had been destroyed long ago. No one remembered the circumstances of his death, or even how the house had been destroyed.
Such a man, such a story, Kien pondered. But there were so many romantics like him now; some close to him, others from just outside his immediate circle.
Once, at his desk in the editorial office of his magazine, a strange man who wished to remain anonymous approached him, asking for his story to be run in the magazine. It was a love story. The main characters were this man and his wife. ‘If the names are changed we can then really tell the truth of this very beautiful but tragic story,’ he told Kien. It was to be an extraordinary present for his sick wife, to commemorate their thirtieth anniversary in marriage. Wasn’t that great?
Kien thought the story was a load of rubbish and very boring. Yet the courage and determination of the man, and his strong desire to create this unusual present, impressed him, set him thinking.
He could, for example, write a novel about his neighbours, above, below and on the same floor as his own apartment in the one building. It could be a story of symphonies. Not a war story.
Stories, humorous, heart-rending, arose every day. Anywhere people were jammed up close together and forced to share their lives. On summer evenings when there were power blackouts and it was too hot inside, everyone came out to sit out in front, near the only water tap servicing the whole three-storey building.
The tap trickled, as drop by drop every story was told. Nothing remained secret. People said that Mrs Thuy, the teacher widowed since her twenties, who was about to retire and become a grandmother, had suddenly fallen in love with Mr Tu, the bookseller living on the corner of the same street. The two old people had tried to hide their love but had failed. It was true love, something that can’t be easily hidden.
Or Mr Cuong, on the third floor, who when drunk once set about his wife with a big stick but by mistake whacked his own mother. The latest gossip was about Mr Thanh, the retired sea captain, whose family was always having problems. The family was so poor they would even squabble over a bowl of rice. Poor Thanh wanted no more of it so decided to commit suicide. He tried once with a rope, then with insecticide, but both times he was discovered and rescued.
Thanh was still better off than old Mrs Sen, blind and lonely, the mother of two sons killed in action. Mrs Sen’s nephew and his wife cheated the poor old lady out of her room by having her sent to a mental hospital to die. The nephew was not only well
educated, but well heeled. He had graduated from the University of Finance and Economics, he travelled abroad frequently, spoke two foreign languages, and lived an easy life. On returning each afternoon he would eat a huge meal, then go out onto the balcony to rest, belching repeatedly and yawning. His wife, a boring, tight-lipped serious woman, worked in the courts. Not once had she ever been seen to smile at her neighbours.
There was Mr Bao, also on the third floor, living with his parents, Dr Binh and his wife. He had been released from prison in the recent New Year Amnesty and quickly won the sympathy of all the people in the building. He had originally been sentenced to death, then had that reduced to a life sentence, then to twenty years. Bao didn’t look like a criminal. His many years as a prisoner had turned him into a devout, religious man. Only a short time after being released this formerly dangerous convict surprised his fellow apartment dwellers with many acts of kindness, and kind helpful words. The only reservation was his obvious sadness, betrayed by his deep, sad eyes. When he looked sad everyone felt sorry for him.
Even such a tiny stream of life, running through this apartment building, contained so many waterfalls, so many cliffs, so many eddies and whirlpools. Children were born to life, sprouted like mushrooms after a shower of rain, grew up, became adults. The adults grew old, some of them falling away every year. Generation after generation, like the waves of the sea.
Last summer, old Du – the great barber of Hanoi – had died in his ninety-seventh year. He was the last survivor of the pre-war generation known to Kien.
‘No one, neither Genie of Jade nor King of Hell, will allow me to live the last three years of my own century,’ his loud voice had declared. He had tried to make a joke of it when Kien came visiting him. ‘Please write a play for me, entitled The Barber of Hanoi. I’ll come up from hell to see the first performance.’
He had been a barber from the time when Hanoi gentlemen followed the ancient Chinese custom and wore their hair braided into queues. ‘These days they call them pigtails, but that would have been an insult. Queues denoted authority and culture,’ he had said. ‘Under my hands three hundred thousand heads and faces have been beautified, turned from messy and rough to tidy and perfumed. Under my sculptor’s hands, rough stone is turned into beautiful statues.’
Before the war his children, his grandchildren and all his great-grandchildren were gathered around him in one big family and although not one of them followed in his footsteps as a barber everyone enjoyed his influence and his style as a raconteur. He worked hard, creating a large, kind family, all pleasant and fun-loving. In his childhood memories Kien sees old Du’s scissors and hears the snip, snip, snip, as Du tells his funny stories, interspersed with bars from the Marseillaise, sung out of tune.
For Kien, the most attractive, persistent echo of the past is the whisper of ordinary life, not the thunder of war, even though the sounds of ordinary life were washed away totally during the long storms of war. The pre-war peace and the post-war peace were in such contrast.
It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people now attempting ordinary peacetime pursuits which are the most horrifying. Like the case of Father Du, who presided over a very large and happily noisy family. Today he is the only living male. And Huynh, the train-driver, whose three sons all died on the battlefield. Like Sinh, wounded in the spine, more dead than alive until he finally died where he had lain for so long.
The spirits of all those killed in the war will remain with Kien beyond all political consequences of the war.
So many friends of the same age have long departed, never to return. Their houses are still here in Hanoi, their images part of them. Their images also endure in the faces of the new generation.
Kien remembers Hanh, a single girl who lived in the pre-war days in the small room close to the stairs, a room which now belongs to Mr Su. Hardly anyone now remembers why Hanh left, or when.
Hanh was older than Kien. When he was very young he would see men quiver with lust when Hanna walked by. They would fight each other to get close to her door. The ones on Hanh’s side of the street tried to fight those from the even-numbered houses across the street to stop them encroaching on their territory, meaning the doorways on the odd-numbered side, where Hanh would walk by at least twice a day. Every time Hanh passed, walking nonchalantly, her long tresses swaying, she would exude a youthful charm that aroused the men. They would stiffen, stop what they were doing, and stare after her with feverish, blatant desire.
The girls around there hated her, calling her a bitch, a whore, or a witch, because of her innocent influence, of which she remained either unconcerned or completely ignorant. Kien felt their passionate hatreds were based on envy and lies. Hanh was a normal, neighbourly girl, he felt. ‘Good morning, sister,’ he would say politely when she emerged. ‘Good morning, younger brother, you’re really a nice boy,’ she would say, tousling his hair. At the Lunar New Year celebrations she gave Kien a gift of money, just as she did the other children in the building. Brand-new crisp banknotes, and wishes for a happy school year. ‘Be a good pupil. Why, you already look almost grown up. Just take care not to be big in body but tiny in brain, my younger brother!’ she laughed.
But it was not very long before she began to change her style of address to Kien. He had turned into a handsome and strong seventeen-year-old and was about to graduate. But he and Phuong, his classmate and sweetheart from childhood, were both so intensely occupied with each other that neither seemed to notice what Hanh had observed, that Kien had matured into an impressively attractive young man.
War was looming. Hanoi was considered a non-combat area yet the authorities ordered the population to practice evacuation, to dig shelters, to heed air-raid sirens and to wear dark clothing. During a lunch break at home from school one day Kien was startled when Hanh slipped quietly into his room. ‘Hey, younger brother, how about helping me later. I want to dig an air-raid shelter under my bed so I don’t have to tear down the street every time that siren goes off.’
‘Okay, sister, I’ll help you.’
That evening was his first time in a room alone with a girl. It was small, but sensitively decorated. Kien wanted to ask her not to destroy the harmony of the room but she had already started on the digging work. He started to dig in the corner, by her small bed, about ten tiles in from the wall. He used a crowbar to break into the foundation, then a hoe and a shovel. Bit by bit, through bricks and the rubble of the foundations, they dug deeper.
Hanh had prepared a nice dinner, and bought beer for Kien. After dinner Kien began to feel a little uneasy, but said nothing, starting on the digging again. In the middle of the work there was a blackout and they had no electric light. Hanh brought out a small kerosene lantern and they continued, with Kien digging and Hanh carrying away the soil in buckets. Both worked silently, patiently for a long time.
‘This is probably deep enough,’ said Kien, panting, ‘it’s above my chest which means the level of your chin. Don’t make it too deep.’
‘Yes. Let’s stop there. But let me try it. We might need some steps for me to get down into it easily,’ she said, holding her arms out to slip into the shelter.
Hanh didn’t look much shorter than Kien, but once inside the shelter in the dimly lit room, she only came up to his chin. Her body pressed into his tall, muscular body as he lifted her down.
She sensed the intimacy and seemed to change her mind, wishing to get back out, but the shelter was too narrow and deep. Her urgent mood transferred itself to Kien whose body began heaving uncontrollably with a burning male sensation that he’d never felt before. He breathed heavily, trying to cope, but the sensations produced by her closeness, her perfume, her hair, her shoulders, her breasts pressing under her thin shirt hard against him, slowly overpowered him.
Confused and trembling out of control, Kien hugged her tightly, bending to kiss her neck, then her shoulders, as she twisted her body to get clear of him. Clumsily he pressed her against the earthen wall, triggering ten
sions in his muscles, which snapped a shirt button, springing it wide open and bringing him suddenly to his senses.
He threw his head back, stepped away and released Hanh, then lifted himself quickly out of the little shelter onto the floor, poised to run out of the room. But in his rush he knocked over the kerosene lamp, which went out.
‘Kien,’ Hanh called in a low voice. ‘Don’t go, don’t run off. Please help me. I can’t see a thing.’
Trembling, Kien bent down and grasped her under her arms and lifted her out, ripping his shirt open even wider as he lifted. Hanh raised her arms and placed them around his neck, whispering to him: ‘Go upstairs for a moment, but don’t stay long. Come down soon. There’s something I want to tell you,’ she said.
Kien went quietly back to his room, took a bath and slowly put on fresh clothes. But he couldn’t summon the courage to return downstairs. He started, but stopped. He sat down. He lay down, but he couldn’t sleep. His emotions were running riot, willing him to return. But his conservative training in restraint anchored him to the spot. The hours dragged by, until he saw the first glint of dawn. He sat up suddenly, walked barefoot to the landing and tip-toed downstairs to Hanh’s room, where his courage ran out again. He pressed his face to the door, his heart beating loudly. He didn’t dare knock, even when he heard a slight scratch of footsteps on the other side of the door and a latch being lifted ever so gently. Breathlessly Kien sensed Hanh’s body pressing on the inside of the door, a centimetre of timber between their bodies. He lowered his hand to the ceramic door-handle, trembling, but it froze on the handle for some seconds, then minutes, and he found no strength to turn it. He finally released the handle, turned round noisily and ran back upstairs, throwing himself on the bed in defeat.
From that day on, Kien avoided her. If their paths accidentally crossed, Kien would bend his head and weakly mumble, ‘…Sister.’ Hanh would look quietly and sympathetically at him and say, ‘Good day, younger brother.’ She seemed willing to say more, to tell him something she had long wanted to say, but Kien’s continued avoidance of her acted as a deterrent. The words she longed to say would never be voiced. Perhaps in their dreams, for soon she was gone.