The Sorrow of War

by Bao Ninh

But life would not let him go that easily.

  It paraded a variety of tempting images before him, calling to him in alluring voices from the other side of his river of life. His time would be another time. There was still too much to do. He had the burden of his generation, a debt to repay before dying. It would be tragic and unjust in the extreme if he were to pass away, to be buried deep in the wet earth, carrying with him the history of his generation. If only he could shed all other needs of everyday living and concentrate all his energies into writing, his task would be over sooner. He would then be released from the burden of life and float freely on the stream to his journey’s end, where countless familiar souls awaited him.

  Back to his duty. From now on his life seemed restricted to the dark hours. His table lamp came on at dusk and stayed glowing until dawn. His own form seemed no more real than the shadow he cast on the wall. As he wrote he seemed taciturn, almost immobile. But the fire within, fuelled by his powerful memory, burned fiercely.

  Kien wondered about his ability to work through the nights. Not everyone could withstand this form of self-imprisonment, or self-confinement. He had probably inherited it from his father.

  His father had been a sleepwalker all his life. He would silently rise from his bed, as though weightless, and slowly advance towards the bedroom door, with his eyes tightly closed, his arms by his side. He would walk all about the room, the hallways, upstairs and downstairs, out of the front door and, if the gate had been left open, out into the street. Hanoi people were kind and good-natured in those days and they would softly step aside for the old man straying from his home. No one disturbed him in his fantasies, not even the children. They intervened only if he was sleepwalking towards the lake.

  His mother couldn’t stand his father’s gentle sleepwalking habits, considering it a humiliation and somehow proof of his failure in the world. ‘A clan of muddle-headed people,’ she used to say, moaning regularly about his failures. Even with his undeveloped young memory, Kien guessed then that his father’s eccentricities had made her leave him.

  All that remained of his mother were some photographs. Most days she left made no impression on him. He had been indifferent to her departure; it was just another sorrowful, inauspicious day in his childhood.

  When he now looked at the yellow and faded photographs he saw a young woman looking back at him; but the look conveyed no meaning to him. Perhaps that was further proof of his inability to fully develop his personality. Perhaps there were innate seeds of wickedness, ruthlessness, hardness and aloofness within him, for he could never recall anything much about her, or their separation, or any comforting words from her. She had constantly told him: ‘I’m a New Intellectual, dear. I’m a Party Member. I’m not an idiot, nor am I dull. You must remember that, please.’

  These statements were often repeated, especially when she spoke to his father.

  She had once told Kien something rather odd and awkward: ‘You’re a Pioneer now. One day you’ll be a member of the Youth Union, then one day you’ll become a real man. So, harden your heart and be brave, my son.’

  He never forgot those words. If there had been other advice, or loving caresses or any gestures of maternal love, they had long faded from his memory.

  At seventeen and about to join the army he finally thought of finding his mother, to learn more about her. But he discovered she had by then been dead five years.

  His father had hardly mentioned her. He had avoided talking about her for his own sake, to avoid suffering. He resigned himself to his fate of keeping his family of two in modest circumstances. Later he began drinking and retreated into deep dreams and his sleepwalking.

  Only now, in his middle age, could Kien truly understand those years. His father had suddenly stopped working at the museum. He no longer carried his easel on his bicycle or wandered off to paint as he had done for years. He had started using the attic in this building as his studio and confined himself there day and night in the wet, dusty air, where bats flew. He would sit there painting quietly, occasionally telling stories to himself.

  It was rumoured he had been criticised by the Party members and had been dismissed and was regarded as a suspicious malcontent, a rightist deviationist.

  His health declined all of a sudden and he quickly became senile, and quite strange.

  Whenever he went into his father’s attic studio Kien’s heart ached and he choked with compassion. The old man’s paintings, seen dimly through the blue cigarette smoke, were diabolic. The smell of alcohol was permanent.

  Twice a day Kien would bring frugal meals to his father, who crouched on a low chair in front of his easel. ‘Who’s that?’ he would say gruffly.

  ‘Here’s your meal, Dad,’ Kien would say.

  ‘Alright,’ he would answer, but he would rarely start eating.

  The meals were on a tray placed on a small bamboo bed, one of the few pieces of furniture they had left. Piece by piece his father had sold the furniture. His mother’s jewels went first in those early troubled days of marriage, and they now adorned some other woman in some other house. There was almost nothing left to sell.

  No one wanted to buy the paintings. His father had long ago stopped attending exhibitions, and he had been completely forgotten by his former circle of artists.

  ‘I’ll produce a masterpiece one day. Just wait!’ But he was usually dead drunk when he said this. It was a senseless boast to make, considering he no longer even exhibited his work.

  His father could never have been successful in that era, no matter how many exhibitions he held or attended. He had been completely out of step with the times, which required artists to accede to certain Socialist ethics, to display material understandable to the working class.

  Kien once heard him ranting: ‘Scrap the aesthetics. Add a philistine touch! Define clearly the social class for mountains and rivers and all landscapes. That’s what they’re demanding now!’ he shouted.

  It was true. His paintings had been criticised because his work was seen to be alien to the working-class understanding of art. When he began closeting himself away in the attic his paintings had taken on their ferocious, diabolic nature.

  Kien began to see life through his father’s paintings. Human beings wore dismal expressions, their faces were long and drawn, their bodies stretched. The colours were strange, too. The paintings were utterly depressing, the subjects moronic.

  Nearing the end of his life, whether painting with oils or on silk, whether painting a man or a horse or a cow, whether it was rainy or sunny, morning or evening, town or countryside, forests or mountains, rivers or springs, even skies and sea, with no exception they were all done in varying tones of yellow. Yellow. No other colours, just yellow.

  In the paintings the characters wandered aimlessly across unreal landscapes, like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures. The tail-ender in these processions was the aged artist himself who cast himself as a tragic figure.

  It was a morbid time for young Kien, for although it was a beautiful New Year, his father saw this as his last, repeatedly saying it was spring itself which urged him to depart this world. ‘At your age, when spring came, I used to look forward to all facets of life. Sunshine, happy times, plenty of wonderful activities. They were inspiring times,’ he said.

  But not now. Spring was finally calling him away.

  And so it happened. One day an ambulance came and collected him, while Kien was at school. People came over from the hospital to tell Kien, who left his classroom. His father was barely conscious but wanted to utter his last words to Kien.

  Kien held his cold hand, which felt like a piece of bronze. There was almost no pulse. He spoke softly and clearly, nor were his words confused. But his final utterances were empty, repetitions of his vain, pitiful dreams.

  Then: ‘Our era is over. From now on you have to be grown up, fight the battle alone. New times are coming, splendid and magnificent and trouble-free times. No more sadness,’ he rambled, then
fell into morbid babbling. ‘Sorrow is inconsolable. There will still be great sorrow, sorrow passed down to you. I leave you nothing but that sorrow…’

  True. Kien later discovered he had not even left his paintings. His father had destroyed them all, burning his precious, strange canvases one by one the night he imagined death had called him.

  At the hospital bedside Kien, his eyes brimming with tears, was confused. He was unable to understand his father’s feelings, to comprehend what had tormented him ruthlessly. At his age it was difficult to come to terms with his father’s mystical, almost insane behaviour. It took him many precious years and months to gradually understand and feel some of the bitter pain of his father’s life, to understand a little of those dying words.

  In later years Kien had regretted his harsh assessment of his father and his disdain for his dying words. He had been embarrassed about his eccentric father and had frequently shown dislike for his work and words when he was alive. That much was true.

  It was all too late now, the love, respect, filial piety, the desire to be close and understand more of his father. All that remained was a grave, covered with earth, heaped with wreaths and joss-sticks and candles. That was the spring of 1965.

  In later years he heard the refrain, like an air in his head:

  ‘His father died in his childhood,

  His mother left him, all alone

  Like a plant, his growth is good,

  In times of war he’s on his own

  So the boy creates his very own man,

  Not mourning the fate of a lonely orphan.’

  The day of his father’s death was the first time Hanoi sounded its air-raid sirens. Air horns on trains and sirens on top of the Municipal Theatre building howled together in a frightening cacophony.

  Although people had been warned it was only a drill the city shivered with fear; hearts almost stopped beating in panic and anticipation. The sirens were the harbinger of dark days to come.

  Doors slammed shut, people clattered down stairways, as exhortations rang out over the loudspeakers: ‘Compatriots, pay attention please, pay attention please compatriots. Enemy aircraft are approaching…’ Lights went out all around town. Patrol cars drove on darkened streets, their own lights masked.

  Kien ran against the flow, groping his way upstairs to his father’s attic studio. It was quite dark and the air was full of choking dust. The stink of wine and paint was everywhere and small bats flew by him uncertainly. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ he said softly.

  There was a breathless silence in the attic, in the building, and across the entire city. Despite the blackout order, Kien lit a small candle. Looking around he was astounded. Where were the paintings? The unfinished one on the easel? Those in frames in the corners? All were gone, as if by magic.

  The end! Kien had no doubt about it then. This was a graveyard. Every image, every trace of his father had been wiped away, replaced by a nothingness. His father had quit the world, gone in a sleepwalker’s dream, taking with him forever the deathly yellow paintings.

  He had left only his son in this world.

  Kien, deep in thought, slowly emerged from the building. In the east he could see, under cumulus clouds, a dim glow. The all-clear siren sounded and he realised the glow was from the moon. It was an ominous sight. Future glows in the night would not all be natural, and the sirens would not be for drills. It was the start of his seventeenth year in life, this icy spring of 1965.

  Phuong knew all about the cremation of the paintings. ‘It was a crazed, barbarous ceremony, a rebellion,’ she recalled, when describing it to Kien later. Phuong had witnessed the scene, but no one else in the building, even Kien, had known about it.

  That night his father had felt the touch of death. Quietly and systematically, he went on an orgy of self-destruction, shredding his canvases then burning them.

  There had been an affinity between his father and Phuong since she had been in her early teens. It was not a father–daughter relationship, nor an uncle–niece relationship for that matter. It was a confused, blurred relationship, based on some shared obsessions and liberal eccentricities. He became extremely fond of the girl and his affection showed in his sad, silent regard for her.

  The very characteristics of his spirit, his eccentricities, his free-flying artistic expressions and disregard for normal rules that annoyed others were what attracted Phuong to him; she was a kindred soul.

  The old man and the little girl would sit side by side for hours, often not uttering a word. She could sit by him calmly whereas normally she would be restless and excitable, above all merry. When she sat by him watching him paint she seemed captivated by the mood.

  When she was older her visits to watch him paint were less frequent, yet she was the only one, other than Kien, who visited the secluded attic studio. Kien’s father would eagerly anticipate her visits. Often she would bring alcohol and cigarettes for him, something Kien had not done. Occasionally she heard him mumbling to himself.

  She was sixteen, and already very beautiful, when he said, ‘You’re really beautiful.’ Then as a veiled warning he had added, ‘You will be unhappy. Most unhappy. These are perilous times for free spirits. Your beauty one day will cost you dearly.’

  He had promised her a portrait of herself in oils on her seventeenth birthday, but Phuong was horrified at the thought, imagining he would portray her with a long, drawn face as he usually painted his subjects. He had even gave his fairies long faces, with seaweed for hair and lemon-coloured skin. He died three months before she turned seventeen, rendering the fears irrelevant.

  The fateful night when he had imagined Death calling him, she had been present. He ordered her to make a fire in the back yard and to help him carry all the paintings down from the attic. She knew then he was about to die.

  She seemed to understand and to agree that the burning had to take place. It had to be so. She had deliberately not called Kien, because of this. Still, she was frightened, and immersed herself in the ritual destruction to dispel her fears. It became a fantastic, flickering unreal atmosphere, giddying her as the flames leaped up. Phuong was forever haunted by that eerie night, of the lasting strange, yet pleasurable, pains that flowed over her in those passionate moments.

  Only the artist himself knew precisely why he went on his orgy of self-destruction, and why he had wanted Phuong, and Phuong alone, to be his witness and helper. She didn’t realise it then, but later she saw in it a prophetic message of destruction characterised by that night. The love of Kien and Phuong had been as doomed as those paintings.

  She had intended to tell Kien about that frenzied night of destruction as they stood together beside his father’s grave at the funeral, but she couldn’t bring herself to torment him further.

  It was on Kien’s final night in Hanoi that she told him. He was leaving for the battlefront the next day. It was to be the last night of their pre-war lives, their last moments of youth.

  These had been the final hours of their secure, pure and happy youth, those years and months counted in pleasurable days before the fateful hour arrived to leave. It came soon enough. The next day it was to be a single step onto a convoy, heading for the front.

  They had been sweethearts for as long as they could remember. Phuong lived in the room next to his, they sat at the same desk in the same classroom in the same school. She rode behind him on his bicycle to and from school. His sweetheart was now the most radiant beauty in the entire Chu Van An school.

  Yet neither of them had other close friends. Others seemed to be unable to penetrate their cocoon of friendship. It was a desperate, pure love, which ached within them and brought frustrations and occasional resentment for the times which imprisoned them in this unnatural state.

  The Youth Union members resented them, teachers were deeply concerned, and there were so many others caught up in the patriotic campaigns which denounced any form of liberalism or romance.

  There were frenzied campaigns championing the ‘Three Alerts’ a
nd ‘Three Responsibilities’ and harshest, the ‘Three Don’ts’ which forbade sex, love or marriage among the young people. Love affairs for ninth- or tenth-formers were regarded as a disgrace, unpatriotic.

  Phuong’s burning, sensuous and conspicuous beauty had infuriated the authorities and her peers. She bore herself confidently, even rashly, paying little heed to the demands of the prudes. Kien, equally, met their objections with an uncharacteristic obstinacy.

  ‘We’ve done nothing evil. We’re innocent. We don’t try to influence others. Our affairs are our own business,’ he responded to one critical teacher.

  Kien and Phuong became inseparable, like a body and its shadow. They clung to each other as if there were no tomorrows, as if there were no time to lose and every moment should be spent together. At nights, in bed, they tapped Morse Code messages to each other on their dividing wall, and dreamed of the natural progression of their love, the ultimate intimacy.

  Then came that wonderful April afternoon, with the cicadas singing and the flame trees in full flower, a day made for reckless abandon. Although all students were to dig trenches across the schoolyard that day, Phuong had come to school deliberately wearing her concealed swimsuit. When the formal ceremonies for the dedication of the trenches were about to start Phuong had whispered to Kien: ‘Let’s go. Leave the straw heroes to their slogans. I’ve got a really pretty swimsuit on, so let’s test it.’

  They both swam out, far from the shore, not turning back until dusk. Exhausted and weary, Phuong clung to Kien. Night fell quickly and bright, scattered stars lit the sky. Kien carried Phuong in his arms, water dripping from her, and placed her gently on the fresh, cool grass. He lay down beside her, stimulated by the swim, bursting with health.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said invitingly. ‘I just want to lie here forever.’ They lay side by side on the soft grass, hand in hand. A red streak appeared on the horizon, leaving a threadlike line down to the horizon. They whispered to each other as they watched it. ‘A sunrise in the west? A flare? If it’s a flare, it could be an alert. Didn’t hear the siren.’ Then, complete darkness and silence.