In the yard, the abbess had climbed up to the third terrace and given her disciples instructions:
“Hail to Buddha, we again stand on the ground of our house. All of you please open all the doors, clean all the shelves, and light incense and candles. And you, nun, your duty is to arrange the flower vases. We will chant prayers to welcome our honored ones back to the old abode.”
“Hail to Buddha, we will comply as you direct.”
He had noticed the respectful manner of all ten monks in front of an old and tiny nun, and a thought had invaded his mind:
“Later on, of all these respectful disciples, which one will push the old lady down the ravine to replace her as the boss of this temple? Which one will put arsenic in the bean-braised tofu or in the cabbage soup?”
But on the far side of the patio, temple bells were ringing. The sounds of a beaten wooden gong and the chanting of the twelve disciples followed. The air filled with the fragrant smoke of incense. He had listened to the regular and continuous chanting, knowing that there was another force residing within our lives, an invisible force, of a kind that was not to be measured by integers as one can calculate the strength of human muscle power.
These memories suddenly coming to mind make him contemplative for a moment. But he also realizes that Vu is waiting for him. He says: “The abbess gave us permission, we can enter the temple.”
“Big Brother, you’ve never been inside?”
“Never. I don’t dare intrude into the land of the ordained. The fact that we’ve pushed ten monks down to the lower reaches of the mountain bothers me. Why don’t they choose another location?”
“I don’t know for sure who chose this spot. But surely this is the best one for Sau and the others to prevent everyone from coming to see you.”
“They are brilliant with respect to those things.”
He smiled while imagining that anyone who wanted to ascend all the way up Lan Vu mountain must appear in the lens of the guard company not for just a few seconds or minutes, but for more like half a day even if they were athletic or professional climbers. Under these conditions, only a wild hare or squirrel could hope to escape surveillance. His enemies in the Party had thought carefully when they had chosen the peak of Lan Vu instead of a dark tunnel as in an old European “oubliette” where people were sent to be forgotten. Here even on top of a magnificent mountain, he had no way to gossip with trusted associates either in his own room or in his doctor’s quarters. All the walls contained listening devices. Each time Le led a technician to change a “bug” he knew it, because each time they carried a canister of mosquito spray on their back. Le would invite him to “take a walk in the woods to stretch his flaccid legs” while Le would “spray for mosquitoes.” He always had to wait for a few hours before the smell of the spray would dissipate, then he could return to his room. Since he never crossed the brick patio to enter the temple proper, the Buddha statues were lucky not having to taste the insect spray. Today, they could use Buddha’s domain to chat with each other for a while.
“Are you are sure that we can talk safely here?” Vu asks for the last time to bolster his confidence.
“Trust me; I’m old but not yet senile,” he replies, looking straight in the eyes of his loyal follower, the only one left who had survived life with him.
“I apologize…but…”
“I understand.”
They are silent for a moment, as memories have returned with each word, each thought. Then trembling, Vu asks:
“Big Brother, do you cough a lot?”
“Don’t worry, I am much better. The remaining problem is my heart. But it’s rare to reach seventy, I have lived long enough.”
“You must take good care of yourself.”
“You, too. But, on second thought, neither of us have any way of prudently taking care of ourselves. Life’s just a gamble.”
“Yes, just a roll of the dice.”
“Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that life has its limits; so, too, does our health. I cannot do anything more at this time, but I still want to know what is going on in our nation.”
“But…”
“Just let me know. We have endured the most dangerous times. I hope you haven’t forgotten that?”
“But you are now very weak, Elder Brother. We who must die cannot hold off the destruction that time brings on.”
“But I am not yet blind, or deaf, and my brain is not yet paralyzed. I still want to know what’s going on outside of here, outside these walls of white clouds, outside this enchanting prison.”
“I don’t have enough courage, please forgive me.”
“I am the one who must apologize to you. I am the one who owes you a debt. I put too much hardship on your shoulders.”
“Brother, please don’t say that. This entire nation is indebted to you. Even if I took on more, it would still not be enough.”
From each shelf of the altar, red wooden statues touched with gold leaf look out at them intensely. The president thinks that his secret conversation with Vu does not go beyond the wooden eyes and ears. The smell of incense slowly rises up, and, for the first time, he understands that he is stepping up to another, a new, realm, entering a new space. He suddenly utters a sigh.
“What is the matter, Elder Brother?”
“Nothing. Tell me so that I clearly understand what’s happening in our country.”
“But…”
“Don’t worry. I can take it.”
“The situation is very bad. Our strength was not enough but they decided on a general offensive. General Han met me and told me that, in the battle at Nam Phai, the entire command staff was wiped out, except for General Han, who escaped because he was in Ha Tinh. The bodies of soldiers clogged the ravines; the streams could not flow through.”
“I had guessed that when they keep urging me to write poetry to inspire the people.”
“The terrible thing was not only that. Han returned to the front for only two days before his family received word of his death.”
“He must have been killed while on the road, for sure in Thanh Hoa province.”
“I suspected that, too.”
“For a long time Thanh Hoa has turned into a bandit haven.”
“Yes, many know this.”
“Pity his whole family.”
“Yes, his young child is not yet ten while his wife has suffered a serious joint ailment for three or four years now.”
“Is there any other reason? Or was it just because he kept in touch with us?”
“For sure. The paper and the radio talk only about victories. Deserting soldiers were stopped at the crossroads on the forest road from Quang Tri to Ha Tinh and were brought to the reeducation camps for deserters. Nobody in the north knows the truth about the battles. But I believe Han was assassinated for another reason.”
“I understand,” he replies, and suddenly feels a frigid wind blowing up and down his spine: “Too many people have been hurt because of their connection with me.”
“You cannot say that.”
“But it’s true. Even me. I have been hurt for being me. It’s the truth.”
“Elder Brother, don’t torture yourself.”
“As you see, I am not blind or deaf, nor losing my mind. I must bear some responsibility before the people.”
Vu looks at him angrily: “There is nothing more you can do for ‘this’ people—the people to which you belong must bear responsibility for themselves.”
“Aren’t they your people, too?”
Vu sighed: “They are also mine, true. But oftentimes I feel so dispirited. Because we can’t change our race like we can change our clothes.”
“But it’s our nation. Even if we want to reject it, we can’t.”
“Because we cannot reject it, we suffer.”
“On this planet, surely there are other peoples that deserve to be as miserable as we are. But many cannot recognize that they must be miserable due to some cause or some condition
. As long as they don’t yet realize that something true and real is justly causing their misery, then that sense of misery doesn’t last.”
The President drops this very vague comment, prompting Vu to look inquisitively at him. He seems to be pursuing something in his mind, his eyes aimlessly looking at the temple patio. Vu waits a few seconds then says:
“You said…”
“What I want to say is that every nation has its strengths and its shortcomings. But to accept and to look straight at the core of our shortcomings is an extremely difficult thing to do.”
The two of them remain silent. Vu anxiously looks at him:
“You are too old and have had too much suffering to think about such things. Life runs within set banks; better to let the stream run its course.”
As for the president, he pensively recalls a spring day in the war zone of Viet Bac along the Chinese border. Then, exactly at the lunar New Year, everyone at headquarters competed in cooking traditional dishes. Among all these, the foremost was congealed duck’s blood with pig intestines. Not only the cooks but all the headquarters staff it seemed had jumped in to prepare those important dishes. At noon, his staff brought him the duck’s blood with pig insides on a tray. During wartime, a mere mouthful of meat was considered a banquet, because there were long periods when everyone at headquarters had only cassava instead of rice. The previous year, a soldier in the intelligence company went crazy from eating only cassava for six months in a row. He was from a well-to-do family, and so had no experience in enduring scarcity. Six whole months without a grain of rice or a piece of meat or fish for your stomach, just cassava every day, first eaten boiled, then for a while eaten broiled, and then afterward boiled again but now in a soup of salt and wild leaves; this man from town took sick, his complexion turned green, his stomach extended as if he were pregnant. One morning, when seeing his adopted brother bring up a basket of boiled cassava, he suddenly jumped up crazed in the yard, screamed as if a devilish spirit had entered him, stripped off his clothes, took hold of his head, and ran into the woods.
This incident had obsessed him. Therefore, his mind opened to all those happenings that carry life forward. And so he couldn’t eat those nutritious traditional dishes anymore. He looked at the bowl of duck’s blood on the tray with disinterest—a tureen full of dark red blood, coagulated like Jell-O, with chopped peanuts and herbs spread evenly on its surface. In addition there was a very small bowl of fresh chili peppers. The guard had carried in his tray of food to respectfully place it in front of him and then had waited to see whether he would enjoy the special dish, because for everyone this was so obviously the most elegant meal in the entire year.
“Just leave it for me. Go down and eat with your friends,” he hurriedly said to the soldier so that he could retire at ease.
Left with him was the bowl of blood. He thought of ways to discreetly get rid of it. Since his youth, he had dreaded the smell of blood, even if it was camouflaged under all the various flavors of herbs such as basil, mint, and cilantro, green onion, shallots, roasted peanuts, and minced fresh pepper. Each time his family had drawn pig’s blood, he would slip away into the fields. Nobody could force him to eat that horrible dish, a dish that many had coveted the most whenever a pig was slaughtered, a dish that both male and female elders esteemed as good for having both “yin” and “yang” auspicious properties. They used to make fun of him:
“Smart in his studies but stupid in his eating.”
He never really knew why he was so put off by this traditional dish. Once, when he was a young man living in Paris, he had gone to a movie about the customs of Africa. Watching the local people draw blood from the cow, whose head bobbed in the vat of blood, then drink the still fresh and hot blood, his skin suddenly burst out in goose bumps, sweat dripping wet on his back. His face took turns being hot then icy cold. He imagined that the people around him were looking at him, noting his strange mental state and guessing all the thoughts hidden in his mind. He had sat paralyzed in the theater until the end of the afternoon, waiting for everyone else to leave before he got up. Outside it was freezing cold. The sweat on the back of his shirt was wet and cold, making his body shake uncontrollably. He had turned around and found the restroom, where he picked up a newspaper and used it to pad his chest and back before going home.
At night his dreams were splattered with red. Animals were slaughtered; blood squirted up; they screamed, jerked, and shook in crazy and desperate ways. All the people had their mouths splattered with fresh blood; all their smiles were also bloody. These images all appeared at the same time, on top of one another, tumbling, twirling in his mind. This had been the first time since childhood that he had experienced such fear. It was like the first time he had held a flashlight to clear a tunnel in which eternal darkness threatened one’s life. Thanks to that movie on African customs, he had found a comparison, a point of reflection. He saw that realizing the shortcomings of a nation was like having a fever: you must endure before you can cure.
That night he could not close his eyes, so he had read until the streetlights became pale white in the dawn light.
Then the storm of revolution had sucked him into turbulence. For years, he had thought he no longer needed to concern himself with what he considered his people’s “shortcomings.” He had had too much work on his hands. The struggle of his people against foreign aggressors was always unbalanced, with the scale permanently tipped in favor of the foreigners. In such circumstances, he could not possibly pay attention to all the details. He had to mobilize the citizens, because their unity provided the highest-quality strength, the kind of power most likely to bring victory in this unequal contest. For this unity, he had to accept things that he found to be “shortcomings.” For this unity, he had many times pretended to be blind in the face of coarse behavior and petty reprisals, which he was quite certain were habits of rebellion against culture itself. For this unity, he had to ally with those who belittled him as “someone with Bordeaux wine in his blood.”
On that New Year’s Day in the war zone, he had poured the bowl of duck’s blood into the bamboo tube he used for water, waiting until the afternoon when everyone left to play volleyball in the field before he dumped it out in the privy.
“Are you all right?” Vu suddenly asks.
The president understands that he has just put his hand to his chest to feel a pain in his heart: “Sometimes the tightness recurs,” he answers, smiling.
“With old age, everything is fixed in place, even death. Therefore, it’s smartest of all to learn to coexist with disease. And with disappointments…”
“First come the disappointments.”
They are silent. A floating moment spreads through the springtime, a moment when dampness mixes with sunlight to make a band of shining sea bubbles. They both hear a pair of larks singing somewhere. Then the chubby guard appears before the temple’s front door.
“Mr. President, the office just called to ask Chief Vu to go down to the landing field.”
“What time does the plane leave?” Vu asked.
“The office did not say when.”
“Please call them back to ask the exact time of departure.”
The soldier left immediately.
On the patio, the sunlight spreads like honey, calm and still yellow from the mountain peak. In that yellow, there is not the muggy environment often found in the low plains of the north, but a delicate, pleasant freshness, like the kind of fall weather found in Europe. He closes his eyes to find himself strolling along the river Seine when the leaves are changing color, where on both banks rows of reddish yellows and light reds burst into the sky like vibrant but fragile flames. The white bridges that appear out of the fog were not made for pedestrians but for painters and poets. He remembers the green slopes of Montparnasse; the lights along the streets, the arrows pointing to sidewalk cafés. Europe: part of his life happened there. He recognizes it by all the emotions that had been engraved deeply and permanently in his bei
ng, by the taste of cheap red wine on his tongue and the noise of the streets in his ears, by the remembrance of the colors of sunlight and sky. The warm memories of youth are tainted by the sadness of having been away from his country. When living there, he had recalled his homeland, missing it as a void, as a madness. Why now do his thoughts go back to that faraway land? Why now has it become something missing within him? Day by day that feeling is becoming more and more passionate, more and more filling his heart with emotion. So sad, so very sad! Nostalgic, so very painfully nostalgic! Europe! Europe! Is it that Europe is only a subterfuge to remind him of his now finished youth? Maybe he recalls Europe because he recalls all the dreams unfulfilled, all the journeys not completed. Was not Europe a land with both foe and friend and thus a companion both silent and nagging, until the moment of burial? He felt very tightly and permanently attached to a land that did not belong to him. Is this his own private drama or is it some eternal pain for every person?
“Chief, the office says that the plane will take off at four p.m. sharp,” the soldier announces, reappearing.
Vu replies in a very curt manner: “Tell the office I will be down there at four; a five p.m. takeoff is not too late.”
“Yes, sir.”
The president waits until the soldier leaves and says to Vu: “Why are you tense with them? Functionaries are functionaries.”
“Sometimes we have to slap their face so that they remember who we are. Not everybody becomes their servant.”
“That is not the fault of the little people.”
“You forget that every golden lord was toppled by his closest guards; they may be little people but they have big dreams. You forget Quoc Tuy? He started out as a professional pickpocket in the Sat market. He was whipped close to death because he did not give up his share to the boss. One night he sneaked in and stabbed his boss, who was in bed at a brothel. He then left his hometown and wandered south to become a plantation worker. There, he got class consciousness and chose to follow the revolution. He became Sau’s follower when the two shared a bunk in the Son La prison.”
The Zenith Page 10