The Zenith

by Duong Thu Huong

  “I thought he was much younger than Sau.”

  “Exactly so. They are at least a dozen years apart. In prison, Sau turned himself into Quoc Tuy’s protective mentor. That’s how they treated each other. Quoc Tuy cleaned his pot, washed his clothes, and even scratched Sau’s back. That’s why Sau later appointed him minister of the interior. That was the most important ministry, with the most power; everybody knows that. At that time, many comrades saw the danger and protested, but Sau repressed them without mercy. His power was in knowing just how to use those whom you call little people. Then the time comes for the little people to use the littler people. The credentials most in demand are: uneducated, with a criminal record. Secondary credentials are being truly poor and stupid, of which the husband and children of that broad Tu of the fish market make perfect examples. Those two kinds of people become Sau’s main pillars of firm support. They will do anything he wishes. Have you forgotten Brother Le Liem’s report?”

  “Everything is too late.”

  “Yes, too late!”

  He hears his younger friend swallow, as if he is swallowing the rage in his throat. He wants to say something to Vu to comfort him but can’t find the words for it. What could he do for Vu and what could Vu do for him now, under the circumstances? No alternative is satisfactory. At least while they sit next to each other they gain some unspoken comfort to soothe the heartaches. On the patio, the wind blows and the trees look naked. The singing of wild birds on the far side of the ravine mixes with the high-pitched chirping of nightingales on the patio, creating a soft, natural mountain harmony. Why are the mountains and rivers so beautiful but the people’s hearts so sad? When had he turned criminal toward himself and toward those others bound up with him? Oh, this question has not ceased to torture his aging heart, and it will torture him until he dies.

  Another gust blows by from the sky. The yellow leaves that it catches are spinning around the patio. It seems the air has turned colder; or is it the misty clouds surrounding the temple that make him shiver? The sunlight has muted into a weak yellow. It is very possible that a spring rain will pour down in a few minutes.

  “You’d better get down the mountain, I am afraid it will rain.”

  “Yes, I must go, as a lot of work awaits. Besides, the plane is only booked for today.”

  He then looks straight at the president. “Elder Brother, please take it easy and rest. Everything is as usual. Although he lives in a distant place, the little one is an excellent student. He just won the Marie Curie math award in the all-city high school competition.”

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “There is another thing I need to tell you truthfully.”

  “I am listening.”

  “Trung is reaching the age of thinking for himself. To spare him pain, I told him that he is my own son, out of wedlock.”

  “What you did was correct. A child out of wedlock is a thousand times happier than a child without a mother and a father.”

  They both stand. One looks down at the old tiles of the temple floor, and the other looks out at the layers of clouds forming a white wall.

  8

  That night the president goes to bed really early.

  When the doctor arrives to take his pulse, he finds the door closed and the lights off. The two guards who are on watch all night stand in front of the veranda. The watch lights illuminate half the temple patio and the trees at the garden’s edge. Not daring to sing and disturb his sleep, the doctor returns to his office, gets some cards, and asks the guards to play.

  “Remember not to laugh loudly or shout. If you get too happy, keep your lips tight and cover your mouth if you want to laugh. The loser will have a mustache drawn on his face with soot, but must absolutely remain silent, OK?”

  “Absolutely, Doc, whatever you say; we are under your command.”

  In the room, the president hears the whispering, the shuffling of furniture, and the doctor’s footsteps crossing the patio to the kitchen area of the temple. Most likely he is fetching a pot to use its soot for drawing the mustache on the loser. When all has been arranged, the group sits down, pleased with their harmless game of luck, and the cards are dealt. From that point on, he hears no sound other than the screaming of his own soul:

  “My child; oh, my own child! My own son!”

  Tears on both of his temples are wet and cold. He presses the pillow down on his face to suppress the sobbing:

  “Why am I crying like an ordinary woman from a most ordinary family? When did this ridiculous thing start to happen? It must be old age, which brings changes to a person, making one act in this silly way.”

  He scolds himself, but a few seconds later, his heart starts crying out again:

  “Oh, my child, my own son!”

  Simultaneously a burning longing to see the little boy’s face tortures his abdomen:

  “Is he taller than the son of the woodcutter, or the same size? And what does his face look like now? I only remember him when he was three months old. Nobody thought that would be the last encounter.”

  He remembers the loft in an old street. One had to walk a long corridor to reach the entrance, where there were always three guards dressed as civilians. The corridor was narrow and very dark alongside a thick wall, and served as a divider with another house, that of a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper had a storefront on the street level, and lived upstairs with an older sister. A huge spiral staircase with a wooden balustrade rose from the dark corridor to the upper floor, to a high and aerated room painted in light blue. For a short time that room was to have been his warm love nest; a nest, however, that had had no time to warm up before it was destroyed by a windy vortex…Like the transit of a shooting star, happiness had passed him by. He hadn’t even had a good look, and it was gone. Happiness: only sand grains in the palm of his hand. Before he could grab them, they had slipped through his fingers.…

  Even with all that, it had been happiness.…

  He thought he had forgotten, but it returned. The vision of an ancient spring day. For an instant, the brightness brought forth the scene of a past paradise—the old room; the old bed. The little one kicking wildly in the white diapers. The baby had smiled at him. Its red lips curled up, trying to say something. And her! She sat at the end of the bed, her fingers rolling up red yarn. All around were small skeins in many colors. What did she do with all that yarn?

  Now he remembers: she had rolled up the yarn to make new dolls to hang around the bassinet for the baby boy to play with. The old doll had been damaged by his older sister a couple of weeks before. She had told him so, because every two or three weeks he could visit the mother and her child.

  While listening to her chat, he asked where his daughter was. She said she went to sleep with Auntie Dong. He didn’t ask of her further, and she pouted that he loved the boy Trung more than the girl Nghia, that he respected men and disparaged women, still living by feudal values. He smiled because she had repeated to him the exact propaganda lesson taught her by the cadres. And he himself had taught them:

  “The revolution will establish a new society, in which everyone will be equal before the law, with no distinction based on ethnicity, religion, or gender.”

  He didn’t listen to what she said, for he was attentively looking at her young pouting lips, recalling the pair of doe’s eyes staring at him through the fire in the forest night. He smiled while she was lecturing him, while the little one wildly kicked in the white diapers. Intensely he looked at the baby, realizing that the boy had inherited the best traits of both him and her:

  “He will be really handsome. He will become an elegant and stylish young man.”

  She was certain of his bias and one more time reminded him:

  “Mr. President, you must love them both equally.”

  “Oh, of course. Each one is our child…” he replied to please her.

  In reality, he cared for Nghia very much, as the girl resembled the older sister he liked best of all in his family. They were a
s two sickles made from the same mold. Because Nghia carried his very own image, she had to bear misfortune. In the little boy he saw her resemblance, his beloved.

  Now she was no more. No one left to pout about his impartiality, a bias that he recognized in himself.

  “I have two children, a girl and a boy; one is only a year older. Why do I remember only the boy? I, who always taught people about equality between men and women?

  “But danger hovers over the boy more than the girl. Thus, probably, my sin through him is proportionately larger. Thus, this constant obsession about him,” he reasons to himself.

  Even if his rationalization is extremely weak, he does not go deeper to question what is in his heart. It would be useless. All the paths in his rationalizing always return him to the old resting point. He misses the boy like crazy. After ten years he thought he could forget, but suddenly memories return and become a permanent pain, a gaping tear in his heart. The dream of being oblivious had dissipated like a cloud before the sun, leaving now only a burning longing:

  “How is my son doing now? Does he worry about where he comes from? Or does he live safely under the protection of his ‘uncle’ Vu, believing that he is the son of some unknown person, an out-of-wedlock child living with an adoptive father? He will believe that. Believing so will provide an anchor for him. An out-of-wedlock child? Fate must have predestined it, because his affair with her had been outside the law. That kind of illegal affair would naturally produce children out of wedlock. Pity all of us, all victims of an unjust game. Now what is happening to my out-of-wedlock child? Does he look like me or her; does he keep intact all those features he had at three months? Is his complexion fair like that of his mother? Is there a Mongolian birth mark on his back like the one on mine, because older sister Thanh said that the mark appeared only when I was ten years old…”

  All these concerns could only be shared with her. He knows that people would dissect every word that came from him. Even if he ventured to tell Vu, Vu could not bring up any photo of Trung, as Vu, too, is being watched closely. If he showed the slightest sign that his heart was still passionate, the child would be used more effectively as a weapon in the hands of his enemies.

  Knowing all this, he still cannot suppress his anxiety:

  “An old father and a young child: that is the reality. Is the unfortunate woodcutter as tormented as I am at this instant? No! No!…because he died right on the hammock, on the way home. That way, even if he were worried and in pain, he only had to put up with it for a couple of hours, not to mention that during so short a time, the pain had paralyzed his brain.”

  Love between father and child runs deep; for the first time he thoroughly understands the meaning of this.

  When he was young, still a child, his spirit had not yet sought the far distant horizon, his ears heard only the wind blowing over the homeland, and his eyes looked only at the roof of the ancestral cottage. The work of the father, the responsible love of the mother: he knew these only as an average person would. Later those bonding kinship emotions grew fainter and fainter, easily forgotten when his heart had turned to a larger and more theoretical love: the country, the people, the nation…

  These terms describe something grand, something wonderful. All great things are abstractions. The revolution was something even more gigantic, even more wonderful…and more shapeless…and more inhuman…

  He recalled the year when the revolution succeeded, how his sister had come up from Nghe An to visit him. He did not set aside even a moment to chat with the woman he considered to have been his second mother when he was young. That woman was a virgin all her life; a virgin until she crawled into the coffin. Her life had been one of complete sacrifice for all her relatives. Not being received by the younger brother, she quietly returned home without a word of complaint. That day, for once, his heart was torn apart. Then he was forced to forget and he had forgotten. All his life he had adapted to accepting and practicing forgetting. A forgetting that had been ordered; a forgetting that was carefully formalized; a forgetting that was deliberate.

  But this time, he does not succeed in forgetting. The boats that had been sunk pop up to the surface of the sea. A ghostly corpse from underneath the ocean’s mud, which has ceased decomposing, appears on the surface, rising and bobbing on the peaks of the waves. This is his hell.

  Suddenly he wants to be a father! Suddenly he can no longer accept forgetting. Suddenly he remembers the son and hourly visualizes his features. Suddenly he craves seeing him, even from afar, even hidden behind a tree or some wall; nameless, shapeless, and ashamed like a fellow that squanders then repents in his old age, trying now to find a way to his own lost drop of blood.

  All this nagging, this wishing, this longing confines him within the cage of an inexorable fate. A prison of his own making. His own legal system, wherein he is both criminal and judge. Why does heaven so torment him? From where does this rushing madness come that brings chaos to his mind, pain to his body, and agony to his heart?

  The necessary psychology of a father toward a son!

  Only now does he understand this reality. Of old, it was said: “Tears run downward.” So true.

  “Filial love for parents can’t equal the ties of anxious love in a father’s soul for a child. Because when we love our parents we look up but when we love our children we look down. And, according to the laws of heaven and earth, tears always flow downward. Especially whenever we recognize that as fathers we have done wrong. Hell itself will then open a door straight into the heart.”

  Such angst is as old as the earth. He had thought that he could avoid the ordinary waves of feeling that come with being human, but now those same ordinary waves are drowning him. For a long time he had assumed that he could just forget his own small affliction, believing that he could concentrate all his energies to better serve his country. There had been times when he had fairly succeeded in such forgetfulness. But forgetfulness was an opponent with a long memory and ferocious tenacity. Now he receives its reciprocating blows. Because life is always a stream flowing between the banks of forgetfulness and longing—a frail human vessel needs only a change of wind or some rough water to bounce it around and beach it on one side or the other.

  “I thought life had calmed down.…I thought I had solved the problem and there were no more worries. But just now, everything has changed.”

  Now the ship that is his life has been pulled by the wind from forgetfulness to longing. He can no longer pretend to live like a saint. He must now face up to every ordinary pain, the pains that run in all the channels of an ordinary life, a life that for so long he had refused to live.

  Might it be that because ordinary people see beforehand the kind of hell that now confronts him, they easily avoid it? For him, could the pain now be appearing when his strength has diminished, making its taste more bitter?

  Damn those old, penetrating and sad songs. He now really hears them only when his sun has almost set:

  “Father, oh, Father, why do you leave the little ones?

  Summer’s sun has not gone, but fall is here.

  Then the winter brings the north wind back.

  Father has left, the house has lost its roof.

  Who will spread their arms to protect the little ones?”

  Before him he visualizes almost thirty heads, each circled with the white cloth band of mourning; pairs of red eyes, swollen with crying; wailings rising in concert, in the harmony of a farewell song; the whole company standing on both sides of the coffin; beyond are dripping candles and bowls of rice each with a boiled egg on top and flowers amid the incense smoke.

  “When I come to die, will any of my children cry for me like all those children of the woodcutter?

  “Oh, no; my two children will stand among a noisy crowd and whisper: ‘The president is dead.’ Or a little more elegantly if they have been well educated: ‘The president has passed away.’ If they would shed a tear or two, it would only be infectious drops picked up from the c
ommon sadness; only a chain reaction, as when people sneeze because the one next to them has sneezed, or one laughs loudly, losing one’s breath, following the spirit of the surrounding crowd.

  “My children will never know that this president was the one who created them, that the blood flowing in their veins is his, that their skin and flesh are no different from his, that their hearts, brains, livers, lungs, all their genetic diseases or their idiosyncrasies are from that same person. They will never know all this.

  “My fate is much worse than that of the woodcutter in the Tieu Phu hamlet, because at the very least, he had blessings. A real father, with real power. Did he not know well what he wanted, what he could do, and what needed to be accomplished?”

  The portrait of the deceased reappears before his eyes. He remembers clearly the handsomely curved eyebrows above eyes both welcoming and taunting. A defiant look: a seasoned life and a firm disposition marked the corners of his mouth with chiseled insets and the straight bridge of his nose with bamboolike resilience. Special is the bushy beard, jet black and curly like that of a European; it frames his square jaw, like that of the folk hero Tu Hai, which was dubbed a “swallow’s jaw.”

  “This peasant dared confront his fate. Even lying in the coffin, he still had this resolved look of someone who defies all obstacles that block his way. And those sad songs sending off his soul, could they break the heart of the one who has just closed his eyes? Oh no, absolutely not. The woodcutter was a blessed father, because he brought good fortune on his son. These chants should be for me, just for me!”

  He thinks this bitterly, and this bitterness makes his tears continue to flow. The tears flow in zigzags on both temples, through his hair:

  “This woodcutter was a worthy father. At least, he had raised his youngest son until the boy was thirteen. Those thirteen years, in stormy times, in sunny times, in the winter rain, he had provided protective arms. That son had tasted the sweetness of a father’s love; he had been secure, enjoying a warm childhood. That woodcutter deserved to be a father. That genuine father is a model putting me to shame as long as I shall live. Why did I put on earth those lost drops of blood, those children without father or mother? Giving birth to children that you cannot protect is not even worthy of animals. From that point of view, I am an irresponsible and incapable father. Moreover, I allowed those unscrupulous people to pursue them like wild animals after prey. Death runs behind them like a shadow. Therefore, not only am I an incompetent father, I have no conscience either.”