The Zenith
Page 35
Some moments passed in perplexity. Then Ton spoke:
“Now, student Chien, student Thang, come here.”
When the two boys reluctantly come before him, the old teacher took them and walked toward Miss Ngan and her son.
“This is the student Lai Van Que. You all share the same descent. From today on, you will study under the same roof and play in the same grassy yard. Please greet one another.”
The three boys understood what was being asked of them. Confused, the brothers and Que looked at one another. One was tall, with fair complexion, clean, and smelling good from head to toe. The other two were skinny, faces messy and poor. Then Quy’s wife stepped forward and pushed her sons forward:
“Say hello to your uncle. Say, ‘We salute you, Uncle Que.’”
After the first day of school, the residents of Woodcutters’ Hamlet were excited. The tears from the two formerly hostile women had stirred up a healthy breeze. Aren’t tears the streams that cleanse animosity, like clear fresh water where people can dive in to erase black spots in the mind? Rural people do not like such cute suppositions; they pay more attention to all that happens before their eyes. Realities perceived by the senses are most important. The first reality they saw was that Miss Ngan had paid all the school expenses for Quy’s two sons. Later that day when school was over and Mr. Quang had returned home from work and was at home to welcome neighbors, Chien and Thang were told by their mother, “Go in and greet the young mother. Then if she gives you anything, bring it here.”
The two kids went to Mr. Quang’s kitchen while Quy’s wife stood next to a nearby hedge. Later, the kids returned with curry rice and chicken. The three went home, like a squad of soldiers returning to their barracks with trophies. That first time, they were clumsy and shy; from then on, things proceeded more openly and naturally. Meeting up with villagers and neighbors, Quy’s wife always initiated the conversation: “There’s a banquet up at the kids’ grandfather’s; grandma wants us to have a part.”
The villagers were happy for them, but couldn’t help being curious. They wanted to know Quy’s reaction.
Once, on an occasion when everyone was in the forest cutting firewood, one daring mouth asked Miss Mo: “Well, the rice and the chicken and goodies from the grandfather, does Quy eat them?”
“No. Not only will he not eat, but the first time he saw my mother bring that food home, he smashed a teapot.”
“Why so?”
“Because my father is angry. He cursed us: ‘You humiliate me. My wife and children are all miserable, good-for-nothings.’”
“Does he still feel that way now?”
“No. After the second time, he didn’t curse anymore. He lay down in his room. My mother told everybody that we cannot eat in the yard but in the kitchen.”
“Why so?”
“So as not to irritate him.”
“Standing on ceremony!”
“Who can know what is going on inside someone?” Miss Mo concluded, mysteriously. People did not ask any more.
At the end of that winter, Quy got a cold and was temporarily admitted to the district hospital. The two sons-in-law had to carry him there. Certainly his illness was the consequence of so many years of setting his mind on revenge; failure and bitterness had depleted his spiritual and physical strength. Flu is a condition that everyone encounters, except those with steel feet and brass skins; ordinarily, when you have a cold, the cure is to extract the toxic forces through vomiting or a bowel movement or by having your back scraped using ointment or steam, to be followed by watery, hot rice soup and bed rest. A flu that requires hospitalization happens only with people who are exhausted, whose bodies have no ability to fight off the invading infection. Serious cases can cause death; the less-serious ones still require good medicine and nutrition over many days. The afternoon Quy fell ill, he had just come back from working in the fields. He went to the well and poured water on himself but collapsed immediately, his whole body stiff like a stone, his complexion dark purple. As he passed them by on the way to the hospital, villagers lifted the covering blanket and looked, shaking their heads. Quy’s wife ran behind, numb, her mouth crooked, tears falling down her cheeks.
Quy was lucky enough to have an outstanding doctor and he was saved. Unconscious for three days, he opened his eyes on the fourth day and slurped down almost a full bowl of rice soup broth. Quy’s wife returned to the village, having hundreds of things to do while her husband convalesced. That afternoon Mrs. Tu had already taken young Que to their gate and said:
“This is brother Quy’s house. He is the father of Chien and Thang. You just go straight into the house and greet their mother.”
Que crossed the yard to the house, just as Mrs. Tu had told him. There he gave a thick envelope to the mother of his nephews.
“My mother said to give this to you.”
Villagers standing by outside anxiously listened in. At the end, everyone sighed with relief:
“Life has been always this way: blood flows and the heart softens.”
And people look up to the summit of Lan Vu Mountain, as if quietly praying to divine beings to diminish humanity’s conflicts, to resolve the “father-son war,” and to bless their lives with faith and dreams of peaceful goodness as had been vouchsafed since days of old.
ACCUMULATED REGRETS AND
NOW AFFECTION FOR HIM
1
The president opens his eyes. It is three in the afternoon.
He has never had an afternoon nap so long and so heavy. The short, frightening dream had merged with images and thoughts that had remained after his learning about the deceased woodcutter, pushing him down an abyss. He feels as if he has just participated in a parachute operation where he was a frightened soldier pushed into the night through the plane door to let his body drop into a black hole full of danger.
It was really horrible.
He steps out onto the veranda. Sunshine covers more than half the patio; a clear kind of light yellow sunshine without a hint of warmth. The cherry tree branches shake in the wind. He looks at them absentmindedly. From the temple on the other side of the patio, sounds of the wooden gong mix with chanting. One could discern the voice of the abbess from the higher pitches of the nuns. He listens to the chanting for a long time to make sure that the dreams are completely gone and that he now lives in the present. The young and chubby soldier sleeps soundly on a hammock hung at the veranda in front of the temple, his face pinkish red. For one so young, his snoring is quite loud. That snoring sound pulls him into reality, out of those dreams that had sunk his soul like a boat stripped of its sails, capsizing, and sinking into a muddy bottom.
“Oh no! I am done…”
The young soldier suddenly stands up and lets out loudly: “I am sorry, I overslept…”
“Don’t worry. I myself also overslept. It’s very cool today.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. Please give me a few minutes. I will make some tea right away.”
The soldier hurriedly folds his hammock and starts boiling water. The administrative office had provided an electric kettle so that now he does not have to boil water over in the temple’s small kitchen. The president looks at him quietly. Daily tasks come and go without variation. Suddenly, he recalls his youth and cannot help reflecting to himself:
“How can he stand to do this boring work all his life? Work that is not remotely appropriate for a lad only twenty. Is it perhaps out of respect that people sacrifice their other passions? Or that they don’t have any passion more inspiring than being in the army for a vocation, drawing a paycheck to carry out boring jobs?”
He swiftly gets rid of this train of thought; he has suddenly and somewhat surprisingly become fond of this young soldier. It is a genuine affection. He does not want to hold any thought that might not be worthy of the lad.
“Mr. President, please come in and have some tea.”
“Thank you. What kind of tea did you make?”
“Jasmine; just like the ot
her day.”
“Good, I will come in.”
He turns to the room; the air is filled with jasmine fragrance. Steam comes out of the pot of newly brewed tea. From the full cup, he slowly takes small sips. During the time when he was still in the Viet Bac maquis, he had a jasmine bush planted right by his house. That bush grew faster than weeds, in only one year it spread itself out to the size of a sleeping mat. During both the muggy summer afternoons and nights of trickling rain, the intoxicating jasmine fragrance enveloped the house. How can such tiny flowers exude such a strong scent? Many a night, he had stood by the window, looking out to the pitch-dark forests, filling his lungs with forest smells mixed with jasmine scent. Then when he had her around, he saw jasmine flowers more often because she liked to tuck jasmine flowers and magnolia blossoms in her hair.
“I had her in my arms in 1953. She was over twenty. The afternoon I met her sharing figs with her friend in the tree, I had to wait two more years; two years of longing, excruciating longing. I did not love a minor. By law, I committed no crime. That old woodcutter guy married a girl younger than she, only eighteen.”
The cup of tea is empty, only a dry jasmine petal is left at the bottom. He stares at the dry petal and suddenly feels jealous for the time past. Jealousy, how very strange, a weakness that is hard to acknowledge.
He re-created in his mind the incongruous setting of that night: the smell of Craven A cigarettes mixed with that of the Gauloises he lit continuously, one after another in a desultory fashion, smoking like a machine, without any appreciation of taste. He remembered the ashtray filled with butts and the stack of files that he had turned page after page without being able to absorb one single line. The first night they made love. The first night her smooth white body appeared before his eyes, uncovered by any bra or blouse, just pure flesh, the pure beauty created by nature. Old folks say: “Clear like jade, white like ivory.” He had heard that saying before but not until that night had he thoroughly understood each word, each phrase. Her beauty was indeed as of a precious jewel. He recalled her laugh, in the soft light of the lamp in the corner of the room, her teeth shining like jade. That was an instant that both the past and the present could sustain, when space became dreamlike and the barriers between two living beings just collapsed. She was inside him, melted into his own flesh, kneaded into his soul. Forever, forever…
But this is quite strange: Why is he so jealous? In the many meanderings of his life’s journey, he had not lacked encounters; he had not gone without the warmth of women. As a philanderer, he is certainly someone who has lived. Thus he cannot escape this ordinary, low-down feeling. After making love, he had told her that he urgently needed to read a stack of documents and he had left the room. But, sitting by the light, he had turned each page while trying to imagine who those others were who “had been” with her. Who had been the first one to have possession of her gorgeous and enticing body? He knew she was a girl from the highlands where life flows free like streams and forest clouds. Boys and girls there make love freely at puberty. For Easterners, people in the mountains are by that very token very much “Westernized.” A healthy and pretty girl like her, there had to have been dozens of guys who had taken a good look, especially those fellows growing up in the same region, by the same streams and woods.
“I cannot escape these so ordinary feelings,” he thought to himself. “It’s hard to understand: after all, I am a guy who spent twenty years in the West—and the first woman in my life was a blond with white skin.”
Instinctively he lets out a sigh:
“The first time I had sex, now that’s over half a century. To be more accurate, about sixty-five years ago. Nobody can really measure time, because it expands and contracts with one’s memories.”
Pouring himself a second cup of tea, he sees that first woman in the steam rising from the cup’s rim: “A widow. A woman in an alley. A seamstress, big and grotesque—my first sex teacher…”
Her face now appears opaque like smoke, but he can never forget her panting and interrupted screams during the lovemaking. They were both renters in a house in the short alley off Rue St-Jean, next to a waterless fountain that stood there rusty amid a flock of old pigeons. She was much older than he; her husband had worked for the post office and had died a few years earlier. Three kids of uncertain paternity were kept locked inside the house. Back then, he was just twenty, at an age when youth exudes seductiveness like a muskrat leaves a scent to attract a mate. One afternoon, the widowed woman had passed him in the alley; she lived in the room built for the housemaid, facing an old garage. She was a seamstress in a small shop that made sleeping caps. Most likely a family business; she had worked there since she was thirteen. They silently walked side by side for a stretch; then all of a sudden the widow smiled and asked him:
“Well, is everything all right?”
“Thank you, I hope so,” he replied, but inside he was quite depressed, because his legs were tired from searching for a job and there was not a hint of hope.
“Good,” the woman said, then she lowered her voice: “Tonight, at one a.m., my door is open. Will you come?”
He was shocked, not knowing what to say. The woman held his elbow, squeezing it hard while repeating: “Don’t forget! One a.m. tonight!”
Then she turned to her apartment. He continued down the next stretch to the last house in the short alley, then climbed to the seventh floor. There he drank water and ate a piece of dry and hard bread from the day before. Cold water and plain bread, with no butter or milk or meat and fish, but his blood managed to stir. The hardest organ in his body could not wait until one a.m.; it had stood up like a mast. He had to walk back and forth in his room; he could not do anything else. His heart beat fast from anticipation but his intellect forced him to smile with bitterness. He had dreamed so often of the first time he would make love but had never imagined it would arrive in such crude circumstances. There was to be no princess of his dreams, no prince of her heart; just a widow needing to fill an empty space in her bed. In those days, even though young, he was already quietly bitter about his fate. It has never occurred to him that the first one who would possess his young body would be a widow twice his age and with blond hair and white skin but no beauty. Nevertheless, he waited with excitement like someone who had never tasted life but was ready to eat his first feast. Then it was time. He silently walked to the already opened door. The woman, too, said nothing; she pulled him to the private room, which was in the old garage, walls hung with loud, flowery wallpaper; it had an antique bed, a quite large one filling the whole room. This confirmed that the postman must have been larger than average.
“Strange! Fate takes care of everything; any path will bring you to where you are supposed to be.”
Also strange is that while he had almost forgotten the widow’s face, he recalled the tiny room very well, especially the old bed with iron posts holding globes on their tops. One could feel that this solid black bed was like the gravel-making machine that had survived since antiquity and would continue to exist for many centuries. He remembers vividly the brown sheet with large stripes, the bed cover colored café au lait. He remembers the ways she taught him how to love. The arms of that seamstress were hot but her muscles were flabby and her hands large, full of calluses that hurt him when her caresses became wild. He remembers the gestures, determined and at times rough, when she took her nightgown off over her head to throw it on the floor. He remembers the glass of hot milk she offered him, the sounds of the spoon clacking in the late night; he was scared because the kids were sleeping on the other side of the wall. All the details of practice preliminary to lovemaking. His twentieth year was thus marked.
“A bigger worry than the jealousy she stirred up in the neighborhood has been the jealousy of other women that I am still ashamed of.”
That little quarter of Paris was full of women without men in their lives: wives of soldiers unable to be with their husbands; widows from the ongoing colonial wars from Africa
to America; Italian women who had escaped their own country. There were too many reasons those beds were cold. The postman’s widow hung tight to her twenty-year-old lover as a drowning person would hold on to a float. At first she was somewhat shy; later she became to him like a prisoner’s warden. And the other women, younger and prettier and no less daring, started throwing swords at the one who had gotten there before them. They stirred up jealous passes around the young and fresh Asian fellow who was crunchy like an apple. He was ashamed. He could not accept the way they used him as bait. He quietly looked for another place in another quarter. And one night he took his bag and left.
“Mr. President, are you done with your tea so that I can clear it?”
“Thanks, I am done.”
The soldier carries the tea tray outside, and he, by habit, pulls over the stack of materials in front of him and turns the pages, while musing to himself:
“I turn these pages not unlike that time long ago. People sometimes can be so mechanical; their automated gestures take up most of their time. Really, living life is only the tip of the iceberg—always the small part.”
Another thought rushes in quickly, like the crest of a wave thrown back on the rocks: “Those little parts are actually life. If they melt away, then our living can have no meaning at all, can only be a copy of a picture in which what we see is no more than an approximation of what is real.”