The Zenith

by Duong Thu Huong

  “It’s truly delicious. This goes marvelously with voi tea.” He then laughs and adds: “I have been here more than a year, yet only today do I dare come into the temple. I didn’t realize what I was missing. Had I taken the liberty of troubling you sooner I would have had a taste of this pudding long ago.”

  “Mr. President, the living quarters of a monastery are certainly not elegant enough for us to dare invite you,” the abbess answers, smiling. Her two rows of teeth are still intact, solid and brightly black.

  Smiling in turn, the president replies, “We are neighbors, we should have gotten acquainted a long time ago. It’s my mistake for being so busy.”

  As he finished the cup he continues: “Venerable Abbess, the other day, apparently, you had a requiem for the newly deceased woodcutter?”

  “Yes, sir. You have such a busy schedule and yet you still have time to be concerned with the fate of a common person. This shows that your compassion is very vast. I learned from my nuns that you went all the way down to the village to attend his funeral.”

  “Oh, I only dropped by to pay him a visit.”

  “But that, sir, is already a great honor for the dead man’s family.”

  “By the way, Venerable Abbess, would you be kind enough to explain to me what a requiem achieves in Buddhist terms? Do all deceased persons need a requiem or only those who have had an unusual, particularly painful, fate?”

  “Mr. President, the Buddhist faith is not strictly tied to any rite. There is no regulation as to who needs or who doesn’t need such a service. Everything depends on the compassion of the living. Only compassion can open our minds, enlighten us to what is needed; and only when enlightened can one have what is needed to see through one’s karma. We in the temple only do what is requested by the living survivors. It is said, ‘When your heart is moved, the spirits will know.’ We monastic people know that when your Buddhahood is illuminated like a lamp, it shines not only on the spirit but also on the earthly body of the people. It shines across the seven skies to open up the lotus blossom of your plenitude.”

  “Venerable, we are outside of your faith. No matter how we try we cannot readily understand the scriptures of your religion. However, from a secular standpoint, we are very much concerned with the story of the father woodcutter and his son. I wonder how you can explain that conflict.”

  “Mr. President, the Supreme One taught us that in everyone’s life, greed is the one predominant drive. It is greed that blurs our conscience just as a black cloud covers the sun or the moon. Feelings between father and son, teacher and student, brother and brother can all be maligned and destroyed by greed. In one of the many lives of the Buddha, even the Supreme One was also murdered by his close cousin, the monk Devadatta. In dynastic histories, from time immemorial, there are many cases where a crown prince would kill his own father, the king. I am sure that you must have read a lot more than me, a poor nun.”

  So saying, the abbess again smiles benevolently. And again he notices the two rows of black and shining teeth.

  “Clearly she is an old Vietnamese lady, with black teeth and a satin skirt. Seventy years ago, she must have been a bright and lively village girl, full of spirit. But she refused to accept a normal life with its normal pleasures in the village; instead she has spent time learning scriptures in order to become a disciple of the Buddha.”

  So he thought to himself as he replied sympathetically, “Venerable, your explanation is just superb. Clearly you have spent lots of time on the scriptures.”

  “I dare not accept your praise, Mr. President. Anyone who has ‘begged’ at a temple door, or who has read carefully the words of the Supreme One, can explain this a lot better than I, your humble servant.”

  And without waiting for him to respond, she turns toward the back room and asks: “Don’t you see, my child, that the pudding dish is near empty? Our temple may not be rich but it never lacks hospitality.”

  “I am sorry. I was so caught up listening to you.”

  He smiles at seeing the venerable abbess still so sharp. Her way of avoiding topics that she does not wish to discuss shows that her reactions are still very quick. He finishes the last piece of pudding in the fashion of neighbors well acquainted for more than half a century, saying, “The pudding was simply delicious. Venerable, let me thank you as well as the nun here for your wonderful hospitality. With your permission, I would like to come back sometime and bother you.”

  “Mr. President, that you set foot in our place is a big honor for us humble folks.”

  He stands up, as does the abbess, who brings her hands together in a lotus gesture.

  When he gets back to his room, the clock shows nine twenty-five. That means that the conversation in the temple lasted an hour and a half. In that time, the aroma of voi tea boiled with ginger and the beautiful smile of the abbess, with her two rows of shining black teeth, had saved him from the chasm of despair. Now he is alone with himself once again. He sits down on a chair and resumes being afraid of the time stretching before him. His solitude returns. Where can he run to and hide? Should he go into the woods? That’s not possible. Should he go down the mountain? There’s no reason. Besides, he will not turn himself into a mental case in front of those charged with guarding him inside this beautiful prison. His self-respect does not allow him to act irresponsibly. Looking up at the bookshelves, he notices dozens of volumes that he has left partially read, books marked with bamboo wafers. Pulling out three of them, he begins to turn one, page by page. The lines of type go past him like so many soulless dots, with no meaning whatsoever. Sighing, he folds the book closed, putting the bamboo wafer right where it was. On the temple patio, the enormous white clouds still keep going by one after another. And the plum branches filled with white flowers still slightly sway outside the window, making his heart ravenlike, gnawed by memories of white snow.

  “I cannot go on enduring these pangs of conscience. This is worse than death.”

  He stands up and picks up his cotton-padded coat, intending to walk out again. But the wet and cold coat forces him to realize that he cannot go anywhere at the moment. He has no choice but to sit down again amid his four jail-like walls, face-to-face with his own tribunal, which is himself.

  Rehanging his coat on the hook, he lowers himself down on the chair. Watching the white clouds roll through the patio like so many pieces of cotton, he remembers the abbess’s words.

  “Even the Supreme One was once murdered by a follower, one who had put on his monk’s robe, one who had become a priest—even such a one was motivated by greed. How can one then blame a common person? Let’s not hold a grudge toward those turncoat comrades. The one to blame first of all should be myself. Yes, me. Either because I am a coward or a dummy, or both.”

  This time, he no longer feels like defending his record. Is the attorney in him dead? That thought indifferently goes through his head as he thoughtfully watches a tattered cloud dragging itself across the patio. The form of this cloud suddenly makes him self-conscious:

  “The roads of life being twisting and turning, how can one know which path to take? For our people I went to Paris yet destiny took me to chilly Moscow, fate chased me back toward Eastern shores. My whole life, I have been formed and pushed by chance. Is a man’s life a sequence of ‘drifting duckweed and floating clouds’?”

  “The France of Diderot and Voltaire opened its doors and invited me in. But another France, that of top-hatted bureaucrats attired in shiny, gold-buttoned uniforms, slammed its door in my face, just like a butler slams the door to beggars. The enslaved people of small and weak countries are chased away from all the roads leading to happiness, and the only cobblestoned slope that welcomes us is the very one leading directly to hell. By the time I realized this, it was already too late.”

  And that hell has unmistakably arrived, no doubt this is true. But who can be courageous enough or contrite enough to dare open their eyes and look into it? He remembers the shock when, for the first time, he saw people
queuing for their turn to buy food. His car had black windows and no one realized that he was inside. The car sped by but there had been enough time for him to see the common people. And that image of misery hit him like a hammer. That year, his heart was still humming joyfully the melody of “Forward to the Capital.” Two years had not been enough time to blur the glorious colors of victory or to cool the ardor in his veins. Busy with work, he did not have time for going incognito among the people. Whatever little time he had, he had spent it with her, but their rendezvouses were always after midnight, when all the activities of the common people were over. On that morning he had had an appointment with a foreign history professor. Because the subject of the meeting had to do with the national museum, he had suggested that they meet there. He had then asked his driver to choose a new route so that he could see something of the people’s lives. Since leaving the maquis, that was the very first time he had had an opportunity to observe the people’s activities. What he saw was not as pretty or as reassuring as he had expected. The masses appeared before his eyes—in person but fighting and in wild confusion—as if they were a herd of sheep contesting their way back to their pen. The faces that caught his eyes were thin, hunger-ravaged ones; faces dark and resigned, marked by patience and shame; faces in terror as they were repressed by fear, waiting, suffering, and hatred. Faces of people who were at the edge of going into institutions for the mentally infirm.

  Repressing a sense of shock, he had tried to ask the driver naturally, “Does your family have to wait in line like that to buy rice?”

  “Mr. President, we’re lucky to belong to the priority list. The government has rice and food items brought to our very office.”

  “Who is in this privileged position?”

  “All of us, Mr. President, who directly belong to the Administrative Office of the Central Management Committee of the Party. Besides those are the special offices belonging to exceptional ministries like the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense…and, above all, the Ministry of Trade and Food because that is precisely their preserve. Personnel belonging to those ministries are considered like the children of kings and lords in the old days.”

  “And what makes one a child of kings and lords?”

  “That expression, Mr. President, implies that they are entitled to the highest level of privileges. They have the same rice ration book as the rest of us but it’s for fragrant rice coming from the most recent crop; the common people, however, are reduced to eating moldy rice because the government sells them only rice that has been kept in storage bins for five or six crops. Likewise with pork: they take for themselves the best cuts, leaving the belly cuts, the lard, and the head of the pig to sell to the people. If you don’t belong to the privileged group, you have to put up with lots of shameful belittlement before you can get a piece of real meat—just as if you were someone condemned to quarry stone. My eldest brother works at the National Library; he is a leading cadre and therefore is entitled to buy five hundred grams of meat per month. Once a month, his wife has to get up at three in the morning to go get in line at the Hom market. Every time, though, she ends up with pieces of pig’s head or pork belly because those in the government store smuggle the good pieces to their own folk and to those government offices that have something to trade: for instance, stores selling rice or fabric, sugar and milk, or some other necessities. It’s only once they have satisfied these privileged exchanges that they look after the people.”

  “How come the leading cadres of the government are not aware of this?”

  The driver was at a loss as to what to say. He briefly eyed the president, both to guess what he meant and to check for some ulterior motive. Then the president realized that he had uttered an extremely stupid question.

  “Maybe they know it but they haven’t had time to report it upstairs.”

  He had answered his own question. And the driver was quick to respond.

  “Yes, Mr. President, it must be so.”

  That night, he sat watching the moon. His quandary made it impossible for him to sleep. It was a crescent moon, looking as deceptive as a rice stalk’s leaf, and reflecting no light. He looked at the moon and thought of the inevitable decline of everything.

  “Life is an insistent, endless turning; a mulberry field can transform itself into a seashore, while people come from nothingness to return to nothingness. Why, then, am I so depressed? Is it because that dying moon is somehow secretly linked to the country’s destiny? And is it an omen for the collapse—sooner or later—of the regime, a finality that must come to pass?”

  That thought felt like a sharp sword that an executioner had placed against his neck. Suddenly he felt a terrible chill run down his spine. In front of him once again there appeared a mass of thirsty and hungry people crowding in a shameful mass in front of a counter distributing rice. He saw arms raised, clawing and pushing at one another; eyes showing only the whites and necks stretched out toward the barred window with all the crazy focus of wild animals lunging after their prey in their gnawing hunger. God, these are his own compatriots, citizens in the society that he gave birth to; people for whom he had nurtured the dream of liberation. Was this an illusion or a reality? Could it be that all his efforts had been mistaken or that what he had dreamed of was only the reflection of a palace upon the waters of a phantom river? He asked but dared not answer. A terror enveloped his mind. The faces that he had seen that morning were like a herd of ill-treated animals tortured by lack of food, no more than beasts in a stall waiting for the hour when they could put their heads in the manger. For if people could still feel outrage, they must no doubt nurture hatred, waiting for the opportune moment to cut the heads off those who guarded the prison, those who kept them in this beastly life.

  Alas, could it be that the regime that he had done his best to build was, in the end, no more than an immense sheep pen? Or was it, more correctly, a gigantic prison, one that kept people down at the lowest level of their material needs? A place over which the most extreme mass self-shaming ruled; a school for cows that they might lower themselves before clumps of grass; or worse, a school for training robbers and thieves, for educating disturbed or schizophrenic people? For no other conclusion was possible. And if there was no other explanation, the present society must then constitute an unimaginable regression, even when compared with the misery of years ago.

  Oh, dear gods, how many people have sacrificed themselves, how much wealth has been expended and destroyed, how many ups and downs have his people endured, only to end up with this barbaric life? If that were the case, then this revolution was the most dicey of all life’s possible undertakings. And if that were the case, then his life must be accounted a tragic failure without equal.

  Now in the Lan Vu temple, he feels goose bumps all over. Chills running down his spine are such that he cannot help but cry out loud, which brings the guards on duty and the doctor rushing in. He has to come up with an imagined physical pain so as to deceive them.

  At the Politburo meeting that had followed his first glimpse of the people’s misery, he had asked that the economic policy be reversed so as to find a way to save the situation. He stressed the meaning of the word “happiness.” Liberation is meaningless if it does not make people happier. All revolutions are crazy and cruel games should they fail to bring freedom and a worthy life. It is the same with independence. Independence is valueless if the people of an independent country do not find themselves able to stand on their own two feet as far as the most essential necessities are concerned.

  No one had contradicted him.

  But no one had listened to him either, even though all thirteen of them (including himself) sat around a huge table. He understood this as he had looked at their inattentive eyes, at their fingers as they indefatigably flicked the ashes from them. Yesterday, they had still been comrades fighting for an ideal. Now they were sitting there thinking of other schemes. The war of yesterday was over. Today was when the generals divided up the war
booty in the palace. Yesterday in the woods they had all received the usual portions of rice and water from the springs, there being nothing to envy or to scheme for. Today, things were different. The social rank of each one sitting there needed to be accompanied by thousands of measurable and immeasurable rights. They were no longer concerned with the things that concerned him, because personal interests are always closest to us and seduce us the most effectively. The things that bothered him that day, to them had become tasteless or even incomprehensible. A whole machine was now serving their own persons or their families irrespective of time or limitations. They lived absolutely in accordance with the golden principle of communism. And that golden principle was meant for only one group of people and excluded the rest of the nation, a nation of sheep and cows that were jostling with one another, waiting to be let out onto the grass.

  He had repeated what he had to say twice, three times. No one had objected. No one had responded either. No one had felt the need to dispute his ideas. Then came a break for refreshments, after which another topic had come up, which had more real, more concrete urgency, than the shame and suffering of the people. For other people’s suffering is always immaterial and difficult to internalize, and the suffering of the people is even fuzzier and harder to feel. For the people are very abstract, formless, having no feet with which to run, no wings with which to fly, not even beaks with which to sing. Independence was then no longer the great aspiration of a slavish and suffering nation, it had become a concrete war booty, somewhat like a boar that has been brought down by the lance of a hunter. With such meat, there is only enough for those who know how to handle spears and halberds; as for the masses who stand apart, they are merely bystanders or gossips. When necessary, he had realized, people can easily become deaf and dumb. Likewise, they can easily become heartless. Yes, those who crowded around him, who had divided up the meat of the freshly killed boar…they had become estranged from him. And he had become difficult for them to understand. The continent had ruptured; he stood on one side and they on the other. That had been the first time he had understood the breakup of relationships among those who had once called one another “Comrade” or even “Brother,” associations that had been woven over decades or even longer. The cutting asunder could happen in a moment once the sword of power had been brought down. Before that blade, all past associations, simply, would be fragile spiderwebs.