The Sorrow of War (8 page)

Kien was surprised by the integrity of his stepfather's words and he listened intently.

"I want you to guard against all those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise

you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the needs of others. You are all we have left, your mother, your father, and I. I hope you live through the war and return home to Hanoi, for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?"

Surprised, and far from agreeing with him, Kien nevertheless trusted his stepfather's words, feeling an affinity with his sentiments. He saw in the old man a wise, multifaceted intelligence with a warm, romantic heart that seemed to belong to another era, a sentimental era with all its sweet dreams and heightened awareness, alien to Kien but attractive nonetheless.

He understood then why his mother had left his father and come to live with this wise, kind-hearted man.

For the entire afternoon he sat with his stepfather in the room in which his mother had lived her last years, and where she had died. And that winter afternoon became his only memory of his mother, a memory of warmth and a special atmosphere conjured up by his stepfather as he read old love poems he had composed for her when he was young. He took a guitar down from the wall and started singing in a deep voice a song by Van Cao, a song his mother had loved. It was a slow, melancholy song recalling loved ones who were forever gone, decrying life's unhappi-ness yet with a strain of underlying hope:

Don't lament, don't bathe in the sorrows. Look up and live on . . .

After joining the army, Kien had written to his stepfather but had no reply. After the war, ten years after his visit that afternoon, Kien returned again to find him.

But when he arrived neighbors told him his stepfather had died many years earlier. Even the house had gone. It had been destroyed long ago. No one remembered the circumstances of his death, or even how the house had been destroyed.

Such a man, such a story, Kien pondered. But there were so many romantics like him now; some close to him, others from just outside his immediate circle.

Once, at his desk in the editorial office of his magazine, a strange man who wished to remain anonymous approached him, asking for his story to be run in the magazine. It was a love story. The main characters were this man and his wife. "If the names are changed we can then really tell the truth of this very beautiful but tragic story," he told Kien. It was to be an extraordinary present for his sick wife, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of their marriage. Wasn't that great?

Kien thought the story was a load of rubbish and very boring. Yet the courage and determination of the man, and his strong desire to create this unusual present, impressed him, set him thinking.

He could, for example, write a novel about his neighbors above, below, and on the same floor as his own apartment in the one building. It could be a story of symphonies. Not a war story.

Stories, humorous, heartrending, arose every day. Anywhere people were jammed up close together and forced to share their lives. On summer evenings when there were power blackouts and it was too hot inside, everyone came to sit out in front, near the only water tap servicing the whole three-story building.

The tap trickled, as drop by drop every story was told. Nothing remained secret. People said that Mrs. Thuy, the teacher widowed since her twenties, who was about to retire and become a grandmother, had suddenly fallen in love with Mr.Tu, the bookseller living on the corner of the same street.The two old people had tried to hide their love but had failed. It was true love, something that can't be easily hidden.

Or Mr. Cuong, on the third floor, who when drunk once set about his wife with a big stick but by mistake whacked his own mother. The latest gossip was about Mr. Thanh, the retired sea captain, whose family was always having problems. They were so poor they would even squabble over a bowl of rice. Poor Thanh wanted no more of it, so he decided to commit suicide. He tried once with a rope, then with insecticide, but both times he was discovered and rescued.

Thanh was still better off than old Mrs. Sen, blind and lonely, the mother of two sons killed in action. Mrs. Sen's nephew and his wife cheated the poor old lady out of her room by having her sent to a mental hospital to die. The nephew was not only well educated but well-heeled. He had graduated from the University of Finance and Economics, he traveled abroad frequently, spoke two foreign languages, and lived an easy life. On returning each afternoon he would eat a huge meal, then go out onto the balcony to rest, belching repeatedly and yawning. His wife, a boring, tight-lipped, serious woman, worked in the courts. Not once had she ever been seen to smile at her neighbors.

There was Mr. Bao, also on the third floor, living with his parents, Dr. Binh and his wife. He had been released from prison in the recent New Year Amnesty and quickly won the sympathy of all the people in the building. He had originally been sentenced to death, then had that reduced to a life sentence, then to twenty years. Bao didn't look like a criminal. His many years as a prisoner had turned him into a devout, religious man. Only a short time after being released this formerly dangerous convict surprised his fellow apartment-dwellers with many acts of kindness, and kind helpful words. The only reservation was his obvious sadness, betrayed by his deep, sad eyes. When he looked sad everyone felt sorry for him.

Even such a tiny stream of life, running through this apartment building, contained so many waterfalls, so many cliffs, so many eddies and whirlpools. Children were born to life, sprouted like mushrooms after a shower of rain, grew up, became adults. The adults grew old, some of them falling away every year. Generation after generation, like the waves of the sea.

Last summer, old Du—the great barber of Hanoi—had died in his ninety-seventh year. He was the last survivor of the prewar generation known to Kien.

"No one, neither the Genie of Jade nor the King of Hell, will allow me to live the last three years of my own century," his loud voice had declared. He had tried to make a joke of it when Kien came visiting him. "Please write a play for me, entitled
The Barber of Hanoi.
I'll come up from hell to see the first performance."

He had been a barber from the time when Hanoi gentlemen followed the ancient Chinese custom and wore-their hair braided into queues. "These days they call them pigtails, but that would have been an insult. Queues denoted authority and culture," he had said. "Under my hands three hundred thousand heads and faces have been beautified, turned from messy and rough to tidy and perfumed. Under my sculptor's hands, rough stone is turned into beautiful statues."

Before the war his children, his grandchildren, and all his great-grandchildren were gathered around him in one big family, and although not one of them followed in his footsteps as a barber everyone enjoyed his influence and his style as a raconteur. He worked hard, creating a large, kind family, all pleasant and fun-loving. In his childhood memories Kien sees old Du's scissors and hears the snip, snip, snip, as Du tells his funny stories, interspersed with bars from the
Marseillaise,
sung out of tune.

For Kien, the most attractive, persistent echo of the past is the whisper of ordinary life, not the thunder of war, even though the sounds of ordinary life were washed away totally during the long storms of war. The prewar peace and the postwar peace were in such contrast.

It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people now attempting ordinary peacetime pursuits which are the most horrifying. Like the case of Father Du, who presided over a very large and happily noisy family. Today he is the only living male. Like Huynh, the tram driver, whose three sons all died on the battlefield. Like Sinh, wounded in the spine, more dead than alive until he finally died where he had lain for so long.

The spirits of all those killed in the war will remain with Kien beyond all political consequences of the war.

So many friends of the same age have long since departed, never to return. Their houses are still here in Hanoi, their images part of them. Their images also endure in the faces of the new generation.

Kien remembers Hanh, a single girl who lived in the prewar days in the small room close to the stairs, a room which now belongs to Mr. Su. Hardly anyone now remembers why Hanh left, or when.

Hanh was older than Kien.When he was very young he would see men quiver with lust when Hanh walked by. They would fight each other to get close to her door. The ones on Hanh's side of the street tried to fight those from the even-numbered houses across the street to stop them from encroaching on their territory, meaning the doorways on the odd-numbered side, where Hanh would walk by at least twice a day. Every time she passed, walking nonchalantly, her long tresses swaying, she would exude a youthful charm that aroused the men. They would stiffen, stop what they were doing, and stare after her with feverish, blatant desire.

The girls around there hated her, calling her a bitch, a whore, or a witch because of her innocent influence, of which she remained either unconcerned or completely ignorant. Kien felt their passionate hatreds were based on envy and lies. Hanh was a normal, neighborly girl, he felt. "Good morning, sister," he would say politely when she emerged. "Good morning, younger brother, you're really a nice boy," she would say, tousling his hair. At the Lunar New Year celebrations she gave Kien a gift of money, just as she did the other children in the building. Brand-new crisp banknotes, and wishes for a happy school year. "Be a good pupil.Why, you already look almost grown up.Just take care not to be big in body but tiny in brain, my younger brother!" she laughed.

But it was not very long before she began to change her style of address to Kien. He had turned into a handsome and strong seventeen-year-old and was about to graduate. But he and Phuong, his classmate and sweetheart from childhood, were both so intensely occupied with each other that neither seemed to notice what Hanh had observed, that Kien had matured into an impressively attractive young man.

War was looming. Hanoi was considered a noncombat area, yet the authorities ordered the population to practice evacuation, to dig shelters, to heed air-raid sirens, and to wear dark clothing. During a lunch break at home from school one day Kien was startled when Hanh slipped quietly into his room. "Hey, younger brother, how about helping me later. I want to dig an air-raid shelter under my bed so I don't have to tear down the street every time that siren goes off."

"Okay, sister, I'll help you."

That evening was his first time in a room alone with a girl. It was small but sensitively decorated. Kien wanted to ask her not to destroy the harmony of the room but she had already started on the digging work. He started to dig in the corner by her small bed, about ten tiles in from the wall. He used a crowbar to break into the foundation, then a hoe and a shovel. Bit by bit, through bricks and the rubble of the foundations, they dug deeper.

Hanh had prepared a nice dinner and bought beer for Kien. After dinner Kien began to feel a little uneasy, but said nothing, starting on the digging again. In the middle of the work there was a blackout and they had no electric light. Hanh brought out a small kerosene lamp and they continued, with Kien digging and Hanh carrying away the soil in buckets. Both worked silently, patiently, for a long time.

"This is probably deep enough," said Kien, panting. "It's above my chest, which means the level of your chin. Don't make it too deep."

"Yes. Let's stop there. But let me try it. We might need some steps for me to get down into it easily," she said, holding her arms out to slip into the shelter.

Hanh didn't look much shorter than Kien, but once inside the shelter in the dimly lit room, she only came up to

his chin. Her body pressed into his tall, muscular body as he lifted her down.

She sensed the intimacy and seemed to change her mind, wishing to get back out, but the shelter was too narrow and deep. Her urgent mood transferred itself to Kien, whose body began heaving uncontrollably with a burning male sensation that he'd never felt before. He breathed heavily, trying to cope, but the sensations produced by her closeness, her perfume, her hair, her shoulders, her breasts under her thin shirt pressing hard against him, slowly overpowered him.

Confused and trembling, out of control, Kien hugged her tightly, bending to kiss her neck, then her shoulders, as she twisted her body to get clear of him. Clumsily he pressed her against the earthen wall, triggering tensions in his muscles, which snapped a shirt button, springing it wide open and bringing him suddenly to his senses.

He threw his head back, stepped away, and released Hanh, then lifted himself quickly out of the little shelter onto the floor, poised to run out of the room. But in his rush he knocked over the kerosene lamp, which went out.

"Kien," Hanh called in a low voice. "Don't go, don't run off. Please help me. I can't see a thing."

Trembling, Kien bent down and grasped her under her arms and lifted her out, ripping his shirt open even wider as he lifted. Hanh raised her arms and placed them around his neck, whispering to him: "Go upstairs for a moment, but don't stay long. Come down soon.There's something I want to tell you," she said.

Kien went quietly back to his room, took a bath, and slowly put on fresh clothes. But he couldn't summon the courage to return downstairs. He started, but stopped. He sat down. He lay down, but he couldn't sleep. His emotions were running riot, willing him to return. But his conservative training in restraint anchored him to the spot. The hours dragged by, until he saw the first glint of dawn. He sat up suddenly, walked barefoot to the landing, and tiptoed downstairs to Hanh's room, where his courage ran out again. He pressed his face to the door, his heart beating loudly. He didn't dare knock, even when he heard a slight scratch of footsteps on the other side of the door and a latch being lifted ever so gently. Breathlessly Kien sensed Hanh's body pressing on the inside of the door, a centimeter of timber between their bodies. He lowered his hand to the ceramic door-handle, trembling, but it froze on the handle for some seconds, then minutes, and he found no strength to turn it. He finally released the handle, turned around noisily, and ran back upstairs, throwing himself on the bed in defeat.