The Zenith (16 page)

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:

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 common 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.”

The pain comes in waves, as if someone is punching him from down below all the way up to his heart. And those punches are at times jabbing, at others nonstop. The president recalls a first-class African-American boxer, one who was famous everywhere when he was young. In his training room, this boxer had the habit of puckering his mouth each time he threw a punch. Each time the sandbag got hit, his face was all frown, and his lips shook, an action resulting from either an uncontrollable smile or the pressure of some state of mind; and his face had the look of his going through extraordinary pain.

“My heart is like such a sandbag being punched by an invisible person. And this invisible person smiles after each punch. A real smile, instead of some contortion brought on by a twisted mind.”

Should he get up, turn on the light, and call his doctor?

But, if he does so, the doctor will discover his tears. Not only that he had cried, but that he had cried for a long time, and that he had cried a lot. The hair on both of his temples is still wet; the pillow on which he rests his face is also wet; the lids of his eyes are swollen. Those things cannot be erased quickly.

“I am too old; why should I live any longer under these circumstances?”

Suddenly, a thought comes upon him, like a sigh arising from an incredible depth. He is not surprised. Nothing should take you by surprise. This is totally contrary to his own feelings when he had first heard the panicked
cries of the son of that unfortunate woodcutter. That cry now blends into another, silent cry. The muffled cry of his own son. The son whose face he does remember; the son he purposely abandoned and intentionally forgot.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

The laughing of some ghost exploded by his ears. More accurately, it was a fit of laughter like pouring rain on a stormy day battering a corrugated roof; a very strange kind of laughter, accompanied by a hoarse reverberation in the throat like the shrieking of a bunch of wildcats. The laugh seemed to come from deep down out of an immense grave or from an abandoned castle buried in the core of the earth:

“Who’s that? Who has such a terrifying laugh?”

He digs in his memory. Who had had that strange laugh and where? That laugh contained the growling of wild animals as well as the hissing of a twisted wind inside a deep dark hole. Both strange and familiar at the same time, it seems…

“Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

The pain disappears as he concentrates his memory to find this ghostly laughter…But he can’t find anyone. At this moment, the laughing one says:

“Really, you don’t remember me?”

He lifts the pillow from his face so that he can intensely peer into the room’s darkness. The electric light outside still clearly shines its rays through the cracks around the door. The giggling of the card-playing group can still be heard softly in his room. Nothing much different:

“Sorry, I don’t recognize you,” he replies.

“Won’t you try one more time?” the laughing one responds, his voice soft and high-pitched like that of some homosexual.

“Sorry, I can’t,” he repeats gently.

The laughter bursts into long waves, and this time, he recognizes the big fat face, round like the dumplings eaten by truck drivers in the north. Chairman Man, the most powerful man under the eastern sky. He has not seen him for a long time, therefore he is a bit confused. Actually, Chairman Man, born in the year of the Snake, two years after him, a man full of demonic plots leading China’s Cultural Revolution, is still alive. More precisely, he is conducting the most terrifying campaign of elimination ever seen in the history of humanity. This extraordinary emperor has displayed
all kinds of acts to awe the people with his championship mettle, the most well-known being swimming across the Yangtze River. Why is he now appearing as a ghost? Why is he borrowing the features of some resident of the underworld? Curious, he strains his eyes to look at the face opposite him and slowly starts to make out the features of the king of the north. Chairman Man’s face floats in space, his eyes squinting with joy, his lips turned up to provide the melody of a provoking smile.

“Greetings, Comrade,” says his visitor from the north.

He interrupts: “Where did you come from, Great Older Brother?”

“I am great indeed, but I am no brother of yours. And don’t call me Comrade either because my once brilliant patina is faded. That other one is dead and he turned into a decomposed corpse a long time ago.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Chairman Man asks most condescendingly. “Thank you. If that would please you. Oh, all the diplomatic forms you know by heart! Oh, the Western cheese gives out a smelly scent to the nose!”

Chairman Man starts to laugh louder, and this time he shows two rows of small and yellow teeth like those of some rural woman who lacks hygiene and is lazy with her grooming. His eyes squint small in a look that both teases and despises:

“You are very polite…the useless and fake politeness of the white men. Me? I challenge all protocol, step on all opinions and customs. I impose my own rules on everything.”

He starts laughing even louder, and now a foul smell comes out of his wide opened mouth. Normally, Chairman Man never opens wide his mouth. When he speaks or laughs, he opens it just to the degree he has calculated. Everybody knows that Chairman Man never brushes his teeth, believing that the tiger has its strength because it never brushes its teeth. Maybe he thinks such mimicry will bring him saintly power, make him a champion like some strong wild animal. The only difference is that, usually, a tiger opens its mouth really wide when it yawns as well as when it roars, while Chairman Man acts in reverse. Is that some mysterious artifice that only he understands?