The Zenith (17 page)

Ending his provocative laugh, the great helmsman from the north continues:

“The word ‘comrade’ is dead and dead with it are all those past formalities. Between you and I, what remains forever is the emperor of China and the vassal of Vietnam. A rock cannot turn into a blade, even if people call it so. Only idiots believe the magic trick that turns white paper into a dove. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“‘At seventy,’ our ancestors taught us, ‘if one is not yet blind or crippled, one does not boast of being good.’ Everyone can still make a mistake before standing in front of the grave.”

“Humility—whether it is sincere or fake—is only a game of those without talent or who have short necks and small throats. Throughout history did you ever see any powerful emperor who was reserved in front of his people? Maybe you would remind us of the Sage Kings Yao and Shun? Those two imaginary ghostly corpses were invented to comfort dirt-poor scholars. Yao and Shun—they are no different from communism. Just votive paper clothing that people burn to please the ghosts. Those alive can’t wear it. Just things to play with or to fool the people. As toys, they are not without purpose. Just as farmers use rakes in the paddies and sickles to cut the rice when ripe, we use these special tools to lure the people to where we want them to be and to force them to do what we want them to do. Communism is much better than Cao Cao’s plum orchard.”

“This I know well, because you called the soldiers ‘Red Army comrades’ when you needed them for the Long March. Then you called the farmers your ‘peasant comrades,’ ‘pillars of the revolution,’ ‘the future launchpad of the nation’ when you needed them out in the fields to shout, to chase away the birds like half madmen or wooden puppets…When you forced them to pull up the rice stalks and feed the pigs water buffalo manure, or abandon the rice fields to the wild and dig pits to make iron, they were sung as ‘the class of saintly peasants,’ as ‘humanity’s progressive force.’ With such a clever way and with such beautiful words, you carried out the most crazy and cruel games, games that no former lord or king had ever dared attempt. Those lessons I remember very clearly. Because we once followed you and we had to pay a price, though that price was less than the one your people had to pay.”

“The people? Just wooden pawns on history’s chessboard. Whatever they do must contribute to the game. When they are no longer useful, just throw them in the fire as kindling.”

“Yes, this I know. Millions of Red Army soldiers eventually became firewood when they no longer had a place in the game. Also, this same lesson I learned at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution up north, in your country. Many times has China’s history applied this slogan: ‘In military matters, it’s OK to sacrifice soldiers’; but with the scale of the Cultural Revolution, you will become the greatest gangster in that history book.”

“No brutality, no heroic greatness! Don’t you forget this.”

“I won’t forget. Maybe I lack the capacity. From my position, I would be
terribly shocked to see our people eat corpses or fight each other over food…Sometimes I have doubts, I don’t have enough courage to believe what is happening right before my eyes. Don’t you know that the peasants in many Chinese cities are dying of starvation; that in those places, people eat grass like buffaloes and wild pigs; that families exchange the corpses of their loved ones so that they won’t eat those dear to them?”

“The race of humans is a race that eats its kind. This has occurred regularly in the history of mankind and of China. Have you forgotten the story of Wu Song, who inadvertently ate a dumpling filled with human meat?”

“No, I have not, but that story, I thought, happened thousands of years ago. And with people having struggled to make progress, they have left such savagery behind them. The border between man’s barbarism and civilization stands at the abolition of cannibalism and incest.”

“Really, you are a good student of some blue-eyed and high-nosed teacher. All kinds of reasoning can lead students by their noses. Me, I don’t believe in any kind of reasoning, other than what I create.”

“You exaggerate. It was thanks to Stalin’s support that you got your throne.”

“Did I get Stalin’s support or did I use him to build a throne for myself as, in the old days, Egyptian pharaohs used the slaves to build their pyramids? Either way, it’s true. It’s called the art of using one’s tongue here.”

“Chinese history has no lack of devious people. But you must be its most extraordinary example.”

“I don’t look backward; neither do I look forward. I am the only such animal on this planet. There is no second.”

“I agree. As far as cruelty and the degree of fooling around with the victims, you are tops. When you forced peasants to the fields to scream at the birds or to become amateur steelworkers, or when you indifferently look at them eating grass or each other, you unite those two traits into one.”

“I choose the jest of cruelty just as you choose the dramatized pain of a coward.”

“I am a coward and a drama queen, is that what you are saying?”

“Exactly! I will show you right now: any emperor from the East at all worthy of being an emperor would never cry up and down over leaving behind a little drop of blood. You know that I have scattered my seeds all over the land like peasants scatter rice husks at harvest time. I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember how many children were dropped along the roadsides. I have no duty to remember them. Others must take care of them. One thing is for sure, among those children, anyone who wants to
betray me will get cut down quickly and firmly, just like when I cut down those with no blood ties who reach for power. Power cannot be harmonized with ordinary feelings of conscience.”

He sees the large face as if it inflates and darkens in seconds. Then it turns phosphorescent. The chairman’s small eyes squirt out dark green sparks:

“For sure our game will end. Then each can open his eyes wide to see…”

He doesn’t have time to open his mouth. Chairman Man has already gone.

He stares straight into space for a while, but the big man doesn’t return.

“The word ‘comrade’ is dead! And with it all the games of that past. There: Chairman Man said it openly. Whether one wanted it to end or not, the curtain had dropped. It was not unintentional that Balzac had named his novelistic productions
‘La Comédie humaine,’
the Human Comedy. But Chairman Man might be right when he said that power cannot be harmonized with conscience. Because a king has only the responsibility of protecting himself, his own governing power. Anything else is just grass to trample on.

“How can I treat like grass those on whose behalf I sacrificed my life? And her, too, her and her children; how can I treat those three lives like earthen graves along a road, or as rabbits dumped in a stew after I have looked them in the eyes? Can I ever imitate the great powerful one in the north?

“If I can’t do exactly as he does, I will be stuck between two cutting boards, power on one hand and feelings on the other. I will be crushed because of my entanglements.

“But it’s too late to change. Whether I like it or not, it has all happened. The wheel of time doesn’t roll in reverse.

“But the issue at hand is as in the beginning. But if…

“There must be no ‘if.’ With an ‘if,’ one can put Paris in a bottle.

“Man knows that there is no ‘if,’ but they still have to invent the word in searching for the truth, just as heaven gives us the opportunity to make choices.”

At this moment, he hears clearly a sad scream down in the depths of his heart: “If heaven gives me the power to start over again, I think I will never act like the powerful one up north.”

He understands that Chairman Man is Chairman Man while he is only who he is. None can change their character or their fate. All words of advice in life are worthless!

The sun up just enough to reveal faces, Vu and his wife, Van, take each other out along the streets, like a pair of lovers most intensely involved. She sits quietly behind as he quietly pedals, each absorbed in their own thoughts. The streets are still deserted, one sees only groups of newly recruited soldiers walking along inexorably, perhaps on their way to an assembly point. Half an hour later, the Red River dike rises up and blocks their view.

“Let’s get off here,” he says, and she nods in agreement.

They get off the bike and climb the Yen Phu slope, looking for a sidewalk teahouse where they can leave their bike, then quietly cross the dike to the cornfield. At that moment the sun shows its top on the other side of the Long Bien bridge, spreading its light in the shape of a fan. The cornfields are still wet with dew. Strings of dewdrops run down the sides of leaves, twinkling like strands of glass beads, as the leaves shimmy in the wind. This year the spring wind is blowing late, as if there were a campaign to change the color of the sky and the season of the wind. Bursts of wind run along the sides of the river, then all of a sudden whisper along the cornfields as if hesitating out of fear. Far off, a pack of sailboats reflects on the pink water, turning it silvery white. The sandy shore is so quiet that one can hear clearly from the boats the sounds of children fighting and of a fisherman coughing. A bent corn plant rubs his arm with all its dampness amid its roughness. He shivers lightly and turns to her:

“Careful, don’t get your clothes wet. It’s still a bit cold.”

“Yes, I know…”

Her response contains some unhappiness but he doesn’t pay any attention because he is busy watching the children on the other side of the river. There are more than a hundred of them, of elementary school age, every single one of them wearing a hat made of hay, with a backpack or a handbag. They cling to one another on a barge. Perhaps students of some school evacuated out here:

“If the planes come, where can they take shelter?”

He is fully aware that the shelters, whether personal or communal, have no real value other than that of a sedative drug. A pad of reinforced cement not bigger than a large bamboo tray covers the opening of a trench not deeper than eighty centimeters. It might shield you from grenade shrapnel, but how could it protect you from heavy bombs dropped from airplanes? But nevertheless people need the shelters to provide some sense of security. War is like a game. A terrible game in which the first victims are ordinary people like those children across the river. Squinting his eyes to see better, he gazes at all the straw hats dotting the morning sunlight, the tiny backpacks and the handbags inside which he knew mothers had packed their own monthly food ration. They had to scrape together the last grains of sugar, save the last of the dry food to give their children a chance to survive at the far-distant destination; a high sacrifice for people living with privation. The endless suffering of a history bespattered with war. Is this the fate of his people? It’s like they are people who are skinned and then made to face tearing winds or searing flames.

He hears her warning and remembers that she is sitting next to him. They are out here so that they can talk more easily:

“Perhaps Elder Brother is right; this country is ours. Even if we want to deny it, we can’t. We belong to a people who have been skinned open, therefore we have to endure all the pain that comes to those who have been skinned; to each his or her own measure. Now we have to go back to our torment!”