The Zenith (35 page)

“OK, whatever you want is fine. What about the five rooms reserved for you, what do you want to do with them?”

“Dad, just keep them for Stepmother and the younger siblings. I do not have any intention of returning.”

“Please think carefully.”

“I only ask you for the money to finish college. After graduation, I’ll take care of myself.”

“If so, I am happy for you. I’m only afraid you won’t qualify for secondary school.”

“I know. From now on I will attend public school.”

“OK, I’ll make sure you have enough money.”

“It’s what I ask for, Father.”

The conversation ended and the youngest son picked up the shiny varnished trunk and left. It was a good separation because, subsequently, Quynh suddenly became more mature and began to do well in his studies. His new grades surprised his whole school.

This New Year, it was Mr. Quang who presented gifts to Miss Ngan. The gift for her was not a red envelope containing a few bills but a pink velvet box. When she opened the box, her eyes flashed like electricity and she jumped up to put her arms around his neck:

“Good-looking old man! This is truly marvelous!”

“Is this gift fit for a girl from Khoai Hamlet? Or are you the literary star from the right branch of the celestial horoscope?”

“Literary star of the left or the right branch does not equal becoming mistress of the house of Mr. Quang in the upper section.”

“Are you sure of that, honey?”

“As sure as teak wood is hard.”

“If Teacher Tuong returns and entices you to leave me, I will hang myself on the jackfruit tree at the end of the yard.”

“Smack that lying mouth. You do want to hang?”

“I’ll hang your neck first, then mine; in the same hour, no more, no less. It’ll make it easy for the kids to do the funerals.”

“That is horrible.”

“Why such a faint heart? Just a little joking around.”

“Don’t be so foolish. We’ve had our share of bitterness. We will live with each other until we step into the grave.”

She held on to him tightly, her tears welling up as if separation were stalking outside just beyond the door sill. He held her tightly, too, to confirm his unconditional protection. At that moment, he had a feeling, extremely definite, extremely strong, like his feeling when he first met her, when she, embarrassed, had put the two bottles of rice wine on the table in the boardinghouse in town: she was part of his bones and flesh, part of his own life, the part that he had forgotten, which he had ditched many incarnations before in someplace so far away, on the far side of the horizon. They stood like that for a long while in the calming New Year’s air, both knowing and surprised as to why they were so passionately in love with each other. Then the sound of a barking dog and the footsteps of young men going out for a New Year’s stroll on the hamlet road startled them out of their love enchantment. Miss Ngan hurriedly put the two red ruby solitaires in her ears.

“My gosh, it’s time to cook food for the ancestors.”

“Why hurry? The ancestors witness our faithful hearts. It’ll be fine to bring them food at noon,” he replied.

There were only the two of them, but the offering meal had to be complete. Besides being smart, Miss Ngan possessed all the necessary skills to cook well in a kitchen. She did not need her husband’s help to prepare a ten-course banquet in less than two hours: steamed chicken with lime leaves, fried honey chicken, stir-fried beef with bamboo shoots, stir-fried fish with celery, stir-fried pork with cauliflower, chicken pie, pork pie with fungus, jellied pork hock, shrimp soup with fish bladder, and braised ribs with bamboo shoots. Not counting different pork rolls and rice cakes. Right at noon, a tray was brought up and enticing dishes were put on display all over the altar. There were eighteen plates and bowls for the main and the minor dishes. Mr. Quang stood there, stroking his beard and complimenting his wife. Incense and sandalwood smoke spread pleasing aromas throughout the
rooms. The warmth of an invisible fire filled the air. The genies of happiness—which always come to a house where people love each other—smiled invisible smiles.

At the very moment when Mr. Quang, dressed in formal robes, stood directly in front of the ancestors’ altar getting ready to offer prayers, Quy with his wife and two daughters stepped in. He carried two pink grapefruit from his own garden with a stack of black cakes, the kind that Mrs. Quang had liked to eat the most when she was alive. After putting these offerings on the altar, Quy said:

“May I pray to my mother first? Afterward, I must go and bring good New Year’s wishes to the units and the villagers.”

“Back away from there! On this altar I have ancestors from seven generations back. After that we have great-great-grandparents, grandparents from both maternal and paternal sides; then come the parents, my uncles and aunts. After that is my older brother who died young. Your mother, that is, my wife, has to wait her turn after him. The order of precedence is settled. There is no authority for a variance.”

“But I…”

“Back off,” Mr. Quang screamed. He did not say it but he knew that nobody in Quy’s family had acknowledged Miss Ngan. She had withdrawn to the kitchen on seeing the animosity on their faces.

“This is my house, not the office of the village committee. Wield your authority elsewhere; not under the roof of this house.”

His father’s determination caused Quy to step back. His wife, always hiding in some corner, reached out to pull her husband’s shirt. Quy then had no choice but to wait for Mr. Quang to bow and pray.

His prayer was a long one because he had to invite, according to proper generational sequence from high to low, the spirits of all the ancestors, from five to seven generations back down to his wife who had just died the previous spring. That length of time was hard to endure for a son who is belligerent and has real power in his hands. Chairman Quy stamped one foot then the other, as if there were a nest of red ants biting his feet so that he could not stand still. When his father had finished, he rushed forward to the altar, bowed twice, bending his back as they do in the theater, then raised his voice to cry out loud:

“Mother, Mother in heaven: if you are divine please return and open your eyes to see all the turmoil under this roof. Oh, Mother, it brings shame to us children. Why were you in a hurry to leave and let frogs jump on the table, chickens
bring trash into the house, and crows build nests on the top of the grapefruit and orange trees?”

“Oh, Mother, dear Mother…”

“Dear Grandmother, where did you go? Like this you left us, Grandmother?”

No doubt having rehearsed beforehand, Quy’s wife and children raised their crying voices like the choir at a play singing along with the orchestra. Their cries resonated in the calm atmosphere of the neighborhood. At this hour, neighbors were getting their clothes ready and preparing to go out. All the words back and forth and the crying of the chairman’s family had slipped right into the ears of the neighbors on all sides who were always ready to listen in.

Mr. Quang was mortified. He was not prepared to receive this blow. To be accurate, nobody had sufficient imagination to anticipate such a thing. They worked hard all year, waiting for the new year with all its new hopes. The first day of Tet is the first day of a new block of time, of a span of life yet to come, a day that has the special, sacred meaning of an unsullied beginning. For that reason, no one would quarrel with any other on such a day; neighbors, even if they hated each other a lot, would suck down their bitterness to make sweet their greetings and wishes, because if words are not good and the meaning is not kind, then misfortune will come to both sides. Even enemies do not fight during Tet; so how could loved ones and blood relatives? That is why he was in shock when he saw his firstborn son with his family crying in front of the ancestors’ altar, turning the sacred New Year’s Day into a funeral. After a second of stunned bewilderment, he knew he had to act. Pulling out a pole leaning in a corner, something that had been at his side for twenty years while in the woods, he turned toward Quy’s face and shouted:

“Go away! Go away right now! This is the altar for my ancestors, not the personal altar for your mother. If you are filial, I allow you to take her picture back to your house to worship. Your wife and your kids, too, get out of this house. I need children and grandchildren, but not a pack of scoundrels that disturb. I will not allow such ingrates to turn this house into a market.”

“Oh heaven, you chase your child and grandchildren out of the house; oh, Grandfather…”

Quy’s wife continued to scream, while her husband stared at his father with red eyes. His breath smelled full of alcohol; for sure the son had been drinking to draw on the encouragement of alcohol before leaving to pick a fight with his old father:

“My mother lived here; you do not have the right to drive ME MYSELF out of this house.”

Mr. Quang stood stiff for a minute as if he did not believe what he had just heard. In his family children of whatever age had no right to use such a self-promoting, personal pronoun with their father under any circumstances. His children as well as the children of his brother and sister all knew this rule and looked upon it as something that distinguished them from other families who were looser in their protocol and discipline. Such a humiliation had never happened in his family. Quy knew that full well. Now he became the first to spit on the ways of the ancestors.

Mr. Quang stood shocked for a long while. A piercing pain ran through his heart again and again as if someone were continuously stabbing a dagger through it. For the first time in his life, he realized that a father’s heart is extremely delicate and easily injured, that bitter pain can make the eyes blur and send tremors through one’s whole body like the shakings that come with malaria. He knew that the change in his son’s use of a personal pronoun to address him marked the last boundary line; that, from now on, they would never be father and son as before. Never as before. The pain kept coming nonstop. At the same time his body suddenly hardened like rock, a feeling similar to that moment when he was seventeen and had first put a house pillar on his shoulders in front of the taunting eyes of some young men from the upper section.

The father considered the face of his son, distorted by hatred and alcohol. Another second passed in silence. Then suddenly the father started laughing:

“Mr. Chairman is drunk.”

He continued to laugh but suddenly his voice turned strange, causing the son and his family to look at one another in surprise: they had never heard him talk with all of them in such a soft and formal manner.

“Mrs. Chairman, take him home now or else I will file charges. The chairman is drunk and disturbs the home of a citizen.”

“What did you say?” Chairman Quy asked, looking straight at his father. Perhaps he
was
drunk, or more likely he lacked the smarts to understand that his father had changed his tone, a way to mark the crossing of that final boundary line. Enunciating his words slowly, Mr. Quang replied:

“Mr. Chairman is drunk and disturbs the home of a citizen, thus doing harm to the honor of the Party and the government.”

“What are you saying?”

“Now you, mister, are no longer my child. You are the village chairman, the
government’s representative. You are drunk and you take your pals around to disturb citizens.”

“I MYSELF, I am not drunk. I MYSELF am humiliated because you brought a whore back to be your wife.”

“In the old days, our elders told us: ‘You can take a whore to be a wife, but never a wife to be a whore.’ If Miss Ngan is a whore, I MYSELF haven’t gone against our ancestors’ teachings. But if my wife is not a prostitute, Mr. Chairman will be punished for defamation and insulting a citizen. Do you understand that?”

“If your wife is not a prostitute then she is a whore who was pregnant out of wedlock. You think nobody knows the story of the teacher sleeping with a student; Ngan pregnant by the teacher Tuong? You think that you can just pick up a whore at the end of an alley or off a mountain or by a river to bring back here and be able to hide everything?”

“I have always acted in full daylight; I have nothing to hide from the eyes of the world. Mr. Chairman crawls away from this house and has already forgotten—such a short memory. Correct: Miss Ngan was pregnant out of wedlock. She was pregnant by someone she loved—Teacher Tuong. It’s like thousands of other women who get pregnant with the men they choose. She was pregnant because she’s as fertile as a bantam hen. Many other women not pregnant out of wedlock are lucky because they belong to the class with duck’s blood, not dove’s blood. Like your mother, for example; she was not pregnant out of wedlock because she belonged to the infertile group—not because she was holding tight to her virginity. Before I married your mother, for a whole year I would take her up to Golden Bamboo Mountain. Do you want me to show you the places where I took her down?”

Right then, it was the son whose mouth was open wide with surprise—like someone being struck by lightning on the ears. And when he realized clearly what his father had said, he squealed like a pig being slaughtered: