The Zenith (38 page)

The group of young people then left as well. Miss Vui sat in front of the altar and looked at Mr. Do’s photograph and whispered:

“Father, you were wise in life and divine in death, please come back and show me the way.”

Mr. Do looked out straight at the face of his daughter with a most stern expression that she had never seen before.

“We made the wrong move, totally wrong. Now we have to find a way to undo it.”

She pondered and considered what she had done. She had gone all the way to Khoai Hamlet to investigate Miss Ngan’s family and the love affair of the mismatched couple. She was the only person who knew the beginning and the end of such things and thus was the one to report back to Quy and the villagers. People would eventually ask: Whatever prompted her to be so enthusiastic? Not because she was submissive to the chairman’s request, because she is never submissive to anyone. She had done everything according to her own thinking. Therefore the argument “the secretary was following the chairman’s order” would not persuade many people. It would be as if a worker were digging a deep well in the dirt to find the water main below; the villagers would dig to the end for the reasons that compelled her to spend her time and money to go all the way to Khoai Hamlet. They will find them with little difficulty. And then the arrowhead will point her way:

“From just last night to tonight, the situation has turned upside down. Can anyone predict when a move will be made?”

She let out a sigh. Last night, before New Year’s Day, the whole village had listened to her report, happily laughing, lifting up and lowering down their wine cups, and carrying her up to the blue skies because she satisfied their curiosity; they looked at the saga of Mr. Quang’s family as a fun comedy for spring festivities. Today, Act Two had been quickly performed, but it
was no longer just the personal story of Mr. Quang’s family; it suddenly touched upon the affection between fathers and sons—as an emotional rope wrapped around a large tree trunk, very close to the old saying: “Pull the rope and you shake the forest.” She instinctively sighed again with the thought that she had been clever but not wise: pulling the rope without thinking of shaking the forest. Now, given what had happened, there was no way to reverse events. After a moment of hesitation, she recalled what her father had taught her:

“Hold out your hands to catch water from heaven; how can you ever catch everything that people say?”

That clever saying brought her some calm. She consoled herself: “To heck with life. Isn’t it useless to worry about catching the rain from heaven?”

Thus, again as always, Miss Vui was her father’s daughter: Mr. Do Vang, the one with a pragmatic mind. She knew that she could ignore all the village gossip, because in the past such gossip hovered like kitchen smoke over the roofs of those who had clout or who stood out from their neighbors. Something she could not ignore was Mr. Quang himself. For a long time, she had known that he was a popular person, with a good heart and generous to his neighbors; but, too, he did not shy from pulling out a sword to confront those with wicked hearts. Even though she had let her imagination fly around the man with a thick beard, she could not have foreseen that he would calmly speak loudly for his children and the neighbors on all four sides to hear the truth: “Before I married your mother, for a whole year I took her to Truc Vang mountain.” If he dared speak so boldly, what would keep him from insulting her to her face in a rude and cruel manner when he learned that she had gone all the way to Khoai Hamlet? Just thinking about this made her whole body hot and her face feel as if burned. With sweat breaking out on her head and on both temples, she looked back at Mr. Do and spouted out these words:

“Dear father, divine and wise father, please show me the way.”

Mr. Do did not say a word, but stared at her sternly. She suddenly remembered a comment from someone in the crowd: “The father is so good-looking; why is the son so homely?”

She had never fully thought about that point. It was clear that when Quy stood next to Mr. Quang it was like trees of two different types growing next to each other. The father openly resembled a gentleman; the son totally the opposite—not only so skinny but with a face dark like the inside of a closed jar, and a stare distant and dangerous. Miss Vui had never seen Quy look anyone straight in the eye. His eyes, sunken in their sockets, under a constant
cloudy shadow, would dart, if not to one side, then often down, as if he were searching for something underground.

“Like that, but still Quy has been village chairman for several terms. And at every election the Party secretary from the district personally came to work with the village committee for that result.”

A thought suddenly crossed her mind and she cried out: “Oh my god! And nobody knows!”

The morning of the second day of the New Year, Miss Vui rode her bicycle down to the district town. There, it took her a long time to find someone selling tea and sweets. Business was bad; sellers put up stalls on the sidewalks hoping for customers spending their spare change on the New Year. Normally a cup of tea cost 50 cents, but that day, the stall keeper charged five times more, 250 cents, when no privilege was given to buyers to bargain, because it was still the New Year holiday. The street was deserted, only a few kids out playing with firecrackers on both sidewalks. To please the seller, Miss Vui drank three cups and ate three overripe bananas, left over from the previous week. Then she gave the owner 3,000 cents and said:

“These are both to pay you and to wish you a prosperous New Year.”

“Thank you.”

The seller smiled broadly out to the ears in front of a rural customer who was ten times more generous than one from the town:

“You are so generous, heaven will bestow on you goodwill to enjoy and keep.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” she replied amicably, and asked her the way to the chairman’s and secretary’s homes.

“Our village is very far, many urgent issues had not been solved in the year. Therefore, I have to come to the district on the first day of spring to resolve them.”

“No matter how urgent they are, you should wait until the sixth day, miss. I’ve done business here for more than ten years. Customers like you come mostly from faraway areas like yours to take care of problems, public and private. Nobody dares to walk into the chairman’s residence before the sixth day.”

“I don’t intend to bother the leaders at their office, but my village has some farm products I want to give to the district cadres to show our gratitude for the concern shown by the Party and the government.”

“Ah, I understand.”

The stall owner laughed more loudly, then with her eyes looked over her customer with her bicycle up against the sidewalk. Miss Vui quickly added:

“My task is only to find the right location. Tomorrow or the next day, our village chairman will personally bring the gifts up.”

“Of course.”

Not waiting for the owner to ask more, she pulled out a 5,000-dong bill and put it on the cigarette plate.

“Here’s for you, to make up for the time you gave me.”

“Thank you, miss. I will take you right away,” the owner answered and without hesitation turned to the alley and shouted,: “Hue, where are you? Come and watch the stand for your mother. Quick!”

Hearing no reply, she shouted again: “Hue! Come watch the stand, Hue!” She called out relentlessly, knowing that selling tea all day would never bring as much money as accommodating Miss Vui. A young girl about seven or eight finally popped out from the alley, her feet trudging in an old pair of sandals.

“I am here, Mother. Where are you going?”

“I have an errand; you don’t have to ask!”

The child sat on a chair behind the stand, curiously looking at the big female customer, as imposing as a temple guardian statue, setting her bicycle down on the street as her mother climbed on behind, holding tightly on to Miss Vui’s back, like a tiny frog hanging on to a watermelon.

Thus, Miss Vui came directly to the residences of the Party secretary and the district chairman. After her ride, sweat trickled down her spine. Now, all the ten things she had suspected were true. Quy owed his position as village chairman to the directing hands of his father and not to some good fortune; nor especially to his own prowess. Miss Vui stared at the houses of the two district leaders: each had two stories, with four rooms on the lower level and three on the upper one; each with an open yard about thirty square meters surrounded by a wrought iron fence, so that each owner could sit and drink tea while looking at the moon for some night inspiration. Each house had stairs inside and outside leading all the way up to the top floor. Each had a large patio down below with a walkway filled with white gravel. Each house had a pair of concrete and steel phoenixes on the roof—all upper-class decor and architecture. The very same style as graced the new home of the teacher in Khoai Hamlet.

It was dusk when she returned to the village. The sounds of a drum arose from the empty lot. Afraid that villagers would involve her in an entanglement, she went around on the other side of the bamboo ridge. The detour was long because there were more than ten separate ridges on which grew all kinds of bamboo, forming necklacelike strands of pearls. The beaten path was uneven, so her bicycle bounced up and down like a wild horse. But her heart jumped more wildly than her iron horse when she pedaled past the foot of the Golden Bamboo Ridge, the highest ridge, which was thick with golden bamboo. That golden color was the same as wedding threads on the bushes of mums in the country gardens. That golden color spilled in the afternoon sun like thousands of gold threads or a piece of superior silk. That golden color shimmered as in a king’s palace or in mandarin robes. Miss Vui looked into the golden bamboo forest on a spring day and thought of a woman who had been there hundreds of times with her lover, but was now lying in peace in a tomb. Will she return on another old spring day or not? Then she thought of herself: Why had nobody ever taken her into that grove? Her secret dream dissipated into smoke, and she wondered if, from then until she lay in her grave, some man would ever extend his hand to her and say:

“I love you…” or: “Dear Vui, from now on we will live together!”