The Zenith (60 page)

“Let me see you out, so I can exercise a bit.”

“Agreed.”

When they reach the stairs, Vu whispers in Tran Phu’s ear, “Why do the people around my bed look at you with strange eyes. Why is that?”

“Why?” Tran Phu asks with surprise. “You do not know the simple explanation?”

“I admit, I don’t know. I cannot pretend that I do as my heart is full of quandaries. Please forgive me.”

Tran Phu turns to look at him attentively, perhaps puzzled, perhaps moved. Then he lowers his voice: “If someone else were to ask this question I would think he is acting up like ‘the lost old deer.’ But with you, I believe
your question is genuine. Perhaps this naïveté governs your persona, and perhaps that is why we love you, you who are the last hero of the epoch.”

“No.”

Now it’s Vu’s turn to be puzzled. He is not used to hearing people voice their feelings so directly.

Tran Phu continues to look at him intensely as if gazing at a painting in a gallery, then says, “You don’t know that our society is intensely and savagely divided into classes, even though it is regularly advertised as being egalitarian, free, and democratic? Even here, people still distinguish class from class, and watch one another from the standpoint of rank. Those in your room are all professional experts in grades eight and nine, which are at the bottom of the hierarchy for professionals and experts. Meanwhile, I am only an assistant grade six, just high enough to gain admission for treatment here. That is why they despise me. While they flaunt their rank, from the human point of view, they are only zombies. Have you noticed the way they stir their bowls of porridge with a spoon or pick up each grain of rice and put it in their mouth?”

“Not yet. I haven’t dared look at them or chat with them much at all.”

“Because of my presence. And because they look with unfriendly eyes. Thus you learned that they cannot empathize with you.”

Vu smiles instead of agreeing.

Immediately Tran Phu laughs loudly: “I am right! You are kind of accommodating. Your personality is more educated and polite than mine—even though I am from Hanoi and you are from Bac Giang. But inside me there is always someone carefree, provocative. I look at nutty people like them as puppets made of paper. I crush their conceit, making them die choking in the mud of jealousy. Look here…”

Tran Vu rolls up the sleeves of his shirt to show his arms still full of muscle.

“No matter how many grades higher than me, their legs are not much bigger than my arms. We might have been born in the same year, but their teeth are now all fake while I have only lost tooth number eight. In the morning, I quickly finish a bowl of pho with two drumsticks while they stir a bowl of thin porridge with their spoons. At lunch I eat two bowls full of rice with homemade braised fish while they chew nonstop on the hospital’s stir-fry of tough beef. There: those are the reasons they look at me with those jealous eyes, if you don’t want to say it straight—those enraged eyes. People have been like that for generations, even as they stand on the edge of
their graves. Don’t worry yourself about it. Now: go to your room to rest. I’ll come tomorrow.”

Tran Phu raises his hand in farewell then goes down the stairs. Vu hears Phu’s footsteps treading lightly on the stairs, and with those steps, hears him softly singing:

A song from the 1940s: dreamy students and slender girls in flowing white
ao dai
dresses. Ah, his youth. Phantoms from that era return with the old song. But he drives them out because a fear suffocates his feelings.

“No! No! No…”

He hurries to his room, gets into bed, hoping to find some sleep, but sleep does not come. Finally he tosses off the blanket and sits up.

The patient across from him opens his eyes: “You give up, Uncle? Can’t sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. No one wins over old age.”

“Yes.”

“That handsome friend of yours, is he coming to visit you tonight?”

“No. He said tomorrow.”

“He does not remember me, but I know him well.”

“Is that true?”

“Before, I had the same rank when he was in command of 507.”

“Then how long after that did you change your branch?”

“I didn’t. I am still in the military.”

“Oh, really?”

“You want to ask, Uncle, why I am lost in here and am not being treated in the 108 hospital, right? I am here like a horse lost in a goat pen.”

He closes his eyes. His dry and dark lips expand and contract in a grinning and bitter smile.

“Because the director of that hospital is my mortal enemy. I will not take my body there so they can slaughter me as they would a chicken.”

Vu keeps quiet, not knowing what else to say.

The grin stays on the other patient’s lips, making his face look like a wax mask. His breathing is fast and comes with strong husky noises, which at times sound like a ghostly hissing wind.

“Everything leads to some end. Each turn of the road will lead to that last destination. But in the journey toward death, people still live with all their grudges, all their entanglements which they cannot undo.” So Vu thinks to himself while looking at the pitiful person in the bed next to his. Then he gently gets up to go out. At that moment, the patient speaks even though his eyes are shut tight.

“Uncle, will you tell Tran Phu that he is a smart and lucky guy? He knows how to live life his own way.”

“Yes, I will tell him.”

“Don’t tell anything about me…Just say an officer of his rank said so.”

“Yes.”

“That I wish him the older he gets, the more cheerful he will be.”

“Yes.”

“I…also wish you, Uncle, the same…”

“Thank you. I am not lucky to have such an uneventful life as my friend.”

“I know. I know, Uncle…who you are,” he says before stopping to catch his breath.

Later he adds: “Nonetheless…I still wish you, Uncle…happiness.”

A grinning and bitter smile appears again on his dark purple lips. It worries Vu. He asks: “Uncle, do you want me to call the duty doctor?”

“Thank you. I know my illness. Go out, Uncle, take a stroll and relax. Go, go!”

Not knowing what to do, Vu steps out into the hall in a hurry and makes his way downstairs to the hospital yard, where he stands like a statue, his eyes glued to the shadow of the trees, looking for a shelter for his trembling state of mind. Fear is after him.

“Well, a few days earlier, was I that deplorable? Did I have a face that was gray like dirty beeswax? Was my mouth wide open like the mouth of the dead fish in a market basket? Was I drooling like those lying in the same room? Oh, heaven: how horrible is one’s incarnation in this life!”

The thought starts him shivering like when you catch a cold or listen to ghost stories.

“I need a healthy and useful life. And later, when heaven is not hospitable, I will seek death in a calm manner. That will be the ideal liberation.”

In front of him, the big trees, all in a row, sway under the sun: the old sapindus trees, the mother-of-pearl trees, and the jacaranda trees garlanded in purple blossoms. They have grown close to one another, not in any particular order but forming an island in the huge yard. This luscious flora has calmed
many patients in their mental agonies, as it does for him at this moment.

Vu sits down in a chair and closes his eyes to listen to the brushing of the leaves and the sounds of the birds fighting. Suddenly, something wet falls on his nose. He opens his eyes wide and realizes that some irreverent bird has pooped on his face. He looks inside his pocket for a cloth to clean himself. While he is busy looking, a hand spreads in front of him and gives him a handkerchief:

“You are lucky. When a bird poops on your head or neck you get a reward. If the reward is not big like a gold bar, a small reward can be a cake or some sticky rice.”

Not looking up, Vu hastily grabs the cloth and wipes his face.

“Where do you come up with such a theory?”

“That is an old theory, my great friend.”

A very strange voice makes Vu look up: Tran Phu is not alone; he is with another man. It is this guest who has challenged him.

“My great friend, don’t you know that in the old days, people believed that dreaming of feces brought good luck?”

“I heard it a couple of times but never paid attention,” Vu replies.

The other man widens his mouth in a smile. His mouth is huge, pulled all the way up to the ears to boast a set of teeth yellowed from cigarettes, eyes blinking behind thick glasses. His face is very dark, with not one attractive feature, yet it projects an attractive aura that is hard to explain. He continues to expound on his theory:

“Because we live where we grow rice in water, we are forced to learn the meaning of dreams about feces.” He smiles.

At that moment Tran Phu introduces them to each other: “This is Tran Vu, the contemporary hero. This is my friend, the writer Le Phuong. We both left home to join the revolution in 1945, when we were just twenty.”’

They shake hands. Then Tran Phu proposes going to the hospital cafeteria for refreshments. It is a large room with a few dozen rows of tables and chairs. They pick what seems to be the least dusty table, near the merchandise case and close to the window.

As the counter is abandoned, Tran Phu calls out: “Hey! Little ones in there…”

Hearing no response, he raises his voice and shouts: “Hey, ladies of the cafeteria!”

No response again.

Then a customer who is eating sesame balls suggests, “You have to go to the middle of the yard to call. Those girls are fooling around where the guards are quartered.”

“Thank you,” Phu replies, and then walks briskly to the yard, where, standing right in front of the door of the guardroom, he asks, “Who is selling in the cafeteria today? We have waited a half hour already.”

“Here! We are here…”

Two or three girls answer then the whole group runs back to the cafeteria, giggling as they run.

Tran Phu turns around, his tone no longer playful but annoyed and threatening: “Hurry up! Two filtered coffees and a number one teapot. For your sakes I will overlook this negligence.”

“Thank you, Chief…We apologize, please…” a few girls answer, no longer smiling but starting to feel frightened. One girl hastily takes out a cloth to wipe their table. A second girl makes tea; a third puts ground coffee in the filter.

“Older Brother Vu, did you see that?” asks Tran Phu.

“Yes, I did.”

“I wonder what that famous and dour Tran Phu, the secretary general of the Party, would say if he were alive?”

“Enough. Let’s change the subject.”

Le Phuong then speaks up: “Going into this kind of conversation is like crawling on the horns of the buffalo. A tunnel without light. Who would have thought what face would mark the society that Tran Phu and his comrades were creating? A revolution is like a pregnancy, and the baby who comes into the world—even if not a monster—will be totally different from the dream or imagination of those who created it. We return to our little lives. Today is a happy day, because Brother Vu is the person I have secretly wished to meet for a long while.”

“No, I am humbled.”

“A long time ago I read Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
, knowing full well that it was an autobiographical novel about a very handsome character. Now that I meet you, I find you just as handsome.”

“No, you are too generous. I am no screen actor,” Vu replies, feeling his ears grow warm with embarrassment.

Tran Phu and Le Phuong look at him attentively like furniture merchants admiring a sideboard carved with dragon, unicorn, turtle, and phoenix, then Phu says laughingly:

“We are happy on behalf of whomever became your wife. Such a handsome man who blushes with shyness in his fifties.”

“Well…”

Vu does not know what to say. These two guys are strangers from a strange land. Their words, their expressions, and their thoughts—all are completely foreign to his world, the world of those who run the machine of political authority. He decides to lead the conversation in another direction:

“Last night I kept thinking, Hanoi is so small, yet how is it that we have never run into one another before today?”

“Because we turned at different intersections, and those turns led us farther and farther apart as time went by. Then we meet again here because this is where life meets death. Those who set foot here are those who, since long ago, have been chosen by the lord of death. They all try to put off that last and eternal surrender for as long as they can,” says Tran Phu.

“I find you more like a businessman ready to marry a concubine than one prepared to go to the cemetery.”

“You are half correct,” replies Tran Phu. “I am here because of my prostate cancer. The doctor wants to operate but I refuse. I combine the medications with taking foods that have good pharmaceutical properties, like raw carrots, fungus, raw tomatoes. Especially no meat: neither pork nor beef. Once in a while, chicken and duck are allowed, on condition that the skin and fat are removed. My main foods are freshwater fish and shrimp. Of course, these things are provided by the family. After four months I had an examination, and the abcess in my testicles had shrunk by two hundred grams. Now I am looking for a young nymph who can make me an active ‘revolutionary’ to an extraordinary degree. If it can be done, then all swelling will disappear.”

“I think you said that to be lighthearted,” Vu replies, and then Le Phuong butts in:

“You have your reasons and Phu has his. Because our views about life differ and our experiences of life also differ, our faiths are not the same. But if you do not remember our sayings and proverbs, I will offer this: ‘Empty bladder, good food.’”

“I had heard that but totally forgot. You two are really masters. How can all those ancient sayings still be stored in your brains?”

“Because we live according to the truth of the downtrodden,” says Le Phuong. “That truth is a commodity put in storage but which never mildews. Whenever necessary, it can be taken out and used right away. No
need to cook or add onion and garlic. According to that learning, if a man resurrects his sexual life, his weak organs will be renewed.”