The Zenith (80 page)

He had not finished thinking along those lines when another soldier from the guard post approached. He looked to be the officer in charge of the guards. He said in a dry, unmistakable voice, “This is a zone that requires strict security. I suggest that you take the child elsewhere.”

Not bothering to answer him, An turned to Mui and said, “We can’t stay here, baby. Uncle will take you to Ngoc Ha market and I’ll buy you a ball. Do you hear?”

Then he climbed on the bike and pedaled away. He could not help but feel angry:

“Hey, man, you who are the father of this little girl here,” he whispered to the brother-in-law he had never met. “Could you ever have imagined this situation? A child stands in front of her biological father’s house yet is not allowed to enter; nay, not even to look at it. A child who is chased away from the entrance to her father’s house. Does a crazy situation like this, I wonder, make you feel bad, my president? Now your daughter is too small
to understand it. But later, when she grows up, will she consider you to be a decent father or will she think that you have been an insensitive, heartless person willing to throw away the very blood of your offspring? Can it be that your splendid, magnificent palace does not have a room to accommodate your wife and children? Or is there a secret, a black reason, why you accept our Little One living with the common people? Could it be because she comes from the mountains that she is forced to undergo the persecution of your court? The very court that periodically comes out with orders that ethnic minorities are to be privileged!”

The suspicions and anger that had been buried in his soul all these years suddenly surfaced. So did curses; they sprouted and multiplied in his brain like a forest of bamboo shoots emerging in the spring. Without noticing, he ended up biking around and returning to Hoang Dieu Street, so he could further mark in his mind the appearance of these magnificent palatial residences now occupied by the pillars of the new imperial order. Afterward, he continued riding through Phan Dinh Phung Street so as to take another look at other residential palaces, palaces the occupants of which he had learned by heart, so that hatred and grudges kept on boiling in the quiet lake of his soul.

“These are palaces reserved for tiny-eyed and black-lipped society ladies and not for our Little One, even though she is a thousand times more beautiful.”

As he processed these thoughts he noticed a minister’s wife ride by in a Volga, her neck shortened by the layers of fat that rose all the way to her chin, and her eyes tiny slits the thinness of a thread watching the streets in full haughtiness. That afternoon the weather was gorgeous but An could not escape being drowned in dark thoughts. Was he pitying Mui? Or Little One? Or could it be that he felt his impotence before fate? It was not until that evening when his wife came back from the hospital with the happy face of a child who had just gotten a gift that he could temporarily put aside his bitter observations.

Nang Dong told him, “In three days we will bring Little One home. I won’t have to take the meals in to her.”

“Is she in good health?”

“Our Little One?” His wife laughed. “She is fine and happy. But I can see that you are biased toward women. You don’t ask about the newborn.”

He burst out laughing. “It’s because the whole society is already biased toward the males, that’s why I do the reverse. Don’t you like it?”

“Yes, I do,” she responded at once. An knew that Nang Dong was extremely
happy to be by his side. He was a liberal type who did not care for richness or wealth. Neither did he care too much about descendants. The years of study at the district school had given him an outlook entirely different from other men his age. This came somewhat like a gift from the creator. On many occasions his wife had asserted, “Oh, how lucky that we live on two sides of the same hill!”

And he would rejoin: “Lucky that I had a neighboring girl already waiting for me when I was born.”

Nang Dong gave a twist to his answer: “You mean because I am older than you, by fifteen days?”

“You could have been older than I by fifteen years, you would still be my wife. That was what destiny had in mind.”

“Gosh!…” his wife burst out. “You must be the most clever liar on earth.”

Their conversations always ended in laughter. An had yet to see another couple as close as they were. When they were young, he did not in the least doubt his happiness. But after Little One gave birth to the boy, a cloudy premonition lodged permanently in his mind, even when he was at his happiest. He would remember the quotations he had learned from the history professor, the one teacher to whom he owed most while studying in That Khe district.

“Beautiful women are like flowers; they blossom early and die in the evening, because blue heaven has bestowed upon them a gorgeous beauty that causes many people to covet and envy them.”

The beauty of Nang Dong and her sister had only grown more and more pronounced, to the point of surprising him. Time, it seems, had no effect on them; on the contrary, the months and years seemed to have matured their beauty, making them more attractive, more mysterious. On numerous occasions An had witnessed passersby stop, struck dumb by the sisters’ beauty; they looked at them as if they were seeing river or mountain goddesses. In Hanoi, one could “light torches to illuminate the forest” and never find that kind of beauty—enough to make fish stop swimming and birds fall to earth.

An felt like he had been in love with Nang Dong since the day he was born. It was only much later that he realized his wife surely must have provoked desires on the part of men who came across her. In that way, he came to understand why the old king could fall head over heels in love with Little One. It’s impossible for any man not to be moved by the sharp-swordlike beauty of such women, who, besides, have simple and holy souls that
promise years of family happiness. Although Nang Dong was totally unaware of all these things, An realized that he was in possession of a magnificent fortress. To protect that fortress, one needed both intelligence and courage. The pride inside him was always accompanied by vigilance. In the case of Little One, did the old king think like he did, he wondered. Or could it be that, given the fact that he was the king, instead of treasuring the rare love of a soul like hers, he would give himself the luxury of considering her beauty to be no more than an exotic dish?

These dark thoughts he dared not express to anyone. An did not want to burden the minds of the two sisters, whom he loved more than he loved himself. He became a silent witness to all their happy and joyful and hopeful conversations.

“Will you go to the Presidential Palace tomorrow?”

“Yes. A driver will come for me at nine.”

“Have you thought really hard about what you will need to tell him?”

“There is not much to prepare. I will tell him only one simple sentence: since we have now both a boy and a girl, we need to legitimize our relationship before the law.”

“That will do. Tomorrow will be a busy day. I will prepare dinner earlier than usual, and you should remember to breast-feed the boy at eight.”

The following day was a Sunday. An took little Mui out in the morning, telling the two women that he would be home late. At lunch, he took his niece to a pho restaurant, then to the circus for the three o’clock matinee. After the circus, they went home. Little Mui went straight to sleep while he quickly gobbled down some food so he could get back to his barracks. He did not ask at all about how Little One’s meeting with the father of her children had gone. An still remembers the questioning look of his wife as she was ironing her sister’s dresses. As for Little One, she was so busy feeding the boy that she did not have time to worry about the unusual silence of her brother-in-law. Or it may have been that she was so filled with happiness and projections of the future that she was not paying much attention to what was going on around her.

An blamed himself for having been so strangely indifferent; an indescribable sadness was tearing him apart. So one day passed after another. Whether he was in training or out on exercises with the soldiers, An felt like he was living in a dream, as if his feet were not on the ground but walking in the clouds. He could not understand why. Sometimes his memories took him back to Xiu Village, with reflections on happy days. At other times memory took him back to That Khe town, to the school where he had stood
way above the other students. Or he would picture the tea-fragrant house of his history professor, whose wife was a jasmine tea merchant. He had sometimes come by to help the family fold tea bags while listening to the professor tell all sorts of stories, both apocryphal ones and official ones from Chinese history or from Vietnam’s own dynasties, tales from the
San
Guo Ji
(Romance of the Three Kingdoms) or
Dong Zhou Lie Guo
(The Vassal Countries of Eastern Zhou), which the professor knew by heart. At other times he felt his heart oppressed with a vague concern that was surrounding him like a gigantic spiderweb.

One Saturday evening, after military exercises, An grabbed a bicycle. After going only a few hundred meters, the front inner tube exploded. He found a repairman, who explained, “Sorry, Comrade. There is no way to fix it. You need a new one.”

“Please try real hard. We don’t live in a time when I can be given a new inner tube.”

“I already looked carefully. I promise you: if I can’t fix it, no one can. That’s guaranteed.”

There was no option but to take the bike back to camp and borrow one that usually carried food. Because the food bike had priority, its inner tubes were always new. The food team lent him the bike on the condition that it be returned the next day at noon so that they could have enough time to get to the afternoon market. After arguing awhile, An was able to extend the time to 3:30. That would give him enough time to take Mui to see the music and dances of the town’s youth group. Content with his victory, An hurriedly pedaled to Hanoi. By the time he arrived, the streetlights were already on. Mui was not standing on the balcony waiting for him as usual; he was definitely late, he thought to himself as he walked the bike through the long hall under dim lights. In the yard, he saw little Mui playing with two other kids, the grandchildren of an old lady in the neighborhood. Seeing him, the little girl rushed out to kiss his cheeks.

An wanted to take the girl to the house, but the old neighbor said, “Just leave her here to play…her mother told me so…”

This seemed odd, but An didn’t feel comfortable asking anything further of the old lady. He went upstairs, where the two women were waiting for him by a tray table with food. Seeing their faces, he understood half of the truth, but he said, laughing, “You must be about to faint from hunger, right? Sorry I’m late. Let me wash my face and then we can eat. I had to borrow the bike from the food team; mine has a burst inner tube.”

“The army doesn’t even have enough inner tubes to use?” his wife asked.

“Inner tubes are rationed for all government-issue bikes. And the priorities do not extend to shirts, underwear, rice, and food. What do you have to feed me today?” An said, changing the subject.

Dong replied, “Today I made banana shoots with steamed pork and Vietnamese shrimp paste.”

“Next meal, I suggest you cook traditional sour beef soup.”

“People say that the sour beef soup of Lang Son is better than ours in That Khe, because they add spices to the broth—grilled onion and ginger, cinnamon, star anise, and other things—as secret ingredients. If you want, when I am free I will go to Mam Street to try it out. After eating it a few times I will figure out the recipe.”

“Yes, why don’t you try that? Lang Son sour soup has been famous for a long time.”

Thanks to this dialogue, they were able to forget temporarily all the troubles and finish their meal. But when tea was served, he could not pretend to be cheerful. The gigantic spiderweb encircling them was pulling tight its choking threads. He was the male, the eldest of the family; he must be the first one to speak the truth:

“Now, let’s deal with our issue. I am waiting to hear.”

Little One was still silent but his wife said, “On Sunday, the issue was presented to the president; he agreed but had to wait for the consensus of the Politburo. On Monday the subject was brought up because that was the day of a regularly scheduled meeting. But the president’s idea was not accepted. Not one supporting vote.”

“For what reason?”

“Because they do not want the president to have his own family. They want the president to be only the elderly father of all the people. Thus…thus, that was the resolution of the Politburo.”

“They forced the president to accept their decision? Or did the president want to follow them?”

Dong remained quiet. Neither his wife nor Little One could reply. But An wanted to get to the core of the issue. He asked Little One:

“You saw the Old Man what day after that meeting?”

“Friday. Around eleven a.m., the president sent a car to pick me up.”

“How did he explain it?”

“The president said that, by Party principle, the minority has to surrender to the majority.”