The Zenith Page 3

  When the president walks into the room, the head cook steps up: “Mr. President, please eat your meal while it’s hot.”

  He looks at the dishes set on the table and says, “You work hard all day, and you still climb up here. Why bother? It’s OK to let others bring the meal up to me.”

  “Mr. President, I want to personally inspect whether the food is good or not.…If there is disappointment, I must change the menu to your satisfaction.”

  “You know that I am not picky about my food.”

  “I am fully aware that you never want to trouble anyone. But your health is a national treasure. We are honored to serve and to protect you.”

  The president silently sits at the table and says nothing more. The assistant cook sets the electric rice warmer on the table and, along with the cook, steps out. Naturally, he knows that they are watching him discreetly from behind the door. Because they really respect him and truly worry about his health, he feels forced to pretend that he enjoys the food, while in reality, he can’t taste any flavor in what he is chewing and swallowing. Then he waits for them to clear the table, blurts out some compliments while sipping the white longan pudding, and listens to their respectful farewell before they return to their base. Sitting alone, he listens to the footsteps of a group of people mixed with their laughter. Turning off one light, he looks out into an empty space framed by the window. In the dark, the tree branches take on peculiar shapes. The light shining on the leaves makes a thousand bright eyes, and every time the wind shakes, these eyes blink with a look, sometimes playful, sometimes dangerous.

  At this time, his heart no longer has that unsettling feeling. The heat in his lungs dissipates, leaving him with an incredible emptiness. His heart is like an abandoned house, where the wind freely and playfully blows, chasing the residing ghosts. His heart is like an uninhabited island after the birds have gone, leaving behind a heap of feathers on the grass.

  He sits disengaged for a long while, not knowing what he is thinking. But suddenly a frigid shiver runs through his flesh, bringing up goose bumps all over his body. Some muttering cry behind him. He turns around. The incoherence won’t stop. When he turns right, the cry comes from the left wall, and when he turns left, the cry changes its place; like a child’s game of hide-and-seek. He stands up and looks at all four directions, seeing nothing but the set of four lacquer vases: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Then the cry comes directly from the top of his head, hanging there, disconnected, fleeting…

  “Is it my own cry? My own quiet scream coming from beyond the horizon, or her final cry, my beloved?”

  He wonders.

  But he does not want an answer.

  A truly painful cry from the girl or a silent scream from himself, it doesn’t make any difference. For a while, for a very long while, he has had the habit of suppressing his thoughts in silence. Those thoughts are like sunken boats, piled up at the bottom of the ocean, buried in slimey mud, where aquatic plants thrive. For a long time, his words have been murdered like unfortunate sailors beheaded by pirates, their bodies thrown over and left on the sea bottom; and the unceasing waves become moving graves, screaming and whispering nonstop to let the ghosts settle in the womb of the dark sea.

  The dead calm sea.

  For a long while, too, he has had a habit of looking at his own thoughts as if they were someone standing out in the hallway and peeking back in through the keyhole, curious and ashamed of the indiscretion.

  In coldness and hatred, his thoughts run away like a shivering little snipe in the field, beset by the sounds of people in pursuit, fearfully hiding in furrows and thornbushes. Under pressure and feeling oppressed, his thoughts sink as if in a muddy field or marsh. As the months and years pass, these thoughts fade like a newborn in an incubator with little oxygen, dying slowly.

  But now, some upset is breaking out. Some sort of disturbance like an earthquake or the warning signs that a tsunami is coming or an insane volcanic eruption is on its way. He realizes the thoughts are distant, having faded away, but now like a thousand tattered pieces of an old shirt are suddenly coming together, trying to reassemble their former shape. Those dying newborns suddenly open their eyes and cry in the incubator. Those months and years suddenly, hurriedly return. Is this a miracle of the gods or a sorcerer’s curse?

  He does not know. He cannot know. But the calm sea erupts. He understands that the person from the past has returned…

  Someone knocks at the door. At first gently, then with more urgency. He suddenly realizes that it’s time for the doctor’s visit. He will take the president’s pulse before he retires to his room across the temple patio.

  “Today, I would like to go to bed early,” he says before the doctor appears in the door frame. “Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep? I will call if I need something. Is the telephone in your room working?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, the technician fixed it. It rings loudly…In any case, please allow me to check you.”

  “There is no need, you checked me carefully last night. Twenty-four hours can’t knock out a life. Go to sleep. And I’m telling you ahead of time that I will smoke one or two cigarettes.”

  “Mr. President…”

  “I haven’t touched the cigarette box for three consecutive weeks. But tonight, I will smoke. Once in a while, we should indulge a habit.”

  “But, Mr. President…”

  The doctor hesitates. He wants to say something but stops. Maybe he wants to say that cigarettes are the president’s enemy…that the president must stop, the sooner the better, that his own duty is to put an end to the craving whenever it develops. But it’s like water off a duck’s back for both he who speaks and he who listens. The doctor realizes that his speaking would be useless. After a few minutes of hesitation, the doctor bows slightly and says:

  “Mr. President, I wish you a good night.”

  “I wish you a good night, too.”

  The doctor disappears in the darkness.

  A few minutes later, a light comes on in a room across the temple yard. A baritone voice is heard singing: “My love! How long before we see each other?”

  The president tilts his head, listening. For quite a long time, the man has not sung this love song. The doctor likes to sing but perhaps because he lives so close to the president, he shyly sings only marches or folk songs. Perhaps tonight, since he gave the president permission to smoke, he now gives himself permission to sing a love song.

  “My love…Where are you now?”

  Word follows word; the light sounds fly like a twirling kite in the summer skies. That faraway summer…That summer, the wind from Laos blew through the western mountains, wildly hissing on the dry and cracked plains, where large cracks turned into huge ones, zigzagging like the veins of unfortunate mountain gods. Thirsty birds had stopped singing, but, in exchange, kites flew up in flocks. Wheat-colored ones, green ones, and yellow ones; the colors of the spring butterflies…Those kites danced close to one another in the skies, like intersecting dreams, like fires of moral purpose burning in the very last seconds for a warrior falling into the abyss.

  “My love…”

  The smooth voice takes him to another summer, with the cool shade of trees and the sounds of flowing streams. To sunsets in the fields shining into the house…

  “Where are you now?

  “Our love is from a distance, but our hearts miss each other…”

  The night is now calm because the wind has stopped blowing. There is no moon. Not even stars. Only a mysterious black color. The mountains, the waterfalls, the forest, the gardens, the woodcutters’ village down below, and the faraway fields are all submerged in the silence of the thick night. A vast, suffocating, black space. In this still time, each word of the song spreads like the dissemination of ringing bells.

  The president lights a cigarette so he can hear the song more clearly:

  “My love…When are we going to see each other?…”

  Now he hears sobbing from right be
hind his neck. This well-known sobbing makes him sit dead still. He dares not turn around. Three times he deeply inhales the cigarette smoke, believing the smoke will clear his mind, chasing away all fancies and confusing visions. He is wrong. The sobbing does not disappear but resonates clearly by his ears to the point where he can hear panting as well. A face all wet with tears leans against his cheeks. A flood of tears; freezing tears. He lights his second cigarette, then a third, letting out the smoke continuously, but he still feels the cold tears.

  “Oh, my love…”

  The singing voice still rises. But no, it is not the singing, but his own calling out. However, he dares not say the words out loud, so all they are is a singing in silence.

  “Please, little one, forgive me…please, little one…”

  His eyes are burning. In a dreamy moment, a faint warmth crosses his eyelashes. The cigarette smoke is dispersing with a flicker; it rolls out like clouds in a stormy wind at dusk; the fading smoke spreads like fog over pond water in the spring. Is his life nothing but ethereal mist, the movement of clouds and whirling wind? Is his authority no more than the fleeting enchantment thrown by opera-house lanterns?

  “Please, little one, forgive me…” He speaks with bowed head, not knowing that the doctor is at the door.

  “Mr. President…”

  He looks up and it takes him a second to recover.

  “Why aren’t you singing? I really like your singing. You have a fantastic voice. You could be a professional singer.”

  “Mr. President, you are too kind.”

  “I am not being diplomatic with you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  “Why did you return?”

  “I was told that you didn’t smoke just one or two cigarettes, but many…It’s extremely dangerous to your health.”

  He looks down at the pack of cigarettes and realizes he has smoked half of it. Thick smoke still fills the room. The doctor stares at his face. Maybe he sees the stains of the tears. The president takes a handkerchief, wipes his face, then clears his voice: “I indeed smoked too much. The smoke burns my eyes.”

  “Mr. President.”

  “It does not matter. I will stop right now.” He squishes out the cigarette in the tray right in front of the doctor. Then he stands up, stretches, covers his mouth with his hands as if he is yawning:

  “Now I have to do tai chi if I want to fall asleep.”

  2

  Vu returns home precisely at noon.

  He just wants to dunk his head in a bucket of water to cool off and then go to sleep. The weather is cold but his rage is boiling; his face feels so hot it might have been fried in oil. Even though he has drunk two pots of tea, on top of one morning cup of coffee, he does not feel hungry at all. He keeps thinking of the bed in the corner of the room, behind the curtain with a pale blue flower design. In just a few minutes, he will roll onto it, in the silence closing his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see anyone, and give those extremely tense threads in the mind an opportunity to unwind. At this instant he realizes how much he is attached to his room with its old-fashioned bed and its old flowered curtain. Many times his wife had wanted to replace the faded cloth curtain with a fancy lace one, but he had firmly objected. Perhaps because we are human, we all have our personal preferences, sometimes strange, weird, or utterly illogical. In his spacious house everything had been changed. From the color of the walls to the furniture, to clothing and food, to pots for plants, paintings, the clothes rack, the box of medals…Only the old curtain remained, surviving as if lost in its new surroundings. It is made of plain cloth, the inexpensive kind, of which the long days and months have whittled down its threads to their core and have faded its color to the point that the tiny wild grass flowers now float like blue dots crowding in upon one another. But Vu likes this curtain. Its presence offers him some consolation. Its blue color brings him a feeling of peace. He cannot explain this to his wife, except to sum it up as follows:

  “This curtain is really unattractive, but it was hung on the occasion of our third wedding anniversary. Don’t you remember that the liaison courier who brought this curtain up to the maquis later died that winter on his way back to Hanoi to get more news?”

  “Yes, I remember. But all things only last for a time. There is a saying: ‘One life of ours is much longer than the lives of a million things.’”

  “If anything brings ease to those who use it, then it should endure. We aren’t forced to follow the crowd. Don’t put too much emphasis on stuff. You are educated; you’re not like that low-class Tu.”

  “You dare compare me with that broad Tu, the fishmonger?” his wife cried out in anger.

  He waited until he could have the last word: “I don’t compare you with those kinds of people. But don’t forget that only those people care a lot about things. They don’t know what to do other than boast about their wealth.”

  His wife went quiet, her face turning red. From that day on, she let him be. Perhaps more out of pride than from a real understanding of the meaning of things. Whatever the reason, he won that round and the curtain remained. For him it was more than a simple souvenir; it was a life-saving talisman. It brought him calm during times of danger. It brought him necessary clarity in times of confusion. It soothed his soul. Whenever he was sad, in pain, he locked the door to his room, lay on the bed, and pulled the curtain all the way over to the far wall to hide everything, leaving in view only the blue that calms. It was a faded color, but it was the color of his youth. It echoed the years and months of the past, but those sounds carried a vitality that could revive his tired soul. That was the vestige of a season that had closed. A trace only, but one strong enough to re-create thousands of worn footpaths in the old forest. As that, it allowed him to find again the vision of himself, regaining the strength he used to have, the courage and the victories he used to be so proud of, the happiness mingled with danger he had enjoyed.

  Many years ago, Vu found a tight bond between the blue curtain and his favorite song from his high school days, “Come Back to Sorrento.”

  This Italian song was first imported by the French schools, then it spread to the local schools until it intoxicated all the boys and all the girls in their flowing white school uniforms. The song inspired a vague conviction that everybody should put down anchor at some shore, someplace where they could heal their wounds, where new skin could grow over an open gash, and you could wait for the scar tissue to harden. A place where they could find again a source of life. A place where they could be reborn. A place called the old home…

  For him such an old home was now just a few yards of faded cloth. He had nothing else besides that.

  He thinks: “In a few minutes, I will crawl onto the bed, into the familiar corner. The blue curtain will protect me and I will find an escape…”

  The sudden braking sound of the Volga startles him:

  “Chief, we’re home.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Tomorrow, what time is convenient for me to pick you up, Chief?”

  “I must leave earlier than usual. Perhaps six fifteen would be ideal.”

  “Chief, will you eat breakfast at home?”

  “Correct; I’ll eat at home to make it simple.”

  He gets out of the car; walks as if running into the house; hurriedly climbs the stairs; hurriedly strips off his outer clothing to change into pajamas; falls crumpled onto the bed with a sick person’s collapse such as one who has been overcome by a seizure and would just drop anywhere on the sidewalk or in the bushes. Familiar feelings and the soft blue color help him regain regular breathing. He closes his eyes, waiting for calm composure to return to his soul just like a farmer listening to the raindrops during the dry season. Downstairs, there are the sounds of china being broken, of chairs being pushed, then the screaming of Van, his wife:

  “What’s going on?”

  …

  “I ask: Who broke my plate of boiled meat?”

  “Trung did.” />
  “Throwing away food? Then in three days you will eat nothing but salt.…Who allows you to create havoc in this house?”

  …

  “I ask: Who gives you the right to pillage under my roof?”

  Van’s voice shries like a knife scraping slate. He has never heard his own woman’s voice so terrifying as just now: “Why is her voice suddenly changed so oddly?”

  “Trung, answer my question!”

  He hears the loud sobbing of the child. And this sobbing is suppressed into the sound of sniffling. Leaning on his arm, he gets up. Downstairs, his wife continues to scream:

  “Did you hear what I said? Answer me, Trung!”

  At this, the child bursts into tears. It is no longer a sniffling sound but the low crying of a teenage boy whose voice is changing. Vu opens the door and goes downstairs. In the dining room, his wife has her hands on her hips, a position that he despises most in a woman; a position that he considers most unattractive, from the point of view of both beauty and morality. In that position, even a beauty queen could not inspire positive reactions from a man, especially from those who have been well educated. For a long time, his wife had not dared to so stand, a stance he often condescendingly called “the manners of that fishmonger, Tu.” For a long time, too, his wife had understood that his disposition was quiet and humble, but that once he became angered or enraged, it would be a tragedy for the family, as a breakup would become unavoidable. For a long time, she had also known by heart those areas into which she should not trespass, which he had formally established, knowing it would be like a deadly minefield if she ever stepped into them…

  Thus, today, what insane spirit had crossed their threshold or what defect of memory had prematurely arrived to make her forget so completely?

  He stands right next to his wife and asks, “What is going on?”

  Van is startled and turns. She points to the corner:

  “Look over there, Trung is fed up with meat and he threw the whole plate on the floor. And Vinh did not have any…From today until next week, I will let them eat rice with salt.”