The Zenith Read online

  “That’s OK,” he says softly, then slows each word, as with students who are just starting to learn spelling. “In the next three years, I will not touch any meat with chopsticks. That way nobody will be missing anything…Are you satisfied now?”

  “Ah…” His wife drops her arms, looks at the smile on his lips. Her red face turns purple then white.

  Having lived with him over thirty years, she knows very well that insipid smile is reserved for his enemies. She backs off, opens her mouth to say something but can’t. Suddenly, she turns away in an unusual provoking and rude manner. Leaving the dining room, she goes straight out to the courtyard, where the jade plant is waiting to be groomed.

  Vu stops and asks Vinh : “What happened between the two of you?”

  “Nothing…nothing happened,” Vinh replies awkwardly. Then he dashes out of the dining room into the courtyard

  Without even glancing up, he knows that Vinh is looking for his mother. That is his only refuge in this house, the place where he can hide from all his sins. Waiting until Vinh disappears, he bends over and asks Trung:

  “What did he do to you?”

  The adopted son bursts out sobbing. He obviously had repressed his cries, but now the water overflows the dike, and he cries profusely and uncontrollably like a three-year-old, but with the low tone of a teenager. Vu waits for his cries to end, and pulls him to his bosom:

  “You and Vinh are the same age but you are ten months older. There is an old saying: ‘Older by one day only, you are still the older brother.’ You ought to behave like one, right?”

  “Yes. I remember your words. But today Vinh insulted me.”

  “How did he insult you?”

  “He told me that I am a bastard, and a moocher.”

  “Suddenly he said that?”

  “We sat down to eat dinner because Mother said you wouldn’t be home for quite a while. At first, nothing happened. But when I was about to pick up some meat, he blocked my chopsticks and screamed: ‘You’re a moocher, a bastard. Your kind only deserves to eat vegetables and peanuts; you have no permission to eat meat or fish. Letting you sit and eat with us is honor enough.’”

  Vu is mute. His face is sweating and his heart grows cold. He feels as if it stops beating for a few seconds. A thought runs across his mind, burning it as if someone is guiding a hot iron across his flesh: “Vinh couldn’t have thought of those things all by himself. He is a rude boy but not too smart. Those cruel words must have come from his mother. From my wife? How could she be so low class?”

  After a while, he calms down and says:

  “You should not bother with Vinh. He is greedy and he lies. You are actually my own son. Your mother’s name is not Van, but the blood that runs in your veins is mine. The skin covering your body is surely my own as well. If Mother Van and younger brother Vinh do not accept you, we will leave them and live separately. Just you and me. Do you understand?”

  “A…”

  The boy opens his mouth; his eyes open wide. In the boy’s state of utmost astonishment, Vu detects suspicion and fear mingled in opposition to a sense of great good fortune. He knows that what he has said has surpassed all the boy’s expectations, and is his dream of all dreams.

  “You are my own child. Do you understand this?” Vu says again.

  Trung still stands dumbfounded, his face pale and his lips turning white. Vu sees clearly all the waves of emotion that surface in Trung’s beautiful eyes.

  A bitterness fills Vu’s heart: “My gosh!…How he longs for a father! Having a father is really an ordinary fact for millions of other children, but for him it is the ultimate dream, or maybe just an illusion. Pity this poor orphan prince.”

  He looks deep into Trung’s clear brown eyes, a doe’s eyes. Gloriously beautiful, yes, but a bit effeminate. Is it merely because of this stunning beauty that he must endure a hard fate? This fleeting thought arises as a light wind. Vu holds tight the hands of the adopted son and repeats each word: “You are my child. For a long time I didn’t want to disclose this for fear of many issues. But now, Son, I have to tell you the truth. Because you have reached an age of mature understanding.”

  “Father!”

  The boy rushes into his arms, the sudden happiness making him burst into sobs. He leans his head against Vu’s chest, tears pouring down his face, soaking wet like a stream. Vu quietly squeezes the child. Together, both tenderness and bitterness invade him and his throat chokes.

  3

  The clock on the wall leisurely rings twelve times. Vu continues reading, as if nothing has happened. His wife comes up behind him and tries to close the book.

  “You should go to bed, it’s getting late.”

  Vu turns back to the page and says, “You go to bed first.…I need to read.”

  “I apologize…”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.…To be truthful, the mistake is the forced union between us…I regret…”

  “What do you mean…” Van says, raising her face, which is warming at his calm but painful words. She wants to debate, to persuade, to show her goodwill. But Vu turns around, raises his hand, and points at the four surrounding walls. Van knows that they cannot talk in here, where recording bugs are placed everywhere, from inside the house to the big trees in the yard. She finds a piece of white paper and writes:

  “We will talk about this tomorrow.”

  He writes his reply right underneath: “Tomorrow, I have to leave at 6 a.m.”

  “Then when can I talk to you?”

  “When I return.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “You, too.”

  Van crumples the paper and burns it, a longstanding habit of theirs. Then she goes to bed. Remaining in front of the table, he turns the pages but not a single word registers. On his chest, the tears of the adopted son are still warm; in his ears, still the sounds of a sobbing boy. He can guess what kind of storm had roiled the child’s soul that afternoon:

  “Poor little one…For so many years, he silently sought traces of a father. No matter how much I loved him, no matter how hard I fulfilled a father’s role genuinely, with dedication and with passion, that lack would leave a huge hole which could never be filled. Blood ties are the invisible strings that unite the generations.

  “You are my own son. The blood that runs in your veins is my own blood. The skin that covers your body is mine as well!—Why did I speak so? Was it the inspiration of spirits or the temptation of the devil?”

  Whatever it was, the words had been said. Words once spoken, four horses chasing them cannot catch up with them. From today on, the fate of the boy is bound to his by this secret relationship. The mystery of this fate arises to hide another mystery.

  Really, he doesn’t know if he behaved rightly or wrongly when he told Trung that he was his son—a child born out of wedlock, to be exact. But that afternoon, he hadn’t had the opportunity to think, nor the time to ponder. He had acted in the manner of a poet caught up in compulsive inspiration, even though he is not a poet, and is not even familiar with acting on such compulsion. But he knew what to do when his own wife and their own son had pushed the adopted child into bitter despair.

  “Am I responsible for letting this shabby and bad situation develop?” he wonders.

  And his soul fills with darkness.

  He cannot measure the complexity of life. He feels too powerless to steer the family vessel. Perhaps he has insufficient insight and lacks the courage to possibly understand the natural inclinations of the woman and his own son?

  “Perhaps I lack both, both clarity and courage. I lack both of the most necessary qualities in a man, in a father and in a husband. It seems someone once told me that.”

  Perhaps…

  Sounds from the past always follow the word “perhaps,” and with those sounds one turns pages yellowed with the stains of time. Vu knows that inside him is a man from the past, one who is concerned with family traditions and the values that cluster around them. For this reason, a son, s
omeone to sustain the lineage, was his most secret and most earnest longing after he had married. After seventeen years of failure, the day Vinh was born was for him a celebration, “shedding tears of happiness,” as they said thousands of years ago. Vu remembers staying up with Van for three consecutive nights as she went through her labor pains. He sat up so that she could lean on him when she did not want to lie down; he gave her his arm so that she could pinch and scratch when the pains tortured her. After the birth was over, both his arms were covered with scars that took a month to heal. The other women in the room had looked at Van with obvious jealousy. They had looked at him with unhidden envy. His wife certainly had not forgotten that. She couldn’t have forgotten that it was he who readily took on the responsibility to launder and cook, to serve her, even though the families on both sides, as well as his office, had plenty of people to help out. Everything he had done flowed from a clear realization that his wife must feel the utmost happiness when she became a mother, when bloodlines mix to create a new human being, the one with the mandate to maintain and prolong the names, the corporal images, and the reputations of the two family lines.

  When Vinh was still young, from one to six years old, his features were dainty, his face was beautiful like a “lady from Hong Kong,” and he looked more like his mother than his father. The two then thought he would grow up to become a movie star, if not as famous as one from Hollywood, at least like an Yves Montand or an Alain Delon. But from the age of ten, his features totally changed. Vinh lost his movie star look, and took on the features of a tough guy. Then, when Vinh came in second in an elementary school athletic contest, he and his wife changed their dream of an artist to one about a sports champion. Besides changing in appearance, the boy also revealed a character that few parents would wish for. First, he became an awful glutton. His son became sickeningly avid when sitting down to eat, at which time he would not see anybody or pay attention to anything, except bending down to get his food. On special occasions, his wife would invite chefs over to cook unusual dishes. On such occasions Vinh would skip school to stay home, dashing to the kitchen to help himself to the food even before his parents and the guests. Many times, Van tried to persuade Vu that a child who eats well is something to rejoice at, because he will grow big and strong. But when he looked at his son hunched over the table and eating while hardly swallowing or breathing, Vu felt his face heat up. When Vinh was twelve, the hair around his mouth grew bushy and his voice broke low; his mother asked Vinh to eat separately with Trung in the kitchen so that Vu would not feel ashamed.

  It was probable that when she had to face reality on her own, his wife also suffered. But in front of him, she never backed down. At all costs, she had to protect her son, the only masterpiece of her life as a mother. Often, too, he wanted to go along with her, to believe that their son would become “someone very famous in the future.”

  He often told himself that a person’s abilities could mature late, bloom late in the season, kick in as needed like slow-burning coal, imitate the Chinese mandarin Lu Wang, who sat fishing on a rock for more than eight years before he lifted a finger to help rule his country. In such fashion, his son might someday become a famous scientist, a designer of airplanes, of boats, a creator of special new chemical formulas, or a doctor who could cure nasty diseases. It was completely possible for the boy to become someone helpful to the people, bringing honor to his ancestors. With the condition that he would have to change his personality and become someone who loved to study.

  “With the condition…”

  Oh, what a supreme and impossible dream for a father and a mother!

  Though in pain as if each segment of his intestines had been cut, Vu realized that his hope was every day moving farther away. Moving away toward infinity. In this bitterness, each day his son more and more resembled Tung, Van’s spoiled younger brother. From appearances, this resemblance drew surprised comments from both families. First, the nose spread too large on the face, with both nostrils large and thick, and with a tip shaped like a garlic clove, always shiny. Then two tiny eyes under extremely bushy brows, the kind people call “caterpillar brows.” Due to his appetite he very quickly grew fat. The fatter he got, the more prominent became his cheeks, erasing all remnants of his once attractive youthful features. Vu did not much believe in the art of physiognomy, but his son’s appearance gave him despair because, from experience, he knew that physical changes to one’s features are often followed by changes in one’s spiritual life and one’s morale. Not much later, his suspicions were proved right. During grade school, Vinh had always been ranked as an outstanding student. Crossing over to the first year of high school, he dropped to the rank of only an average student. The very next year, he fell into the category of “special needs students,” and it was all downhill from then on. Vinh was often written up, and his wife had to visit the teachers almost daily. Vu noticed that his wife always brought gifts along, some that he had bought when abroad on official business; some from the countryside, where special local delicacies were available such as garden-raised chickens, fresh ocean crabs and shrimp wrapped in banana flowers, fresh fruit, and homemade candied fruit.

  Once, he couldn’t help telling his wife: “You’re going to spoil our son one hundred times over if you keep doing this. Vinh doesn’t have any inner drive. I’ve seen it many times: he pokes his head into the packages you bring to the teachers, like a circusgoer, careless, as if it’s all a joke. He seems to think that he can spend his energies having a good time and being stupid while his parents do everything to give him a life. Please stop it; if you don’t, your son will become a totally useless person like his uncle. That ugly resemblance is already on display.”

  Blushing red from her face down to her legs and arms, his wife turned around and lamented: “I know that my family is inferior to yours. My brother was a dumb student. Why didn’t you pick a wife who was well educated, with writing covering her from head to toe?”

  “Don’t be petty and proud. You should think seriously about our son’s future. To do that we need to look straight at the truth. The truth is that the more Vinh grows up, the more he likes to play around. His uncle Tung comes by to take him out at any time. And you keep protecting both of them. To study like this, sooner or later he will be a social misfit.”

  “Nobody in this family is a social misfit. Don’t be too strict with your son. He is a stubborn child, so we have to pick a certain way to bend him. Look around. How many successful people passed through this kind of naughty childhood? There are illiterates who became successful. It is said, ‘A good horse often has flaws…’”

  Vu was forced into silence. Fed up but silent. What else could he say? He felt powerless. What could he do to turn the situation around?

  The child was their joint product, but her contribution was the larger. All during the pregnancy, she vomited and always felt sick. Her pregnancy was a thousand times more difficult than that of others. She was not born for getting pregnant and giving birth. This boy child was her life’s lucky lottery. There would not be a second chance. For seventeen years she had often been pregnant but then miscarried. She would miscarry one month and become pregnant again a few months later. This unhappy sequence kept on repeating, to the point where her family and even her colleagues thought of her going to the maternity clinic like a common chore. No pregnancy survived its fourth month. With the magical assistance of heaven and earth, when she was forty-one, at the age that ends all women’s hope of becoming a mother, she succeeded in having Vinh. That was why, for her, this child was like a king without a throne. The peculiar thing was that this circumstance could turn around entirely a mother’s point of view. During the early years of their courtship, Van often showed open contempt for her brother by referring to him as “Tung the pig.” Now that their own son so resembled “Tung the pig,” her feelings for her brother grew more affectionate and tender. But for Vu, each time he watched uncle and nephew chat, or play around, or flirt, or eat, he could not but
feel terrified. A man past his forties with no beard and a teenager with thick bushy hair around the lips. Both had fleshy, bloated faces. Both had such bushy eyebrows that their eyes were left as slits hiding in shadowy darkness. Both had a voluptuary’s gaze when their eyes gauged a young girl or a woman. A horselike, hissing laugh was identical in both and so unbearable that he had to leave. At twelve his son already had a fat belly, just like his uncle in his youth on the day when Vu had set foot on the threshold of Mrs. Tuyet Bong, the village seller of fish sauce.

  “How can we tell to which port life’s boat will sail? How could I have guessed my only son would inherit all the disgusting traits of his maternal family? I loved Van, believing that her essence flowed from her father, Mr. Vuong, the teacher, not knowing that along with the delicate and dainty traits of her father, she nevertheless was filled with the seeds of her mother’s character, that seller of fish sauce famous for her bad temper and unattractive presence. Is this marriage the greatest failure of my life? A failure without redemption?”

  The Phu Luu district was known for its prosperity. When they reached their full-moon years, they were known as a handsome young man and a pretty gal. Then they were sent to Hanoi for middle school, dandy and sophisticated students with ironed clothing, well supplied by their families so that they might keep up with their peers. Romance happened easily when they all were in the same boat; she read a novel while he turned a newspaper’s pages. Romance also blossomed easily when they were together in summer camp as “boy scouts” and “girl scouts,” when they sang foreign songs such as “Serenade,” “Come Back to Sorrento,” or “Santa Lucia.” Furthermore, Van was pretty. She was known as the beauty queen of Phu Luu. And to top it off, both of them were at an age to dream of love. Moreover, they had no worries about making a living and the stormy wind of revolution had yet to touch them. Besides…