Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

by Ho Anh Thai

  But at that time Thế succeeded, to some extent. I gradually grew content with life at the school, like combustible material that had been next to a flame for a long time and only just caught. The daily martial arts exercises gave me a sense of self-confidence. Martial arts are not for the purpose of fighting, but to give people self-confidence; most importantly, they’re an outlet for the excess testosterone of amorous adolescent men. One evening I went out for a walk along the bank of the Lấp River, and as I was ambling along a girl came out from behind a tree and blocked the road. “Help me, please; if you help me you’ll be helping to feed my two children.” A thrill went through my whole body. I followed the girl back to her small rat’s nest of a flat. Two children of about seven and ten years old were grimacing and crying in hunger. The girl gave them some of the money that I’d given her as payment in advance, told them to go out into the alley and buy some food from a street vendor, and then bolted the door, turned around and came back.

  That was how I became a man.

  But I didn’t go straight back to my room afterward. I ran to the girls’ dormitory, and rushed into the beauty queen’s room. One of her friends told me that the beauty queen, Yên Thanh, was out visiting a girlfriend in a neighboring dormitory. I charged over there, and found the room number. Yên Thanh was indeed there, chatting with a friend in the room of the relatively deserted dormitory.

  “Ah, the handsome gay guy! Who are you looking for here?”

  “I’m here for Yên Thanh,” I said. At that point the girl’s boyfriend stepped into the room. She glanced at Yên Thanh and said, “Go ahead, the bottom bed belongs to a girl who’s just gone back home.” She and her boyfriend climbed up onto the top bed, and pulled the sheet up over themselves. Yên Thanh flashed her alluring virgin’s eyes into mine.

  “So, gay guy, what brings you to me?”

  “I love you; it’s as simple as that.”

  “You love me? What will you do to prove it? Would you jump straight down from this third floor onto the ground for me?” Seizing her hand, I walked directly to the hallway, intending to carry out the jump immediately. The beauty queen quickly grabbed me. “Forget it, forget it, I’m just kidding; it’s just a stupid meaningless joke.”

  We squeezed into the bottom bed belonging to the girl that had gone back to her village, then pulled the thin mosquito net down as if to hide us, as is the custom of those who don’t feel any shame. The boyfriend on the upper bunk called down to me, “Do you have everything? Here, take my extra.” He reached down and handed me one. About forty minutes later he handed down another “foreign sock,” like a helicopter dropping reinforcements to a besieged ally. When the students that had been out watching a concert noisily came back and climbed up into their mosquito net–shrouded beds, the guy on the upper bunk handed down two more “rain jackets.”

  The beautiful flower was in a state of relaxed exhaustion. “Hey, gay guy, you’re not even a little bit gay, are you? Well, there are some things that people can only find out in bed.”

  The situation in our battle of love had reversed 180 degrees. From this time forward Yên Thanh searched me out, hunted me down. She exorcised her carnal desire regularly and wildly. My schoolmates were jealous because I possessed the most beautiful girl at school. She graduated two years ahead of me and found a job working at the port. After two years I graduated and Thế secured me a job on a long-haul shipping vessel, where I worked temporarily as the assistant captain, a kind of on-the-job training, before I was promoted to captain. Thanks to the patronage of people from all the trade unions, everything happened smoothly and quickly. I had a handful of extended trips, up to five or six months at a time, during which I would grow homesick. I knew that Yên Thanh wasn’t capable of living even a month without a man. Surely she was now hot and steaming, searching out casual lovers. I wasn’t jealous, just impatient. I was the same way. In every port, I had to find sources of quick pleasure with girls of many skin colors. It didn’t mean that Yên Thanh and I weren’t waiting impatiently for my return or that we wouldn’t reunite passionately. The excited anticipation of my impending return would lead Yên Thanh to chase off all of her casual admirers. Many times my mind would drift to the many disasters that could strike us in the middle of the ocean, but I would shove those thoughts aside. Many people believed that they would meet with fatal accidents if their wives back at home didn’t remain faithful. But this superstition applied to wives, not to lovers, and Yên Thanh wasn’t my wife—not yet.

  The reality is that we lived together like husband and wife but I hadn’t proposed. The valuable merchandise that we’d hidden from the eyes of the customs officers, or, if not, then shared with them, were turned into an apartment with all the modern conveniences. Yên Thanh managed that household for me. Meanwhile Thế was praying to heaven to help his poor girl-crazy brother, praying that I wouldn’t entrust all of my possessions to my lover’s care—especially a lover of such doubtful virtue. He sent Phũ and his two buddies down to Hải Phòng to stand by in case the Law of the Jungle was required to resolve the problem.

  Yet, despite everything, they still respected my decisions. And I was satisfied with my private life. I didn’t complain about anything or give them any reason to take action on my behalf.

  That trip was the most disastrous of my eight years on the ocean.

  There were quiet skies and smooth sailing at first, and the ship sailed straight along its proper course. We weren’t crossing the ocean, just skirting the great S-shaped coastline of Vietnam, from the south to the north. Easy going. On the fourth day of the voyage we realized that we were no longer in our own territorial waters. In front of our eyes was Hainan (Hải Nam) Island.

  I realized that the fault lay with the chief engineer. He’d come up into the helm to talk with me and had mistakenly left his battery-operated flashlight next to the ship’s compass. The compass’s needle had been pulled off course and had pointed us in the wrong direction. We turned the ship around. The assistant captain cursed the chief engineer incessantly, damning him as the cause for every disaster on the voyage. Thanks to him we’d sailed off course, and it would be difficult to fix the mistake. The engineer’s wife had brought another man into their house. His daughter had also brought a man into their house. Over here his wife’s bed, over there his daughter’s bed, the both of them built upon the fruits of his labor.

  I went down to the chief engineer’s quarters. He was listening to a song filled with the emotions of an ocean voyager: “But I’ve traveled so far / To the edge of the clouds / I carry your body with my loneliness / Through these days of passing storms / The sea screams with rage in its wild tempest / How can you stay so calm?” I saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

  I shuddered slightly. It felt somehow like fate itself. It felt like proof of the words of Thế and the others. Although I wasn’t married like the chief engineer, both of us had brought this cursed fate upon the ship.

  The compass was totally useless. The ship had lost its bearing. We were heading in the wrong direction. The crew became scared and began to fight among themselves. After finishing his work, the chief engineer didn’t dare show his face; he just hid in his room, crying along with his depressing songs. The ship wandered lost for a day in the East Sea (a.k.a. the South China Sea) as it was tossed by a raging storm.

  A wide and dazzling ray of sunlight had suddenly illuminated my mind then, piercing my hopelessness. That virgin face with its debauched smile appeared clearly in front of my eyes. My whole body shivered. Maybe my life was over. If the ship dropped anchor now, it would be torn apart and sink. Instead it was blown by the storm winds until it finally crashed straight into some submerged rocks. We abandoned ship, jumping into the life rafts. A mountainous wave capsized us and dumped us into the sea. Regaining consciousness I found myself alone and clinging to a plank of wood floating along the black surface of the ocean. I tried to swim until I ran out of energy and was overwhelmed by exhaustion, and then I abandoned my
self to fate, and drifted with the currents.

  The next afternoon I awoke in a small, empty thatched cottage. A woodstove was burning weakly off to one side. It seemed like it had been burning all day to warm me and to dry my clothes. I stirred, and sat straight up. All of my clothes had been dried but instead of being put back on me, someone had laid them out on the ground next to me. I was totally nude. Just then I realized that there was a woman leaning her back against the mud wall, sitting a bit away from the stove. She had a dark, sad countenance. Her eyes brightened slightly when she saw that I had regained consciousness. I quickly pulled on my underpants, turning away from her as I dressed, my clothing dry and smelling pleasantly of wood smoke.

  “You should lie down and rest. The storm hasn’t let up. The sea is still rough.”

  It was clear that I still needed to lie down. My body was covered in bruises, and she’d massaged it with medicinal oil made from some kind of plant. I lay back and listened to the firewood crackling in the stove next to me. It seemed that the ocean waves had deposited me onto the shore of a deserted island. That morning the woman had gathered me up, unconscious, from the beach. It must have been hard for her to haul me into her house, which was the only building on the island, just as she was the only resident on the island—and a temporary one at that. I call her a temporary resident because she would row out to the island only one day a week in order to care for her orchard and to let her flock of goats out of their shed to graze on the hillside. That same day she would cut enough grass for the goats to live off of for the rest of the week in their shed.

  She didn’t have a pretty face, but she couldn’t be called ugly, either. Her looks just seemed somehow faded in appearance, as if she’d been consigned to oblivion. She also seemed a bit taciturn, as if she didn’t trust people. But that’s not exactly right. She was taciturn, but she would still whisper to me late into the night. Even though she didn’t trust people, she still felt confident enough to tell me that she was alone on this island.

  The next morning I was able to get out of bed. A bowl of uninteresting but piping hot dry fish porridge energized my usually vigorous body. It was still raining outside, the sea still leaden with clouds. I groped my way out to the goat shed. The woman was standing at the divider between the two separate stables. A male goat was standing and waiting on its side of the partition. Every time the woman would open the small door to let a female goat out, the billy goat would jump forward lustfully. She stood back and silently watched the deed between the billy goat and the female goats over and over again. Whether it was a miserable silence or a blissful silence, I couldn’t guess.

  Suddenly she spun around and looked at me. She shut the divider back down in a flurry of panic and ran back to her house, abandoning all the poor female goats that hadn’t been able to get out and were now bleating noisily.

  I followed her back. When I came inside, I saw the woman was crying softly next to the stove. I sat down next to her. Not knowing what to say to her, I just rubbed one of her shoulders and consoled her to try and calm her down. Her calm finally returned. A moment later she leaned her head on my shoulder, and she started talking about how her destiny was intertwined with that of the island.

  From a bird’s-eye view, or at sea level from a distance, the island looked just like a ship. During the war years, American planes repeatedly dropped bombs and shot rockets down at this ship. The woman’s village was about a day’s journey by rowboat from the island. If one left early in the morning, one could arrive here the afternoon of the same day. Her father had been a militiaman, and was mobilized to build a chimney on the island, painted white along the top so it looked like a boat’s smokestack. His duty was to stick close to the chimney day after day and raise a flag on it, turning it into a boat to attract the American bombs and missiles. When the flag fell, he would replace it with a new one. When the smokestack was blown up, he would build a new one. He lived on the island for six years. In 1972 his bomb shelter was struck and it caved in. His shelter had turned into his grave.

  Her father had sacrificed himself just like the young men who had been mobilized by their cooperative to go fishing and cast their nets out at sea. Without even a certificate of recognition. Without even any special treatment for his family. After her father was martyred, the young girl began to carry her books to school. She went to school irregularly and forgot what she’d learned; she had studied that way until the seventh grade, when she had to quit because her mother had died. In her hardscrabble village, people didn’t have the energy left over to care about the rights of a fourteen-year-old girl. So she set out by herself on her little rowboat to find the island for which her father’s blood had been spilled. Once there, she burned incense and prayed in the dark for the soul of her father to protect her. She built up the area in an attempt to plant an orchard. And now she had an orchard full of longan trees and a flock of twenty goats. On that island, she was the boss. On that ship she was the captain with a crew of twenty hands, while in her village she was just a woman past marrying age who had fallen into oblivion.

  I now realized that behind her appearance as a middle-aged woman there was a sturdy peasant woman, and that behind her wasted-away face she was just around twenty-six years of age. It was just a lucky coincidence that the day I’d washed ashore happened to be the day that she’d rowed out to the island. I felt pity for this woman whom people had abandoned and who now had to earn her living watching goats breed.

  We came together naturally. We came together in the middle of a sentence in her story. At first I was a bit shy and reluctant. I didn’t have any protection on me, and without it I didn’t dare touch a stranger. Right up to that moment, I was full of that kind of hesitation, but I still had enough tricks up my sleeve to use some sly surgical probing in order to inspect her. There didn’t seem to be anything suspicious there at all. But once I’d infiltrated her defenses, I was perplexed to find that she was still a virgin. I’d never felt such a feeling of happiness. It wasn’t love. It was rather a sense of hope, of gratitude, of happiness, all of the most sincere and honest emotions. The kinds of uncertain emotions that people experience with the people they love.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said as she rested her cheek on my bare chest.

  Me? I didn’t have anything to tell her. She had a ship that would never sink. My ship had already sunk. Who knows how many of my sailors were alive and how many had died, and where the survivors were wandering? I could paint, especially the ocean. But now I was without a brush, and without paint.

  I suddenly got to my feet. I took a length of bamboo from the corner of the house, and etched some lines deeply into the dirt floor. A face appeared. A young woman of the sea who no longer looked withered, her mouth smiling in contentment.

  “Are you drawing me?” she asked with a shiver.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  And we entered into each other again.

  Two days later the storm let up. The waves were at peace. The ocean calmed down. The woman rowed me off the island on her boat. At a certain distance, I looked back and saw how the small island really resembled a ship, its smokestack still painted white. Once it had been a place for the enemy to drop bombs. Now I had been dropped there, to add more pain, more unhappiness. Or was it happiness? I needed someone else to tell me; there was no way I could judge for myself.

  As the afternoon darkened to dusk, our boat came to the dock of Quảng Nguyên. I took off my overcoat and gave it to her to hold as a keepsake of the brief time we’d lived together on the island. I climbed ashore, waved down a truck, and early the next morning arrived home in Hải Phòng.

  When I got home it wasn’t Yên Thanh who opened the door as before. Phũ greeted me with blinking eyes, saying, “You’re home, Uncle,” and then staggered into the bedroom. Phũ, Cốc, and Bóp were all in the room. I shrugged and walked up the staircase. I couldn’t find Yên Thanh in any of the rooms. I didn’t want to wake up Phũ again to ask him about this strange
turn of events. Instead, I changed my clothes and then hit the sack as well.

  During the more than one month that I’d been gone, Thế’s trusted sources of intelligence had reported that Yên Thanh was preparing to marry some guy that had just graduated from the University of Medicine, but who was still unemployed. For a long time she’d been using our money to support him like a dependant, while all the while he was still practicing his anatomy lessons, not on corpses or cadavers, but on her body. Thế had immediately understood that he had to intercede by pushing through my own marriage. All the possessions accumulated by his girl-crazy young brother during his years at sea were lying in the hands of that ungrateful girl. He immediately oversaw the drafting of a shipping contract. According to the contract, I was to retain a portion of the goods, valued at eighty thousand dollars, that I was bringing back from Singapore. He drove down to Hải Phòng, and showed the contract to Yên Thanh, along with an official request from me for her hand in marriage. Yên Thanh had to think carefully before she answered. She had to decide between, on the one hand, the mountain of money that was suddenly rushing down around her ears, and, on the other hand, the medical student that she wanted to marry. In the end, human nature won out. She signed the two copies of the marriage registration forms that my brother had prepared. Women can be quite sharp in dealings when they have the time to think things over and ponder. But women find it difficult to maintain their vigilance when riches are rushing in. My brother Thế kept the signed marriage contract as if it were a court order that Yên Thanh couldn’t marry that corpse-groping brat. And that was just the first blow. For his second blow, Thế suggested that his “future sister-in-law” withdraw around twenty thousand dollars to “smooth the way” for acquiring the goods for the new contract. He’d figured out that the amount that Yên Thanh had taken from me, including the house, totaled around that much. The plan formulated in Hanoi was that if she didn’t fall into this trap, my nephew and his two buddies would fall back on the Law of the Jungle. However, women are indeed rendered unusually blind by greed. Yên Thanh rushed, as if in a fever, to get the money to give to Thế, as if she were giving a young child money for the New Year.