by Ho Anh Thai
Mai Trừng wrapped lengths of white cloth around both of our heads. The only people at the funeral procession were some old neighbors, looking skeletal and hobbled, as if they themselves were the spirits. Heavy, slick soil peeked out here and there along the sand road. The soil made popping and sucking noises as it settled from the previous day’s rain. After a long drought, yesterday the sky had suddenly opened up. The grave had been dug beforehand, and was now waterlogged. When the bearers released the coffin, it floated up. They had to bail all the water out before they could lower the coffin back into the grave.
The funeral lacked the traditional clarinet and drum funerary music. The bonze was old and feeble; she couldn’t descend the mountain. She sat up in the pagoda, beating the gong and chanting prayers for the departed soul. Then she struck the big bell and all the small bells throughout the temple. The sound, like a shattered mountain of sharp crystal shards, poured down into lowlands, filling them, and becoming a kind of tomb for the soul that had died such a sudden and unjust death. That is how it is for the poor everywhere. They live their whole lives in restless apprehension, with no source of security; knowing their lives could end at any moment from some disaster, from a jagged bit of glass infecting their foot, from any kind of unforeseen calamity from which those who are better off could easily recover.
After the funeral, everyone went home. Her son was sitting by himself. I sat down next to him. Twelve years old, and now forced to be the head of the family. He still had two younger siblings to feed and educate. He didn’t have the right to sit and ask himself, What do I do? He was only allowed to stand up and just keep going, to jump headfirst back into the flow of life in order to make a living for his family. Where was his father? Was he affected? Did he shudder and did his eyes flutter?4 Did he stumble and fall on that day? And how about me? Did I ever shudder and blink my eyes? My friends liked to say that I had children scattered all around. Men who wander so much, across the seas, across the world, all have had such meaningless liaisons.
“It was just mom’s appendix. If we’d had money, she wouldn’t have died,” the boy said suddenly. His voice was dry and sharp. “People told us that the hospital was busy treating someone from the beach with heart pain. The people at the beach have money.”
Producing another link in the chain of hatred. Nurturing another link in the chain of hatred. Villagers in Cửa Lớn would run out to block the roads to the beach, stopping the tourists, forcing cars to detour a few extra kilometers to get around them. Sometimes they also surged out onto the beach and tried and stop the tourists down there. Angry at the fish, but taking it out on the chopping board. Resentment toward some was dumped on the heads of others. Hatred fueled a vicious circle.
“They just saved the swimmers. The swimmers had money,” the boy kept mumbling.
There wasn’t anything I could do for him now. The dreadful deaths I’d witnessed, the anguish I’d had to bear, the times I’d been betrayed, been deceived . . . it was all meaningless, it was nothing compared to the unbearable misery existing in the mind, and on the shoulders, of this young man.
The next day, we helped the bonze with the Lost Souls Day ceremonies.
The three children wearing white mourning headbands also climbed up the temple to volunteer their services.5 Crowds of beachgoers clambered up the hill to the temple. There were faces of those filled with curiosity, just sightseeing.6 There were sincere faces, sincere for the moment. There were faces dark and credulous, tormented by ignorance. They’d come to the temple to burn incense, to listen to the prayers and chants, to give donations, and then to ask for blessings from heaven. They strolled around the temple garden, stuck joss sticks everywhere, and wedged in a prayer—wishing for nothing but their own desires, nothing but the good life. If they had one house, then they wanted to build three. Turn one million into four hundred million, four hundred times.
I vaguely heard a line of prayer to that effect. Demanding four hundred times as much, what else could he be doing besides planning a robbery? In reality, there are thieves who, before every job, very sincerely go to the church, temple, or pagoda to ask for blessings. And after they’ve done the deed, they return to express their thankfulness and confess their sins.
Mai Trừng and I walked around the temple’s lush garden with the boy and Ki. We tucked banyan-leaf funnels of porridge among the tree roots, in their nooks and crannies, in the rattan bushes and the wild pineapples, and in the cracks of rocks. The forsaken spirits had their full meal right away. Beggars came and gathered up the porridge, drinking it right out of the banyan leaves, and some of the tourists carelessly kicked over the funnels.
All of a sudden, someone rushed at me from behind. Although my back was turned, I could sense the movement. I threw myself to the side immediately, and skillfully kicked out my left foot to trip whoever it was. In the same instant, Mai Trừng, seeing a knife, swiftly flung herself forward to shield me and shove me out of the way. The knife holder tripped over my leg, but the momentum carried whoever it was forward to crash into Mai Trừng. They both fell onto the ground.
Ki dashed forward and bit the assailant in the hand. And he got the knife in his mouth.
I twisted our long-haired attacker’s arm, and pulled up. It was a woman. Her eyes were filled with fanatical hatred.7 She tossed back the hair covering her face, soaked and sticky with sweat. Yên Thanh.
“I hate you,” she wailed. It was a challenge. She was ready to bear even the cruelest punishment.
Yet the punishment had appeared on her face. Vague traces of the beauty queen’s attractiveness remained, but it had faded and withered. Perhaps the flame of hatred burning in her heart had gradually burned away everything joyful about her. Or maybe the depravities of her wanton life had left circles under her eyes and had wilted the skin on her face. Or maybe both.
I pushed her toward the security guards standing among the large group that had gathered.
Mai Trừng’s arm had been cut. It was a relatively deep gash, but the knife hadn’t reached bone. She was losing blood, so we took her into the temple and used bandages to stop the bleeding. The bonze just looked at us with her blurry eyes and kept crying, “Na Mô A Di Đà Phật; how could this happen at Buddha’s door like this? How could this happen on Lost Souls Day like this?”
The wound wasn’t serious; a bit of bandaging and it was fine. Mai Trừng and I left out the back door of the pagoda. Escaping the bonze’s words of pity. Escaping the three kids who, right after having to bear a funeral, had almost witnessed another death. Escaping the noisy, curious crowd.
“In the end, the maiden goddess sheds blood,” I joked. I remembered a story from a South Asian nation, in which people anointed young girls as living goddesses, as virgin goddesses. The goddesses were never supposed to bleed like normal mortals and were deposed when they reached puberty, or if their skin was accidentally scratched and bled.
The goddess sitting next to me was exactly the same. Just a few days before, the knife would never have broken her skin. The hag Yên Thanh would have come out of their somersault with a painful and paralyzed arm.
“So are you sorry that you can’t punish people anymore?”
“I’m glad to be able to be a normal person,” she answered simply. She lowered her head onto my shoulder and seemed to doze off. The wind rustled across the mountaintop. The sea murmured below. They each seemed to be singing a lullaby.
EPILOGUE
We cremated Mai Trừng’s parents’ bones in the garden of the pagoda. The bones went into two large cast-iron pans filled with gasoline. The gas burned everything down completely until the bones were reduced to ash. We had to keep adding more oil to the pans. Night fell, but the bones still hadn’t finished disintegrating. Mai Trừng and I had to sit beside the big flaming pans.
We were going to leave the temple a few days later. Mai Trừng planned to go back to the world of the living. I planned to go back to sea. But plans might change. Nothing is ever for certain. Both pla
ces, the real world and the sea, have hidden undercurrents, fierce waves, and tidal waves. They’re both full of chaos. They both have people who are fed up with being human, and people who are happy to be nothing more than that.
I let my eyes wander down to the sea, sparkling with phosphorescent waves. Behind an outcrop of rocks were more points of fiery light, like flowers dissolving and reforming. The flames formed an oval shape and distorted circles. The women of the night were making burnt offerings, legs held at 25-degree angles, votive offerings flaming in their hands. Of course, from the mountaintop, you couldn’t really see anyone. You could see only the flames spinning around and around in circles, like a fire dance.
Suddenly a ball of fire erupted where the road ran along the woods of casuarina trees. It clearly illuminated a gang of people howling and running from said pillar of fire. It clearly illuminated the fact that the pillar of fire was actually my own burning Toyota Corona. I’d left the car down there, planning to pick it up later and drive it to the inn.
I sprang to my feet.
But it was too late.
The car had exploded. Flames rolled out onto the surface of the road, then climbed onto two nearby trees, which caught fire and burst into flames like two torches.
Mai Trừng stood up and held onto me. We’d both become powerless. The only thing we could do was stand there and watch the flames.
Who was the arsonist? Yên Thanh? Hooligans who’d come to the beach to party and gratify their perversities? Or maybe the peasants who’d lost their land had returned for revenge on people with money? To them, every beachgoer is someone with money, living the high life, someone who comes and goes, leaving behind garbage and waste on their land and bastard children and intractable diseases for the local women, and poisoning the living ways of their men and children.
Suddenly the pagoda bell tolled in panic. And it tolled in terror. The bonze had been robbed of her peace. The enraged bell poured down into the air. It was no longer a tinkling pile of crystal shards. This time it was a clanging rain of metallic iron and steel fragments. The whole world collapsed beneath this metallic downpour. The whole world was flooded with a metallic deluge.
The human world seemed to be on the edge of the abyss of annihilation. An earthquake in Japan. Huge floods in China. Tidal waves in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. Terrifying and abnormal heat waves in France, England, and the United States. Thousands had died. So what else can one think except that the dark hole of oblivion had begun to appear?
Beneath the mountain, to the right was the fire dance of the prostitutes, whirling points of flame. Down to the left, my car still glowed and smoldered. High upon the mountaintop, two fires burned in two iron pans. And the silence of the night continued to be rent as if by stray shards of shrapnel.
Early the next morning, I returned from the town, where I had reported the burning of my car. The pagoda was in an uproar. Someone was guiding the half-blind bonze to the bell tower. She groped her way to where the bell hung. Her two emaciated, trembling hands reached out into empty space. Her hands tried to feel for the bell. She couldn’t believe that it was no longer there. Only the night before she’d struck the bell again and again. She’d hit it frantically. Like she was possessed. Like someone was giving her extra strength, guiding her hand as she ceaselessly hammered on the bell.
And now the bell was gone. It weighed many tons and was hundred of years old. It had looked on as countless people’s lives began on the seashore and then returned to wind and sand. It had witnessed countless bonzes, one after the next, who spent their lives in the temple. It had rung and vibrated innumerable times into the dark, wayward world of humanity.
And yet the bonze did not utter a single sound of lamentation. Tracing the air, her hands seemed to shape the surface of the bell, as if it still hung in front of her. As if it was just invisible to the human eye. She stroked it lovingly, as if its spirit remained, but without a physical being. And so she didn’t utter a single complaint, not a single word of sorrow or complaint.
All that night, after I’d descended from the mountain to report to the police, nobody had left the temple. Nobody had broken in, either. How could somebody have carried such a giant bell down the mountain without leaving a trace?
The bell had simply vanished.
Seeing the old bonze sitting calmly by herself in the bell tower, I also managed to find calm. For years afterward people would still talk about the night the bell disappeared. It was said that someone had seen a jet of light, like a shooting star, flash into the sky from the summit of the mountain, from the site of Bao Sơn Pagoda.
In the evening I entered the pagoda to say good-bye, and thank you, to the bonze. Without the bell, the pagoda was silent for good. I felt that it was wrong for me to leave right then, as if I were leaving the temple helpless. But after a long hesitation, I decided to say farewell. The bonze was still uncannily dispassionate. She told me to take some of the fruit from the temple with me; next time I came to the temple there would be other fruit. Then she asked where Mai Trừng was. Would she be going with me?
“She went down the mountain earlier,” I said. “And she asked me to give you her thanks and to say good-bye.”
A bus took me along the Cửa Lớn Beach for the last time. People would keep swimming, buying, and selling in droves like they did every day. I’d lied to the bonze. Since early in the morning, when the disappearance of the bell had caused such chaos in the pagoda, I’d been searching for Mai Trừng, who was nowhere to be found in the temple. When I went down to the police station, she was still watching over the two iron pans. When I returned, the two pans were empty. They were sparkling clean, as if they’d never contained the bones’ ashes. They’d been cool for a long time. There weren’t any signs to show that only the night before, they had still been red with flame.
I didn’t tell the bonze any of this. There was no reason to disturb the calm in another person’s heart.
I believe that one day I’ll see her again. Somewhere in some distant city. I will spend the rest of my days searching. And even if I have to search every possible place, I will still keep searching.
I’m thirty-five years old. The age when the Buddha reached enlightenment. Many people pass thirty-five years old and remain forever unenlightened. Many people are enlightened even before they reach that age. But whether enlightenment comes late or early, each and every one deserves pity.
NOTES
Introduction
1. The literal translation of the title is awkward in English: “The apocalypse bell resounds in the human abode.”
Chapter 2
1. “Bob” is a homonym for a Vietnamese word meaning strangulation.
2. Revelation.
3. The Captain’s Studio.
Chapter 3
1. It is believed that sons born on the first day of the lunar month, and daughters born on the fifteenth, are destined to be strong, and the leader of any group they join.
2. In The Tale of Kiều, Từ Hải was a mighty general who revolted against the government, but died only because he listened to Kiều’s advice to surrender.
3. Prosperous.
4. Violent.
5. Slang for a girl who has been kidnapped and forced into a brothel.
6. One chỉ is a unit of gold worth approximately US $150.
7. Thềm lục địa: slang referring to some part of the vulva.
8. Used as a fake hymen.
9. “Green coffee shop” is a euphemism for a place frequented by prostitutes.
10. Security is the name of a sensational daily in Vietnam.
11. Cậu ấm cô chiêu: literally “mandarins’ sons and daughters.”
12. ĐHNN is the acronym, in Vietnamese, for the Foreign Languages University, now officially called Hanoi University (ĐHHN).
13. Roads in downtown Saigon.
14. Slightly less central roads, but still pretty much in the main city center.
15. Old Quarter streets.
17. Thanh Niên runs between West Lake and its little neighbor, Trúc Bạch Lake.
18. A traditional symbol of mourning, usually seen at funeral ceremonies.
19. Xe ôm: A commercial motorbike on which the passenger has to hug the driver (xe: motorbike; ôm: hug).
20. White headbands are worn by mourners at funerals.
21. Giao Chỉ refers to the ethnic group that lived in northern Vietnam when the Chinese invaded two thousand years before: here the term connotes someone who looks wild or savage.
Chapter 4
1. One can teach a stranger, but not a son or someone close.
Chapter 6
1. Vietnamese sailors believe that if a crewman’s wife is unfaithful, it will lead to disaster at sea.
2. Kéo dài công đoạn và tần số: a play on propaganda slogans during the period of collectivization; the phrase sarcastically reverses the slogan.
3. This means the parents had set a bad example for the children.
4. The joke is based on regional accent and vocabulary differences. In the northern-central provinces of Ha Tinh and Nghe An people call their fathers Bọ, in the north people call them Bố, and in the south Ba. The joke here is that bọ also means maggot or grub as well in the northern usage. So when the old man from central Vietnam asks the soldier what he calls his dad, the soldier thinks he’s asking him what he calls maggots, and he answers with another word for maggot.
5. Literally “the land of the amusing quip”: a cane in one hand and a sack in the other. In 1945 Thai Bình suffered a major famine, which killed millions throughout Vietnam. Thai Bình was one of the worst hit and many people fled the province for other areas. People made a joke that these “hobos” were wandering playboys. They also joke that Johnnie Walker is a Thai Bìnher because of the logo on the bottle: a man walking with a cane.
6. A revolutionary song by composer Huy Thục.
7. It is believed that if the whole pot burns, then the soul has agreed to whatever was requested.
