The pain comes in waves, as if someone is punching him from down below all the way up to his heart. And those punches are at times jabbing, at others nonstop. The president recalls a first-class African-American boxer, one who was famous everywhere when he was young. In his training room, this boxer had the habit of puckering his mouth each time he threw a punch. Each time the sandbag got hit, his face was all frown, and his lips shook, an action resulting from either an uncontrollable smile or the pressure of some state of mind; and his face had the look of his going through extraordinary pain.
“My heart is like such a sandbag being punched by an invisible person. And this invisible person smiles after each punch. A real smile, instead of some contortion brought on by a twisted mind.”
Should he get up, turn on the light, and call his doctor?
But, if he does so, the doctor will discover his tears. Not only that he had cried, but that he had cried for a long time, and that he had cried a lot. The hair on both of his temples is still wet; the pillow on which he rests his face is also wet; the lids of his eyes are swollen. Those things cannot be erased quickly.
“I am too old; why should I live any longer under these circumstances?”
Suddenly, a thought comes upon him, like a sigh arising from an incredible depth. He is not surprised. Nothing should take you by surprise. This is totally contrary to his own feelings when he had first heard the panicked cries of the son of that unfortunate woodcutter. That cry now blends into another, silent cry. The muffled cry of his own son. The son whose face he does remember; the son he purposely abandoned and intentionally forgot.
9
“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
The laughing of some ghost exploded by his ears. More accurately, it was a fit of laughter like pouring rain on a stormy day battering a corrugated roof; a very strange kind of laughter, accompanied by a hoarse reverberation in the throat like the shrieking of a bunch of wildcats. The laugh seemed to come from deep down out of an immense grave or from an abandoned castle buried in the core of the earth:
“Who’s that? Who has such a terrifying laugh?”
He digs in his memory. Who had had that strange laugh and where? That laugh contained the growling of wild animals as well as the hissing of a twisted wind inside a deep dark hole. Both strange and familiar at the same time, it seems…
“Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
The pain disappears as he concentrates his memory to find this ghostly laughter…But he can’t find anyone. At this moment, the laughing one says:
“Really, you don’t remember me?”
He lifts the pillow from his face so that he can intensely peer into the room’s darkness. The electric light outside still clearly shines its rays through the cracks around the door. The giggling of the card-playing group can still be heard softly in his room. Nothing much different:
“Sorry, I don’t recognize you,” he replies.
“Won’t you try one more time?” the laughing one responds, his voice soft and high-pitched like that of some homosexual.
“Sorry, I can’t,” he repeats gently.
The laughter bursts into long waves, and this time, he recognizes the big fat face, round like the dumplings eaten by truck drivers in the north. Chairman Man, the most powerful man under the eastern sky. He has not seen him for a long time, therefore he is a bit confused. Actually, Chairman Man, born in the year of the Snake, two years after him, a man full of demonic plots leading China’s Cultural Revolution, is still alive. More precisely, he is conducting the most terrifying campaign of elimination ever seen in the history of humanity. This extraordinary emperor has displayed all kinds of acts to awe the people with his championship mettle, the most well-known being swimming across the Yangtze River. Why is he now appearing as a ghost? Why is he borrowing the features of some resident of the underworld? Curious, he strains his eyes to look at the face opposite him and slowly starts to make out the features of the king of the north. Chairman Man’s face floats in space, his eyes squinting with joy, his lips turned up to provide the melody of a provoking smile.
“Greetings, Comrade,” says his visitor from the north.
He interrupts: “Where did you come from, Great Older Brother?”
“I am great indeed, but I am no brother of yours. And don’t call me Comrade either because my once brilliant patina is faded. That other one is dead and he turned into a decomposed corpse a long time ago.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry?” Chairman Man asks most condescendingly. “Thank you. If that would please you. Oh, all the diplomatic forms you know by heart! Oh, the Western cheese gives out a smelly scent to the nose!”
Chairman Man starts to laugh louder, and this time he shows two rows of small and yellow teeth like those of some rural woman who lacks hygiene and is lazy with her grooming. His eyes squint small in a look that both teases and despises:
“You are very polite…the useless and fake politeness of the white men. Me? I challenge all protocol, step on all opinions and customs. I impose my own rules on everything.”
He starts laughing even louder, and now a foul smell comes out of his wide opened mouth. Normally, Chairman Man never opens wide his mouth. When he speaks or laughs, he opens it just to the degree he has calculated. Everybody knows that Chairman Man never brushes his teeth, believing that the tiger has its strength because it never brushes its teeth. Maybe he thinks such mimicry will bring him saintly power, make him a champion like some strong wild animal. The only difference is that, usually, a tiger opens its mouth really wide when it yawns as well as when it roars, while Chairman Man acts in reverse. Is that some mysterious artifice that only he understands?
Ending his provocative laugh, the great helmsman from the north continues:
“The word ‘comrade’ is dead and dead with it are all those past formalities. Between you and I, what remains forever is the emperor of China and the vassal of Vietnam. A rock cannot turn into a blade, even if people call it so. Only idiots believe the magic trick that turns white paper into a dove. I thought you were smarter than that.”
“‘At seventy,’ our ancestors taught us, ‘if one is not yet blind or crippled, one does not boast of being good.’ Everyone can still make a mistake before standing in front of the grave.”
“Humility—whether it is sincere or fake—is only a game of those without talent or who have short necks and small throats. Throughout history did you ever see any powerful emperor who was reserved in front of his people? Maybe you would remind us of the Sage Kings Yao and Shun? Those two imaginary ghostly corpses were invented to comfort dirt-poor scholars. Yao and Shun—they are no different from communism. Just votive paper clothing that people burn to please the ghosts. Those alive can’t wear it. Just things to play with or to fool the people. As toys, they are not without purpose. Just as farmers use rakes in the paddies and sickles to cut the rice when ripe, we use these special tools to lure the people to where we want them to be and to force them to do what we want them to do. Communism is much better than Cao Cao’s plum orchard.”
“This I know well, because you called the soldiers ‘Red Army comrades’ when you needed them for the Long March. Then you called the farmers your ‘peasant comrades,’ ‘pillars of the revolution,’ ‘the future launchpad of the nation’ when you needed them out in the fields to shout, to chase away the birds like half madmen or wooden puppets…When you forced them to pull up the rice stalks and feed the pigs water buffalo manure, or abandon the rice fields to the wild and dig pits to make iron, they were sung as ‘the class of saintly peasants,’ as ‘humanity’s progressive force.’ With such a clever way and with such beautiful words, you carried out the most crazy and cruel games, games that no former lord or king had ever dared attempt. Those lessons I remember very clearly. Because we once followed you and we had to pay a price, though that price was less than the one your people had to pay.”
“The people? Just wooden pawns on history’s chessboard. Whatever they do must contribu
te to the game. When they are no longer useful, just throw them in the fire as kindling.”
“Yes, this I know. Millions of Red Army soldiers eventually became firewood when they no longer had a place in the game. Also, this same lesson I learned at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution up north, in your country. Many times has China’s history applied this slogan: ‘In military matters, it’s OK to sacrifice soldiers’; but with the scale of the Cultural Revolution, you will become the greatest gangster in that history book.”
“No brutality, no heroic greatness! Don’t you forget this.”
“I won’t forget. Maybe I lack the capacity. From my position, I would be terribly shocked to see our people eat corpses or fight each other over food…Sometimes I have doubts, I don’t have enough courage to believe what is happening right before my eyes. Don’t you know that the peasants in many Chinese cities are dying of starvation; that in those places, people eat grass like buffaloes and wild pigs; that families exchange the corpses of their loved ones so that they won’t eat those dear to them?”
“The race of humans is a race that eats its kind. This has occurred regularly in the history of mankind and of China. Have you forgotten the story of Wu Song, who inadvertently ate a dumpling filled with human meat?”
“No, I have not, but that story, I thought, happened thousands of years ago. And with people having struggled to make progress, they have left such savagery behind them. The border between man’s barbarism and civilization stands at the abolition of cannibalism and incest.”
“Really, you are a good student of some blue-eyed and high-nosed teacher. All kinds of reasoning can lead students by their noses. Me, I don’t believe in any kind of reasoning, other than what I create.”
“You exaggerate. It was thanks to Stalin’s support that you got your throne.”
“Did I get Stalin’s support or did I use him to build a throne for myself as, in the old days, Egyptian pharaohs used the slaves to build their pyramids? Either way, it’s true. It’s called the art of using one’s tongue here.”
“Chinese history has no lack of devious people. But you must be its most extraordinary example.”
“I don’t look backward; neither do I look forward. I am the only such animal on this planet. There is no second.”
“I agree. As far as cruelty and the degree of fooling around with the victims, you are tops. When you forced peasants to the fields to scream at the birds or to become amateur steelworkers, or when you indifferently look at them eating grass or each other, you unite those two traits into one.”
“I choose the jest of cruelty just as you choose the dramatized pain of a coward.”
“I am a coward and a drama queen, is that what you are saying?”
“Exactly! I will show you right now: any emperor from the East at all worthy of being an emperor would never cry up and down over leaving behind a little drop of blood. You know that I have scattered my seeds all over the land like peasants scatter rice husks at harvest time. I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember how many children were dropped along the roadsides. I have no duty to remember them. Others must take care of them. One thing is for sure, among those children, anyone who wants to betray me will get cut down quickly and firmly, just like when I cut down those with no blood ties who reach for power. Power cannot be harmonized with ordinary feelings of conscience.”
He sees the large face as if it inflates and darkens in seconds. Then it turns phosphorescent. The chairman’s small eyes squirt out dark green sparks:
“For sure our game will end. Then each can open his eyes wide to see…”
He doesn’t have time to open his mouth. Chairman Man has already gone.
He stares straight into space for a while, but the big man doesn’t return.
“The word ‘comrade’ is dead! And with it all the games of that past. There: Chairman Man said it openly. Whether one wanted it to end or not, the curtain had dropped. It was not unintentional that Balzac had named his novelistic productions ‘La Comédie humaine,’ the Human Comedy. But Chairman Man might be right when he said that power cannot be harmonized with conscience. Because a king has only the responsibility of protecting himself, his own governing power. Anything else is just grass to trample on.
“How can I treat like grass those on whose behalf I sacrificed my life? And her, too, her and her children; how can I treat those three lives like earthen graves along a road, or as rabbits dumped in a stew after I have looked them in the eyes? Can I ever imitate the great powerful one in the north?
“If I can’t do exactly as he does, I will be stuck between two cutting boards, power on one hand and feelings on the other. I will be crushed because of my entanglements.
“But it’s too late to change. Whether I like it or not, it has all happened. The wheel of time doesn’t roll in reverse.
“But the issue at hand is as in the beginning. But if…
“There must be no ‘if.’ With an ‘if,’ one can put Paris in a bottle.
“Man knows that there is no ‘if,’ but they still have to invent the word in searching for the truth, just as heaven gives us the opportunity to make choices.”
At this moment, he hears clearly a sad scream down in the depths of his heart: “If heaven gives me the power to start over again, I think I will never act like the powerful one up north.”
He understands that Chairman Man is Chairman Man while he is only who he is. None can change their character or their fate. All words of advice in life are worthless!
10
The sun up just enough to reveal faces, Vu and his wife, Van, take each other out along the streets, like a pair of lovers most intensely involved. She sits quietly behind as he quietly pedals, each absorbed in their own thoughts. The streets are still deserted, one sees only groups of newly recruited soldiers walking along inexorably, perhaps on their way to an assembly point. Half an hour later, the Red River dike rises up and blocks their view.
“Let’s get off here,” he says, and she nods in agreement.
They get off the bike and climb the Yen Phu slope, looking for a sidewalk teahouse where they can leave their bike, then quietly cross the dike to the cornfield. At that moment the sun shows its top on the other side of the Long Bien bridge, spreading its light in the shape of a fan. The cornfields are still wet with dew. Strings of dewdrops run down the sides of leaves, twinkling like strands of glass beads, as the leaves shimmy in the wind. This year the spring wind is blowing late, as if there were a campaign to change the color of the sky and the season of the wind. Bursts of wind run along the sides of the river, then all of a sudden whisper along the cornfields as if hesitating out of fear. Far off, a pack of sailboats reflects on the pink water, turning it silvery white. The sandy shore is so quiet that one can hear clearly from the boats the sounds of children fighting and of a fisherman coughing. A bent corn plant rubs his arm with all its dampness amid its roughness. He shivers lightly and turns to her:
“Careful, don’t get your clothes wet. It’s still a bit cold.”
“Yes, I know…”
Her response contains some unhappiness but he doesn’t pay any attention because he is busy watching the children on the other side of the river. There are more than a hundred of them, of elementary school age, every single one of them wearing a hat made of hay, with a backpack or a handbag. They cling to one another on a barge. Perhaps students of some school evacuated out here:
“If the planes come, where can they take shelter?”
He is fully aware that the shelters, whether personal or communal, have no real value other than that of a sedative drug. A pad of reinforced cement not bigger than a large bamboo tray covers the opening of a trench not deeper than eighty centimeters. It might shield you from grenade shrapnel, but how could it protect you from heavy bombs dropped from airplanes? But nevertheless people need the shelters to provide some sense of security. War is like a game. A terrible game in which the first victims are ordinary people like those ch
ildren across the river. Squinting his eyes to see better, he gazes at all the straw hats dotting the morning sunlight, the tiny backpacks and the handbags inside which he knew mothers had packed their own monthly food ration. They had to scrape together the last grains of sugar, save the last of the dry food to give their children a chance to survive at the far-distant destination; a high sacrifice for people living with privation. The endless suffering of a history bespattered with war. Is this the fate of his people? It’s like they are people who are skinned and then made to face tearing winds or searing flames.
He hears her warning and remembers that she is sitting next to him. They are out here so that they can talk more easily:
“Perhaps Elder Brother is right; this country is ours. Even if we want to deny it, we can’t. We belong to a people who have been skinned open, therefore we have to endure all the pain that comes to those who have been skinned; to each his or her own measure. Now we have to go back to our torment!”
Smiling, he says: “I let you go first.”
“No. You are the man.”
“In our time, man and woman are equal.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You did. Everything that happens in our household shows not only that you believe women are equal to men, but also that women can influence men with their feminine ways.”
The Zenith Page 12
