The Zenith

by Duong Thu Huong

  “Thank you, Big Uncle, for giving us food that’s filling and wine that’s ‘relaxing.’”

  The older brother-in-law began: “Now that we have finished eating, we have something to say.”

  The younger one cleared his throat to continue.

  The host smiled: “Please, be natural; it is said that when wine goes in, words go out! The elders said this, so it must be true to some extent.”

  “Nephew Quynh is at the maternal grandmother’s home, in pain, sad and confused. We don’t have to tell you why he left…”

  “You are mistaken, I have no idea why. But when that little twerp left home and dropped out of school, he could have had a hundred reasons. I don’t have time to guess what games they keep in their pockets.”

  “You, Big Uncle, have wined and dined out in the world for decades. We are just hicks who stick near our gardens and mountain. We dare not, but if we dared, we do not have sufficient skill to argue with you. But in reality, Quynh’s current situation is driving the whole clan crazy.”

  “The whole clan crazy? Are you serious or are you joking? But your clan or mine? That fact must be clear.”

  “The maternal clan, your wife’s clan. First is grandmother. Then, the two of us here. People say: if the father dies, there is the uncle; if the mother dies, the aunt will nurse.”

  “I understand that!” Mr Quang interjects, then laughs loudly.

  His laugh resonates through all five rooms, even in the kitchen. Ms. Tu and Miss Ngan strain their necks to listen.

  “So, when the mother dies, the aunt nurses; but the mother of Quy and Quynh did not have a younger sister, so the two of you must play that role. Excellent! I have never seen such a deep love being expressed. Now that you show such compassion, please do take care of Quynh. Thus you both can help me, taking some weight off my shoulders. Your nephew has good fortune, having both his paternal and maternal families for support. Having both sides, the left and the right, gives one a lucky fate as red as red sticky rice, and a fortune as firm as a fort. If you two can help him fully, the maternal family’s reputation will be so much better. I have raised him all these years; I think I have nothing to regret. Now, if, at sixteen, he wants to enjoy favors coming from the maternal side, it’s quite commonplace. Everyone in this life must have both father and mother, not to respect one and despise the other.”

  He turned to his three guests, his neighbors, and said: “Taking advantage of their presence, my neighbors can be witnesses: I hereby relinquish to both of you my parental rights. From now on, for Quynh, his schooling, food, and clothing, and then, in the future, his marriage, are all the responsibility of his grandmother and you two. Quynh will agree to this. And his mother in heaven will be very satisfied.”

  The two brothers-in-law did not even have an opportunity to reply when Mr. Quang called out to the kitchen:

  “We’re finished eating; if you have sweet porridge, bring it up.”

  “Right away, Big Uncle,” Ms. Tu replied. In less than a minute, a tray of sweet porridge was brought out; the six men continued with their dessert. Expecting a riposte from the brothers-in-law, the three neighbors ate with curiosity mixed with despair. But those two only bowed their heads, eating without looking up. The dessert was no longer sweet but bitter to their throats. Before the dessert was finished, Mr. Quang called for his wife to wrap cakes and candies as gifts for his former wife’s mother with such a smiling and natural manner that the brothers-in-law could only accept the package then run out into the street without being able to utter a good-bye.

  Left were the three neighbors and the host, drinking water while picking their teeth and chatting. Night in the deep woods is always more quiet than down in the lowlands. Mr. Quang turned on the Victrola to let the neighbors hear some music. In half an hour, some women and girls gleefully entered the patio, some waving flashlights, others carrying torches.

  “Mr. Quang, please turn it up louder; let us listen, too.”

  “Say, any candies from the city left? We came to get some sweets to go with our nightly chitchat.”

  “Where is the new mistress of the house? Please light the lamp so that we can all have some cheer.”

  The storm lamp, hung in the middle of the patio, lit up the whole house to the kitchen. Ms. Tu carried the pot of sweet porridge, big as a pot of rice soup during the Mid-Autumn Festival, to serve the guests in the communal way of eating: a basket of bowls and clean spoons was put on the table for all to serve themselves. When the pot was empty, Miss Ngan opened new boxes of cookies and candies. In the countryside, eating and drinking are a fixed custom, even when people are condescendingly reminded, “A bite bigger than your mouth can bring you down.”

  The following days took turns passing by like acts in a disingenuous drama where the actors and spectators disdain the parts they have to play. For certain, the actors were those whose feelings had been bruised. Chairman Quy was not accepting, as everyone had predicted. He had his hands on power. Like it or not, power is a force that can be witnessed but not touched. With his title of chairman, he could easily mobilize his direct subordinates like the head of police, the chair of the women’s unit, the secretary of the youth brigade, et cetera. Additionally, there was a nameless, shapeless, invisible power that everyone could feel and even smell: the force telling everyone how to live. Quy believed unequivocally in that force just as strongly as he trusted in the seal of the village government, two talismans that he held firmly in his fists.

  First, Quy had to ally with his youngest brother, because every struggle turns on force. The stronger the force, the quicker the victory. In this struggle, the most trusted allies have to be your close relatives. “Brothers are like arms and legs; husband and wife are like shirts you take on and off.” In the past, Quy and Quynh had not been close, partly because there was a big gap in their ages, partly because Quy had felt that his parents had favored their youngest son over him. And Quy ran the risk of not inheriting a large portion of the family assets if his naive and flirtatious brother was preferred. According to the common rule, a youngest child has a right to inherit if both parents agree and the oldest son has flawed abilities and attitudes, or has a congenital mental deficiency. The chairman does not feel threatened as to lack of ability, but that very clever mind of his might prove to be a double-edged sword when one’s capacities turn around to “kill their owner.” But now, the appearance of “a cheap broad from nowhere wearing a green blouse” provided an opportunity to test his youngest brother’s heart, to win him over and turn him into an effective right hand, something he had done with almost all of his opponents in Woodcutters’ Hamlet since he had become village chairman.

  As for Quynh, everything was the opposite. The youngest brother was spoiled, still at a romantic age and more concerned with having a good time than worrying about life. Sometimes, if he were asked, “Who will get the big house?” Quynh would smile and reply: “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all belong to my father.”

  They would probe a little more: “Do you mean to say that Mr. and Mrs. Quang do not plan to write a will?”

  He would turn red and retort: “My parents can still wrestle water buffalo; they don’t need to worry about a will.”

  After that, nobody could get a word out of his mouth. To be fair, Quynh was a good one, liking only to play and not work. From his birth until his mother’s death, Quynh had not thought about anything. Everything had been provided for him by others. Even when his mother had died on the roadside while he had been away, sleeping over at the neighboring hamlet, he was not like others who would have felt torn apart, with remorse so haunting that you can’t eat or sleep. But Quynh had not felt a bit shocked. When the family had scolded him, he felt sad for a few hours until mealtime, when with a full stomach his concerns would disappear. At night, he slept like a toddler; just like a three-year-old child. The relatives grew tired of talking, of complaining, to Mr. Quang, who only smiled and said:

  “Parents give birth to children, but heav
en gives them character! What can I do? In my family, only the twins are concerned about work and think about what comes first and what comes later. But they both enlisted on the same day.”

  Then Mr. Quang would sigh, sadness filling his eyes; only families with enlisted children would understand him.

  “During wartime, tears drop as a waterfall. Weeds grow in the gardens; no ferries cross the deserted river.”

  These couplets echo his thoughts:

  “My family situation is similar; the smart ones leave for war, the stupid and the awkward stay behind.”

  “It’s not just us! Everywhere it’s like that. The nation is the same for all. The war comes; the wind blows open every door.”

  People considered Mr. Quang to be a forgiving and easygoing father. They also concluded that Master Quynh was big but not wise; maybe not that frivolous, but surely not mature enough to know how to be frugal, how to meet family expectations and be polite in general. Especially in his schooling he had made his mother unhappy more than once.

  Thus, one could not understand why this awkward, heartless, and silly boy left his home the first day his young stepmother appeared. Perhaps this was the biggest question for the neighbors, and most of all for the chairman. He trundled down to the lower section to find out why. It didn’t take long to discover the reason. Just two days later, the village people knew that Master Quynh was in love with his stepmother. At the very moment Miss Ngan set foot in his home, the young man had been stricken by the blinding beauty of the young woman in the green blouse. In his mind he had thought she was the wife that heaven had sent him, because together he and Miss Ngan fit the golden formula for marriage, “a girl older by two; a boy by one,” a formula that had been tested for thousands of years. This dream had come in a wink and then had crumbled away the very next instant. The whole drama played out in the young man’s heart in less than half a day; from the morning when Mr. Quang’s horse carriage brought the new bride to the village to the disappearing of the sun, when Quynh had quietly left home for the lower hamlet.

  In the past, cases of sons falling in love with their fathers’ new brides were not rare. In such instances, usually the woman had been condemned for being “loose” or a whore—“those immoral ones who seduce both father and son.” Insulting the woman is so very easy; it satisfies the public mind, even when a majority are themselves women. And yet, in Quynh’s case, the villagers dared not fault “an immoral city whore who wants to sleep with both father and son.” First, because, even if Miss Ngan were “loose,” she had been in the community for only half a day with no time to practice her trade of seduction. Second, and this consideration was more important, Mr. Quang stood militantly by her side. Whether the thought was ever spoken or unspoken, everybody knew that this canny old man never feared anyone.

  That is why when the chairman put it about all over the village that his youngest brother, Quynh, was in love with Miss Ngan, the story took effect only with a handful of people who needed the hamlet seal on their official résumés or certificates of birth, marriage, and death. And even with these people, they dared to suck up only in order to get their way; afterward they avoided Quy.

  “Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business! Messing around will get your head broken.”

  The people in Woodcutters’ Hamlet told one another to sew up their lips with thread. But in life, everything that they “tell each other” or “keep to themselves” doesn’t really avoid or remove the reality. Like children who are afraid of ghosts but love to hear ghost stories or people who appear indifferent but actually burn inside with curiosity and resentment. Their self-restraint lasts no more than twenty-four hours. Then they would blurt out to each other precisely how many times the chairman had come to look for his youngest brother. They told one another everything, how in the end the oldest brother branded his youngest brother as “stupid, a lowlife, someone who would not eat rice, but only shit…”

  People said the youngest son was rather of a sweet and playful disposition, fearful of his father and ashamed at falling for his stepmother. Therefore when his oldest brother urged him on to do this or that, he only shook his head:

  “I will not do it. Heaven will kill me if I do that!”

  Therefore Quy’s stratagem to make an alliance completely failed. From then on, this existential struggle had only himself on the front lines.

  At that time, the old year drew to its last days; every household was preparing to celebrate a new year. This year, the Tet festivities would probably be lavish because the previous year had been so cold and devoid of any joyful feeling of celebration. Everybody was waiting for heaven’s reparations so that they could have an occasion to gather and be merry. The open ground at the tip of the upper section was cleaned up, holes were dug for poles in preparation for the flag contest. Next to the holes, people prepared for games of cock fighting and releasing doves. This year, the hamlet had a registration for buffalo fighting. Many people from the mountains would come down to attend. Even though Chairman Quy was burning from anger, he still had to go and get the opera group to perform on New Year’s Eve, because providing such spiritual refreshment was one of the important criteria that people used to evaluate the ability of hamlet officials. Two days before the New Year, early in the morning, the chairman asked Miss Vui to go to the district town with him to help organize the evening celebration. When there, he assigned the secretary to “investigate the background of that slut Ngan; everything else I’ll handle myself.”

  Thus, according to the formula that one stone can kill two birds, this expedition down the mountain was to take care of official business, as well as to settle a personal vendetta; it was indeed a well-perfected scheme.

  From the secretary’s viewpoint, she was complying with an order from her superiors, the hamlet chairman and the assistant chairman, as well as satisfying her curiosity as a spinster, which she had to conceal very tightly, in the elaborate manner that people use to put a top on a brine jar that has started to ferment. In such an excited mind-set, she did not hesitate to display all her skills, which she constantly used in the role of host. If one says “strong and daring due to wealth,” then she was indeed a more daring authority than many other women. Therefore, after bidding farewell to the chairman, she ran straight to the district public works compound, where Mr. Quang was one of the three most reputable supervisors of the cement workers and carpenters and where he had met Miss Ngan. Miss Vui believed that there all relevant connections could be uncovered.

  She was not wrong; in just half a day she had collected the whole romantic saga of the couple so far apart in age. At noon, she slipped some money into the pocket of a public works driver:

  “Comrade, may I get a ride to Ha Tay? I need to resolve an urgent family matter.”

  The driver reluctantly replied: “In principle, we are not allowed to let others ride in official vehicles.”

  After stating the official position, he slowly put his hand inside his pocket, his mouth puckered up to whistle. He carefully felt the envelope Miss Vui had slipped into the oversized pocket of his laborer’s shirt, to make sure. When the music stopped, he signaled to the assistant:

  “Get in the back, little twerp.”

  Immediately the little twerp ran toward the truck’s cargo platform. There he sat between stacks of cement bags and curing forms. It was not jinxing him to note that if there were a swerve or an accident, he would definitely be squashed like a roach under those gigantic wooden forms.

  When the assistant driver relaxed, he tied down a cloth cover, turned the truck around, and said to Miss Vui:

  “OK; if you have a family emergency, Comrade…get in.”

  Miss Vui climbed up into the front seat and sat comfortably next to the driver, a deeply dark-skinned fellow as skinny as a frog. With that kind of true bravado, she went all the way to Khoai Hamlet, in Hung My village, Ha Tay province, to discover once and for all the nest of dragonflies.

  That night Chairman Quy retur
ned to the village, while Miss Vui spent the night as a faraway guest in order to complete the mission that the chairman had assigned to her. She returned home in the early evening of the twenty-ninth day of the last month of the year that was about to end, her face beaming like a flower, on her shoulder a sack full of New Year’s toys and treats. Chairman Quy stood to welcome her at the entrance to the middle section:

  “So?”

  “In good time. Take it easy.”

  “Aren’t you cocky today.”

  “Not cocky, but the money for transportation and the inn is worth a ton of rice, dear friend.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Never in my life have I taken any reimbursement,” she replied with the tight tone of someone who always has a full purse. Quy wanted to help her carry the sack of New Year’s goodies into the house, but suddenly realized that it would be silly; if someone saw him, they would laugh in his face. Therefore he quietly followed the woman. Clearly detecting the excitement on Quy’s face, Vui cried out:

  “Go home. We can keep the story for a couple of days without spoiling it. It’s almost New Year’s Eve. I have to clean and straighten up my house; get the altar ready for the offering. Besides, I have to boil some water to bathe, too. Two days on the road, living in inns; I am dirty and itch like crazy, with black dust in my nostrils. My hair feels full of sawdust.”

  “OK. I am leaving, then. Are you going to the opera performance tomorrow?”

  “Of course. It happens only once a year. Who would be dumb enough to miss it?”