The Zenith

by Duong Thu Huong

  Quy hurriedly left recalling that this spinster worshipped even her bathing. People often said that if Vui needed to take a bath and anyone tried to interrupt her, she would go crazy and chase after them. Her bathwater was infused with pomelo leaves and peelings, lemon grass, jasmine flowers, and other herbs. They were mixed according to a fixed formula and boiled in a copper pot. When the water started to boil, the fragrance wafted around the neighborhood. Additionally, each time she bathed and shampooed her hair, she lit sandalwood incense so that the mysterious fragrance would penetrate her hair and skin; her bathing brought back to life the habits of royal women in olden times. Yet those palace women took such care of their bodies and their beauty in order to entice love from the king; what suitor was there for Miss Vui that she might pine for in secret? Either time or the demons would tell, not before.

  The chairman walked away but could not suppress his discontent: “This old maid respects no one.”

  He walked and fumed quietly, his face hot despite the cold air. He wanted to forget it, but couldn’t; he kept thinking about the curt way he had been dismissed, cowardly chased out of an “Old Maid’s” house like any neighbor who came to her door asking for some favor. The veins on Quy’s temples pulsated wildly.

  “She eats a mullet from the head, and thinks of shit as food. She is really irreverent. She forgets that it was I who first suggested to the subcommittee that she be made its chair. She’s the kind who forgets a favor. You can’t blame heaven for not finding her a husband!”

  He walked once all around the middle hamlet, greeting others by mechanically nodding his head without really knowing who it was he was greeting. His restlessness was burning inside him. At this hour, all his official responsibilities were done and all the rest of the New Year’s chores and family offerings were tasks for his wife. Quy’s mind was transfixed on only one image, one name, one green blouse, one shy smile, and they all belonged to a whore named Ngan!

  “A whore named Ngan, a whore named Ngan, a whore named Ngan!”

  He quietly cursed.

  Then, while so cursing to himself, he realized that he was cursing someone without having any proof. So, now the main thing for him remained how to prove that the whore named Ngan was “indeed a whore, one hundred percent a whore.”

  But, sad to say, to prove this point, he needed Vui’s help—that old maid who was unpredictable and irreverent. She was the one who could provide the proof. Just as a hungry cat must find a way to scratch the throat of a well-fed cat, so too with women. Forcing this old maid to scramble for clues about this well-bosomed whore would be the best plan. But even the best plans have flaws: Vui deserved her reputation for being capable but she was more conceited and disagreeable than anyone else. These thoughts took Quy to the familiar path returning to the upper section. Suddenly he realized that he was getting close to home. The cold wind during his walk had cooled his rage. At the end, he consoled himself:

  “Even if I am enraged to the point of bursting inside, I can’t do anything. Vui knows all the ins and outs of the story, not me. And this old maid will not listen. Well, if earth won’t give in to heaven, then heaven will have to give in to earth. I have to be flexible with her.”

  He crossed the entrance just as his two daughters carried the kumquat plant from the garden to the inside patio. Back in the kitchen, a pot of rice cakes boiled briskly, the appetizing smell spreading through the air. Here and there, the sounds of small firecrackers were heard around the hamlet. The feeling of the New Year approaching was starting to spread. Quy went inside the house, threw his leather jacket on the table, and lay down on the settee, stretching his legs. He closed his eyes and visualized what would happen tomorrow night: New Year’s Eve, the last night of this unfortunate year. The district opera troupe will arrive here to perform Thi Mau Will Go to the Temple. For sure, Mr. Quang and the whore Ngan would stay home and not attend. Their absence would be the best excuse for the villagers to gossip, and, at that moment, Vui would do her thing. Her trip must bring success to him. Tomorrow night would be the night of victory. He stroked his belly, inhaled deeply, and screamed:

  “Someone boil me a pot of cilantro water. I have not bathed for the whole week!”

  The district Public Works Committee always had three work teams on duty, under the supervision of three general contractors, usually known by the cute name of Managing Cadre Outside the District Organization. Mr. Quang was in charge of the masons and carpenters for the city. The second gentleman had a contingent from Ha Tay province. The third was in charge of the team from Phu Tho. Except for Mr. Quang’s team, the two others included many women and girls. These were adventuresome proletarians who had to seek food for themselves far away from their parents.

  If you are born in a city, you already know the difference between living in a city and living in the countryside. Such a difference can never be eliminated:

  “Being wealthy in the village does not equal being a squatter in the city.”

  Getting a bowl of rice in a village is extremely difficult; besides rice stalks, what is there that can turn into income? In half mountain and half paddy villages like Woodcutters’ Hamlet, cows, water buffalo, bees, and poultry can be raised. But in the lowlands, houses are small, the population is dense. Grass patches are narrow like a panel of a shirt, not large enough to feed buffalo to work the fields, let alone raise cattle. Life depends on the rice stalks, and such skinny stalks will not support many expenses, such as for salt and fish sauce, oil for lamps, gifts for New Year’s, funerals and weddings, taxes, clothing and jewelry, education and medicines for the children. Because of these realities, Mr. Quang’s work team had not a single woman, while the other two teams had many. These women were given a spiteful name: “Coolie Girls.”

  More concretely: “Nai Shop Guys and Coolie Girls.”

  Nai shops were found at the intersection where drivers coming and going from all over the Red River basin stopped to eat, bathe, or seek other needs in the dark. When there is demand, there must be supply, though the government intervenes in all manner of useless ways, even tearing them down sometimes. In the end the government had to permit the residents of the Nai street to erect a row of eateries, noodle shops, cheap boardinghouses, tea shops, fruit and cake stands, and other miscellaneous establishments. Nai Shop Guys were skilled in buying and selling. For a long while used to having money, they enjoyed taking pleasure with women and gambling. Anywhere a game of chance is found, there too are cheating, trickery, deals, and paybacks. In the eyes of ordinary people who lived lives of lawful order, those escapades of Nai Shop Guys that flounted heaven and pissed on earth, along with their bloody killings and stabbings, appeared as an epidemic, a terrifying pox pandemic that must be avoided at all costs.

  Second to the Nai Shop Guys were Coolie Girls from construction sites, peasants who had flown their cages, nicknamed “aspiring peasants” by sharp tongues in the city, or “crazies” by rural villagers who gave them suspicious stares. From those two unfriendly vantage points, those who yesterday had dirty legs and muddy hands from rice paddies or dry fields, but today bent their necks and shoulders to carry timber and bricks in construction sites, were grotesque and unrestrained.

  In the minds of villagers who are tied down to one home and one paddy field and who, for generations, have hidden behind one temple roof and a bamboo hedge a thousand years old, the lifestyle of men and women living together, the hustle and bustle of construction work, as well as constant moving from one place to another, deservedly places suspicion on their moral character:

  “Taking food from others, temporary quarters…vagabonds like traveling opera actors.”

  An unusual lifestyle, without repose, makes others half envious and half terrified. As things go, whatever differs from us, we first spit on. If you can’t remove it, you just throw stones to keep it away.

  Given these emotional responses, once they decide to leave, women from the countryside—with one shoulder burdened by heavy family debts and the
other with shame thrown at them by villagers—do grow adventurous. They intentionally taunt society, take on a careless air, respond in your face, believing that such reactions give them energy to stay strong.

  And so, Mr. Quang’s young wife had been one of those women—laying bricks, whitewashing, building—women who undertake the heavy labors that, usually, only men have the strength to accomplish.

  One morning Mr. Quang had been crossing a bare patch of land where a temporary fence made of wooden poles had been erected to create a barrier between two work teams—his and that from Ha Tay province. Suddenly he heard the striking laughter of girls. Surprised, he turned around. Seeing no one familiar, he continued walking straight ahead. At that instant, three or four girls called out repeatedly in the Ha Tay accent, which cannot be mistaken for any other:

  “Hey, mister…hey, you there!”

  “Hey, you—Mr. Good-looking Old Man—turn around, someone is calling you.”

  “Hey, good-looking old guy…turn around, a lady wants to talk to you. You, old man!”

  Inside, Mr. Quang was a bit annoyed, but he thought if he turned his back, they might think he was a coward, and the next time they would tease him in a worse way. He turned around and walked toward a group of silly girls, altogether more than ten of them sitting close to one another on top of some cement forms.

  “Here I am,” he said, looking at all the faces covered by scarves, only tiny eyes showing. “Here I am. Whoever wants to talk, please stand up. I am not used to squatting.”

  The group of women all turned to the girl with a green blouse, with a scarf over her face that was also green. Her eyes were no longer smiling but blinking with embarrassment:

  “Here I am. The very one that called you to turn around.”

  “Miss Ngan, please speak louder!”

  “She called you ‘the good-looking old man.’”

  Now she was totally spent, like boiled meat…

  At this point, Mr. Quang laughed. Looking at the girl with the green scarf, he discovered her breathtakingly beautiful eyes, a pair of eyes like he had never seen before. To put it in poetic form, they were “the eyes of a songstress.”

  No one said a word more. He felt the group of women was growing embarrassed, so he turned away.

  Two months later, after drinking with his workers, Mr. Quang returned to the boardinghouse in town. It was about midnight. Almost all the lights at the site were extinguished, except for some at the supply warehouse or at other vulnerable spots where burglars could enter. Mr. Quang shone his flashlight on the path through the site beaten down by the workers’ feet. Suddenly he heard the screaming of a woman behind a row of houses with finished brick walls that had not yet been plastered. The scream was from a woman from Ha Tay province:

  “Let me go! Oh my god!”

  “Oh my god! Save me!”

  He ran toward the cry for help. The flashlight shone on two fiercely fighting shadows. A woman’s hair was disheveled, her pants and blouse ripped open. A man, big and short like a bear, was wearing dark clothes. Throwing the flashlight to the side, Quang jumped forward and struck the man twice like a hammer right into his face:

  “Here’s for taking advantage of a woman! Here’s for raping this woman!”

  Another punch struck the man’s chin. Then Quang grabbed the man, and using all his bodily strength, slammed the attacker’s head against the wall, believing that this would be the finishing stroke.

  Indeed, it ended the fight as he had intended. The man slumped down, letting out a cry like a hurt wild animal. To make sure it was over, Quang added two more kicks. Seeing that the attacker had no hope of getting to his feet, Mr. Quang picked up his flashlight to shine it on the face of the one who would rape a woman. A panic immediately rushed through him like a lightning flash: it was the deputy chairman of the district public works office. He did not directly assign any work or set wages for the construction workers, but he was the trusted right hand of the person who had that authority. Because of this, he had been made deputy after only two years as a middle-level foreman so that the big boss could easily take advantage of him.

  In this dangerous situation, maybe because heaven guided and earth advised, or maybe at the prompting of a guardian angel, he acted wisely. Pulling out his loudspeaker still dangling on his neck like a talisman, Quang blew noisily and brought a sudden frenzy down on the quiet construction area like villagers running from the enemy in war. The sound of the loudspeaker spread from the workers’ camp to the area of the cadres supervising construction. After hearing the loud thumping of running steps coming closer and closer, he then turned to the woman who had been attacked:

  “Miss, stay put; do not run away, understand? Keep your torn clothing intact, keep the scene of the man struggling with you untouched. That is what happens, don’t be ashamed. You’ll get me in trouble if you leave now. Do you understand? If people ask what happened, just tell the truth.”

  “Yes, I understand,” the woman replied, and suddenly he recognized her vaguely familiar voice. But it wasn’t until all the lights at the site were turned on brightly that he realized that she was the girl in the green blouse, the one who had nicknamed him “the good-looking old man.” Yes, it was her. Thus, just like that, it seemed that fate united them.

  What happened next was nothing complicated. Once the bright lights came on, the sight of a bruised woman with torn clothes and a beaten man down on the ground with a freshly bloody face and the fly in his trousers open let the onlookers understand right away everything that had transpired. No need for too many opinions. After many years of struggling to make a living, Mr. Quang had learned the lesson well:

  “To protect the moral authority of the Party and the nation!”

  He knew that the situation could flip upside down like the turning of a hand, and he himself would become the sacrificed pawn in that new game. That was why he insisted that the supervising committee for the work site invite the police to come and make an investigative report. And immediately, he mobilized the workers to demand that the local authorities, the construction site supervisors, and the provincial labor union act as official witnesses. Even though it was night, representatives of these three organizations had to come and sign statements. Skilled in speaking, Mr. Quang simultaneously used the situation to announce in front of the crowd:

  “We take in wandering wives and daughters who have left their homes to seek a living on the land of others; we cannot allow them to be raped. If we don’t do our duty fully, people will spit in our faces. Today it’s a woman of Ha Tay, tomorrow it might be one from Phu Tho or from our own community. On everyone’s behalf, we insist that the government protect the innocent and punish the thugs. If those thugs infiltrate into the ranks of Party cadres, the government must punish them more severely.”

  “We are one with Mr. Quang!”

  The other two contract bosses agreed instantly, seeing their interests being protected under the circumstances. If the event had happened to them—since they were not like Mr. Quang, “one who went without food and spoke like wind, had a heart hard like cast iron, and tendons harder than steel”—they would ultimately have blamed the woman as “a whore who seduced a cadre” and they would have found a way to kick her out of the work site, the sooner the better. Therefore, hiding behind his back, they bravely repeated the same refrain:

  “We are totally of one mind with Mr. Quang. Public Works has the duty to protect its workers.”

  “To preserve the impeccable moral authority of the Party and the nation, we demand that the culprit be punished.”

  Like a tsunami, rage swept over those peasants who wore the garb of workers; their rancor thundering all over their tiny world. The disaster Miss Ngan had suffered might well be waiting for them one day. The humiliation that she had tasted could very well be the bitter gift their fates had reserved for them at some dark instant in their future. In the lives of those people with muddy feet and dirty hands, self-pity was like a stove that was always o
n, with its pilot light of hatred and incipient protest continuously burning. In such situations, feelings of solidarity arose simultaneously as their sense of humiliation was provoked. The men as well as the women saw in the tattered woman a reflection of their own pride, a mirror giving back their own destiny, reflecting back generations of meager lives struggling for existence. No wonder that, after the hard, sharp words from Mr. Quang, their anger exploded, like water rushing through when a dike is broken. A crowd surrounded the deputy head of the construction office, who now raised his head to look at everyone with dull eyes. They screamed; they cursed. They spat at him, they kicked his back. The administrative cadres as well as the head of the construction security unit all signed the report in the face of such worker anger. After that, there was no alternative but for the head of the office to discipline the offender by transferring him to supervise the rock-pile site at Yen Bai. Things transpired the way dominoes fall—one upon another. The head of Public Works seemed perplexed for several days, as if he did not want to understand what had happened. But then with his lazy habit of not thinking, he quickly recovered his ordinary rhythm. Besides, he didn’t need to worry himself too much, for there was no lack of willing brownnosers. One subordinate may fail but ten others will line up to take his place. Within two weeks he found another assistant administrator. The new flunky was smaller, handsomer, and worked harder.

  After this incident, Mr. Quang became famous, not only within Public Works but also all over the town, as a hero, a Prince Valiant come to life. Thus everybody was happy.

  When everything had returned to normal, the romance commenced. Ngan found a way to meet him at the inn, with a gift in one hand and two bottles of medicinal wine in the other.

  “Please, let me thank you, sir. If it hadn’t been for you, I would not have escaped that guy.”

  “It was nothing. I am a man; if I meet with injustice, I can’t ignore it. Others coming across such an immoral thing as that would certainly do as I did.”