The Zenith (33 page)

“You bastard! Why do you have such a toxic mouth? You wish me misfortune like the teacher in Khoai Hamlet, don’t you?”

“I don’t wish you any such misery as that. But if you worry about what might come from afar, you can avoid misfortunes closer at hand.”

When Miss Ngan’s fetus was just into its fourth month, though it was already rather late, her school gave her a letter of introduction to the district clinic, asking that the fetus be removed due to an “accident of morality.” Ngan’s mother took her to the clinic at night; each covered her face with a cloth, showing only her eyes with a hat pulled down to the eyebrows. Ngan’s father announced publicly that she had been disowned and banished from the family, telling his wife, “It would have been better if she had put a knife to my heart rather than put me in this situation. From this day on, under this roof, if she is here, then I am not, and vice versa. It’s up to you to choose.”

His wife dared not choose, because both the husband and child were immediate
family. After taking Ngan to the clinic to have the fetus scraped out, she turned her daughter over to her own mother. There, Ngan lived with her uncle and aunt and her maternal grandmother. A year later, Ngan’s uncle, a skilled mason, found her a job as a painter for Public Works.

When Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan decided to unite their lives, they planned to legalize their life as a couple. In her family situation, Miss Ngan did not want a lavish wedding as others do. First, she did not want to stir up waters that were settling. The wound to her father was surely not yet healed. Hamlet people still talked about the goings on when he had left his class and rice fields for a month, how he had smashed all his tools with which to harvest and fish in the river. Night after night, he walked like a madman along hamlet paths, sometimes tilting his neck and howling like a wolf calling for his pack. His uncle, the village chairman, had to pay money to bring a doctor down from the provincial capital to give him a shot. Everyone believed that, sooner or later, he would pack up a sack and enter an asylum. Thanks to the good karma coming down from his ancestors and the skill of the provincial doctor, he seemed to recover his senses, but still, once in a while, he used incomprehensible gestures or words. The daughter had indeed been the glorious dream of the father. That dream had shattered like a mirror smashed into small pieces. The hamlet teacher did not want to accept that painful reality. He found ways to erase all traces of time past, when the dream had been alive. Anything connected with Ngan, he removed to burn or throw into the river: all the beautiful photos that once hung everywhere in the house, her trunks of clothes, her sewing kit from when she had taken home economics, the cloth dolls she had made herself, all her school notebooks.

Mr. Quang had been a father. He understood how wounded pride could drive a person to one kind of hell or another. All these years of struggling here and there in so many places, pushing along so many strange roads, had taught him how to be emphatic and patient. His fortunate happiness must in the end run up against a challenge. He would be the one to carry the burden and not Miss Ngan. After much reflection, he decided to ask Ngan’s uncle to invite her mother to the construction site for a visit. On the first night, the girl’s mother heard how she had come to fall in love with a man forty-three years her elder but appearing as an ancient hero reborn to protect and save her. On the second day, Miss Ngan took her mom to town to buy for the family all those things that make people’s eyes brighten like streetlights. On the third day was the official meal between the girl’s mother and the future
son-in-law, who was twenty-four years older than she. Then was discovered a coincidence that increased the awkwardness on both sides: Ngan’s father had been born in the same month and year as Mr. Quang’s oldest son, Quy; only the day of birth was different.

Ngan’s mother was a practical person. She understood that her daughter had missed her main chance and could never recover that lost opportunity. It must be her destiny that she could only find happiness with older men. No one can defy heaven’s rules and regulations. From Teacher Tuong to Mr. Quang, her life’s plan could be found drawn in the lines on the palms of her hands. Ngan’s mother sighed deeply but accepted everything she couldn’t change. Besides, for residents of Khoai Hamlet, material goods were held in very high regard. Ngan’s future husband would well provide her with the material side of life. And that was the compensation provided her by destiny.

On the fourth day, her mother returned to her hamlet with two heavy trunks. She did not say anything to her husband about her visit to their daughter; she quietly put things away and said:

“In a few days the uncle of that Ngan will bring workers here to build a house. Down there, he has saved quite a bit of money.”

“I told you: don’t ever remind me of her name to my face.”

“Oh, I forgot. From now on I only talk about her uncle. Next month he will help us fix the house.”

“Do whatever you want. This house is always under your authority,” the teacher replied slowly, and with his hand behind his back, went out.

Two weeks later, her brother brought a group of eight workers to Khoai Hamlet. With them came three truckloads of timber, bricks, cement, and other supplies. The villagers gathered to observe, just like children who run out to look at the turning shadow lamps during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Khoai Hamlet had never had a tiled roof. Throughout the hamlet there was only one style of roof: thatched with straw or leaves. Walls were made of the sides of vats, broken little ones bought from the next hamlet. The Khoai people were used to the odd looks of houses built with rejected materials. But if a wandering adventuresome guest ever stopped there, he would be startled with fright at the sight of walls that were twisted, with bumps, sometimes extended like a big belly, sometimes deflated like the inner cavity of a ball. Such houses evoke in one a fearful hesitation. With their odd forms, they look like caves for bears, horses, or tigers, but not houses intended for humans. For that reason, houses that were straight, pretty, with red roofs, was the ultimate aspiration of people there. Therefore,
it is easily understood why people crowded around to see the trucks bringing all the materials and the city workers down to the hamlet, just like visitors to a museum.

The construction work went forward in haste. The uncle stayed to supervise it personally. The two-story house emerged as if from a fairy tale. It was beyond what people could imagine. After her house was finished, the teacher’s wife had the courtesy to give to the husband’s uncle, also the current village chairman, half of a truckload of leftover bricks and cement.

The day the new house was inaugurated, the teacher’s wife prepared a twenty-tray banquet for all the relatives. Even though they had been invited, people in Khoai Hamlet were mad because a fairy tale had become real. Why should it come true for an absentminded instructor and not for them? Therefore, they tried really hard to find the truth.

The investigation was not all that difficult because the eight guys who worked on the house had enough time to glance at the hamlet girls and so become smitten with their beauty. Among the workers, two were still single. These two recognized right away the beauty of the girls in a poor village, far away, at the end of a river and at the foot of a mountain. Both decided to conquer, to follow “the old man’s footsteps, the good-looking old man named Quang.” A few meals with wine in a house with some pretty ones was enough for the two guys to spill all the secrets about the love affair between “Miss Ngan and Mr. Quang.” In the end, people were reassured in finding the fairy wand, the wand that transforms all the frogs into pairs of exquisite shoes.

A couple of weeks after the finishing and inauguration of the new house, it was rumored that Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan would come back to the village to register their marriage. If that were to happen, for sure the village chairman would have to perform the procedure personally. As for witnesses, it could not have been anyone but the bride’s mother and her younger brother. Everything went quietly and extremely quickly, so no one outside the event knew anything. Moreover, the village chairman never opened his mouth to say even half a word about it. People could only speculate as they saw the new couple walk to a car waiting for them on the other side of the river to return to the city. Seeing them off were her mother and uncle. Smiling, the village chairman waved his hands together in front of his chest. Miss Ngan cried before getting into the car. She looked a couple of times at the old hamlet, the river, the fields…her birthplace, a place of penetrating pain, a place to which she will never return.

The New Year’s Eve drinking party at Miss Vui’s went past midnight. Firecrackers exploded in all directions but the group of people who were drunk with talking still lifted their cups up and down:

“Is it midnight already? We enjoy talking so much we forget our way home.”

“Not only is nothing amiss, we are able to taste the best rice wine. We have to admit that Miss Vui’s skill deserves respect. She learned secrets from the parents of Mr. Do. The same yeast, the same glutinous rice, but the rice wine made by this family is smoother than mine.”

“Not only do we have good wine, we also have good tea and great stories, too! Hey, Miss Vui, I thought that you were only good at doing things; I had no idea you are good at talking, too. You should be in teaching.”

“I dare not, you are too kind! I just told you exactly what I heard about Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan, nothing added or subtracted.”

“Telling it as it is also requires the tongue to move into the words. There is no lack of people who understand everything quite well but who cannot make any sense when they talk.”

“Well, you guys are just complimenting a prince to his face. She is the secretary of the subcommittee; naturally she must know how to talk.”

“The subcommittee secretary only knows how to publicize formal decisions, play up accomplishments, or announce rules, how could she know how to describe the highs and lows of serious feelings and situations?”

“That is true. It’s very clear that Miss Vui has a talent for storytelling. But one has to admit that this couple’s romance is quite interesting.”

“You are right. Mr. Quang’s love story is quite something. This year is really fun! Because each year we have only one opera. This year we have two. Miss hostess, more wine, please…”

“That’s right. Vui, the story you told was splendid. It was worth a thousand times more than your two banquet trays.”

The hostess brings out two more bottles of rice wine. Whether or not the compliments of the guests are true, her cheeks are bright red, her eyes are shining, and clearly she looks a hundred times prettier than usual. The men continue to pour wine, but the women suddenly stand up:

“That’s enough, it’s the New Year and you eat like monsters, worse than those who went hungry in 1945.”

“What? Let the men be themselves. If on the New Year you have many guests come to eat at your house, in January your business will prosper.”

“Each river has its banks, any garden small or large has its fences. Every banquet will eventually end. Let’s go and let the hostess rest.”

“Let’s go. I am very anxious.”

The men may have had firm dispositions, but, in the end, they had to understand that when the women speak up it means the hour has come. One fellow poured a final cup of wine down his throat and then said, “OK, gentlemen, let’s empty our cups and get going. There is an old saying: ‘A man’s order does not equal a woman’s heft.’ People nowadays add: ‘Wife comes first, then heaven.’ OK, we must look around at the people and follow them.”

“You are really henpecked!”

“I am indeed henpecked, I yield to you to hold your head high. Who else is henpecked like me?”

“Me.”

“Me too.”

“Me also…”

The women clapped their hands in praise, while laughing wildly when they saw their husbands unsteadily stand up. At the end only two unhenpecked husbands were left. They looked left and right and realized that all those around them had stood up, so they were compelled to put their cups down: