The Zenith (66 page)

He ate the next dish—braised garlic eggplant—in the same quick manner. In his village, people were used to eating eggplant slightly pickled or deeply immersed in salt –a hand-me-down recipe for all poor farmers, not only in central Vietnam but also in the north. There is a saying that makes fun of stingy, wealthy men harshly using their prospective sons-in-law:

That meal had taught him that people could make something of this vegetable totally different from what he had known at home. The braised eggplant dish that evening had included crisp, deep-fried soft tofu, slightly burned cubed pork cutlets, and a bright red tomato sauce. In addition, there had been plenty of garlic, both fried and fresh.

As he later walked along his paths of destiny, he had eaten dishes from East and West, but nothing ever compared with the flavor of the braised eggplant by the woman in Phan Thiet.

“Mr. President, please start your meal before it gets cold.”

The group of soldiers who have done the cooking are still outside the window, still looking at him.

“I will eat now,” he replies, then mechanically picks up some braised eggplant. He smells the garlic, the grape and perilla leaves, the fried tofu, the grilled pork, the eggplant fried in lard. But these smells do not come close to the ones he knew before. They are only a faint reminder. His mouth does not water and the food tastes bland. His youth, too, is gone; gone, too, is a far horizon enticing him forward; gone, too, is his faith. And likewise the braised eggplant dish is no more. What is left before him, in an expensive gold-rimmed dish, is its ghost. A ghostly shadow of that evening meal a long time ago in Phan Thiet.

“Mr. President, is the eggplant dish I cooked OK or is it undersalted?”

“Good, very good. And the frying in lard was perfect, not too much, not too little,” he answers quickly, intentionally picking up some raw garlic and herbs to please the cook. The food sticks in his throat. He has to take some soup to wash it down. The cook still observes him attentively and respectfully.
He tries to finish the bowl of rice, sticks his chopsticks into the second dish, and nibbles on the red fried pumpkin blossoms before placing his chopsticks down.

“Please clear all this. The food is very good today but I am not feeling well. Maybe a headache. Your duty is successfully completed; I did my part poorly. Old age is something we cannot avoid.”

“Mr. President, you did not finish one third of your food.”

“When you reach my age, you will understand,” he says, making a gesture to pacify the group and to close the conversation. The on-duty doctor steps in to prepare his medications.

On the other side of the temple, the sounds of nonstop chanting can still be heard. There was no stopping for lunch. “How can they endure all their lives such a strict regimen and still stay healthy?” the president thought to himself. “If I am not mistaken the founder of this religion lived until his eighties. What strength nourishes them besides their faith?”

The sounds of the bells synchronizing with the chanting return him to reality. The congregation is praying for the soul of a father who had been assaulted by his own child. Is it performed genuinely with full regret by the guilty child or is it just for show? Further, if this father had not died abruptly by accident, and if he were alive with all the operative strengths of body and a clear mind, would the child still display heartfelt repentance?

“Alas, the answer already comes to mind given the arrangement of the ceremony.”

Suddenly, a curiosity arises in his mind: “When I die, will the cadres who betrayed me cry?”

He imagines those people in a group standing on the platform in Ba Dinh Square, with of course everything being as it must. Above their heads would be the flag at half-mast, his portrait surrounded by a black border, and so many heartfelt and powerful slogans, such as:

“From Generation to Generation We Mourn Our President, the Great Father of Our Mountains and Rivers,” “The President Will Forever Live in Our Hearts,” or, “The Country Survives; the People Survive. The Thoughts of Our President Are the Compass Showing Us All the Way.”

Perhaps all those beautiful words will be used to praise his public achievements. Beautiful words cost least of all; they call for lots of saliva but very little morality and intelligence. Besides words, there will be music, because, always, music has been an effective charm and hypnotic. Will they not look for both old and new songs to make the national funeral more
heart-wrenching? More tragic? Will they play the Sa Lech Chenh tune? Or the Nam Binh or Nam Ai song? The Ly Chieu Chieu or the Nghe Tinh marching style? Oh, what a country brimming with sad tunes to see people off to heaven. Suddenly he sees clearly before him events at their comedic best and so he imagines the delegation standing on the platform for his funeral, all using handkerchiefs to wipe away tears, real or fake.

“They will be forced to pretend that they are crying but in their hearts will rise the loud noise of teeth grinding: ‘Why did you wait so long to die, you hunchbacked old man? We wasted so much building the public edifice to speed your passing over to the other side but your stubborn will to live hung on until this minute. Too much to endure…’”

But they could also be crying real tears.

“Tears mixed with salt really will roll down from their eyes, because they will cry first of all over their fate. Because they know for sure that someday they, too, will go down to the grave, the last place for every human life. A place for gathering in—common to all—that none of us can miss. There, they will have to face me!”

That thought makes him shake his head, depressed. He quickly drinks a sip of tea because he fears the soldiers will notice his mood. They would think that he has lost his self-confidence, has become an old, enfeebled patient. Many times in the past he had passed on the streets of Paris old people who walked while talking or laughing to themselves. He thought: “Pity to watch the old ones.”

Now could such pity be directed his way? A muffled laugh rises in his thoughts: “If only I could laugh to myself and talk to myself as they did!…But—the worst thing is that I don’t even have that much freedom. Even worse, my memory is not fatigued from traveling over the years. It refuses to sink into the fog. It does not want to fade with age. The biggest punishment for a person is to have their old body house a sharp memory. Memory forces me to live in hell day after day. Memory is the one who builds you a permanent court of justice. Memory is the one at your side from whom you cannot run nor can you dare repudiate. Without our memories, would not life be lighter?”

He bends his head to continue drinking tea, looking at the yellow liquid that resembles the color of the curry he had eaten before he had left Guangzhou in China. The rest house at Guangzhou—a vacation that had been exactingly prepared like a contemporary over-the-top Broadway play. The whole time he had been there, the cook had made only Vietnamese and Chinese
dishes. For his last meal, the Chinese cook had gotten the idea of cooking Indian food for a treat, knowing that he was soon to leave. The meal had been good. Before getting on the helicopter he could still taste the flavor of curry mixed with oil in the rice. It made the color of the dish quite attractive: a smooth and shiny yellow, a color depicting warmth or happiness.

A military helicopter had taken him that night back to Hanoi. They had told him they had to use a helicopter to fly real low and so avoid the antiaircraft defenses. War often turns misjudgment into farce. To ensure his safety, they had been forced to use a ragged, obsolete piece of machinery.

The pilot had seemed nervous, even agitated. He wanted to say something but stopped. The president had looked at the soldier and immediately felt confident.

“I have ridden in carts drawn by buffalo. Riding in your plane is a luxury. Don’t worry.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot had replied, then sat down at the controls. The president’s four bodyguards had sat at each of the four corners as specified. The flight began. When the helicopter had risen up the necessary height over Guangzhou, it had shaken and bumped around like a buffalo cart rolling over crumbling mountain roads. The moving air around them was like many waves continuously dropping down, mixing in with the clouds. The night was ink black. He could see only a vast black space, with no moon or stars. And so they had flown in silence to the next zone. But once the helicopter had crossed the border, tracer antiaircraft rounds shot up, plowing narrow lines of red fire. Each time, those lines of fire had come closer. He knew that they had entered the no-fly zone defended by the antiaircraft units in the northeast area, from Lao Cai to Quang Ninh. The pilot brought the helicopter down under the red streaks made by the tracer bullets. His stress had caused his eyes to bulge out from his face and sweat to roll profusely down his nape, soaking the collar of his uniform. Sweat had also run down to his hands. The president still remembers the image of those hands, thick and firm, with hair on top and on the last knuckles of the fingers. He recalls fixating on those hands, as did his bodyguards. They had been unable to do anything but breathe anxiously and glue their eyes on the hands of the pilot. That had been the longest plane ride in his life. Each minute going by had been an anxious one—listening to the puffing sound of the old engine, waiting to see what would happen. The pilot and the four very young guards dared not say anything: he knew fear had turned them so stonily silent.

Finally, the pilot breathed a sigh of relief and showed him the Long Bien bridge. He tilted his head to look through the glass to see the familiar bridge
in the faded light of a city during wartime. Without turning his head backward, he said, “Inform the president: we will land in a few minutes.”

Hesitating a little, he had continued: “If nothing special happens.”

The president had replied, “If something special happens or not, one person is in charge. On this plane you are the pilot, not me.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot answered, eyes looking straight ahead. At that moment, the helicopter started to circle. The soldiers, who had just begun to relax, now again were afraid, and their worry contaminated the small cabin.

The plane circled a second time, then a third.

Silence weighed heavy in the air. Strangely, however, at that moment a calm suddenly came over him followed by a playful smile.

“Certainly, every game has to end. At least, the people will see the last scene of this play. Won’t that have some benefit?”

The pilot suddenly turned around and spoke: “Mr. President, the landing lights are placed in the wrong position.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, Mr. President, one hundred percent.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if we land based on the landing lights as positioned, the plane will fall right in the middle of Dinh Cong Lake.”

He was quiet; he could almost hear the wild beating in the chests of the four guards. After a few minutes, he asked, “Have you been flying for a while now?”

“Mr. President, not quite as long as some others but I know all the airports of the country like the palm of my hand,” he replied with the determined manner of one who is cautious and has a sense of responsibility.

The president was satisfied, because from the start he had trusted this person, a soldier among thousands whom he had met only for the first time. He smiled and said, “In the old days, great weavers wove in the dark. They only needed to hear the sound of the shuttle and the tempo of the thread bobbins to know what was going to happen. The palace selected outstanding weavers for the court using this criterion. We call such proficiency a test that challenges the skills of expertise. I find you are a good pilot. Therefore, just use your expertise.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot replied. He finished flying his fourth circumnavigation then began to set the helicopter down in the middle of a pitch-dark area. Suddenly, the guard on the president’s left grabbed his arm and squeezed, half in seeking comfort and half in wanting to protect him from
danger. The grabbing fingers—hard as nails—hurt him, but quietly he bore the pain. Then they heard the wheels touch ground.