The Zenith (74 page)

“If he has been determined to have been eaten by a tiger, then how can he come back and live under another name? Especially when two rifles have been abandoned. Do you think, Comrade, that an escapee can throw away his rifle and survive in the woods with only his bare hands when in front of him are both wild animals and the enemy?”

An gets the feeling that his division commander does not believe what
the Meo is telling him and that he is trying his best to lead him toward another explanation.

In hesitation, Ma Ly mumbles for a while but then speaks in a most decisive way: “I know. What you said makes sense. But I cannot be mistaken, since Chi Van Thanh also recognized me. He even told me not to call him by his old name, that he had been pursued and that he had changed his name and family name.”

Suddenly, whistlings and passionate shouts echo all over the woods:

“Bravo, bravo…”

“Encore; one more dance…”

“Once more! Hurray…Once more, please!”

“Once more! Please do it again.”

An is sure that the Cham Rong dance must have just been performed, the dance of spring, the dance of love, of festivals and of aspirations. He imagines the crowd’s excited faces under the headlights. At the same time, an idea comes into his mind:

“Dear commander, you and I have no enmity or hatred, we don’t have any unhappy memories of each other. You have been like a generous brother to me but right now I have no choice. Please pardon me.”

An points his gun at Ma Ly’s back, aiming at a span and a half below his left shoulder, and pulls the trigger. An explosion. Surely the Meo’s heart must be a mess. Moving his gun half a millimeter to the left, he shoots two bullets into the other, much larger, man. The whole thing happens in a blink. Both bodies fall forward almost at the same time, in the same direction.

An lowers the gun and puts it down at the foot of a familiar tree, where he used to sit by himself in the afternoon. The reflection of the fireflies in the water on the other side of the stream and the uncertain light of the phosphorescent balls under the tree bushes are all he needs to find everything. After hiding the gun, An walks toward the two corpses, which are piled one on top of the other. Both corpses are warm. First he carefully takes the pants of each man so that the blood from their chests does not smear their pants. The he picks up their weapons and flashlights, their cigarette packs and lighters, the nail cutters in their shirt pockets, notebooks and pens, and stacks everything on the grass. Then he takes off their shoes and socks. Figuring that all has been taken care of, he carries the Meo upstream to Roaring Elephant Falls.

Stopping to breathe a bit, he then throws Ma Ly’s body down the falls. He hears the corpse drop into the water and watches as the black body is carried violently downstream. Coming back, An tries to pick up the division commander. He is very heavy. Finally he gets the sturdy body over his shoulder and walks step by slow step to the falls, where he puts the corpse down on the bank. He then pulls from his pants pocket a parachute string and ties one of his legs to a nearby tree. Gathering all his strength, he picks up the corpse and throws it down the cascade. The momentum from his throw makes him fall after it, but the string stops him. An then jumps up and unties the string, then goes back downstream, where he immerses himself in the icy water to get the blood out of his clothes. He then picks up the flashlight and submachine gun, intending to go back to the underground chamber. But as he looks up, suddenly he hears running feet and glimpses a dark silhouette disappearing among the black trees. Though he does not get a clear look, it is for sure a living creature, not some ghost.

“Was someone watching me?” he thinks to himself, immediately going in pursuit of the dark shape.

Whatever made the noise might as well have been a fox or some other animal. It disappeared in a flash, leaving no trace, as if it had blended in the woods. Nonetheless, An tries to follow, pursuing it all the way to the edge of the forest, where finally he stops. Though the prey he was after might be human or a ghost, or even a fox, he lets it escape. To follow any farther would put him in danger of getting caught with the trappings of a murderer, wet from head to toe.

“Well, I will take care of you later,” he resolves, and proceeds back to the underground chamber. Luckily for him, the quarters are totally deserted. Hanging his wet clothes on the drying rack, An stands there a moment looking at the fire in the brazier lit to dry clothes in the damp underground chamber, feeling at once sad and indifferent. He feels like sleeping. But, that being impossible, he puts on fresh clothes and goes back to the clearing, joins his unit, and quietly hides himself behind his troops as the performance continues.

After about ten minutes, he puts a hand on the shoulder of the fellow in front of him:

“Having a good time?”

Taken aback, the fellow turns around and looks at him.

“Where did you go, Chief, to be here only now?”

“Commander Nha told me to go with him and take a nap in the underground chamber. I overslept.”

“You missed half of the evening already, you know.”

“So be it…But at least I had a good rest. Besides, being ten years older than you, I no longer yearn as much as you do for the pretty girls. Isn’t that right?”

The soldier laughs heartily. “To that question I have no answer.”

“Go ahead, enjoy the show, lest you lose out on the fun,” An replies, putting a sudden end to the conversation. He then uses his right hand to squeeze a vital spot on his left shoulder. Only now does he feel his whole body aching after the strenuous and tense episode he has just passed through. His eyelids start to weigh heavily like lead and it begins to seem as if they will no longer obey the will of their owner.

“I can’t sleep now,” An thinks to himself. “I have no right to do so. Having just declared to everybody that I got a good nap with the battalion commander, I cannot have a reason for napping some more.”

But, starting to yawn, he pulls out his pack of cigarettes and lights one of them. As soon as the smoke spreads, five or six heads turn around, greedily looking to share in a smoke. Arms spread toward him:

“Me first, Commander. I had my hand up first.”

“Liar, I was the one to raise my hand first. Sitting where you are in front, how could you smell the smoke before anyone else?”

“I am third. Please do not forget me.”

“How about me? Is not an old soldier entitled to a smoke?”

“I thought you all were fixated on the show,” An replies. “That’s why I dared open my pack of cigarettes…You all certainly have keen noses.”

The cigarette then passes from hand to hand through the ranks with its butt burning bright then dimming then burning again. In the end it disappears even as more hands are raised in expectation. An looks up to the stage but in his ear he can still hear the thud and the gurgling sound of the water when the body of the division commander was thrown in.

“He certainly was a strong man. He must have been an authoritarian father to his children and an exhausting husband in bed. People from maritime provinces consume lots of fish, so they are born potent, needing no bear or tiger paste. His heart was really pumping blood. It spurted out like water from a sprinkler.”

So thinking, An instinctively put his hand on his neck to ascertain whether he was entirely free of the commander’s blood. On the way toward the waterfall, blood from the commander’s corpse kept flowing out, gooey and warm, soaking the base of his neck and then flowing past his chest, his navel, all the way down to his pubic hair, making him feel extremely
uncomfortable. It had then split into two streams flowing down the interior of his thighs, feeling a bit sticky like a sauce coming from a stew pot. It made a very strong impression—an unforgettable one. The blood felt like a kind of thick tree sap but it was warm and gave a slightly fishy smell. All of a sudden, An feels his limbs go weak. A hatred rises up and becomes a whisper in his heart:

“Why couldn’t you just shut up, you damn Meo? I didn’t do you any personal harm. Besides, you have no idea why I had to flee my home province. How can you understand the pain of someone forced to leave his homeland? What dark wind blew in your direction so that you dumbly listened to others? What wicked black veil covered your eyes so that you looked on me blinded by such a poisonous thought?”

Onstage, they are performing a short piece of
cheo
theater from the traditional ethnic Vietnamese playlist. The piece is called
Xuy Van Gia Dai
(Xuy Van Feigning Madness). An cannot recall any of the details of the story, only that it is about a woman betrayed in love who has gone mad. The actress onstage wears a bright red skirt the color of kapok flowers with a white magnolia flower in her hair. Her confused movements and her beautiful, thoroughly sober look don’t seem to go together at all. Her singing is mournful, imbued with authentic melancholy, but at the same time quite alluring. To An, it isn’t the singing of a madwoman, but rather that of a female bird calling for her male companion.

“Male and female birds call to each other in the spring, coo throughout the summer, make love throughout the fall, and take turns brooding their eggs over the winter. Those are the happy birds. Only we suffer. Now we can never call to each other or carry out a courtship with our words and songs. We can no longer make love and never will we have children to cuddle and nurture like little birds that are taken care of by their parents.”

As these thoughts slowly pass through his mind, they cut like a knife heated hot in a furnace and now applied to his skin and flesh. He can almost feel his skin and flesh sizzling under that horrible knife. He misses her, the pretty wife he had. His first love but also his last. The one and only woman in his life. Fused with his flesh for sixteen full years, she will live forever in his soul.

“Dong, where are you now? My lover, please ride the wind and the trees, please borrow the voice of birds and beasts to give me an answer. Where are you? And where is your little sister?”

Dong and An had become lovers at the age of fifteen. But they had known each other since they could barely walk. They had been the closest neighbors,
their houses separated only by a mountain slope. Both their mothers had become pregnant in the same year, and had given birth to each of them in the same moon, her at the beginning and him at the end. The following month, the two families agreed to take the full-moon day to celebrate the first full month of both children. The mountain village people had gone to her home to kill a cow and celebrate at noon, and in the evening they had come to his family’s house to roast a pig, boil chickens, and have a feast. The festivities went on until very late and everyone stayed the night, not returning to their homes until the next day.

The immense flank of the mountain had been their playground during childhood. It was where she would follow him into the bushes to find ripe fruit, catch May bugs and ladybugs, or dig up cricket holes. When they were five, he had taken her on their first adventure, leaving the familiar hill to go look for the springs that brought water to the village, then up the mountain to where one could hear the sporadic songs of the nightingales. In the winter of that year, a pharyngeal epidemic had spread throughout the district. Xiu Village was lost in an isolated, faraway valley yet it, too, could not avoid the common plague. Since then An had been an orphan. His father had died one day, and the next, his mother also passed away from an epidemic that killed mostly young ones. His parents were its only adult victims. What had been odd was that he was living in the same home yet he stayed in splendid health. His parents and the young dead had to be collected, put on the same pyre, and buried together in a corner of the valley so as to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

The saying used to go, “With father gone, there’s still the uncle / With mother dead, the aunt will still give suck.” That was all one needed in a traditional Nong clan. After the funeral, An’s uncle and aunt sold their house to a neighbor and moved into his parents’ house on stilts so that they could take care of their nephew. At the time they had been a young couple. Not until four years later, when he turned nine years old, did they have an only child, a girl called Nang My. There had been nothing to set off one child from the other and they loved each other as if they had come from the same parents. Nang My had been born the same year as Dong’s younger sister, called intimately “Little One,” and thus, in their case also, those two girls—niece and aunt—had become fast friends from the time they were toddlers. At the age of seventeen, his uncle and aunt had married him to Dong. After the wedding, seeing that her father was by himself, they had been allowed to go and live in the house on stilts on the other side of the mountain. It had been a marriage made in heaven, as it was like a series of honeymoons. Or
better yet, one unending honeymoon. Two weeks after the wedding, he had gone down to That Khe district town to continue his studies. Once a month, the lovers had been allowed to be together. At that time, the district school did not have enough students, so the program dragged along. For that reason, it took him more than ten years to complete his secondary schooling. At the graduation ceremony that year, he, Nong Van Thanh, was the only Tay to graduate—the pride of Xiu Village, who had achieved a dream shared by all prominent Tay families.