And that hell has unmistakably arrived, no doubt this is true. But who can be courageous enough or contrite enough to dare open their eyes and look into it? He remembers the shock when, for the first time, he saw people queuing for their turn to buy food. His car had black windows and no one realized that he was inside. The car sped by but there had been enough time for him to see the common people. And that image of misery hit him like a hammer. That year, his heart was still humming joyfully the melody of “Forward to the Capital.” Two years had not been enough time to blur the glorious colors of victory or to cool the ardor in his veins. Busy with work, he did not have time for going incognito among the people. Whatever little time he had, he had spent it with her, but their rendezvouses were always after midnight, when all the activities of the common people were over. On that morning he had had an appointment with a foreign history professor. Because the subject of the meeting had to do with the national museum, he had suggested that they meet there. He had then asked his driver to choose a new route so that he could see something of the people’s lives. Since leaving the maquis, that was the very first time he had had an opportunity to observe the people’s activities. What he saw was not as pretty or as reassuring as he had expected. The masses appeared before his eyes — in person but fighting and in wild confusion — as if they were a herd of sheep contesting their way back to their pen. The faces that caught his eyes were thin, hunger-ravaged ones; faces dark and resigned, marked by patience and shame; faces in terror as they were repressed by fear, waiting, suffering, and hatred. Faces of people who were at the edge of going into institutions for the mentally infirm.
Repressing a sense of shock, he had tried to ask the driver naturally, “Does your family have to wait in line like that to buy rice?”
“Mr. President, we’re lucky to belong to the priority list. The government has rice and food items brought to our very office.”
“Who is in this privileged position?”
“All of us, Mr. President, who directly belong to the Administrative Office of the Central Management Committee of the Party. Besides those are the special offices belonging to exceptional ministries like the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense…and, above all, the Ministry of Trade and Food because that is precisely their preserve. Personnel belonging to those ministries are considered like the children of kings and lords in the old days.”
“And what makes one a child of kings and lords?”
“That expression, Mr. President, implies that they are entitled to the highest level of privileges. They have the same rice ration book as the rest of us but it’s for fragrant rice coming from the most recent crop; the common people, however, are reduced to eating moldy rice because the government sells them only rice that has been kept in storage bins for five or six crops. Likewise with pork: they take for themselves the best cuts, leaving the belly cuts, the lard, and the head of the pig to sell to the people. If you don’t belong to the privileged group, you have to put up with lots of shameful belittlement before you can get a piece of real meat — just as if you were someone condemned to quarry stone. My eldest brother works at the National Library; he is a leading cadre and therefore is entitled to buy five hundred grams of meat per month. Once a month, his wife has to get up at three in the morning to go get in line at the Hom market. Every time, though, she ends up with pieces of pig’s head or pork belly because those in the government store smuggle the good pieces to their own folk and to those government offices that have something to trade: for instance, stores selling rice or fabric, sugar and milk, or some other necessities. It’s only once they have satisfied these privileged exchanges that they look after the people.”
“How come the leading cadres of the government are not aware of this?”
The driver was at a loss as to what to say. He briefly eyed the president, both to guess what he meant and to check for some ulterior motive. Then the president realized that he had uttered an extremely stupid question.
“Maybe they know it but they haven’t had time to report it upstairs.”
He had answered his own question. And the driver was quick to respond.
“Yes, Mr. President, it must be so.”
That night, he sat watching the moon. His quandary made it impossible for him to sleep. It was a crescent moon, looking as deceptive as a rice stalk’s leaf, and reflecting no light. He looked at the moon and thought of the inevitable decline of everything.
“Life is an insistent, endless turning; a mulberry field can transform itself into a seashore, while people come from nothingness to return to nothingness. Why, then, am I so depressed? Is it because that dying moon is somehow secretly linked to the country’s destiny? And is it an omen for the collapse — sooner or later — of the regime, a finality that must come to pass?”
That thought felt like a sharp sword that an executioner had placed against his neck. Suddenly he felt a terrible chill run down his spine. In front of him once again there appeared a mass of thirsty and hungry people crowding in a shameful mass in front of a counter distributing rice. He saw arms raised, clawing and pushing at one another; eyes showing only the whites and necks stretched out toward the barred window with all the crazy focus of wild animals lunging after their prey in their gnawing hunger. God, these are his own compatriots, citizens in the society that he gave birth to; people for whom he had nurtured the dream of liberation. Was this an illusion or a reality? Could it be that all his efforts had been mistaken or that what he had dreamed of was only the reflection of a palace upon the waters of a phantom river? He asked but dared not answer. A terror enveloped his mind. The faces that he had seen that morning were like a herd of ill-treated animals tortured by lack of food, no more than beasts in a stall waiting for the hour when they could put their heads in the manger. For if people could still feel outrage, they must no doubt nurture hatred, waiting for the opportune moment to cut the heads off those who guarded the prison, those who kept them in this beastly life.
Alas, could it be that the regime that he had done his best to build was, in the end, no more than an immense sheep pen? Or was it, more correctly, a gigantic prison, one that kept people down at the lowest level of their material needs? A place over which the most extreme mass self-shaming ruled; a school for cows that they might lower themselves before clumps of grass; or worse, a school for training robbers and thieves, for educating disturbed or schizophrenic people? For no other conclusion was possible. And if there was no other explanation, the present society must then constitute an unimaginable regression, even when compared with the misery of years ago.
Oh, dear gods, how many people have sacrificed themselves, how much wealth has been expended and destroyed, how many ups and downs have his people endured, only to end up with this barbaric life? If that were the case, then this revolution was the most dicey of all life’s possible undertakings. And if that were the case, then his life must be accounted a tragic failure without equal.
Now in the Lan Vu temple, he feels goose bumps all over. Chills running down his spine are such that he cannot help but cry out loud, which brings the guards on duty and the doctor rushing in. He has to come up with an imagined physical pain so as to deceive them.
At the Politburo meeting that had followed his first glimpse of the people’s misery, he had asked that the economic policy be reversed so as to find a way to save the situation. He stressed the meaning of the word “happiness.” Liberation is meaningless if it does not make people happier. All revolutions are crazy and cruel games should they fail to bring freedom and a worthy life. It is the same with independence. Independence is valueless if the people of an independent country do not find themselves able to stand on their own two feet as far as the most essential necessities are concerned.