No one had contradicted him.
But no one had listened to him either, even though all thirteen of them (including himself) sat around a huge table. He understood this as he had looked at their inattentive eyes, at their fingers as they indefatigably flicked the ashes from them. Yesterday, they had still been comrades fighting for an ideal. Now they were sitting there thinking of other schemes. The war of yesterday was over. Today was when the generals divided up the war booty in the palace. Yesterday in the woods they had all received the usual portions of rice and water from the springs, there being nothing to envy or to scheme for. Today, things were different. The social rank of each one sitting there needed to be accompanied by thousands of measurable and immeasurable rights. They were no longer concerned with the things that concerned him, because personal interests are always closest to us and seduce us the most effectively. The things that bothered him that day, to them had become tasteless or even incomprehensible. A whole machine was now serving their own persons or their families irrespective of time or limitations. They lived absolutely in accordance with the golden principle of communism. And that golden principle was meant for only one group of people and excluded the rest of the nation, a nation of sheep and cows that were jostling with one another, waiting to be let out onto the grass.
He had repeated what he had to say twice, three times. No one had objected. No one had responded either. No one had felt the need to dispute his ideas. Then came a break for refreshments, after which another topic had come up, which had more real, more concrete urgency, than the shame and suffering of the people. For other people’s suffering is always immaterial and difficult to internalize, and the suffering of the people is even fuzzier and harder to feel. For the people are very abstract, formless, having no feet with which to run, no wings with which to fly, not even beaks with which to sing. Independence was then no longer the great aspiration of a slavish and suffering nation, it had become a concrete war booty, somewhat like a boar that has been brought down by the lance of a hunter. With such meat, there is only enough for those who know how to handle spears and halberds; as for the masses who stand apart, they are merely bystanders or gossips. When necessary, he had realized, people can easily become deaf and dumb. Likewise, they can easily become heartless. Yes, those who crowded around him, who had divided up the meat of the freshly killed boar…they had become estranged from him. And he had become difficult for them to understand. The continent had ruptured; he stood on one side and they on the other. That had been the first time he had understood the breakup of relationships among those who had once called one another “Comrade” or even “Brother,” associations that had been woven over decades or even longer. The cutting asunder could happen in a moment once the sword of power had been brought down. Before that blade, all past associations, simply, would be fragile spiderwebs.
“I should have understood this since then. I should have changed my game after that day. But I was not fast enough, so now I am washed away in floodwaters.
“Oh, they are much too many while I am one, by myself. It’s terrible to think that I consented to go along with them, believing that compromise would save the great work. I thought that, if I sacrificed for them, then — out of respect for what was greatly righteous — they would forget their personal ambitions. That was my stupidity. The chess game moved toward mate. They took advantage of that compromise to push me into the back rooms.
“But where does it lie, the root of my failure? Was it my stupidity or was it only fate’s twisted road? I journeyed in the same ship with them but when we reached the other side of the ocean, how could it be that only I was left behind on a forsaken island? Could it be that I am fated to be a lone wolf that can’t survive long in any gathering?”
Was it fate or wasn’t it?
These questions go around and around unceasingly in his head. His old, tired heart palpitates.
The clouds still roll unceasingly on top of Lan Vu Mountain. The snowy season of Paris and reflections of a youth long past also float by. His brain is racked by suspicions. Then his melancholy heart suddenly turns back to a Western city, a place known forever as one for love and short-lived love affairs. Only his soul remains behind like an orphan left on a deserted beach after the noisy days of a summer with lots of visitors. Paris! Strange that after leaving it, he had looked back as if it were no more than an inn; yet now that city appears in his heart as a port of last resort, very much inviting to a traveler. He misses an absent child because, after he left the apartment in the alley right next to Rue St-Jean, a baby girl had seen the day. A baby girl with a name extremely popular in France — Louise. He did not suspect that the nights spent with the seamstress had left a forbidden fruit. It was dumb negligence on his part. It was not until seven years later, on a chance encounter with the mother, that he had learned of this. He realized that it was simply the unexpected result of bodily urges. Nonetheless, the child still carries his blood, his very own blood. He had always meant to go back to the old alley and find the seamstress and Louise, but he did not have enough money in his pocket to buy her a proper gift. Then the tornado of revolution carried him away. In the end, he never bought for his daughter a single skirt or a pair of shoes. He has yet to hold her in his arms and look into her eyes.
“By now, she must have become a grown woman, for sure. She must be married with children. Does she ever, I wonder, search for the image of her absent father? Does she ever entertain, I wonder, the idea of going to Vietnam, a faraway tropical land, to watch an alien people who somehow are still related to her by blood? Or has she simply forgotten all about me even before getting to know me, deliberately so?”
This last thought makes him feel numb. He touches the teapot; he wants to take a sip but the tea is already cold. His face is reflected clearly in the mirrorlike surface of the table. He leans down to take a look at his silhouette. In silence. And a whisper is heard in his mind:
“This man is the worst possible father on earth. One of these days, you will have to come face-to-face with loved ones in the supreme court of your heart. The Autumn Revolution of 1945 will eventually be lost in the on-flowing river of history, just like any other revolution. Like the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the volcanic eruptions. Time will efface all traces. In time, all the crowns on earth will be shredded. All illusions of glory will be shattered. But the supreme court of the heart will always be there on the grounds of a secular world and that court will also be there on the other side of the river of illusions, where the souls of the dead are crowded together on boats made from ashes and dust, with empty eye sockets and three pennies placed on their silent tongues.”
An invisible net closes on the president, nearly asphyxiating him.
His head feels ice cold but his entrails are burning. He thinks this must be his own private suffering, only his. For he is a materialist, he does not believe in telepathy. From the beginning, he only knew the visible world, only considered real things that impacted the six senses, like most people.
Yet the president’s suffering is precisely the result of sympathy with other people’s sufferings. For on this earth there is another person in exile. An anonymous person. A person whose name he no longer remembers; whose face he does not know. A shadow of nothingness. Yet that shadow is still and always a living being in the flesh. That other being never stops thinking of him. That unfortunate person is linked to him because of an unusual destiny, a constant suffering, and a tragic chase. But the irony of fate makes it so that all the things happening to that other person must remain in the dark, beyond his understanding and imagination.