That morning, when the alarm clock rang, he got up and immediately went out to the garden, knowing full well that he could catch a cold. Walking aimlessly among the trees for a while, he then had gone in to get dressed. Then he sat down at the dining table in front of the bowl of noodles that his wife had prepared. He suddenly looked at Van’s face, swollen with lack of sleep. It appeared exactly like that of Mrs. Tuyet Bong.
He thought, “I am getting old; I can’t see clearly. Nobody ever said that Van looked like her mother. People always commented that she was a carbon copy of Teacher Vuong, just like Tung was a copy of the fish sauce wholesaler.”
Then he had looked and looked at his woman — the person who had shared his life for more than thirty years, the one he was so familiar with, from the way she brushed her teeth and combed her hair, to the style and color of her favorite clothes, the way she picked up her food or put on her charms. He had then looked at her with some doubt, in the state of someone who cannot rely on his own senses. Because from a certain angle, he did see that his wife did have some of Mrs. Tuyet Bong’s features. It was not the shape of the face, nor the bridge of her nose, nor her walk or smile, but an invisible resemblance that eluded any verbal description.
“It’s not my imagination, but the weakness of my mind in analyzing…or a simple habit of forgetting. I have seen Van standing with her hands on her waist, arguing with a cadre managing supplies, in a strident and vulgar way just like her mother. That was long ago. Sixteen or seventeen years ago. That time she was extremely ashamed of herself. Now, it happens again and she is no longer ashamed. With the months and years, everything rots away…”
“Sir, let me pour more water in the teapot.”
The young woman has come back with a thermos of hot water in her hands. She is about to pour water into the teapot, but she hesitates and asks:
“Sir, do you need new tea?”
Vu looks up and answers: “Thank you. The tea is still strong, you can just add more water for me.”
He fills his cup with the new very hot tea. He brings it up to the level of his chin, where the steam spreads across his face and a whisper repeats itself again and again:
“With the years, everything slowly rots away…With the years…”
He does not know what causes this thought to take over his brain, something like those hungry leeches that stick tightly to the thighs of miserable water buffaloes. Vu’s family owned no rice fields, but rural life had been familiar to him since youth thanks to summer vacations. Later, when he committed himself to the revolution, he was forced to become familiar with paddy fields. During that entire period, the image that terrified him most, a fear he could not acknowledge, was the sight of leeches in low-lying fields. Every time he saw a pack of leeches darkening the water’s face and chasing after bait, whether the bait was him or someone else, Vu’s skin grew goose bumps. He despised leeches not because they sucked people’s blood, because mosquitoes as well as other insects did likewise, but because, most frightening to him, their slimy bodies evoked uncertainty, a kind of elastic and free-floating danger, a threat about which one could not predict either its origins or its end.
There is a kind of pain that tugs like the leeches do, that grabs the heart tightly at its deepest recess and never lets go. Real leeches are not that dangerous; you can let them suck the blood of water buffaloes until they grow as fat as your big toe. Once satiated, they just fall off. You can drop those blood-filled leeches into a pit of active lime, and in that way most effectively massacre these parasites. But when facing a lingering pain, people become paralyzed, unable to pull the parasite out from a bleeding heart.
Vu does not remember in which book he read about this. But suddenly the thought returns, like smoke from smoldering hay hanging over the field of memory.
Suddenly, cheerful laughter catches his attention: popping out of the door frame between the canteen and the kitchen is a group of four young girls, each one round, with red cheeks, twinkling eyes, and a face full of happiness. The two in the front carry a big basket with a heap of sesame balls. The two behind, even more hefty, carry the largest size of army pot, probably with broth for the beef noodle soup. Behind the four girls comes a fellow with skin dark as a burned house pillar and shoulders square as a Tet rice cake, carrying a basket of sliced noodles. It’s time for the canteen to serve the morning meal to the soldiers at the airport. Vu looks down at his watch; at that moment a gong is struck briskly.
After three slow and three fast rings, the airport soldiers happily enter, every single one of them with his hair well groomed, his uniform well pressed, his complexion smooth and pinkish, clearly the most important, pampered group of soldiers in the corps. They walk while joking around, exchanging stories and conniving looks.
Out of curiosity Vu follows them with his eyes, thinking: “In this group of good friends, who, I wonder, will take a knife and stab whom? Who will pour poison into whose glass of water? And who will lure whom into a spot that has been mined?”
The young soldiers see him. They stop chattering, raise their hands in salute, and follow one another to sit at a row of tables on the right side of the room, an area reserved for middle-grade meals.
The canteen is only one room, serving only one kind of sesame ball and one kind of beef noodle soup, but it is divided into two sections. The area where he sits is reserved for higher-class meals, the floor having been raised some six inches by a platform that has had a veneer carefully applied, one that shines like a mirror. Also, the chairs and tables here are made of good wood and the tables are covered with white tablecloths. The cups, plates, and bowls are nice, thin Chinese porcelain. The area on the right, at a lower level and reserved for middle-grade meals, has a brick floor. Here the furniture is of plain wood, there are no table coverings, the cups are aluminum and the bowls and plates of Hai Duong porcelain, the kind that is thick like tiles but chips easily. Dividing the two areas, as if to clearly mark the separation, is a row of carved wooden posts hung with strings of paper flowers in various colors. In a disdainful, aloof manner Vu looks at the strings of shiny flowers and smiles cynically as he thinks to himself:
“What is the difference between a bowl of upper-grade noodle soup and middle-grade soup? Maybe the first bowl holds twelve pieces of beef and the other only six or eight pieces. Is it that the first bowl gets more sliced onions than the second, or that its broth might have more fat or more pepper? Oh, this practice is so far from the ideals of all those who joined the revolution. After many bones have been broken and much blood spilled, all so that life falls back to counting the pieces of meat put in a bowl of pho or on a plate of food…”
He quickly gulps a mouthful of hot tea, suddenly recognizing the familiar path that leads to purgatory. But the shiny paper flowers grab his attention. The thought of caste division, of the dominion of power, of precarious and unchanging conditions of man’s existence…all of these permanent tensions rip and tear his heart like a pack of leeches.
Yesterday morning, as soon as he had arrived at the office and before he could even put his briefcase on the desk, the young secretary had hurriedly run in to report that the administrative office of Central Party Headquarters was summoning him unexpectedly. This secretary, skinny with a pale, greenish face and an anxious disposition, looked really pathetic: