Dear Brother, early tomorrow morning we have to leave. Surely there will be no return. Please live to revenge this by any means. Please protect My and our children. If you do, even in the grave, I will owe you a debt forever.
Your younger brother, Hoang Huy Tu
The signature is firm, not a bit shaky; the writing of a welder who had used a hammer since youth. Hoang An puts the letter down. An emotion shakes his body. Then thoughts run through him one after the other like rats.
“They murdered the women with a wooden mallet because that was the most frugal and simple way to kill. They stabbed Mr. Cao, letting people think that his death was due to some score being settled among playboys because Mr. Cao had left the hamlet to run around for twenty years. They kidnapped my uncle and aunt in an airplane and killed them, then threw their bodies in the woods of another town, making it appear as if bandits had murdered them, because my uncle was then village chief, the lowest position in the power machine. All my loved ones destroyed as chess pawns. I have no one left in this world…no one.”
The flames in his head burn like the fire of the two houses. The rats inside his head do not stop running back and forth, jumping around. The thick smoke rises right to the top of his skull and a sharp pain erupts in his stomach, overflows his throat, and pushes into his lungs with a burning hot steam, as if his chest is now a pressure cooker ready to explode. Suddenly, he lets out a terrifying scream, one that makes him dizzy; it sounds like the roaring of an odd monster who has borrowed a human throat.
Everybody comes out to look. They have never heard such a horrifying scream; it sounded like wild waves twirling with a terrifying force. People are so scared that they stop breathing. Such a scream could only have come from a river demon, a mountain devil, or a demented, wicked giant who was extremely agitated.
But there is nothing to see other than Lieutenant Hoang An sitting by himself at the side of the stream. As he hears the footsteps of the approaching group, Hoang An turns around, his face pale but smiling broadly.
“This is my brother’s backpack; he died in the Thuan Hoa battle. I could not bury him nor can I cry for him. I screamed from rage. I hate America’s lackeys.”
“Comrade An…” The head of the hospital gently puts his hand on his shoulder. “Please go back to the hospital to rest. It is war. We are all here because of this war. All of us hate America’s lackeys…”
4
The president awakes at midnight from very heavy dreams, his heart apprehensive and tense. From the two guards outside comes the sound of the slapping of cards. It’s 1:25 a.m. He pulls the blanket to his chin and absentmindedly listens to their whispering:
“Eight.”
“Ten.”
“Queen of Spades.”
“King of Spades.”
“King of Hearts…you’re about to die, kid.”
“Dying, no shit. The red king is hot. I’ll wait to see what you drop.”
“Kid, it’s the end of your life.…Ace of Spades. Where is the joker? Play it. If not, just surrender…”
“OK, I accept defeat this time. If I’d had the joker I would give you a sticky face. Now it is eighty-three. You still owe me five rounds. It’ll be hard to undo tonight, mister.”
“They are really happy, these lads who play at cards,” the president thinks to himself. “In victory, they eat a couple of sesame or peanut candies. In defeat, the opponent will paint their face with ashes. Their game hurts no one; no blood is shed, no heads roll, no one harbors hatred.”
A face appears in the president’s imagination — the face of the woodcutter’s son. He sighs.
“My own son: if the traitors leave you alone and don’t kill you, for sure you will live as just an ordinary person. You will mix with those at the bottom of society. Someday you will play cards for sesame candies and get a mustache like those guards. Who knows, maybe you will be satisfied with such anonymity. Perhaps games that pay off in candy might bring you real happiness.”
To chase away these obsessions, he reaches out to turn on the light at the head of the bed to read but suddenly remembers that doing so would interrupt the game of the young men, who would then fret over why he wasn’t sleeping. He lies back down, pulls the blanket to his chin, and stares at the dark ceiling. At the base of one wall, there is a tiny night-light the size of a firefly. In his childhood, he and his friends had caught fireflies and put them in eggshells; at night, the eggshells would light up. That summer of fireflies had been the most magical summer of his life.
“Nowadays, I wonder, does the boy make firefly lights?” the president asks his imagination. “He now lives in the countryside with his classmates and around them are gardens, grass, and a village cemetery full of vegetation like when I was still in Nghe An.”
But his son will never know where that ancestral hometown was, and nowadays no child would play with fireflies. The nation is at war; instead of the twinkling lights of stars, bullets blaze the night sky red, making a light that spreads terror and death.
“War, war, war…A history thick with one war after another, thus leaders become obsessed with victory, seeking one more with this war. A war without end — both in mobilized efforts as well as in all the blood and bones. What a stupid war. A war carried out as the punishment of a people, a colossal meat grinder for a bloodbath of brothers, a thousand times more terrifying than the ancient two-hundred-year conflict between the Trinh and Nguyen clans!
“What can I do now that the game is lost? When I must become a hand-carved wooden puppet for these murderers? All my traitorous brothers: Why did they purposely turn their backs on conscience — because competition for power gives more pleasure than does ensuring the happy fate of a people? Oh, ambition and glory…the kind of people with whom I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t be close — but they have frightening power to destroy, not just individuals or factions, but an entire race.
“But for what reason do I still passionately care for and still suffer for this nation? The nation that needs my life as if it needs an animal to sacrifice to its gods. The nation that smiles aimlessly but with satisfaction; that cheers for me as it would a great king; that admires me as officers admire a fabulous marshal who has never lost a battle, and does not understand at all the nagging suffering of my heart, and does not have enough goodness to bestow upon me even a tiny bit of happiness? For what reason do I tear myself apart for this selfish and uncaring nation, though mine it is?