The familiar tune arises. The president is now forced to stop in the middle of the patio with his guards, seeing at a glance that the village chief is glaring at the musicians, not knowing whether to compliment or threaten them. In any case, everyone has to wait for the song to stop.
The national anthem! The national anthem!
He is as dumbfounded as if he were hearing it for the first time; for years the verses with their deep meanings had been imprinted in his mind. Is this the impact of the funeral or have his own mental abilities changed over the years? Or do the folk instruments bring on a peculiar expression to a quite familiar piece of music? It’s impossible for him to explain this clearly, but a terror invades his soul as he hears the national anthem played on a one-string zither, a flute, and a two-string fiddle. Why is the melody so very sad? A patriotic song for a nation but one so sentimental and so full of melancholy? As if this upbeat and energetic melody hid within its notes evening temple bells and the howling of night owls. As if this provocative singing brings out parallel images that befit its ambience: dark, foggy horizons, deserted and cold streams, banks full of rubbish, a cemetery that spreads itself out infinitely under the sheltering wings of flying crows.
“Is it old age that makes me easily melancholic, or do these folk instruments bring to the national anthem a sadness that it does not usually promote? Because music for Sending Off the Soul is only appropriate for traditional songs like ‘Lan Tham, Sa Lech Chenh, Sam Soan’?”
He can’t find an answer. A pain twists in his heart. He looks up to the blue sky beyond the tops of the bamboo, trying hard to chase away such distressing thoughts, but to no avail.
“Let me know who your friend is; then I will tell you who you are. As such, I can say that: let me hear a people’s songs and I will tell you that people’s fate! Could it be true that a people’s fate is determined by its songs, by its oldest forms of dances, by songs that accompany a people like a companion for eternity, like your shadow, like the entwined male and female sides of some asexual fish? Can human beings change their fate or not, and in life can their efforts bring on no more than a small percentage of all that will accumulate in a lifetime?”
“Mr. President, please step along,” the chubby guard, who stands close behind him, whispers.
The president turns around and waves his hands to bid farewell to the musicians, then heads toward the gate. There the two platoons of guards are ready. They resume their previous formation to head back to where the helicopter is waiting.
7
“Venerable Abbess, we bother you too much.”
“Mr. President, we are honored to serve you.”
“Venerable Abbess, it might just be that our discussion will go on all afternoon. If so, your afternoon chanting will be interrupted.”
“Mr. President, as ordained people we pray throughout our lives. When we need to stop, we stop. Buddha’s spirit is within us even in our silence.”
“Venerable Abbess, aren’t you afraid that the sacred one will scold you?” he asks, half joking, half serious, with a smile that hides multiple meanings.
“Honorable Sir, if a Buddha did that, then he’d no longer be a Buddha,” the abbess replies with a smile, a gentle smile, then walks out of the room.
He and Vu step aside as the nun passes by. The smell of soapberry spreads in the air, because the nun’s clothes are washed in soapberry. There are three old soapberry trees in the corner of the temple, healthy and bushy, with lots of pods all year long. He often saw the nuns go to the garden and bring back full baskets, then line up the berries to dry them on a steel grate resembling a huge fish grill. On afternoons with pouring rain when vapors from crevices rose up to mix with the white cloud, the two women would sit silently while the berries were drying, their silence stretching on until the evening meal, when a nun would light altar candles and tweak the oil lamp on the old bamboo table.
“What are they thinking in that lingering silence? Maybe they don’t think about anything at all; many people can’t imagine that they are really so simple and intellectually empty that they don’t have much at all to think about. Because those who don’t think, cannot act with so much courage…”
Many times he has asked himself that question. He has never found a satisfying answer. He remembers that the first time he was at the temple he had seen all the doors locked like in a warehouse. He had summoned Le and the administrative officers for a discussion. When he had learned the truth, he had hurriedly ordered that the guards let the abbess and at least two novices return. This had been his primary condition in agreeing to stay at this place for rest and recuperation. Two days later, the guards had brought a group up the mountain. He knew that they were implementing his instructions, but he did not know why such a large group was needed.
“It can’t be that they have agreed to let twelve venerables and nuns return to the temple,” he had thought.
But he had rejected that hypothesis right away because it was improbable. He had backed into his room to observe. It was true that twelve venerables had appeared in the temple patio, but they did not have permission to return. They had come only to accompany their superior back to the old place. According to tradition, that was a way by which students could show their respect to a teacher. He saw ten tall and healthy monks, full of life; because only those with enough physical and mental health would be able to meditate in such isolated mountains. Those ten hefty men surrounded a tiny old woman, not taller than five feet, with a calm face and the very ordinary features of an average Vietnamese woman. She held a bamboo pole in her hand.
“With this very pole, the old lady went down the mountain after the officials forced her to leave the temple, and now, with this same pole she climbed up a mountain over three thousand feet high, needing no one to carry her on their back. And this tiny old lady is over eighty years old!”
Perhaps because the abbess was seven years his elder, he felt embarrassed and sad simultaneously. Perhaps because the legal might that had forced her into exile was his very own political system, of which he was the official spokesperson. He couldn’t find a precise explanation.
In the yard, the abbess had climbed up to the third terrace and given her disciples instructions:
“Hail to Buddha, we again stand on the ground of our house. All of you please open all the doors, clean all the shelves, and light incense and candles. And you, nun, your duty is to arrange the flower vases. We will chant prayers to welcome our honored ones back to the old abode.”
“Hail to Buddha, we will comply as you direct.”
He had noticed the respectful manner of all ten monks in front of an old and tiny nun, and a thought had invaded his mind:
“Later on, of all these respectful disciples, which one will push the old lady down the ravine to replace her as the boss of this temple? Which one will put arsenic in the bean-braised tofu or in the cabbage soup?”
But on the far side of the patio, temple bells were ringing. The sounds of a beaten wooden gong and the chanting of the twelve disciples followed. The air filled with the fragrant smoke of incense. He had listened to the regular and continuous chanting, knowing that there was another force residing within our lives, an invisible force, of a kind that was not to be measured by integers as one can calculate the strength of human muscle power.