Now he remembers: she had rolled up the yarn to make new dolls to hang around the bassinet for the baby boy to play with. The old doll had been damaged by his older sister a couple of weeks before. She had told him so, because every two or three weeks he could visit the mother and her child.
While listening to her chat, he asked where his daughter was. She said she went to sleep with Auntie Dong. He didn’t ask of her further, and she pouted that he loved the boy Trung more than the girl Nghia, that he respected men and disparaged women, still living by feudal values. He smiled because she had repeated to him the exact propaganda lesson taught her by the cadres. And he himself had taught them:
“The revolution will establish a new society, in which everyone will be equal before the law, with no distinction based on ethnicity, religion, or gender.”
He didn’t listen to what she said, for he was attentively looking at her young pouting lips, recalling the pair of doe’s eyes staring at him through the fire in the forest night. He smiled while she was lecturing him, while the little one wildly kicked in the white diapers. Intensely he looked at the baby, realizing that the boy had inherited the best traits of both him and her:
“He will be really handsome. He will become an elegant and stylish young man.”
She was certain of his bias and one more time reminded him:
“Mr. President, you must love them both equally.”
“Oh, of course. Each one is our child…” he replied to please her.
In reality, he cared for Nghia very much, as the girl resembled the older sister he liked best of all in his family. They were as two sickles made from the same mold. Because Nghia carried his very own image, she had to bear misfortune. In the little boy he saw her resemblance, his beloved.
Now she was no more. No one left to pout about his impartiality, a bias that he recognized in himself.
“I have two children, a girl and a boy; one is only a year older. Why do I remember only the boy? I, who always taught people about equality between men and women?
“But danger hovers over the boy more than the girl. Thus, probably, my sin through him is proportionately larger. Thus, this constant obsession about him,” he reasons to himself.
Even if his rationalization is extremely weak, he does not go deeper to question what is in his heart. It would be useless. All the paths in his rationalizing always return him to the old resting point. He misses the boy like crazy. After ten years he thought he could forget, but suddenly memories return and become a permanent pain, a gaping tear in his heart. The dream of being oblivious had dissipated like a cloud before the sun, leaving now only a burning longing:
“How is my son doing now? Does he worry about where he comes from? Or does he live safely under the protection of his ‘uncle’ Vu, believing that he is the son of some unknown person, an out-of-wedlock child living with an adoptive father? He will believe that. Believing so will provide an anchor for him. An out-of-wedlock child? Fate must have predestined it, because his affair with her had been outside the law. That kind of illegal affair would naturally produce children out of wedlock. Pity all of us, all victims of an unjust game. Now what is happening to my out-of-wedlock child? Does he look like me or her; does he keep intact all those features he had at three months? Is his complexion fair like that of his mother? Is there a Mongolian birth mark on his back like the one on mine, because older sister Thanh said that the mark appeared only when I was ten years old…”
All these concerns could only be shared with her. He knows that people would dissect every word that came from him. Even if he ventured to tell Vu, Vu could not bring up any photo of Trung, as Vu, too, is being watched closely. If he showed the slightest sign that his heart was still passionate, the child would be used more effectively as a weapon in the hands of his enemies.
Knowing all this, he still cannot suppress his anxiety:
“An old father and a young child: that is the reality. Is the unfortunate woodcutter as tormented as I am at this instant? No! No!..because he died right on the hammock, on the way home. That way, even if he were worried and in pain, he only had to put up with it for a couple of hours, not to mention that during so short a time, the pain had paralyzed his brain.”
Love between father and child runs deep; for the first time he thoroughly understands the meaning of this.
When he was young, still a child, his spirit had not yet sought the far distant horizon, his ears heard only the wind blowing over the homeland, and his eyes looked only at the roof of the ancestral cottage. The work of the father, the responsible love of the mother: he knew these only as an average person would. Later those bonding kinship emotions grew fainter and fainter, easily forgotten when his heart had turned to a larger and more theoretical love: the country, the people, the nation…
These terms describe something grand, something wonderful. All great things are abstractions. The revolution was something even more gigantic, even more wonderful…and more shapeless…and more inhuman…
He recalled the year when the revolution succeeded, how his sister had come up from Nghe An to visit him. He did not set aside even a moment to chat with the woman he considered to have been his second mother when he was young. That woman was a virgin all her life; a virgin until she crawled into the coffin. Her life had been one of complete sacrifice for all her relatives. Not being received by the younger brother, she quietly returned home without a word of complaint. That day, for once, his heart was torn apart. Then he was forced to forget and he had forgotten. All his life he had adapted to accepting and practicing forgetting. A forgetting that had been ordered; a forgetting that was carefully formalized; a forgetting that was deliberate.
But this time, he does not succeed in forgetting. The boats that had been sunk pop up to the surface of the sea. A ghostly corpse from underneath the ocean’s mud, which has ceased decomposing, appears on the surface, rising and bobbing on the peaks of the waves. This is his hell.
Suddenly he wants to be a father! Suddenly he can no longer accept forgetting. Suddenly he remembers the son and hourly visualizes his features. Suddenly he craves seeing him, even from afar, even hidden behind a tree or some wall; nameless, shapeless, and ashamed like a fellow that squanders then repents in his old age, trying now to find a way to his own lost drop of blood.
All this nagging, this wishing, this longing confines him within the cage of an inexorable fate. A prison of his own making. His own legal system, wherein he is both criminal and judge. Why does heaven so torment him? From where does this rushing madness come that brings chaos to his mind, pain to his body, and agony to his heart?
The necessary psychology of a father toward a son!
Only now does he understand this reality. Of old, it was said: “Tears run downward.” So true.
“Filial love for parents can’t equal the ties of anxious love in a father’s soul for a child. Because when we love our parents we look up but when we love our children we look down. And, according to the laws of heaven and earth, tears always flow downward. Especially whenever we recognize that as fathers we have done wrong. Hell itself will then open a door straight into the heart.”
Such angst is as old as the earth. He had thought that he could avoid the ordinary waves of feeling that come with being human, but now those same ordinary waves are drowning him. For a long time he had assumed that he could just forget his own small affliction, believing that he could concentrate all his energies to better serve his country. There had been times when he had fairly succeeded in such forgetfulness. But forgetfulness was an opponent with a long memory and ferocious tenacity. Now he receives its reciprocating blows. Because life is always a stream flowing between the banks of forgetfulness and longing — a frail human vessel needs only a change of wind or some rough water to bounce it around and beach it on one side or the other.