Quiet, she looks elsewhere. He continues, melancholic:
“Bringing this up does not make me very happy because I, too, like you, am made of flesh and bones. However, after many years of hesitation, I know that the truth can’t be avoided. And, in truth, you can’t accept that your child is inferior to the child of another, no matter who that other is.”
“I didn’t mean to say that. I was too angry.”
“You didn’t mean to say that, but you thought it for a while, a long while. We live under the same roof; we should not let frustration wound our feelings. We are no longer young. You can live separately with our son. I can raise Trung because that is what I promised before my conscience. I will save him at any cost, even that of my own life. I told you that at the very beginning, nothing hidden. Now the decision is up to you. You have complete power to decide.”
“You’re filing for divorce?”
“I am not doing anything. But people can live separately even if the law still keeps them tied. Because the laws have no control over the heart.”
“Do you love someone else? Is there another woman in your heart?” she blurts out suddenly, and instantly blood rushes to her face, turning it bright red like the face of someone carrying a heavy load up a slope in the middle of June.
He looks at her: “Are you serious or are you joking?”
“I didn’t mean that you love some girl in your office or in this town.”
“Because you know as well as the palm of your hand the backgrounds and personalities of all the women in my agency, young or old, married or single. And you have a network of spies to follow them and thwart them. Isn’t that right?”
“I am not talking about those who work with you.”
“Do you mean to say it’s some woman in an embassy that I met during one of my official trips? You often open up the lists to check. I can provide you those lists directly. If not, you can find them at the foreign ministry, or even in Sau’s office. As I know, he receives you quite warmly every time you make a call on him. Everyone knows the scheme: the wife of your enemy is your best ally.”
“You suspect me?” she bursts out, and it makes him laugh.
Immediately she knows she has overstepped, and his laugh makes her furious. He is one who is never jealous. If he were, even once, the situation might be different. But he is a straightforward man, with self-respect, and he does not allow himself to have feelings he finds demeaning, according to the moral criteria he has learned.
“Are you asking seriously or not?”
“I am sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“So, what do you mean?”
“I am not talking about anyone alive.”
“So, you are talking about…”
He stops because he cannot continue to talk, because of all the shock, the confusion, and the fear that she incites in him. But when he sees her eyes looking down, he understands most of it: not only is his wife jealous of the adopted son because he is more intelligent, better-looking, and has more character than her own, she is jealous of Trung’s mother. His mother was younger than her, prettier than her, not once but a thousand times more, even though she herself had been known as the beauty queen of the war zone during the resistance.
“She is jealous of the dead,” he realizes to himself. “How can jealousy create something so irrational and loathsome? She has nurtured these unwholesome, illogical thoughts for how long and I wasn’t aware? But I couldn’t have known, as this is totally outside my way of thinking. No one of ordinary mind would give in to such a sick and shocking emotion. It can only be a new thought. But my wife is strong; in her family no one has yet to…”
He looks at his wife intently, his jaw locked, his mind unsettled. He feels like one struck dumb or paralyzed by an ill wind, a dangerous and hidden sickness that could not be foretold, neither by a doctor nor the patient.
“A wicked wind.”
This is a sickness that can threaten a person from the neck down. Now he himself has been hit, engulfed in a state half awake and half paralyzed, seeing everything turning dark purple, half the color of the chan chim flower, half the color of eggplant. The face of his wife also turns faint purple, each elastic feature agitated as if she were looking at herself in the face of a pond being hit by stones.
With glassy eyes he looks at the familiar face as it changes, all its features growing thin, breaking, quivering, and wonders if it is real or a dream. What is happening before his eyes?
“What is it, what is it that has happened to our lives?” he wants to ask, but his lips won’t open. His hands and feet can’t move either, though in a second he would have raised his hand to violently hit his wife. He freezes comatose in his emotions. Like a living corpse. Completely like that. Because he has a clear intention about his own survival.
At that moment, she recovers just in time. After pouring out all that had accumulated like a volcano, she has deflated like a beach ball, like a tire losing its air. She looks at him staring down, grasping that her words had come out of unconscious jealousy. Now it is her time to fear. She stands up and heads toward the dike.
He stands there for a while, absentminded, unaware that the sun is becoming very bright. On the river, the barge suddenly blows its whistle. The strident sound brings him back to the present. The numbness slowly dissipates and he can feel his legs and arms and warmth on his face. The wind from the river brings the smell of grass and the water, mixed with the warm and organic smell of trash decomposing in the waves that push against the banks.
A tickling feeling makes his throat itch. As his hand touches it, he gets hold of a praying mantis. The little creature waves its swords like mad. Even after he catches it in his hand, it does not stop moving its thorny legs in the air:
“You are pretty wild — a young horse fond of kicking, a young praying mantis fond of fencing, a young dog fond of barking, a young cat fond of scratching…What are you fond of doing?”
Next to his ears, he suddenly hears a children’s song that he used to sing when he was six, on those summer days in the countryside when he followed the village kids to ride water buffalo and fly kites. It has been sixty years. One’s life is like a dream. Instinctively he bends down and looks at his shadow on the corn rows:
“How many more springs will I see this shadow?”
The question just popped up in his mind, the reply already bouncing back with a sad laugh:
“Oh, of what importance is that? The longer you live, the more shame you endure, it was said of old.”
Lifting the mantis, he observes it for a last time before throwing it in the cornfield. The tiny insect disappears among the rows of green leaves that wave without tiring. His nape again erupts with an itch. This time it’s not because of a mantis or a grasshopper on him but the heat. The roots of his hair also start to sweat. Vu takes the soft hat, puts it on his head, and then returns to the Yen Phu dike.
The road is deserted, so he can see right through the entire little town. People shouldering goods in baskets quickly walk by. Smoke from electric generators blows out black dust that turns part of the town dark. To the other side is West Lake, a huge expanse of water behind rows of purple flowers along the Co Ngu road. A little farther on, he can see the Tran Quoc pagoda with little buildings unevenly arranged close to the water. A boat bobbles in the distance, most likely belonging to a fisherman, because every now and then a net is thrown in the sunlight.