“A devil’s work; definitely an evil spirit!”
“There is no evil spirit, that’s just old superstition. I think the guy’s a smooth talker. People say men fall from their eyes, women from their ears.”
“Eyes and ears, yes; still, there must be a reason. Why on earth would a young girl fall in love with an old man the same age as her father? She must be mad! If not, then this guy gave her Love Potion Number Nine. Once my cousin, a laborer in Tay Bac, had a Thai girl put a love charm on him. Each time he tried to find his way back down to the plains he turned mad, rolled his eyes, and mumbled all in Thai. The family had to let him go up and live with that woman.”
“Until now?”
“Exactly! His wife had to wait five years to ask the village to give her a divorce so that she could remarry. Their two children were sent to my aunt and uncle to be raised.”
“I don’t believe in love charms or potions.”
“I do!”
“I think this teacher has a way of enticing women and girls that we don’t know.”
“What way?”
“Maybe hypnotizing. This guy may look skinny, but when he looks at anyone, they feel as if they’ve been nailed down, no longer able to move. I think that girl’s soul was sucked out by those eyes.”
“Perhaps. But why didn’t he ever seduce others? Doesn’t every class have more than a few pretty ones?”
“True. Before this he had no affairs? If it’s a question of seduction, of promiscuity, something would have happened long before. Fifteen years have passed; there was no lack of pretty girls; why wait for Ngan?”
“Because destiny planned it. When the month and day arrive, the child comes out of the mother’s womb. Just so, when the month and day arrive, disaster also shows its face.”
“You think of it as a disaster? I believe it’s good fortune. Nothing else: sleeping with a virgin girl as beautiful as a fairy. No different than finding paradise.”
“But after paradise comes hell. I just heard that Ngan’s father aggressively sued the school, and took a knife demanding to kill Teacher Tuong, who had to flee to the city. I heard he accepted his punishment to relocate elsewhere.”
“Relocate where?”
“I don’t remember exactly, but for sure somewhere up along the frontier. Up there, he was assigned to a nowhere place, teaching new recruits in a noncommissioned officers’ training school. Schools that train high-level officers are usually near big cities, but training schools for NCOs are always tucked away in areas where dogs eat stones and chickens eat gravel. There, even watercress is hard to find. All year long the only food is dried fish and shrimp paste.”
“Serves the dirty old man right! What goes around quite rightly comes around. He had enjoyed the gift of virginity, had tasted the body of a girl whose skin is like peeled cooked egg, then for the rest of his life he has to suck on dried fish, that’s fair.”
“If I were young Ngan’s father, I too would take a knife and give him a slash. That was the end of a girl’s life! A sad fate for a beauty!”
“You’d give him a slash, then you’d have to sit in jail and peel the calendar day by day. It takes two to tango; it took the two of them…why slash him?”
“You are really stupid. By law, eighteen years make you an adult. Ngan is only sixteen. To sleep with her, only the guy breaks the law. That crime is called seduction of a minor. Actually, he should have been indicted and sent to jail for at least four years. But his father’s older brother is a judge in the provincial court. For that reason he got no prison time.”
“Really, I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t read the law?”
“Where’s the time for reading law? I work two shifts, sometimes three nonstop. Six days a week. Sometimes on Sunday I must also make some sacrifices for socialism. When I get home, the only thing I want to do is sleep. I’m too tired to climb on top of my wife, so much for reading law!”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twelve.”
“You should read the law now. If you sleep, just close one eye, the other should be left open to look around. If you don’t, there might be some guy your age that would like to call you father-in-law.”
“You bastard! Why do you have such a toxic mouth? You wish me misfortune like the teacher in Khoai Hamlet, don’t you?”
“I don’t wish you any such misery as that. But if you worry about what might come from afar, you can avoid misfortunes closer at hand.”
When Miss Ngan’s fetus was just into its fourth month, though it was already rather late, her school gave her a letter of introduction to the district clinic, asking that the fetus be removed due to an “accident of morality.” Ngan’s mother took her to the clinic at night; each covered her face with a cloth, showing only her eyes with a hat pulled down to the eyebrows. Ngan’s father announced publicly that she had been disowned and banished from the family, telling his wife, “It would have been better if she had put a knife to my heart rather than put me in this situation. From this day on, under this roof, if she is here, then I am not, and vice versa. It’s up to you to choose.”
His wife dared not choose, because both the husband and child were immediate family. After taking Ngan to the clinic to have the fetus scraped out, she turned her daughter over to her own mother. There, Ngan lived with her uncle and aunt and her maternal grandmother. A year later, Ngan’s uncle, a skilled mason, found her a job as a painter for Public Works.
When Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan decided to unite their lives, they planned to legalize their life as a couple. In her family situation, Miss Ngan did not want a lavish wedding as others do. First, she did not want to stir up waters that were settling. The wound to her father was surely not yet healed. Hamlet people still talked about the goings on when he had left his class and rice fields for a month, how he had smashed all his tools with which to harvest and fish in the river. Night after night, he walked like a madman along hamlet paths, sometimes tilting his neck and howling like a wolf calling for his pack. His uncle, the village chairman, had to pay money to bring a doctor down from the provincial capital to give him a shot. Everyone believed that, sooner or later, he would pack up a sack and enter an asylum. Thanks to the good karma coming down from his ancestors and the skill of the provincial doctor, he seemed to recover his senses, but still, once in a while, he used incomprehensible gestures or words. The daughter had indeed been the glorious dream of the father. That dream had shattered like a mirror smashed into small pieces. The hamlet teacher did not want to accept that painful reality. He found ways to erase all traces of time past, when the dream had been alive. Anything connected with Ngan, he removed to burn or throw into the river: all the beautiful photos that once hung everywhere in the house, her trunks of clothes, her sewing kit from when she had taken home economics, the cloth dolls she had made herself, all her school notebooks.
Mr. Quang had been a father. He understood how wounded pride could drive a person to one kind of hell or another. All these years of struggling here and there in so many places, pushing along so many strange roads, had taught him how to be emphatic and patient. His fortunate happiness must in the end run up against a challenge. He would be the one to carry the burden and not Miss Ngan. After much reflection, he decided to ask Ngan’s uncle to invite her mother to the construction site for a visit. On the first night, the girl’s mother heard how she had come to fall in love with a man forty-three years her elder but appearing as an ancient hero reborn to protect and save her. On the second day, Miss Ngan took her mom to town to buy for the family all those things that make people’s eyes brighten like streetlights. On the third day was the official meal between the girl’s mother and the future son-in-law, who was twenty-four years older than she. Then was discovered a coincidence that increased the awkwardness on both sides: Ngan’s father had been born in the same month and year as Mr. Quang’s oldest son, Quy; only the day of birth was different.