They return to Vu’s room. Obediently he drinks a glass of warm milk before going to sleep. And indeed, his sleep turns out satisfactory. The next morning, he wakes up and sees Tran Phu already chatting with the head doctor. Both seem excited.
Seeing Vu awake, they turn around and say, “We wish you a good morning.”
Tran Phu says it first. The doctor follows, smiling.
“Today you will eat rice porridge with meat. Congratulations as you transition to another phase of your recovery much faster than ordinary people.”
Vu smiles and replies, “It must be my kind friend who proposes to the doctor that I am making progress?”
“No. No one has the right to propose. Professional decisions are always one-sided. Professional advice is always arbitrary. It follows professional principles only,” the doctor answers while raising his arm to bid farewell, as others are calling noisily for him at the end of the hall. Tran Phu enters the room under the cold looks and harsh stares of people hanging around. But he appears oblivious to all of them. At the head of Vu’s bed, he goes through the pile of oranges, bananas, and all kinds of cakes and candies in the little cupboard.
“You should not eat these. Let me give them to the other rooms. Even though this is called the Viet-Russian hospital, reserved for high-ranking cadres, many people do not have enough money to buy fruit. These packages of cakes we can give to charity. At your age you should not eat these ‘state-enterprise’ candies and cookies. I will share mine with you.”
Without waiting for Vu’s answer, Tran Phu leaves the room and returns a little later with an aluminum basket in which he puts all the fruit and candies, taking it away without saying a word. Vu says nothing. He silently mixes his milk, quietly embarrassed because of the attentive looks from bystanders. But the hunger that has returned with racehorse speed reassures him. While drinking his milk, he looks at the trees swaying outside, feeling as if he were in a strange land, a place where he had never before set foot and thus distinct from the world where he had lived. It is a permanent disruption from all the days that are now behind him; a new continent that has opened up upon his return from death.
After the meal, Tran Phu returns with a basket full of fresh fruit. He arranges them nicely on the cupboard at the head of the bed, saying, “You have started to eat savory porridge. That means you can eat all of these fruits. No more restrictions. Here are flan and the madeleine made by my sister. You can have them when you drink your milk or hot tea.”
“Thank you. I feel bad that you have spent so much time on me.”
“Not as much as you thought. All is prepared by my younger sister. I have been spoiled since I was young, even though there were many mouths in the family. Go take a nap; we will see each other again tomorrow.”
“Let me see you out, so I can exercise a bit.”
“Agreed.”
When they reach the stairs, Vu whispers in Tran Phu’s ear, “Why do the people around my bed look at you with strange eyes. Why is that?”
“Why?” Tran Phu asks with surprise. “You do not know the simple explanation?”
“I admit, I don’t know. I cannot pretend that I do as my heart is full of quandaries. Please forgive me.”
Tran Phu turns to look at him attentively, perhaps puzzled, perhaps moved. Then he lowers his voice: “If someone else were to ask this question I would think he is acting up like ‘the lost old deer.’ But with you, I believe your question is genuine. Perhaps this naïveté governs your persona, and perhaps that is why we love you, you who are the last hero of the epoch.”
“No.”
Now it’s Vu’s turn to be puzzled. He is not used to hearing people voice their feelings so directly.
Tran Phu continues to look at him intensely as if gazing at a painting in a gallery, then says, “You don’t know that our society is intensely and savagely divided into classes, even though it is regularly advertised as being egalitarian, free, and democratic? Even here, people still distinguish class from class, and watch one another from the standpoint of rank. Those in your room are all professional experts in grades eight and nine, which are at the bottom of the hierarchy for professionals and experts. Meanwhile, I am only an assistant grade six, just high enough to gain admission for treatment here. That is why they despise me. While they flaunt their rank, from the human point of view, they are only zombies. Have you noticed the way they stir their bowls of porridge with a spoon or pick up each grain of rice and put it in their mouth?”
“Not yet. I haven’t dared look at them or chat with them much at all.”
“Because of my presence. And because they look with unfriendly eyes. Thus you learned that they cannot empathize with you.”
Vu smiles instead of agreeing.
Immediately Tran Phu laughs loudly: “I am right! You are kind of accommodating. Your personality is more educated and polite than mine — even though I am from Hanoi and you are from Bac Giang. But inside me there is always someone carefree, provocative. I look at nutty people like them as puppets made of paper. I crush their conceit, making them die choking in the mud of jealousy. Look here…”
Tran Vu rolls up the sleeves of his shirt to show his arms still full of muscle.
“No matter how many grades higher than me, their legs are not much bigger than my arms. We might have been born in the same year, but their teeth are now all fake while I have only lost tooth number eight. In the morning, I quickly finish a bowl of pho with two drumsticks while they stir a bowl of thin porridge with their spoons. At lunch I eat two bowls full of rice with homemade braised fish while they chew nonstop on the hospital’s stir-fry of tough beef. There: those are the reasons they look at me with those jealous eyes, if you don’t want to say it straight — those enraged eyes. People have been like that for generations, even as they stand on the edge of their graves. Don’t worry yourself about it. Now: go to your room to rest. I’ll come tomorrow.”
Tran Phu raises his hand in farewell then goes down the stairs. Vu hears Phu’s footsteps treading lightly on the stairs, and with those steps, hears him softly singing:
“Then the waves will erase all on the sand beach—
The footsteps of couples and lovers…”
A song from the 1940s: dreamy students and slender girls in flowing white ao dai dresses. Ah, his youth. Phantoms from that era return with the old song. But he drives them out because a fear suffocates his feelings.
“No! No! No…”
He hurries to his room, gets into bed, hoping to find some sleep, but sleep does not come. Finally he tosses off the blanket and sits up.
The patient across from him opens his eyes: “You give up, Uncle? Can’t sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. No one wins over old age.”
“Yes.”
“That handsome friend of yours, is he coming to visit you tonight?”
“No. He said tomorrow.”
“He does not remember me, but I know him well.”
“Is that true?”
“Before, I had the same rank when he was in command of 507.”
“Then how long after that did you change your branch?”
“I didn’t. I am still in the military.”
“Oh, really?”
“You want to ask, Uncle, why I am lost in here and am not being treated in the 108 hospital, right? I am here like a horse lost in a goat pen.”
He closes his eyes. His dry and dark lips expand and contract in a grinning and bitter smile.
“Because the director of that hospital is my mortal enemy. I will not take my body there so they can slaughter me as they would a chicken.”