Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (17 page)

Looking again into the old schoolteacher’s eyes, I noticed that they were now completely dry behind her spectacles. I had studied with professors like this. They believed indiscriminately in the good heart of mankind. They clung to their naïve belief in humanity and decency. They believed that the bad could be reeducated. They believed that virtue could ensure the success even of a censored education, one without an open, straightforward dialogue that illuminated overly crude or sensational issues. She was the kind of person who, even this far into the 1990s, still didn’t believe that our society had working girls and drug addicts, or that organized crime controlled city districts and wards.
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What she regarded as sensationalized, exaggerated, vilifications of society drove her into a rage. The road of her life consisted of the path she walked from her house to the middle school. After school, she would walk back home straight along that same road, retreating into her ivory tower.

Maybe it was exactly for this reason that she’d trusted me from the moment we met. She saw me as a good young man who had just bungled his way into a fight with his girlfriend, a fight that had driven her away.

“Giềng and I buried Mai Trừng’s mother next to Hùng’s grave. So they were together again after just a short time apart. A year later, the station was discovered by American planes and bombed brutally. I lost a leg, and was evacuated off the line. Only Giềng remained there, with a group of reinforcements.”

A crippled woman carrying a fifteen-month-old child returned to Hanoi. That was 1970. Miên went to study at the Teacher’s College, becoming a literature instructor and teaching about things that were good and beautiful, idealistic things that still resonated with generations of idealists. It was only during the era of the market economy that the subjects she taught lost a bit of reality. And too much reality existed in those extracurricular classes the students were forced into,
¹⁰
and that she hated: classes in which the teachers coolly calculated their fees and “gifts,” and the students were no less skilled in monetary matters than their teachers.

Walking with an artificial leg, Miên had led Mai Trừng back to the home village of her father, which boasted a booming porridge and porridge-ladle production industry, since it was too poor to have enough rice. The whole village had been completely razed by American planes. She also tried taking Mai Trừng back to her mother’s land of earthen sticky rice cakes. But both sides of her family were in total and utter disarray. Many of her relatives were living hand to mouth, unsure where their next day’s meal would come from. Finally, Miên returned to Hanoi with Mai Trừng and told her husband that they would take care of her as if she were their own child. She told me that she also had a daughter of her own, who was now studying English at the Foreign Languages University.

“Go to Mai Trừng. Talk to her. Just make her listen if you can,” she advised me as she was seeing me off at the foot of the stairs. And suddenly, I knew I could trust her words.

SEVEN

I
had to hurry to catch up to Mai Trừng. I was running out of time. If I didn’t rush after her, I wasn’t sure that I’d even have time to beg for forgiveness. Who knows, perhaps she still thought that I was hunting her. But I wasn’t, and if she had some supernatural intuition, I hoped that she’d somehow recognize my heart’s sincerity and benevolence. There was no resentment or poison left there.

I felt drained of energy. I was weakening little by little. But I knew that I would, with the help of Phũ’s Toyota Corona, keep trying to find her.

I put two boxes of bottled water and two cardboard boxes of food in the back seat. Bread, canned meat, and some canned fruits and vegetables—enough water and provisions to last two weeks without having to buy a single thing on the road. I had no idea if the food along the way would be tainted with poison meant to kill me.

I brought Ki—my only remaining friend and the most dependable as well—along with me. I wrote Thế a letter. I was going to leave it somewhere where he wouldn’t find it for a few days:

Brother Thế, if something bad happens to me, don’t be surprised. I’ve sown the seeds of this storm, so now I am going to reap its harvest. The same was true for Phũ and his friends.

I know this was cryptic. For materialists like Thế, cause and effect are clear, not like this murky half-light of reasoning.

Nobody’s responsible for these disasters at all. Only Evil itself can be blamed for these cruel and obscure deeds.

This was even more cryptic. Human beings kill, but no human is ever responsible for so many deaths. The responsibility flows from the existence of Evil. Thế, I knew, could never see his own friends and loved ones as evil themselves.

I may return, if, for instance, I’m forgiven

But who has the power to forgive in this case?

Please, brother, don’t get worked up and come rushing down to find me.

I didn’t need to tell him that, I knew he wouldn’t anyway.

I wrote the note. Then I tore it up. He’d never understand this letter, written half as a warning, and half like a suicide note. The personal ID card and papers that I carried with me would be enough. If fate took my life, someone would call home and let Thế know what had happened.

Instead, I very simply told him that I had something to do and would be gone for a few days. I didn’t say much. I didn’t explain. Many times before I’d gone off like this and Thế never questioned me. But this time I saw a look of anxiety flash through his eyes. By nature, he had a politician’s face. It never revealed his feelings. He never let himself get agitated. He never burst out with happiness, anger, or worry. The more nervous he was, the more this was the case.

I drove the car down along Highway 1, working my way south. It was the same road that the teacher Miên, as well as Mai Trừng’s parents, had traveled so many years ago. And it was the same road Mai Trừng herself had just passed along. I didn’t know if I’d be able to follow her trail. But I had to find her before I could find forgiveness. If not, my life would last only a few days more.

At lunchtime, I stopped in Thanh Hóa to eat lunch. At dinnertime, I stopped in Vinh to eat dinner. Then I stopped at a simple and clean boardinghouse. At each meal, even though I was tapping into my own provisions, I would let Ki eat first and drink first. Only when he was done with the meal would I start to eat. It was safe this way. I knew that my food hadn’t been poisoned. Anyone looking would have seen a man who loved his dog. A man sitting there and adoringly watching his traveling companion eat until it was full. But the loyal traveling companion in this case fell into the role of an expendable servant, of a suspicious tyrant’s chef. The truth was that I earnestly wanted to live. I still desperately valued my life.

But, during my second day on the road, I started to feel sluggish. I began to pay less and less attention to the road. And my body was also gradually becoming tired and worn, as if it were deteriorating. It was as if, as I drew nearer to Mai Trừng, I was also approaching death. How could it be happening so fast? Please, wait for me to find you, for me to tell you everything, for me to pray for your forgiveness. Then, after that, you can weigh the evidence and pass judgment.

As afternoon descended, I arrived in the Cửa Lớn region. Farming and fishing were the two occupations of the area. Along the ocean people fished with nets, earning a meager income, their entire floating lives depending on the sea. A few years before, some city people and tourists suddenly discovered that Cửa Lớn had a wonderfully flat, spacious, gently sloping sand beach of the most beautiful sort, of the cleanest sort. So Cửa Lớn turned into a very famous beach area. People from all over the place arrived in droves. The fishery commune ordered its work teams to shift their activities to serving the beachgoers. The tourist trade offered a much higher income than did the tenuous dangers and hard work of fishing. The men began to rent out inner tubes and to work as lifeguards. The women went out to sell fish, swimsuits, and other essentials. As the tourists flocked in, so did the players looking for sex. When their massive demand eclipsed the supply of professionals, a “militia” of local women was mobilized to take on the task.

The other half of Cửa Lớn—the farmers living just inland—were jealous of the fishing region’s sudden rise in fortune. Inland, where the land could be farmed, the people still planted vegetables, trees, and rice. They were resigned to their fate, offering their faces to the earth and their backs to the sky. During the war everyone had been poor. Now both the cities and the beaches were developing rapidly, and only the poor peasants remained destitute.

I was driving through the agricultural area. Somber, suffering faces. Withered shoulders bending under creaking shoulder-poles. Ragged conical hats. Tattered clothing.

Suddenly, I heard several gunshots burst from somewhere ahead. The rice paddy was filling with civilians with shovels and shoulder-poles. I could make out the yellow shirts of policemen who were spreading out in formation. A human stream came crashing up onto the road from the field below. Was there a murder? A robbery? I quickly stopped the car and then spun it around, planning to get as far away as possible. I wasn’t about to get myself tangled up in the chaos.

A group of peasants at once rushed over and surrounded my vehicle. They were struggling with each other to talk in a dialect that even if they spoke very slowly, I was unsure I would understand. Yet seeing two men soaked with blood, one holding his head and the other clutching his arm, I began to understand. “Excuse me, sir, excuse me. Please do us a favor and take these two guys to the hospital for us; it’s so far.”

Ki was sitting in the front seat. I opened the back door to let the two men help the two injured people into the back seat. They moved my boxes of water and food to the floor between the seats, so they could rest their legs and sit. I drove off swiftly.

The four men kept interrupting each other to tell what happened. The more than ten kilometer ride between the village and the hospital was long enough for me to figure it out. On average, the peasants of Cửa Lớn each had only around one
sao
(360 square meters) of farmland, not enough to grow the rice they needed to survive, and so they had to leave their villages to find extra work. They would make their way up the mountains and there destroy the terrain, digging out slate to sell. They had razed Núi Bút, Non Nghiên, and Hòn Bảng Mountains completely.
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Those three symbols of an era when the region was famous for the preparation for scholarly examinations had been so thoroughly destroyed that each year the scholars’ modern descendents manage to get only two or three kids from the entire district into universities. But even at that impasse, the peasants were not in peace. Recently the provincial leader decided to cut some hectares of land from Cửa Lớn to carry out an economics, trade, and tourism project. What economics? What trade? What tourism? Actually, those few hectares of land—the source of life for the peasants of Cửa Lớn—became a stopover for people on their way back from the beachfront. From there to the beach it was only a few kilometers. The tourists, looking for some fun after a day ducking and diving beneath the ocean, would flock there for rest and entertainment. And just like that, the peasants lost their farmland.

On this day a force of officials and police had been mobilized, the officials standing in the roads and the cops down in the fields. The rice was blossoming, and as the residents had set off into the fields to work they had been intercepted and stopped. In response, the whole village poured out of their houses armed with canes and sticks and shovels. From below, the police attacked the villagers with their batons until their arms were tired, and they fired into the air. Like bees swarming out of a broken hive. Stalks of young rice lay thick in the fields, squirming and writhing. People fainted. People were injured.

“The old district chairman you saw standing up there on the bank?” one of the men said. “During the war, my auntie took care of him and hid him in her underground hideaway. And then after the war, during the time of the peasants’ agricultural quota, he let people come and take my auntie’s chickens and pigs as payment in place of agricultural tax because we were too poor and didn’t have enough paddy to hand over.”

“And that old cop who was standing over in the field? Different guy, same story,” the other man said. “During the war, he came to our place and told us that he needed logs to line the roads for the trucks crossing this muddy area. To take out the posts, we had to dismantle our entire house. And my whole family had to move down into our shelter. But, even though they pulled our whole house apart, we were still determined to fight the Americans. Suffer now and live better afterward! Now we can see clearly. Suffer then and still suffer now! After all we did, he still lets people beat me bloody.”

I took them to the hospital, where they were crudely bandaged. They didn’t have any money to pay, so they couldn’t stay. Knowing that they would have to walk back otherwise, I waited for them, and then I took them back close to where everything had happened and let them out. Then I turned onto another road, and drove down toward the beach of Cửa Lớn.

I parked the car on an empty stretch of road, next to a stretch of shoreline. I would eat dinner first, and then I’d find somewhere to rest. I had some water and some bread, and gave Ki some canned food to eat first. Please forgive me, my travel mate. I knew that turning my friend into a sacrificial guinea pig wasn’t right. But, after all, how many people had given their lives for their friends? Nowadays it’s hard to find the kind of friends that are willing to lay down their lives for each other.

And I craved life now more than ever.

With my heart full of shame, I ate dinner silently in the night.

Suddenly, Ki leaped into the back seat and started barking toward the rear of the car. Under the noise, I could hear some women’s voices saying something. I saw them stop a safe distance from the car, so as not to provoke the dog. Then one of them called out, “Hey, man, how about a quickie? It’s just fifty thousand đồng.”