The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 9

The men in the shop appeared taciturn and unmoved, only ever erupting once the officers had departed. Debate had never threatened their solidarity, but over the days, Hng could see the circle around o develop the pointed ends of an ovoid.

"Might it not be in our interests, ultimately, to co-operate?" asked a young poet named Truc. "Give them this for now, leave us free to pursue our own work later?"

"Right," said a balding calligrapher. "We temporarily set our own pursuits aside."

"Weak, weak!" o shouted, pointing at each of them in turn. "If you give these things up, they will never be returned to you! Do you even hear yourselves? The Party celebrates its liberation of the peasantry while it devastates the countryside. How can you believe anything they promise?"

The next day, Hng saw the ovoid that surrounded o collapse into a straight line.

"You're a coward," o spat at the calligrapher.

"And you are a hypocrite," the calligrapher shouted back, jabbing his fist in o's face, "a self-serving anti-revolutionary."

Hng was not the only one in the room who gasped. He immediately sent Bnh to collect bowls from the dishwasher in the alleyway. He wondered how much Bnh understood. Of events both in the room and the wider world. Hng walked to the back door and stood on the threshold while a disembodied voice spewed propaganda through a megaphone.

"Who are the people?" he heard Bnh ask of the dishwasher. "Every day he talks about 'the people.'"

"Well, we are," said the woman. "All of us."

"But why is he so angry at all of us?" Bnh asked.

The woman shrugged, unable to offer the boy an answer.

The following morning, the ninth day of the officers' appearance, the young poet Truc rose, crossed the floor and reported himself for duty. On the tenth day, the calligrapher and his cousin followed.

"There are many different ways of fulfilling our revolutionary duties, comrades," o pleaded with those who remained. He then turned to the officers, addressing them directly for the first time. "Why not allow us the freedom to develop a national literature? How better might we serve the revolution than to tell the stories of a people liberated from imperial rule after centuries of struggle?"

"And what qualifies you, a man who stubbornly refuses to do his duty, to know best?" one of the officers asked, jabbing a firm finger into o's sternum.

Hng saw the anger in o's jaw. He placed his hands firmly on Bnh's shoulders. The officer raised his gun and pointed it briefly at o's head before nudging his new recruits out the door.

Hng has a memory of Bnh holding out a small fistful of clean chopsticks just as a man fills the doorway of his shop. The light is too dim to make out the man's face, but the row of s.h.i.+ning medals pinned across his chest suggests he is neither an officer of the Department of Propaganda and Political Education, nor a recruiter for the Literary a.s.sociation for National Salvation. He is a comrade of a different order altogether.

The men who remained allied with o had released the second issue of their journal, Fine Works of Autumn, the day before. Hng had found anonymous notes stuffed under the front door of the shop twenty-four hours later: We have been waiting for this, We are hungry, You give us hope, Please continue, read the bulk of the messages. Your disease could be fatal unless you seek immediate help, read a solitary note he did not pa.s.s on to o.

The man in the doorway thwacked the b.u.t.t of his rifle on the floor. The chopsticks cascaded from Bnh's hands, clattering on the tiles. The boy's fear was enough to propel Hng forward, but the officer simply swept Hng aside with a steely arm, walking straight over to the men seated in the far corner of the room. Three armed men followed him in, guns held tightly to their chests.

o rose, while the rest of the men remained seated, silent. Bnh looked from his father's face to the officer's face, then up to Hng's. Hng pulled the boy toward him, pinning him against his solid thighs.

The officer stood before the men with his feet planted firmly apart, his hands stiff on his hips. He spoke with a chilly lack of inflection. "There's a particular scourge of arrogance and narcissism that seems to afflict artists and intellectuals," he began. "You've been brainwashed by foreign ideas and been made slaves to your own egos. This sickness of the self needs curing. It has already perverted your politics. Must we really wait to see what it will infect next?"

"Comrade, sir, I a.s.sure you we believe fully in the theories of Marx and Lenin," said o. "We believe absolutely in communism, the most wonderful ideal of mankind, the youngest, the freshest ideal in all of history. But if a single style is imposed on all writers and artists, the day is not far off when all flowers will be turned into chrysanthemums."

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend, Hng thought to himself. o was alluding to Chairman Mao's invitation to artists and intellectuals to share their criticisms in order to shape and strengthen China's new order.

But the beauty of o's language was wasted on these men. They remained stone-faced, unimpressed. Two of them moved toward o and lifted him up by the elbows, suspending him above the ground.

"This is a warning to you," the officer said. "If you do not cease and desist with your publications, if you do not find a way to use your energies for the revolutionary good, you will have no garden left in which to grow your stupid, ugly flowers."

Hng felt Bnh's spine twitch against his thighs as the two men dropped his father. o winced as he went over on his ankle. The officer bent at the waist and swiftly spat into the bowl of ph in front of o, wiping his satisfied lips on the back of his hand before departing.

Hng loosened his grip on Bnh, stepping forward to lift the sullied bowl off the table. Bnh followed Hng through the shop as he carried the bowl out through the back door, tipped the broth into the alleyway and cracked the ceramic in half against a rock.

o appeared on the threshold behind his son. "Come, Bnh," he said, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Say goodbye to Mr. Hng. Breakfast at home from now on."

Hng, still holding the broken pieces of ceramic in each hand, turned around and waved goodbye to the sullen boy, knowing it best, and painfully aware that the days of Bnh shadowing him were unlikely to come again. The moment was bittersweet: o was finally being a father to his son, but protecting Bnh meant sending him away.

The following morning, the officers were back, making a great display of throwing armfuls of confiscated copies of the journal into the burning guts of an oil barrel planted in front of Hng's shop. Black smoke billowed in through the front door while the officers broadcast messages of condemnation over a crackling megaphone, calling Fine Works of Autumn the work of reactionaries and Trotskyites, the senile ravings of syphilitic minds.

The men in the shop did not speak or otherwise react; they simply carried on eating from their bowls. When Hng suggested the men might wish to leave by the back door, o said, "We will not be cowed by their theatrics. We will leave by the front door." And so they did, the eight of them who remained: in solemn and single file.

The effects of land reform soon began to be felt in the city. The baskets of country women rattled with a few bruised apples, the price of rice became impossible, the greens in the market were limp reminders of things that had once grown in abundance, the only meat available was grey and taut with age.

Hng did without green garnish and pounded tough cuts of beef with a mallet and was simply grateful that the men did not complain, still came morning after morning to eat a soup that could not be compared to the soup of earlier times, came despite the rings of late nights beneath their eyes and the worry apparent on their faces.

They'd become a small army dedicated to thought and solemn talk. They gave up shaving, perhaps having given up returning home to bathe and sleep in their beds. They needed a faster and cheaper way to communicate with the people, a way to extend their readers.h.i.+p and reach. They agreed to produce a tabloid-style magazine going forward, one they would call Nhan Van-Humanism.

Hng remembers inhaling the ink rising darkly from the pages of the first issue, reeling drunk from the intoxicating smell and the thrill of its daring words. Just as he was burying the issue safely beneath his mattress in his backroom, Party officers were raiding the magazine's offices, burning books and papers and shelves and damaging the press.

o moved the giant press to a secret new location at the back of a communal house in his neighbourhood with the help of men in black masks. The men published the next two issues of Nhan Van from here in quick succession, but they might as well have fed the magazines directly into the fire given how rapidly the copies were confiscated and destroyed.

The men were quieter than Hng had ever known them to be, both exhausted by their efforts and wary of the potential presence of spies in their midst. Hng was relieved that Bnh was at least safe at home with his mother, Amie; he felt sure that any day now the shop itself would be set on fire, but he missed the boy like one might miss the sense of smell. The boy had never wanted ideology or politics; he wanted the simple things a man like Hng offered: customized chopsticks, an extra dash of fish sauce, praise for a ch.o.r.e done well, a greeting just for him.

There were details that Hng used to share with Bnh, things that no one else noticed, things Hng no longer saw in the boy's absence. Hng lost track of the translucent trail left by the lizard that made its home on the wall of his backroom.

"Why does he leave a trail?" Bnh had once asked. "Do you think he wants us to find him?"

The atmosphere in the shop was so tense that Hng longed for the relief he used to feel whenever he felt his hope for Vietnam's future flagging and he looked over at Bnh and was relieved of despondency or doubt.

Then suddenly, one morning as he was delivering a stack of bowls to the dishwasher in the alleyway, Hng caught sight of the boy in an adjacent doorway. Only his ears and knees seemed to have grown in the months since he last saw him.

"Bnh," Hng said. "But what are you doing here?"

"Ma only makes rice," the boy said, shuffling over. "She never makes ph."

"Yes, well, I can understand that, Bnh. It's a lot of work and she's a busy woman. But rice is not so bad, is it?"

He shrugged his small shoulders. "It's okay," he said. "Everything's just quiet."

"Ah," said Hng. "You miss the conversation, is that it? The company?"

Bnh blinked. "I miss you."

For a man who had largely gone unwanted in his life, this was a particularly unsettling thing to hear. And how did one respond to affection, particularly when expressed so nakedly? One cleared one's throat, shuffled back and forth on slippered feet and slowly recovered one's composure.

"What about this, Bnh," Hng proposed. "Ask your mother's permission to come see me at the end of the week. You wait here for me, just in that doorway where you were waiting this morning, and I will bring you a bowl of ph."

Bnh did come to the alleyway behind ph Chin & Hng accompanied by his mother that Friday. "Of course I gave my consent," Amie said to Hng. "The boy is terribly fond of you. But please, you mustn't let o know, he'd be furious with me. He means well, he's just trying to keep us safe."

And so they had crouched in the alleyway and eaten Hng's ph that Friday and the next. The Friday after that, Bnh came without his mother. He carried a chessboard, laid it down in the dirt, and tried to entice Hng into a game.

"One move each," said Hng. "That's all I have time for."

"But I don't know how to play," said Bnh.

"Oh dear," said Hng, squatting down in the dirt with the boy, the board between them. "I'm not sure that I do either." Hng picked up a wooden piece carved with the Chinese character for elephant and laid it down.

Hng carried on with his routine every morning, bracing himself for the day when his shop would be burned to the ground. Winter was upon them, the grey days of November, when the fourth issue of Nhan Van was published. o delivered a copy to Hng after dark, knocking on the back door of the building. Hng, heart in throat, opened the door.

"I went out into the country myself," o said to the ground. He hesitated, a man of words unsure of what to say next, his uncharacteristic awkwardness silencing them both. "To my wife's village," he finally added, pressing the magazine heavily into Hng's hands.

Hng read the editorial that night by the weak yellow light of his lamp. There, listed plainly, were the crimes of land reform, unmasked by poetry or allegory. The Party had violated the Republic's const.i.tution by making illegal arrests, deliberately miscla.s.sifying peasants as landowners, seizing their property, throwing them in prison, subjecting them to barbaric torture, performing executions and abandoning innocent children, leaving them to starve to death.

The editorial went on to suggest that it might be time for new leaders.h.i.+p, since H Chi Minh and the other senior Party officials seemed to have become rigid and closed-minded with age. They had now forbidden all protest-but had they not, as young men, engaged in protest themselves? How had the Party come into being in the first place? Were they now, from the comfort of their positions of power, content to stagnate, to atrophy, to close the Vietnamese mind?

Hng was overcome by a fear of the sort that turns a mortal heart into concrete. He wished with every fibre of his being that o had not gone so far in his attempt to compensate for his failure to empathize with the peasantry. o had not merely criticized the Party's policies, he had committed the ultimate crime-insulting Uncle H'o-for which he risked the threat of the ultimate punishment.

The next day, none of the Nhan Van contributors turned up for breakfast. The room was so quiet that Hng could hear the slow beat of his heart. After breakfast was over, the fire extinguished, the tiled floor swept, the chopsticks neatly housed, Hng closed all the shutters, pulled the beret o had given him years before down over his eyebrows and left the building by the back door.

The paranoia that had stopped the men talking in the ph shop had now infected him as well. He put his hands in his pockets and studied the ground as he walked very deliberately in the opposite direction of the Nhan Van office. When he was certain he had not been followed, he doubled back and emerged at the busy eastern edge of the Old Quarter, slid into Cafe V, strode through the length of it, exchanging no more than a nod with the owner, and walked out the back door into yet another alleyway.

He turned the corner.

He smelled the burning before he saw it. This time the Party had not been content simply to destroy the contents of the office. They had razed the neighbourhood communal house, the place for meetings and wors.h.i.+p of the ancestral spirits, at the back of which the men of the Beauty of Humanity Movement had been given sanctuary. A crowd of people stood across the street and stared at the smouldering rafters, too late to save the building or the people who might have been trapped inside.

o in flames-Hng couldn't bear to think of it. o choking, gasping for air. Hng walked away as he had walked away from his village's temple, feeling as if everything vital had been desecrated. He eventually found himself at the sh.o.r.es of Hoan Kim Lake. He studied the ever-calm surface of the water, willed a turtle to rise from the murk and walked across the red Bridge of the Rising Sun toward the temple on Jade Island.

A single spiral coil of incense burned inside the temple, where once, not long ago, there would have been hundreds. He raised his hands to pray, but a great listlessness overcame him and he abandoned the effort. It was communism that caused the weight in his arms. Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage.

But where he found no comfort in the temple any longer, he still prayed each night to the ancestral spirits, lifting Uncle Chin's photo from its small altar at the back of the shop, dusting it, offering fruit. He prayed for o's life, but woke each morning in certain distress, dread lodged like an egg in his throat.

Days pa.s.sed without any sign of o or his colleagues. Hng found himself at the threshold of o's apartment in the French Quarter. The door had been torn from its hinges. "Bnh," Hng called out, his voice echoing in the front room. "Amie?"

He knocked on the doors of the adjacent apartments to no avail. But someone must have heard him, for the next day, o's wife came to see him at the shop. "He must have been sent to a re-education camp," Amie said.

Hng failed to reply, fearing a fate far worse, having no rea.s.suring words to offer.

"Hng, please tell me you think he has been sent to a re-education camp," she begged.

Hng could not imagine o ever abandoning his convictions, but then, perhaps there would be torture and brainwas.h.i.+ng, the likes of which Hng had read descriptions of in Nhan Van.

"I will keep the broth hot in antic.i.p.ation of his return," Hng said, which became true the moment he uttered it. This would be his vigil.

"Did o tell you we had another baby, Hng?"

Hng took a step backward, startled by the news.

"Last month. A baby brother for Bnh. But the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck."

Amie's voice was one of quiet desperation, her expression one of pain. "His face was blue from lack of oxygen," she continued, "but instead of cutting the cord and freeing him, the midwife just pulled the cord tight."

"An act of mercy," Hng said gently. "It must have been too late for the child."

"But not for the child's sake, Hng. Not for my sake or o's either. Do you know what the midwife said?" Amie's lips were trembling now. "A child like this will be of no use to the revolution," she whispered. "This is what prompted o to go to the country. To finally see the devastation for himself. To be able to write of it."

Hng suddenly felt o's presence, as if they stood side by side bearing witness to the carnage of his village. o now understood that the revolution would not stop short of murdering everyone who stood in its way. But they had missed the opportunity for this conversation, the moment where o might have said, Now I understand with my heart, and Hng might have said, Forgiven.

"Perhaps you should take Bnh away from Hanoi for the time being," Hng said.

"Yes," replied Amie. "We will go back to my mother's village. You'll send word to us if you hear anything, won't you?"

"Of course," said Hng, leaning over to the rattan drawer. "And take these. They belong to Bnh."

He watched Amie run down the street, her hand gripping the boy's short chopsticks, her ao dai flapping behind her like a struggling kite.

s.h.i.+t on a Canvas.

Beyond the sound of birds, there is little to suggest it is morning when Maggie strikes a match to light the gas burner. She sits down on a hard wooden chair at the table and waits for the kettle to boil. The sky outside the kitchen window is an industrial grey designed to challenge the most resilient of spirits, so unlike the blue expanse of a Minnesota morning at this time of year. She misses home-the ease and familiarity of it- though she misses fewer people than she expected. It's easy to a.s.sume colleagues as friends until you are no longer working beside them every day.

She always felt herself an alien to some degree-not at work so much, but in the wider world. It happens when people-even the most enlightened among them-can't resist asking you where you're from. It reminds you that you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place, except insofar as you are pioneering your way through it in your own lifetime, your roots buried in some faraway earth.

You don't always want to answer the question.

And the answer is not always the same.

Maggie presses the plunger into the Bodum prematurely, forcing it down with both hands. She adds a thick dollop of condensed milk to the cup and takes her first sip of coffee, pressing a fingertip to the few grains of coffee stuck to her bottom lip.

Despite the dullness of the day, she's looking forward to spending it with T. He showed her the lake the other day; she introduced him to some art. She wonders if he considers it a fair exchange.

Only in her last year of high school did Maggie realize she wanted a career in art. It had never occurred to her as a possibility before because she lacked artistic talent, something her father must have realized when she was just five years old. She hadn't known there were options like curation until a trip with her sociology cla.s.s to see an exhibition doc.u.menting the protests in Tiananmen Square.

"But why are they placed so far apart?" she had asked her teacher.

"That was probably a curatorial decision."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the curator takes the work and presents it in such a way as to tell a story. If you read these pieces from left to right, chronologically, you realize how much of the story is missing. All that white s.p.a.ce. You go from thousands of people in that shot to only one person in the last shot. Maybe you're supposed to use your imagination to fill in the gaps."

When it comes to her father's story, she has exhausted her imagination. She wants the justice of facts, some hard evidence.

Hng wakes late this morning, battling a storm of a headache. What a relief it would be to lay his head in Lan's lap as he had once done, the velvet pads of her forefingers ma.s.saging his temples in hypnotic circles. He had been working his hardest in those days, his earliest days as a roaming ph seller, seeking customers on empty streets in the mornings, making his broth and pondweed vermicelli in the afternoons, and spending his nights fas.h.i.+oning dung cakes and foraging for reeds for his fire and repairing the cart he had built out of random sc.r.a.ps.