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THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467) PREMIER ISSUE VOLUME 1 NUMBER 1 JUL 1999
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VO KY DIEN THE OLD MAN WHO BELIEVED ONLY WHAT HE SAW Translated by HUYNH SANH THONG Old Man
Seven, the blacksmith, lived near my maternal grandfather in a slum on the
outskirts of the provincial seat. The path that led to the smithy, strewn
with granite chips, a jagged and filthy mess, in particular when it rained.
But, even during the dry season, it remained a track of slush because there
was a well alongside the blacksmith's shop. From dawn to dusk, you never
ceased to hear the clanking of tin buckets against the rim of the well. No
fountain had yet been installed in this area, so the whole neighborhood
depended on the well. Old Man Seven's smithy, already astir with customers,
became a more bustling place still. Folks, waiting for their turn to draw
water, would drop by to watch him forge knives and scissors or just to chat
about the weather. I loved to hear Old Man Seven talk of any subject under
the sun. I had never seen him wear anything but black trunks. A brawny chest,
a dark skins that shone in the glow of the furnace fire, despite his fifty-
odd years of age, he was quite strong physically. There was a fluid grace to
his bulging muscles. He handled the huge sledgehammer as though it didn't
weigh much. Each time the hammer hit the bar of red-hot iron, it sent off a
shower of sparks like a fireworks display. On a
chilly day of rain, nothing could give more pleasure than to snuggle up by
the blazing coals of the furnace and watch Old Man Seven beat iron into a
knife as he held forth on how to interpret some riddle that the Chinese
organizers of the Forty Beasts gambling game had set. Grandfather
and Old Man Seven, friends of long standings and kindred souls, relished each
other's company. Whenever I went to Grandfather's house and he wasn't there,
I could count on finding him at the blacksmith's shop and nowhere else. Among
the people of this small community, the two made a name for themselves as the
foremost interpreters of conundrums in the guessing game of the Forty Beasts. Once,
Grandfather showed an issue of The Morning Bell to his friend, pointing to the
"Whispers in the Ear" column where this enigmatic clue was
published for the next round of the game: A clear-sighted man must both
gaze ahead and look back. Grandfather
pondered for a long while, then exultingly declared: "That must mean
the Dog! Yes, indeed! Bet on number eleven and win." Old Man
Seven asked why. Grandfather lost no time grabbing a chance to strut his
bookish learning: "An old adage reads like this: If the wolf steps
forward, it's will get caught by the dewlap; if it steps back, it will get
caught by the tail. In other words, the poor creature finds itself in a
quandary, unable either to advance or to retreat." He clucked
admiratively and went on: "He's a clever devil, the fellow who's
propounded the conundrum. Gaze forward -that's the wolf's dewlap. And look
back-that's it's tail. Does it seem right to you, Brother Seven?" Old Man
Seven grinned, baring the gaps of lost teeth on his jaws: "Well, it
does make some kind of sense. But I myself think that the riddle has to do
which the Pig." I had been
sitting there in speechless rapture. Puzzled by Old Man Seven's
interpretation, I blurted out: "Does a pig like to gaze forward and
look back, Grandfather Seven?" The old
man smiled an indulgent smile: "You don't know much, do you, child?
When you interpret a riddle for the game of the Forty Beasts, you don't just
settle for the obvious- you must look for the hidden meaning. If it were so
easy to read riddles like you do, everybody could figure out the answer and
get rich in no time, Let me explain it to you-the key to it all is in the
phrase look back. To 'look back' is to turn around and look. To 'turn around'
is quay laïi, and quay also means to turn a beast and roast it. You know how
our guests from China love roast pork. I'm telling you-it's the Pig!" I saw the
light and danced with excitement. The two oldsters' money in hand, I ran
nonstop to the shop of the Chinese man named Caùnh where I placed bets on the
Dog and the Pig. That afternoon, the answer to the conundrum was announced:
the Duck. Old Man Seven tore his hair, sore at the loss of his hard-earned
money and angry with himself for having overlooked roast duck. At that
time I was about twelve. Every day I was entrusted with a most important
mission, which was to run to the newspaper stall at the crack of dawn and buy
The Morning Bell for Grandfather and Echoes for Old Man Seven. While the two
respectively pored over "Whispers in the Ear" and "A Word to
the Wise", I devoured the centerfold where appeared some detective novel
by Phuù Ñöùc. Since early childhood, I had harbored a passion for fiction and
for the strange and marvelous. One day, in a geography class, the teacher
taught us that the earth was round and that it turned about the sun. When to
Old Man Seven I boasted of that freshly acquired bit of fantastic lore, his
eyes rolled heavenward with incredulity: "What a weird thing you just
said, child! Repeat it to me, please." I spoke at
one go: "The teacher says that the earth is round, like a ball. It
turns all day without ever stopping. And it turns quite fast..." Old
Man Seven shook his head: "I don't believe one word of it. If the
earth were round, why could we stand on our feet without falling? If it moved
and rolled like a ball, then we would have been thrown off its surface. The
earth is flat, and the best proof of it is that you see it's flat and lies
still, so we can build houses on it. If it shook, all the houses would be
shaking too." "We
believed the earth to be flat," I retorted, "only because
it's so big. Actually, it's round. Go out to Vuõng Taøu and watch the sea:
you'll find that the horizon is a curve." "I've
never been to Vuõng Taøu and never seen the sea. What I don't behold with my
own eyes I don't believe." I was
rather irked by Old Man Seven's insistences that the earth was flat and
squared when drawings in my book clearly showed it to be round. I proceeded
to demonstrate the fact just like the teacher had done in the classroom: Grandfather
Seven, imagine yourself standing on the seashore and gazing at a ship far away,
on the horizon. At first you see only the smokestacks. As the ship draws
nearer you'll see part of the hull. You'll make out the whole vessel only
when it gets close to shore. That goes to prove that the earth is round-the
smokestacks alone are seen first because the surface of the earth is
curved." "I
don't believe it! I've never seen a single smokestack on a ship, and I can't
imagine myself ever going to the seashore. Anyhow, it's absurd to claim that
the earth spins and rolls like a hall. If it behaved that way, we all should
be hurled into the blue!" I
patiently pursued my demonstration: "The earth does spin quite fast,
but we are not hurled into space thanks to something called gravity: it's a
force at the core of the earth that pulls every down and stops it from flying
off into space." Old Man
Seven shook his head with exasperation: "Young chap, this is
apparently your day to talk rubbish. How come a bird that flies up there
isn't pulled down to the ground? Ha, if you're so leaned and smart, explain
that to me! Those French colonialists have crammed your head full of rot.
Goddamned aggressors! Confounded bandits! You know what happened to little
Teøo yesterday? He came down with a touch of cold and was taken to the
hospital: there they stuck him with a needle and he dropped dead! That's what
they call Western medicine. If only his folks had gone to the Chinese grocery
and purchased one of those powders for a cold! You'd better look out and save
your own skin: one of these days, when they get to your school and promise
you a cure-all with a sting of their needle, run for your life. Don't be a
fool and believe their bunk. Gosh, you're still so green and callow that
you've fallen for all that. But they never can trick this old codger. I
believe only what I see. Don't you set any store by rumor and hearsay." I was
consumed with doubt and uncertainty. How could it be that the teacher taught
nothing but lies? What Old Man Seven said sounded far from implausible, though.
By his age, he had learned much from the school of experience. Some of his
children were as old as my father and mother. Grandfather himself yielded to
none in his high regard for Old Man Seven. While Grandfather hardly ever won
at the game of the Forty Beasts, his friend did score several triumphs. When
I brought up the topic of the French attempt to conquer our country and asked
Grandfather about it, he would talk just like Old Man Seven. Indeed, the two
saw eye to eye on that very subject. When they read paper accounts of French
defeats along the rivers Ñaø and Loâ, they were beside themselves with joy.
They reached the pinnacle of ecstasy on that day in 1954 when, after Ñieän
Bieân Phuû, the colonialists signed the Geneva agreements. After a long wait,
I had to jostle with the crowd before I could make off with a tattered
copy of the morning paper. I ran like one possessed and gave it to Old Man
Seven. Tears welling in his eyes, he said in a choked voice: "So our
country knows peace at last! This time, when my baby boy comes home, I'll get
him a good wife and have him live here with me to comfort me in my remaining
days." Grandfather
couldn't control his emotions any better: "It's the same here. My
sixth son left home some ten years ago. Now that the war is over, he can come
back and tend my garden and my field. My house is his. It all belongs to him
because he is to use income from it for 'fire and incense', for the ancestral
cult in the family. My few acres in Xoùm Möông will yield enough for him to
live on. He'll be able to relax and enjoy himself after all those harsh years
in the jungle." That day,
the two old men stayed up into the small hours and caroused all through the
night. Neighbors dropped by to join them in their libations, trading one toast
after another. I had to make a few trips to the Chinese Caùnh's shop for more
liquor. We all had a rollicking time. As I was
told, my uncle-Grandfather's sixth son- and Old Man Seven's baby boy had
joined the Vieät Minh as far back as 1945, during those epic days when
the anti-French started
with bamboo spears. I had been just a tiny tot then. I still hazily remember
those grownups who held aloft red flags with the yellow star and sang as they
marched. They also huddled together and talked in whispers. Now we all
reminisced about those events of ten years ago. Though still too young to
know much about anything, I burned with a fierce desire to be old enough to
fight the French and save the country. Alas, my uncle and the blacksmith's
baby boy had performed all those feats of arms, and not much glory was left
for a teenager like me to garner in my turn. During
that summer vacation, I went to the area on the Right Bank of the Bassac
river and stayed with paternal relatives. Together, my maternal grandfather
and Old Man Seven trekked toward Xuyeân Moäc to see their son off: those two
Resistance fighters chose to go North after the signature of the Geneva
agreements and the partition of Vietnam. They didn't know they could come
home again. Since the country remained in a state of unrest, they still had
debts to discharge as patriots. Nevertheless, their fathers fervently hoped
that the day was near when their families would be reunited. For the moment,
the country was divided along the seventeenth parallel. Russian and Polish
ships were transporting groups of guerrillas from the South to the North.
Meanwhile, French and American ships were carrying a million of our
compatriots from the North to the South. Old Man
Seven, watching them arrives, shook his head and heaved deep sighs:
"They had such a bright future up North! The Revolution had triumphed,
the country was winning independence and peace, freedom and happiness. And
they left all that to come down here for what! If I were younger, I would no
doubt apply to go North and build a smithy there." A few months later, in front of
the blacksmith's shop pulled up the pushcart of a peddler of phôû noodle
soup. The vendor was more or less the same age as Old Man Seven. Nobody knew
the name of that newcomer from the North. But, as a true Northerner, he would
often make a point of ending a sentence with the exclamatory particle 'cô '.
Before long, the particle came to be adopted as his nickname by people in the
neighborhood. Uncle Cô's
noodle soup tasted delicious and cost little: the community around the
blacksmith' s shop began to enjoy and appreciate that specimen of Hanoi
cuisine. But if his noodle soup was swallowed with relish, what Uncle Co had
to say didn't go down so well. He claimed that in the North the people were
living a wretched life. The secret police snooped on everyone and could nab
anyone. Folks toiled and toiled and didn't get enough to fill their stomachs.
The state confiscated land and houses, boats and vehicles. Human life up
North made the fate of a buffalo or a pig seems enviable. After he
had heard uncle Cô talk Old Man Seven told me, his face glowering with fury: "That
noodle soup peddler also peddles false propaganda. He's an undercover agent
who works for Saigon. He slanders and smears the Vieät Minh. Revolutionists
struggle to bring about a change for the better. If the people suffer, lack
food and clothes, and get arrested on whim, when why have a revolution in the
first place? ! Don't you eat either his noodles or his words. I loathe that breed
of propaganda-mongers" What Old
Man Seven said made logical sense. Uncle Cô's noodle soup, though, proved far
more persuasive. I couldn't deny myself its forbidden delight-so, every day,
along with his soup, I had to gulp down a heavy dose of propaganda from Uncle
Cô. "You
know nothing about it, of course," said he, " but up North
schoolchildren have a hell of a time. When they're through with their lessons
in the classroom, they have to go and do labor planting potatoes or cassavas
in the uplands. On Sundays and holidays they must dig canals or build dikes
for Uncle Hoà and the Party. That's backbreaking work, yet they're given
nothing to eat! You boys and girls live the good life down here in the
South." What I
heard grated on my ears. Children digging canals on Sundays?! It struck me as
wildly farfetched, so I told Uncle Cô: "If they find it so hard, why
don't they just quit? Who'll force them to do it?" Uncle Cô
rolled his eyes at me, replying: "How could they quit?! If they did,
they'd be sent to a so- call reeducation school and their death. If you act
up and get a bad record, that's tantamount to a sentence passed on your whole
life. You'll find it beyond belief, but up in the North people need official
permission before they may eat a chicken!" I was
nonplused and unconvinced. That was propagandistic overkill, all right. Go to
school and meet your death? Ask permission to eat a chicken? Where in the
world could such excesses take place? I repeated it all to Old Man Seven. He
guffawed to his heart's content. "You
see, what did I tell you?!" he said. "He's an undercover agent
for sure. What children are strong enough to dig canals? Just the matter of
asking permission to eat a chicken shows he's an arrant liar. Whose
permission?! The chickens I raise I eat, and I shall let no one on earth stop
me. The truth may be stretched and still pass muster. But when he lies
through his teeth like that, who will heed what he says? Let anyone barge
into my house without proper cause or due authorization and I shall kick him
out! I may even drag him before a court of law: that's illegal invasion of
privacy, if you ask me. Up in the North, that fellow Cô must have been one of
those running dogs of the colonialists and the feudalistic. No wonder he
opposes and maligns the Revolution. But what is communism, after all?
Communism means justice! In the communism society, there are no millionaires
and no paupers, no oppressors on top and no little downtrodden people at the
bottom. It's one big happy family of equals. Don't you find that a much
fairer scheme of thing? Instead, down here in the South, the rich wallow in
luxury while the poor lack the bare necessities of life. Come to think of it,
a revolutionist is just like me, a blacksmith. When I forge a chunk of iron,
I hammer it nice and flat to smooth out bumps and hollows, ridges and
grooves. Both revolutionists and blacksmiths are levelers! That's what the
Revolution is all about, my boy. If it were a sad mistake, would I and your
own grandfather have let our sons leave us and go North?" With Old
Man Seven's impassioned speech a new day dawned in my social consciousness.
Yes, the Revolution was the genuine article. No love or pity should be wasted
on the selfish rich. They met their comeuppance when they got stripped of all
their villas and cars and their wealth was shared among the have-nots. Give
back to the people what belongs to the people. Still,
something bothered me. I asked Old Man Seven: "But Uncle Cô is
himself a poor man. Up in the North he couldn't have made a pile of money
peddling noodle soup with his pushcart. Why doesn't he like the Revolution,
Grandfather Seven?" "You
stupid boy! Down here he makes a poor mouth, but up North he may well have
been a big landowner, a bourgeois capitalist or the like. People always speak
well of themselves. And they speak well of what they love. What they loathe
they find fault with. That fellow Cô hates the Revolution, so he tears it to
pieces. If the new regime is worse than the old it has replaced, how can it
be called the Revolution? In Russia and in China they've had the Revolution
for decades now. Has it hurt anyone except the privileged few" "But
Grandfather Seven ! I've heard that up North they've denounced their fathers
and their mothers, their husbands and their wives. Such tales scare the
daylights out of me!" "Come,
now, boy! What the noodle soup peddler says boils down to this; somehow the
revolutionists have all taken leave of their senses! Is is likely? I think
not. Remember what I've told you again and again: Believe only what you see.
Never trust rumor and hearsay. I trust the evidence of my eyes and nothing
else. The colonialists and imperialists are past masters at spreading false
reports." I gazed at
Old Man Seven, and his sincerity touched me. On the face that was mesh of
wrinkles, the eyes shone with intense resolve. But in them I also caught a
faraway gleam of longing for his baby boy to come home. The young man, like
my own uncle, was now an active participant in the Revolution up North. The
noodle soup peddler's face and eyes flashed through my mind: the features
differed, but it was the same sincerity and resolve. Uncle Cô's words echoed
faintly in my ears: "Just mull over the reason why I left my father
and mother, my wife and children, my beloved birthplace, and risked death to
come down here. I'm only human and feel human feelings. Why did I leave,
then?" Because of
the Revolution Old Man Seven made his sacrifice and let his youngest son go
up North. And because of the Revolution Uncle Cô left his wife and children
and his all behind to come down South. There was just one fact: why two
opposite ways to deal with it? It haunted me, that question to which I found
no adequate answer yet. The savage
conflict went on, with more blood seed. Every day, houses shook under the
impact of shells and bombs. The havoc and horror of war was no longer the
figment of my novelists imagination but the stuff of life. Humans, somehow,
learned to numb themselves and acquired the needed callousness to live. My
maternal grandfather, grown quite old; died after a short bout of illness.
Old Man Seven, bereft of his closest friend, didn't fare badly thanks to his
two oldest sons: well off, they had his rundown house remodeled into a decent
dwelling. The smithy had been long gone. On its site there was now a garage
for the repair of cars. Every so often I stopped by to visit with Old Man
Seven. Though well into his seventies, he remained hale and hearty. He often
talked of his youngest son and sorrowfully wondered if he could ever see that
favorite child of his again before he was to go and meet his ancestors. As for
Uncle Cô, his noodle soup business was thriving. He had removed his pushcart
from the neighborhood of the old smithy and opened a big restaurant in the
provincial capital. He went about his business with industry and diligence.
In the way he dressed and comported himself he looked no different from the
refugee who had fled from the North. He made enough money to justify the old
adage: Great wealth comes from Heaven, and small wealth from hard
work. These days, Old Man Seven would from time to time go downtown and
treat himself to a bowl of noodle soup at Uncle Cô 's restaurant. On such an
occasion, politics was set aside. As you get old, you can't afford to pick
and choose a friend in your age bracket. When Old Man Seven and Uncle Cô met,
they just sat there together for hours. Only once in a long while would they
break the silence and exchange a few words. In those troubled times it was
wiser to listen than to talk. By then, moreover, the Revolution had become a
dead issue that no argument could resolve or decide. Good or bad, the
Revolution no longer concerned two septuagenarians. It only pertained to
younger people like me. * * * After
1975, when the Revolution had caught up with the South, I met Old Man Seven
again. Below the broad forehead, the eyes seemed overcast with sadness. A
lime could fit into the hollow of each sunken cheek. The prominent cheekbones
made him look drawn and gaunt. With his walking stick he had been aimlessly
roaming the neighborhood, like a lost soul. As he passed my house, he stopped
by to rest his feet. I offered him a cup of tea and asked about his family.
He sighed and began a recital of all their woes: "My
oldest son was sent to a reeducation camp, so his wife went back to her folks
in Moû Caøy. My second son's bus was taken away from him- they politely
called it a 'requisition'. The Land Transportation Service borrowed his house
to use it as an office. He had to petition the government and grease many
palms before his family was allowed to stay in a shed behind the garage. It
breaks my heart to watch my grandchildren go and do labor for the state. Last
month, Daân, only fifteen years old, was picked by lot to work with an
irrigation project in Chaùnh Löu. The boy couldn't stand constant exposure to
the elements, had fever and delirium, and was carried home for treatment- he
hasn't recovered yet. His younger brothers and sisters walk around rummaging
through garbage dumps for scrap paper and tattered nylon bags to bring back
to their teachers at school as part of their homework. As for me, I'm
supposed to raise one pig and ten chickens to help the village implement its
plan for self-sufficiency in food supply. Every day I must find things for
the pig and chickens to eat. And you know how hard it is nowadays to scrounge
up food for humans, let alone feed for beasts! Every few months the team
leader comes around to count and make sure the pig and all the chickens are
still there, so he can report to the upper echelon and get good marks for the
village. It's only now that I realize what he meant, that fellow Cô, the
noodle soup peddler..." I tried to
comfort Old Man Seven: "It hasn't been long since the Revolution came
to the South. Many difficulties remain to be coped with. It's just like when
you started to forge a piece of iron: you had to wait until it was...
red-hot!" Old Man
Seven snorted sarcastically: "Ugh, the way these Communists forge the
new society! They simply shut their eyes and hammer away. Even this gaffer
got a rap a while ago. On Uncle Hoà's birthday, all households were ordered
to fly the flag at their front doors. My dwelling is now set way back from
the street- it 's a mere shed, not a house, strictly speaking. Yet their
policeman in the area swaggered into my place and uttered all sorts of
threats, and I had to go buy a flag..." I thought
of Uncle Cô and of how Old Man Seven had lectured me about the Revolution. I
felt so sorry for the blacksmith. I asked him: 'I've heard that your
youngest son holds a high post in the revolutionary administration. Hasn't he
intervened in your behalf?" Old Man
Seven, who was about to touch the cup with his lips, put it down on hearing
my question. He seemed to hesitate, carefully choosing his words. After a
rather long pause, he whispered in a broken, faltering voice: "He's
back -so I'm happy. But that's all. I don't want him to lift a finger for my
sake. He's now far apart from the rest of us in his way of thinking. 'When
they ask you for something, it's all right, but if you ask them for
something, that means trouble. I even keep him in the dark about family
matters- it's better so. Luckily, I was a lowly blacksmith who managed to
scrimp and save some money. Heaven knows what would have happened to me if I
had been a wealthy man. Anyhow, down here in the South, we all are 'unlawful
puppets'. The boy worries about guilt by kinship- he has to keep his distance
or he'll be censured and reprimanded. Now he has Uncle Hoà and the Party- he
doesn't need his father. Please speak of him no more." At this
point Old Man Seven gasped for breath. His pent-up rage had gotten the better
of him. How could he help feeling angry and hurt? Throughout his life he had
invested all that he had held dearest in the Revolution, and that had
included his youngest son, his pride and joy. The investment turned out to be
a fiasco. The Revolution came, but the good life and happiness were nowhere
in sight. All around him he witnessed nothing but hunger and misery,
suspicion and hatred. As to his son, the boy now shared with him a striking
physical resemblance and nothing else, for he thought and felt like Uncle Hoà
and the Party. Could the bonds between father and son prove so thin and
fragile? It had taken Old Man Seven more than twenty years to discover that
truth. He had planted and nursed the tree of the Revolution with loving care
only to reap now its bitter fruits. Old Man
Seven's life imitated the game of the Forty Beasts as he had played it once
and lost. He betted on a roasted pig: the Revolution laid an egg and hatched
a canard. Translated by professor HUYNH SANH THONG · THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467), Copyright
© 1999
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