He treated Kien warmly and politely and with the correct intimacy for the occasion, making him hot tea and inviting him to smoke and generally feel at home.
Kien noticed that his eyes were blurred and his scraggy and frail old hands trembled.
He looked over to Kien and said gently, ‘So, you’re off to the war? Not that I can prevent you. I’m old, you are young. I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to. I just want you to understand me when I say that a human being’s duty on this earth is to live, not to kill,’ he said. ‘Taste all manner of life. Try everything. Be curious and inquire for yourself. Don’t turn your back on life.’
Kien was surprised by the integrity of his stepfather’s words and he listened intently.
‘I want you to guard against all those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but for you not to die uselessly for the needs of others. You are all we have left, your mother, your father and me. I hope you live through the war and return home to Hanoi, for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?’
Surprised, and far from agreeing with him, Kien nevertheless trusted his stepfather’s words, feeling an affinity with his sentiments. He saw in the old man a wise multi-faceted intelligence with a warm, romantic heart that seemed to belong to another era, a sentimental era with all its sweet dreams and heightened awareness, alien to Kien, but attractive nonetheless.
He understood then why his mother had left his father and come to live with this wise, kind-hearted man.
For the entire afternoon he sat with his stepfather in the room in which his mother had lived her last years, and where she had died. And that winter afternoon became his only memory of his mother, a memory of warmth and a special atmosphere conjured up by his stepfather as he read old love poems he had composed for her when he was young. He took a guitar down from the wall and started singing in a deep voice a song by Van Cao, a song his mother had loved. It was a slow, melancholy song recalling loved ones who were forever gone, decrying life’s unhappiness yet with a strain of underlying hope:
Don’t lament, don’t bathe in the sorrows, look up and live on…
After joining the army, Kien had written to his stepfather, but had no reply. After the war, ten years after his visit that afternoon, Kien returned again to find him.
But when he arrived neighbours told him his stepfather had died many years earlier. Even the house had gone. It had been destroyed long ago. No one remembered the circumstances of his death, or even how the house had been destroyed.
Such a man, such a story, Kien pondered. But there were so many romantics like him now; some close to him, others from just outside his immediate circle.
Once, at his desk in the editorial office of his magazine, a strange man who wished to remain anonymous approached him, asking for his story to be run in the magazine. It was a love story. The main characters were this man and his wife. ‘If the names are changed we can then really tell the truth of this very beautiful but tragic story,’ he told Kien. It was to be an extraordinary present for his sick wife, to commemorate their thirtieth anniversary in marriage. Wasn’t that great?
Kien thought the story was a load of rubbish and very boring. Yet the courage and determination of the man, and his strong desire to create this unusual present, impressed him, set him thinking.
He could, for example, write a novel about his neighbours, above, below and on the same floor as his own apartment in the one building. It could be a story of symphonies. Not a war story.
Stories, humorous, heart-rending, arose every day. Anywhere people were jammed up close together and forced to share their lives. On summer evenings when there were power blackouts and it was too hot inside, everyone came out to sit out in front, near the only water tap servicing the whole three-storey building.
The tap trickled, as drop by drop every story was told. Nothing remained secret. People said that Mrs Thuy, the teacher widowed since her twenties, who was about to retire and become a grandmother, had suddenly fallen in love with Mr Tu, the bookseller living on the corner of the same street. The two old people had tried to hide their love but had failed. It was true love, something that can’t be easily hidden.
Or Mr Cuong, on the third floor, who when drunk once set about his wife with a big stick but by mistake whacked his own mother. The latest gossip was about Mr Thanh, the retired sea captain, whose family was always having problems. The family was so poor they would even squabble over a bowl of rice. Poor Thanh wanted no more of it so decided to commit suicide. He tried once with a rope, then with insecticide, but both times he was discovered and rescued.
Thanh was still better off than old Mrs Sen, blind and lonely, the mother of two sons killed in action. Mrs Sen’s nephew and his wife cheated the poor old lady out of her room by having her sent to a mental hospital to die. The nephew was not only well educated, but well heeled. He had graduated from the University of Finance and Economics, he travelled abroad frequently, spoke two foreign languages, and lived an easy life. On returning each afternoon he would eat a huge meal, then go out onto the balcony to rest, belching repeatedly and yawning. His wife, a boring, tight-lipped serious woman, worked in the courts. Not once had she ever been seen to smile at her neighbours.
There was Mr Bao, also on the third floor, living with his parents, Dr Binh and his wife. He had been released from prison in the recent New Year Amnesty and quickly won the sympathy of all the people in the building. He had originally been sentenced to death, then had that reduced to a life sentence, then to twenty years. Bao didn’t look like a criminal. His many years as a prisoner had turned him into a devout, religious man. Only a short time after being released this formerly dangerous convict surprised his fellow apartment dwellers with many acts of kindness, and kind helpful words. The only reservation was his obvious sadness, betrayed by his deep, sad eyes. When he looked sad everyone felt sorry for him.
Even such a tiny stream of life, running through this apartment building, contained so many waterfalls, so many cliffs, so many eddies and whirlpools. Children were born to life, sprouted like mushrooms after a shower of rain, grew up, became adults. The adults grew old, some of them falling away every year. Generation after generation, like the waves of the sea.
Last summer, old Du – the great barber of Hanoi – had died in his ninety-seventh year. He was the last survivor of the pre-war generation known to Kien.
‘No one, neither Genie of Jade nor King of Hell, will allow me to live the last three years of my own century,’ his loud voice had declared. He had tried to make a joke of it when Kien came visiting him. ‘Please write a play for me, entitled The Barber of Hanoi. I’ll come up from hell to see the first performance.’
He had been a barber from the time when Hanoi gentlemen followed the ancient Chinese custom and wore their hair braided into queues. ‘These days they call them pigtails, but that would have been an insult. Queues denoted authority and culture,’ he had said. ‘Under my hands three hundred thousand heads and faces have been beautified, turned from messy and rough to tidy and perfumed. Under my sculptor’s hands, rough stone is turned into beautiful statues.’
Before the war his children, his grandchildren and all his great-grandchildren were gathered around him in one big family and although not one of them followed in his footsteps as a barber everyone enjoyed his influence and his style as a raconteur. He worked hard, creating a large, kind family, all pleasant and fun-loving. In his childhood memories Kien sees old Du’s scissors and hears the snip, snip, snip, as Du tells his funny stories, interspersed with bars from the Marseillaise, sung out of tune.