‘Now,’ he said, equally clearly, ‘I don’t know what to do with the mountain of papers.’ He meant his novel. Now that he had written it he had no use for it. Whatever devils he had needed to rid himself of had gone. The novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils.
Kien had written for the sake of writing, not to publish.
He had looked over the room. Then out of the window. She had watched his hands, then his eyes, then his lips as they softly formed poetry in tune with his magical glances as he described his latest story.
She leaned over. Slowly, gently, she kissed him.
Their first kiss.
He seemed unaware. He changed the subject, telling a story of his father’s studio. This one, here. Now.
‘I don’t know what to do with all these papers,’ he said.
This awakened her. She leaned over and kissed him again. This awakened him. He gently pushed her back on the bed. But his eyes were a little crazed and for a moment she expected a beating or some retribution.
He lifted from her and left. She could hear his footsteps on the stairs, as he returned to his apartment.
He did not return for some days. She waited for him with painful anxiety, but he did not come.
One night she decided she would visit him. There was another blackout, which gave her the cover of darkness to move around. She tiptoed downstairs and peered through the partly opened door. It was never locked, anyway. She could see him by the light of a kerosene lamp. The smells of alcohol and kerosene mixed in the air.
She thought she heard him groan as he wrote. He seemed obsessed and definitely didn’t feel her presence. She stood by the door like that for a long time. From then on during every blackout she came down and watched him. His hair grew longer, his face grew more haggard. He looked older. Surely the writing had to end; yet she did not want it to end, fearing the end would have other consequences for her.
After some weeks, on another blackout night, she had returned later than usual and stopped to peer in on her way upstairs. Kien was kneeling by his stove shoving torn paper into it and lighting and relighting it.
She silently closed the door behind her and softly walked over and kneeled beside him. She recalled the story of the frenzied destruction of his father’s paintings; she placed her hand over his, to stop him putting another page into the fire.
At first he looked startled to see her there. But he stopped the burning, letting the fire go cold. He turned and took her in his arms, away from the stove. In the total silence he then possessed her as though nothing else in the world mattered. She gasped in desperation for him and for many hours they remained locked together. His loneliness pierced her like a knife, throbbing painfully.
He had left while she was still asleep. Somehow she knew she would never see him again. This was his final departure.
She understood he had left his apartment for her. He had left the door wide open and a chilling wind had blown through, disturbing the papers and carrying many of them into the hall and down the stairs. She gathered them all together, tidied his room, and took the manuscript to her own attic.
None of the pages were numbered. There was no obvious order to them and she was able to understand only a very little of it. But she knew she had to keep them.
Months went by. Then a year. The manuscript gathered dust; it looked like an elegant old parchment.
Hanoi. Now Kien writes only at night because only then can he hope to write that which is truly his own. He drinks to stay awake, yet his recall is clear and he is more alert than ever. By night he is more creative, tapping his imagination, his poetic streak, and gathering in the plot of the story more easily.
His street neighbours are now more accustomed to his eccentricities in burning the night lights, despite their ghost-like quality in the gloom.
Professional burglars and prostitutes in the lake area soon get to know about him. The Ha Le lake was their circuit. So they nicknamed Kien’s room the Ha Le lighthouse. They would greet him: ‘How’s the Ha Le lighthouse-keeper these days? Get plenty of writing done last night?’
He returns a smile to them when he opens his window in the morning to welcome the dawn breeze. A little further down the street a famous ‘pavement girl’ wolf-whistles up to greet him and make fun of him.
At nights, when all around him grows dim, Kien feels closer to life. It seems that darkness truly reflects the darkness of his soul. Now, sleepless nights have become normal for him. Unless he is very drunk he never sleeps before early morning. The nights have become more precious and urgent to him. By day, he sleeps; an unnatural, dry and uncomfortable sleep. And if he does doze off at night it is only briefly, for Time jolts him out of his sleep with a fiery reminder to his soul.
There are times when he feels that only death will give him a real rest. In his childhood he heard the saying: One’s life is only a handspan; he who sleeps too much shortens it by half. Kien realises his time is running out. He is not afraid of death; there is nothing about it that frightens him. But he is sorrowful, and heavy with regret for tasks unfinished.
Once, in slumber around daybreak, he had the vivid impression he was leaving life. The images and the exalted feeling he experienced were so clear and deep that he wondered if he could ever feel the same when he really came to depart this earth. Kien felt he had died right then; however briefly, he had died. In that one-thousandth of a second something inside him that was normally so blurred, so unclear, froze and became sharp and cold and visible. He seemed to have inside him a deep slash, into which his life force was draining, pouring from him so slowly, silently, yet irrevocably. His vital force dropped from him as from a broken pot, and Kien fainted away.
It was a little death. Kien knew it as his head dropped to his desk, as his pen fell from his hand and rolled on the floor. It was not like the times he had been shot, or when he had fallen victim to a fever and been unconscious. Nor was it anything mystical. It was a new experience which had overcome him. It was the truth of all truths, the rule of all rules, the very last point of life. It was death. He recognised it.
He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river.
Kien saw the Buoi school as it had been back then, in April 1965, just before the outbreak of war. It was a late spring afternoon. By then its shady row of trees had been chopped down, its yard criss-crossed with deep trenches, anticipating war. The headmaster, wearing a fireman’s helmet, boasted loudly that the Americans would be blown away in this war, but we wouldn’t. ‘The imperialist is a paper tiger,’ he screamed. ‘You will be the young angels of our revolution, you will rescue mankind!’
He pointed to a pupil among the tenth-form boys who were holding wooden rifles, spears, spades and hoes, showing childish bravado. ‘Life is here, death is also here,’ the boy said and the others sang noisily. Someone yelled, ‘Kill the Invader!’ and everyone cheered.
But Phuong and Kien were not at the school meeting held to preach the three golden rules of preparedness. They had escaped and had hidden behind the Octagon building on the shore of the West Lake. From where they sat, under a tree on the lake’s edge, they could see the Co Ngu road, tinted red by the setting sun, and the flame trees in brilliant bloom. Cicadas sang loudly, continuously.
‘Don’t worry,’ Phuong had said smiling, delighted she had skipped classes with Kien and also dodged trench-digging duties. She had worn her skimpy swimsuit under her school uniform, right there in the school, as if for a dare. ‘Forget about the war and all the heroes, young and old heroes. Let’s swim over to the Water Palace, far enough out to be dangerous…’