Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (12 page)

The next afternoon I awoke in a small, empty thatched cottage. A woodstove was burning weakly off to one side. It seemed like it had been burning all day to warm me and to dry my clothes. I stirred, and sat straight up. All of my clothes had been dried but instead of being put back on me, someone had laid them out on the ground next to me. I was totally nude. Just then I realized that there was a woman leaning her back against the mud wall, sitting a bit away from the stove. She had a dark, sad countenance. Her eyes brightened slightly when she saw that I had regained consciousness. I quickly pulled on my underpants, turning away from her as I dressed, my clothing dry and smelling pleasantly of wood smoke.

“You should lie down and rest. The storm hasn’t let up. The sea is still rough.”

It was clear that I still needed to lie down. My body was covered in bruises, and she’d massaged it with medicinal oil made from some kind of plant. I lay back and listened to the firewood crackling in the stove next to me. It seemed that the ocean waves had deposited me onto the shore of a deserted island. That morning the woman had gathered me up, unconscious, from the beach. It must have been hard for her to haul me into her house, which was the only building on the island, just as she was the only resident on the island—and a temporary one at that. I call her a temporary resident because she would row out to the island only one day a week in order to care for her orchard and to let her flock of goats out of their shed to graze on the hillside. That same day she would cut enough grass for the goats to live off of for the rest of the week in their shed.

She didn’t have a pretty face, but she couldn’t be called ugly, either. Her looks just seemed somehow faded in appearance, as if she’d been consigned to oblivion. She also seemed a bit taciturn, as if she didn’t trust people. But that’s not exactly right. She was taciturn, but she would still whisper to me late into the night. Even though she didn’t trust people, she still felt confident enough to tell me that she was alone on this island.

The next morning I was able to get out of bed. A bowl of uninteresting but piping hot dry fish porridge energized my usually vigorous body. It was still raining outside, the sea still leaden with clouds. I groped my way out to the goat shed. The woman was standing at the divider between the two separate stables. A male goat was standing and waiting on its side of the partition. Every time the woman would open the small door to let a female goat out, the billy goat would jump forward lustfully. She stood back and silently watched the deed between the billy goat and the female goats over and over again. Whether it was a miserable silence or a blissful silence, I couldn’t guess.

Suddenly she spun around and looked at me. She shut the divider back down in a flurry of panic and ran back to her house, abandoning all the poor female goats that hadn’t been able to get out and were now bleating noisily.

I followed her back. When I came inside, I saw the woman was crying softly next to the stove. I sat down next to her. Not knowing what to say to her, I just rubbed one of her shoulders and consoled her to try and calm her down. Her calm finally returned. A moment later she leaned her head on my shoulder, and she started talking about how her destiny was intertwined with that of the island.

From a bird’s-eye view, or at sea level from a distance, the island looked just like a ship. During the war years, American planes repeatedly dropped bombs and shot rockets down at this ship. The woman’s village was about a day’s journey by rowboat from the island. If one left early in the morning, one could arrive here the afternoon of the same day. Her father had been a militiaman, and was mobilized to build a chimney on the island, painted white along the top so it looked like a boat’s smokestack. His duty was to stick close to the chimney day after day and raise a flag on it, turning it into a boat to attract the American bombs and missiles. When the flag fell, he would replace it with a new one. When the smokestack was blown up, he would build a new one. He lived on the island for six years. In 1972 his bomb shelter was struck and it caved in. His shelter had turned into his grave.

Her father had sacrificed himself just like the young men who had been mobilized by their cooperative to go fishing and cast their nets out at sea. Without even a certificate of recognition. Without even any special treatment for his family. After her father was martyred, the young girl began to carry her books to school. She went to school irregularly and forgot what she’d learned; she had studied that way until the seventh grade, when she had to quit because her mother had died. In her hardscrabble village, people didn’t have the energy left over to care about the rights of a fourteen-year-old girl. So she set out by herself on her little rowboat to find the island for which her father’s blood had been spilled. Once there, she burned incense and prayed in the dark for the soul of her father to protect her. She built up the area in an attempt to plant an orchard. And now she had an orchard full of longan trees and a flock of twenty goats. On that island, she was the boss. On that ship she was the captain with a crew of twenty hands, while in her village she was just a woman past marrying age who had fallen into oblivion.

I now realized that behind her appearance as a middle-aged woman there was a sturdy peasant woman, and that behind her wasted-away face she was just around twenty-six years of age. It was just a lucky coincidence that the day I’d washed ashore happened to be the day that she’d rowed out to the island. I felt pity for this woman whom people had abandoned and who now had to earn her living watching goats breed.

We came together naturally. We came together in the middle of a sentence in her story. At first I was a bit shy and reluctant. I didn’t have any protection on me, and without it I didn’t dare touch a stranger. Right up to that moment, I was full of that kind of hesitation, but I still had enough tricks up my sleeve to use some sly surgical probing in order to inspect her. There didn’t seem to be anything suspicious there at all. But once I’d infiltrated her defenses, I was perplexed to find that she was still a virgin. I’d never felt such a feeling of happiness. It wasn’t love. It was rather a sense of hope, of gratitude, of happiness, all of the most sincere and honest emotions. The kinds of uncertain emotions that people experience with the people they love.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said as she rested her cheek on my bare chest.

Me? I didn’t have anything to tell her. She had a ship that would never sink. My ship had already sunk. Who knows how many of my sailors were alive and how many had died, and where the survivors were wandering? I could paint, especially the ocean. But now I was without a brush, and without paint.

I suddenly got to my feet. I took a length of bamboo from the corner of the house, and etched some lines deeply into the dirt floor. A face appeared. A young woman of the sea who no longer looked withered, her mouth smiling in contentment.

“Are you drawing me?” she asked with a shiver.

“It’s you,” I said.

And we entered into each other again.

Two days later the storm let up. The waves were at peace. The ocean calmed down. The woman rowed me off the island on her boat. At a certain distance, I looked back and saw how the small island really resembled a ship, its smokestack still painted white. Once it had been a place for the enemy to drop bombs. Now I had been dropped there, to add more pain, more unhappiness. Or was it happiness? I needed someone else to tell me; there was no way I could judge for myself.

As the afternoon darkened to dusk, our boat came to the dock of Quảng Nguyên. I took off my overcoat and gave it to her to hold as a keepsake of the brief time we’d lived together on the island. I climbed ashore, waved down a truck, and early the next morning arrived home in Hải Phòng.

When I got home it wasn’t Yên Thanh who opened the door as before. Phũ greeted me with blinking eyes, saying, “You’re home, Uncle,” and then staggered into the bedroom. Phũ, Cốc, and Bóp were all in the room. I shrugged and walked up the staircase. I couldn’t find Yên Thanh in any of the rooms. I didn’t want to wake up Phũ again to ask him about this strange turn of events. Instead, I changed my clothes and then hit the sack as well.

During the more than one month that I’d been gone, Thế’s trusted sources of intelligence had reported that Yên Thanh was preparing to marry some guy that had just graduated from the University of Medicine, but who was still unemployed. For a long time she’d been using our money to support him like a dependant, while all the while he was still practicing his anatomy lessons, not on corpses or cadavers, but on her body. Thế had immediately understood that he had to intercede by pushing through my own marriage. All the possessions accumulated by his girl-crazy young brother during his years at sea were lying in the hands of that ungrateful girl. He immediately oversaw the drafting of a shipping contract. According to the contract, I was to retain a portion of the goods, valued at eighty thousand dollars, that I was bringing back from Singapore. He drove down to Hải Phòng, and showed the contract to Yên Thanh, along with an official request from me for her hand in marriage. Yên Thanh had to think carefully before she answered. She had to decide between, on the one hand, the mountain of money that was suddenly rushing down around her ears, and, on the other hand, the medical student that she wanted to marry. In the end, human nature won out. She signed the two copies of the marriage registration forms that my brother had prepared. Women can be quite sharp in dealings when they have the time to think things over and ponder. But women find it difficult to maintain their vigilance when riches are rushing in. My brother Thế kept the signed marriage contract as if it were a court order that Yên Thanh couldn’t marry that corpse-groping brat. And that was just the first blow. For his second blow, Thế suggested that his “future sister-in-law” withdraw around twenty thousand dollars to “smooth the way” for acquiring the goods for the new contract. He’d figured out that the amount that Yên Thanh had taken from me, including the house, totaled around that much. The plan formulated in Hanoi was that if she didn’t fall into this trap, my nephew and his two buddies would fall back on the Law of the Jungle. However, women are indeed rendered unusually blind by greed. Yên Thanh rushed, as if in a fever, to get the money to give to Thế, as if she were giving a young child money for the New Year.

And then came the third blow. While everyone was sitting around a dinner table filled with Yên Thanh’s cooking, Thế brought out one more agreement and told her to sign it. It was an agreement to transfer ownership of the house to me, Captain Tạ Dương Đông. The agreement also clearly stated that Động was the person who had purchased the house. However, this time her woman’s cleverness and keenness had enough time to rear its head. She choked and coughed, spewing pieces of half-chewed food from her mouth. As she coughed, her eyes overflowed with tears and her nose with snot. Amid the unending waves of coughing, the sound of “no” bubbled up like little hiccups.
Sign it now! No. Sign it. No. Sign. No. Tell me whether you’re going to sign it or not. No.

Phũ stood suddenly. His two friends continued to sit there indifferently, awaiting their time to act. Phũ would give it a shot first. If that didn’t do it, then Cốc would grind her down. If that didn’t do it either, then Bóp would employ his wrench-like hands. But, in the end, Phũ’s skills at leverage were enough to put an end to it. He grabbed her hair and shoved her face into the bowl of bamboo shoots and soy sauce. She couldn’t struggle. When he pressed her down into the bowl of broth a third time, she surrendered. Cốc gave her a napkin to wipe off her hands and face and then gave her the pen to sign the clean copy of the agreement.

Thế went straight back to Hanoi. The three younger guys stayed there to advertise the sale of the house. They let Yên Thanh stay there until she found a place to stay with her uncle. The three times she’d had her face dipped into the broth had left an impression on her. Full of hatred, she’d cleared out as soon as she could.

A year later I found a wife. Well, more correctly, Thế found a wife for me. I needed to have a stable family to act as an anchor for my overseas voyages. I’d loved a lot, and many people had loved me. But Thế had his reasons. Many of his friends, and many of my own friends, had married for love, and then left each other after five years, three years, even after only one year of living together. One of my friends had lived with his girlfriend for six years, and then once they’d decided to go and register their marriage, they left each other after just three months. Thế saw the durability of a marriage as the highest ideal for a family. He’d also gotten married hurriedly, so that his foolish younger brother could live comfortably while he went abroad to work. They’d lived together for twenty years, without warmth, but also without any other feelings. He told me that such a marital life would suit me well, too. True happiness is something that doesn’t exist—it’s just a fantasy of humankind, the product of an artistic style full of illusions.

I clicked my tongue in answer. From any direction, I couldn’t avoid the truth of his statements. Both families were eager to arrange things. My wife was a public high school teacher, which meant that she would make a good mother and a good teacher for my future children. This is how Thế figured it. I thought so, too. Many people thought so.

But family life turned out to be an anchor dropped at the wrong time, an anchor that regularly held the ship firmly in place even when the ship needed to be let free. My unending days living on the ocean had indulged my vagabond nature. My sense of freedom and desire to explore strained at my bonds. And I couldn’t get used to having a strange creature stirring in my bed every night. I couldn’t get used to the regular breathing of the woman lying in my bed. Living together with her in love for a dozen years wouldn’t have added more than our living together a few months as husband and wife. She wasn’t a skilled or deft wife in many people’s eyes. Neither had she been prepared fully with knowledge about sex. That generation went through a period where the parents were responsible only for feeding their young children, and didn’t give them anything in terms of sexual education. In this area it seems that the Vietnamese are still less civilized than a number of the mountain peoples: the mountain women, upon reaching puberty, meet with their mothers, who teach them how to use a species of leaf gathered in the jungle as birth control, thus educating them in basic sexual education.