The Beauty of Humanity Movement (63 page)

But where had everyone gone? He clambered inside the root cellar,
pulling the door shut behind him, encasing them together in the dark. He begged the old woman to speak.

She spoke without euphemism because she had nothing left to lose; what would it matter now if she were killed for denouncing the soldiers who had come to liberate the village?

“They filled the air with speeches about our revolutionary duty, saying it was our responsibility to help them root out all class enemies— only then would we live in the glorious new light envisioned by the great father.

“The Chang family knew they would be the first accused. They ran and barricaded themselves inside their house and the soldiers just took a torch and burned the house down. You could hear them screaming, H
ng, but the soldiers just said, ‘Burn, you bastards, and let this be a lesson to the rest of you. We will turn all landlords, notables and reactionaries into ashes, into dust; we will cleanse this place of greed.’ H
ng, anyone with a patch of dirt to call his own is an enemy in their eyes. Anyone who grows so much as a carrot for his own consumption.

“The ones who surrendered their land without resistance have been sent away for re-education, but the ones who did resist, oh, H
ng,” she said, her voice breaking. “They called everyone in the village to the
đình
. They forced us to watch. Shot them dead and left their bodies to rot in the street. Their families were too afraid to claim them.”

“And my parents?” H
ng asked.

“H
ng,” she said, her face in her hands now, speaking through her fingers. “There are sons of the village among those soldiers. Those sons were the ones to point fingers and say, that man has a vegetable plot, and this family owns land they have not told you about down by the river, and this man works a kiln for profit, and that one raises silkworms for sale, and that Widow Nguy
t built her wealth on the backs
of peasants, and these people here, her neighbours, are beneficiaries of that wealth.”

“These people—my parents?”

“Yes,” she croaked.

He could smell the mildew of starvation in her mouth; he could smell her last days.

“And my brothers were the ones to report them?”

“You will find two of them in soldiers’ uniforms smoking a pipe in the
đình
.”

“And my sisters?”

“I lost track of who was killed and who just ran,” the old woman said, hanging her head. “I don’t know where they went. Up into the mountains, perhaps, or out to sea, what does it matter now?

“Have you any plastic?” she asked, a moment later.

“But why?” said H
ng.

“Because then I can suffocate myself.”

H
ng kissed her forehead, the skin as thin as rice paper, and bid her goodbye.

He reached the far end of the village. The temple was no longer standing guard between the village and the world beyond; it had been torn apart, limb by red limb, to serve the fires of the starving. He heard a nightingale sing the song of an inverted world. He inhaled the scent of a rare, night-blooming flower, a smell that would forever be associated with the village he would never return to again.

T
makes his way to the Metropole on foot, his thoughts numbed by revving engines, the insistent beeping of horns, the crowing of street vendors, the racket of hammering and sawing, the spark-flying screech of metal cutting metal. “Dancing Queen” blares through giant speakers on the sidewalk of a café where schoolboys and office workers sit under a green-and-white striped awning dripping with Christmas lights, steaming bowls of ph
perched on their knees.

T
takes a moment to adjust to the hush of the Metropole, idly scanning the front page of the
Vietnam News
lying on a table in the lobby, the headlines declaring the imminent launch of the “Learn and Follow the Exemplary Morality of President H
Chí Minh Campaign,” and the president’s posthumous awarding of the Gold Star Order to two former Party officials for their effort and dedication to the cause of national liberation in the late 1940s.