Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (10 page)

The woman rummaged through the handbag clutched tightly in her lap, and showed me a photograph of her and her deceased sister. A round face, like a dish, a flat nose, and a pair of eyes with one puffy eyelid. European and American men would all go crazy for such a pretty native Giao Chỉ face like that.
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But she was the kind of girl that the young men of Vietnam would find too rustic and immediately turn from. Honestly, how could I let myself compare this little imp to my three guys? Three big, impressive guys, around 1.8 meters tall, overflowing with desire, overflowing with life. I just couldn’t understand how those powerful bodies, those bewitching faces, could fall prey to the fire, or could decompose in the swampy, muddy earth beneath their graves. And I couldn’t believe that maybe there was a wandering soul hidden in the white banks of clouds outside, flying and following this airplane carrying Phũ’s body.

The woman had cried and lamented at length about how everyone in her family had wanted her to bring her sister’s body back to Hanoi for the funeral, but the airline refused to transport it. They had been on their own in Saigon, and she didn’t know anyone who had the power to help, so she finally resigned herself to having the body cremated. She was carrying the urn of ashes right here in her handbag. She thought that it must have been because of the urn that the hostesses were burning incense and praying. I didn’t have the heart to expose the truth that the prayers and offerings were for Phũ’s body. Nobody knew anything about her urn, and her poor sister who suffered in life and then died, continuing to suffer in the afterlife.

Immediately after the disaster I’d waved over a cyclo to take Phũ’s body to the hospital. Luckily the roads were relatively empty; the motorized working girls had fled in fear, lest they be forcibly called as witnesses. There weren’t any police on the street, either; it was as if they’d had a previous arrangement to leave the prostitutes alone. Only on the street was there still any trace of the accident. That night Thế had called the hospital and the hospital had arranged everything. Even after his son’s death, he still had his special perks. Although the airline didn’t want to carry the body, it had no choice in the end. Two corpses in the space of a week.

So it was that everyone still held the same rank in death as they did in life. Some people had privileges. Some had absolutely none.

FOUR

“O
kay, you tell me and I’ll listen. What happened to Phủ? What happened to all three of them?”

Thế’s desperation was clearly revealed in the way he asked this question. Usually he was so at ease with everything. He rarely asked questions; generally he was someone who knew absolutely everything, who would anticipate everything beforehand. He had translated and participated in the secret meetings between international leaders, and had gotten along with men and women from the full gamut of the social spectrum. Politicians, scientists, artists, and laborers—all of them were his friends. When he needed something, they would flock together to come to his aid. Now he’d actually asked me something that anyone, absolutely anyone, could answer. But he was confused by the truth that he was incapable of believing.

We two brothers were sitting across from each other in the coffee shop of the Apocalypse Hotel. The waiter still brought us our two cups of coffee, just as if we were newly arrived guests. It had been three days since Phủ’s funeral. My sister-in-law was nearly catatonic. Phũ had been their only son, their only child; there were no brothers or sisters. Cốc and Bóp were also the precious sons of their families. And, of course, even if they hadn’t been the only sons, even if it hadn’t all been so sudden, what parent wouldn’t have been deeply pained when faced with such a loss?

“Cốc died because he caught a chill under the water. Bóp hanged himself for some reason. And Phũ crashed his bike while he was driving full speed.”

I understood right away that Thế didn’t believe it. This string of deaths, occurring one after another, had totally wiped out a group of three friends within two weeks. But he did still believe that Phũ’s wild motorbike racing had led him to disaster. Thế had bought him a car at the same time the hotel opened. A car—on the disorderly streets of bicycles, motorbikes, cyclos, and Lambrettas—he felt would help Phũ stay calmer and be more careful. Many people thought this was the best thing to do with young kids who raced motorbikes. Some even thought a racetrack should be constructed, so those kids who were so intoxicated with speed would have a place where they could race. They didn’t understand that a racetrack was too controlled an environment to meet the young people’s need for rule breaking, risk, and destruction. Even after he’d gotten the car, at times Phũ would take his bike out to race around the city streets, just like before.

But I still didn’t want to tell Thế about the girl. Just like the three guys who’d died, I believed that this was something we had to deal with ourselves. It was not a matter for the security services, the authorities, forensic scientists, or jurors to get involved in. Revenge is a cause-and-effect chain. Death demands payment with more death. I remembered the words of the Buddhist works that I’d pondered and read from cover to cover. They explain that everything dear to us—every last thing—would change, will come to nothing, and, thus, clinging to our possessions only leads to more suffering. They also teach that our loved ones are mortal. These teachings seemed reasonable to me. But one would surely be a weakling just to sit back and watch as his friends were exterminated one by one, and to pray for forgiveness for the murderer. Words in a book belonged in the book. But I had to act according to the need for justice that was blazing up in my veins.

“Having money, one still suffers,” Thế said. “Having passion, one suffers more. Having a well-known name, one suffers the most. So I have renounced all these things and only chose to suffer less. But I have not been able to predict such a tragic denouement.”

Was it really Thế saying these things? I had been able to face the truth much earlier than Thế. Faced with one story, he was still caught up in another story. I sipped a mouthful of coffee. Extremely bitter. Dark black. The color of the sewer waters submerging the body of Phũ. The wicked girl eventually escaping. Her blouse-skirt ensemble identical to that of the girl with the permed hair . . . I suddenly jerked up. I ran over to the reception desk and asked for the guest register to check something.

  Date,

  Date,

  Date,

  In the Captain’s Studio . . .

Here we are. Staying in the Captain’s Studio that day was . . . my heart bounced hard like a ball had rebounded inside my chest. A line of writing in the customer’s own hand: “Mai Trừng, Wild Rose LLP, Hanoi.” Written clearly. Signed clearly.

The woman in the Captain’s Studio that day hadn’t been able to hide a beautiful face under all the smeared-on makeup and lipstick. At the time I had suspected that she had enlisted the aid of the makeup to hide her true identity for some reason. And now I quickly understood everything. That permed hair, looking like instant noodles, was a wig. That woman and the girl named Mai Trừng were one and the same.

She had hidden in the hotel the day after Cốc’s burial, then had left five days before Bóp’s death. I was afraid to go back to the coffee table where Thế was sitting; I felt like my face had turned to iron.

Thế put his hands on mine and pressed them into fists on top of the table. “It’s up to you; you’ll say it when you want to. I just want you to remember one thing: I just have myself and you left. We two brothers are the only men left in this family.”

How could I not remember? When my parents had been lost during the war Thế had been forced to rush into marriage so he could create a family for his younger brother at home, while he’d gone off to serve the country in distant France. He raised me like a father, the person who’d planned out my life and who was partly responsible for producing such an unfinished and imperfect work.

I still remember how, after he’d returned from his years abroad, he suddenly appeared in our house, which had been blessed with two wonders. The first wonder was the chubby little guy babbling in baby talk. The second wonder was the young man of twelve years who had painted nearly a hundred watercolors. Peaceful color paintings of scenery and skies, graceful lines resonating with deep feelings. He quickly came to the conclusion that this youngster, painting scenes of such profound tranquility, had promise. In our small apartment, still sparsely decorated, he’d hung my paintings on all the bare spaces. When his friends came over he became engrossed in guiding them through the forest of serene images, analyzing the lines in detail, the outlines, the shades, as if revering the works of famous painters. He asked a friend of his who’d gone on a business trip overseas to bring me back some tubes of oil paint. I was convinced that my life’s only consuming pastime would be painting, nothing but painting.

But as soon as I turned fifteen, Thế forcibly gave me over to an old martial arts trainer. I was a small, awkward kid, who until then would just sit in the corner of the house painting all day. I had a shy and bashful character and he hoped that the old master would make me more self-confident and vigorous. I followed my instructor reluctantly. I learned fast and I could move concisely and accurately, but I just studied to get it over with, without passion. My favorite time was just after these lessons when I would rush back to the empty apartment, and could sit by myself in my shadowed room. There I wouldn’t have to force anything; my heart was still racing from the exercise, the blood still pounding in my veins, and all of my cells seemed to tingle. At that moment, sitting quietly, I could think deeply about things and often inspirations for new paintings would jump in my head.

I never doubted that those martial arts lessons that Thế had arranged was part of his long-term plan for my life. But a sharp knife can’t cut its own hilt.
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Later, with Phũ, he didn’t make the same kind of arrangements he had for me. He simply intervened when the situation changed. He moved Phũ from Russian into English, and that was that. But, in my case, Thế schemed to divert me from my passion for painting and to reroute me onto the shortest road to riches. That road, he knew, would never be open to someone with such a sensitive and emotional heart. A sentimental heart could only be fixed with martial arts.

In autumn of the next year, when I was starting my final year of high school, Thế sat down to hold “bilateral talks” with me. I told him I was planning on taking the test to enter the fine arts university. Thế told me to keep painting; that no matter what career I chose, I could always paint, but that I shouldn’t try to make it my career. He told me to look, for example, at all the old men who had been my art instructors; they were skilled and talented, but lived in sickly, squalid conditions, in houses with crumbling walls, their standard of living even lower than that of cyclo drivers. He wanted me to go into foreign relations, foreign trade, or navigation—careers worthy of the dreams of months and years in the real world of economic life. He told me straight out that he’d already decided that I would study navigation, that it would suit my way of studying well, and that after that I would go work as a captain on a long-haul ocean liner. I went into a rage. I screamed that I hated long-haul ocean liner captains; all they knew how to do was to shit into the ocean for the fish to eat, until finally their whole bodies would also turn into specialties for the fish to consume. Thế slapped me; he could not control his unexpected anger. I stomped out of the house. I stayed over at my friend’s house for two days until Thế tracked me down and brought me home. He slapped me on the cheek again. Then, with tears in his eyes, he apologized. Nobody mentioned anything else about which school I’d take the exams for.

But I now understood, for the first time, that Thế had lived in a political atmosphere for such a long time that he’d even taken on the persona of an old-time politician. The next day he invited the editor-in-chief of a newspaper, a man he’d been friends with for a long time, over for dinner. This editor also wrote literature, though with some anxiety, as each writing was like a record of past crimes. He’d been promoted in the manner in which people still promote managing officials in places like the state motor pool, the post office, or the freshwater fish industry. He’d become famous because his ten-year-old daughter had written more than five hundred poems, and whenever he’d meet anyone—even the lady who sold water spinach on the sidewalk—the editor would become absorbed with reading his daughter’s poems as if they were his own. Any kid that had sat down for a moment could have vomited out heaps of poems like this little girl’s, normal stuff like “Mr. Moon up above, come down here to let me pinch you once, / Closing your eyes and squealing like a frog, come play with me again, / Play with me and you can go back up to watch me from above.”

When the editor and his poetic child prodigy stepped into our house, Thế introduced them and everyone sat down to eat. The prodigious poetess suddenly changed her countenance as she was wolfing down her food, and then asked me for some paper. I assumed that the ten-year-old had some kind of digestive problem, so I gave her a piece of old newspaper and told her I’d show her where the restroom was so she could do her business. She didn’t understand what I meant by doing business, and had to look up at me and ask me why I was giving her the piece of newspaper.

“In our house everyone uses this paper.”

“For writing?”

“Oh, you wanted it to write on? What do you want to write?”

“A poem, right here and right now.” The child pushed aside the plates of food and assumed the face of a genius poet. Silent, profound.

I almost smashed the face of the kid poet who was trying to come off like a celebrity. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thế’s crafty sneer.

The next day I decided to take the entrance exam for the navigation university. I didn’t want to become a child prodigy like that cerebral little kid. Thế had succeeded by bringing me face to face with an artist who, for years to come, I would still find creepy.