The Beauty of Humanity Movement (115 page)

But how can he possibly prove the illustrator was Lý Văn Hai in the absence of the journal?

As he pushes his cart home later that morning, he thinks about a poem published in that spring volume. “When you find yourself upon the threshold of the door to your new home,” Ðạo had written during the brief but euphoric blush that followed the ’54 revolution. He remembers an illustration of a house, its door open, a welcoming hearth in the room. H
ng repeats the words to himself, generating speed, hoping to take a verbal run at that door, skip over the threshold, find the rest of the poem waiting inside.

“When you find yourself upon the threshold of the door to your new home,” he says aloud, dropping his hands from his cart, coming to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road. Damn. Nothing. Motorcycles honk and veer around him. He leans against his cart, putting his elbows upon it, closing and rubbing his eyes. Perhaps his sudden recall is limited only to that particular poem he was able to share with Maggie. He had been hopeful of a broader recovery.

H
ng arrives home and parks his cart behind his shack, hauling his pots down to the bank of the pond. He stacks them there, abandoning
them for a moment while he returns to his shack. He riffles through the piles of paper he collects to feed his fires, some of them a metre high, looking for
Fine Works of Spring
. He catches himself midway through the second pile and smacks his forehead with his palm. What is he
doing
? The journal is long gone. Every single one of his papers was gone by the time the Party’s vice squad overturned his shack in the spring of 1964.

His breathing had slowed as he caught sight of the Minsk motorbikes parked in front of his shack that morning. They were throwing his few belongings out the front door. His clothes flew across the threshold, his tea canister rolled down the slope; bits of straw from his mattress filled the air.

H
ng parked his cart and dared to approach his shack. “Sirs, what is it you are looking for?” he asked through the doorway.

“Are you H
ng?” an officer shouted.

“No, sir.”

“Well, this H
ng is harbouring anti-revolutionary literature. You can tell him when you next see him that the Party is well informed of his traitorous connections. If he’s harbouring the evidence, we’ll find it.”

But you’re too late, he could have told them. You’ll find nothing to implicate the man. Those papers are already gone. In fact, the man you are after—keeper of poetry and believer in the beauty of humanity— that H
ng is gone.

He proceeded to carry his pots down to the pond and scrub them in its brown water. He lingered over the task, not turning around again until he heard the revving of motorbike engines. He caught a glimpse of movement in the doorway to Lan’s shack. She was hiding, keeping watch. He refused to acknowledge her.

One of the officers tossed a burning rag through the door of his shack as he drove away on his motorbike. Smoke billowed through the doorway; the interior burst into flame. H
ng quickly plunged the largest of his pots into the pond and filled it with water. He ran awkwardly up the muddy slope, water sloshing from side to side, and heaved the contents of the pot through his front door. He did this over and over until the flames relented. The guts of his shack were charred, but the structure remained.

H
ng eases himself down onto his straw mattress. He runs his fingers over his few strands of hair. He lies back and listens to the belch of an obstinate water buffalo somewhere in the middle distance. He hears the ruffle of a duck shaking water off its back, the blip of a fish gulping a spider off the surface of the pond, the whir of a dragonfly’s wings. A crow lands on his roof; he hears the tick tack tick of its nails across the tin surface.

He caresses the soft mole on his cheek for comfort as he used to do as a child. It is the colour of asphalt, the texture of moss. A birthmark, a simple birthmark, as his Uncle Chi
n had assured him long ago, not a curse at all.

Where H
ng had hoped to be able to offer Bình and T
a poem by Ðạo in celebration of the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival, he will prepare a special lunch for the family instead. Cooking is something no one can steal from him—not poverty nor the Party, not a war, not a girl, not age. Since T
shows no signs of getting married, this might be the last opportunity H
ng ever has to prepare a feast for him and his family. He will invite the lovely Maggie as well.