The Beauty of Humanity Movement (121 page)

“Why has he not spoken to you?” T
’s father asks, rare astonishment in his voice. H
ng is not a man who has enemies.

The woman looks to the ground as if ashamed of the answer. She raises her eyes sheepishly and stares at Bình.

“Ahh,” says

T
’s father. T
looks between them, confused. Bình nods at the old woman and turns away.

“What is it?” T
asks his father as they set off on foot toward the river. “Why does he not speak to her?”

“Did you see the regret in her eyes? The pain? My guess is that long ago she broke our H
ng’s heart.”

T
feels rather chastened: he has never thought of the old man as having a love life, and it must have been something of a dramatic love life to take him from the light of loving this woman all the way to the dark of not speaking to her. T
thinks about this as he and his father push the motorbike along the route that the old man is most likely to take into the Old Quarter given the size and awkwardness of his cart. It is three kilometres to the bridge where he last served breakfast. They peer into dark alleyways and call out H
ng’s name, but apart from a drunk and a mangy dog, no one responds to their cries.

T
and his father sit down when they reach the bank of the river and watch the struggling moon. “We’re lucky to have each other,” says Bình. “I was never able to help my father.” A man’s worth is principally his worth as a son, and this is something T
recognizes his father has been denied.

Bình carries on talking, reminiscing about his boyhood, telling T
how he’d felt a stranger growing up in a household of women in his mother’s village. It was only in being reacquainted with H
ng all those years later that the feeling abated. He came to see himself as part of a lineage, H
ng the bridge between his own small life and a much longer and greater story. “And that was your fault, wasn’t it,” he says, slapping his son’s thigh. “Your stubborn refusal to join me on this earth until I discovered that bridge to the past.”