The Beauty of Humanity Movement (127 page)

“Ðạo?” H
ng says with less certainty this time, the clouds in his head parting.

H
ng arrived home that fateful morning after peddling his pondweed noodles. Just a few days before, he’d dared suggest to Lan that they might join their shacks, and he was preoccupied and pained by his inability to read her reaction. He wondered if she was quietly deliberating or discussing it with her grandmother. He would simply have to wait the agonizing wait until she spoke her mind, though he could not resist embarking on a certain amount of reorganization inside his shack in anticipation.

It had been such a fine day, not a cloud or a plane in the sky, he felt giddy returning home with a new trowel thanks to a customer who was a blacksmith. He parked his cart and made his way down to the pond with the first two of his pots. As he was squatting on the muddy bank rinsing the second pot, something caught his eye—a sudden flash of light, a display of colour, as if a rainbow had just fallen to earth.

He turned his head to see Lan, standing such that from where he was squatting, her head blocked out the sun, standing as if her head
were
the sun. He raised his hand to his brow so that he might take in the full length of her beauty. He gasped at the sight of her in a luxurious
áo dài
, just like the one he’d always imagined she should wear. She was wrapped in sky-blue silk embroidered with gold thread, perfectly tailored to hug her small breasts, her narrow waist, the slight curve of her hips.

“You always said I deserved it,” she said.

He was speechless, enraptured, beaming with a happiness unlike any he had ever experienced before. He felt it burn through every inch of him.

But as she stepped aside, her head no longer blocking the sun, her face became visible. His smile faded. Had she given herself away to a man? Had she been lured into prostitution?

“Who bought this for you?” he asked tentatively.

“I bought it myself,” she said.

“But however did you get the money?”

He watched her grow uncertain. She batted her eyelashes, then quickly glanced away, just long enough for a terrible gaping hole to open up in his stomach. He turned and stared through the doorway of his shack.

“H
ng,” she said, reaching for his forearm, but he shook off her hand, marching stiffly toward his shack.

He stood on the threshold and cast his eyes about the room. He scanned the ceiling and the walls. He fell to his knees and rifled through the piles of his few clothes and belongings, then lifted the corner of the mattress. He crawled under the mattress, suspending it on his back.

His papers were gone. The journals, every issue of the magazine, every poem Ðạo had ever written out for him or H
ng himself had copied down.

H
ng threw down the mattress. She’d taken the words of these men, taken all that was left of them and sold them to a stranger? And then clothed herself in silk?

“Who did you sell them to?” he shouted through the door of his shack.

“The man who sells firewood,” Lan said, stepping backward, beginning to cry.

H
ng’s eyes darted left and right as he considered running in search of the man and retrieving those papers before they fed someone’s fire, but the truth was
she
was the fire. She would set light to whatever she needed to keep her flame burning. She had been using him in much the same way.

“Get out,” was all he said. “Get out.”

A week later he found four pillows on his doorstep—four plump, sky-blue silk pillows stuffed with duck down. But H
ng could not forgive her. He could not forgive himself. He could not even acknowledge the pillows, leaving them to weather on his threshold, bleached by the sun, drenched by the rain until they were mildewed beyond recovery, much like his heart.

How had he begun speaking of the girl next door? Here he is with Bình now, propped up against the wall, telling the man who is like a son to him about the moment when he felt the last of humanity’s goodness slip away. With the loss of those papers he gave up hope, spending years in silence, wondering whether anything left in the world mattered. It was only with Bình’s appearance in the shantytown all those years later that he had recovered the sense that anything did.

“I was such a fool, Bình,” says H
ng. “I lost everything because of
a foolish heart. Am I dying? Why else would I even consider regret?”

“Shh, H
ng, it is not your time yet,” Bình says, passing him a bowl of pickled eggplant, the only thing H
ng has had any appetite for since his accident.