The Beauty of Humanity Movement (138 page)

H
ng was an innocent. He had wanted nothing more, had in fact never imagined anything more than sitting in one of these bars and,
in return for a few đ’ông, listening to a beautiful lady sing a song just for him.

And now that he is finally visiting the street? It is under water. It is the winter of 1973 and the Americans have obliterated the entire neighbourhood. The vast majority of residents were evacuated to the countryside when the U.S. destroyed the train station a week before, but the poor, the sick and the stubborn remained behind. Some of them are now fishing alongside H
ng in the muddy crater, which quickly filled with the heavy rains. They are recovering pieces of metal: tin cans and bombshells they’ll be able to use as cooking vessels; the fuel tank of an airplane, which will make a good tub for washing clothes. They lift tattered bits of cloth from the water, parachute silk and torn tarpaulin dangling like seaweed in their hands. But as H
ng quickly discovers, where there is tattered cloth there is also likely to be a body. Or a piece of body. He screams as a disembodied head bumps against his thigh, its eyes rolling loose in their sockets. He screams and retches and squeezes his own eyes shut.

He hears voices around him. Voices of the dead. A man shouting below him. But perhaps those dead—the innocents—are speaking to him from above, from heaven. He tentatively opens one eye. Someone is bathing his feet. He is lying in a bed in a room full of identical beds, moss-green paint peeling from the walls. A woman’s voice says, “
Hallucinating. The painkillers will do that
.”

He recognizes that voice; it is Anh. His bed is surrounded: Anh and Bình, T
, Maggie and Ph
ng.

“You fell over, H
ng, do you remember? Coming down the stairs.”

Bình looks wide-eyed and unlined, just like he did when he was a boy with questions in his eyes. “We were so worried,” he says. “We thought you’d had a heart attack.”

H
ng runs his palm over his chest. He is intact. He is not a headless torso or a disembodied head.

“It was your leg, not a heart attack,” says Anh. “You must have fallen unconscious from the pain. They put in three pins and two metal plates.”

So he has had an operation. He lifts the sheet and sees the length of his leg encased in solid plaster.

“We should have brought you to the hospital in the first place,” says Bình. “It never would have healed properly on its own.”

Bình clearly blames himself. “I am a stubborn man,” says H
ng.

But H
ng is also a man afraid of this place. The Americans destroyed this hospital with their bombs, and even though it has been rebuilt, H
ng still fears the presence of ghosts. The spirits of the dead have not properly been put to rest. “Please, Bình, just tell me the people—the patients, the doctors, the nurses—”

“Everyone here is alive,” says Bình. “I assure you.”

The ward smells like boiled chicken, antiseptic and the dusty fog of old men’s urine. An orderly in pale green taps H
ng on the shoulder with a plastic cup of pills, an awful lot of pills, Maggie notes. H
ng reaches awkwardly, his plastered leg now held aloft by a barbaric-looking contraption, throwing the pills into his mouth and washing them back with the dregs of some weak tea.