The Beauty of Humanity Movement (68 page)

“What is it, H
ng?” Ðạo asked, his eyebrows knitted in confusion.

“That is the question,” H
ng said cryptically. “For nothing is as it seems.”

Ðạo opened his mouth as if to speak but then closed it. He turned away and stepped through the door, returning to join the other men in the shop.

Ðạo’s faith in words remained unshaken. Over the next couple of weeks, under Ðạo’s direction and the keen editorial eye of an aging revolutionary named Phan Khôi, the men in the shop committed themselves to producing a literary journal they would publish and distribute.

When
Fine Works of Spring
was released later that month, it immediately drew to H
ng’s shop the officers of the newly created Department of Propaganda and Political Education. Like flies to feces,
H
ng couldn’t help but think as he watched the men in uniform descend upon copies of the journal lying open on the low tables.

They confiscated everything they could: sketchbooks, notebooks, newspaper. They stroked the shafts of their guns. They spoke in a language at odds with the threat of their presence, smiling as they stressed the importance to the revolution of having men like Ðạo and his colleagues join their ranks as ideological educators. They needed artists— as illustrators, sloganeers, balladeers.

“And you are just the type of man we need to lead the new Literary Association for National Salvation,” they said, pointing at Ðạo.

H
ng, standing firmly rooted with his hands on Bình’s shoulders, watched the men in the shop watching Ðạo. Ðạo stared at the wall just beyond the officers’ heads, his jaw firmly set. He remained silent until the officers were out the door.

“What is art if its creation is dictated?” he said angrily to the men who surrounded him. “What is art if the critical eye turns blind, if we can no longer use it to comment independently on the state of the world?”

The same officers appeared the next morning and every morning after that. They promised status within the Party and priority in government housing to those who would fulfill their revolutionary duty by submitting themselves for re-education.

H
ng did not close his doors that day until the men had exhausted themselves with debate, and for Bình’s sake he did his best to radiate a calm he did not feel. The boy had already proven himself a capable assistant—ducking beneath gesticulating arms and the plumes of smoke that billowed from nostrils and mouths in order to slip empty bowls off the tables—but when the officers began to turn up, H
ng gave Bình additional jobs to distract him—refilling water glasses, collecting clean chopsticks from the dishwasher in the
alleyway, the same woman who, decades before, had sewn H
ng his first decent shirt.

The men in the shop appeared taciturn and unmoved, only ever erupting once the officers had departed. Debate had never threatened their solidarity, but over the days, H
ng could see the circle around Ðạo develop the pointed ends of an ovoid.

“Might it not be in our interests, ultimately, to co-operate?” asked a young poet named Trúc. “Give them this for now, leave us free to pursue our own work later?”

“Right,” said a balding calligrapher. “We temporarily set our own pursuits aside.”

“Weak, weak!” Ðạo shouted, pointing at each of them in turn. “If you give these things up, they will never be returned to you! Do you even hear yourselves? The Party celebrates its liberation of the peasantry while it devastates the countryside. How can you believe anything they promise?”

The next day, H
ng saw the ovoid that surrounded Ðạo collapse into a straight line.

“You’re a coward,” Ðạo spat at the calligrapher.

“And you are a hypocrite,” the calligrapher shouted back, jabbing his fist in Ðạo’s face, “a self-serving anti-revolutionary.”

H
ng was not the only one in the room who gasped. He immediately sent Bình to collect bowls from the dishwasher in the alleyway. He wondered how much Bình understood. Of events both in the room and the wider world. H
ng walked to the back door and stood on the threshold while a disembodied voice spewed propaganda through a megaphone.