The Beauty of Humanity Movement (72 page)

And so they had crouched in the alleyway and eaten H
ng’s ph
that Friday and the next. The Friday after that, Bình came without his mother. He carried a chessboard, laid it down in the dirt, and tried to entice H
ng into a game.

“One move each,” said H
ng. “That’s all I have time for.”

“But I don’t know how to play,” said Bình.

“Oh dear,” said H
ng, squatting down in the dirt with the boy, the board between them. “I’m not sure that I do either.” H
ng picked up a wooden piece carved with the Chinese character for elephant and laid it down.

H
ng carried on with his routine every morning, bracing himself for the day when his shop would be burned to the ground. Winter was upon them, the grey days of November, when the fourth issue of
Nhân Van
was published. Ðạo delivered a copy to H
ng after dark, knocking on the back door of the building. H
ng, heart in throat, opened the door.

“I went out into the country myself,” Ðạo said to the ground. He hesitated, a man of words unsure of what to say next, his uncharacteristic awkwardness silencing them both. “To my wife’s village,” he finally added, pressing the magazine heavily into H
ng’s hands.

H
ng read the editorial that night by the weak yellow light of his lamp. There, listed plainly, were the crimes of land reform, unmasked by poetry or allegory. The Party had violated the Republic’s constitution by making illegal arrests, deliberately misclassifying peasants as landowners, seizing their property, throwing them in prison, subjecting them to barbaric torture, performing executions and abandoning innocent children, leaving them to starve to death.

The editorial went on to suggest that it might be time for new leadership, since H
Chí Minh and the other senior Party officials seemed to have become rigid and closed-minded with age. They had now forbidden all protest—but had they not, as young men, engaged in protest themselves? How had the Party come into being in the first place?
Were they now, from the comfort of their positions of power, content to stagnate, to atrophy, to close the Vietnamese mind?

H
ng was overcome by a fear of the sort that turns a mortal heart into concrete. He wished with every fibre of his being that Ðạo had not gone so far in his attempt to compensate for his failure to empathize with the peasantry. Ðạo had not merely criticized the Party’s policies, he had committed the ultimate crime—insulting Uncle H’ô—for which he risked the threat of the ultimate punishment.