The Beauty of Humanity Movement (73 page)

The next day, none of the
Nhân Van
contributors turned up for breakfast. The room was so quiet that H
ng could hear the slow beat of his heart. After breakfast was over, the fire extinguished, the tiled floor swept, the chopsticks neatly housed, H
ng closed all the shutters, pulled the beret Ðạo had given him years before down over his eyebrows and left the building by the back door.

The paranoia that had stopped the men talking in the ph
shop had now infected him as well. He put his hands in his pockets and studied the ground as he walked very deliberately in the opposite direction of the
Nhân Van
office. When he was certain he had not been followed, he doubled back and emerged at the busy eastern edge of the Old Quarter, slid into Café Võ, strode through the length of it, exchanging no more than a nod with the owner, and walked out the back door into yet another alleyway.

He turned the corner.

He smelled the burning before he saw it. This time the Party had not been content simply to destroy the contents of the office. They had razed the neighbourhood communal house, the place for meetings and worship of the ancestral spirits, at the back of which the men of the Beauty of Humanity Movement had been given sanctuary. A crowd of people stood across the street and stared at the smouldering rafters, too late to save the building or the people who might have been trapped inside.

Ðạo in flames—H
ng couldn’t bear to think of it. Ðạo choking, gasping for air. H
ng walked away as he had walked away from his village’s temple, feeling as if everything vital had been desecrated. He eventually found himself at the shores of Hoàn Ki
m Lake. He studied the ever-calm surface of the water, willed a turtle to rise from the murk and walked across the red Bridge of the Rising Sun toward the temple on Jade Island.

A single spiral coil of incense burned inside the temple, where once, not long ago, there would have been hundreds. He raised his hands to pray, but a great listlessness overcame him and he abandoned the effort. It was communism that caused the weight in his arms. Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage.

But where he found no comfort in the temple any longer, he still prayed each night to the ancestral spirits, lifting Uncle Chi
n’s photo from its small altar at the back of the shop, dusting it, offering fruit. He prayed for Ðạo’s life, but woke each morning in certain distress, dread lodged like an egg in his throat.

Days passed without any sign of Ðạo or his colleagues. H
ng found himself at the threshold of Ðạo’s apartment in the French Quarter. The door had been torn from its hinges. “Bình,” H
ng called out, his voice echoing in the front room. “Amie?”

He knocked on the doors of the adjacent apartments to no avail. But someone must have heard him, for the next day, Ðạo’s wife came to see him at the shop. “He must have been sent to a re-education camp,” Amie said.

H
ng failed to reply, fearing a fate far worse, having no reassuring words to offer.

“H
ng, please tell me you think he has been sent to a re-education camp,” she begged.

H
ng could not imagine Ðạo ever abandoning his convictions, but then, perhaps there would be torture and brainwashing, the likes of which H
ng had read descriptions of in
Nhân Van
.