Read Online Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) by Ho Anh Thai - Free Book Online Page A

fortuneteller had said to Phũ. “Not only to die, but also to go to jail,” I said, trying to intimidate him a bit. Phũ smiled insipidly and repeated the words he’d spat into the fortuneteller’s face. He hadn’t killed anyone, so . . . certainly nobody would be thinking about killing him.
    I surrendered. I abandoned him to fate. Man tries to outdo the heavens. Who knows if he’ll succeed? However it ended, we would finally conclude this incessant cycle of vengeance.
    In 1972, my sister-in-law, not having had time to get to a hospital, gave birth to Phũ in an evacuation zone. During the war the hospital was more than ten kilometers away, and bicycles were the only means of transportation. Instead, she had had the benefit of a village midwife. That midwife had cared for almost everyone in the village—except the deputy village chairman, who had led a group of uncouth youths in pissing in the incense bowl and then burning down the temple of the village tutelary spirit. And except for a widow of doubtful chastity, whose husband had been dead ten years and was known throughout the village, her eyes always darting back and forth, her face always glowing and content, not even trying to hide behind an appearance of sorrowful virtue. And except for a few people who drifted around making their living through theft and fraud . . .
    Everyone else in the village had been blessed by this midwife. Now it was my nephew’s turn.
    Behind the pressed-bamboo screen, my sister-in-law shrieked intermittently, “Thế! Thế! You’ve killed me!” I had just turned twelve and, hearing this, I was panic stricken, afraid she was actually going to die. I ran through the partition. She was lying on her back on a wooden platform, her face completely white, her big belly arched weirdly up into the air. The midwife quickly covered my eyes and screamed, “What’s wrong with you? Someone get this kid out of here.” My aunt ran in and pulled me out. My sister-in-law was still howling: “Thế! Thế! You’ve killed me!” At this time, Thế was serving the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks and everybody here was watching the conference, waiting for the Americans to stop their last bombing raids on the North.
    Thế had been in Paris since the beginning, and had done nothing to her to make her scream so tragically.
    My sister-in-law still hadn’t finished when a squadron of American planes appeared. Everyone jumped into a shelter beneath a wooden screen. Only my sister-in-law and the midwife remained above—just the two of them, face to face with the pirates of the sky. Everyone jumped as the roaring of a bomb erupted all around us and the surface of the earth trembled and shook as if it were in the throes of febrile convulsions. Above our heads my sister-in-law, who had continued her screaming, was suddenly quiet. The always-daring Phũ couldn’t handle staying inside anymore and finally emerged from his mother, thanks in part to a bomb’s exploding so close by that people soiled their pants. Then the squadron of planes left, as if the sole mission of that wave of attacks had been to help her give birth.
    My old auntie and two other women rushed out of the shelter to help the midwife. I sat there with a handful of my auntie’s children. The whole group of youngsters was sitting with eyes glued to the pairs of ladies’ legs clad in black pants and running back and forth above our heads. From the edge of the wooden platform, drops of red blood began to drip like rivulets of rainwater.
    In this manner, Phũ came into the world: a purple-faced kid weighing 4.9 kilos, stubbornly determined not to cry. The midwife put him aside in order to save his mother, who had fainted and was showing signs of dangerous complications. She placed him into a flat basket in front of the awning and turned to his mother. Just then the temple-destroying village vice deputy rushed in, screaming for more laborers to go fill in the craters left in