Read Online The Zenith by Duong Thu Huong - Free Book Online Page A

of hot water in her hands. She is about to pour water into the teapot, but she hesitates and asks:
    “Sir, do you need new tea?”
    Vu looks up and answers: “Thank you. The tea is still strong, you can just add more water for me.”
    He fills his cup with the new very hot tea. He brings it up to the level of his chin, where the steam spreads across his face and a whisper repeats itself again and again:
    “With the years, everything slowly rots away…With the years…”
    He does not know what causes this thought to take over his brain, something like those hungry leeches that stick tightly to the thighs of miserable water buffaloes. Vu’s family owned no rice fields, but rural life had been familiar to him since youth thanks to summer vacations. Later, when he committed himself to the revolution, he was forced to become familiar with paddy fields. During that entire period, the image that terrified him most, a fear he could not acknowledge, was the sight of leeches in low-lying fields. Every time he saw a pack of leeches darkening the water’s face and chasing after bait, whether the bait was him or someone else, Vu’s skin grew goose bumps. He despised leeches not because they sucked people’s blood, because mosquitoes as well as other insects did likewise, but because, most frightening to him, their slimy bodies evoked uncertainty, a kind of elastic and free-floating danger, a threat about which one could not predict either its origins or its end.
    There is a kind of pain that tugs like the leeches do, that grabs the heart tightly at its deepest recess and never lets go. Real leeches are not that dangerous; you can let them suck the blood of water buffaloes until they grow as fat as your big toe. Once satiated, they just fall off. You can drop those blood-filled leeches into a pit of active lime, and in that way most effectively massacre these parasites. But when facing a lingering pain, people become paralyzed, unable to pull the parasite out from a bleeding heart.
    Vu does not remember in which book he read about this. But suddenly the thought returns, like smoke from smoldering hay hanging over the field of memory.
    Suddenly, cheerful laughter catches his attention: popping out of the door frame between the canteen and the kitchen is a group of four young girls, each one round, with red cheeks, twinkling eyes, and a face full of happiness. The two in the front carry a big basket with a heap of sesame balls. The two behind, even more hefty, carry the largest size of army pot, probably with broth for the beef noodle soup. Behind the four girls comes a fellow with skin dark as a burned house pillar and shoulders square as a Tet rice cake, carrying a basket of sliced noodles. It’s time for the canteen to servethe morning meal to the soldiers at the airport. Vu looks down at his watch; at that moment a gong is struck briskly.
    After three slow and three fast rings, the airport soldiers happily enter, every single one of them with his hair well groomed, his uniform well pressed, his complexion smooth and pinkish, clearly the most important, pampered group of soldiers in the corps. They walk while joking around, exchanging stories and conniving looks.
    Out of curiosity Vu follows them with his eyes, thinking: “In this group of good friends, who, I wonder, will take a knife and stab whom? Who will pour poison into whose glass of water? And who will lure whom into a spot that has been mined?”
    The young soldiers see him. They stop chattering, raise their hands in salute, and follow one another to sit at a row of tables on the right side of the room, an area reserved for middle-grade meals.
    The canteen is only one room, serving only one kind of sesame ball and one kind of beef noodle soup, but it is divided into two sections. The area where he sits is reserved for higher-class meals, the floor having been raised some six inches by a platform that has had a veneer carefully applied, one that shines like a mirror.