Blood and Soap Page 2

  When Ho Muoi was ten, his mother enrolled him in school for the first time. He was slow and it took him a year to learn the alphabet. He could never figure out how to add or subtract. His worst subject, however, was geography. It was inconceivable to him that there are hundreds of countries in the world, each with a different spoken language. Every single word of his own language felt so inevitable that he thought it would be a crime against nature to call a cow or a bird anything different.

  Ho Muoi could not even conceive of two countries sharing this same earth. “Countries” in the plural sounds like either a tautology or an oxymoron. “Country,” “earth” and “universe” were all synonymous in his mind.

  Ho Muoi’s teacher was a very sophisticated young man from Hanoi. He was the only one within a fifty-mile radius who had ever read a newspaper or who owned even a single book. He even fancied himself a poet in his spare time. He did not mind teaching a bunch of village idiots, however, because it spared him from the bombs and landmines that were the fate of his contemporaries. In the evening he could be found in his dark room reading a Russian novel. The teacher was short and scrawny and had a habit of shutting his eyes tight and sticking his lips out when concentrating. Still, it was odd that he managed to attract no women in a village almost entirely emptied of its young men.

  Whenever this teacher was exasperated with his charge he would shout “!” but no one knew what the word meant or what language it was in so it was dismissed as a sort of a sneeze or a clearing of the throat.

  At twelve, something happened to Ho Muoi that would change his whole outlook on life. He was walking home from school when he saw a crowd gathering around three men who were at least two heads taller than the average person. The men had a pink, almost red complexion and their hair varied from a bright orange to a whitish yellow. They were not unfriendly and allowed people to tug at the abundant hair growing on their arms. “Wonderful creatures,” Ho Muoi thought as he stared at them, transfixed. One of the men noticed Ho Muoi and started to say something. The words were rapid, like curses, but the man was smiling as he was saying them. All eyes turned to look at Ho Muoi. Some people started to laugh and he wanted to laugh along with them but he could not. Suddenly his face flushed and he felt an intense hatred against these foreign men. If he had a gun he would have shot them already. Without premeditation he blurted out “!” then ran away.

  When Ho Muoi got home his heart was still beating wildly. The excitement of blurting out a magical word, a word he did not know the meaning of, was overwhelming. He also remembered the look of shock on the man’s face after the word had left his mouth. He repeated “!” several times and felt its power each time.

  Ho Muoi would think about this incident for years afterward. He recalled how he was initially enraged by a series of foreign words, and that he had retaliated with a foreign word of his own. In his mind, foreign words became equated with a terrible power. The fact that his own language would be foreign to a foreigner never occurred to him.

  The incident also turned Ho Muoi into a celebrity. The villagers would recall with relish how one of their own, a twelve-year-old boy, had “stood up to a foreigner” by hurling a curse at him in his own language. Many marveled at the boy’s intelligence for knowing how to use a foreign word, heard maybe once or twice in passing, on just the right occasion and with authority. They even suggested to the schoolteacher that he teach “the boy genius” all the foreign words from his Russian novels.

  The schoolteacher never got around to doing this. He was drafted soon after, sent south, and was never heard from again. As for Ho Muoi, he became convinced that, given the opportunity, he could quickly learn any foreign language. This opportunity came after Ho Muoi himself was drafted into the Army.

  His battalion served in the Central Highlands, along the Truong Son Mountain, guarding supply lines. They rarely made contact with the enemy but whenever they did, Ho Muoi acquitted himself miserably. He often froze and had to be literally kicked into action. What was perceived by his comrades as cowardice, however, was not so much a fear of physical pain as the dread that he would not be allowed to fulfill his destiny.

  The war was an outrage, Ho Muoi thought, not because it was wiping out thousands of people a day, the young, the old, and the unborn, but that it could exterminate a man of destiny like himself. And yet he understood that wars also provide many lessons to those who survived them. A war is a working man’s university. Knowing that, he almost felt grateful.

  Ho Muoi also had the superstition (or the inspiration) that if the war eliminates a single book from this earth, then that would be a greater loss than all the lives wasted. The death of a man affects three or four other individuals, at most. Its significance is symbolic and sentimental, but the lost of a single book is tangible, a disaster which should be mourned forever by all of mankind. The worth of a society is measured by how many books it has produced. This, from a man who had never actually read a book. Ho Muoi had seen so few books, he could not tell one from another; they were all equal in his mind. He never suspected that war is the chief generator of books. A war is a thinking man’s university.

  In 1970 or 1971, after a brief skirmish, they caught an American soldier whom they kept for about thirty days. The prisoner was made to march along with Ho Muoi’s battalion until he fell ill and died (he was not badly injured). This man was given the same ration as the others but the food did not agree with him. Once, they even gave him an extra helping of orangutan meat, thinking it would restore his health.

  As the prisoner sank into delirium, the color drained from his face but his eyes lit up. He would blather for hours on end. No one paid him any attention but Ho Muoi. In his tiny notebook he would record as much of the man’s rambling as possible. These phonetic notations became the source for Ho Muoi’s English lessons after the war. I’ve seen pages from the notebook. Its lines often ran diagonally from one corner to another. A typical run-on sentence: “hoo he hoo ah utta ma nut m pap m home.”

  The notebook also includes numerous sketches of the American. Each portrait was meant as a visual clue to the words swarming around it. Ho Muoi’s skills as an artist were so poor, however, that the face depicted always appeared the same, that of a young man, any man, really, who has lost all touch with the world.

  Ho Muoi was hoping his unit would catch at least one more American so he could continue his English lesson, but this tutor never materialized, unfortunately.

  Though all the English he had was contained within a single notebook, Ho Muoi was not discouraged. The American must have spoken just about every word there was in his native language, he reasoned, through all those nights of raving. And the invisible words can be inferred from the visible ones.

  Words are like numbers, he further reasoned, a closed system with a small set of self-generated rules. And words arranged on a page resemble a dull, monotonous painting. If one could look at the weirdest picture and decipher, sooner or later, its organizing principle, why can’t one do the same with words?

  Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest. Fools will argue with you about this, but any surface can be deciphered. The entire world, as seen from an airplane, is just a warped surface.

  A man may fancy he’s making an abstract painting, but there is no such thing as an abstract painting, only abstracted ones. Every horizontal surface is a landscape because it features a horizon (thus implying a journey, escape from the self, and the unreachable). Every vertical surface is either a door or a portrait (thus implying a house, another being, yourself as another being, and the unreachable). And all colors have shared and private associations. Red may inspire horror in one culture, elation in another, but it is still red, is still blood. Green always evokes trees and a pretty green dress.

  Ho Muoi also believed that anything made by man can be duplicated: a chair, a gun, a language, provided one has the raw materials, as he did,
with his one notebook of phonetic notations. If one can break apart a clock and reassemble it, one can scramble up phonetic notations and rearrange them in newer combinations, thus ending up with not just a language, but a literature.

  At the time of his arrest, Ho Muoi was teaching hundreds of students beginning, intermediary and advanced English three nights a week. For twenty-five years, he had taught his students millions of vocabulary words. He had patiently explained to them the intricacies of English grammar, complete with built-in inconsistencies. He had even given them English poems and short stories (written by himself and the more advanced students) to read. When interrogated at the police station, however, our English teacher proved ignorant of the most basic knowledge of the language. He did not know the verb “to be” or “to do.” He did not know there is a past tense in English. He had never heard of Shakespeare and was not even aware that Australians and Englishmen also speak English.

  In Ho Muoi’s made-up English, there are not five but twenty-four vowels. The new nuances in pronunciation force each student to fine-tune his ear to the level of the finest musician. There is a vast vocabulary for pain and bamboo but no equivalent for cheese. Any adjective can be used as a verb. I will hot you, for example, or, Don’t red me. There are so many personal pronouns, each one denoting an exact relationship between speaker and subject, that even the most brilliant student cannot master them all.

  By sheer coincidence, some of Ho Muoi’s made-up English words correspond exactly with actual English. In his system, a cat is also called a cat; a tractor, a tractor; and a rose, inevitably, perhaps, a rose.

  Some of his more curious inventions include blanket, to denote a husband. Basin, to denote a wife. Pin prick: a son. A leaky faucet: a daughter.

  Ho Muoi’s delusion was so absolute, however, that after he was sentenced to twenty-five years for “defrauding the people,” he asked to be allowed to take to prison a “Dictionary of the English Language” and a “Dictionary of English Slang,” two volumes he himself had compiled, so that “I can continue my life studies.”

  It is rumored that many of his former students have banded together to continue their English lessons. Harassed by the police, they must hold their nightly meetings in underground bunkers, lit by oil lamps. Their strange syllables, carried by the erratic winds, crosshatch the surrounding countryside.

  But why are they doing this? You ask. Don’t they know they are studying a false language?

  As the universal language—for now—English represents to these students the rest of the world. English is the world. These students also know that Vietnam, as it exists, is not of this world. To cling even to a false English is to insist on another reality.

  A bogus English is better than no English, is better, in fact, than actual English, since it corresponds to no English or American reality.

  Hoo he hoo ah utta ma nut m pap m home.

  The Town of the Hidden Coffin

  The Red River Delta is one of the most populated areas on earth: for hundreds of square miles, there are village after village, town after town, and each available (and unavailable) acre of land is cultivated. That’s why Noi Yen is such an anomaly. Located in the heart of the Red River Delta, a mere 50 miles from Hanoi, the town is almost completely abandoned. I’ve only seen it once, in September or October of 1998, and I don’t think I’d ever want to see it again.

  Arriving from busy, thriving Hung Chan, crossing a stinking, narrow creek, I was first startled by the empty, ghostly aspect of Noi Yen’s main street. All of its houses and shops were shuttered. Many appeared vandalized and had fallen into ruins, uninhabited, an unheard of phenomenon in Vietnam, where even concrete pillboxes from the French era, built more than half a century ago, are converted into dwellings. About the only life in Noi Yen’s “commercial district” were a dozen beggars and hawkers, selling almost nothing, who gathered in the blue shadow of the eternally closed post office. One of them, a ten-year-old girl, tried to run after our car waving a fistful of lottery tickets. We left her standing in the dust.

  Leaving the town itself, I was further shocked by the sights of the deserted countryside. For many miles I did not see a single buffalo, chicken, dog, or bird. All the fields lay fallow, overgrown with weeds and wild flowers, and every few feet there was a small, carelessly dug pit. There were literally hundreds of these pits. “Was there a battle here?” I asked my driver, rather stupidly, as it turned out, as I’d never seen a real battlefield in my life. “No,” he answered me tersely, and stepped on the gas pedal to speed us away. Sensing my annoyance, he quickly added: “I’ll tell you all about Noi Yen once we get to the next town.”

  Later, over dinner and a dozen bottles of Hanoi beer, he finally explained: “Noi Yen has been abandoned for about ten years now. No one can live there, it is cursed. There are a handful of explanations, but the most convincing, and therefore it must be true, is the story of the empty coffin.”

  “The empty coffin?!”

  “Yes, the empty coffin. You see, about fifteen years ago, there was a feud between Noi Yen and Hung Chan, and the people of Hung Chan put a curse on Noi Yen, and that’s why no one can live there any more.”

  “What was the feud over?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was because some men from Hung Chan had raped a girl from Hung Chan, or maybe somebody had insulted somebody, or maybe somebody owed somebody money and didn’t want to pay, or maybe it was because Noi Yen had beaten Hung Chan in a soccer match by bribing the referee.”

  The vagueness of the origin of the feud annoyed me a little, but then I thought it really doesn’t matter, since there are so many reasons, all valid, of course, human beings may decide to exact revenge on each another.

  My driver continued: “You see, once the feud between the two towns had started, there was a rash of strange deaths in Noi Yen. People would simply drop dead as they were going about their daily business. I could be sitting in a cafe talking to you, as I’m doing now, and without warnings, I would crash to the ground and be dead within a few seconds.”

  “How many strange deaths were there altogether?”

  “Hundreds!”

  I squinted at my driver skeptically. Four or five heart attacks at most, or maybe epileptic fits, or cases of food poisoning. Why do we always exaggerate so much, my friend?

  Talking of food poisoning, I remember that what we had that night was truly awful. We had asked for different varieties of noodle soups, mine with seafood, his with chicken, but the waitress only smiled at us most pleasantly, then went into the kitchen to return a minute later with two bowls of identical slop, both with thin strips of old pork in them. That’s what can happen when you travel to these forsaken towns: you are either pleasantly surprised by a local delicacy at a give-away price, or they make you pay through the nose for garbage.

  My driver chugged down his mug of beer, spilling plenty out of the sides of his mouth, then continued: “Yes, there were hundreds of death within a month, each day there were at least a dozen funerals, but no one could prove that these strange deaths were caused by a curse from Hung Chan. But there were no other valid explanations! Before the feud, no one was dying!”

  My driver paused to grope into the ice bucket for yet another bottle of beer, his eighth or ninth, then continued: “So it was clear there was a curse, but since no one in Noi Yen knew what that curse was, they could not neutralize it. But then, out of pity, perhaps, someone from Hung Chan finally let on that there was an empty coffin buried in Noi Yen. That’s why so many people were dying. The coffin needed a corpse, and until there was a real corpse placed inside it, the people of Noi Yen would continue to drop dead.”

  “And that’s why there were all those pits in the fields?”

  “Yes, yes, the people of Noi Yen knew there was an empty coffin buried in their town, but they did not know exactly where it was, and that’s why they had to dig all over, just so they could place a corpse inside it.”

  His reasoning does make some sense
, I thought. Everyone knows that when coffin sales are going slow, coffin makers like to sleep inside a coffin to suggest death to the gods, to induce business. It is also self-evident that a coffin above ground is just a coffin, but a coffin underground must have a body inside it.

  “And they never found the coffin?”

  “Of course not. That’s why they had to flee the town. In their desperation the people of Noi Yen had even hired a famous Buddhist monk from Hanoi to locate the coffin, but even this monk couldn’t find it. The monk claimed the coffin was eluding him.”

  “What do you mean ‘eluding him’?!”

  “The coffin was moving around underground to escape detection!”

  “But I thought the coffin wanted to be detected, so it could have a body inside it.”

  My driver remained silent for a few seconds. I had finally stumped him, I thought. But then he said: “You see, a coffin is not unlike a woman. It wants a body, but it acts as if it doesn’t really want a body. It doesn’t want to be pregnant!”

  “Is that what the famous monk said?!”

  “No, monks don’t know anything about women. But it makes common sense. It’s what I’m telling you.”

  Yes, a female coffin, made of cheap wood surely, homely, secretly and hastily inserted into the ground, eternally hankering for the chilled body of any man, woman or child, but resisting the paid susurration of a fake monk.

  “But maybe there’s simply no empty coffin in the ground?”

  “But of course there is. That’s why all those people were dying.”

  “But not everyone fled. We saw a dozen people today, by the post office. How come they’re not dropping dead?”

  My driver looked at me with blood shot eyes. He was completely drunk by now and would probably crash into the first truck or tree we see after we get back into the car. I had known he was a lush before I hired him but his vehicle, an old Soviet junker, could be had for dirt cheap. It appeared we would have to jostle for a place inside the empty coffin that night.