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A Short Story in Vietnamese by Lê Vĩnh Tài
Translation by Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

You can see it right, the drooping autumn leaves, on the branches falling to the ground, nourishing the earth, she said. And the truth is each time around Tết the tropical almond tree would shed its leaves, its branches shivered in the fall while we shivered with the cold.

In the middle of her needlework, she would cry out proudly three times. In the distance is a looming tall building, rather lonely even though it’s right next to the market. Each thread in her piece is the colour of heaven and earth, you can see it right, it’s magnificent, she said, not turning her head, looking at me from the corner of her eye. 

The piece inspires her obsession. The landscape is rather surprising, I said as I stared at the four-story building in the embroidery. It’s the only building in the area and it’s right by my house. An imposing giant wall like a castle pitted with bullet holes from a long-gone era. People ran out of it to hide in the primary school, also near my house. As it turns out, my house was the focus of her piece and yet absent from it. Then again, she had deleted lots of people’s world of memories, so my house is nothing. Like how now people would erase the name of a waterfall or river. In the piece she worked on, the landmarks were embroidered exactly where they should be, including the peaks of each red mountain. The wooden longhouses were splendid, they were embroidered in chocolate, making the four-story building look even more out of place. She didn’t include the airport in her piece, the two-way lane highway runs infinitely beyond the eye as though it never existed. She laughs, our piece shall be green, all the possible shades of the vegetation all around us, she carefully embroidered each petal of tithonia like a jacket. Coming soon will be an inconceivable magical exhibition, purely of her inspiration.

The beating of the war drum never seems to stop, it doesn’t wait for the new school year to start pounding again, it continues to beat to the end of term one, hence term two echoes term one, and so on. Perhaps it’s the reason why there’s never been peace anywhere in the world for very long. I asked her, will there be another war? She grabbed my hand and said, the echoes of the drum continue to rise, the drumming doesn’t stop and the beat goes flying along with the baton in the air from the hands of someone she can’t really see clearly. So she decided not to include them in her embroidery. Because the sound of the drums refuses to retreat so she decided to stitch the rising sound of the drum. Surprising is the sound of the drum, hiding both deception and the truth, the drumming continues at sunrise to the moment she closes her eyes. And my friends, so many of them sleep in, they no longer wake up in time for school anymore.

We all look forward to tomorrow. We all wait for the moment the wall of the four-story building with the sad bullet holes, and the last doors completely leave the alleyway. The last strings of firecrackers burning in unison for the last time the way she used to welcome the new year. Rows of houses remained in her embroidered piece, rows of trees forming what might look like a map, the subject of geography seems to weigh on her more than maths and it’s compulsory. How I can’t work out what is where in her embroidery since the pile of rubble next to my house had also disappeared.

She said, don’t look at it anymore, I’m not an artist. All I want is to live with you and be your muse. And so I lived with her even before I completed my lessons on how to write poetry. I’m just a child from a small town surrounded by rubber plants and plantations.

I grew up, buying produce from the wind and selling the tides, so that the dead bodies bought had enough time to drift away along with the springs and find their way to the open sea. I told her not to look for these springs, since in my childhood the springs I grew up with were never given a name, lost somewhere in a sports field, like a lake I saw recently filled up with dirt, as I held onto my mother’s hand and ran to keep up with other people. Hence the colour blue through her embroidered sunset did not surprise me, I now believe anything is possible, though it might not be in poetry. I cry sometimes, I have such a short life, to live with you, it will never be enough. And darkness is never a collaborator. 

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Lê Vĩnh Tài, the poet and translator born in 1966 in Buon Ma Thuot, Daklak, Vietnam. The retired doctor is still a resident of the Western Highlands and a businessman in Buon Ma Thuot.

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm, the blogger, poet, and translator, was born in 1971 in Phu Nhuan, Saigon, Vietnam. The pharmacist currently lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia.