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A short story in Vietnamese by Mai Thảo
Translator: Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

At seventeen, I lived long and hard with many stars. The stars I said belonged to Diệu. Why and why now have I decided to talk about these old stars, I will explain now below. In those days, we lived in a small area called Hiến. A grass hut that belonged to an elderly gentleman named Bằn – the landlord – a small garden by a small pond turned into our small observatory, each night we would go out and sat outside, innocent souls and pure heart opened up to pathways towards the skies. My first book of poems that Diệu had given a title – never to be published – it was called Phương Sao. The first few rhymes written in the small exciting hours by a small flame, in the middle of the night in a small town was the boundlessness, the blank pages were as white as it could possibly be were spaces comparable to a world of stars. Often it was not until very late that we would turn in. The nights were freezing. The woven bamboo blinds thin. The flowers, leaves and the trees had a bizarre and curious smell. The familiar blades of grass in the dark at the foot of the pond were as intimate as the human spirit. Patches of earthy damp moss emitting an eerie air. The stars seemed as though they were falling, down to us to discuss the universe and life on other cold planets with shifting icebergs, floating around them across the horizon.

An age obsessed with stars, the moon was a friend and the path we took was the glittering flow of the Galaxy, dreamy lights occupied every nook and cranny in my mind, in all the pages of my books, invaded my sleep. Our school in Hanoi moved here after several bombardment of a Japanese ammunition depot in Gia Lâm, it was around the end of 1944. The reason why the sky was always a blueish bruised hue, a flammable war time in the shadows of b-2 bombers flew from the coast inland toward the air defense identification zone. The mean bomb burned down a corner of the North Gate of the of old citadel. Two days later the school was closed and we left for Phà Đen terminal.

We left Hanoi at two in the morning the night I met Diệu on the ferry. Even if Diệu was still alive, for the rest of my life I will never forget that night on the ferry. The water choppy. Darkness thick and deep. The horn sobbed as the ferry left the terminal. Diệu’s death, the ride on the ferry, the sound of the horn, the rising darkness alive again in me and materialized were the eternal images of the seventeen year old. Tonight in my mind as I reminisce on the old stars as I ride the evening ferry in Hồng Hà. I find myself losing Diệu again, in a far off place, nowhere near Hồng Hà and the old stars.

That afternoon, a ferry left Hanoi. The long howl of the horn slammed into hidden empty beaches. Sobs were the final goodbye. The back and forth rythmic sway of the water under the bridge. The water ran down through the propeller as the rutter turned back. It was my first impression of time on that first trip. I can recall every single detail. It was a while since the ferry left. The candles were lit up all at once. We were four hundred people not sleeping. Bow to stern were the rumble of quiet chatter. Canvas covered everything in all direction on that winter’s eve. Rose from the engine room was the stuffy smell of coal and fire. I couldn’t sleep couldn’t read the book I brought along nor did I had anything to add to what my friends had to say. In the end I stood up, pulled myself away from the bunched up bestrewn familiar bodies on the ground flipped one flap of the canvas and pulled away from my friends through it, made my way towards the bow.

That was the first time I saw Diệu. He sat with his back to me on a pile of steel chains. I didn’t know then who he was but I was immediately drawn to him. The familiarity of two people who had something in common in a unique moment where if Diệu was not already sitting on the pile of steel chains it would have been me sitting there with my back to the stern facing the bow. I froze, did not move, steadied my self by holding onto the steel rail wrapped around the deck of the ferry. In the future after that, I did once found another person who sat like that, on a small platform one sprinkly rainy night, composed like a statue immersed in the silence. I love those who could compose themselves like a statue like that. Infinite strings of thoughts ran through their mind pushed out the finite moment and they were by themselves left alone in a world that was detached from everything presently around them. Rodin when he was molding the thinker probably had such moments of detachment created the inexplicable sculpture of a person facing a world in their mind. I don’t think Diệu was there yet in his mind. Shoulders, back, his posture were still preoccupied with what happened: Hanoi. I stood there quietly watching Diệu, the smallest sound felt like an unforgivable intrusion. Diêu’s shadow, an imprint over the eddies in the water, white bubbles like strips of cotton thread. The stark contrast. Inside were four hundred students being evacuated with their heads together over pages of fiction, quietly talking or fast asleep. While outside, one person sat staring at the night, at time, sat alone in another world. Diệu was an odd sight. As though he was no longer a student. A mixture of surprise and respect swelled up inside me. Finally, I gravitated. My foot caught on something made a noise and Diệu turned around. He viewed me with indifference, but his eyes lit up like two tiny stars. Quietly I sat down next to him, on the icy pile of steel chains. The ferry continued on its way. A moment later after the ferry had passed Bát Tràng, or it might have been Gốm I came to know somewhat about Diệu. His name, he was from Sơn tây and he had only been enrolled in our school for six months and the school had to move. As it turned out, we were from the same school. I asked Diệu:

“It freezing out here. You’re not sleepy”.

“No, Diệu laughed. When I was younger I took a ferry on Sông Đáy I stayed up all night looking at the stars until I had to get off. I like looking at the stars”.

Quiet for a while, Diệu continued:

“There is nothing more beautiful than stars”.

Our chatter cut with periods of long silence. We stared into the darkness in the river under the bow. Looking up from the blackness appreciated more of how the stars were so beautiful. Glancing a look at Diệu, the celestial bodies in his eyes and I knowing nothing about what he was in his mind. He was thin, small. His black áo dài was loose on his shoulders, too big for him. When we did not look at the stars, Diệu would tell me about Sơn Tây. An old abandoned rock citadel, deep moats covered completely by over grown grass, the tired midday naps in a small town under the shade of giant bayans, falling asleep to the sound of horse carts through the front and back gates and how in the afternoon the breeze from Sông Hồng came rushing through the streets along with trucks loaded with goods from Trung Hà heading for the dock. Diệu had an interesting way of telling a story then that made me laughed. Later I would come to discover for myself the sounds of the commotions around those front and back gates, abandoned moats full of grass that would eventually turned into the most beautiful pages of fiction that I had the privileged to read written by Diệu.

The night following the school to Hiến the stars were also bright and things were strange. The flow of the Galaxy draped over and touched the heart of the river cutting it turned it into an aureole intersection of light. Not sure when Diệu was pointing at something and said:

“Over there where the stars are all on top of each other there must be millions”.

The truth was that I had never imagined how there could ever be so many stars. After that night, the stars I might see them but I only feel closest to them, saw them as the most beautiful stars I have ever seen was the night on the ferry where I first met Diệu. The night sky was a black backdrop overhead, beneath was a bottomless river, the ferry slipped through between two blankets of stars, one of water and one of sky. We were sitting in the middle. Thicker were the descending mist, colder the night, more brilliant were the stars. The heavenly body beauty that lies in the mind and imagination of people. Look up, sketch the imaginary lines towards an unexplored distant planet or take an imaginary stroll between the two banks of the stream of the Galaxy, how I felt that night was not something that could be explained by science. The universe was a thing of amorous beauty, I couldn’t explained it when it came to those alluring secretive stars. The ferry continued on its way. I was up with Diệu like that, more preoccupied with admiring the stars than talking, till the ferry docked in Hưng Yên. In contrast were the lights there, dull, sad and ordinary. Then materalised was a pitch black road into town through the corn fields. The alluvium inning vast and wide. The line of students dragged on. Diệu withdrew to the back of the group by my side and we continued our conversations about stars. I nudged him. Diệu then told me about the nights in Sơn Tây, he would stand and watch the stars appeared above the gate of the citadel. He remembered the biggest star would always show up late over the back gate of the citadel, he would wait for it to show as though it was a friend, always at the same predestined place. A few years later after that he couldn’t see the star at the same old place and the sky was missing a bright light like a dark longing. The longer I listened the stranger Diệu became.

By the time we set foot into Hiến there was a faint light of dawn in the sky. The horizon was pink without a single star but those stars were the reason we became friends. My friendship with Diệu after that had a cold light, yearning for stars like on that first night.

Diệu’s sadness was always present. The entire forteen months – the time we stayed in Hiến – not once did I see that Diệu happy. The new school really suits Diệu. It was a monastery, a three storey grey building that stood out in the middle of a large grassy field behind a market accessed by a red dirt road into town that was always muddy. Behind the school, quite a distant away, lined my a long dike, shadows of longans trees as tall as each other drew along with them consistently the memories. I will never be able to forget the starry nights in Hiến, nor will I forget the river banks in Hiến. Lush green grass, always budding, always fresh, down to the foot came falling down from the top of the dike, the ideal place for us to take a midday nap, each under the shade of a longan tree, looking at a boundless sky through the space in the canopy filled with sunlight. Leaves shaped like the boats in the verses by Huy Cận. They drift into Diệu’s sad and desolate world, I believed like the Chàm tower in a verse by Chế Lan Viên when my soul had barely grasped the rhythm of a verse by Nguyễn Nhược Pháp in my formative years. The present of a soul in those romantic formative years. The way Diệu lived and act gave us, the deepest part of Diệu’s disposition opened a door to a path to a world that was not only sad but beautiful. Beautiful because of all the light. Sad because of all the noise. Light from stars, silent in the darkness of the universe. Often at the foot of the dike – the quietest spots away from everything, I would completely lose the concept of time, sat there till the clothes on our back took shape, the afternoon had already disappeared without notice. The sunlight barely had a breath left over the eaves of the monastery. The field seemed bigger and deeper was the sky. An afternoon when, Diệu pointed at a patch of sunlight on the grass. And said:

“To able to see such beautiful light now and then in a lifetime is enough”.

I did not not understand what Diệu meant by “enough”. Maybe instinctively Diệu knew something was up, that his life will be cut short, that soon, he will never be able to see these patches of afternoon light again. I knew then that he had understood fully what this enough meant. Thousand and thounsands of people have lived a life three or four times Diệu’s short life, had never been able to grasp and feel the beauty of a patch of afternoon sunlight on the grass like Diệu, a star. They simply see the light, the star, unable to grasp their beauty, heaven and earth viewed blandly by outsiders, superficial, meaningless. What I loved about Diệu both when he was alive, and after his death, a great loss, was the depth of his sadness, and the way he had lived with intention. Not just some shadow turning up to then leave so fast in the middle of a life he was more like a shadow bursting with life that was contantly growing. Here: Diệu did not only earnestly found his way into the depths of all things, he gave them sincerely his love and adoration. Diệu and his way were one. Diệu and the stars were one. Sometime he was a tree. Sometime Diệu was the star.

It was not long before I wrote my first verses of poetry, after my time spent with Diệu. As though nature had intended it, some school kid composing poetry. What made me write them? Was is because in the classroom taught by nature I sat next to Diệu? Phương Sao, by book of poetry will never be published – to me, it was an offering, the last testament to a friend who was dead – I lost it in Sông Mã before we docked at Lèn and the afternoon was swooped by bombers. The dreamy verses I can no longer recall, but the feel of all those emotions stayed, how I felt the first time the nib of my pen touched paper, how I felt about nature through Diệu. Like how the sound of Diệu’s soul was like an echo through every nook and cranny of a mountain. I learned to take in all the things around me but Diệu remained wholly missing from each moment I was stunned by the beauty I saw. Diệu was the image of an idea that encapsulated everything. When I feel a woman gives me the impression of the first woman I have ever known, then Diệu was the first beautiful impression that will always stay will me, and I find it time and again in the beauty I welcome now and I know so in the future to come. Across my horizon alone, starlight, in turn, infinitely show up. But Diệu will always be the first.

19, Diệu died. Not in Sơn Tây, or in the street somewhere in Hiến but at alley no. 5 at the end of Khâm Thiên road in Hà Nội. The eruption of The August Revolution. We left school, some left for their home in the country, others for Hà Nội. Time past by for a while before I saw Diệu again. It wasn’t until I was back in Hà Nội that I found out Diệu was gone. I asked around and found where he lived. It was around noon. A big road led into a long alley walled off by long grey walls. I stood there for a long time at in the middle of the alley looking up at the empty space in the sky. A foreign smallness of that space in the middle of town. I thought about Diệu’s last days alive, living in this alley, with a few rare stars flickering in this narrow walled up sky. I knocked on the tightly fastened door. An elderly woman opened the door. She regarded me quietly. After I introduced myself, she nodded and said:

“Yes, two months since he’s gone. It was his lungs! He wanted to be buried on the outside, away from town. He left me a letter to give to you”.

I thought to myself: Right here, a star had went out. I followed the elderly woman into the house. The room was dimly lit. The parapet wall old and cracking. The table and chairs stood their in silent on the cold and dark ground. I was standing there for a long time, my entire body numb from waiting for something unknown. That one thing from Diệu, an image, a familiar colour. The pain rose inside me. The room left not a hint of any kind of evidence that Diệu had came back to this space to live and died. How could something like that happened? If he was looking for death then it was the right place for him to die, he couldn’t possibly live in such a place, it was no different to a locked up monastery suffocating like a box in the basement. The house was cold, dim, darkness pooled in the eyes of those who was in it. At the same time the memories of million and millions brilliant stars over the damp grassy embankments slabs of deep blue sky over the trees Diệu’s heart and soul out there, beyond the city, beyond civilization, on the road, on the roof, where space did not shrink but instead infinitely expand, where humanity could see and be as small as a grain of sand and yet as boundless as the universe, because living and taking in enough is the beauty of boundlessness of both the inside and outside of a person.

The elderly woman opened a draw, pulled out an envelope and gave it to me. It was a standard size letter nothing out of the ordinary. In a few words, he told me that he was going to die, and he hoped that I could go and visit him out there, buried, alone. I folded the letter up. Enquired more about his last moments, she said, Diệu was restless, he barely slept. And the last week before he died, he wanted to lie next to the window. Diệu wanted to remember a lifetime of stars before he died? But the alley was narrow and the wall too high, he couldn’t possibly see any thing, all he could do was guess or imagine. I thought. If he had a choice, Diệu probably wanted to die at the bow of a boat on a river, or on a steep dike in the middle of a field with nothing around. Under a sky full of stars.

*

Many years passed by. Phố Hiến still old and ancient, Sơn Tây still sad and beautiful, soft grassy dikes, abandoned without my footprints, because of the distance and lack of opportunity. I would take the night ferry on Hồng Hà now and then after that. But before leaving Hà Nội for the South, I went to Diệu’s grave. Saying goodbye to someone who was gone were as overwhelming as someone who was still alive. The elderly woman, Diệu’s maternal grandmother had fulfilled her grandson’s last wish, at the end of his short life. Diệu was buried in a field on top of a hill. The tombstone facing endless fields with an unobstructed view of the blue sky. The afternoon I went to see my friend’s grave, I sat down next to the tumulus. The grass was brown with the hue of the afternoon light. I turned my back to Diệu as I head back into town. People’s lives here flew away like lost planets because their lives were so short. And yet still so whole and beautiful. Now Diệu could, fully enjoy his stars. If death were images of the night then all the stars were his alone. I was back in town and the streets were scattered with shadows. I felt light headed, my head spinning. Time. The wheel turning. A pair of brilliantly white wings. The enduring significance of something that was not eternal. And my friend, a star, will continue to shine forever in me.

*

I had no desire to ever talk about all the stars that had belonged to Diệu – there are beautiful things people reserved only for themselves – if I did not came across the passage written by a friend in a book he had given me this afternoon. The passage spoke about the disposition of looking back at the past was a sign of a weak spirit. Which past though? The passage did not made me focused on the writer nor was it stirring like the stars: “The death of the stars last night were like falls into darkness. People must walk on the path of the Sun”. I used a pencil to underline that sentence. I missed Diệu suddenly, the stars of the past. I put on a coat and left the house. Through the narrow streets, piled on top of each other at the centre of town, heading gradually for the bank of the river. The streets slowly less cramped. Roofs eaves walls things were further and further apart from each other. Streetlights casting lower and lower shadows over rows and rows of trees. Appeared suddenly high up was the sky. Still a skyline of a city but more generous was the view unravelling before me as I looked up. I stopped in front of the river. I sat down on a rock bench. I had been a long time, days months years, that the stars had left me with a first impression. They were coming down to see me. Twinkling, lively as though they were trying to quietly tell me something. I was again alive with Diệu. Seventeen with Phương Sao, the book of poetry that will never be in print. The value of events that had destroyed what was left of what had meant anything. A beauty derived from the past still like a ray of light necessary for people to live in the present. I live in the present, inseparable from what is dead or from those who were gone, along with history and the persistent human spirit. The knife severing the body of the past could concurrently painfully cut and rip into the corpse of the present. Three portion of time is but one. These thoughts plaqued me. Surrounded by streets, running water, rows of trees, roofs, unreachable sky, bottomless stars. They come together to form one entity of togetherness. The beginnings indistinguishable. The poems I will write will be in the same breathe as the poems I first wrote. If I want to look back at my life through the distillation of a life of someone who was gone, I want to do it with an attitude. People must walk on the path of the Sun toward the future. But it was the past that had made me grow up. Imagined if I had a thousand years to collect all that was beautiful, gifts from the stars of the past then endless will be my collection. And I will always end up with the one conclusion: All beauty contain images of the past.

*

By the time I left the rock bench and followed the same streets home it was already late. A fresh cool breeze brew through a city fast asleep. Heaven and earth fully became one with the streets. Leafy watery shadows. Stars in harmony with the trees, walls, license plates in their familiar enviroment. I walked amongst this familiarity. I accepted myself. I felt less alone. An old movie popped into my head. A sad soldier returning from a great battle, he lost his mind because of all the loud bombs and explosions. Everything was rendered unfamiliar to him. He didn’t know who or where he was. His unmarried wife was just one of the thousands of women who were unfamiliar to him. The same old room, the chair by the fire where he sat in the afternoon, the chair where he sat in the morning, the rows of trees, the steps down into the garden, all the familiar images did not help him remember his home, the people he loved, eventhough it was where he lived dreamed, where he spent the happiest time of his life. He was like an alien from another planet. He had lost the past like a tree that had lost its roots. The days and months of the past was a blurr, the impression of the past was a bottomless dark pit. He lived as though he was already dead. He was dead amid life. I don’t want to be a soldier coming home with this trauma, without the past, the present is an abandoned cemetery and living is torture. I want to remember, always remember. A decimated city came to mind. The crumbling homes and fallen trees. Broken bricks everywhere. I saw the builders amongst the destruction, built their homes and roads. I saw them with intention went through one pile of rubble after another, looked for evidence of themselves. A photograph. A scarf. An old shoe. What they wanted was to remember. They don’t want to lose the past. Because they want to live. Because they know that the most beautiful flowers can not bloom, from barren and frozen land and that chill is the cold indifference and the lack of memories we had of each other.

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source: social media

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Mai Thảo [1927-1998] real name is Nguyen Dang Quy, another pen name: Nguyen Dang, he was born on June 8, 1927 in Con market, Quan Phuong Ha commune, Hai Hau district, Nam Dinh province (originally from Tho Khoi village, Gia Lam district, Bac Ninh province, the same hometown and related to the painter Le Thi Luu), his father was a merchant and wealthy landowner. Mai Thao absorbed his mother’s love of literature from Bac Ninh. As a child, he studied at a village school, went to Nam Dinh high school and then Hanoi (studied at Do Huu Vi school, later Chu Van An). In 1945, he followed the school to Hung Yen. When the war broke out in 1946, the family evacuated from Hanoi to Con market, in the “House of the Salt Water Region”, from then on Mai Thao left home to Thanh Hoa to join the resistance, wrote for newspapers, participated in art troupes traveling everywhere from Lien Khu Ba, Lien Khu Tu to the Viet Bac resistance zone. This period left a deep mark on his literature. In 1951, Mai Thao abandoned the resistance and went into the city to do business. In 1954, he migrated to the South. He wrote short stories for the newspapers Dan Chu, Lua Viet, and Nguoi Viet. He was the editor-in-chief of the newspapers Sang Tao (1956), Nghe Thuat (1965), and from 1974, he oversaw the Van newspaper. He participated in the literature and art programs of radio stations in Saigon from 1960 to 1975. On December 4, 1977, Mai Thao crossed the sea. After 7 days and nights at sea, the boat arrived at Pulau Besar, Malaysia. In early 1978, he was sponsored by his brother to go to the United States. Shortly after, he collaborated with Thanh Nam’s Dat Moi newspaper and several other overseas newspapers. In July 1982, he republished the Van magazine, and was editor-in-chief until 1996, when due to health problems, he handed it over to Nguyen Xuan Hoang; Two years later he died in Santa Ana, California on January 10, 1998.

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.