A man leaves his village without saying goodbye to the girl who was waiting for him, roams the world for half a century, and returns at seventy-five to learn that she married his friend the schoolmaster, that she cared for his own parents as a daughter-in-law, and that she died three years earlier. The two old men then become confidants. At the centre of the story stands a canistel tree in the yard, whose fallen flowers the two children threaded into necklaces — and the poem “Hoa trứng gà” (Canistel Flower), given in full in the third part.
Part 1. SHE
That year it was just autumn. The sky was clear, the moon bright. The rice was harvested and the drying already done. Every evening the boys and girls of our village would call on one another to go and take the cool air and watch the moon, sitting on the rim of the open well at the village entrance. At first we stayed in a cluster, chatting about this and that, and we thought it would never end. But then, little by little, we drifted off, we split away, we split into pairs, into pairs, each setting down a sandal a little apart. The mouth of the well was round and wide, so there was room for three, five, seven couples, and the assurance that none would trouble the other. From the earliest days down to that time, who could say how many generations were born and grew up out of the love of girls and boys that budded at the rim of that legendary well? Where we came from, in those days, if you did not love at the village well, if you did not sit in a corner of the kitchen or under the eaves to murmur to one another, where were you to sit, where were you to stand? It was an old well, a well of earth. The other day, going back, I found it ringed with a wall, the way people build to protect some relic a thousand years old.
Like everyone else in those days, she and I made a good round pair. My beauty had a finely closed lip, a cheek of green peach, an eye like a knotweed leaf, a brow like a willow leaf, a slender bearing: in the village and in the whole canton she was thought very pretty. They say a beautiful girl, one way or another, will always suffer through love. Many coveted her, but she had decided to love me. Our love was so ripe, and our hearts so ready, that one day, her eyes half closed, her gaze lost in the distance, she said to me shyly: “Tomorrow go home and cut the bunch of areca in front of the gate, invite your father and mother to come over and speak of it here, and let us settle our affair; if we drag it out, word will go about, and there will be trouble enough.” I stammered: “And do we know what your father and mother think of it?”
I asked for the asking, but my heart was already made up. For a long time I had nursed the idea of leaving the country. I wanted to go far, to the end of the sky and the end of the earth, to see, to know how wide the earth is and how high the sky. I loved her very much, and yet I did not want to take her along. And had I wanted to, there is nothing to say that she and her parents would have consented to my mad notion, contrary to good custom. Besides, I had read somewhere that clinging to wife and children keeps a man from accomplishing his will, and that a young man's life born into this world is then only a life thrown away.
Where I come from, for generations, it seems to me that no one had ever left the village. That is what I concluded. I speak of that time, of course; now it is otherwise. In those days our village had two hamlets: the boys of the West hamlet married the girls of the East hamlet, and the other way round. The bold found love themselves, the timid had the matchmakers to see to it. To every pot its lid. So, up the hamlet and down, each had a happiness of his own. No one had to share with anyone: no second wives, no children of another bed. Happiness overflowed in the fields, on the banks, in the yards, in the hamlets. Life seemed very light indeed, very light!
But I was different. I had to go out into the world, whether for better or for worse. At least I would know that beyond the fields of my own country there are the fields of elsewhere. Was I to spend a whole life turning between the West hamlet and the East hamlet? The West and East of Nguyễn Bính in his poems — how do they resemble, how do they differ from the very real West and East of my village? Even the cricket knows how to set off on an adventure: how much the more a man.
So thought, so done. I left. Without saying goodbye to her. I knew that if I saw her to part from her, I would soften, I would sob, and I could never tear myself away. My father and mother opposed it violently at first, then came the sweet words, the coaxing, the closed faces — all of it; but seeing my will made up and my mind settled, they understood they could not stop me, and they consented. I know well that they suffered much for it. What father and mother would not suffer to have a son as bad as I? Unable to think of them in the decline of their years, busy only chasing the trace of a fish, the shadow of a bird, hunting after phantoms — and even then, were there phantoms to hunt?
With a fat two-hundredweight pig sold for eight piastres at my belt, my trousers rolled to the knee, a colonial helmet on my head, I jumped onto the North-South train, straight on for the South. The villages fell away, and the image of my first love fell away too. That is to speak of the outside: within, I never once stopped longing for her.
Well, what good is it to tell of my years of wandering in foreign parts? To tell the truth there would be plenty to say, but all told they are only small things. When I have the leisure I shall write out two or three passages to amuse my readers. For now, let us keep to her.
All in all, my whole life will have been nothing but waste. Great designs for governing and succouring the world, but a fate thin as a dragonfly's wing, weak strength and middling talent. Tens of years of wandering to be nothing but a petty vagabond, without the least merit at the end of it.
The other year I was coming on for seventy-five and more. Leaning on my stick, at little steps, I came back to my native place. The place has become a “new countryside”, and it has changed much, very much. Fine houses built like villas with gardens, spotless lanes of smooth concrete, electricity everywhere and glittering, with beds of scented flowers beneath swaying clusters of fruit, and flocks of sleek fat hens, a whole air of plenty and contentment. I am glad for my village.
After I left for exile she married in the East. I was of the West hamlet. She married precisely Sinh the schoolmaster, my friend. She bore the schoolmaster Sinh eight children. Her children and grandchildren are today well settled; there is nothing there to give worry or complaint.
Having come home the day before, I went the next day to see the schoolmaster Sinh. Today one must say: the old master. She departed for the land of the immortals three years ago now.
The old master has remained as scholarly as ever. After the tea, having called down to his youngest son's wife to kill a hen and prepare a meal for the guest, he further charged her to set out a careful tray and burn incense for her, to tell her of my return. Only then, unhurried, did he tell me her story.
After I left, she longed for me without cease, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep. Advice had no effect on her, words no result: she absolutely wanted to die and keep her faith to the faithless man I was. Her parents, my parents, turned the thing every way, exhausted counsel and means, tried every trick — without success.
My friend the schoolmaster loved her greatly too. Partly because he had once had a thread of tenderness for her, but, embarrassed that I had come first, had given it up. Partly because, seeing her in that state, he could not bear it. So the schoolmaster came, early and late, to her door, to reason gently with her. Fine rain soaks in at last: she came to love the schoolmaster without knowing when. But the fidelity she kept for me did not yield an inch. She asked the schoolmaster to mourn our love three full years, three months and ten days before there could be talk of loving. The schoolmaster, gentle, good, of a humane life, fell in with her wish. And then they came together, as you know.
She also asked the schoolmaster to let her come and care for my father and mother as a daughter-in-law, as a daughter. Perhaps too because I was an only son, and she pitied my parents in the decline of their years, with no one to lean on. The schoolmaster consented to her wish and treated my parents truly as his own, without making any difference. A gift from the fields, a cake, a day of contrary wind, a change of weather: the schoolmaster's family and she were there. In truth I am grateful to her, endlessly.
I rejoice too that she found an accomplished husband, who loved her and cared for her, in body as in soul. Had she married me, one thing is certain: her life would have been a sorrow without end. But I have been sad for the schoolmaster too, for from what he has told me it appears she almost never ceased to think of me. What misery!
That night we two old men talked until very late. Passing again before the silent village well, I went to our old place and thought it all over. Well, my life is not worth much, but a wandering that has lasted a whole existence will at least have served for something: for not making her suffer any more…
Part 2. FRIEND OF THE HEART, FRIEND OF THE SOUL
Since, old and broken, leaning on my stick, I came back with nothing accomplished to settle in my native place and finish out what is left of my life, alone, all alone, I have become the friend of heart and soul of the schoolmaster Sinh. As in the story I told you the other day and you have heard, one may as well call the schoolmaster Sinh my rival as my benefactor: both are right. I revere the humanity in him. The way the schoolmaster Sinh treated my beloved and my parents, I shall never in a thousand years discharge the debt, nor the weight of the favour. It is strange that life offers so many scenes which at first sight seem a mockery, and whose depths are yet so humane and give so much to think on. Our story, these tens of years, seems long to think on, seems heavy with torment, and yet it passes like water skimming a bridge. Soon the dust of time will cover it in mist, like a horse's shadow, a fish's trace. How impermanent life is!
These last days, partly because of the Cô vi (COVID) virus epidemic, going about was not convenient; partly we are people of years, the air was damp at the turn of the season, one catches cold easily, and we hesitated to call on one another. There is the telephone in hand, but we had long since stopped using it, both of us hard of hearing and catching one word in two. Sitting drinking face to face, one can still guess the shape of the lips, and every remark has its context, so one figures it out easily: nothing difficult in that. But to telephone, face absent, heart absent, that is difficult. And so: a good moon gone by, or near enough, without seeing one another, without calling on one another.
I was reaching for the kepi hanging on the nail in the house-post to go over to the East and see the schoolmaster Sinh, when I hear a call at the door: “Ho there, is old Giáp at home?” It is the schoolmaster Sinh indeed — what a gift for arriving on cue.
By the way, I am Giáp. The other day, all taken up with my story, I forgot to name myself, so that some old friends kept writing to me on Facebook to ask who I was, whether I was not Giáp, since the story seemed to them familiar as Giáp's own. Yes, Giáp, that is me! Born in the year Giáp Dần. Year of the Tiger, king of the forest. In my youth my father and mother instructed me, and I did not listen. They said: “My son, go into the forest, into the far solitudes, and found your establishment there, and perhaps you will make something of it; but a tiger that comes down to town is only made into meat to boil for balm — what would you eat there, and what talk is this of governing and succouring the world?” Wise, truly! It is quite true that the child who does not listen to his parents goes wrong a hundred ways. Now it is over: what use is there in dreaming still?
We are of much the same age, but the schoolmaster Sinh looks sturdier than I. Well, one says that, but the sturdiness of a man of about seventy-five, no one can answer for. Heaven grants us a fair face for a while, and one enjoys it while it lasts. I likewise, the schoolmaster Sinh likewise, and whoever is of our age, likewise. We are all near the earth and far from the sky now!
The schoolmaster Sinh set his rattletrap bicycle against the foot of the canistel before the yard, then came in at unhurried steps. He is very conservative, mind you: his children and grandchildren offer to buy him an electric bicycle, he begrudges the expense and refuses. He says: “Let me pedal, it does me good, it takes the place of exercise.”
The schoolmaster Sinh's bearing has always been so, settled and calm. That sort of man is at all times gentle, distinguished, dignified, neat.
The canistel, which some call lekima. That tree, in season, strews the yard with its fallen flowers. If I come back to the canistel, it is because when we were children she and I would gather its fallen flowers to thread necklaces and crowns, and play together; it was great fun. Once I even made a poem of it. Published on Facebook, already. My verses may not be good, but they are true; many have read and praised them, and the more they praise, the more bitterness I have, and pity for a past now beyond reach.
I go to make a pot of tea. Top-grade “hook” tea from Tân Cương, Thái Nguyên, to honour an old friend. Of this tea the poet Phùng Cung, of the Nhân văn – Giai phẩm movement, wrote an immortal line: “Whip it again with boiling water / let the tea suffer and be crushed / it will not change the accent of Tân Cương.” In the plain sense: this tea holds its water. But in the figurative sense — the “derived sense”, as the children learn it now — it means you may knock him about as you please, he remains himself. Nothing can change him. There is a man of character!
To come back to our affair, it is always so. At first each hesitates to speak of her, but after three words and five sentences the talk leads us back to her. Just so. Usually the schoolmaster Sinh speaks and I listen, for I have not much to say. Besides, the old memories between her and me I want to bury deep in myself: what good would telling them do? One never knows, it would grieve the schoolmaster Sinh. And that I shall never want.
Today, apropos of the Cô vi virus, burning, feverish, in the world's headlines, the schoolmaster Sinh told me that once she had seasonal influenza. One of those fevers of a change in the weather. In the country, who escapes them, in contrary weather? And the work of the fields, one sun on the back and two dews, still less. But that time, coming home from the field soaked with rain, she ran a high fever. In the middle of the night, burning at forty degrees, she came to delirium. In her delirium it was not the schoolmaster Sinh she called: it was my name. Her children looked at her, astonished. The schoolmaster Sinh looked at her, his heart wrung. He forbade the children, when she came to herself, to say or tell anything of her delirium. Perhaps she never knew that in her delirium she had called my name?
I asked the schoolmaster Sinh: “Does it not hurt you? Do you not hold it against her?” He answered: “To be a man, and not to suffer? But hold it against her, no!”
Who would not be hurt when the one whose head rests beside yours, cheek to cheek, calls out in dream, startled, the name of an old love? But as an intellectual, as a schoolmaster, the schoolmaster Sinh understood that the feeling she had for me had printed itself deep in her mind. Graven in folds in her brain. It is enough that the occasion arise, and those recordings unwind and play, like the needle of a gramophone set right in the groove of the record.
But according to the schoolmaster Sinh, after that time he loved her, he esteemed her the more. A woman as faithful as she, in times like these, would one count many? Above all when I was an ingrate, a faithless man.
Hearing the schoolmaster Sinh analyse it scientifically, I was in part eased, for I thought myself far too much at fault towards him. But alas, I suffered doubly: how could I have been cruel enough to betray such a love? How could she have been faithful to me to that degree? Was I worth it, my dear?
I know she does not curse me. That the schoolmaster Sinh does not curse me. But I find it hard to forgive myself. Must I then leave the country again? For here, at home, wherever I sit, wherever I go, wherever I lie, wherever I look, I see silhouettes, objects, utensils, old memories that call her back to me.
The talk lasted two pots of Tân Cương. Seeing the sun already down behind the hill, I urged the schoolmaster Sinh to go home, fearing that with night fallen the bicycle would not be very safe. From my hamlet over to the East is a good stretch of road, it is no small thing…
Yesterday someone asked me whether this story was true. I answered: if it were not, what good would there be in telling it? At my age, why tell nonsense? I say things as they are, without adding salt or brine to make the story strange, engaging, or full of mischance — so my story may be neither fine nor moving to anyone. But I tell myself that from the truth of my life someone may perhaps draw a lesson for himself: that is why I tell it. That is all!
Part 3. A FURTHER WORD ON THE POEM “CANISTEL FLOWER”
The other day, writing the passage where the schoolmaster Sinh set his bicycle against the foot of the canistel before my door, the day he came to see me after some days without meeting, because of the order to limit movement in the season of the Cô vi virus, I mentioned this canistel of ours and a poem. This canistel is to me a living witness, filled brimful with memories infinitely beautiful and pure, between her and me, and between her and me again. That poem, at bottom, was my wish to set down in words a part of those quiet, beautiful memories, buried early in my past. But I fear it hardly reaches the degree, the intention I wanted to express. For the feeling is indeed in me, but my word and my way of writing are clumsy by nature. And then, I am no poet, to presume to write well enough for it to have a soul and a frame, and reach the rank of a fine poem able to spread and move hearts. This poem I have already published on Facebook. Truly! That day I said so too, I had already published it, but I neither quoted nor copied out two or three lines, two or three passages, so that some friends, half believing, half doubting, thought I was boasting, that I knew nothing of poetry to presume to make it and, what is more, to show it off. Yet I had indeed published it on Facebook some years ago, and not recently. Some have read it, but others, no doubt, have not read it yet. So I copy it out here in full, that whoever has not read it may read it, lest anyone still think I make up stories for bait. Here it is, the proof, this poem does exist:
Hoa trứng gà — Canistel Flower
As children we gathered the fallen flowers: canistel
and threaded them into necklaces — how pretty, my dear
She said: could jewels ever match this?
I decreed: even diamonds fall far short
Eyes shut, she dreamed we would stay so always
Eyes half closed, I promised it — why yes
Children's games, in the time when we were children
Trousers holed, shirt worn through — how I miss it.
Trousers holed, shirt worn through — how I miss it
The two of us together, dawdling on and on
In the yard we drew the lines to play at squares, did we not
In the lane we raised a hut to play at shopkeeping, just so
From morning to evening, turning the game: father and mother
From noon to night, turning and returning the same talk
And without thinking, all at once, here we are grown
We two, two roads, and forever so?
We two, two roads, and forever so?
All this time without meeting, I miss you, my dear
In the school of life I wish you no suffering
And secretly wish that “they” be honest with you
Since we could not go one road for a whole life
It remains to remember always — what else is there
By chance, the other day, coming back to the old country
The flowers strewed the yard — how I miss it.
The flowers strewed the yard — how I miss it
Dazed, I go over the things of long ago
I sitting threading my chain of flowers on this side
You standing being charming just there
My mother said: you two, dreaming like that
My father said: those two would make a fine pair
She laughed, eyes creased: I am still little
It was yesterday, and now — how I miss it!
There, it is clear. You see: I made up nothing, not a sentence, not a story! It is all true. For everyone, the canistel, also called lekima, is bound up with the song about the beloved heroine Võ Thị Sáu. But for me there is another story besides. A love story beautiful by nature, but whose end was left hanging. Far, far too much left hanging.
And yet, about the foot of that canistel, she and I had only small stories, small games of the childhood of long ago — and it has never ceased, quietly, to torment me, to burn like a night-light in my heart, to cling and to grave itself in my memory and my soul all my life long; it is no small thing. To think of our stories then, of the time that was ours, and to compare them with the children of today, the difference is too great. I do not know what memories, what feelings for one another will form in this time when children and adults, old and young, have their noses buried in the networks, in the clever telephone they hold in their hand. Will they be whole, simple, plain, humane, charitable, as in the time that was ours? In truth I give it up: I think and I cannot get there! For in that time, when we had played, loved, cherished one another, it was very beautiful, it was close, it was sweet, it was dreaming, it was sacred. Old friends, the older they grow, the more they remember, the more they think of one another, the more they wish to meet again and call on one another — how much the more when one has been, for a season, for a life, the person loved, cherished, longed for.
So I meant to publish the poem for proof, lest anyone say that, being old, I turn and change and make up stories and tell lies. But the more I wrote, the less I could hold back the flood of feeling that rose; so I contained myself and wrote a few more sentences of comment, of explanation, to make it clear. Hoping too that the reader, out of regard, will pardon my sin of length.
Well, I stop, lest I add length to length. Then, at leisure, if you wish to read on, to hear the rest of my story, mine and hers, and that of the schoolmaster Sinh, her husband, my friend, I shall take my free moments to write and tell the rest. And if you do not care to, let me know, that I may stop, that I may leave off — for there is still so much to do at home. There!
Part 4. THE OLD PLACES, BUT WHERE IS THE ANCIENT SHADOW
Yesterday a young woman read what I write on Facebook and imagined that I had a wife. She even decreed that if she were my wife, the canistel at the house would certainly have nothing left but a stump. That is right! Jealousy is a common thing among people. A woman who does not know how to be jealous is proof that she is not a woman. Blind jealousy is blameworthy; but here, witness and proof are there, in plain view: no escaping it. To strike out of jealousy is within one's right. See: the jealousy of Hoạn Thư, in the Tale of Kiều, is the limit of the kind, and who in the world holds it against her? She is understood, approved, defended even. It is Thúy Kiều who is blamed, rather. But while I am at it, allow me to remind the ladies, the sisters, the young women of this: at the extreme, strike out of jealousy, otherwise let it be, leave your husband a door open; a man who has a small fault may be the one who has talent. If you do too much, and he comes to wither, it will be a pity. A waste!
“In truth, the canistel very nearly had not even a stump left.” The schoolmaster Sinh led me to the foot of the tree, pointing to some scars opened by a few very sharp axe-blows, driven deep into the trunk, and that is what he said to me.
My head swam. Could it be the schoolmaster Sinh? All this time I believed him magnanimous, and here he went no further than that. Jealous, selfish, narrow, like anyone. They are men, after all. So I thought bitterly to myself, without daring to say it.
The movement of my heart did not escape the sensitive, knowing eye of the schoolmaster Sinh. “Why this emotion?” he asked. “You think, no doubt, that those axe-blows are mine? A great mistake, my friend!” And the schoolmaster Sinh laughed heartily.
It turns out those axe-blows were not the schoolmaster Sinh's, but my father's. The canistel, old in years, no longer gave fruit or flower in season; my father had therefore spoken to my mother of felling it, to widen the square of sun before the yard and have room, in season, to dry the rice, the maize, the potatoes at ease. My mother had agreed.
But heaven so willed that, on that morning, as my father had just landed a few axe-blows at the foot of the canistel, the schoolmaster Sinh and his wife arrived. She let out a piercing cry: “Father… don't!” Then the schoolmaster Sinh threw down his bicycle in haste and pulled my father inside. After a while of explaining and reasoning from the schoolmaster Sinh, my father saw the sense of it — and that is how our canistel escaped the worst. A narrow escape!
The canistel escaped, but the marks of those axe-blows have stayed there for good. The day you come to my house, I shall show them to you.
The schoolmaster Sinh told my father that I would certainly come back. Sooner or later, one day, I would come back. So he advised my parents to keep and preserve, as intact as possible, the places and things of old, as they were in the time when I lived in the house. So that on my return I should feel warm, at home, and not a stranger in my own house, on my own native soil.
I looked about me. It is true: the whole village, the whole canton has become “new countryside”. Everything is fine and neat. But our house. The fold of the house is the fold of a hundred years before. The path in still has its two hedges of tea clipped straight. The eaves of the kitchen, the bamboo hedge, the well… and even the canistel: I remember it as a picture, almost nothing has changed. And my memory of a very old time came flooding back at once… with my father and mother… with her too…
And according to the schoolmaster Sinh, the idea of keeping my house intact like a museum, for space and objects as for time and memory, was not his: it was hers. The schoolmaster Sinh only helped to make it real. He did not much believe in my return, but she was sure of it. And then the schoolmaster Sinh wanted her to be able to steep herself in the old memories each time she came to the West to see my parents.
In truth I do not know what more to say of the man the schoolmaster Sinh is. He was too good to her. He was too good to me.
Part 5. AND HOW THEN DID SHE LIVE…
“Your readers are right to wonder.” So the schoolmaster Sinh opened the conversation. Most women are happy only when they love, are loved, and marry the very one they love. To love one and marry another, and the marriage usually ends badly.
If she had the idea of mourning her love with you three years, three months and ten days, it was for two reasons. The first, that she was waiting to see whether you would not change your mind and come back to her. The second, that if you did not come back, she would have had time to let her wound close, and to break off, and to give you up. Three years, three months and ten days is also a sacred number. And one may say she had thus fulfilled all her duty towards you. But alas, the hearts of people are neither wood nor stone. The word “love” was already graven deep in hers. As I have told you many times, in her whole life she never had a moment in which she could forget you.
Your readers thought she would live like a body without a soul, drifting alongside my life? To tell the truth, they are not wrong. For years and years she lived so: “I walk still beside my own life / the bland tenderness of my husband / and each autumn dies, each autumn dies / keeping hidden in my heart the shadow of someone…”
I felt a cold along my spine when the schoolmaster Sinh reached that stanza. Heaven! Could it be that the poem I copied out in my own hand for her that day, into a notebook, was so fulfilled upon her? She had even asked me why I had not found gay verses to copy for her, rather than a poem so sad. I had laughed: but the poem is so beautiful, and that unfinished love, so beautiful!
“The Two Colours of the Tigone Flower”! By T.T.Kh. Who was she, and until when will she hide her face? Was she writing of herself, or did she know beforehand and write of her and of me? I sobbed low, my throat tight: “Not knowing that one departure would be a failing / under a sky of misery, love died / The person is so far away! — I am much grieved / on a day of joy where the firecrackers dye the road…”
Through all those months and years when I ran the thousand leagues after phantoms, at home she had, because of me, to endure so much torment and pain. And I had the cruelty to ignore it, to know nothing. Tens of years entire. Perhaps her tears would have sufficed to make a stream, a river, while I amused myself with the wind and the moon, with the gourd and my companions. Going over those carousals till dawn, those nights of the singing girls till morning, with the “chát”, the “boom”, the “Hồng Hồng, Tuyết Tuyết”, forgetting the very purpose of my departure, my throat turns bitter with it. Yes, there are no doubt many young people today who are and will be as I was then. One leaves the green bamboo hedge, takes the road with eagerness, the heart pure, naive, brimming with drive. But the temptations of life, who has the strength to overcome them? One turns a whole life round to come back with a good round zero, for want of holding firm to the goal of the beginning. O my friends, if your step carries you off to a foreign sky to make your life there, hold firm and beware the traps, the sweetnesses of this world. The future is only for those who trace out a straight road for themselves in advance, be it difficult and hard. Remember: only a good horse can go to the end of a long road…
“Although I was never cold with her, my efforts were often without hope.” These explanations from the schoolmaster Sinh brought me back to the present. I was grieved. How then, in all those years, did they live together? Could their love have been bitter to that degree? How does that differ from torturing, tormenting, rubbing salt in one another's hearts? My heart had infinite pain from it!
“Be easy. Without being able to forget you, her feelings for me were forced only in the first years; after which they never ceased to grow with time.” As if reading the thread of my thoughts, the schoolmaster Sinh went on. Do you know, nothing can convert a person's feelings like a sincere heart. I treated her with all the sincerity of mine. I did not have those memories of childhood nor the stirrings of a first love that were in her, but I brought her the confidence of a friend, the solicitude of an elder brother and the understanding of a husband who loves his wife with all his heart. In the later years we could open ourselves to one another about anything. Little by little, being two we were but one, and there was almost no distance left between us. You yourself were no longer a chasm between her and me. She could speak to me of you at her ease, and I was ready to share with her every sweetness and every bitterness. Our married life, one may well say, was an accomplished happiness.
“She lived at ease, and cheerfully.” The schoolmaster Sinh went on. She conducted herself towards her family and mine in an accomplished manner, and always kept her duty as a daughter-in-law. She was attentive and always ready towards the neighbours and the people of the hamlet, so that all loved and cherished her. The good order and usages of my house, if they are today as correct from top to bottom, that is her work too. The schoolmaster Sinh said it with pride.
And towards your parents she also fulfilled entirely her duty as a daughter-in-law, though she was never for a single day the daughter-in-law of your house. Each time she went over there, it was as if she returned to the memories of her childhood, to her first love… Did that not make you sad? — In truth I was very sad, but I respected her, and I deferred to her for it. So the schoolmaster Sinh confided. — Everyone has his memories of childhood, everyone has a hidden corner in his life, has he not? said the schoolmaster Sinh, his throat tight…
(END)
The original is in spoken Vietnamese, digressive and deliberately archaic (giời for trời, nhời for lời, me for mẹ). The translation keeps that talkative, tender voice rather than smoothing it out, and accompanies the original for reference only.