A few months before receiving my pension, my agency sent me to Da Lat for a ten-day convalescence. My friends didn’t care much about me having fun and hanging out, but I was still excited about something that had been on my mind for a long time. That was because for the past few months, the press and public opinion had been buzzing about elephant tail hair and its miraculous uses.
Last month, a friend of mine who was known for being stingy with every penny, on a business trip to the Central Highlands, dared to spend a million dong to buy an elephant tail hair as a medicine for self-defense. He bragged about it, I knew it, and even whispered: "A short piece the size of a toothpick is more valuable than gold, it's very hard to find, old man!"
I know that there are only about a few dozen wild elephants left in our country. Some newspapers, both printed and online, are full of information about dozens of elephants in Lac village whose tail hairs have been stripped off by thieves. One barbarian tried to cut off a piece of his tail, but was trampled to death by the elephant.
As someone who has spent his whole life doing scientific research, I did not easily believe that a few elephant tail hairs could be a miracle drug. But for generations, my family has suffered many disasters, just because of the white elephant tail hair, a family heirloom passed down from my great-grandfather for five generations, so it is a hundred percent true.
Everyone in my village, my clan, knew that for nearly two hundred years, my family had been keeping a piece of white elephant hair, a relic of my great-great-grandfather who was a high-ranking official in the royal court. When I was young, I had actually seen it with my own eyes a few times. I could only look at it, but I was absolutely not allowed to touch it.
It was on the big death anniversaries of the year. Before opening the ancestral hall for his descendants to offer the offering tray, my grandfather alone took out an ivory tube slightly larger than a chopstick that was kept secretly behind the throne of the late King. Then he opened the knot himself and gently pulled out a piece of white elephant tail hair, harder than the ivory-white fishing line, inside it.
Then, he respectfully placed in front of the mirror a picture of the late Emperor sitting stiffly like a log, in his official uniform. Looking at the sparse silver beard meticulously drawn under his pointed chin, I don't know why I always paid attention to his mouth with its thin, tightly pursed lips.
And always wondered: Are there any teeth left inside that solemn mouth? If I had known that, I would have been able to conclude the truth of all the persistent rumors about the miraculous effects of that white elephant tail hair.
I had not had the chance to ask the elders in the family before he had to leave for many years. Until now, I only know the biography of the late Emperor, through a few sketchy notes on a few tattered pages of the family tree that were fortunately left. In general, before being promoted to the position of Censor, he had spent several years teaching at the Imperial Academy.
Among his students, there was one who was sent to govern the Central Highlands. At that time, this land was still wild and mysterious like in the primitive times. In gratitude to his teacher, the mandarin gave him a piece of white elephant tail hair, so that he could use it as a toothpick every day.
He used that precious toothpick until he died. Perhaps its use was as simple as that. The white elephant was the king of elephants. Its tail hair was considered extremely rare. It was also a daily item for high-ranking officials, so people made up all sorts of fantastic stories. Some said that if you kept it on your person, you wouldn't die from a poisonous snake bite. Some said it could cure all incurable diseases. Some said that if you used it to pick your teeth, your mouth would be fragrant, your teeth and gums wouldn't be eaten away by cavities, and even if you lived to be a hundred years old, your jaws would still be intact and strong like a young man's teeth, dry like a chicken's leg, still chewing...
Also because of this news, not long after Mr. Ngu passed away, a rich family begged to exchange his first-class rice field for another one, but my grandfather still refused. During my grandfather's generation, despite his poor family background, he met two or three rich families who offered to buy him at a higher price, but he still did not change his mind.
Yet it was lost by my grandfather's younger brother. He was a clerk in the district office. He was fond of gambling. One of his colleagues wanted the elephant tail hair toothpick to treat his father's chronic tooth decay. He lured Mr. Thua into a fraudulent gamble.
In the end, Mr. Thua lost five hundred Indochinese piastres. It was a huge sum of money, beyond Mr. Thua’s ability to repay. He had to risk hiding the elephant hair tube from my grandfather and give it to him. When the incident was discovered, my grandfather was very angry, pointing at Mr. Thua and cursing: “You have ruined the family reputation.”
Mr. Thua argued: "It's just an elephant's tail hair, can it be that the rise and fall of the family is all due to it?" From then until the end of his life, the brothers did not see each other for a single day. To the point that on the day my grandfather passed away, hearing the sound of the funeral drums in the night, Mr. Thua regretted it and sat hugging the pillar of his house and cried all the time. But it was too late.
I don't know if the father of the gambling swindler was cured of his toothache by the elephant tail hair. I don't see any information about it. Honestly, my family has never tested it to see its uses. I think the ancestors stubbornly kept it, considered it a treasure, just to maintain its noble reputation.
But in any era, reputation is not important. That is why when Mr. Thua did that, the whole family had to keep it a secret, no one said a word. The neighbors still believed that the priceless elephant hair was still kept by my family. It has had a lasting impact on our lives.
The story happened when my village was unfortunately under enemy control for several years. That year, my mother died of typhoid fever, and my father was gone forever. I was sent by the organization to study at the military academy in the Nanning campus, China. At home, there was only my grandmother and my seven-year-old brother Hau. The communal house at the beginning of the village was turned into a French outpost.
The deputy police officer was from the village. That year, his grandfather had a cavity in his teeth and both jaws were swollen. He immediately thought of the elephant tail hair that was our family heirloom and told his nephew to take my grandmother to the police station for interrogation. At that point, my grandmother still did not confess, so Mr. Thua took her to pay off her gambling debt.
The deputy station chief threatened to shoot all the Viet Minh race. He held out a handful of Indochinese money, held his swollen cheek, and between his teeth oozed yellow pus, running down both sides of his mouth. In pain, he kept repeating:
- Well then... well then... please let me borrow Mr. Ngu's toothpick to poke between my teeth to cure my illness. Now that I'm cured, please reward me.
My grandmother still insisted that it was no. These were the stories I heard from her later. In fact, when I was ten years old, when the resistance war against the French was raging, my father sent someone to take me to Viet Bac, and then sent me to study at the Nanning campus.
Until the day the country was at peace, I still had to stay abroad to finish my studies before returning home. Then I went to study for a long time in the Soviet Union, and my grandmother passed away, and I was not at home. Since then, several decades have passed, and I would never have thought about that unjustly inherited elephant tail hair again, if not for the many delusional rumors about it that have been circulating for the past few years.
On this vacation, I really wanted to go back to the land of elephants, hoping to find out the truth of the story, but I could only gather vague information. After wandering around Da Lat for several days, I did not see any elephants.
But around the hotel where we stayed, there were often a few people hanging around, vaguely showing off a few short, black hairs, saying that they were definitely elephant tail hairs. When asked, they assured me that they were real and not fake. When asked about the uses, they would only chatter away at things I already knew. When asked about the price, some said five hundred thousand, others said one million.
But I suspect that it is just the hair of a cow or horse's tail. Because their clothes are similar to those of their ethnic group, their accents are also quite slurred, but their hands are callous-free and their teeth are so white that you can see them in a mirror.
All ethnic people who smoked since childhood have black teeth. How can you trust them? After a few rides on a horse-drawn carriage along the foothills, I asked some real ethnic people about the elephant tail hair, and they were honest: I don't know.
The man smiled mysteriously: Yes, but it was a long time ago, it was lost. Half-believing, half-doubting, I was about to ask the head of the delegation for permission to go to Dak Lak elephant land for a few days to find out more, when I received an urgent call from Hau about something.
Returning to my hometown, right at the entrance of the alley, I saw my younger brother with a full beard and a prosthetic leg up to his groin, limping out onto the main road. Outside, he had a small house with a rice mill. He waved his hand for me to come in, then went into the place where he earned his daily bread. After a few minutes of the machine roaring to life, he finished his work and limped onto the sidewalk, as if nothing important had happened, making me want to go crazy and blame him for telling me to come back so soon. But he got right to the point:
- You remember Mr. Hach. He's about to die. Not knowing what to hide, he sent someone to call me over several times to cry, telling me to call you back to tell him something, otherwise he'll die with his eyes open.
Mr. Hach and our father were classmates. Before 1945, both of them were enlightened by the village teacher and sent to work in secret. My father has been gone since then. After 1954, he only left a message that he had to be sent far away, so the whole family could rest assured and not worry.
Later, Mr. Hach worked in the province. For some reason, he was transferred to the locality to work as an office worker at the Commune People's Committee until he retired. His wife passed away a long time ago. His only son, a few years younger than me, lives in Hanoi with his wife and children.
Now he lives alone. There is only his niece, in her sixties, who calls him “uncle”, who lives nearby and comes to cook and look after him every day. After 1975, she returned from the battlefield at the same time as my younger brother. Each of them has several anti-American medals. My younger brother lost a leg. She spent her youth in the jungle, without a husband or children until now.
Feeling something important, that afternoon I went to Mr. Hach's house. His house, from the tiled roof to the brick walls, was as old and mossy as an ancient temple. Dry bamboo leaves fell all over the yard, shimmering in the faint afternoon sunlight.
The wind blew the leaves from one end to the other, making a sad rustling sound. The niece sat chopping water fern in front of a basket next to an old banyan tree, which was shedding its leaves, raising its thin branches up to the sky, like the skinny arms of an old person.
I greeted her, she recognized me and called inside: “Sir, we have a guest.” I heard the creaking of the bed. She reached out and turned on the light switch. A pale yellow light flooded over a body lying stretched out in a wrinkled, porridge-colored outfit, pressed flat against a protruding belly that rose and fell irregularly.
That was Mr. Hach. I held his swollen, milky white hand like a young radish as a greeting. It felt like his whole body was covered in some kind of cloudy liquid. But his eyes did not look like those of a dying man, they kept staring at me and then looking away as if they wanted to say something difficult. Only after a while did he finally whisper:
- I was disciplined and sent back to my hometown to work as a commune cadre, but I still hadn't reformed. That year, my father was sick, his teeth kept falling out one by one, he was in so much pain, and no cure was found. Suddenly I remembered the elephant tail toothpick that was a family heirloom, I was sure that his grandmother still had it, so I went to ask her to lend it to me, hoping to save my father.
Hearing his wife insist that he was gone, I didn't believe it, thinking that the old lady was evil and didn't want to save people. I've been holding a grudge ever since. When his brother got his university admission notice, I secretly hid it and didn't tell him. Later, I was afraid that his fiery temper would find out and things would get bad, so I made a plan to put him on the list for military service.
His younger brother was a young man with great ambition, so a few years later he was sent by his unit to study for an officer. When he returned to the commune, I secretly wrote on his resume that he was descended from a feudal mandarin. Even though I knew his father was secretly working somewhere, I still wrote that he had been a revolutionary for a while but had gone missing, suspected of following the enemy to the South. His older brother studied in the Soviet Union and was infected with revisionist ideology...
I know I am about to die, brother! I cannot close my eyes if I cannot say these words to you, if I cannot bow my head to apologize to your grandmother's spirit. Now that I can say it, I will ask you to forgive me to the extent that I can. So that in the future I will have the opportunity to meet your grandmother, meet your father in the place where everyone must return.
Oh my God! What can I say to you? Everything is coming to an end. If you realize this, you have taken the yoke off your neck.
Oh my God! At that time, a record as black as soot, as heavy as a rock, even ten of my younger brothers could not bear it, could not raise their heads.
That night, I returned to my old house, straight into the room where I was born, where my mother breathed her last, where my grandmother and Hau clung to each other through many years of hardship. Now, for more than twenty years, my brother and his wife have used it as a place to raise their disabled and deformed child.
He was infected with Agent Orange from his father. Looking at his nephew with a head as big as a pumpkin placed in the middle of the bed, a tiny belly, two tiny legs kicking and turning, rotating around the heavy head in the middle of the bed like a compass leg rotating continuously.
From its mouth, slimy drool dripped down and wet its cheeks. Hearing it cry out incessantly, looking at its pure white eyes, bulging like half a lemon, I sat and hugged it, sobbing without making a sound. Crying without being able to squeeze out a single tear. Crying dryly, the tears flowed back into my heart like a knife cutting.
That night, I decided not to tell my brother what Mr. Hach had said. I was afraid that something more heartbreaking would happen, and I was also worried that his suffering was already too much to bear. Knowing more, I felt more pain. Near dawn, I heard three drumbeats of the funeral, and I knew Mr. Hach had passed away. I stepped out into the moonlight, and my brother had been sitting there for a while. The two of us sat there quietly, thinking that each of us would silently pursue our own thoughts, but unexpectedly he spoke first:
- I know what Mr. Hach just told you. I knew about it after the unit announced that I was sent to officer training but encountered problems. A comrade officer told me the truth. But there were instructions to give me two options, one, go to officer training; two, leave the army and go to a civilian university.
I guess it was because I had the privilege of having a father who was on assignment somewhere far away. But I chose the path to the front. The most beautiful life is the life on the battlefield fighting the Americans. At that time, Le Ma Luong's spirit was truly the spirit of Vietnam, truly the conscience of the times, brother. Now my life is very difficult, but I have no regrets. I just can't stop feeling sorry for my disabled son... But never mind, let's not bring up the past anymore. It's no use being sadder.
I was stunned to see her sitting like a monk meditating. One good leg hung comfortably from the edge of the sidewalk to the ground, forming a half-square shape. A short, dark thigh protruded from the opening of her shorts. Her face was tilted back, pensive. Her upper lip mustache grew in disorderly length, and her beard under her chin was sparse like her ancestor's beard. Both jaws were black and shimmering in the blue moonlight, a heartbreakingly beautiful sight.
So you have truly grown older than me, my dear. The words I intended to say only to you tonight, I find unnecessary. One leg left on the battlefield, a disabled son that his wife and I have loved, painfully, and cared for in vain for decades have given him many realities to contemplate, how can I be as wise as him?
That night, my brother and I quietly leaned against each other, sleeping sitting up, leaning against the wall of the house that had once been the place where several generations of my family had lived and died. Every now and then, we both woke up, because of the three loud drumbeats of mourning beating in the quiet sky.
I had the feeling that my brother and I were dreaming a sweet dream, sleeping peacefully under our mother's arms on nights long ago. Our dear old days seemed never to be in the distant past. In my ears, the laughter of children was ringing.
But tomorrow morning we have another important matter, we will go to Mr. Hach's funeral together. Consider it as closing an unwanted past.
VTK
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