The Call - Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper

Son smirked, realizing that the words he was hearing could only be a way for Duc to share the feeling of helplessness that arose whenever he picked up a pen with the intention of writing something on paper.

While sitting with Duc over morning coffee, Son felt an overwhelming unease about tomorrow engulf his soul. He couldn't resist the urge to go somewhere secluded, far removed from the noisy, hot, and dusty atmosphere of the town, to build a literary world filled with dreams of love and justice.

For the past three years, Son has been nurturing his "once-in-a-lifetime" creative ideas amidst the suffocating reality of submitting application after application to various organizations that regularly announce job openings. The days of waiting for a job where he could apply his knowledge and abilities as a formally trained literature graduate with a good GPA to real-life situations in his hometown ticked by for Son.

In every moment, Son was nurtured by the worried gaze of his patient mother, who cared for him, providing him with meals and ensuring he slept well, and advising her son never to lose hope in life. Oh, my mother! She never once went to school to understand the dream of academic achievement that had shaped the talent of the students, and therefore she knew her son was constantly suffocated by the pressure to become the "number one writer" for everyone.

Every day, Sơn's mother and father would wait for any truck, bus, tractor, or motorbike to pull up in front of their house, requesting that the vehicle's license plate number be stamped on three sides of the truck bed, along with the name of the managing agency, or that the license plate be renewed if necessary. People passing by the road in front of the house would often see Sơn's father hunched over, skillfully hammering a thin sheet of metal the size of a school notebook page, while Sơn's mother used both hands to hold the small metal plate steady on the anvil. Their heads huddled together, trembling slightly on the porch, echoed the hopeful anticipation of today and tomorrow, and the peaceful joy of the family's simple meals.

Beyond the confines of those movements, sounds, and emotions, it was always Son who tirelessly arranged his storylines, intending to achieve literary fame. "The lowest path to success is through hard work," Son's father cherished this ancient wisdom and reminder, never wanting his son to lose heart. Only the faint rustling of his body each night revealed his self-reproach for a lifetime of hard work yet failing to provide his son with the "tickets" to calmly enter a life increasingly filled with bargaining, exchange, and buying and selling. Meanwhile, his seventeen-diopter nearsighted eyes were beginning to dim, and his hands, now over sixty, were starting to slow down.

***

Stepping into Duc's charming little house on the hill south of town, Son almost cried out in surprise at the near-absolute silence that reigned. A naive belief flashed across his lips, and Son smiled brightly, certain that here he would soon attain creative pleasures that could astonish and captivate the reader's soul.

In the initial moments of fulfilling his yearning to write about innocent childhood, pure adolescence, and the smoldering dreams of youth, Son suddenly felt a surge of hope. He realized that fate was now his, his hands and heart open wide. Filled with this premonition of happiness, Son wrote the opening of a short story whose ending would no longer be lonely and painful, arduous and despairing. It wasn't difficult, after all. He had often witnessed the bittersweet feelings in the heart of the girl next door. He had often gazed upon the empty plastic cans held by outstretched hands of young and old. He understood the smiles of engineers and workers clasping hands as the last meter of power line to a distant village was stretched across the sky; he understood the embrace of football players after a goal… But Son could never understand why his writings remained so solitary, so distant from the reader. Until when?

The glorious midday June sunlight streamed onto his writing desk, where Son measured the depth of the intentions he wanted to convey to his readers, burning himself with the words he couldn't yet write: the rescue of a needy person, the fulfillment of a promise of love, the respect for genuine talents and upright character... Unable to imagine a world without his literary works, Son swiftly scribbled a few stories that could make readers smile. These included the graceful, expectant face of a woman with an elegant appearance, the hurried departure of a successful man from his busy work, and scenes of romantic encounters and promises of happiness...

Germany darted across the steps like an arrow:

Hey, come to the car with me.

As he spoke, Duc used a book to prop up the pages of text on the table.

- What's the rush? I'm almost finished with this story and I'll treat you to a beer tonight.

Son looked up, his eyes sparkling with the conviction that nothing in this world is harder than stopping writing when your imagination is fully charged.

- I'll take you home. Oh, no. Actually, you need to go home right away. Your father was just taken to the hospital. He's in serious condition.

Illustration: HOANG DANG

***

The hospital's emergency room was like a blank sheet of paper. The neon lights cast a white glow on the motionless body of Son's father, whose temperature and blood pressure were being checked by a nurse while a ventilator tirelessly pumped oxygen into his unconscious lungs.

The night was deep and dark. Son fumbled to unfold the folding chair and placed it against the wall outside the emergency room. Helping his mother sit on the chair, Son hugged her thin shoulders tightly, listening to her story interspersed with soft, drawn-out lamentations:

- It was almost dark, but my dad was still painting truck beds. He didn't schedule work for the next day because he was afraid people would go somewhere else. We're trying to scrape together money to get work for our son, so he's taking on extra work in the evening. My mom said he wouldn't even let her cook anything to eat to regain his strength when he works so late. After finishing painting, he packed up his tools, and my mom went to cook dinner. The big truck started its engine to reverse onto the road and ran over my dad while he was looking for the paint sprayer cap that had fallen under the truck...

- Who is a family member of the patient named Tâm?

As soon as the nurse finished her question, some invisible force pulled Son's mother out of the suffocating feeling of numbness. She stood up on her frail legs, which had just been touched by the hope of her husband's life.

- Grandma, take this paper to that place to pay the hospital bill.

Holding the piece of paper handed to her by the nurse, Son's mother nervously asked:

- Can my husband get through, miss?

- The hospital is trying to save him...

***

- I can make a living with my pen.

Son spoke to the calloused, sinewy hand of his father, who lay silently on the hospital bed. His thoughts were interrupted repeatedly by a wave of anxiety that made him constantly check if the IV drip was still falling. And it was in that incredibly brief moment between the two drops of clear water that Son's thoughts about life and literature suddenly flooded back, engulfing the entire week he had become a familiar figure in the emergency room and hospital corridors.

- You yourself must be a pen overflowing with ink, my son. An ink blended from life with genuine emotions so that you can write many literary works that evoke beautiful feelings and impressions.

During a family meal interrupted by several visits from customers ordering license plates, noticing his son's annoyance and impatience, Sơn's father surprised him with a remark that was even more insightful than the literary criticisms published in newspapers at the time.

"Dad doesn't know how to write stories or poems for people to read, so he doesn't understand how difficult it is for me to write a short story or a poem," Sơn retorted.

The father looked at Son with a stern yet warm gaze:

- My parents have changed their lives several times, doing one job after another, and even at this age, they still hope to have work to do every day. Our family has been and is still slicing iron, steel wires, and both new and rusty corrugated iron sheets into food, water, and my university degree. It will be the same tomorrow. My father can still do it. If you want to be a person respected by society, you must transform the drops of blood that fall from the thorns of life into beautiful and fragrant flowers on this earth...

The vivid memories overwhelmed Son. He was bewildered by the thought that tomorrow was Saturday, and his father wouldn't wake up early, gently draw water from the well to brush his teeth and wash his face, then go alone to the place where the charitable porridge was being cooked, joining other simple, kind-hearted people in handing out hot bowls to the poor patients being treated at this hospital. Always thinking that his father deliberately tormented himself in this way, he didn't want to embellish his artwork with such simple and touching details...

Lowering his head and resting his forehead against the edge of his father's hospital bed, Son felt himself rapidly losing strength, unable to resist. Before falling into an unusual sleep, Son mumbled what he had just been enlightened about:

- I will only write about working people, about the arduous yet expansive lives of my father and mother...

***

Sơn woke up with a start. He had just heard a faint call from his father's gently rising and falling chest:

- Mom!