(An excerpt from the novel, “The Rebel Cospolist”)
Atyl’s office—Fifth-Rank Cospolist, commander of District Δ9 (also known as Black Antwing) in the region of Woodchest—was not very different from the office of the director of a medium-sized company on Mother Earth toward the end of the twentieth century. It seemed to have almost nothing in common with its owner (who nearly always wore dark glasses, enormous ear-rings reminiscent of Yul Brynner in The King and I, and lips as thin as though they were forever on the verge of unfolding into the smile of a master magician who held his audience in contempt); rather, it resembled the private room of an ascetic monk, of a man dry as baked tile and pitiless as death.
Atyl despised self-moving chairs. He preferred moving chairs himself. And those chairs were no joke. Among those who came here—including Borju, Atyl’s superior—few could shift them at all. Atyl would sit motionless, watching a visitor break into sweat wrestling with a chair, with the same cold, unperturbed gaze. For the rare few, Atyl would condescend to move the chair himself, in a manner not unlike the chairman of a Japanese conglomerate snatching a briefcase from a subordinate when he saw the poor fellow on the verge of collapse.
The paperweight on Atyl’s desk was made of ankorite stone, larger than a goose egg and weighing forty-eight point nine kilograms. Atyl liked to rest it on the palm of his hand and slowly raise and lower it in undulating motions like waves. It seemed to be one of the ways by which he followed the current of his own thoughts, rendering it partially visible in the stone’s sinusoidal movement.
Through the only window, whose height and width matched Atyl’s own size, one could see part of Gilgamesh 9 across the bay, submerged in the orange-violet glow of evening. In one of those innumerable buildings stood the room where Atyl waited to see his Marzenna appear, a waiting hopeless and without end. In another building—or, more precisely, now this one, now another, impossible to predict—there was a room, or a courtyard, a stair landing, a janitor’s closet, or a balcony crowded with dusty, withered flowerpots, where Trungku might appear at any moment as though from thin air after travelling tens of thousands, millions of kilometres through the vertiginous tunnels of Instant Teleportation, a discipline only a handful of Fourth-Rank Cospolists and above, those possessing more than eighteen hundred kubi of Mind Force, could employ without risking leading themselves into oblivion.
While reading a news bulletin on a screen suspended in mid-air, one hand absently stroking his earlobe, Atyl suddenly shifted and looked out toward the pinnacle of Shakazulu Hotel Tower rising far above the city “like the mirage of eternal happiness hanging high above the filth and pettiness of humankind.” His gut informed him that somewhere in space-time an Instant Teleportation had just been completed. Intuition made his bowels almost tighten. A similar constriction sometimes occurred whenever the abnormal deaths of many living beings happened simultaneously somewhere. For Trungku this ability was an advantage, a gift from Heaven; for Atyl it was a nuisance.
Switching off the screen with his eyes, Atyl then thrust a finger twice as thick as an ordinary person’s into his nostril and began picking his nose with concentration and reflection. With some visitors Atyl picked his nose; with others he scratched the edge of his lips; with still others he tugged at an earlobe or rubbed the pale indigo birthmark along his left jaw. When he saw his counterpart distracted by these gestures, Atyl’s thin smile would slowly emerge, cold as ice. With the rare few who looked directly at him from beginning to end, without agitation, without losing themselves, maintaining mindful awareness, Atyl smiled as well, though the smile was somewhat fuller and somewhat warmer.
Unlike Atyl, Trungku almost never smiled. To Atyl this was rather like a man born with two perfectly healthy legs physically, but whose mind had somehow convinced itself that one leg was crippled, with the consequence that the leg truly became crippled. In truth it was Atyl himself who limped, though no one knew why, no one knew why he did not replace the damaged leg with a healthy one. Sometimes Atyl limped, sometimes he did not, and there were a few who had had the opportunity to see the slightly warped bone itself, displayed by Atyl within a three-dimensional projection that seemed submerged in mist.
Atyl did not turn when, from somewhere to his right about ten metres away, there came a faint rustling sound, vaguely resembling a dense field of reeds being parted with skill and composure. The Barrier was opening for Trungku. Not every time did the Barrier manage to read and recognize the frequency of Trungku’s biofield. This time it did. At other times only a suitable combination between Atyl’s biofield and Trungku’s would allow the Barrier to open. Once, the Barrier’s structure had been shattered because the intensity of Trungku’s biofield at that moment had been too great. Sometimes the friction between the Barrier and Trungku’s field caused sounds like logs exploding in a furnace or a large bundle of scorched rags catching fire. Usually this happened when Trungku’s mind was unsettled, though at times it was because of the presence of an unfamiliar biofield, presumably carrying hostile intent, at the moment Trungku entered the Barrier. This time there was no such sound.
Atyl did not look back. Calm in body and mind, he registered Trungku’s biofield drawing nearer. It was like the approach of a cool, moist forest layered with fresh green growth, and at its centre a great black stone, hot to the touch. It seemed that somewhere within the stone a mass of lightning was gathering and gradually taking shape, compressed and controlled.
When Trungku was about five metres away, Atyl rotated his chair to face him, revealing in full the guardian-like body clad in garments white as snow. The whiteness itself seemed almost to darken in the presence of the other man.
“Greetings, brother,” said Atyl.
“Greetings,” said Trungku.
The two men looked at one another.
“Sit,” said Atyl.
Trungku looked at the second chair in the room, standing beside the tall glass wall some five metres away. Rather than ordering it to move, he walked over to it, lifted it, carried it back, and set it down roughly two metres opposite Atyl. Then he stood looking at it for a moment, as though looking at an intelligent horse responsive to every gesture of its rider. After that, he sat down gently, looking directly into Atyl’s eyes.
After a while, Atyl’s thin lips unfolded into a smile not unlike that of a father wishing to play one last joke on his son before killing him so as not to see him killed by someone else. Tilting his head slightly, as though trying to discern the afterimage of hundreds of thousands of kilometres of travel together with all the magnetic storms, solar winds, radiation, meteoric fragments, and cosmic debris through which Trungku’s cheeks, jawline, ears, and temples had passed, Atyl finally said:
“Are you tired, brother?”
After a while, Atyl said:
“How long has it been since we last saw each other, Trungku?”
Calmly, Trungku looked deep into Atyl’s eyes.
“Three hundred and seventy-eight years, eleven months, and nine days,” he said.
“Where have you been, Trungku?”
“It gladdens me to see you again, Atyl,” Trungku said after a pause.
Atyl gave a short snort of amusement and looked at his friend.
“Let me see if I can find out where you’ve been. Provided you don’t block me.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t mislead me,” said Atyl.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t blur yourself.”
“I won’t,” said Trungku, with a faint smile, the first smile since he had entered the room.
How many times have we exchanged these words, brother? his smile and eyes seemed to say.
“How many more times will I be able to see you again, Trungku, if you keep carrying on like this?” said Atyl.
Trungku parted his lips, yet remained silent. After a moment he said:
“My heart hurts, Atyl.”
“I know your heart hurts,” Atyl said gently.
A pause.
“The more you return to those times, the more your heart will hurt, Trungku.”
“You do not return to those times as I do, but that does not mean your heart does not hurt,” said Trungku.
“My heart hurts enough from our own age already. It needs no additional pain. It needs to become harder and stronger.”
“You are not hard and strong enough yet?”
“With a colleague like you? No, Trungku.”
“What I do causes trouble for you. I do not wish that.”
Atyl looked at him for a while, then gave another dry laugh.
“What would you like to drink, brother?”
“One day you will have to answer to Borju because of me. It will not be easy for you, Atyl.”
“What would you like to drink, Trungku?”
Trungku looked deep into Atyl’s eyes.
“Perhaps we do not have much time left together, brother.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Not in this world. Because of what I am doing... what I will do.”
“What comes, will come. What would you like to drink, Trungku?”
“Water. I need water.”
“Mm. Of course,” said Atyl.
He rose, crossed to a recessed cabinet, poured a glass of water, returned, and placed it before Trungku.
For a while Trungku looked at the ceramic cup containing distilled water. Then he picked it up and slowly drank it dry. There was no sound of water passing through his mouth and throat, as though the water were sinking directly into the flesh of the earth.
“Another?” said Atyl, looking at the empty cup.
Trungku looked at him and smiled briefly.
There was something pitiable in that smile, like the smile of an orphaned child being asked about his mother one more time.
“I do not know whether all the water in the world would be enough to quench my thirst, Atyl.”
Atyl looked at Trungku for a moment. A strange glint flickered in his eyes, carrying the chill of crystal, of metal.
“Do you realize that what you just said sounds very much like the words of a man who wants to put the entire world into his pocket?”
Calmly, Trungku met Atyl’s gaze.
“I know that, Atyl. And I know what you’re thinking. I myself may become the very thing I wish to eliminate.”
Atyl stared into Trungku’s eyes.
Slowly, he picked up the empty cup, walked to the recessed cabinet, filled it again, and returned. Setting it before Trungku, he said:
“Everything is all right, isn’t it, brother?”
Trungku remained silent, looking at the water.
“All right by your standards, if that’s what you mean, Atyl.”
“Fine. This world is an egg that we spread our fingers around, trying to keep it from slipping and shattering while we stand on the deck of a ship pitching and plunging like a mad thing in a storm. That egg is what people call social order and peace. So far we have not dropped it. So far we have not let it break, Trungku. Naturally we would like nothing more than for the storm itself to end, to vanish as soon as possible. But you know as well as I do that creatures as insignificant as us cannot command the storm. Our task, our lot, is to keep performing our balancing act with the egg despite the storm. To accept the game, devotedly and proudly, even when it drives us half mad. We do it well. You do it well.”
There was a brief silence before Trungku spoke.
“When I look farther away, I no longer think I am doing it well.”
“Our job is to look far only when necessary. You look too far.”
Trungku fell silent.
And when he finally spoke, it felt as though somewhere in space-time a ripe sapodilla had fallen onto dew-wet paving stones.
“Would you like to know what my most recent return was like?”
“Yes. Tell me.”
Trungku looked at Atyl for a moment, as though leaning against him inwardly so that the words could find a shape.
“I returned to the house where my wife lived, the woman I loved. In the middle of the night. I walked softly, afraid of waking her. I came back without warning, so she was not waiting up for me.”
Silence.
Atyl, in a mocking tone:
Returning from the garden at night,
How light the footsteps are,
Like the soul of years gone by.
“The country of that songwriter again, I suppose.”
“Yes. While he was still alive. The first years after the Thirtieth of April.”
“Not an easy time.”
“No.”
“Go on. You walked softly because you didn’t want to wake her. Admirable devotion. What happened next?”
“I sat on the veranda waiting for dawn.”
“You didn’t sleep?”
“I did. I nodded off for a little while, then woke with a start. Several times. Near dawn I lay down, used my backpack as a pillow, and slept as though I had never been allowed to sleep before.”
“And in the morning?”
“I did not stay until morning. At the second crowing of the rooster, I withdrew from his body, left him and his wife there together, returned here, and came to see you.”
“Why not stay longer? You had travelled so far.”
Trungku was silent for a moment.
“I had seen how she would die.”
“Which ‘I’ are you talking about?” said Atyl. “The Trungku sitting in front of me right now, or the fellow in the twentieth century whose body you had the privilege of borrowing?”
“He did not see that scene. I did. But he will know. I withdrew so that he could receive the fruit himself, the sweet and the bitter alike.”
 |
| Tranh của Kaii Higashiyama |
“Can the poor devil carry it alone? On many previous occasions you stayed longer. With you there, those fragile little souls might not collapse entirely. They might not kill themselves, lose their minds, or murder a dozen others. You’ve told me as much before, haven’t you? A noble gesture, Trungku. Though not one that falls within the duties of a Cospolist.”
Trungku remained silent.
“I met Adam Justemann there,” he said.
Atyl pursed his lips as though about to whistle.
“Really?”
Looking deeply into Atyl’s eyes, Trungku said after a period of silence:
The young woman dreaming of peace,
Loving her homeland as she had loved herself—
That was her. Adam Justemann was one of the men who killed her.”
“Ah. One of them.”
Another silence passed before Trungku continued.
“They raped her. Then they killed her. At sea. Gulf of Thailand.”
“Excellent. And then?”
Trungku was silent.
“So far I’ve managed to isolate only about forty percent of the aftershock of that event in space-time. A fragment of it may erupt approximately two hours from now, somewhere between one thousand and one thousand three hundred and fifty kilometres to the west-northwest. I’ve already warned the people there.”
After a brief silence, Atyl said:
“I can see the wound in your heart through your eyes.”
“There is a wound in your heart too, Atyl.”
Atyl gave no sign that he had heard the remark.
“What was the first thing I ever told you? Do you remember?”
“You told me I was unsuited to be a Cospolist.”
A faint smile touched Trungku’s lips.
“I have been a Cospolist for more than sixty years now, Atyl.”
“Yes. And during all those years, how many times have you smiled?”
“That is none of your concern.”
“Making certain that your nervous system remains under control is very much my concern.”
A brief silence.
“My nervous system remains under control because I have work to do,” said Trungku.
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
Trungku said nothing. Then his voice and bearing softened.
“There will come a time when I will have to lean on you. A time when I will need your love, Atyl.”
“What are you planning to do?” said Atyl, his voice sounding perhaps a little harder than usual, perhaps not.
Suddenly Trungku turned his head toward some distant point, like a man hearing a strong wind and thinking of the young trees he had planted in his garden, trees only now beginning to grow.
“She has a five-year-old child, Atyl.”
“And the child?” said Atyl after a pause.
Trungku turned back.
And Atyl saw in his friend’s eyes that spure black light he had so often seen in those who had resolved to move steadily toward death.
“They killed him,” said Trungku. “If they left him alive, he cried. The crying irritated them.”
Atyl was silent.
“I am not going to stop,” said Trungku.
He paused briefly, then smiled a strange smile.
“Besides, it is rather an interesting game, isn’t it, Atyl?”
“Ha! Yes. Interesting. There has to be something interesting in the work we do, otherwise we’d all go mad. Naturally. Of course, brother.”
Trungku picked up the cup and studied it for a while. Then, extending his arm fully, he hurled it at the wall opposite him.
The cup sank into the wall and vanished soundlessly, as though disappearing into a bank of mist.
“Adam Justemann is an extraordinary mad beast, one I have pursued and challenged with extraordinary enthusiasm, and he knows this as well as I do,” said Trungku. “Yes, this game is large. This game is fascinating. And I will not abandon it, Atyl. When a fish that big is involved, a man cannot simply decide to stop. Not when even a scrap of excrement fallen from him can be auctioned for millions of dollars. Just like the great love of your life, Atyl. You cannot simply decide to stop.”
Atyl seemed not to have heard the remark.
“Why are you so powerful, Trungku?” said Atyl. “There is no need for it. Ha. It is rather amusing, when you think about it, that I am your superior officer. It ought to be the other way around. And yet I am still the one whose task it is to hold you back.”
Trungku smiled faintly.
“ ‘One day I shall return with nothing, both hands surrendered.’ Many centuries ago, Trịnh Công Sơn—the man you always mention with that mocking smile, Atyl—wrote those words in a song. They are about human beings. They are about me because I am human. One day I too shall return with nothing, surrendered, and then you will no longer have to spend so much effort on my account. But that day is not today. And so you will continue to be dragged through hell because of me. I am sorry, brother.”
“Where are you going now?”
A small muscle moved briefly in Trungku’s cheek, as though some soft tissue hidden deep within him had just been cut by the passing edge of a razor blade.
“I want to see Natai,” said Trungku. “She will not allow me to see her. You know that.”
“And then?”
Trungku looked somewhere beyond the wall.
“I will return there. That is where I must go back.”
A pause.
“There are few times and places in history where human beings have had to endure so much suffering, where so many questions of the human condition have pressed themselves upon life.”
He paused again and looked at his friend.
“I will return there. You may find me there, Atyl.”
“Do I ever need to tell you where I want to go or what I intend to do?”
“All right,” said Trungku with a faint smile. “You could go there and meet me without my knowing it. You could appear as the woman I fall in love with at first sight, as my benefactor, as the journalist who keeps pestering me, or as the slightly peculiar old woman I accidentally bump into in a crowded street. That is your style, Atyl. I wonder whether I would recognize you. I hope I would not wound you.”
“I might visit you as a fly you are tempted to swat,” said Atyl with a thin smile. “Or as a woman who is not particularly beautiful, yet whom you desire the moment you meet her, with a desire so absurd that it resembles a sudden urge to throw yourself over a cliff. Though then again, is not the abyss precisely where you are forever throwing yourself, whether it is for the woman you love or for the things you wish to accomplish? I know there is no point in saying this, but I will say it anyway: whatever it is you are planning, think about it a hundred times. The fact that I am powerless with you does not mean Cospol is powerless with you. It does not mean They are powerless with you.”
“They will show you exactly what it is you are capable of doing.”
For a while Trungku looked at Atyl with affection and gentleness.
“Thank you for saying that to me, Atyl. As for yourself, whatever you can do to me, do it with all your strength. I am sorry if I am going to make life difficult for you and everyone else for a long time yet.”
He paused, looked away for a moment, then turned back.
“The world is a sorrowful place, brother.”
“Ha!” Atyl laughed aloud. “Do you realize how badly I want to knock your teeth out, Trungku? Because you are right. People have known that for thousands of years, and yet you say it as though you had only just discovered it today. Damn you, Trungku.”
“I know I deserve a beating, especially from a man like you, Atyl. But I will do what I must do. At least some of these sufferings must come to an end. Somehow.”
“You know perfectly well there are things you cannot do. You are not God.”
“Of course I am not God. I merely intend to do everything I can within the limits of being human.”
Trungku paused, as though suddenly becoming aware that he was drifting into a region of mist visible only to himself.
“You know as well as I do what position the Justemann family occupies. They stand above Cospol.”
Atyl’s voice turned cold.
“That much even children know. We do what Cospol permits us to do. That alone is enough for us not to be ashamed of being human, Trungku.”
A silence followed.
“I am ashamed because humanity can do nothing to the Justemann family,” said Trungku.
“Do you remember the most famous line Krishna speaks in the Bhagavad Gita?” said Atyl.
“‘I am the Destroyer of Worlds.’”
“Are you Krishna?”
“I only wish to destroy one among many great evils, Atyl.”
After a brief silence, Atyl said:
“Do you possess the moral authority to make that decision yourself, Trungku?”
Slowly, a curious smile appeared on Trungku’s face.
“Do you not think that question is unnecessary, Atyl?”
A pause.
“According to whose criteria, whose definition, does one possess such authority or not? If I am not God, then whoever established those criteria and definitions is not God either. If it were God, perhaps I would listen. To Him alone.”
A silence.
“I must do it, Atyl. No matter what the world out there says or does.”
Another silence.
“At this moment, the only thing that concerns me is whether I possess the spiritual worthiness to meet Natai one more time.”
“You honestly believe that doing this will increase your chances of seeing Natai again, even slightly?” said Atyl. “Is your head still attached to your shoulders, Trungku?”
For a moment Trungku looked at him. His eyes seemed full of tears. Or perhaps not.
Then, without saying a word, his body began to fade, gradually becoming paler and more indistinct until it disappeared completely into empty air.
Atyl watched the process with calm indifference, as one watches a patch of sunlight slowly vanish from a wall. From the very beginning he had suspected that the figure before him was not Trungku himself, but merely a projection. To create a projection of oneself with such perfect material density that even Atyl found it difficult to distinguish it from the original—only Trungku was capable of such a thing.
Slowly inserting a finger into his nostril, Atyl said:
“So where are you, Trungku?”
“You can find me,” came Trungku’s voice.
Slowly, Atyl leaned back in his chair.
“Of course I can find you, Trungku. Two atoms at opposite ends of the universe can still recognize one another.”
Trungku’s voice said:
“I am going back to that house, to see her. I want to sing her to sleep once. Together with him, her husband, I want to sing her to sleep. She does not have long left to live, Atyl.”
A pause.
“As for everything else here, I have fulfilled my obligations, have I not, Atyl? If so, let me fulfill this one small thing for the woman who once waited for me to come home.”
For a long while Atyl said nothing.
Then he spoke, his voice resonant like a great bell that had suddenly cracked, a single fracture as thin as a thread running through it.
“We will find you. And we will stop you. Do not place too much faith in yourself, Trungku.”
Then came a long silence, made all the quieter by the only sound present: wind passing through a grove of olive trees in a place to which Atyl sometimes liked to retreat for a brief rest. The wind in the trees and the silence gradually soothed Atyl’s mind. After a while rain began to fall, at first very softly, then somewhat harder. And mingled with the rain, arriving clear, round, and gentle within the centre of Atyl’s nervous system, came Trungku’s voice once more.
“You once listened to this Russian song with me. You’ve probably forgotten it. It is about me.”
Spring arrives, but not for me.
The Don overflows its banks, but not for me.
A young girl’s heart stirs with love,
Yet not for me.
The orchards bloom, but not for me.
The forests in the valleys bloom.
The nightingale sings to greet the spring,
Yet not for me.
Like diamonds, the streams whisper softly.
There grows a dark-browed maiden.
She comes of age, but not for me.
For me there is a piece of lead,
Driven into my fair white flesh.
Bitter tears flow.
That is what life has reserved for me.
(translated by the author)
@Trần Tiễn Cao Đăng
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