by Kieu Bich Hau
The hospital room was full of the stench of wounds, alcohol and the toilet in the corner. Little Tam felt quite uneasy. For the past two days, sitting by the side of her mother, Mrs Sung, Tam had tried her best to discover the whereabouts of the key to open her Mum’s trunk, but all her efforts came to nothing. The old woman always refused point-blank.
"Where did you put the trunk key, Mum?" asked the little girl. "Let me have it or it will get lost."
"I put it carefully in a secret place. Don’t worry about it," whispered Mrs Sung, as if she had a bitter taste in her mouth.
"You see, my mother’s very stubborn," Tam told her aunt when she came to the hospital to visit. "I’ve asked her for the umpteenth time, but she never tells me where the key is. Let me go out for some fresh air and maybe you can persuade her to tell you."
But Tam’s mother was determined. How could she disclose to them the greatest secret of her life? The trunk was indeed a special and unique thing to her, for inside were the most valuable ornaments of her girlhood.
***
At the age of seventeen, Ly Thi May, the adoptive daughter of an old couple without offspring in Hung Yen Province, was urged to return to her native village Phu Xuyen to get married. She took home a wooden trunk and a pair of treasured gold earrings.
It was a gloomy morning when May’s uncle, her only surviving relative and a tenant of the old couple, asked them for a special favour: to allow their adoptive girl to return home with him so that she might turn over a new leaf. At that time country girls had to marry when they reached their late teens, or they would be considered spinsters.
Unfortunately for May, her miserable days began from that fatal morning!
In neat handwriting, she jotted down her maiden name on a small piece of paper, folded it then inserted it inside the wooden trunk, because from now on, she would have her husband’s name: Sung; hence Mrs Sung.
After her wedding, she often recollected the days she had lived with her adoptive parents, seeing them as the happiest of her life.
At the age of three, her parents had died in a flood and she survived thanks to the help of her uncle. He rigged up a thatch-roofed hut on the foundations of their former dwelling and eked out a living there for a short time. Later, when he was compelled to work far away, he put May in the custody of – some kind-hearted neighbours. Once after working in the far-away province of Hung Yen, he brought her along with him and let her be the adopted daughter of his childless landlady.
During the first year in the alien land, her adoptive parents took good care of her. Afterwards, thanks to her good luck, the landlady gave birth to a baby boy. Over the six consecutive years, she had two more sons and one daughter. May became a so-called unpaid servant to this large clan. Every familial chore, big or small, she had to perform with care. As a result, she had to do the housework from dawn to dusk. Nevertheless, she was able to learn her ABCs and eat to her heart’s content. What’s more, on festival days, she was well-dressed to take her siblings to the bustling festivals.
Year in, year out she grew up remarkably without thinking much of her future. Sadly, she was quite unaware that those were the happiest days in her life.
***
Crossing the uneven brick yard full of thatch lying scattered around the straw pile and reaching the unpainted door, Tam pushed the door wide open to enter the old house facing the submerged fallow fields. A mouldy odour rose from the humid floor and the dirty clothes hung on the hooks. It mingled with the sour smell of spirits emanating from Mr Sung’s mouth. She felt dizzy. Tam dropped her crumpled cap on the chair, poured out some cold tea from a pot with a chipped spout.
"Is your mother alright?" Mr Sung asked his daughter.
"As bad as before, dad," sighed Tam.
"Has she given you the key to the trunk yet?"
"Not yet dad, she’s still as stubborn as ever. Are you sure you have had a thorough look for it?"
"Actually, no corner has been left untouched. Or else Tu’s wife is keeping it. I saw them secretly whispering something to each other before your mother went to hospital," said Mr Sung.
"Mum doesn’t trust me," Tam said, biting her lip hard. She thought and thought. Maybe one of her siblings had found the key and taken her precious ornaments away. Anyhow, Mum owned at least six taels of gold: five for the necklace and one for her pair of earrings.
Tam knew this because one day she found her mother wearing them as she got ready to attend the wedding of her cousin’s daughter. Later, when Tam asked her mother to borrow one tael so that she might buy a motorbike, the old woman denied her daughter’s proposal at once. Since then she had not seen her Mum wearing them again. Perhaps, Mum had put them all in the trunk, but where was the key? When her mother was in hospital, Tam had tried to look for the key, but in vain. Maybe one of her sisters had promised to pay her Mum a very high interest rate. Tam was afraid that when her mother was in agony and muttering her last words, she would forget the key and the treasures would be lost for good.
***
Mrs Sung was said to have been depressed for a long time, when she lost her key. Before, she used a red thread to string her jewels around her neck or on her ears so she could boast about her former glory days.
When she had been living with her adoptive parents, every year May was given two new suits of clothes – one for summer and the other for winter. When she returned to her home village to get married, her adoptive mother offered her the most beautiful trunk made of bright yellow ironwood, whose eight corners were rimmed with brass, together with a lot of brass-headed nails driven firmly into the metal ring going around the edge of the lid. For Mrs Sung, the trunk was a rare and valuable thing. So she kept it very carefully. She only took it out from under her bed and opened it to contemplate its costly contents after bolting the door tightly to prevent curious eyes from casting a covetous gaze at them.
But once, when she took off the key ring from her neck to have a bath, she hung it on a hook nailed into the wall and forgot to put it back on after washing. When she went back to look for it, it had disappeared. Consequently, she dared not tell anyone about the loss. She doubted everybody else in her clan and became irritable and quick to temper.
After her marriage she was called Mrs Sung, not May anymore. Woe to her: she gave birth to her first baby after just ten months, and within a dozen years ten children, male and female, came into being. They were born so fast that she just called them First Boy, Second Boy, Third Boy, Fourth Boy, … and Seventh Boy; and the last three daughters: the Eighth, the Ninth and the Tenth. Among them, her three daughters just looked like miserable little kittens, and the sixth boy was named Nhue, in memory of the Nhue River where he was born on its bank. With such a large group of kids she hoped that later, when they grew up, they would make her and her husband happy, rich and kept in good health. "‘The more, the richer,’ goes a Vietnamese proverb, you see," she often said.
With three acres of paddy field to cultivate, a flock of more than a hundred ducks and several sows to raise, her hands were always full.
In a word, her entire life, although young and healthy at first, evolved around the matter of childbirth, one after another. On the whole, with their ten young mouths to feed, the couple could barely make both ends meet.
***
Beside his sick wife, as thin as a lathe, with sunken eyes and smelly breath, on a cold steel bed inside the patients’ room sat Mr Sung, a thin middle-aged man. He was feeding his spouse with hot milk patiently, spoon after spoon.
"I’m about to leave, but Tam will stay here with you. What else do you want to talk to me about now?" he asked her.
"You are just waiting for me to die so you can take the key!" she cried.
"How can you say that? I always thought that you would recover soon and return home with me, but, by the way, where is the key?" he whispered.
She turned her head away with difficulty.
He marched out in despair. "Anyway, the die is cast," he said to himself.
"He merely intends to appropriate my belongings, that’s all," Mrs Sung said to herself in a low voice. "Hm, let him try to look for the key and all his efforts would come to nothing."
Miss Ly Thi May’s life would have turned in another direction if she had not come back to her native village by the Nhue River that day to get married because of the demands of her uncle. Fifteen years before, he sold her parents’ house with a plot of land attached to it because of his gambling then died of apoplexy in a hut temporarily rigged up in the middle of the submerged field. Unfortunately for her, on her parents’ death anniversaries, she had no place of her own to go back and worship. But when she had to bring a simple food tray with a boiled duck and a small bottle of rice wine to the terrace stretching in front of her husband’s house to celebrate these events, her husband threw the whole lot on to the roadside.
"This is my house inherited from my parents. You’re not allowed to do the ritual service here," her husband warned her.
"But I’ve got no other place to perform it," she said in a choked voice.
"If so, you can worship your parents on the road," he replied coldly.
As a result, over the past ten years, she had had to worship her ancestors right on the roadside with a heavy heart.
Bearing the painful wound, she became confused. If she had found the key to the trunk, she would have opened another door to a better life.
***
After giving birth to the tenth child, a baby girl, Tam went through the menopause. She became weaker and thinner. She also had to provide each of her sons with a little shanty for them to get married and to live in. How could her seven boys live in harmony under the same roof of a small house with three babies? Worse still, some of them were drug addicts while some others were gamblers. Her three daughters only asked her for some money before their weddings.
***
"Give me fifty thousand dong," Mr Sung asked his wife.
"To be frank, I’ve got no money. Why don’t you ask your sons?"
"Then open your trunk, please. You can find lots of money in it."
"But the key has been lost."
"Hm, I’ll break the trunk asunder."
"Please do if you can, but smash me up first, will you?" replied Mrs Sung.
"Pop! Pop!" went his two slaps on her cheeks, which made her see stars.
But she still kept the trunk intact.
Before Tet, her sons-in-law came and offered them several bottles of wine, a dozen kilogrammes of sticky rice and some other items indispensable for the most important event of the lunar year. Early on the New Year’s Day of the lunar calender, their grandchildren appeared in front of their house in legion to wait for li xi, a monetary donation in a small red envelope, from adults. It was hard to say why she did not feel happy at her old age with such a large family!
At twilight, sitting alone in her bedroom with the door under lock and key, she silently opened her trunk full of clothes in order to contemplate the multi-coloured costumes she used to wear in her mid-teens when she played the title roles of the heroines in the cheo popular theatre in the courtyard of the communal house to the admiration of village youths.
***
Mrs Sung died when a flood ravaged the ricefields of her native place. The flow of the Nhue River rose up to the top of its bank, threatening the life of the inhabitants inside its dike.
Because villagers were hurriedly fighting against the spate, her burial was attended by only a few people. Lying inside the wooden coffin, she looked pale with a shrinking body under the rectangular glass cover that showed only her face for everybody to pay homage to her for the last time. The funeral procession marched slowly, face to face with disaster if the dike broke.
***
With a single stroke of the heavy hammer, the brass lock of the trunk was broken apart. Her children and grandchildren rushed in to ransack its contents. To their surprise, what they were dreaming of was nowhere to be seen. They stared at one another in doubt. Who had found the key and stealthily opened the wooden trunk? God knew, for Mrs Sung did not disclose anything to anyone.
***
Three years later, when her skeleton was unearthed to be carefully washed down and placed in a new tiny terra-cotta coffin before burying it again, her gold necklace together with a pair of gold ear-rings was discovered among the broken ribs.
Translated by Van Minh
(from Viet Nam News)
(from Viet Nam News)
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