Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Against the Flood by Ma Van Khang (©2000 by Ma Van Khang).

Khiem stretched himself out on the beach.

The waves rolled onto the shore in a measure as regular as the breathing of a giant. The water slowly inundated the edge of the sand, licked at his ribs like a puppy. His eyes half-closed, he let his muscles relax, let himself become part of the dream of the beach. First light was opening the sky like a door. A long purple cloud shaped like a sword lay low over the horizon. It elongated, and the sunlight glinting beneath it clarified its shape and reflected down onto the sea and then onto the shore where it lay like a moment at the creation of the world: a strange, vaguely dewy light that trembled between the new day and the slow melt of the darkness.

Dawn as an opening book. The faint, bass voices of breezes. The sound of waves swelling, falling, slowly withdrawing, their frothing foam leaving white, crooked traces. The soft shuffling footfalls of the all-night fishermen as they moved backwards up the beach, drawing their dripping nets towards their chests. The fierce flapping of the desperate fish caught inside.

Under these sounds, a worshipful silence. A temple, well and cleanly kept. The salt taste of the sea, permeating his senses, smoothing the chaos of his life. Silence as the melting of all noises and troubles eroding him and the vague sense, somewhere in it, of the true from of his life, fastened to the shapes of sky and sea in the early dawn.

The sun, like a red egg yolk, like hot iron, rose above the horizon. Khiem squinted at the huge form that carried in it the memories of millennia. Here on the smooth and, he felt suddenly that he was lying in a false calmness. He stirred, as if half caught by an idea that had just come to him, or a desire just out of his reach.

The cadence of the waves until now had sounded like hesitant footsteps, reluctant to destroy the dawn’s silence, gently ratting the shells left like night gifts on the shore. The footsteps suddenly grew louder now, rushing, the stampede of a horde released from cages, dashing into one another, pouring out. Some inner force seemed to be building in the waves; they threatened now, roared, threw themselves onto the beach, overran the dry zones, boiled up like water thrown onto a metal stove. Waves smacked into Khiem’s flesh. He felt the sand washing out and collapsing under his back in stages, his body being pushed and drawn, and suddenly he was sliding out of the place where he’d been lying. He closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of lightness, of slipping away from the complications and troubles of his days in a haze of longing, floating towards her, the woman, who had asked him to come here.

After a while, he opened his eyes. The landscape around him had changed. The sun was higher. The ceiling of cloud was high now too, hanging over an immense expanse of blue sky. The curve of the beach separated itself from the sea and the empty sky; behind the rows of sea pines, the shore was crowded with guest houses, hotels, and hostels of all styles, each competing with the other to push close to the water. Nearby, the squares of the salt-production fields sparkled like segmented glass, and down the coast he could see villages here and there behind the sea dikes, their houses white as crumbs of rice powder cake.

A faint worry rose in him, here in front of this immensity which seemed a symbol of absolute power. Yet at the same time he felt a sense of joy, a lingering of the sincerity he had just touched.

He had seen the sea for the first time when he was twenty years old. That brief, long-ago meeting had left impressions that had never gone away, and he sensed in those memories, that feeling, a piece of the Creator within himself. Humankind came from the sea; its salt still traceable in their blood. He had read that somewhere; he remembered it forever, and he’d inherited the elements of the ocean in his own body. His ancestors were the children of the Lady of the Nation, Au Co, Mother of the Hundred Eggs that became the Hundred Children, fifty who went to the forests, fifty who went to live by the sea. His forebears were tattooed fishermen, pearl divers, strugglers against the fierce creatures of the ocean, its waves and its wind. Their lives and legends had burned like stars in the firmament of his childhood imagination. He’d loved those stories in which people had to put aside their own safety when they were forced to dive for pearls under the terrible Chinese Ming dynasty.

The sea. In that first meeting with it, Khiem had come face to face with something invisible and magnificent that stood outside of time.