Illustration by Dao Quoc Huy
by Khong Van Duong
When I was about fifteen years old, one day my father brought me a handsome male dog with white fur and black eyes, which we called Ven; contrary to the Vietnamese farming tradition of not naming livestock, including pets. That year, there was a serious famine due to many crops failing one after another. Because of this, all our family had to eat what was a little rice mixed with slices of sweet potato or cassava. Oddly enough, our dog grew a lot bigger. By my reckoning he weighed at least fifteen kilogrammes and his fur looked and felt like velvet. When any member of our family called out “Ven”, he would wag his tail gracefully and give a little yelp. Usually he just lay under my father’s bed and stared at the doorway. If a visitor dropped in on us, he would only give a few warning barks. With people that he was familiar with, he would stand up, walk to the door and wag his tail happily.
Our house seemed safer when he lived with us and Dad liked him very much. On cold winter days, Dad kept him warm by wrapping an old sack around his body. On hot summer days, he led him down to the river so he could swim and cool off. When we had money, Dad often brought home a bone he could gnaw on. Because of all the love and affection Dad gave him, Ven always walked by his side wherever he went.
***
One morning, two strangers from the next village, separated from ours by a huge field, approached us wanting to buy our dog.
“Tomorrow, we are having a major party to honour the death anniversaries of our ancestors, so we are badly in need of a big dog to butcher so we can feast our kith and kin,” they said.
“No, never,” answered my father resolutely.
“The six of us had often stayed hungry for days. How could we possible keep him at home during these hard times?” Mum said, as she tried to persuade Dad softly after a long moment’s silence.
Curiously, when my parents reluctantly agreed to sell him, he was nowhere to be seen. “Could he understand what we were saying?” I asked myself. We went to look for him all around our compound and then round the neighbouring houses, but all our efforts were in vain. Only when Dad, tears in his eyes, called him loudly, did he jump up from under a pile of straw behind the pigsty. All at once, he was grabbed by the neck. After that, his legs and snout were bound tightly and while saliva oozed out of his muzzle, he whined pathetically. Dad gave him a hug and sobbed his eyes out.
After paying my parents the money, both men left with our poor dog hung under a long shoulder pole. Dad went straight to bed and lay down, hands crossed over his forehead, sighing sadly. That evening he did not eat. The bowl of rice and a plate of sweet potato stayed in the bamboo larder.
“Why are you so depressed about a dog?” Mum asked him. “If you want, we can get another one,” she added. Dad just lay motionless in bed as if he was sick.
That night, it was pitch-dark. All of us slept soundly except for Dad. Time and again, he woke up, stroke a match and had a smoke. Then he laid down and let out another sigh, while tossing from side to side. He was in a really bad mood as if he had lost something very dear and precious. In the small hours of the morning, he was the first to hear strange noises at the door. He was all ears. “Burglar?” he asked himself. “No, nothing of the kind! We’ve got nothing valuable that would attract a thief,” he went on. It seemed to him that the dog had returned. “Is it our poor animal?” Dad said again. Outside, the violent scratching at the door and the mournful cries could be heard very clearly. Getting up, Dad walked over to the door and opened it slightly. It was our pet dog. He quickly ran in and my mother got up and switched on the light. We were surprised when we saw an iron ring round his neck with a frayed piece of rope dragging on the floor. Poor him! His whole body was drenched from the rain and his legs and tail were covered in mud. He was also very hungry. At once Dad removed the iron ring and rope from his neck then washed all the mud from his coat. After that, he gave the poor animal a bowl of rice – his meagre food ration from the previous day. He also added some soya sauce to the bowl. Unexpectedly, he just looked at my father instead of eating the food but as soon as Dad gave him the signal, he began to devour the bowl of rice. My father patted him for a long time before letting him crawl into the space under his bed. A few minutes later, Dad fell into an untroubled slumber. Early the next morning, the men who had bought the dog the previous day came back again. Strangely enough, our poor pet seemed to know this in advance, as he had made a run for it. My father decided to hand back the money to them, with a sincere expression on his face. We were all aware that Dad would never sell him to anyone ever again, even if he was about to die of starvation.
From that day onwards, we paid more attention to him and cared for him better. Every mealtime, Dad set aside half of his portion for the dog. In the meantime, the animal became even more deeply attached to my father. Wherever he went, the dog would follow him. If he had been away for a few hours, the dog just lay on the veranda floor waiting for him to return home. As soon as he saw him, he would wag his tail, as if he was welcoming Dad coming home.
About two years later, when our standard of living was much better, our pet dog became bigger and stronger and looked healthier. One summer afternoon, my father went to the pond to gather ferns to make manure. The place was very muddy and the bank was covered with the roots of wild plants, which created a lot of deep burrows where big eels, catfish and even otters lived. What’s more, there was also a three-metre long python, a great hunter of small animals in the marshy ground. When he reached the root of a big plant, he saw the tail of the big snake at the entrance to a big hole. He made up his mind to capture it alive, or if necessary dead. Grabbing its tail, he tried to pull it out of the hole and when he had eventually managed, it wrapped itself round his leg and bite him. He fell over at the edge of the pond and shouted loudly for someone to help him. Immediately, Ven dashed to the huge snake and snapped at the its neck. In reply, the reptile coiled itself around the dog. Our poor pet dog! Its backbone was broken but its teeth still held the snake by the neck in a vice-like grip. Blood oozed out of the dog’s mouth and with his jungle knife at hand, Dad gave the big snake a tremendously heavy blow to the head. After a few seconds in convulsions, it stopped moving. Despite the blood trickling down his leg, he did his best to pull the dog’s muzzle from the python’s neck, then he hugged the wounded dog tightly. When he saw the dog’s body, stained with mud and his eyes tightly closed, Dad burst out crying. He thought that the poor animal had died. After taking him home, Dad put him in a big bamboo basket at one end of the veranda after washing and drying him carefully, then he told me to look for a large wooden box to bury him in. When Dad picked him up to put him in the box, he realised that his eyes had opened slightly and had begun winking. In high spirits, he sent for Ta, the witch-doctor in our village to come and cure our poor dog. As a result, his back was treated very carefully, with two bamboo splints placed along both flanks, tied with a piece of rope round his body. After that, Dad sat down on the veranda floor with Ta to wash his wounds and dust them with antibiotic powder before bandaging up the injured animal.
In the afternoon, Dad told Mum to cook some rice porridge with two chicken’s eggs for Ven, the kind of food that we rarely enjoyed in those days. As for the dead python, he said that it would be cut up into pieces for our neighbours. Nobody had thought that our dog would live any longer. Some suggested that he should be killed for food because if he died, it would be a waste of good meat. However, Dad did not think so. “He will live with me for good and when he dies I’ll bury him as we would a human being,” Dad insisted.
Two months later Ven had partly recovered thanks to Dad’s care and concern. Yet, his two hind legs were totally paralysed because of his spinal injury. He could move by dragging his hind feet along the floor. To our surprise, a month later, he could move as fast as any other dog.
Ever since then, Dad regarded the unlucky animal as one of his children. Half of his daily food ration was given to Ven and it was more than likely that the pet animal was deeply moved at Dad’s affection, so he kept following Dad’s every footstep. At night time he would lie under Dad’s bed to keep his master safe and sound.
***
In February 1959, my father passed away after a bad illness. During the funeral, it was very cold and worse still, it poured with rain. From amongst the cortege of our relatives, friends and local villagers, all of a sudden, our poor dog appeared, dragging himself through the heavy rain and mud to the local cemetery. Not until later that night, when the paraffin oil lamp was on, did we find him, with his wet fur and sad eyes, lying motionless under Dad’s bed.
The next morning, after my clan’s burial rites for our late father had been completed, I urged him to move and get something to eat, but he ignored my calls. At last, I found him on the veranda, staring at the gate. “Has he been waiting for Dad to return?” I asked myself. Immediately, I took him inside to comfort him and ease his pain, yet he did not even touch the pork meat balls, his favourite food. I put him back under my father’s bed. It was astonishing to me that he crept to the veranda once again. It was there he just lay motionless, like a pile of firewood, expecting my father to come home.
After a week of not eating, he became dangerously thin. His health was getting worse and worse with every passing day. I tried to persuade him to eat some meat, but all my efforts ended up in smoke.
One early morning, when it was extremely cold and the grass was wet with dew, we went to our local burial ground to plant a tombstone and burn joss-sticks on Dad’s grave. To our surprise, we found our poor dog lying dead on my father’s last home: his fore legs stretched wide over it; with his crippled hind legs hanging over the end of the tomb. His body seemed to have turned to stone and his eyes were tightly closed but I was sure I could see some tears on them.
When I got back home, we made a big wooden box for him and put him in a shroud. After that we interred him at the foot of my father’s grave. Planting some sticks of incense on his small mound, I thought a lot about the fates of both my father and our poor dog.
“Esteemed father, now you are in the nether world, do you know that your beloved pet dog will always be with you for ever?” I whispered softly, praying reverently that his soul would rest in peace.
Translated by Van Minh
Đăng ký: VietNam News