Paradise of the Blind

The habit of misery had twisted these people, driving them to this paranoia. What had been diligence turned to desperation.

At the center of these stifling landscapes, on a green carpet of weed, those purple flowers always glistened, radiant in the middle of filth: the atrocious ornament of a life snuffed out.

Outside, on the other side of a black iron grill, was another crowd, just as anxious, just as sweaty and frightened. These were the parents and friends of those departing. They all waited for deliverance. When all the customs procedures had been completed, when the crowd of travelers had passed through the last security booths and were walking toward the tarmac, you could see, on the faces of those left behind, the relief, the joy, the pride of vicarious success. The vision of a happier future elsewhere, anywhere but here. Smiles of contentment, faces radiant with happiness. Nowhere else in the world does separation bear the hideous face of joy. This was a grotesque face, a deviation from all rules of human nature.

Well, like there's no river without a bend, there's no life without its unhappiness.

A rich man loves to work, a poor man loves to eat.

I remember my first winter in Russia. The bitter cold that singed my ears, crept into my gloves, tightened around my body like a vise. I can still see the road to the textile factory, the deep banks of snow heaped up in front of the bus stations. I remember the exhaustion, the hours hunched over the machines, trudging back to the residence, in the snow, numb with cold, still shaking from the jolt of the machines, choking on the smoke and the dust. After days like that, our evening meal was like a benediction. We calculated the price of everything--butter, cheese, meat--leaving ourselves just enough to keep going, to keep from falling on our faces in the snow. The rest was always for our families.

People say I'm extravagant. I tell them Yes, that's right, and I'm offering this to myself in memory of all my suffering.

...the affection between two human beings is something I will always hold sacred.

We "exported workers" had shut ourselves away in our boxlike rooms, savoring our homesickness, fermenting in our own sadness.

In every life, there must come a moment when what is most sacred, most noble, in us evaporates into thin air. In a flash of lucidity, the values we have honored and cherished reveal themselves in all their poverty and vulgarity, as they had to this girl. From this moment, no one is spared.

In life, you break at the moment of surrender. Afterward you just go on.

When I couldn't sleep, I would just stare at those devastated rice fields and weep. Sometimes, I considered suicide. As if by coincidence, I had to walk past the old well at the gate to the temple five or six times a day. The water was so clear. It was as if it were beckoning to me. I would stare at my reflection and tell myself, iI could end my suffering. But it would be too cowardly. They'll just come and laugh on my own grave. I've got to survive. To see their undoing and to win this chess game with heaven.

I suddenly understood why, when I brought out the gifts, she had shot me the anxious look of a shoplifter. This was the way they lived here, viligant, spying on each other, each keeping watch over his neighbor. One mouthful too many, and the others might turn you in as a potential threat to the collective.

The air echoed with the sounds of fury: Drums beat, bugles sounded the charge, mobs shrieked, and guerrilla patroles crisscrossed the roads, bayonets glinting at the tips of their rifles. The guerrillas kept their weapons cocked, threatening, ready to do battle. Their bayonets reflected in the gleam of their eyes as they glared suspiciously at every passerby. NO LANDLORAD WILL SLIP THROUGH OUR NET. That was the new slogan, scrawed in lurid colors across the roads. Whomever they stopped shuddred under the violence of their gaze, this blind hatred that needed no basis, no justification.

In our society, there are only two respectable types of people: the proletariat—the avant-garde of our society, the beacon of the revoluation—and the peasantry, faithful ally of the proletariat in its struggle for the construction of socialism. The rest is nothing. The merchants, the petty tradespeople, they're only exploiters.

The shouts of the villagers masked their own terror. Their screams were both a release and a sordid way of asking for grace, a baseness difficult to avoid in those troubled times.

And I saw the roof of the shack in Hanoi where my mother lived. Sheet metal patched together with tar paper. On rainy days, the roof leaked. In the heat of summer, the acrid smell of tar was overpowering, nauseating. All around, the gutters, gurgling under slabs of cement, flowed from one house to the next. Children played in this filthy black water, sailing their little white paper boats. The few mangy patches of grass were at the foot of the wall where men drunk on too much beer came to relieve themselves. The place reeked of urine. This was my street. I had grown up here.