THE COOK

Anarchic vegetation, impenetrable bushes suffocated in wild grass, fruit trees and army tents spread out in the meadow – a calm herd – the French army. Mules ascended to the city daily, nervously flaring their nostrils as their hooves stumbled on the stones, laden with cheeses, meats, and wine.

Sometimes, he would take the same road at dusk; the officers waited for him at the club to create something special, more French. A sous-chef on the steamer “Latouche-Tréville” had told them he learned the secrets from a chef in Marseille.

When he finished, he would lie down in the dry grass from the hayloft and gaze at the moonlight as it played with the ornaments and the plants that glimmered with a supernatural awe on the walls of the mosque. It was a time he didn’t want to think about how it was possible to be a cook in the service of the French army amid the mud of war, preparing champignons and rôti de veau in the ruined Ottoman mosque for noble Catholic officers.

He awaited sleep to take him, even for a moment, to return to the rice paddies, the tea plantations, and suddenly encounter pagodas and supernatural statues of Buddha. The next morning, he would ride back to the encampment, also hanging the Kodak he had around his neck to photograph the waters as they rushed vigorously from the rocks, the balls of hemp dangerously heavy as they tumbled down to the rope factory, the dried faces of the farmers swaying slowly in their beasts of burden.

The peasants resemble each other, he would think, his gaze on the earth, a frugal one who knows how to be in poverty. Carefree, his worries small, he would wait for more events to come to line up his thoughts and for fate to bring them to its plumb line so he could one day stand opposite the uniforms of the French army, wanted in the jungle, to disappear like a reptile with a face dipped in camouflage colors.

And when he would appear again, he would no longer be the humble Nguyen Sinh Kung who once left on the steamer "Latouche-Tréville" but an enlightened one who had been purified. And this is whom the kite with the long tail had waited for so long, the one who would now be called Ho Chi Minh to lift him from the floods of rice into the sky to set him free.