God! Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined her telling me I was going to die in such a fashion.

During that night – it wasn’t all that long – I finally knew what it meant to be with a woman. Death ceased to matter. Three days later, with no regrets, only boundless joy, I happily departed your world.

Thank you, Ngọc. Goodbye!

8

From here on, what I’ll tell you about happened after I died.

It’s often said that ill people – all ill people, regardless of what they may be suffering from – die at a certain time. Those with weak hearts tend to expire in the mornings, those with tuberculosis find the darkness of the night most amenable. I died in 1973, 28 January, at 2:38 in the morning right on schedule. Ngọc, À Ơn and Dr Blanchet were there to see me off. Compared to Ngọc, À Ơn lacked the proper preparation and so the shock of my death hit him hard. The last thing I saw were the tears flowing down his face, uninterrupted, mournful, devastated …

I used to believe that once a man died, there would be nothing he had left to say, but that’s not how it is. In fact, my story, my brilliance all came after I died. Death is a passageway from one world unto the next; when death extinguished the light of my life, it also divested me of my sickly, weak, frail body. You could say that as a corpse I had nothing left to be ashamed of. After I entered the mortuary, I felt much better about myself. To be fair, in this place, one didn’t really see whole undamaged bodies. Compared to those that I did see, mine was quite satisfactory: no scars or wounds of any kind; nor was it aged and decrepit. I am sure that when Bureau Chief Lü stood next to my body, he would have been struck by that point.

Bureau Chief Lü arrived in the afternoon of the day I died; Dr Blanchet accompanied him. I didn’t know this man; nor would I have even known his name if it weren’t for the fact that Blanchet mentioned it. I also found out that he was Chinese, one of those who had come to assist in our fight against the Americans. In military fashion they inspected each of the corpses in the morgue, exchanging words I couldn’t understand. But I could tell they were looking for someone in particular. When they made their way to stand in front of me, I could tell that Bureau Chief Lü had difficulty concealing his delight. ‘Eh, who’s this?’

Dr Blanchet quickly related my story, whereupon Bureau Chief Lü replied, ‘He’s the one. He’s what I’ve been looking for.’