Hearing the screams of his wife inside, the man rushed in. There at the threshold he found her lying on the ground, trying to crawl out of the hut into the courtyard with a watery trail between her thighs.
"It’s... a... " she stuttered, trembling.
"A what?" he asked.
"A s-n-a-k-e," she managed.
"How could a snake make you so scared? Where is it?"
"Over there, in the corner of the room."
While carrying a pile of dry pancakes into the room from the back courtyard, she noticed a black shape in the darkness. At first she assumed it was a tyre her husband had taken home, but she quickly realised her mistake. The shape suddenly began to move, its head swinging slightly to and fro and its tail raising up. It was a cobra, poised to pounce. At once she dropped the pancakes onto the ground and dashed for the door.
Her husband tensed at the prospect of the intruder in the thatch-roofed, earthen-wall house he had spent two months rigging up. Picking up a pole he tiptoed over the doorsill and stared into the dark corner under his small bamboo bed. There, the huge reptile was dilating its neck and staring at him. It was the biggest cobra he had ever seen. It swung its head menacingly as it wound its length around a tree branch.
Releasing the pole, the man shot towards the door.
Meanwhile, outside his wife was describing the cobra to a group of young people returning home from the fields. Her husband rushed to the gate to ask some of them to come and help him – something he had never resorted to before. Chopping knives, heavy sticks and thick sickles in hand they slowly stepped in. Standing in front of the hut, the husband heard the crashes of breaking objects and saw the roof jarring repeatedly. Five young men sprinted out empty-handed.
"What a gigantic cobra!" one of them cried. The whole group hovered at the gate of the man’s hut, the space he had once planned to convert into a tiny workshop to repair bicycles.
Instead, every day, he pedalled his bike 20km to a primary school at the edge of the forest to teach little children the three R’s and earn a starvation wage at the end of the month. The chain, wheels and tyres of his bicycle had become worn down from his trips on the rugged paths of the mountainous region. He was unable to replace them, however, because parts were scarce and distributed among the teaching staff according to seniority and length of service, and there were far from enough to go around.
In order to supplement their meager incomes, the teachers held a variety of odd jobs: dealing in water buffaloes with the Hre minority people, hauling aloe wood or selling goods at the district market.
"One hundred and sixty-one bicycles pass here in both directions every day. So you should open your repair shop here," one of his fellow teachers at the municipal secondary school in Quy Nhon had suggested, while they drank alcohol brewed from sugar cane, raw figs and salt.
As a result, their stall for selling pancakes and repairing bicycles had been recently set up. Now a cobra controlled his hut as if it were the owner. How could he be so submissive?
"Will someone fetch me a piece of bamboo, please?" he said to the youths standing around him.
He had no other choice: his home was occupied by a monster, and he had to face it and drive it out at any cost.
* * *
He cut a length of bamboo, sharpened one end, then boldly approached the enemy.
"My shot must be very exact, or the cobra will strike and kill me," he said to himself. The youths followed behind him, each with a piece of bamboo or a knife for self-defence.
The great snake remained in the same place. Seeing human beings approaching it from below, it came to life, its head swaying to and fro, its neck dilating. As the man approached and prepared to attack, the snake repeatedly struck after him. He focused his gaze on the yellow patch on the animal’s neck. When the yellow patch came down, he lifted his sharp stick and punctured the neck of the snake with its pointed end. A stream of red blood oozed out and drenched the bamboo stick. The hut stopped shaking after the snake fell down with a heavy thud.
A throng of villagers was waiting in his courtyard, talking about his achievement. When he emerged, the villagers showered him with praise. Sitting on his veranda, he felt proud of himself as the kids dragged the dead snake to the gate. He had brought about a miracle unheard of in the community.
Tales of his exploit were exaggerated more and more each day. Finally it grew into a myth that a sacred cobra that had caused panic and destruction to the community and had been lured into his house, where, after arduous combat lasting nearly one day, he had defeated it.
Yet, he started worrying about the possibility of revenge, and his fear was growing stronger and stronger with every passing day. He knew that old snakes usually lived in couples and that when one of them was killed, the other would try its best to avenge its death. Since his childhood he had heard horrible stories about vengeance of the cobra.
For that reason, he couldn’t have more than a moment of sleep before he’d see a snake, or sometimes more than one. He would envision them jumping at him shrieking with laughter, their necks spurting out hot streams of blood. Sometimes, he would see a huge white cobra chasing after him before sliding all over him. Once he dreamt of the dead snake’s mate coiling itself into a dark corner of his house as though getting ready to attack him.
To ease his mind, he had labourers clear the hill behind his hut of trees and plants. Every hole was filled with stone or brick, and he walled up the French troops’ old quarters.
That night he thought he would be able to sleep soundly; nevertheless, a few minutes after he had fallen asleep he woke with a start, thinking he heard commotion around him: the sound of creatures crawling over dead leaves, the clangs of falling objects and especially the hissing of a reptile outside. Getting up, he grabbed a sickle and placed it beside him on the bed. Over the past few weeks, he had been putting weapons like machetes and sticks in every corner of the house.
Soon he was losing sleep for nights on end. His house, his pride and joy, had become a burden to him. Although it was always under lock and key, he was beset with fear. A few nights, he stayed at school with some of the teaching staff, drowning his fear in alcohol, but when he dozed off he still saw a snake head beside him. He screamed so loudly that his colleagues woke up panic-stricken.
Spirits and lack of sleep only made him feel worse.
One evening, he lay and hugged his wife, comforted by her familiar smell. Suddenly he thought he saw the roof buckle as two huge snakes chased each other on top of it. One of them, whose neck was torn apart, was the very snake he had killed before. He arose and stared at his wife’s neck. There was nothing different about it.
On another evening, a fit of fear drove him out of bed. He seized the sickle and darted into the garden waving it. In the emptiness and silence, he stopped running and shouted wildly. He looked around, eyes in tears. When his wife found him, she burst into tears and tried to take him back to bed. A chill ran along his spine. A strange noise seemed to be following him. He turned back in despair, dropped his sickle and waited for the monster’s appearance.
"Damn you! Kill me! Kill me now!" he shrieked. His body drooped like a fallen plant, and his wife tried to drag him into their hut.
Half a year had passed and the giant reptile had not turned up yet. Indeed, it never came, until one morning, when his wife got up to find him sitting motionless and breathless by the door, still gripping the pointed sickle in his cold hands.
Translated by Van Minh
đọc bản Việt ngữ : VÔ ẢNH CỪU
© Tác Giả Giữ Bản Quyền.
