Anson Cameron
Bên ngoài cửa của lăng mộ Hồ Chí Minh tại Hà Nội, một người đàn ông cầu xin được phép đánh bóng giày cho tôi . Ông chải không khí cho thấy tôi làm thế nào sẽ được thực hiện. Tôi giải thích. "Rõ ràng bạn không thể đánh bóng." Tuy nhiên, ông kiên quyết, như thể là một ngọn núi để leo lên. Làm thế nào để một người đàn ông bị mất một cánh tay? Ông ấy có là một trong những binh sĩ chiến đấu trong chiến tranh chống Mỹ? Nếu vậy, ông chống lại binh lính nước ngoài rôì chỉ để đánh bóng giày của họ sao.
Đây là nơi ông Hô` Chí Minh đọc Tuyên ngôn Độc lập năm 1945 của Việt Nam, từ Tuyên ngôn Hoa Kỳ độc lập được thực hiện vào năm 1776. Tất cả mọi người được tạo ra bằng nhau ... quyền bất khả xâm phạm nhất định ... vân vân.
Lăng mộ ông Hồ là một Pantheon khổng lồ bằng đá theo mô hình trên ngôi mộ của Lenin. Ông nằm trong một khuôn khổng lồ với bức tường kính. Ở trên đầu ở một bên treo cờ của nước Cộng hoà xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam, mặt khác, búa và liềm...
Nếu cộng sản đã giữ lơì hưá của mình để phục vụ ngươì dân, thay vì giai cấp trên, thì nhân dân ngày nay không cần xêp´ hàng xem xác ươp´ của lảnh tụ và ngươì nghèo cụt tay phải tim cách chùi giày cho ngoại quốc .
"Tôi đánh bóng tôi đánh bóng.", Ông thúc giục. "Xin vui lòng, có một số tiền." Ông quỳ trước mặt tôi và đặt túi xách của mình. OK, tôi cho.
Du khách dừng lại để chụp những bức ảnh của giao dịch điên này. "Nhìn xem, Shirley. Một người Úc trả cho một anh chàng để làm hỏng giày của mình."
....
An audience with Uncle Ho
April 2, 2011
Anson Cameron witnesses the cult of personality at a mausoleum in Hanoi.
Outside the gates of the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Hanoi, a one-armed man pleads to be allowed to polish my Dunlop Volleys. He brushes the air back and forth above them, showing me how it will be done. "They're canvas," I explain. "Clearly you can't polish these." Still, he eyes them determinedly, as if they are a mountain to climb. How does a man lose an arm? Was he one of Ho's soldiers? Did he fight in the American War? If so he's been badly served by victory; pitting his life against foreign soldiers daily, only to end up polishing their shoes.
As I join the kilometre-long queue to see Uncle Ho, the one-armed shoe-shiner and all the street-hawkers and hustlers fall away, forbidden to work in this sacred place. The day is sodden with heat, and Vietnamese women wear surgical masks so the sun doesn't darken their skin. Cameras and bottled water are confiscated by guards. Young soldiers in white dress uniforms stand close and glower, leeching frivolity and imbuing us with the solemnity an audience with the great man demands. The queue shuffles wetly, gasping, unsmiling.
This is the place H o Ch i Minh read Vietnam's Declaration of Independence in 1945 when the French were readying to return. He filched its opening lines from his memory of the United States Declaration of Independence made in 1776. All men are created equal ... certain inalienable rights ... et cetera. Within 20 years he was fighting that country (and ours) for independence. He beat the French but didn't live to see America defeated. Though he died in 1969, it can be rightly said the victory was his. For he had lived and learnt in the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union before returning to Vietnam to lead the independence movement.
Ho's mausoleum is a monstrous Soviet parthenon of dark stone modelled on Lenin's tomb. Finally stepping inside it from the Hanoi heat and horn blast, the air is so chilled you wouldn't be surprised to see frosty carcasses hanging from hooks. The queue shuffles along a corridor of black stone into darkness and enters the great room in which Ho waits. He lies inside an enormous black casement with glass walls. He is simply dressed, rudely spotlit, half-sunk in silk, his face and hands yellowing.
Above his head on one side hangs the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; on the other, the hammer and sickle. Strange to see the old paymasters and architects of global communism represented here, now the Russians have given up on the revolution and taken to tooling about on jet-skis and owning English football clubs.
We are prodded along by guards and made to file around the casement quickly, as if Ho is an illusion that can survive only limited scrutiny. Perhaps he is. The embalming was done by Soviet doctor Sergei Debrov and took a year to complete. Apparently, the Soviet embalmers still guard their formula as jealously as Coca-Cola does its recipe. They needn't, because it is not perfected and certainly no antidote to time. Ho's hair looks too coarse and his ears waxy. It is said at one time his nose had rotted away and his beard had fallen out. They are back now but Ho's face is greasily sheened and looks no more real than characters at Madame Tussauds.
Most disconcertingly, he looks too big. All footage and photography show a small man. Perhaps it is the light, the occasion, the waiting, the reverent hush but he looks to have grown in death, as though hagiographers with bike pumps were at work.
Pushed along by the guards, we are out of Ho's presence quickly. Back in the daylight, I see my scepticism is not widely shared. Many of the Vietnamese are gravely composed, some are crying quietly. Any grandee lying in public state for only 40 years is a mere pup among the immortals and must be understood to have a tenuous hold on the office. As the world's politics changes, so does the man in the mausoleum and you can't be embalmed against that. Mao's tenure in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square is said to be coming to an end. Leading intellectuals in China have said "the time has come for this absurd devotion to finish". And where is Stalin now, who once lifelessly kept a lifeless Lenin company? Whisked away to an obscure grave among minor leaders of the revolution in the shadow of the Kremlin wall. An embalmed exile without even the promise of decay to put an end to his indignity.
But a cult of personality still surrounds Uncle Ho in Vietnam. His face is on every banknote and many public buildings. Watching the Vietnamese people in Uncle Ho's presence, you know he is safe for now.
On the way out of the compound, we visit the old house where Uncle Ho used to live. On his garage is a sign that reads: "H o Chi Minh 'S USED CARS", as if the old boy owned a second-hand lot and sold lemons to suckers. Inside the garage sit two clunky Soviet vehicles and a dowdy Peugeot. No open-top Mercedes 770k for Uncle Ho. Looking at these underwhelming motors, I realise that here, as much as anywhere else, is the clue to the real H CM. No totalitarian chariot in this garage, just three old bangers. This is why he lives on in the hearts of his people.
Still, if communism had lived up to its promise to serve the workers rather than an overclass, the people of Vietnam wouldn't be queuing to see a Great Man in a mausoleum now. Vietnamese mausoleums would contain an embalmed proletariat lying in frosty legion for the living to visit. Instead, the proletariat waits at the gate, one-armed, needing work, still eyeing off my sneakers.
"I polish. I polish," he urges. "No. Please, take some money." But to offer the man money is to set the deal in motion. He kneels before me and puts down his bag. OK, I give in .
Tourists stop to snap photos of this crazy transaction. "Look there, Shirley. Look. Damned if it ain't an Aussie paying a one-armed dude to ruin his shoes." Ho's Unknown Warrior applies black polish and works briskly with rag, then brush, at my Volleys, heading towards some result that will satisfy him that his end of an honourable bargain has been upheld.
His is a modest private enterprise. And it will never run short of customers as long as Uncle Ho lies in waxy splendour, worshipped as the creator of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/an-audi...331-1cn0h.html
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