by Paul Yoon
“It’s just you?”
“Just me,” Marta said. “Yves died, years ago. He lived long enough to be perpetually annoyed by the hippie campers, as he called them. He missed the clinic. It was more his nature. Our perpetual doctor. The man who once wanted, when he was told he was sick, to operate on himself, convinced he would be able to cure himself. Stubborn, cocky fool, that Seabird. Did you know his brother?”
“I didn’t know he had a brother.”
Marta lowered her eyes and then tapped the table. She said that it was his house they were working in and stuck in. The children. Alisak. Prany. They were stuck because the Americans had bombed the main roads to cut off the advance of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese through the Plain of Jars. The only ways in and out were through small routes in the valley that they had to make for themselves.
“With the motorbikes,” Khit said.
“He was happy there,” Marta said. “Alisak. He admitted that to me one day. He said it like it was a great secret. I think a great part of him was ashamed to think that. It was wartime. How old is your boy?”
“Eight.”
“They were sixteen, seventeen. They were still just children. Children hired to help others survive a war… It’s hard for me to imagine… Forgive me. I was talking about Yves’s brother. He fled in the middle of the war, but he left everything behind at the house. All his furniture and art. They were estranged, the brothers, so we never knew where he went. I think out of everyone he was the most broken of them all. I think he harmed others, but Yves was never sure. Or didn’t want to know.”
“Harmed?”
“I think the broken break. He was in the Second World War. Like my parents. And he survived it like them, and then he spent years living how he did across the world in that valley. Yves was too young for that war. So he was at home, here, in Canigou. He would go for long walks and get lost so that one of his parents or a farmer had to go find him.”
“My son,” Khit said. “He had a dream last week that he found a cave up in a mountain and he asked me in the morning what happened if you left a dream you wanted to stay in. I didn’t know the answer to that, but I told him to keep thinking of it and maybe he would find the cave again on a future night. I just realized that I don’t know if in his dream he went back to the cave. And I never asked if in the dream he was ever afraid. I think I am always afraid and don’t know that I am.”
“You said ‘afraid’ earlier.”
“That it will end. That it will all go away. That I am back in an abandoned house starving and exhausted, pleading with a stranger to take me with him. Or I am back in those years before, unable to walk anywhere, my legs trembling, terrified of where to step, not knowing if I’ll trigger a bomb that could take out my feet or shoot up into my groin and up my torso and come out of my mouth as though I had spit it out… afraid to walk anywhere, but sometimes having to do more than walk because someone has seen you and wants to talk to you, looks at you that way and promises he has food or clothes or whatever they say… Tell me where Alisak is.”
The telephone began to ring in the other room. They stayed where they were across from each other at the table, not moving until the ringing stopped.
“If it’s important, they’ll leave a message,” Marta said.
“I left you a message.”
“You did. And I called you back.”
Khit nodded. “In New York City once, I overheard a man talking to himself at a pay phone. This was in Jackson Heights. I was probably sixteen.”
“A block from Javi,” Marta said.
“That’s right.” She said the man was speaking Lao. Other than her parents, Khit hadn’t heard it in months. They didn’t see a lot of Lao or Hmong in the neighborhood. She rushed up to him, this man at the pay phone, and asked if he knew anyone in France, and if he did, whether he could send along a message. She said Alisak’s name. She didn’t remember his face but she remembered his shoelaces were untied. She gave the man her apartment telephone number and her address, in case he heard. The man asked if she had any spare change for the phone and Khit gave him the coins in her pocket.
“Later,” Khit said, “coming home from school, I found the same man in front of my apartment door, banging loudly. No one was home; my parents were working. A neighbor was peering out, quietly watching. A Korean woman who worked at the wash and fold. I remember a red dish towel always draped over her shoulder. She spotted me and motioned me to hurry into her apartment. Which I did. Then the two of us peered out and watched as this man kept banging on the door, yelling that he was given this address because it was his new home, his now, to please let him in, because the girl who had been living here was dead.”
Khit grew silent. Now she heard footsteps upstairs. Marta did, too. Together, they listened as the sound became louder and came down into the open space, Khit utterly convinced there was someone else in the house.
But it wasn’t anyone at all; it was Marta’s dog.
“How did you get back in?” Marta said. She opened the door to let the dog out again and they watched as it trotted into the distance, moving from field to field.
“Is Alisak alive?” Khit said, looking outside.
“Oh, I have no doubt.”
* * *
Seeing the dog made her miss the strays in Phonsavan. There were days when Khit remembered them more clearly than anyone she ever knew or any one person she tried to get money from or stole from or was hiding from. How those animals would hook their heads over her knee as she sat, all of them tired and dehydrated but keeping her company. Their patience as she attempted to untangle their matted fur or wipe their paws, knowing it wouldn’t matter as soon as they bounded off to their alleys and corners.
What did dogs remember? She spent four years on the streets with them convinced they remembered her from when her father, who had given up hiding, with almost nothing left in him, brought her to the border of what was left of the woods and told her to hide behind a tree as a Pathet Lao truck approached. The dogs there sentineled around the trunk as though already sensing the future before she could.
“You didn’t leave the town after,” Prany had said, when they were together in the farmhouse. She had told him about her father. Whatever fire had been in Prany when they met had suddenly vanished in that moment. She sensed a vacancy in him. It terrified her at first, as though she were blind in the dark, as though it would also happen to her one day, but she had reached for him instead. She would always remember that. Five seconds where she held his limp hand beside a piano, the two of them on their knees, looking down at a floor covered with objects he had taken from the dead.
“Be good,” her father had said that day as the military truck approached and he moved away from the tree and the strays. “I won’t be long.”
Where would she have gone?
She and her father had been on their own for so long that Khit knew no other world. Prany she knew for only two nights. In two nights, Prany helped her do what she couldn’t do herself after her father vanished. And all these years later, walking up to a house in southern France, past a rotting bench and a tree, Khit remained unsure why Prany had helped at all, unsure whether she would ever find an answer. She kept seeing him slip a doctor’s coat on her shoulders and brush dirt off the lapel. Then the shadow of him behind a window as she turned once to look back at him and never did again.
When the door opened and she followed Marta inside, she spotted the piano in the far corner, identical to the one in the farmhouse in the Plain of Jars, and breathless, Khit almost ran to it.
* * *
There was a knock. The man who had been washing his hair was standing in front of the house. He asked if there was more coffee for the barn kitchen. Turning to Khit, Marta said that she would be right back and accompanied the man down to the barn, carrying a box of provisions.
For the first time since she had arrived, Khit was alone. The solitude in the new place made her shy. She remained by the table, th
en moved again to the piano. Then, when Marta didn’t return, she wandered the house, shaking off the stillness in her body as she explored and tried to imagine a life here: Marta’s, Yves’s, Alisak’s. The books and the small television in an office down a short, wallpapered hall. Two cans of paint stacked on top of each other in a corner. A flower vase was drying, upside down, by the sink, and there was a large colorful painting of hills hanging on the kitchen wall.
At the camp, her new future, her parents’ futures, all of them, had been determined by a single sponsorship. They had been waiting to go anywhere. Now she wondered how different the days would have been in a place like this. She wouldn’t have learned English. She would have never met Javi. There would be no Philip.
There were four rooms upstairs. She tried to guess which one had been Alisak’s, but was unable to. They seemed anonymous to her. Whether that was because of the years or intentional, she couldn’t say. All the beds were made. Each room had a dresser and a closet and an empty vase on the nightstand. She guessed the room with clothes on a chair was Marta’s and avoided it, then went in. There were some old photos, photos of Marta’s parents, she thought. She sat on the edge of the bed. The room smelled of herbs.
“Alisak is on the right. I am on the left.”
Marta was leaning against the bedroom door. Khit apologized, getting up, but Marta ignored her and gave her a photograph. The photo was of three people leaning against a seawall. The tall one in the middle with his arms over the other two. Marta said it was taken in 1970, the summer.
In the photo, Marta, young, was standing with one foot up behind her as she scratched an itch on her calf. Her hair wild in the wind and her eyes nearly invisible. Even then she had a moat around her. But the camera focused on the tall one. It was impossible not to. He swallowed them and the sea behind them. It was the way he stood there, knowing that he did. He was someone who didn’t know how to be alone. And Alisak was on the right, leaning into the man, shy of whoever was taking the photograph, of perhaps all of them, but not uncomfortable as something out of the frame caught his attention. More handsome than she had imagined, and in that moment when the camera clicked, sure of himself.
As she kept looking at the photograph, Khit sensed the environment between the two of them shifting. Marta seemed to relax. Perhaps it was because it was her own room. As though Marta were shedding something—that moat. She spoke more softly now:
“He called us his motley crew. His ragged bunch. He said that a lot. Yves. It used to make Alisak smile. His motley crew, his ragged bunch. He was the country doctor, Yves. We were essentially his nurse practitioners. About five of us. It was a clinic for the farmers in the area. Mostly it was for treating broken bones and stitching up cuts. Though on occasion a gunshot victim would come in, his arm filled with pellets. It was often a family quarrel of some kind, though they would claim it was a hunting accident. Two brothers trying to kill each other over an animal, property, maybe a girl. Yves kept the clinic going for as long as he could. He almost went broke. It was his family home, as I mentioned. Where he grew up. Him and his brother. Shall we head back down?”
She took the photo back from Khit and they returned downstairs. The tape recorder was still there on the center of the table. Khit turned it back on.
“You never told me what happened to him,” Khit said. “The brother.”
Marta didn’t know. Yves didn’t either. The brother disappeared. But Yves knew some of the staff at the farm who had worked for him, Marta said. Some of them ended up staying when the war reached that area, fighting or working for a doctor over there whose name she couldn’t remember. Alisak only mentioned him once. But that was how Yves got word of what was happening at his brother’s house. Of what was happening to the country.
“That would have been before they were at the house,” Khit said. “The kids.”
“The truth was that he was trying to get the people he knew out,” Marta said. It had taken too long. Years. They all died or, like Yves’s brother, disappeared. Then Yves heard there were teenagers there working as nurses, so he decided to sponsor them and try to bring them over. That was how we met Karawek. She had been living here already in Marseille.
“What was she doing in Marseille?” Khit said.
“She’s a painter! Landscapes. There is one in the kitchen.”
Then Marta told her that for a long time, Alisak didn’t leave the property. He needed the borders of it. Like a coat to wear. But that it was Karawek who first convinced him to come out with them on the weekends. So she would arrive with her fingernails stained with oils and drive all of them to the coast. She always brought her camera along.
“Alisak was uncertain of all that water that wasn’t a river,” Marta said. “Where there wasn’t a far bank. He would wade in and hurry back to the beach, not wanting to go farther in. I was the opposite. I wanted to swim out for as long as I could. I would keep going, and when I couldn’t feel my limbs, I would stop and see him in the distance, waiting for me on the beach, as though afraid I would just keep going.
“You know, Yves had a soft spot for him. Because, I think, of his own estranged brother. As though Alisak had carried here some of his brother’s house in him. Supposedly, there were three of them trapped in that eccentric house in the Plain of Jars. The girl died. They lost track of the other one. That must be Prany. So tell me. What happened to him? And who was the girl?”
“The girl was Prany’s sister,” Khit said. “They called her Noi.”
It had been Auntie who had told her about Noi. It was on the night Auntie helped Khit cross into Thailand. As they walked through the Plain of Jars, the woman kept talking to pass the time. Khit realized only years later that Auntie had been expecting Prany to be there beside her. But it was Khit. He had paid instead for Khit.
I’ll come visit, Auntie said, and for the second time in her life someone older than her said words she wanted to believe but knew were not true. They crossed the valley and then she was placed in the back of the van and was driven away toward the border to Thailand. She remembered the weight of the doctor’s coat she was wearing that someone would steal from her in forty-eight hours. And Auntie waving. The small figure of this woman by the side of the road.
“But you see,” Khit said. “She did come visit. Every week, she came to the camp. She kept her promise. On occasion bringing somebody else, a terrified orphan child clinging to her as she entered the camp. How she always spent the night. How she always checked in on me. How we talked.”
“Who was the first?” Marta said. “The first who said something to you that you wanted to believe, but knew was not true?”
“My father. My first father.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said that he wouldn’t be long.”
* * *
Later, Marta asked if Khit had ever gone to the hospital during the war. She poured them wine and brought out olives. She lit a cigarette and slid the pack across, tapping her ash on a teacup tray.
Khit said she hadn’t, but her mother had been taken there. They had been separated. She was with her father, her biological father, looking for her. Both of them unaware that her mother, exhausted and wandering the valley, had stepped on an unexploded cluster bomb.
“One of them drove out, picked her up, and returned to the hospital,” Khit said. “Fast enough so that she didn’t bleed out. Her legs, you see. Her stomach. The shrapnel. They saved her life. Or kept her alive for as long as they could there. Prany told me all this. We were cut off, my father and I. We never saw her again.”
“Noi,” Marta said. “That is a nickname. A common nickname in Laos. It means small, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember a few things from Alisak. But he never spoke of those two. Or rarely. Another ocean he didn’t want to step into. Or didn’t want me to step into. But, he said once that Noi was braver than both of them.”
“You say brave,” Khit said, “and I think of those kids
, those teenagers, driving across minefields all for a little bit of money when, or if, they came back. I think of my biological mother, whom I have no memory of anymore, lying on a cot, and I hope the three of them, Alisak, Prany, and Noi, kept her company.”
Khit looked down at the recorder and then at her hands. They heard a distant airplane and they let it pass.
“Does it ever bother you?” Marta said. “That you live in, and are now a citizen of, the country that bombed your first?”
She said she didn’t think about it as much anymore. She didn’t want to. They got out. They lived.
She said, “I think of my son. What kind of life he will have. Whether he will ride a bicycle or play baseball. Whether he will have a family of his own one day. Whether he will be happy and healthy and safe, and whether he will carry in him the sadness I carry. I think always of my mother, my biological mother, and whether she died alone. I think of Prany and wish he were here. I think of all the stray dogs I left behind and I think of the ghosts.”
“The ghosts?”
“Do you believe in them?”
Marta lit another cigarette. The smoke swirled up toward the ceiling light. She didn’t answer, but told Khit that on Alisak’s first night here, he ran away. Or walked away. She had insomnia. She was outside on the bench. He appeared from the house, went past her, and stopped by the tree. He was facing the clinic, and she thought he was about to walk down the slope. He didn’t see her yet. In the moonlight, he looked so much younger than he was. She had just turned twenty-three. Yves had a birthday party for her the week before and there was a cake stain on her shirt. She had been rubbing it, looking at him, trying to gauge him. Alisak was a stranger to her and yet in that moment he was also like a phantom, spectral, floating across and down.
But he didn’t go down. He turned and walked straight toward her. He was humming something she couldn’t remember now.
“But I remember,” Marta said, “that he took my face in his hands very gently, and I didn’t know what to do. I looked back at him. It was like he wanted me to. And then he walked across a field and began to climb the mountain. I should have, but I didn’t follow him just then. He had frightened me. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to kill me or ask for my help. I looked into his eyes and it was like there was nothing anchoring him. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t look as he climbed. Eventually I went in, tried to sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was light. First light. My favorite hour. When everything feels forgivable. And then I remembered. And I ran. I ran up the mountain trail and, two hours later, I found him at a park ranger station, beside a shed, asleep, curled into himself and nearly frozen.