Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  One of the officers pointed at Austin with his machine gun, grinning in a mocking way as he said something to make his partner laugh. El gabacho mas guacho. Hustler. Austin wiped his lips with his hand as he worried about whether they would question him, but they continued their search. When they found a quarter-pound of Chato’s personal redhair rolled into a newspaper under the large cooler in the kitchen, filled with beer, they hesitated, looking almost apologetically at Chato and Tiphaine. The police didn’t even bother with the handcuffs as they led Chato and Tiphaine across the sand toward the police car parked in the street, where kids had stopped their baseball game to peer through the fence at what was happening.

  “Find Olivia,” Tipahine said to Austin as they passed him, the desperation clear in her voice. “She has to tell Luz what’s happened. And Sebastian –” But she couldn’t bring herself to finish her sentence.

  “M’ijo,” Chato said, calling out for Austin. “I’ll call you when I know about the fine.”

  But Austin knew Chato and Tiphaine didn’t have any money. Whatever hadn’t gone up her nose, Chato had spent on women; any amount would be too much.

  That night and all of the next day, Austin waited by the phone at El Principe, his bag packed for Arizona and waiting by his side. When the phone finally rang, he found it hard to breathe, the fear catching in his throat. His hand trembled when he picked up the receiver. What could he say to Tiphaine to comfort her?

  She told him about the heat in the cells, the bedbugs. Each word was a thin, unsteady soprano more whispered than spoken, airy as a desert and just as empty. “I, I don’t know about things anymore,” she said.

  “How much does he want?”

  “He wants too much.”

  The words barbed his heart and wouldn’t let go. They made him wonder how things could have been different. If she was rid of Chato and free of all that madness. If she kept herself clean. He could have kept her happy, could have kept her and Sebastian safe. And maybe if he stayed in Honduras just a little longer, he still could.

  As Tiphaine listened to Austin reassure her that he would ask his parents for a loan or offer the commandante information in exchange for her freedom, she thought back to being with Chato in the police car. How he’d turned to her across the back seat, looking at her with confusion the way he had once before, when he’d caught her snorting his personal stash. She knew he’d wanted to shout at her, but, instead, he’d touched her lips with his fingers and said nothing. Just gazed at her, his eyes so strange then, as if he were trying to slice her open, to discover what part of her was still his and what part he had lost. A person will grab anything to stop himself from falling, Tiphaine had thought, even the edge of a knife.

  It wasn’t catching him with Marie that made her do what she did next. Tiphaine’s love for Chato was too much for one person to bear; she’d never been able to carry its weight. Maybe you had to push yourself away from a love like that. And Sebastian, her beautiful boy, he didn’t need her falling; her getting up only to fall back down again. He was still young enough to forget and to move on without them.

  She told Austin what he already suspected: “There is no money. The commandante wants $5,000 American and there is no money.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  HER VIETNAMESE BOYFRIEND

  “Thank you,” Herr Müller said, as Elke poured coffee into his cup. “It smells good and strong.”

  Elke smoothed her hands over her starched white apron before taking it off and folding it over the back of her chair – proud she’d passed this test, made coffee the way his wife would make it. She felt her cheeks flush, so she lowered her gaze and let it settle on the braided rug on the kitchen floor.

  “You don’t always have to wear your uniform,” Herr Müller said. “You could wear some of my wife’s clothes. She’s the same size as you.”

  Joachim groaned.

  “Mama has pretty dresses,” Daniel said. “My favourite is the one with swirls.”

  “What do you know?” Berbyl said.

  When Elke first arrived at the Müller farm, she had expected babies she could carry like baskets and toddlers who’d cling to her shirt, not this: Daniel, five and feral, with elderberry twigs in his hair and pockets she had to empty nightly of feathers and dead beetles; and Berbyl, who was twelve, surly, and standoffish. How many times had Elke tried to draw the girl out of her room, where she sat all day playing with paper cut-outs of maids and kings she had drawn herself?

  Then there was fifteen-year-old Joachim. Only four years younger than Elke, he was raw boned and sharp-eyed and clutched his fork with large, awkward hands he had not yet grown into, though he seemed emboldened by their new size. His brown sloping gaze made her skin burn, as if he could see through her uniform – all her nerves torn loose beneath. He had his father’s eyes, and they reminded her of the eyes on the deer Herr Müller’s wife had painted on the china plates decorating the buffet.

  “Why does she get everything?” Berbyl yelled suddenly.

  Herr Müller flashed his daughter a withering glance.

  “It’s not fair, why don’t I get letters?”

  “You need to write letters to get letters,” he said. “Who do you write letters to?”

  “But I don’t care about that!”

  Elke gripped the edge of her seat.

  “Go to your room.” Herr Müller’s voice sounded strained by the effort to keep it steady.

  Berbyl glared at her father as she got up from the table and scraped her chair across the floor. As she walked past Elke she leaned over and hissed into her ear, “You’d look worse than anyone in Mama’s dresses.”

  The day Elke had arrived on the farm, Berbyl circled the room they’d newly made up for her – fresh slivers still ringed the screw holes around the hasp latch Herr Müller had put on the door for Elke’s benefit. Elke felt bad for Berbyl. Under her overalls, her body was already pear-shaped. And such thick glasses! Maybe she could braid the girl’s hair. They could talk and share secrets the way she and her sisters did.

  “What a room!” Berbyl had said. “I’d like to sleep in here sometimes, can I?”

  “Let our visitor get settled,” her father said. “Come, Berbyl.”

  “It’s okay,” Elke said. “She can help me unpack.”

  After her father left, Berbyl sat at the edge of the bed, her feet dangling above the floor.

  Elke moved the frame with Da-Nhât’s picture to make room for her hairbrush and hand mirror on the night stand. “Do you have a boyfriend?” Elke asked. Then she wondered if it was unprofessional to ask so personal a question.

  “All the boys in my class like Annette Schnorr, because her mother makes nice cookies, and she’s very kind. It doesn’t matter. I just eat my lunch alone.”

  Elke pictured her on a bench, head down, stones at her feet. Her next question would be more professional. “You must have friends?”

  Berbyl shrugged. “Not really. No one likes the games I play.”

  “What kind of games do you play?”

  “I like to pretend. I like to play pretend games.”

  Berbyl was nothing like Elke’s own sisters. For Berbyl, being sent to her room was more relief than punishment. She was just a child, prone to tantrums at that, but not for the first time Elke wondered how different the children were when their mother was around.

  “Who’s the letter from?” Joachim asked, interrupting Elke’s thoughts. “Your boyfriend?”

  A letter? Perhaps from Da-Nhât to ask why she hadn’t yet responded to his proposal. She’d sent him a letter a few days ago – surely it hadn’t already arrived.

  Herr Müller shook his head in reprimand at Joachim. “Yes, right. After lunch. Don’t let me forget to give it to you. It came today.”

  Joachim speared two more sausages from the serving dish. A lock of hair fell over one eye as he looked at his father. “You realize you ask Elke about Mama’s clothes every
single day.”

  Herr Müller chuckled nervously. “Not to give,” he said. “To borrow.”

  “My uniform is fine,” Elke said. She’d been tempted to say yes to Herr Müller’s offer every day these three weeks she’d been at the farm, because she owned only two dresses of her own that were not handed down from a sister.

  “Mama and you are not the same size,” Daniel piped in. “Mama’s tummy is fatter. She has a baby growing in there.”

  Herr Müller smiled sadly as he rumpled Daniel’s hair. “You miss Mama, don’t you?”

  She was about to ask Daniel whether he wanted a baby brother or sister, but stopped because she wasn’t supposed to discuss private matters with the family – such a question might be seen as too intimate. She hadn’t even been told the details of Frau Müller’s convalescence.

  “I don’t miss Mama,” Daniel said. “I like Elke. She has long eyelashes.”

  Every night Daniel would cry for his mother, and every night she would stroke his cocoon-white hair and sing “Sleep Child Sleep” until he drifted off. Later, as she tiptoed out of Daniel’s room so the wooden floorboards wouldn’t creak, Elke’s stomach would flutter as she recalled how a state employee named Ute had once filled her own mother’s absence in her family’s home like a prosthetic limb, after her mother had the cancer in her ovaries removed. She’d forgotten whether her mother had gone to the convalescence spa in Schandau or Marienburg or Tölz, but she remembered how, when they were alone, Ute would speak to her almost like a sister.

  Now Elke was such a worker. Someone to rock Daniel to sleep, wash the family clothes, cook, clean, and take her place opposite Herr Müller at the table, sitting in his wife’s chair.

  After they finished eating, Joachim watched Elke clear the dishes, patting his lips with the cloth napkin she’d ironed that morning. He placed the napkin on the table then cracked his knuckles, trying to discomfort her.

  The first day, Joachim had come to her room with his father to see how she was settling in. Joachim held a feather blanket in his arms.

  As she thanked him and placed the blanket at the foot of her bed, Herr Müller noticed the pictures she’d brought from home: one of John F. Kennedy that hung on the wall, one of Jesus, and on the nightstand, in a small black frame, one of Da-Nhât sitting astride his Lambretta scooter in front of the business building at the Sorbonne, wearing a slim tie and a suit with narrow lapels, his hair wavy and pomaded so that he looked like the French New Wave actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.

  Joachim had leaned over to take a closer look at the photo. “Nice bike.”

  Continuing to unpack, she told them about how she had met Da-Nhât through a magazine for pen pals, and how they were learning English together. How he lived in Paris now, but had lived everywhere. How he was from Vietnam and very avant-garde, and how one day they might even get married and move to America.

  When she had stopped talking, Herr Müller raised his eyebrows, a grin playing about his lips. On the surface, Joachim’s smile didn’t change, but there was a tension in the skin of his forehead, a minute tightening in his jaw. He pulled his earlobe and stared at an imaginary spot past her shoulder, unable to meet her gaze. Moments in which no one said a word ticked by, until the silence was finally broken by the crack of Joachim’s knuckles.

  Now Joachim again cracked his knuckles while she dropped dirty plates into the soapy dish water.

  Though her back was to him, she could feel Joachim’s eyes tracking her movements and, imagining them, she became so flustered she almost dropped a cup. A swirl of coffee floated to the surface of the water and then vanished. What was she doing?

  Not until Herr Müller brought her the letter he’d mentioned did she realize she’d forgotten to put her apron back on. There was gravy spattered down the front of her uniform; she’d have to scrub it and hope it would be dry enough to wear in the morning.

  She rubbed the plates with a cloth and tried to picture herself somewhere else, ordering dinner at a restaurant in New York, maybe, with her hair done up in a chignon and silk stockings on her feet. In America. The word melted in her mouth like chocolate.

  As soon as she was finished with the dishes, she hurried to her room to read the letter. She could see Herr Müller from her window walking toward the barn, Joachim and Daniel flagging behind, tossing the cat back and forth like a sack of flour between them.

  Elke’s room was next to the storage shed, where she imagined potatoes grew eyes in the dark while the apples softened. Reaching for the letter in her apron, she noticed the key to her padlock was missing. She was sure she had left it in her apron’s front pocket.

  Being unable to lock herself in for privacy unsettled her, not that she believed someone would intrude, but because the lock and its key reminded her of how she’d felt in Da-Nhât’s hotel room that first time. Away from the noise of the two-bedroom apartment she shared with her parents and five siblings, with a place to finally call her own.

  She had bought the lock shortly after she’d arrived at the Müllers’. Joachim had knocked on her door and leaned against the doorframe, his arm blocking the threshold. He hadn’t spoken two words to her since she’d arrived, and now he stood peering past her into her bedroom.

  “My father’s having a friend over and they’ll be drinking tonight,” he said, “You’d better stay in here.”

  The way his hand was planted on the doorframe, his shadow falling across the floor of her room, suddenly made her wish she was back home in Rendsburg.

  All through her training at the Evangelical School for Home Care, she’d yearned for a posting with her own room. Now she missed the crowded apartment, and her family, and the drab, factory-smogged, military-barracked city – even the loathsome market where she shopped for groceries week in and week out, with its buckets of churning eels stinking in the rain.

  That night Herr Müller and his friend had pounded their beer steins on the table, singing like alley cats, their voices rising and falling where they pleased, “Thoughts are free, who can guess them? No man can know them, no hunter can shoot them.”

  The next day she’d walked into town and bought a fashion magazine, a chocolate bar, and a padlock from the hardware store.

  No one, not even Herr Müller, knew she had the lock. But now the key was gone.

  With nothing to be done about the missing key for now, she pulled the letter from her apron and was disappointed to see the letter was postmarked Rendsburg. It wasn’t from Da-Nhât, but from her mother.

  Along with news about how her brother Gerhard had managed his janitorial exams, her mother had sent her the Evangelical School’s new brochure, which included a photograph of her leaning studiously over a table full of books and binders. How ridiculous. She’d been the least academic of all the students, always afraid a teacher would cross-examine her, doubting her own intellect.

  In the last letter she had received from Da-Nhât before leaving for the Müller farm, he had written, “How interesting my friends in Vietnam would think me to be, to have a German banking position and a German wife.” Was it a proposal? She’d looked up nearly every word of his letter in a German-English dictionary, but she still couldn’t be sure.

  She slumped further down on her cot and ran her hands over the duck-down blanket. John F. Kennedy stared at her from the wall. She’d fallen in love with him when he said the words, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and she had cried for two weeks when he died, even though she wasn’t political. In fact, she was awed by students like those demonstrating in Paris. They knew things she didn’t. She knew small things: how rain fell on a North Sea wave; how her mother looked when she wore her blue suit to church, her waist as trim as a paintbrush; how a purple fig tasted when plucked, encrusted in sugar, from a vendor’s cart in the evening.

  “Do you know they gave me the best blanket in the house?”

  JFK nodded and said, “I know.”

  She turned from JFK to her picture of Jesus. “I’m a selfish girl, aren’t I? And I miss my
mother.”

  After putting her mother’s letter under her pillow, Elke walked down the hall to Herr Müller’s bedroom to dust and polish, as she did every day. The room was spare but tidy: an armoire, a chest of drawers, a bed with a handmade spread, a dresser with an oval mirror, on top of which stood a basin and a pitcher decorated with the same deer painted on the china in the kitchen.

  The wooden crib that usually stood by the bed had been moved to beneath the window, and there were two woollen socks and a pair of work pants hanging from the railing. She suspected Herr Müller had pushed it against the wall to make more space for himself until his wife came home. Yesterday, she had plucked two well-thumbed Goethe books from where they rested on the white eyelet cover. Yes, the family needed her to keep things tidy until the baby arrived. She picked up the socks and pants and put them by the door to wash later.

  As she dusted, she hummed a song, her thoughts circling around to Herr Müller’s wife, Sigrid. Did she sing while she worked? Were they Pentecostal hymns like the ones Elke sang or Catholic ones? Did Catholics sing? Elke wondered.

  She dusted the crib railings and smoothed the quilt; she dusted the mirror of the dresser, then its wooden surface. On the dresser sat a small soapbox. She held it to her nose and breathed in the scent of flowers, dying and sweet. Was this the scent that lingered in the air by the sink when Sigrid was home?

  She opened the box and saw a hat pin, a silver broach, a heart-shaped pendant, and four pairs of earrings, clip-ons and pierced. No one Elke knew had pierced ears. Her mother said earrings were for Jezebels.

  Elke held a pair of pearl-drop earrings to her face and marvelled at how they caught the sunlight. She clipped on one and then the other, stroking her hair behind her ears to get a better look at herself in the mirror, wondering if she looked like a Parisian woman. Then she noticed something else at the bottom of the soap box; she’d seen her brother use cigarette papers before, but these were pink.