Anguli Ma

by Chi Vu

  The man tells the monk of the vividness of his visions and memories and dreams. The monk advises him that these are the impurities of the mind, which arise from deep meditation.

  “Do not place attachment to them at this moment. Try to return to the present. So much has happened to each of us.”

  Beyond that, the monk remains silent, because the truly sacred things one does not talk about until the listener is ready. They watch the tea-coloured water glide past under the slender trees, as the brown man rests his sore legs and back.

  Bác

  The old woman locked the door to the studio; the girl had a key so she could get in later. Or if she had forgotten her key, she could knock and Bác would get out of bed to unlock the door for her.

  Bác pulled the woollen blanket over herself and rubbed her legs together to get warm. The studio seemed bigger without Sinh on the other side. The old woman’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and she scanned the partition, made up of cardboard boxes filled with fabric and household items the charities had donated to Đào when she first arrived. A large cardboard still life of fresh fruit covered another part of the partition, and then a curtain.

  Bác slept, and dreamt that her son was calling her from the bottom of the ocean’s body. And no matter how much she tried to bucket the salty water away to reach him, more would rush into the very spot. Her clothes were soaked, and clung heavily to her old thin body.

  When she awoke, she saw that she was in the studio. The light was still on. The old woman didn’t know what time it was. She switched off the light, and then realised as she stood in the dark that the reason the light was still on was because Sinh had not come home.

  With all the troubles their landlady had had, and Đào’s heart drying up like a piece of beef jerky, Sinh had made herself scarce from the house recently. Still, it was unusual for the girl to be out this late, especially on a cold night. Bác eventually fell asleep.

  Her ears brought her attention back to the studio. She heard a female voice speaking methodically and comfortingly. “She is just outside,” the old woman’s hope rose; “It is Sinh, standing outside, trying to be quiet so she won’t wake the landlady up,” the old woman thought.

  “I’m coming, I’ll open the door in one second.” Bác began to rise dully from her bed. She managed to sit up, and had one foot out of bed, when she realised that the female voice had continued talking, over her response.

  “Sinh?”

  The old woman’s mind became attuned to the cadence of the female voice. It was in English, and there were no pauses in her speech. Not a conversation, not a live person standing outside their door, the old woman began to dread.

  Where was Sinh at this time of the night? Who could she be with right now? The Cowboy or someone else? Her alarm pricked her. Bác realised that it was the voice of a radio announcer, floating across from the neighbour’s house. The old man was drinking beer alone with his radio on, in the peaceful night.

  Đào

  She offered more fruit to the Buddha and Ancestors. Buddha’s eyes were serenely downcast, while her dead parents looked out from the photograph as though stunned by the flash from the camera. Đào pressed the thin stems of incense between her palms, and raised them three times to her forehead.

  “Phật ơi, Nam mô a di đà Phật, Buddha please keep me sane. Nam mô a di đà Phật, Buddha keep me sane. Nam mô a di đà Phật, please keep me sane.”

  The smoke was sliced with each gesture by the incense sticks, and dissipated into thin haze. She had tried to calm the old woman down, and perhaps she did do a good job, but now Đào found her hands trembling as she planted the incense sticks in the urn. She stood there, lost. This was the terror of emptiness, of finding herself utterly severed from her ancestral land. Đào looked over to the crucifix, very high up above the door. Jesus’ head drooped heavily to one side, and Đào could not see whether His eyes were closed. Đào did not know whether He was the Son of God or not, as the tall church-people had told her, but maybe He had some influence in this peaceful, rich land, and could pass on her prayers for a future of peace and prosperity.

  Đào planned to keep her own ears and eyes open. She tried to tell her son about it when he came over that weekend with Tuyết. There was an unusual silence between them, as Đào tried to tell Trung her fears, that the girl was missing; that Thảo and others from the hụi group had enlisted the Society-Black after she had lost their money.

  “Where is the girl today?” her son unthinkingly asked, somehow tuning into his mother’s fears.

  “I don’t know where she is…” Đào was about to continue, but then stopped. She tried to pull the words up from her stomach, to throw them from her mouth into the wide world. The pain still lingered. She felt a sickness in her liver that she could not get rid of. If grief was a colour, it was certainly a dirty orange. Her son stood on the edge of the unknown, wanting to ask further.

  “I need to borrow money from you,” Đào said abruptly.

  “How much?” he asked in a careful tone of voice.

  “Bây giờ mày có how much money?” she demanded.

  He shifted uneasily and looked around the cluttered room. “I’ve got enough,” Trung declared, ready to defy her if she was going to berate him for earning so little, for being lazy, for being selfish and wanting to enjoy his life outside the shadow of catastrophe.

  “But you don’t have anything spare, do you? Nothing big saved up for a rainy day.”

  “I’ve got enough to look after my family…” Trung’s voice wavered.

  “Just as I thought,” Đào said, shrinking in her disappointment.

  Finally, Trung gave up. “I’ve got to go, I’ll pick Tuyết up at six.”

  Đào picked up the phone and dialled Thảo’s number. The phone rang and rang and rang out. She listened incredulously and then put the receiver down. She tried to breathe but her chest was heavy. She picked up the phone again and dialled, listening to the regular tone in the earpiece. She counted the rings, then the line cut out at thirty-six. No one home, or Thảo was not answering.

  Tears dripped down Đào’s face, seeped into her warm skin and her clothes. She wiped her cheeks with her fingers. And tried to call again. Another thirty-six and then silence.

  She turned to the horoscope page. It said: If you should search today, then you will find the precious possessions that had been long ago buried or lost.

  A gem of hope sparkled in Đào’s heart, and she dragged herself to the spare room to rummage through all her upended refuse again. The empty cardboard boxes vibrated with the noise from the trucks going past.

  A few of the boxes were wet at the bottom. A thin film of water covered the floor. Đào would have to tie new rags more tightly around the leaky taps, and empty and dry the boxes before the contents began to stink. She rummaged through the clean fabric offcuts from the factory: shoulder panels, collars, arms, legs, reinforcing, front panels, torsos, scooped pockets, looking for the right length and absorbency.

  To her surprise, Đào found an orange-pink embroidered top. A whole one. It looked old-fashioned, but didn’t smell musty; it had the aroma of tropical fruit. She tried to figure out where it had come from, as she held it in her desiccated hands. She traced the patterns of billowing embroidered clouds, and red curls and orange petals, with her pointing finger following the stitching. The needlework was intricate, with tonal changes in the flower petals, the different shades of green on the stems and leaves, and thread of varying colours showed dappled light on the embroidered human figures.

  The phone rang. Could it be Thảo? Đào put the embroidered top aside. She tiptoed slowly down the hallway. Could it be the Cowboy? Or her friends from the migrant hostel days? Đào sat by the phone. Each ring tore into her brain, and the silence between rings seemed to get longer and deeper than the one before it. Could it be Sinh, ringing to let her know where she is?

  Đào snatched the handset. “Allo?”

  An Austra
lian male voice said, “Good afternoon Ma’am, how are you today?”

  “What you want from me?”

  He was taken aback, and after the briefest moment replied, “Ahh, it’s not what I want – it is about what you want,” and told her that she was very lucky to be given a special discount.

  “You have been selected to receive an extremely modern vacuum cleaner worth a hundred dollars, for only two dollars per week, that is, two dollars per week. I know you’re a very intelligent woman, and you’re thinking this is twice as much as the best models in the stores. But this vacuum cleaner is so modern, it is not available through retail outlets. Let me give you the facts: it uses technology to clean triple the amount of dirt, as well as filth that you can’t even see.”

  “Fifth?” Đào asked.

  “Filth, yes, unwanted and unhygienic dirt. Your house will be spotlessly clean and will be the envy of all your friends,” the man on the phone explained.

  “How many weeks paying two dollars?” Đào asked.

  “You would pay two dollars a week for two and a half years.” His voice rose slightly as he corrected her broken English, “You, Mrs Na-gu-Yen, are very fortunate to be selected for this opportunity. This is excellent value to you. We do not make this offer to everybody.”

  Đào pressed her lips together and worked out the maths: 2.5 years was 130 weeks, times 2 equals $260, which was $160 more than what he said the cleaner was worth if she bought it outright. With her calculation, Đào did not feel the least bit invisible, or inadequate, as she told the man on the phone, “Me no-Englit!” and hung up.

  Đào rushed back to the spare room and the embroidered top. In her haste to get to the phone earlier, she had dropped the orange top on the floor, and now the sleeve was wet, deepening the colour of the fabric and embroidery.

  It reminded her of a holiday at the end of school, before she was about to be married. She had felt so womanly as she stood with her girlhood friends on the beach. They were wading out from the shore, to look at the mussels growing under the pier, laughing, and taking in the coastal air at Vũng Tàu.

  She knew for certain now that she did not bring it with her on the boat journey over. The embroidered top had come from Vietnam. That style and workmanship did not exist here. Đào wondered how she had kept it for so long, it would have been after Vũng Tàu, then over twenty years of marriage, then her escape from her homeland as it descended into social and economic chaos.

  She discovered other impossible things in her over-cluttered house:

  children’s socks, her red wedding áo dài, her dead husband’s glasses. Things she did not bring with her to Australia. It was as though they had floated up to the surface from forgotten crevices deep below. Somehow, time had returned to the beginning, as though the past and the present had been shipwrecked against one another.

  Seeing these objects made Đào realise more keenly how she had been reduced. All the things in her house, collected and cluttered together with all of her concentration and effort, had no story or meaning to her. The furniture, the modern appliances, the boxes of clean good scrap fabric, the plastic containers – all evoked nothing inside her.

  She looked for Sinh amongst the impossible objects. For any clue about Sinh’s whereabouts here in Australia.

  Nothing.

  Horrified, Đào decided to incinerate her objects. Despite the pain this separation caused, she hoped that if she returned the impossible things to the past then Sinh could be found.

  Trung

  “Where is grandma?”

  “She’s out in the backyard,” Tuyết answered.

  “It is very cold for grandma to be outside,” Trung said.

  “She’s keeping warm by the fire.”

  “The fire? What fire?” Trung repeated.

  “Grandma is burning her clothes in the steel drum. She poured some smelly water onto the clothes, and I wanted to come out and watch but she yelled at me, and made me to go back inside, but I watched the clothes floating up to the sky as smoke, and then the phone rang, and I ran to pick it up, and it was you, and now we are talking,” his daughter relayed.

  Trung glanced along the cord of the public phone.

  “Hurry and get grandma to come to the phone,” he told his daughter.

  He could hear the creaking of the door, and a slice of traffic rumbling, as he waited for his mother to come in from the backyard.

  “Sao?” his mother answered, as though phone calls were charged by the word.

  “What are you doing? I am not going to let my daughter visit if there are fleas or lice there,” he said quickly.

  “No, it has nothing to do with Tuyết,” then his mother’s voice became distant, “I’m only destroying what should not be here.”

  Trung did not know what this meant, but pictured her house full of the junk she’d accumulated since they arrived. He had borne her disappointment in him for so long, that he did not even know who she was when she turned her attention elsewhere.

  Bác

  In the evenings that followed, the old woman observed that Đào had begun the habit of forgetting the terrible loss that had struck her. After preparing the rice and broth, she asked Bác to please tell Sinh that dinner was ready, and to come in from the studio to eat with them.

  Bác simply shook her head and moved away feebly. “This one does not know where the girl is.”

  Bác had come to the end of her days feeling she had been harassed by what she had witnessed in life. She had seen this depth of grief many times before, and knew that Đào would wallow in the circle of pain for years before she would become aware of her animal situation.

  Bác found a moment alone with Trung when he visited his mother. The sky was already dark and the temperature had dropped as soon as the sun’s rays had retreated. She told him the head and tail of the story of the missing hụi, and the disappeared girl who lived out the back, and Đào’s recent descent into madness. Trung was mortified, and could not work out why his mother had not told him any of this before.

  “Hurry, their anger cannot have been sated.”

  With that, Bác felt she was free of her debt to Đào.

  Very soon after that, Bác packed her few belongings into a tri-colour plastic bag. “I am old, my time is running out. I cannot live like this,” she told her landlady. The studio had been partitioned to accommodate both her and Sinh. Now it was lifeless, empty on one side, and frozen in time on the other, to the exact day when Sinh disappeared. Bác left the door of the studio open, hoping this would call the girl back.

  Đào pleaded, “Please stay one more week, and maybe she will be back then. Then the house will be back to normal, things washed and cleaned, food on the stove…”

  The Brown Man

  The man watches the different states of mind come and go, the pain scatters in patches across his back, and floats slowly like clouds in the sky across the horizon of his being. Sitting in deep meditation, he observes his skin drying up on contact with the outside air, and little by little, becoming taut as the moisture evaporates from him. At other times, he feels the warmth in his body radiating constantly, as a candle burns wax to emit its flame. The man’s focus improves and he can follow the changing forms of his breath, which becomes his constant friend. He asks himself, “Which species of breath am I being inhabited by now?” Still, the brown man cannot retain equanimity before the pain in his limbs, which seems to move from place to place as though each limb is being amputated and rearranged.

  The monk advises him that if the pain is too great, and one has already lost the balance of one’s mind, then it is best to stop the meditation. However, if one’s mind is still balanced, the meditator can lean into the pain, as though walking against a strong wind; lean into it with your calmness and attention. The monk explains that these are experiences familiar to all who have meditated deeply.

  “The human race needs to practise to know itself as an animal, this is not the same as to be an animal,” the monk says qu
ietly to his disciple, and his own heart.

  On his next attempts, the man experiences increasingly longer moments without the prattle of plans or hopes or conversations recreated inside his head. His body becomes present to itself. His body is aware of itself as breathing, pulsing, pulled down and sagging in gravity, heating the air around it, slowly burning in time. This thing we call time. The storms of anger and violence accumulate and break across his being, until they empty him out completely. Then he is ready to experience loss. Another cloud of pain gathers in a different part of the body, and his attention is already there, ready to observe it. And increasingly, it is not his pain experienced in his body: it is simply pain, or its twin, hope, and it arises and then departs.

  Sinh

  She was walking in the park and found, by the river, a fish trap created by the land’s first inhabitants. Not knowing what it was, she thought it was a bridge. Sinh took off her coat, put her little shopping bag down and rested. There seemed to be other plastic bags there too, abandoned, but she did not pay any attention to them, being taken so much by the idea of the bridge of boulders, and how much it gleamed, while all around it was dusty and muted in colour. She decided to go and sit on the stones in the middle of the bridge, and pretended that she was in fact overlooking a great waterfall, like the one in Đà Lạt. Then, for her own amusement she discovered that if she lay down on her back, and hung her head over the rocks, she could view the great waterfall upside down, its powerful gushing sounds drowned out all the other sounds. She proceeded like this until her long hair slipped out of its elastic tie, and fell into the murky water. Her wet hair dripped on her dark coat.

  Dark and thick clouds gathered at the top of the hill, and she started to get cold, and would certainly get colder still if she didn’t begin to return home straight away. So she rushed off, up the hill, until halfway up she realised she had forgotten her little shopping bag at the bridge of rocks. She hurriedly ran down the hill. When she reached the boulders, she looked at the very spot. It was then that she took in all the other abandoned plastic shopping bags, as though they had been placed there all along to confound her. She glanced at each one, but none were hers. She looked all around in case it had been blown over. She looked behind and in front of it, and still it was not there. Behind her was the river, unmarred by any fallen bag.