Lady of the Realm

by Hoa Pham

  Then a strange thing occurred. Another woman came up to us and inclined her head in respect. She offered Bình rice cakes and then Bình gestured for her to give one to me.

  “Liên, my friend,” she said as if by explanation and the woman left without asking for payment or anything in return. I began to wonder. Was Bình like Bà, the keeper of the village đình?

  But my questions were set aside when I smelt the cooked rice as Bình opened the banana leaf wrappings of the cakes. Hungrily I untangled the string around the cake, and anticipated the first mouthful of fish and rice. As I tasted the fish and its familiar strong flavourings from the coast, tears came to my eyes. I had come home.

  “Good, heh? She is the best cook around here.”

  “Cam on chi, thank you sister,” I said, my hands sticky with the glutinous rice.

  She smiled.

  “When I was younger we used to worship the Lady of the Realm close to here,” I said after my hunger was sated.

  “Ah yes. I remember a story about the Lady before the wars. She blessed a virgin girl with warnings of the wars, and the girl and some of the villagers that listened to the warning escaped when the Northerners came. If only the Lady had warned the entire country.”

  I felt myself reddening. I had never heard of my story told like this and I felt alien to myself being described as a virginal girl again. Yet the story was not told about how my family was killed. I was able to help some but not others, the curse of my gift.

  “I do not understand why the Communists have banned her worship.”

  Bình turned her shrewd gaze on me and I felt myself being assessed and weighed up in her mind.

  “The Lady is for women. We are not a threat,” I continued.

  “Hồ` Chí Minh is a jealous master,” Bình said as we were interrupted by a man who approached us. His clothes were in disrepair and in worse condition than my own. Yet he bowed to Bình and discreetly gave her a wad of crinkled dirty notes. The money disappeared quickly through Bình’s hands and the man went away without acknowledging my presence as if ashamed.

  “I save my worship for the dong. Money. It will get me out of trouble in a way that faith cannot,” she said firmly and the subject was closed.

  Yet later in the day as we walked to the beach to help bring in what little catch there was, she pulled me aside before we reached the water. “There is a tall stone that some of the faithful visit every now and again, where the Lady is said to have given dreams to the virginal girl. It is in the barren forest area. I’ll take you there later.”

  I smiled for the first time since Saigon fell. The spirits were still with the people regardless of Communist demands. Hope, absent for so long from my heart, began to grow again.

  To my surprise we did not gut the fish ourselves, but gave that dirty work to the woman who had presented us with rice cakes earlier that day. Her son retreated to the tarpaulin to sleep as the heat began to bake the afternoon. I was sleepy and wished to nap too, but Bình pulled at my arm to keep walking.

  “No one watches in the middle of the day,” she explained as she led me away from the market towards the barren forest.

  A lone bird wailed wheeling far up in the sky, and my memories of how the forest used to be brought more tears to my eyes. The smell of ash filled my hair and nostrils as we walked. Amongst the stumps and burnt out trunks of trees, new growth was beginning slowly, little green tendrils reaching for the air among the ruins.

  We came across the rock outcropping suddenly. It was hidden among the remains of trees. Someone had cleared the rocks of ash, and a wilting purple paper garland hung around the tallest standing stone.

  A sensory memory of sleeping here in the sun, Tài by my side, came to me. My skin tingled with the remembrance of safety and peace. This time I did not cry, but felt warmth, remembering that once I had felt like this.

  Bình bowed to the tallest rock outcropping and I followed suit. Then we sat on one of the other rocks just like I had so long ago.

  “I wanted peace so much,” Bình reflected after we shared a companionable silence. “But I did not imagine it would be like this.”

  It was the closest she had come to saying anything about the Communists.

  “Neither did I,” I replied, my mouth dry and full of ash. Bà would not have wanted the Lady hidden away like this.

  I stood up again, heedless of what Bình thought, and stood in front of the garlanded rock, my hands in prayer. I felt my soul settle as I focused on the image of the Lady in my mind. She merged seamlessly with Quan m at that moment. The goddesses were with me.

  I did not know what I wished for then. But when I opened my eyes, I saw Bình observing me.

  “You were a monastic,” she said.

  I nodded. Bình got to her feet and began to walk back down the slope.

  “The people will remember,” she said as I joined her.

  Even hidden away the Lady could still bring hope, I thought. I had found the Lady in many guises, but the strongest seemed to be the Lady I had inside.

  It was through Bình that I found the future again. More people gave her money and goods. When she invited me to join a money-lending circle with a laugh, I realised what she was.

  “I know you have nothing,” she said when I declined. She was a money-lender, a profession that was looked down on, but deemed necessary in these times.

  Owing her nothing meant I could truly be her friend. I did not ask how she survived the wars, it was evident in her shrewdness and knowledge of the black market. She also dealt in food coupons as well as cash, and I never enquired as to where the coupons came from.

  One day she presented me with a badly photocopied book.

  “I thought you might like this,” she said. It was Lotus in a Sea of Fire by Thích Nhất Hạnh, well-worn and handled. I bowed in gratitude.

  The village rebuilt itself, but without the village đình. Houses sprang up but where the village đình once stood there was an empty place for the market and the children to play in. Bình arranged for a house to be built for herself and her son, and once it was completed invited me to stay with her as a guest.

  A loudspeaker was installed where the latest Communist messages were broadcast and the occasional Communist cadre would visit the village for a time then go back to the city. Bình gleaned that the cadres viewed visiting the coastal villages as a chore and did not wish to be stationed there.

  Then Bình began trafficking in people. The first I knew of it was when strange families would come to the village and disappear the next day. In those fearful times, no one asked too many questions. Ever alert, I wondered whether Bình knew anything about it. But this time the wily money-lender did not confide in me.

  I went to visit the rock outcropping and noticed new offerings, marigolds and little bean cakes from the city. I knelt by the rocks and prostrated myself before the Lady, hoping that she had taken care of her worshippers.

  That night I dreamt of Bình down at the beach at night with her son. They were pushing a fishing boat out to sea, in an eerie echo of what had happened to me so long ago. The fishing boat was jammed full of strange people, mothers with children and fathers with grim faces.

  I woke up with sweat on my brow and salt on my lips. Bình and her son were nowhere to be seen in the darkness of our shared house. I knew better than to try and find them on the beach. Bình would not appreciate that.

  The next morning, Bình looked weary. Her son had dragged himself into the house and had fallen asleep in his clothes. Rumours at the market said another communist cadre was coming with soldiers, news that Bình barely blinked at. With a heavy sigh, she sipped her coffee with condensed milk.

  “Liên, do you ever wish to leave Vietnam? Go out of the Communist reach to America?”

  I noticed her gaze on me and I realised that she was not asking lightly. Somehow she had the means to get there.

  “No,” I said automatically. Then I thought a little more. “This is my country and my home
.”

  The Lady resides here, was my unspoken thought, but I knew Bình would not be sympathetic to that.

  “Hmmmm.” Bình replied and was lost in thought. “I do not hear from the ones that escape. It’s a long way over the sea to Malaysia. And what would I do in the land of white ghosts? Here I am rich with a house and a son with business.” She laughed, a sour laugh and I did not join in.

  My dreams of peace, of meditating outside in the open, seem even more remote now. My tears have receded into a sitting sadness and a happy joy that somehow I am still alive.

  I had lost so much, my village destroyed and yet my ancestral land is still here. In the shelter of Bình’s networks I was safe, yet the communist regime kept me awake with one eye open.

  They had forced our worship behind closed doors, with family altars hiding inside. When I do mindful breathing, walking and exercises from the monastery, I do it away from prying eyes. I valued Bình all the more because I could trust her – a rare privilege in those days.

  Every day I sat beside Bình in the marketplace and watched people come and go. They grew familiar but not close to me. Most were displaced fisher people from further down south. The communist cadres, a pair of them, both men, walked amongst us briefly for an hour each morning then retreated to their office to drink beer and watch women.

  I missed the people of my village, and every day I offered a prayer inside the house: may they be well wherever they may be.

  METTA,

  LOVING KINDNESS

  SOUTH VIETNAM, 1991

  Touching the present moment, we realize that the present is made of the past and is creating the future.

  THÍCH NHẤT HẠNH

  One day a stranger came to the marketplace. I heard about him before I saw him physically, he claimed to be from the Lady of the Realm village. He was immediately directed to me and Bình and was accompanied by an inquisitive fisher woman.

  “Bác Liên, Aunt Liên,” the fisher woman greeted me.

  I stared at the man in shock and peered into his matured features.

  “Tai?”

  “Chị Liên! Sister Liên!” His voice was rough and deep from smoking, and his deeply browned face was wrinkled. But when he embraced me in a hug, I finally knew we had returned home.

  Bình graciously allowed us to sit in her lounge room to catch up on the years apart without prying villagers hanging on every word. I could not stop smiling, I was so happy. Tài walked with a limp but his dark eyes still sparkled mischievously. I wondered how I appeared to him, with wrinkled hands and eyes, stooped over from catching fish. But the years seemed to dissolve when he smiled at me and caught my eye.

  “How did you survive?” I asked after making him a cup of tea.

  He became sober as he sipped his tea slowly.

  “I was taken away with your mother and sister to help infiltrate the strategic hamlets.” He opened his hands, rough with years of hard work and callouses. “Your mother and sister died early on of pneumonia during the wet season. They did not have a strong enough will to live.”

  The guardedness in his eyes relaxed when I indicated the small family shrine that Bình kept in an alcove in the kitchen. No Communist cadre would have superstitious rubbish in his home.

  “I had a wife and child. They were killed during the wars,” he said.

  “So you took vows?” he asked a little later.

  I hesitated. Suddenly I did not want to be a monastic to Tài.

  “I’m not actively linked to a temple anymore. Nowadays you can’t be.”

  “No you can’t.” He fell silent, looking at me with a frank open gaze and a smile on his lips.

  The moment deepened and I remembered how he used to be with me all those years ago before I became a woman. He must have been remembering the same time for his next words hit my heart.

  “Do you still dream, Liên?”

  “Yes. I dreamt of the wars and people dying. But I always had this vision of peace.” I found myself telling him of my hopeful dream, which I had not shared with anyone since Hương died.

  “I hope that time will come,” he said seriously. “Although I cannot see it now.”

  Tears came to my eyes, at all the times we had both lost thanks to the Việt Minh. We should not have been parted.

  He grasped my hand, and held it as I wiped away my tears. I had never felt so old until that moment.

  “And you never had a husband or children?”

  I shook my head.

  We ended up in an embrace. It seemed the most natural thing to do in the world.

  I showed Tài our family graves and how I had cleaned his family plot as well. I was proud that the flowers I had laid at both sites were still fresh and the thanks I received from him made me blush.

  “All this time I was praying for my ancestors. And you were looking after them for me, little Liên.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m glad I’ve returned and you are here. Is no one else here?”

  Mutely I shook my head, and tears threatened again.

  “I’m glad that most of the men died here where they were born, rather than being forced into slavery.” He shuddered and looked off into the distance, into memories I could not reach.

  We knelt at my family’s plot and prostrated ourselves before leaving some mandarin pieces with the flowers for the graves. Then, holding hands, we began to walk back to Bình’s house.

  I noticed the tension in the marketplace and the silence first. Even Tài picked up that something was amiss. There were no sounds of gossip or lively chatter. I glanced around. Bình’s son was awake, a rare enough sight during the daytime, and was busy fixing a net with his head down.

  He did not acknowledge me.

  I felt a prickle down my back and turned around. Tài let go of my hand.

  A new communist cadre, young and fresh from Hanoi surveyed me and Tài.

  “Are you married?” he rapped out impatiently.

  “We are,” Tài lied and my heart swelled with joy.

  “No one at the office informed me about you two. You have to come with me and register at the office.”

  Tai and I looked at each other and reluctantly followed his instructions. I grasped quickly that the cadres Bình had bribed were no longer in charge. And Bình was nowhere to be seen.

  I had never been inside the hot concrete box that the communist cadres claimed as their office. The new Vietnamese flag hung limply in front of it, red with a yellow star.

  We stepped inside the office. A fan was blowing and the two other cadres were alert at their desks. Books and records were collected behind them in untidy piles. Their customary bottles of beer were nowhere to be seen.

  “Who are these two?”

  “Chị Liên. Sister Liên. Anh Tài. Brother Tài.”

  “How come they are married and not in the register books?”

  Silence fell except for the blowing of the rickety fan.

  “This is why we are inspecting all the outposts in the south. You cannot allow people to just appear in your jurisdiction. They may be trying to escape.”

  He glanced back at us, and I said nothing, breathing in and out to calm my panic.

  Where was Bình?

  “You. Anh Tài. How do you serve your country?”

  “ My first wife and children died in the American War. I came back here, to my village, to pay honour to my ancestors and return to fishing.”

  “You should not indulge this sort of superstitious crap,” the cadre from the North chided the other two. “But fishing is a good occupation and suitable work. Chị Liên. You are from the market, yes?”

  I nodded, my palms sweating. What did he want?

  “Where is Chị Bình?”

  “She went to the next village to trade,” I lied, hoping that I was not hanging myself and Bình in the process.

  “They are respectable traders,” one of the other cadres suddenly said, in loyalty to his bribes. “Her son is in the market if you want inf
ormation about her.”

  “I see. Anh Tài and Chị Liên. Your loyalty now is to the party that liberated you from the puppet forces. Not to your ancestors or your village. Your loyalty is for your fellow comrades. I expect to see you at the village meeting tonight.”

  He dismissed us with a wave of his hand.

  We scuttled out the door and quickly returned to Bình’s empty house. Once safely inside Tài locked the door.

  “Where is Bình?” Tài asked. He had seen through my lie.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I was scared. I did not know whether Bình’s bribes would work on a young fervent Communist or whether she would end up in prison.

  “I did not come back South for this,” Tài said to me angrily. “I had heard in the South they were more lax.”

  “They usually are,” I told him miserably. I was now beginning to realise how influential Bình was in the village.

  “What do they do at these village meetings?” he asked me.

  “Usually they get the children to sing songs to Hồ` Chí Minh. Nothing more than that. We are too poor and uneducated to be sent to a camp.”

  “I see. Liên …” he looked at me strangely and I wondered what he was thinking.

  “Liên, I did not come back only for my ancestors. I heard that for a fee, you can be smuggled by fishing boat out to the ocean to Malaysia. Do you know anything about this?”

  I nearly laughed out loud from nervousness.

  “No I don’t,” I lied. When Bình returned, I would suggest him as a customer to her. If she returned.

  “Would you leave me so soon?” I asked lightly.

  “I would want you to come with me,” he said seriously.

  Stunned, I could only swallow at his suggestion. My ancestors were here. Bà was here.

  And one day, peace would come. Or would it?

  I had begun to doubt my own prescience, I had held on to that dream for years and it was still no closer to being fulfilled.