She Weeps Each Time You're Born

by Quan Barry

  She could hear the driver drumming on the steering wheel with his fingers. He had yet to start the car. Ash was still wafting through the air. From the backseat, she held her hand out and caught a black flake on the tip of her finger. She was glad to be with these foreigners. It was her own people who would’ve ruined everything. Most times the South Vietnamese soldiers would leave a body where they’d found it, not even caring enough to close the eyes.

  Within minutes another soldier climbed in the front seat and slammed the door. The jeep fired up, and she was moving, the ash hitting her in the face. The soldiers were taking her to Cong Heo, the old strategic hamlet built by the Americans. The Americans didn’t even know what Cong Heo meant. She had a way of knowing things she shouldn’t know. The scar on her chest burned like a third eye. She hadn’t crossed the river in years. She knew she wouldn’t cross it now.

  Wait. Bà held up her hand. The jeep came to a stop. Carefully she pointed at the house, gesturing that there was something she needed. The driver and the other soldier considered it, grunting among themselves. They were tired and didn’t care, their resignation evident to Bà even as they spoke in their own tongue. Oui, she said, in the only other language she knew. She heard the car door swing open. The other soldier helped her out.

  And if the glaze had momentarily lifted from her eyes, she would have seen two soldiers digging by the sugar-apple tree, a body bag lying on the ground, the body already in it. She would have seen another soldier hammering together a makeshift box made of splintery wooden boards from her own house. If Bà’s eyes had been clean, she would have seen the boy-leader approach the long black bag, unzipping it partway, the boy reaching into the void and placing a single bright circle in the corpse’s mouth as someone had done for his own mother years before on the island of Gye-do in the Korean Strait when she died giving birth to him, then sealing the bag up again.

  Bà walked straight into the house, her hands at her sides. When she didn’t come back after ten minutes, the driver stubbed out his cigarette and shot the other soldier a look. The soldier got out and ran up to the house, slipping on burnt sugar apples, the smell not unpleasant but for the tang of gasoline lingering in the air. After a minute he came back out shaking his head. The old woman was nowhere to be found. The driver glared at him, but the soldier just bowed and wiped a scorched apple off the bottom of his boot.

  Please know that those among us who chewed the betel leaf say they did so for the sting of it. Blood ringing in the silvery chambers of the skull. A rush where normally there would only be inertia. The body’s internal compass trained north even in the darkest dark.

  EVER SINCE THE FIREBOMBING ACROSS THE RIVER THE OLD honey seller had been trying not to think about the future. The sun was almost behind the mountains. Her two nearest neighbors had packed up their few remaining chickens and pigs and left hours ago. The day before, the elderly village chief had said it was time. His women carried him down the road in his hammock, his feet never touching the ground. She had heard the routes through the jungle were cut, that the bombers had flattened everything in the free-fire zone for fifty square miles. One full day had passed, and when the wind was right, she could still see black smoke billowing up from across the river.

  Huyen sat beside her hovel and spit out a long red stream into the dirt, her teeth the same bloody color as her spit. Inside their patchwork of sticks and canvas, Qui had fallen asleep on a ragged mat. Yesterday Huyen had kicked the girl awake and sent her out alone with an empty jar to check the hives down along the river. The girl didn’t say a word as she took the jar and headed off. She never spoke anymore. The front of her black shirt was always damp and sour smelling, her long tangled hair falling all the way to the backs of her knees. Despite her wan complexion, there was a savage beauty in her face, bones chiseled like a deer’s.

  In the distance Huyen could see one last group of villagers slipping through the landscape, the sound of their wooden wheels rutting the earth. The whole village had emptied, her neighbors simply draining away. She knew they had left her and Qui behind on purpose. They didn’t want to be around old Huyen and her sharp tongue and bloody teeth.

  Toward dusk the leaf-nosed bats began to appear. Huyen opened her eyes. She didn’t remember closing them. The moon was out. Qui was sitting beside her, the front of her black shirt damp as if she had spilled something on herself, a sourness wafting up off her chest. The girl was holding a jar of honey and tipping it from side to side, the honey rumbling back and forth.

  Together they sat, grandmother and granddaughter, waiting for a sign as to what they should do, anything to spur them into action. Em, snarled Huyen, addressing Qui with the word meant for small children, though Qui was too old for it. Huyen cleared her throat and moved the lump of betel leaves she was chewing to the other side of her cheek. From time to time she would pose a question to her granddaughter in the hope of lulling the girl out of her silence. King, father, mother, child, went sailing in one boat, Huyen said, met a storm and sank. It was an old Confucian riddle. Who would you save from drowning and in what order?

  Qui never took her eyes off the jar she was holding. The honey gleamed in the moonlight. On the ground her long black hair pooled like a hole. Through the empty village the sound of a door creaked painfully in the wind. As if to answer her grandmother, Qui put a hand on her belly, but Huyen reached over and swatted her hand away.

  Dark clouds were racing overhead, the moon in and out of shadow when the woman arrived, the cuffs of her loose black pants caked with dirt. She looked as if she had been to the ends of the earth and back. There was no emotion in her eyes. Later, Huyen would recall that it had seemed as if she were floating, the stranger motionless in the moonlight. Overhead the leaf-nosed bats were spinning themselves into a frenzy.

  The woman took off her hat. Her scalp gleamed through her patchy hair. Everywhere shadows massed on her face. Slowly, as if yawning, she opened her mouth and pulled something off her tongue. The object flashed in her fingers. She placed it in Huyen’s wrinkled palm. It was a silver coin. Stamped on one side were two flowery dragons chasing each other’s tails, on the other, a man with a Confucian-style beard. Grandmother, the woman said, her voice echoing inside Huyen’s head as if the old honey seller were simply thinking the words to herself. In the next life I will serve you.

  Then the woman turned her sunken eyes on Qui. The moon revealed itself from behind a cloud. The stranger bent down and kissed the ragged girl on the forehead. Lovingly she swept back the long black curtain of Qui’s tangled hair and whispered in her ear. With her left hand the woman pressed her thumb and third finger together. The air filled with the sound of ringing, like a needle imperceptibly vibrating with human electricity, or a fly’s wings beating to keep it aloft.

  Under a nimbus of leaf-nosed bats, the woman held out her hand. There was nothing imploring in the gesture. Qui placed the jar of honey she’d been holding in the stranger’s dirty palm. The woman tucked the jar in her shirt.

  Huyen opened her eyes. Hadn’t she just opened them? The woman with the hollow face was gone. Everywhere the sounds of the empty village echoed in the night. The old honey seller began to wonder if it had all been a dream. In the sky a few clouds shrouded the moon. She turned to her granddaughter. What did she say to you, Huyen demanded. The accusation in her voice masked a deeper fear.

  Qui sat with her hands at her chest as if still holding the jar of honey and tipping it from side to side. Huyen wasn’t expecting an answer. The girl hadn’t spoken since the night Huyen had ruined her. When it came, she didn’t even recognize her own granddaughter’s voice.

  Qui pressed the imaginary jar to her heart. She said be her mother, Qui whispered. Overhead a bat went spiraling through the night like a falling star. The old woman reached over and eased the imaginary jar out of her granddaughter’s hands. It was the last thing Qui ever said.

  In the morning Qui roused her grandmother. The girl moved with a newfound energy she hadn’t shown in mon
ths. The front of her shirt was damp as if she had pressed two wet hands to her chest. Is it time, said Huyen. Qui nodded. Together they packed up their meager belongings and set out. Huyen followed without question. She had known this day was coming. After last night, the bats thronging in the air, she knew the moment had arrived. In some ways it felt good to hand over the burden of being the one in charge. Huyen smiled, her bloody teeth flashing. Maybe that was what had made her cruel. After everything she had done to Qui, it was only right that now she should serve her granddaughter. They were already in the next life.

  Three things cannot be hidden long: the sun, the moon, and the truth. Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.

  TU SAT UP IN THE TREE WHERE HE WAS WAITING AND ROLLED up his pant leg. A small dark sack clung to his calf, the thing almost as big as a rambutan, but the skin was smooth and rubbery. He poked it with his finger and watched it toll like a bell. He was lucky. It was only the second one that day. It was almost done feeding and would drop off soon enough. He didn’t have any salt, plus he didn’t want to use up a match. In a way it was part of him. He stroked it with his finger. With his eyes closed it almost felt like a hot pearl or a young girl’s innocence. For a moment he considered keeping it and somehow presenting it to her as a gift. This is my blood, he would say. When I am away from you, know that I am here. He laughed at the idea, knew it would be a twisted thing to do, to give your love a jungle leech bursting with your own blood, but he also knew if he did, she would nod solemnly in that way she had and hold out her cupped hand as if she were receiving the Buddha’s unpolluted heart. She would treasure it until it was just a piece of shriveled skin. She would never throw it away.

  Even lazing in the branches of a tamarind tree on the edge of the strategic hamlet, he was sweating. In the days and weeks after the monsoon, the humidity had emerged as if reestablishing its domain. From his perch on the edge of the jungle he could see the untended paddies, water buffalo wandering through the landscape at will. Yesterday he had watched an old man and a young woman having sex by the stream. As he watched, he made up a story in his mind, how the woman was actually the wife of the man’s adult son but how she had fallen for the father because in her eyes he was the man the son should have been. Long after the man and woman had risen from the grass, Tu kept developing the plot, the son running off to join the northern army, then later killing his father in battle but only realizing what he’d done well after the fact.

  Tu stretched himself to full length. There was nothing else to do but dream. In Cong Heo there was no reason to work. Mostly the peasants sat around and drank a fermented rice wine dark as soy sauce. The Americans would provide everything, and why labor in the paddies when you might be relocated again at any moment? When someone could walk through the fields that you had planted by hand and with a flamethrower reduce all your work to ash in a matter of seconds?

  Suddenly the leech dropped off his leg. He looked for it on the tree limb, but when he didn’t find it, he realized it must have fallen all the way down to the ground, somewhere down there his blood pointlessly coating the grass. He tried not to see it as an omen, but there was no way his wife and mother could stay on in the free-fire zone, not after a full night of bombing. He could feel the birthmark on his face begin to smolder. Through the peasants in Cong Heo he had left word that if his family arrived, someone was to come find him. He would hug his mother and receive her blessing, then whisk his bride away deep into the jungle, maybe to the cave he had found by the falls. Afterward, they would wash each other in the thundering water. She would kiss the diamond red birthmark on the edge of his scalp, and then he would probably want her all over again.

  He had learned about the baby from another man living in the jungle. He didn’t know the man. There had been no joy in the telling. The man had simply said the women in the markets east of the Song Ma say you will be a father. When Tu had looked around in the darkness at the other faces climbing up into the trees for the night, all he had seen was fatigue. All night he lay in his hammock worrying he’d be shot—his face beaming, his happiness radiating outward like a beacon.

  An hour after his small dinner of tapioca he could hear someone coming through the elephant grass toward the tamarind tree. A head popped up out of the brush. The sun’s fading light reddened the landscape. It was a young girl, her hair in uneven braids. The girl pointed up at him. Uncle, she said, and smiled. Her front tooth was missing, the head of the new tooth just starting to break the skin. The time for daydreaming was long over, the birthmark on his face as if on fire. Tu shimmied down out of the tree and began to run.

  From Cong Heo it was twenty miles to the river and then another two to the hamlet. It was the night of the full moon; he would be easy to spot regardless. He figured she was probably too big to move easily, though Vietnamese women had a way of working in the paddies right up until the moment arrived. The last time he’d seen her was by the Song Ma, her face still as a statue’s and impossible to read. He wondered if she were angry. He had promised he’d be home well before this, and here it was almost three full seasons, more than eight months.

  After only a few miles on the road, he saw an American convoy speeding his way. His first impulse when he saw the dust billowing up in the distance was to get off the road without being seen, but by then it was too late. He knew he’d been spotted. Running would only make him look suspicious. The first two trucks whooshed by. He had to close his eyes and cover his nose, the dust was so thick, so fortuitous.

  It wasn’t until a series of jeeps began to pass that one of them stopped. There was an American driver with an important-looking man sitting in the passenger seat, the man’s silvery hair cropped close around his head, the cut so sharp Tu imagined it would draw blood if he touched it. The man didn’t have on any of the colorful bars the American officers wore around their own bases, which made Tu realize how important he was—only those of high rank needed to hide who they were. In the backseat, a Vietnamese soldier sat next to a haggard-looking Vietnamese man in the loose black clothing of a peasant, the man’s hands tied together.

  Ask him where he’s going, said the driver. The Vietnamese soldier cleared his throat. In the fading light Tu could see there was something unbalanced about the soldier’s eyes. The right one was brown, the left a pale blue. It was unsettling. Tu tried not to stare.

  Grandfather. The soldier cleared his throat again. Where is the road taking you today? Tu wondered who the soldier was talking to. It wasn’t until much later when he saw himself in the Song Ma that he realized he looked like an old man. His entire head of hair had been dusted white by the passing trucks.

  Em, Tu said, as if he were the soldier’s elder. The words came effortlessly to him. I am going to see the medicine man who lives by the Song Ma. I must have medicine for my heart. The soldier tried to hide his incredulousness. Grandfather, that’s almost twenty miles. I must have it, repeated Tu. The soldier let out a long sigh and lowered his voice. Please ask him to say a prayer for all of us, he said, his blue eye gleaming like a marble. Tu looked at the prisoner. There was a thin red line of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

  Tell him to be inside by nightfall, said the important-looking man in the passenger seat. The soldier coughed again. Ong, please be safely beside the fire before sundown. Tu nodded. Make sure he got that, the American added, but they were already driving away.

  The sun had set, the air still humid. Tu was more than a mile down the road by the time the jeep came back, headlights off. This time it was the Vietnamese soldier driving by himself, in the darkness his blue eye reflective like a cat’s. I will take you to the river, the soldier said, and nodded to the back. Tu climbed in. They didn’t talk the entire way.

  The full moon was just starting to rise. Tu could see the rabbit stamped on its face. In the backseat he put his hand down in a pool of something. He sniffed his fingers, then wiped the blood on his shirt.

 
; The soldier pulled over at the edge of the river. Though he gripped the steering wheel attentively in his hands, he seemed tired, as if he’d had enough. Everywhere insects chirred in the tall grass. The soldier kept the jeep idling. Brother, he said as Tu climbed out. Please remember me in your prayers. Tu swung the door closed. Even in his weariness the soldier’s blue eye burned bright. Then he turned the jeep around and headed back in the dark.

  They were squatting by the river in the shadows of ash when he stumbled on them. They used to be houses, growled the old woman. Tu hadn’t noticed her sitting there. In the moonlight he could see that her teeth were a deep red from chewing betel. Beside her was a young girl who looked to be barely in her teens. The girl was obviously demented but with a savage beauty Tu found startling. She raised a dirty arm and pointed, her long hair rippling over her shoulder. On the other side of the river he could see a boat bobbing in the current. Despite the girl’s looks, he didn’t feel any shame. Qui, hissed the old woman, but the girl didn’t look away, her eyes shining as Tu took off his clothes.

  When he was done undressing, he walked down the bank and into the water. Instantly his feet disappeared. For a moment he wondered why they called it the Song Ma, the River of Dreams. The water was a deep nut-red and warm on his skin, the river still swollen from the recent monsoons. Then something startled him, and he drew back. He looked again. Staring up at him from the surface of the Song Ma was an old man, hair dusted white as death. Then Tu saw the birthmark on the edge of the old man’s hairline, the thing shining bright like a bloodstain. Feverishly he ran both hands through his hair before dipping his head in the muddied water as if his life depended on it.