by Quan Barry
He was across in less than ten minutes. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but the current seemed listless despite the water’s swollen level. On the other side he crawled up onshore. Everywhere there was the smell of burning, the water like voices whispering. Quickly he got in the boat and began pulling himself back across to where the two women stood waiting. He didn’t know where they were headed, but he couldn’t leave them stranded. As he neared the other shore and gazed on the burned huts dotting the riverbank, he thought of the little girl and her grandfather, the fisherman who’d been killed in the fire. He wondered what happened to the silvery bird the man was always seen with, the bird as if carved from ice.
When he arrived back where he’d started, the women were still huddled in the shadows. There is nothing over there, he said to the old woman, nothing but death. At the word death the feral girl clamored into the boat. Tu was panting but not from exertion, the image of himself as an old man still in his mind. The old woman handed him his clothes and crawled in next to the girl. Even with the added weight the boat rode high in the water.
Crossing the river with the two women, Tu thought of hell and the childhood stories of the places that befell the body after life. He pulled the rope as hard as he could. If they capsized—he wouldn’t let himself think of it. The underworld was said to be a festering blister, the darkness so cold it turned the skin blue. When he looked back across the river, he thought he could see someone standing on the shore they had just come from, the figure small like a child, its hair in braids.
On the other side they scrambled out one at a time. As he held the boat steady for the girl, Tu realized there was a smell coming from her. He didn’t know what it could be. He imagined it had something to do with sorrow, though, despite the grimness of her physical appearance, the girl seemed animated and darkly beautiful, as if she were on her way to the happiest day of her life, her happiness in stark contrast to the landscape. Everywhere the world was charred. The bones of trees stood like primordial signposts warning of pestilence and death. In the moonlight the earth looked blackened like the skin of a fish.
The three of them walked single file without speaking. At one point they passed a burned shack with one of its walls caved in as if a car had driven into it. In spots the ground was still smoldering. Tu had to hold his hand up in front of his nose. It was obvious there were bodies inside.
A few hundred feet down the road something glimmered in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. When they got closer, he could see it was a dead pig, the body completely charred, the long gleaming tusks exposed all the way up to the root where they were fused tight to the yellow jaw. The old woman picked up a stick and whacked it on the flank. From somewhere deep inside the animal Tu could hear things stirring. By the time he realized what was happening, they were already pouring out through the desiccated orifices of the face. A few streamed out of the shriveled ears. Bees. Honey bees. In the moonlight each one silvery like a coin. The sound of the bees’ thrumming a dark electricity.
The air filled with the vibrating swarm, the bees pouring out, the pulsing mass coming on and on without end. Tu could feel their papery wings brushing against his face. It lasted only a minute, and yet it seemed like hours, their wings soft as wind. He had heard of such things happening in the land of the dead. Quickly he touched the side of his neck to make sure his heart was still beating. He found it easily, his pulse hammering.
None of them were stung.
Finally there was the same bend in the road, the one he always remembered coming around on his way home from the fields. He thought of the last time he’d been there. How he had arrived at night, the darkness like a cloak, and how he found her sitting under a sugar-apple tree singing softly to herself. And here he was again. There was the same sugar apple she’d been sitting under and beside it a mound of fresh earth, an empty rice bowl propped in the dirt.
The simple wooden hut he’d built with his own two hands was torn apart. Two of the walls were dismantled, the splintery wooden boards missing. The truth began to present itself. Maybe he had always known. The girl rushed into the dark hut as if her heart were waiting for her, black hair streaming like a flag. What does she think is here, Tu asked, but the old woman just followed her granddaughter inside.
There was no reason to go in. The room was empty. No sign of his wife or mother. The ashes in the fire pit were long cold. A few pots and woven baskets hung on what was left of the walls. Underneath a shelf a broken jar lay empty. In a corner a tin bucket sat half full of water, his mother’s empty hammock swinging in the breeze.
Tu sank down in the dirt. He waited for the tears to come, but nothing came. He and Bà had always been close. Somehow she had always sensed him, had always known what was happening to him even when they were apart, the scar on her chest often hot to the touch. The sugar-apple orchard was still smoldering, the orchard Bà’s pride and joy. When the tears still wouldn’t come, he sat back. A strange feeling of hopefulness fluttered in his stomach.
Then he heard a scratching, the sound of fingernails scraping on a door. He jumped up and ran through one of the missing walls, tapping on the floor with his foot. When he found the spot, he dropped to his knees and began moving the dirt with his hands. He lifted a board, the earth yawning open. The girl raced around and around the room, her hair flying, but when she saw who it was, her face dropped.
Bà rose out of the earth, her eyes completely white. Mon chéri, she said. Tu felt like a child as the tears wet his cheeks. Within minutes Bà had a fire going and some leftover rice boiling in a kettle.
And so they waited, each for their own reasons, each with their own thoughts. Bà sat with her dragon pipe clenched between her lips, the pipe’s eyes burning as she scoured an old pot with sand, her face still grimy from her internment. Qui and Huyen were off in one of the remaining corners, the old woman untangling her granddaughter’s hair. To Tu this was the makeshift vigil for his dead wife. He sat in what was left of the doorway looking off at the mountains. Even in the moonlight, ash still hung in the air. He thought of the first time he’d ever seen her. It was evening. She was riding her bicycle. In the road a small boy was driving three water buffalo to their night field. For a moment she stood up on her bicycle, pumping hard to pass the boy and his animals. Then her hat blew off as if plucked from her head by an invisible hand, her long black hair flying loose in the wind as she kept pedaling, the hat sailing behind her and landing in the road. He watched as the lead buffalo stepped on it. How she had gotten off her bicycle and walked back, picking up the smashed thing in her hands. Thinking she was all alone, she had cradled it in her arms. But he had been there, watching from a ditch by the roadside where he had been relieving himself. Her hair blowing loose as if she were standing on a cliff overlooking the sea. It had only been last year. She was sixteen.
Then somewhere in the long night a noise began. The sound of something banging, a door slamming shut over and over. At first the sound was faint, then the noise changed and filled the air. Tu looked to his mother, unsure of what he was hearing. Even Bà with the things she knew that she shouldn’t know moved her head from side to side as if tracking a housefly and waiting for it to land. Outside, the night was filling with bats.
Qui was the first to locate the noise. She pulled herself up out of the dirt, moving like a woman out of balance, chest-heavy, her stained shirt glistening in the moonlight. In the doorway she stepped over Tu and walked outside to the mound of earth. At the foot of the sugar-apple tree she cocked her head and closed her eyes. She stood holding her hands in front of her chest as though cradling something until the two old women followed her out to the grave.
It was impossible, but finally Tu allowed himself to acknowledge what he was hearing. From the doorway he stood and watched the women massing in the yard. Something dove past his head. He turned and ripped a plank from one of the ragged walls and marched toward the grave. The women stepped back. He began shoveling the earth with the board. The fre
sh dirt moved easily. In less than ten minutes he hit something.
A box. Look closer and realize it has been hastily nailed together with sun-bleached planks from the one-room house where your mother lived with your grandmother, the old woman’s eyes knitted with clouds. Wait until the top of the box has been lifted off, the body bag unzippered to fill your tiny lungs with the first clean air you have ever inhaled, breath sugary sweet. Know that the world doesn’t always smell like this, ash and soot, though every time you smell it you will flash on the sudden feeling of lying on someone’s stony breast. Let the man who is your father lift you out of the darkness and up into the moonlight. Look closely at his face, the birthmark on the edge of his scalp. You will not see him again for many years if at all.
See these four faces as they peer at you, one of the old women with tears in her ruined eyes. Wonder who all the other faces belong to who are crowding in to see your perfect form. Wonder why you have been chosen to speak for all of them, tens of hundreds of thousands of millions. In a country full of ghosts, begin learning how to distinguish between the voices of the bodied and the voices of the spectral.
Tu bent over to zipper the bag closed. He was careful not to look at the face of his beloved, her hair pooling like a dark star behind her head. Under the full rabbit moon he caught a glimpse of her hand gleaming in the moonlight. He touched her finger, a small bead glistening on the tip. He picked up her cold hand and put it to his lips. It was honey.
In the beginning the words were all in her head along with memories of sulfurous clouds and leaf-nosed bats blessing her with their leathery wings. Perhaps we are the reason she didn’t utter a single word for so long. The truth is during those first years of total silence, people hardly noticed. Why talk to the living when she had us? And if they had noticed her lack of speech, if they had wondered, what would they have seen? The way at dusk this baby girl would sometimes look at empty air, nothing there at all, and begin to weep?
SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE LEFT SIDE OF BÀ’S BODY, and they were still hours from the coast. We should have left sooner, Huyen grumbled, eyeing the sun, her cheek packed with old betel leaves she’d already chewed. At this rate they wouldn’t reach the highway by nightfall and would have to sleep outside again. Huyen wasn’t even sure she wanted to reach the highway at all and now this—Bà with a sudden inclination to walk to the left, body listing like a boat. It was gradual. If the path were straight, within a few hundred yards she would be on the verge of walking off the trail as if headed into the muddy waters of the Serepok.
Huyen had first noticed a change days earlier as they packed up their belongings beside Lak Lake. Qui had been sitting under a palm tree plaiting her endless hair into two thick braids, the baby nested in her lap. In the distance a trio of elephants trundled across the shallows, their handlers nowhere to be seen. A canoe floated by carrying some of the local M’Nong people, the boat weighted down with housewares and livestock. It was then as Bà bustled around the yard loading the two-wheeled cart that Huyen noticed how the left side of her face appeared as if melting, the skin going slack. It’s just age, Huyen thought, and put it from her mind.
In their two rooms by the shores of Lak Lake she and Bà had argued about what to do if the central highlands fell. Would it be safer to be part of the fleeing millions pushing south all the way to Saigon on Highway 1, or should they stay clear of the masses and use forgotten trails like this? Bà had said it ran all the way from Cambodia to the coast in one form or another. From her girlhood she remembered new recruits arriving at the rubber plantation near Kontum, the people trudging in from a week’s march on the trail, their faces haggard. How the overseer would immediately hand them each a tin bucket and send them out.
In the end Huyen decided they would go as far as they could on small trails following the Serepok east until it hit the Song Cai. From the highlands it was seventy-five miles to the coast. Nights they would sleep in what remained of the brush. In the coastal city of Nha Trang they would join the masses on Highway 1 and push south. Secretly Huyen feared the highway. She had seen mass exoduses before. The lawlessness, the air like tinder. The population realigning itself because somewhere far away somebody had drawn a line on a map, the population fleeing because everyone else was fleeing.
Huyen surveyed the trail ahead of them, the terrain jungly and overgrown. From the looks of it the journey would only get tougher. If you put in the work to sharpen steel, eventually it will turn into needles, she growled, but the adage didn’t lift her spirits. Silently they trudged forward, the only sound the cart’s wheels rutting the earth as Qui pulled it along.
Their fourth day on the trail was hot, but they were used to it. The elephant grass scratched their necks. Small brown burrs stuck in their hair, the sound of the Serepok always in the distance. The full face of the lidless sun shadowed them on their way. Each day their skin grew darker, except for Qui, who stayed the same ghostly hue as she pulled the cart along using a wooden bar built for an animal. The baby sat in the cart along with Huyen and some bamboo mats, a few utensils including a rusty cleaver which they used on chicken they were able to catch on the outskirts of abandoned villages. On the second night of their journey, outside the hamlet of Son Trinh, Bà had brandished the cleaver when they heard something rustling in the elephant grass. Who goes there, Bà whispered, but nothing appeared. As a precaution she had taken to sleeping with the cleaver under her head. Already if she lay down without it she couldn’t sleep.
Mornings she blamed her dreams on it. Ever since her eyes had soured, her dreams had dissolved into fuzzy splotches of color. But since sleeping with the cleaver under her head, Ba’s dreams had taken on a new brilliance, images clear as day. An orange spider the size of a crab lurking in the trees. A white horse grazing under a colony of bats. The French Foreign Legion officer coming toward her with his cold gray eyes, the tip of his burning cigarette that already smelled of scorched skin. Each night, dreams like a river of memories bearing her away in the current.
It was almost noon. Tomorrow they would reach the coast. Qui stopped for a moment and wiped her forehead. She could feel the ends of her braids tickling the backs of her calves. Her breasts hurt. The baby was taking less and less, but her body was producing more and more. Evenings the milk ran silver in the light of the fire as it leaked from her nipples. Along with her ghostly white skin it was her one miracle. Her chest burned day and night. Mornings the ground was damp where she’d slept.
Already the baby was no longer a baby. She was four in the ancient system of reckoning, the months counted in which the unborn are forming in the dark caves of their mothers. Traditionally it was said babies arrived fully one year old with their little old-man faces wrinkled and red, their old souls hardening in new vessels.
When he had first pulled her from the body bag buried in the ground, Tu had held her up in the light of the full rabbit moon. Love, he whispered. Ai. The air glittered with soot. He held her high above his head, letting the silver light bathe every inch of her. The goddess be praised, said Bà, bowing her head and clapping her hands in prayer. Huyen and Qui stood silent. Ash drifted through the sky, sparkling as if sprinkled with mica, then going leaden as it hit the earth.
When Tu brought the baby down out of the moonlight, she was completely clean. No blood or waxy yellow slick coated her skin, everything just soft and shining, her small cap of black hair fragrant as honey.
That night standing by the grave Huyen had spit a long dark stream in the dirt. Love, she growled. She reached over and took the baby from Tu, then handed it roughly to Qui. You name your child Love and the gods will be jealous, she said. The way she looked at him, the heavy furrows gathering between her eyes. As if to say, don’t you know anything?
Tu didn’t argue. His true love lay cold and dead in a makeshift wooden box at his dirty feet, her head resting in the bowl of her hat. A piece of ash blew into his ear. Frantically he tipped his head. As he pawed at his ear, he didn’t see the ring of white wor
ds beaming up into the night, the poem he had paid for long ago in its entirety. In the long river, fish swim off without a trace / Fated in love, we can wait a thousand years / Who tends the paddy, repairs its dike / Whoever has true love shall meet / But when?
Tu looked to his mother, her gray eyes shining. She had a way of knowing things she shouldn’t know. Already the baby was cooing in Qui’s arms. A piece of ash landed on the baby’s forehead. Bà nodded. It was settled. No one would ever call the child Love.
Qui swooped down and picked up the pale blue rice bowl half buried in the dirt and turned back to the hut. The baby suckled on her nipple. The young girl’s face went rapt, the feeling as if a ray of light were being drawn out of her body. For the moment the memory of the thing her grandmother had done to her was forgotten.
Huyen watched her granddaughter walk back into the hut. Already the girl was cutting a path through the world like a mother bear, already her appearance less deranged. Huyen grunted, satisfied. She was the oldest among them, older even than Bà by some years. It was right for the others to defer to her. It was how she negotiated the world, how she’d lasted. If you showed any attachment to things, you risked the gods’ wrath. It was best to act as if the objects closest to you were of no consequence. Indifference kept the pain from shattering you when ordinarily you should have shattered.
And so the night of the child’s arrival passed like a dream. Inside the dismantled hut, the fire burned down in the fire pit. In the distance no blue flames danced on the broken mountain. In less than a week Tu was gone, back to his days in the jungle passing messages and parts of heavy artillery along the network.
Even during the few days he was with them, watching Qui handle the baby out of the corner of his eye, they had begun calling her Rabbit, naming her for the full moon that had licked her clean. The rabbit with its innocence, its youthfulness, its long bright ears that hear everything in the realms of both the living and the dead. Rabbit because the world is full of rabbits. Rabbit because by sheer force of numbers, the rabbit walks among us unnoticed but pandemic.