by Quan Barry
A man was standing in a doorway. It looked like it had been a shop of some kind. Through the window Qui could see the empty shelves. The man wasn’t wearing a shirt as he stood coolly smoking a cigarette. A handmade flag was tacked just above a window, the flag red with a single yellow star in the middle. It was probably something his wife had stitched up from rags. Qui wasn’t sure which one was prettier. The north’s solid red with the one yellow star or the southern flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three red stripes running horizontally in a field of yellow.
There were other people making their way to the highway. Many of them were traveling with carts and bicycles loaded with possessions. Occasionally a motorbike would speed past, or just as often someone would be pushing one, either out of gas or trying to conserve it. Everyone looked dirty and hungry but energized just the same. Qui tried to imagine what had happened in these streets in the first minutes when news of Buon Me Thuot hit, that the central highlands were falling. Qui knew that for many it was the beginning of a road without an end.
It took a while for her to notice that not everyone was fleeing. Qui saw a woman carrying a burlap sack of rice on her back. Two teenaged girls walked beside her, one with a proprietary hand on the sack. Both of the girls carried large sticks. They were walking the wrong way back up the street. The woman looked tired. Maybe she wasn’t ready to abandon her ancestors. Maybe in her mind she told herself she had nothing to fear, that she had never uttered a single word against the north, but her eyes said something else.
At the end of the street, Qui stopped and put down the cart. They had arrived at the boulevard that would take them to the highway. On one side of the street there were open-faced shops and small buildings, on the other side endless white sands and the aquamarine waters of paradise. Huyen looked at Qui. What, she said. Qui shook her head and picked up the cart again. Her hands were bleeding, the skin blistered and peeling. It would take too long to explain. Clouds of the small white birds sailed on the winds. She had never seen the ocean before.
It’s not too late, said Huyen. We could stop here. It was true. The world was fleeing without knowing exactly where, people pushing south as if just the word south could save them. Huyen traced the horizon with her eyes. The four of them could simply walk off the road, find an abandoned house, build a fire. In the early morning before sunup, she would take Qui out to the ocean, teach her to wade into the surf at low tide, throw a net. They were mountain people, but they could learn. Qui wiped her brow with a bloody hand.
A man and a woman meet in a barren landscape. The man is a dragon, the woman a fairy. Why they love each other we cannot say. What their congress looks like we do not know. In time the woman lays one hundred eggs, each one the soft pale color of mercy. There is joy and happiness followed by much sorrow as often occurs with pairings of this kind. Eventually the man and woman accept that they can no longer be together, their love poxed by the stars. The man is of earth, the woman water. She takes fifty of their children to the sea, he takes the others to the mountains. Such are the origins of the Vietnamese people.
AND NOW THEY WERE STOPPING. EVERYWHERE PEOPLE MADE camp in the road. It was well past midnight, the noise of a million displaced voices and the full moon like an eye over the world. Huyen massaged the back of her skull with her fingers. If she kept her eyes focused in the middle distance, the headache was bearable. All over the highway campfires blazed like the fires of an army. Some of the travelers looked as if they had been on the road their whole lives. She wondered if, when the time came, they would know how to stop.
Qui piled their bamboo mats one on top of another and laid Bà out, folding the mosquito net on top of her. She picked up the baby and opened her shirt. A young boy in a group on the edge of the road sat watching, his eyes black as holes. Qui wasn’t sure if it was hunger or curiosity or something darker that made him stare.
Huyen spit some chewed rice into her palm. She tried to feed it to Bà, but the old woman wouldn’t open her mouth, her eyes snowy. A man was picking his way up the road carrying an armful of dried brush. He stopped and stared at Qui before peering at Bà lying in the moonlight. She’ll be dead by morning, he said, without any inflection. Huyen had thought he might offer some of the brush to build a fire, but he didn’t.
Hours later she nudged Qui. Most of the fires along the highway had burned out. It’s time, she said. She lifted Rabbit up off of Qui’s stomach where the baby had been sleeping and put her down next to Bà. Say goodbye.
Overhead something fluttered through the darkness. Rabbit rubbed her ears. The world went black like the moment before a curtain lifts. Gingerly she put her tiny hands on her grandmother’s face. Through the fabric of the old woman’s shirt she brushed the spot with her lips where Bà’s scar gleamed next to her heart. A dog barked in the distance and then a flash and then everything, Bà’s life spooling into her granddaughter in the span of a human kiss.
Lady, your face is growing wet. A light mist slicks your cheeks, but it’s not rain, the sun peeking through the haze. Lightly you run a finger over your forehead and stick it in your mouth. Salt. Spindrift. You begin to recognize the soft sting in your nostrils, the world listing at five degrees. Then you realize it’s not music filling the air so much as the cries of seabirds.
A sudden splash. A body hits the water, then another before a gun is fired into the air. In the sky the line of little white birds riding the winds parts for just the briefest of moments before re-forming. You watch as the man with the gun takes aim at two dark shapes in the water, the shapes paddling furiously. Another few shots and they stop moving and sink below the surface. For the rest of the short journey south nobody else jumps overboard even though the ship never leaves sight of land.
The day began on a quay, an interminable line slugging forward. People standing in the hot sun waiting for their turn to make their mark on a piece of paper, lines organized by place of origin. Ha Nam. Nam Dinh. Ninh Binh. At the head of each line there is an agent and a doctor from the company who looks at both sides of the hands and pries the mouth open, searching for signs of fever because, aside from fever, everything else is acceptable.
A recruiter walks among the lines saying it will be the easiest three years of your life. He is missing his left index finger all the way down to the knuckle. You notice this and everything there is to see. Your eyes are clear as gems. You try not to stare as he says something about free medicine, thirty pounds of rice a month, eight-hour work shifts, and the company will pay to bring you right back here, repatriate you in the land of your ancestors with money in your pocket.
All over the quay large men stand around holding rattan canes as if the foot-long sticks were nothing more than fancy pointers used to direct traffic. Some of the men are foreign, ex-members of the French Foreign Legion, their faces etched by sun and swifter sharper things. Some of them stare openly at the women. One scratches the black stubble of his chin with his cane as if that’s all he ever does with it. Already you are learning that order is something the company must maintain at all times, and that it is the job of these men to do so at any cost.
Two hours and then you’re up. How old, says the agent. Your mother looks at you as if he’s asked for your weight, something she needs to consider. She reaches over and brushes a strand of hair from your face. Thuan is fourteen, your mother says, her voice smoothing over the lie. The truth is you were born in 1930, and you will be ten in the fall, your eyes clear as water, but as you are learning, women are mercurial. Tell a man what he wants to hear and he will see whatever you tell him. The agent plunks down a contract. Sign here, he says. You take up the plume and dip it in the inkwell, draw the small square with the two lines that partition it like a rice paddy, the symbol of your clan. Your mother looks on. There isn’t even hope in her eyes, just resignation. A mother and a daughter, their hunger like a bond between them.
What your mother doesn’t know. The agent doesn’t care how old you are. He gets paid three xu for every signature he collects.
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nbsp; It’s a good place for a family, the agent says. The company will look after you. Your mother wonders why, now that he has your signatures, the agent keeps spinning his lies. Everyone else from Nam Dinh headed south years ago, and none of them have come back, though everyone in Nam Dinh knows what happens down on the plantations. They went for the same reason your mother has decided to make the move. There is simply nowhere else to go. Even the rats in Nam Dinh are scarce. War is settling on all the continents of the known world, and rubber is the dark currency that makes it all possible.
Another three hours and the processing is done. One of the company’s men moves from line to line collecting the contracts, filing them in a brown binder that you will never see again. Each person who signed was promised ten dong just for signing, though the workers from Ha Nam have the lowest rates of literacy. Even before boarding Le Cheval, which will take you all south into hell, the people from Ha Nam will be swindled out of four dong, a fact they will come to find out in the days ahead, though there is nothing they can do about it.
On board you are given a shabby mat and told in French to find space on deck. The sailor who tells you this speaks like a native, but his skin is dark as earth. Le Cheval is full of ore; you are just a secondary cargo. The food from the galley is inedible, the rice filled with sand, the fish already rotting. Once out at sea, people eye the railing but in their hearts everyone knows it is too late.
This is all you remember of the boat ride down the Vietnamese coast in the land the French call Indochine: the little white birds trailing the ship, the night sky as if salted with stars. How a man from Ninh Binh demanded drinkable water and was hit on the head only once, though the blood came down out of his scalp as if he’d been beaten again and again. On the third night a man and a woman lay writhing on their small square mat while everyone else slept, the man with his hand over the woman’s mouth, and the cords in her neck either straining with pain or something you can’t fathom.
On the fourth day the seabirds have doubled in number, land close enough even the weakest swimmer could make it. By the time Le Cheval sails into port, your mother has already finished her daily implorations to the goddess. Lady, keep us safe. Lift up our hearts in the darkness.
Once the ship docks, chaos breaks out when a foreigner boards and begins beating the air in front of him with his cane for no apparent reason. Partez! Partez! A woman falls clutching her head. It takes another hour to sort things out. All over the splintery wooden boards of the pier you notice rusty stains that theoretically could be anything.
The provinces are all going somewhere different. Due to war profiteering, the rubber companies are legion. Michelin. Mimot. Bigard. Cardesac. Because you and your mother hail from Nam Dinh, you will board one of the trucks heading back up north. It will take nearly two whole days to get where you are going. From time to time the truck stops so that you can climb out to relieve yourselves, then fill your arms with as many pineapples as you can carry. Some will wonder why the ship didn’t just stop near Tuy Hoa and let you off, but no one dares to ask.
And then you see it slipping through the trees—Terres Noires—up in the central highlands with its fourteen villages, its million hectares. The earth is red, though the French call it black because the original rock is volcanic and dark in color. In time the dirt turns a deep red as the rock breaks down, fertility beyond anything imaginable.
In the back of the truck your mother holds your hand. Thuan, she says. Remember who you are. You don’t know if she’s reminding you that you’re supposed to be fourteen or if she means something deeper. You jump off the truck, and a woman hands you a thin wooden badge on a tin chain. The woman’s face is dark and lined, her own badge weathered and dangling around her neck like a battered soul. Your mother slips hers on first. No. 1220. Put it on, but don’t become it.
Your first night in the barracks of Village Twelve you hear someone screaming from the woods. There are a hundred people sleeping in the room, but nobody rises to go to his aid. In the morning you learn that a man had gone out to meet his lover but had been mauled by a tiger. Before roll call there is a crowd gathering by the water station. The man’s extremities look intact but his innards have been skillfully removed. A woman bends over the body but doesn’t shed a tear. It is a crime to leave the plantation at night. There is talk of rebels proselytizing in the hills. Nobody comes forward to claim the body. Eventually two men are singled out to take it away. The men load it on a flatbed and drive it to the place where the workers are building Village Fifteen. The body will be planted where the new saplings will go.
A few days later a small shrine goes up by a storage shed, a tiny pagoda with a roof not much bigger than a rice bowl, a place to burn joss. When Eduard, the head overseer, sees it, he orders it torn down. We’re not running a goddamn temple, he says. Your mother bows her head, closes her eyes. When she’s done, she looks to you to do the same. You bow your head but don’t know what to pray for. As the days and weeks pass, this happens repeatedly, words not readily coming to you. Like speaking into the darkness. A feeling of being all alone, though there are thousands at your side, each one stooped and suffering. Lady, keep us in Your sight.
Terres Noires stretches for miles, trees planted in straight lines as far as the eye can see. In the back of Eduard’s flatbed it takes more than two hours to drive from one end to the other. Such cultivation, such care. You will be ten years old in the fall. You are too young to consider how any of this got here. How the first truckloads of men and women came down from the north in the late twenties. Men working to clear the land. Hack down the forest. Rip out the old trunks. Plant the saplings. Build the villages. The barracks and sheds and the garages and the water stations and the cooling rooms where they store the liquid rubber and the system of houses for the network of overseers, the great villa where the propriétaire lives with his thousand-bottle reserve in the cellar.
You will be ten years old in the fall, eyes clear as crystals. Nobody believes you are fourteen as your mother claims, though many of the women who have given birth to children are hardly bigger than you. The first few weeks you work the land around Village Twelve like everyone else. Roll call at five, then up on the trucks and out to the sectors. The day starts at six, then all day in among the trees with your pruning hook, your hand ax. The tin bucket always with you, which you use to empty the small wooden bowls that sit in hooks placed at the end of the track, the track itself a great ribbon cut diagonally around the trunk so that the latex oozes out and runs down the long slanting gouge and into the bowl. The latex white and creamy, which the workers joke about though you don’t understand. You never knew there could be so much to do in the world, every hour of your life given over to something, the need to stay in constant motion. You spend the days filling your bucket, careful not to spill.
This is what you learn that first week at Terres Noires. There are no eight-hour shifts. No medical clinics worth mentioning. No thirty pounds of rice per month. On the trucks by five, all day milking the trees, then back on the trucks at six. Sundays you spend cleaning the village, sharpening the adzes and pruning hooks, cleaning the tin buckets of their residue. When it is all done, sometimes there is time for cheo, the traditional plays of song and dance that help the workers forget themselves. In cheo lovers meet in wet paddies. Lost princes wander the land before being restored. Tricksters with good hearts ultimately deliver the protagonist from his enemies. It is all a metaphor, but for what you are unsure.
In each of Terres Noires’ fourteen villages there is a commissary, a small store where everything is costly and of the worst quality. Your mother is trying to stretch the money she has been paid, though the salary is only a figure in the manager’s book, a number inked on a piece of paper. Last month the commissariat informed her that they were only paying you half the wages. But she’s fourteen, your mother wailed. Thuan deserves a full salary. The other women in line told her to be quiet. Let them treat her as a child, one woman whispered. The women all
lowered their eyes. It is the only line they respect, someone said. Your mother stopped protesting and accepted the eighteen pounds of rice without further complaint, then made her mark in the commissariat’s book.
And that very afternoon as your mother is learning another of the thousand things mothers fear for their daughters, you see him for the first time—a grown man in his late thirties. Underneath the cashew tree with its white flowers the size of fists.
He sees you staring. There is something in his eyes that you have never seen before. A knowing gentleness, the palms of his hands white as clouds. It is 1940 and when he looks at you, you can feel yourself being recognized for the first time.
In each village there is a medical clinic where a Frenchman sits smoking a cigarette as the patient struggles to describe his malade in a foreign tongue. When the patient finishes, the Frenchman will rise and flick his cigarette out the window. Do not eat or drink for the next twenty-four hours, he will invariably counsel. Give your system a chance to purge itself. And the patient is ushered out.
When the people don’t work, it means the plantation doesn’t have to pay them. The company would rather you stay home and starve than go out into the woods and earn a wage.
So the workers turn to him when they fall sick, the man with palms white as liquid rubber. The people’s sicknesses are predictable, the dark siftings leaking from their bodies from the poor food, the dirty water. Depending on whether or not there is blood or pus the man with the unworldly smile will brew a tea made from the bark of the philodendron. Drink this, he says. Within hours the rumblings in the worker’s belly fall silent.
That first time you see him it’s Sunday. He is sitting off behind the barracks in the shade of a cashew tree, legs in the lotus position, eyes shut, the white flowers of the tree big as fists. You have been working Terres Noires for months. The muscles in your thin arms are striated. The empty buckets you are carrying bang rhythmically against your knees as you walk by. You don’t know the word for the thing you are feeling in the pit of your stomach, though you know it has nothing to do with dirty water. The moment like walking a long dirt road directly into the sun, the sound of the buckets like the clattering of your heart. There is something in the stillness of his body, though somehow you know there is a fire burning deep within like one you have never known. How is it possible? The man opens his eyes.