by Quan Barry
Not your mother. Not Hong Hanh, who is actually fourteen and lives in Village Eight with her whole clan from Ha Nam. Hong Hanh, whom you’ll meet in the grand kitchen of the propriétaire, the copper pots and saucepans hanging from iron hooks. Nobody. Personne. Not a single soul will ever understand the unworldly rapport between you and this man. You barely understand it yourself.
It happens like this: there is a riot in Village Two. Village Two is one of the original villages. Some of the workers have been cutting the trees there for more than a decade. As Village Two is more than fifteen miles away, news of the riot doesn’t reach your village for almost a full day. The night after it happens the first of the rioters begin to trickle into your sector well past midnight. When they knock on the barracks door, only he will rise and step outside, the man with the palms white as cream standing in the moonlight and patiently drawing a map in the dirt. The man tells them which river the dogs won’t ford, which mountain tribes are friendly, which to avoid at all costs.
And so a new girl is needed in the kitchen. The girl from Village Two who used to work there doing whatever was needed has disappeared along with her family. The truth is maybe one of the overseers saw an opening and took it, lured her out into the field of new saplings by Village Fifteen, and did what he’d been waiting to do, ultimately burying her body there beneath the young trees where they will grow and mature and bleed for years. Who can know for sure?
Two days after the riot you are filling your bucket out among the rubber trees when one of the LeBonne brothers appears and says come with me. His skin is pitted as if with a needle. You turned ten years old in the fall, though you are starting to look fourteen. For the rest of the day your mother, who was only a half mile away when you were driven off, will be tearing her hair out.
In the grand house you see things you have never seen before. Indoor plumbing. Gas stoves. Lace so fine it hurts just to look at it. Staircases carved in teak. Ivory and china and the fabric they use to blow their noses in finer than anything you have ever touched.
This is where you will grow up, not out there under the rubber trees and the watchful eye of the other LeBonne with the battered rattan cane he is never without, your hands callused like leather, fingers peeling and raw where the white sap sticks to them and won’t come off. No. This is the world the world has been hiding from you. Massenet. Lavender. Madeleines. Taupinière. A world of leisure, though the hours of sweet inactivity are not for you. You will work as hard as ever in this other world.
Time passes. The war arrives. Nobody is allowed to leave. Because Vietnam shares a border with China, the battle-thirsty Japanese invade, desperate to keep Vietnamese supplies from the Chinese. Occupied France allies herself with Japan, and now Indochine has a new ruler. On the plantation three-year contracts are extended indefinitely because where would you go, child? The Japanese have faces like yours but different somehow, eyes smaller, hard as knives, eyes as if entirely made of pupils, like insects with their compound lenses. Mostly it doesn’t matter. The French are still very much in charge because business is business, and the Vichy are accommodating, though the young mademoiselle sits at the piano crying that her life has been ruined, that she will never stroll the Seventh Arrondissement with a lover on her arm. Mon pauvre petit chou, you say, fanning her with a banana leaf. My poor little cabbage.
You no longer sleep in the barracks but in the servant quarters with Hong Hanh and the rest of the staff. The few times you see her, your mother says she is happy for you. Your French is flawless in that way children pick up foreign languages without even trying. Once when you haven’t seen her for months, you barely recognize her, the lines in her dark brown face as if gouged with an awl. The first time you call your mother Maman, she looks stricken, as if you’ve just hit her.
Though you never forget the moment by the cashew tree, as the years pass you only see the man with the beautiful palms every now and then, mostly when the French garagiste sneaks him into the building just off the main house where they keep the Saoutchik shipped in all the way from Marseilles so he can work on the great black car so polished it always looks wet, the thing bigger than any room you have ever shared or ever will. The way the man with the beautiful hands can intuit what is wrong, twisting the right cap, replacing the right part, with the result that the engine purrs back to life and the garagiste can hold his head up around the grounds. You always knew the man was magical, his hands like blank pages. This is the proof.
Today the garagiste yells through the back door to bring them some coffee. Though you are in the middle of boiling the napkins, there is no one else around, so you do as you’re told. You make it just the way the propriétaire himself likes, the aroma so bitter you wince at the smell. You leave it in the press and carry the tray outside, your house dress just below the knee, your body fully blossomed, eyes clear as glass. In the night when Hong Hanh is asleep, the breath sniveling out through her nose, you are learning how to touch yourself. Sometimes you think of him, the man with the perfect hands, the light in his eyes seemingly faceted like a cat’s, and when you do, it happens faster.
For a moment you stand in the light of the garage. He is under the great black hood. You can see yourself reflected in the liquid metal—a girl holding her heart out in front of her. Then he comes out from under it and everything is as you’ve remembered. Even under the grease his hands shine like moonlight. The garagiste is nowhere in sight. Thuan, the man says. It is the only time he will ever speak your name. The rooms in your heart flooding.
In the days after the European war is over, when the danger in Vietnam is at its most extreme as Indochine steadies herself to fight the French imperialists, Hong Hanh will say this is why the man with the lily-white palms befriended you. Because you have access. You can get him keys and maps and help him drug the dogs and tell him things about the cycles of the great house. You stand in the pantry with your hands folded across your chest. Ta guele! you shout at your best friend. And years later, after all the passion has drained from your body, you will keep the physical memory of your first afternoon of love, July 1945, the propriétaire’s niece to marry that very week, the tent like a great sail staked out under the flowering cashew trees, the man beaten, his back laced with welts, and how he brought out the dragon fruit nevertheless, the thing he had been hiding just for you, and the way he brought it out from the dark cave of his body where he had kept it hidden between his legs as the overseers beat him with their canes, the LeBonne brothers with their homicidal rages blind to who he was, not knowing that stealing the fruit was the least of it, that he was Vietminh, that he was organizing the workers, that nights he would read to them from Than Chung and Humanité, the French Communist paper, tales of workers finding their voices, the collective power of their awakening, of sûréte agents and managers and armies of overseers being overthrown at last, and the memory of that first time when the man peeled the fruit for you and watched you eat of it, and the way he took you in his arms, and all the while you were careful not to touch his back as he moved into you and you felt the little death creeping up on and on until you died and he moved in you until you died again and you said I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours you never stop saying it even when someone tells the overseers about the two of you there on the eve of the August Revolution, Ho Chi Minh with his declaration prepared, the war in Europe over, the Japanese emperor declared just a man, August 1945 and Ho Chi Minh né Nguyễn Sinh Cung with his letter of friendship to Harry S. Truman which will go unanswered ready to tell all the world that after a thousand years Vietnam is Vietnam’s at last but before it happens the LeBonne brothers come and drag you out of your bed and put you in a room where a series of Frenchmen ask you where is he and it goes on and on until one of them puts his cigarette out on your chest not because he thinks it will bring an answer but because he can the burning going all the way down to your heart a window a hole that lets the light in gives you second sight a way of seeing in the dark which is why now at
the end of everything you see yourself lying on a highway in the middle of fleeing millions a girl a child kissing your scar light of my blood everything spilling into her so that you can finally rest but it isn’t the end, n’est-ce pas? After life there must be life.
And years later when an old medicine man with green scars in the pits of his hands moves to the same province where you live by the Song Ma, the River of Dreams, you will be vindicated. It wasn’t all about access, about dogs and maps and keys. It wasn’t.
This is what Rabbit sees in the instant she kisses the skin where a Frenchman burned her grandmother next to her heart. Terres Noires and everything that followed—the three or four men who came after the man with the milk-white hands, one of them the father of Tu, the subsequent fire of childbirth, the feeling of Tu’s small hot mouth on Bà’s breast, war and more war and war without end and the living on because you had to, the years beside the Song Ma and the years on Lak Lake and all the while the world growing dim though in the heart it was the opposite. The scar on her chest like a medallion.
She’s dead, said Huyen. In among the clamoring light of the full moon, Rabbit could hear others dying farther up on the road, the closest one only a few hundred feet away.
Lady, lift us up in the darkness.
September 1945. Within two months the uprising in Indochine is over. All over Vietnam the plantations are once again under French rule. The end of the war in Europe means that France has been liberated and Indochine is still a colony. The French gendarmes and the sûréte agents and even a division of Allied soldiers have put an end to the revolt, rounding up as many Vietnamese Communists as they can. But what the French don’t know could fill a universe.
Today the wound on your chest from the August Revolution no longer smells and is starting to heal, though it will never fully heal. Now you work the rubber trees again as you did long ago when you were a child pretending to be a woman. Each day you take up the sharp pruning hook and gouge the bark. Each tree forever scarred.
One tree over, Hong Hanh puts down her pruning hook and points. A truck is coming through the woods, but you don’t stop what you’re doing. It’s just another truck full of prisoners headed to Con Son Island off the southern coast. Now that the revolution has failed, Terres Noires is shipping them out, anyone suspected of illegal activity, of being a Communist and organizing against the French. It isn’t until your friend, who has also lost her job in the kitchen, snatches the hat off your head that you put down your bucket and look.
In the truck bed the prisoners stand shoulder to shoulder, their arms held out in front of them where, in lieu of rope, someone has speared a length of copper wire through the center of their hands, the men strung together like fish on a line, each man wired to the other. Already their hands are growing green and useless.
Calmly Rabbit kissed her grandmother’s forehead. Co ta không chêt. She’s not dead, said Rabbit, her first sensical words. She was four years old in the ancient system of reckoning. In the darkness the freckles on her face seemed to shine. Huyen put a hand over Bà’s mouth, but there was nothing coming out.
And when you see him, the man you have always loved, as you invariably will, your love riding in the back of a truck with wire running through his palms under the hot September sun, don’t cry out. Don’t acknowledge his presence. His swollen hands sewn to his neighbors’, his back riddled with fresh welts.
He doesn’t see you, his mind a thousand miles away, the anger already growing in him, a rage that will carry him through the term of his imprisonment. Standing there in the hot sun he doesn’t see anything. He can’t. But the Lady is watching. We are always in Her sight. And so for some reason the man lifts his heavy head and looks out at Terres Noires one last time. He turns his face toward you out there somewhere among the trees, a knife in your hand, your eyes bright and cloudless, and bows.
The Christians among us have a story about the light of the world and a voyage by water. “Now under the Semites’ Barley Moon of the Strong Rain it came to pass that he went into a ship with his disciples, and he said unto them, ‘Let us go over unto the other side.’ But as they sailed he fell asleep, and there came down a storm of wind, and they were filled with water and were in jeopardy. And they came to him and awoke him, crying, ‘Master! Master! We perish.’ ” This is what the Christians among us believe, and as some of us have lived it word for word, the waters serrated and thronging, our stories are not dissimilar. East and West. Night and day. The light of the world indiscriminately keeping watch over all of us.
RABBIT AND SON WERE SITTING ON THE FRONT PORCH with their feet in the river when the boat floated by. It was the sixth one that month. The engine was up out of the water, a mass of weeds threaded through the rusty blades. Two men stood on either side of the pilothouse using bamboo poles to push the boat downstream. The only noise was the sound of the bamboo stabbing the water, the boat gliding down the Mekong through the floating village of Ba Nuoc on its way toward the sea in the darkness before moonrise.
Squatting on the porch, Son waved, but the men didn’t wave back. Nobody else came out of their rickety houses to stare as the boat drifted by. Son knew better. It might look like nobody was watching, but somebody always was.
Ba Nuoc was a small community of fewer than fifteen houses, each one no more than three rooms built on empty fifty-gallon drums along with a type of river weed that the men harvested and the women matted together until it floated. Sheets of metal covered the roofs, at night the rooms lit by firelight. Some of Ba Nuoc’s residents were extended families like the Dinhs, Son’s clan. Others were southern professionals like Dr. Kao who had been pushed out of the cities with nowhere else to go but the Mekong delta. It was thought the doctor had a wife and children somewhere. There were rumors he had once been the personal physician to Madame Nhu. Now his house was just a floating raft with a shack lashed to it.
The water coursed under the porch where Son and Rabbit sat waiting. There were floating villages all over the delta as well as floating markets and floating factories, in places the Mekong so wide one couldn’t see the other side. In some spots the villages were built on stilts to avoid the annual flooding when the river overran its banks. Everywhere things were made to float, the whole world tying itself to something and not letting go.
The boat was almost to the bend in the river. Soon it would disappear behind the thick curtain of mangroves. There was still no sign of Son’s mother, Phuong, or Huyen and Qui and the other women returning from the floating market. The moon was well above the trees. Finally the boat rounded the bend.
Let’s go, said Rabbit, her voice as if inside Son’s head. He jumped up before he could help himself. He was nine years old in the modern system of reckoning, two years older than her, but in every other way Rabbit was the leader, her hair cut short as a boy’s, a black bowl encompassing her head. From a distance she and Son looked like brothers, their bodies lithe as saplings, Rabbit’s ribs also visible when she went without a shirt. Once, out on the porch of their floating house, Son’s own mother had called to Rabbit thinking the little girl was Son. Then Rabbit had turned around and Phuong had seen the map of freckles adorning the child’s face. Phuong shuddered at her mistake. The freckles were unsettling, the spots so rare among the population that nobody knew what to make of them.
At the other end of the porch Rabbit began untying the sampan. Son opened the cage and took Binh out first, placing her black webbed feet on his shoulder. Binh was the first bird Rabbit and Huyen had ever trained. While other birds came and went, Huyen had allowed Rabbit to keep Binh. There was a trainer over in Sac Bao who clipped the wings of his birds, taking the strongest feathers from each appendage. That way they couldn’t fly away and never come back. It also meant they couldn’t dive as deep. Consequently the fish they caught were midsize and unremarkable, but the man said that was the price you paid if you never wanted to worry about losing your bird.
Son had been with Rabbit and Huyen when they’d first found
the nest hidden in the mangrove roots by the water’s edge. Huyen had taught them to never take more than they needed, otherwise the birds would move and never come back. Over the next three years they had returned again and again to the same nest, never taking more than one egg with each visit. It was a time-consuming process. Huyen showed them how to keep the eggs warm until they hatched, then how to feed the hatchlings tiny shrimp and bits of fish. The few times Son had gone hunting for a nest with his uncles with the intention of raising a pair of birds to sell, they had picked eggs that never became anything. By the time they realized it, they couldn’t even eat them, the shells starting to grow soft. With Huyen and Rabbit it was different. Every egg they took became a bird.
Ordinarily it could take as long as six months to train a young adult, but Huyen could do it in less than three. The locals joked she was part cormorant, her betel-stained teeth the same fleshy color as her tongue. Son knew it had something to do with the silvery room inside Rabbit’s head, the place where she went to listen. He imagined a cavern blasted somewhere deep inside her skull, a jagged room made of silvery rocks like the caves down by Cuu Long Bay where people hid things from one another, a place where Rabbit could hear things no one else could hear. That was the only way he could explain it. All she had to do was speak a thing and the bird would do it, Rabbit and the bird as if talking to each other. Dive. Open your mouth. Give it here. Be quiet. Sometimes Son did exactly the opposite of what she said just to make sure she didn’t have any power over him, but even then he wondered.