He held the candy in his lap while his father drove in silence. Even through the plastic, he could smell the sugar and chocolate. Some of the houses outside were dark, and others were outlined in Christmas lights.
After a while, Ajay rolled down the window slightly. The car filled with wind. They passed the building where Aman’s accident had occurred. Ajay had not walked past it since the accident. When they drove by, he usually looked away. Now he tried to spot the fenced swimming pool at the building’s side. He wondered whether the pool that had pressed itself into Aman’s mouth and lungs and stomach had been drained, so that nobody would be touched by its unlucky waters. Probably it had not been emptied until fall. All summer long, people must have swum in the pool and sat on its sides, splashing their feet in the water, and not known that his brother had lain for three minutes on its concrete bottom one August afternoon.
PAPIER
from GRASS ROOF, TIN ROOF
Dao Strom
I.
It was a grand story with many events and an inconclusive ending, and it left her with an ache in her brain and heart, a feeling akin to wanting. Wanting tinged with amazement and understanding—the ending would always be inconclusive—and this was why the story worked as well as it did; this was why it was so affecting and rending and lingering. For many nights afterwards, she went to sleep wishing she could live this story and picturing herself after the experience a wiser, sadder, nobler person. Or she liked to imagine meeting a man who had lived through such an experience, a humble, beaten man whose integrity only she would recognize, and she would be his friend. She wouldn’t ask for more than that.
She had been introduced to the story by a man whom she knew only by his first name, Gabriel. He was a French war correspondent living intermittently in her country and his own. When she met him in 1969, she was twenty-four years old, unwed with one son, then a toddler, from a previous relationship, and she was taking French and English literature and language classes at the Saigon University where Gabriel often came to visit the teachers, many of whom worked on the side as interpreters. She had aspirations of being a writer or artist; she hadn’t decided yet which kind. On her first date with Gabriel they saw an American movie about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, starring Kirk Douglas. The theater was mostly full of American GIs and foreign news correspondents and their Vietnamese dates or associates—other English-speaking, local advocates of Democracy—writers, teachers, print and broadcast news reporters and employees, students, businessmen, travel guides and ambitious prostitutes. Tran did not align herself with this latter group, and trusted Gabriel did not either, though she knew it would look suspect, a local woman on the arm of a foreign man. Her foreign man, the Frenchman, however, was obviously not a soldier; for her sake, he wore his press jacket (she had insisted on this, wanting the distinction to be clear, but had told him it was because she liked him better in the jacket). His build was also too slight and reserved for a soldier, and he was older, with a long face and faintly smiling, thin lips. Tran thought Gabriel’s deep-set eyes—with their yellowish-hazel color, behind wire-framed glasses—held an intellectual, disenchanted cast.
DAO STROM was born in 1973 in Saigon, Vietnam. She emigrated to the United States in 1975 and grew up in northern California. Her first novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof, was published in 2003. She is currently at work on a second novel.
The movie was maudlin and heroic, this in a time when such sentiment in the movies was still cathartic—though it is likely any movie featuring the likes of Kirk Douglas would’ve been cathartic at that time, at that outpost. Already a sense of hopelessness and consternation pervaded the streets, though people seemed to be laughing, selling, buying, venting opinions and eating and drinking with all the usual fervor; it was this fervor, in fact, that seemed now volatile and dangerously indifferent. Tran felt watchful in public places. And though she would in all sensible mind claim not to admire any military, she looked with a naïve respect, even a deferent longing, toward the American military men, for the very details of their dress and physicality (the size and stoutness of their bodies, the muted colors and fitted cut of their clothes, their sweat rings that seemed evidence to her of their formida bility rather than—as it seemed with the local militia men, whose uniforms always sagged—their inability to cope) had in her mind aligned itself with a concept of order.
Tran was wiping her eyes when the lights came up at the end of the film, and when Gabriel asked why, she replied in her cautious French, “I understand very well the melancholy of the life of an artist.” She had actually meant to use the word l’angoisse, but when la mélancolie slipped out of her lips she realized this was more right: a more subdued, less violent—more poetic, even—portrayal of the pain she had meant. Suddenly the small theater trembled in a great ground shudder and there was a muffled boom and the noise of commotion outside. Inside, people began to panic and run for the exits. Gabriel took hold of Tran by both shoulders, pushed her into a corner against the stage. She felt the rough efficiency of his body pressed suddenly, unsexually, against hers—she felt more conscious of this than of the rumbling walls, which she had already surrendered her fate to in the first instant. With intensity Gabriel was watching the crowd, craning his neck. His body blocked Tran’s view and she found herself staring at the fine brown hairs of his chest visible through the folds of fabric between his shirt buttons. She closed her eyes. Then the shaking stopped. They made their way toward an exit, and when they came out onto the street they saw the throng of people gathered in front of the bookstore and mail depot, its front now blown open and billowing black smoke. Three Vietnamese civilians writhed on the sidewalk in front of the mess, crying in pain; a few local policemen and Americans were running toward them. Gabriel directed Tran to wait at the back of the crowd. “I have to work,” he said. Then he took his camera out of the small canvas satchel he wore slung over his shoulder. Tran watched his back (his shirt half untucked, the seat of his pants rumpled) pushing through the crowd.
Later, much later, they would define the bombing as fate—not necessarily to say their relationship was doomed, but that this omen was representative of what was to come, or the nature of how things were to open between them.
The novel he had recommended to her was an American classic, Gone With the Wind. They read passages together (“If you want to learn English you must read this story,” he’d said, “there is not much good about the English language except this story”). It was Gabriel’s favorite American novel for a couple of reasons: one, he saw it as a great depiction of “the American insistence upon naïveté”; and, two, he liked those literary classics by authors who had never intended to be authors, who said all they needed to in one book alone. There was something more honest, more respectable, this way, he theorized, as if the book, the story itself, had forced its way out of the reluctant author, rather than the other method, where the story became tangled up in an author’s ego. This author was a woman (which appealed to Tran) in the 1930s, and the novel had a good dose of everything: the rise and fall of vanities and societies, births and deaths, unrequited loves, illegitimate children, an ir repressible heroine, a scandalous hero. And at the center of it, a civil war between North and South, something relevant. Occasionally Tran and Gabriel would discuss the parallels between life and literature and politics and cultures, which spanned years and seas.
Tran did not always understand Gabriel’s theories but was drawn in by his wry spirit, the nonchalance with which he delivered his well-informed and devastating perceptions about current politics, the same politics that only distressed Tran’s Vietnamese colleagues and sometimes confused Tran; she could easily find merit in every point of view. In fact she somewhat admired Gabriel, his aloofness, his sense of comedy, which was almost cruel and thus took on another quality—acerbic, tragic, self-denying. How did one become like this, she wondered, so intellectual and so resigned yet not resigned, by sheer virtue of his commitment to that very attitude? The more time she spent
with him, though, the more she began to see cracks in his mask. When they practiced reading in her language, his accent was slow and clumsy and almost embarrassingly earnest. The way he would point to objects on the street (phone booth, gutter pipe, spokes of a bicycle wheel) or a part of her body, and ask her the words that named these places, these appendages. His candor and his deep, eager, fumbling voice repeating after her at first surprised her; she saw a man who desired to be someone other than he was, whose knowledge and wit encumbered rather than enlightened him. She understood then the grace, the simplicity, he saw in her—and the lack of which he despised in himself. Thus did clumsiness and a hidden vulnerability become the characteristics she associated with white. His white body, covered in dark curling patches of hair, was long and awkward and remorseful when they made love. His white linen shirts, wrinkled and sweat-stained. His white skin that seemed so thin and unsuitable a cover, especially under the tropical sun, and made nudity look unnatural (she soon developed the impression that white people were meant always to be clothed, that it was their more natural state). Yet he was her vessel and gateway both, to a strange vision of power and regret, to so much of the outside world she didn’t know how else she would ever reach. Though she did not think she loved him, at times she felt sympathy for him.
When Gabriel’s assignment in Saigon ended in 1971, he returned to France; someone else had always been there waiting for him. Tran was not mournful and told him confidently that she wished him well and would not miss him, that theirs had been what it was for the time it was—an intimacy enabled yet limited by the temporal circumstances of war, a situation wherein people like him (more than her) could for a period dis inhabit the more regulated life to which they must eventually return. Tran was not an impractical woman; back in 1966, when the man who was her son’s father had denied any involvement with her, she had learned her first lesson about the potential disappointments of love. In short, she had learned not to count on reciprocation. He had been a slightly older man, an established schoolteacher in their community, and he had introduced her to much about philosophy and the creative life. For the first few months after discovering she was pregnant with his child she had pursued him, demanding either money or that he marry her, and he had laughed her off, claiming that her relationship with him was merely a schoolgirl fantasy. Where the live proof came from, he had said, he would leave to speculation. Tran had felt crushed, indignant, humiliated. She went to a fortune-teller who informed her she should not try to marry before the age of thirty, as all her lovers would either die or leave her. And a man from far off would come for her one day. “I tell this to many women, it is true, to keep their hearts awake, their hopes up, but to you I mean it,” the fortune-teller had said. And for the first time in her life Tran had experienced the resolve of knowing. Yes, she would have the child, but she did not want or need the father. Her own father was shamed and her mother heartbroken when Tran announced her decision. But they could hardly deny the presence of new life when actually it did arrive.
It is said love can move any mountain is how she began her version of the story, and love comes to us when we are not looking, when we have turned our backs on its very possibility, have resigned ourselves to the longing. Yet when it comes, we know it from the first moment the would-be object of our affection appears. We know love by both the dread and excitement in our hearts, by the resistance our minds raise against what our hearts are straining toward; we know it by the fact that we cannot stop it once it starts to happen and suddenly the world is full of a sense of great and imminent change just ahead: the most minute detail overflows our senses now with the indescribable pleasures of hope.
It was heavy-handed and sentimental and she recognized this, but it was the best she could do on a first try. She also believed that what came out first was rawest and truest, and should not be revised, to uphold its integrity. She had no diligence for backtracking. She was a young writer. Eager to expel her words.
Her story was commissioned to appear as a daily serial novel in one of the city’s independent newspapers. A writer friend had secured the assignment for Tran, and it was to be her first citywide publication. A big step, for she had previously published only a few articles and short stories in reviews and smaller papers. “This editor, you have heard of him, he can help you,” her writer friend assured her, “as he has helped many like us.”
The man her friend spoke of was the paper’s chief founder and editor, but because of his notoriety in politics, he and others had decided his affiliation would be best maintained as an unofficial relationship. Only his close colleagues knew his role. He filtered decisions through a young, posing editor in chief, and any actual writing he did he credited to other writers (some of whom existed, some of whom did not). His physical presence in the office was explained as visits to friends or consultations as a technical adviser. He shared a semiprivate office with the senior reporters, and entered and exited the same way most of the staff did, through a back-alley entrance. For the most part, he was not recognized and went about inconspicuously under his assumed name. He had assumed names at least five other times in the past fifteen years, and had still been jailed four times for what the ever-shifting government had labeled “the creation and advocation of slander and/or immorality.” He had been dubbed a “gadfly.” But he took no side wholeheartedly when it came to the subject of the war—not the Communist, not the American, not the South Vietnamese—for he believed them each to be a flawed system. Rather, he believed the true source of all troubles between humans ran someplace far deeper than politics.
It was under his latest name, Le Hoang Giang—a nom de plume alluding to the evanescent quality of autumn, translated literally from the Chinese as “yellow river”—that Tran met him.
He was thirty-four years old, an unassuming presence, slender, with kind eyes, a long, gentle face, and a warm smile. His hair was black, his skin very brown. A hint of knowing and humor lingered about the edges of all his expressions, as if he were continually assessing but withholding judgment. In a crowd, he was likely to retreat, to stand against a wall or leave without warning or good-bye.
“Tell me your idea,” he said brusquely the first time she sat down before him. As she began to speak, he rested one hand on the side of his face and fixed his lucid gaze upon her.
“I want to write a love story based on the American novel Gone With the Wind—you have probably heard of it,” she told him. “I want to set it in our country, but follow the same story line as the original. At least in essence I want to follow it.”
He smiled as he leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. On the opposite side of the street below was a sidewalk café that was a popular hangout for the paper’s writers and supporters; it occurred to Tran he could have been staring out the window minutes ago and seen her seated at a table down there, awaiting her appointment with him. It was raining, and the sound of water beating on the tin roofs was like nails in a metal can. Rain dripped in heavy streams from the eaves outside the open window.
“I read that book a long time ago,” said Giang. “I found it moving. And so thorough. You must’ve been just as moved by it as I was.”
It didn’t seem necessary to respond, but out of respect Tran said, “Yes, Uncle.” She felt she must address him formally, as her elder.
He looked at her again. “What will happen in your version of the story?”
She told him: instead of Atlanta at the crumbling of the United States Confederacy, it would be the northern port town of Haiphong at the climax of French rule. The heroine would be from a rice farm in a small northern village, and her family devout French-influenced Catholics. The family would be forced to flee south at the advance of the Viet Minh, and the story would follow that passage, which would bring the heroine to Haiphong.
“But mostly I want it to be a love story,” explained Tran. “The heroine is torn, you see, because she is in love with a childhood friend who has gone off to fight for the Viet Minh.
Then there will be a second man, who is committed to neither the French nor the Viet Minh—he just wants his own personal freedom—and he falls in love with the heroine and pursues her though she tries to deny him. She herself is apolitical. She doesn’t want to go any further south simply because she is waiting for her childhood love to find her again. Maybe my story will reflect some contemporary issues. The heroine might find herself suddenly on opposing sides from the man she loves and once could trust, but mostly, to be honest, I’d like for my story to focus on the personal, emotional lives of its characters. When it comes to literature, that’s what I’m truly interested in, you see.”
“Yes,” said Giang, seeming bemused, “life is never interesting unless one is in love with another who is in love with something or somebody else.” He was looking at her now, but Tran felt as if he were speaking more to the space behind her than to her directly. “It is no new thing, you know,” he said, “this story of men going off to war and women waiting in anguish for them to return. Every continent in the world knows this story.”
Tran didn’t speak, unsure if he meant to belittle her ideas.
He sat forward, laying his forearms on the desktop, his back slightly bowed as if he were about to stand. He turned his face toward the window for a moment. She could hear the hum of activity on the floor below, voices and typewriters and drawers slamming and laughter and footsteps. Finally Giang spoke: “I want you to write whatever you wish, and I will see that it gets published. Do you know, little sister, that is all I want to do myself? I am starting to think the only reprieve we will ever
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