Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Page 1
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., a Penguin Random House Company
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First published 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Lisa Jager
Cover Images: (boat) Allistar Clark/Arcangel Images; (swirl) Shutterstock
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Thanh, Yasuko, author
Mysterious fragrance of the yellow mountains / Yasuko Thanh.
ISBN 978-0-670-06878-4 (paperback)
I. Title.
PS8639.H375M97 2016 C813′.6 C2015-905587-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-14-319327-2
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v3.1
For Hank
Plunging streams—one after another
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part III
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part IV
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
If you fail to bury a body, if the body dies away from home, if it dies unloved while hurrying from a coal mine shaft, or without its head, in the middle of a field, lonely, if it dies in the street, lost, if it dies a violent death, if it dies with a bamboo pole on its neck, the shoulder callused from heavy work without the proper rituals of mourning, if it dies alone, it will become a wandering ghost.
In 1908 the French rule Cochin China. The pro-independence movement is scattered and unorganized. In the south, an army trains, not to fight, but to turn invisible, the general working on a potion that will make his army vanish before the eyes of the French.
In a hundred years, one will be able to board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City and pay a woman with small feet and waist-length hair a few dong for a body massage, to be rendered and received naked in a room that smells of coconut oil.
Today only a small number of English and German merchants discuss the politics of Italian missionaries with French Navy officers while they dine in restaurants with waiters who must adhere to curfews and by colonial-era law carry lanterns to identify themselves at night when they go out.
The French expel Vietnamese nationalists to South American jungle camps or chop off their heads, leaving them on stakes at the marketplace.
The country, some say, is shaped like a dragon. In the north, near the Gulf of Tonkin, one spies a bay full of pirates and fishermen’s houses clinging to the shore. Knee-deep in water, women work in the fenced-off plot of a rice paddy. On the other side of the hill, a Tonkinese coal mine and a small cattle farm shelter a group of houses where pottery makers and brick makers live.
The dragon’s slender waist is home to the Chams, an ancient tribe. The villagers wear caps decorated with polished pebbles, sing songs, and hunt rhinoceros with sticks made of sharpened bamboo. A man smokes marijuana from a pipe and its perfume spires into the giant kapok trees. A child tires himself scurrying through the underbrush all day and goes to sleep on a woven, movable floor that can be elevated when the river water of the Central Highlands rises.
The Chams share their river with the Moys, a tribe descended from Hindu kings. They wind in procession through the fire trees, arrows in bags slung across their backs. The women stroll with squares of fabric that barely cover their breasts, and both women and men pierce their ears. Their toes are spread wide from years of walking barefoot.
So legend has it, both tribes are such good hunters, they can shoot a bull so not a single drop of blood is spilled.
In the south, in the Mekong Delta, water buffaloes pull wooden harrows to plow seedbeds. Lotus flowers sprout from mud flats. Fish ponds flank roads busy with farmers, lazy with bamboo.
In Saigon, Vietnamese women work cramped shops lit by red lanterns. In theatres men dressed as women play the parts of women so well it’s impossible to tell them apart. Gigantic barracks built by Chinese labourers sidle next to French-built houses of several storeys with encircling verandas. A closed carriage with two horses rides beside an open carriage with one horse. There is a pagoda, a covered market; on the banks of the river thousands of boats bob up and down.
Along the Saigon River, arrack palms preside over the large open spaces between houses on the shore. The roofs of wooden houses are woven from palm leaves, and wickerwork walls divide the rooms within, affording little privacy, since they do not reach all the way to the ceiling and, moreover, are thin and let through every sort of sound. (A few of the houses built by Chinese immigrants a hundred years ago are made of stone with red tile roofs, and these afford slightly more privacy.)
And
now we arrive at the villa of Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh. His neighbours’ houses rest on the far banks of the Saigon River, where fog sweeps the waters the way a bridal veil might sweep a lover’s face. One day, Georges-Minh, too, will get married.
For now, Georges-Minh lives alone in a mansion in the Thao Dien area. Neoclassical in design, modern in every aspect, built by the French fifty years ago (although his toilet is just a hole cut out of a wooden plank, over the river, and open to the sky—fish charge the pilings when they hear his footsteps on the jetty, but no mind).
In addition to working in his home office in one wing of the villa, and making his own pharmaceuticals in another, Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh spends a few hours each week at Clinique de la Dhuys near the floating city, treating the growing number of prostitutes for political reasons. To him they are a result of colonialism: poverty and class oppression, and the sexual decadence of the wealthy and powerful.
Furthermore, to him, any Vietnamese person who would collaborate with the French is simply a political prostitute. They deserve no pity, in contrast to the girls, boys, men, and women whom he sees at the clinic, dying, who have no option but to sell their favours, who have an unquenchable yearning for imported French goods that lie beyond their means: vestments, sweets, food, medicine, perfume, cosmetics, betting on horse races, tennis racquets, bicycles, wanting to paddle-boat, wishing to attend a cocktail party. Clinique de la Dhuys is funded by the Ministry of Health of France.
Georges-Minh’s neighbour, the manager of the Banque de l’Indochine, who is from Paris but no devil, and who has this way of wiping his son’s mouth with the hem of his shirt with a tenderness that Georges-Minh finds touching, on many nights plays racquetball with Georges, and last week offered Georges-Minh some trout heads from his recent fishing trip. Sometimes Georges-Minh considers speaking to him of these things, but always closes his mouth again.
Georges-Minh has a medical degree from the Lycée Condorcet, Paul Verlaine’s university. What he owes to the French, and how they’ve fucked up his country, together carve rifts in his psyche, and he is slowly going mad.
PART I
Poison
1
Killing a man is easy. Life is fragile, for one. And the world is poisonous, for two. How poisonous? Cobras, mushrooms, stonefish, apple seeds. Consider the datura plant. Datura stramonium. White flowers the shape of a trumpet and the size of a human heart. The seeds, crushed with a mortar and pestle, are easily processed. Thieves and prostitutes favour its killing properties. Georges-Minh has seen the results in his practice and he has such a flower blooming in his courtyard.
Five men plotted in a circle. Five men, none of them yet thirty. Five men, cross-legged on Georges-Minh’s bed, which took up half the room, no mattress in the Chinese style, carved from the rarest red wood, Georges-Minh’s command centre, where he ate, slept, played cards, and officiated the meetings he held at his house twice a month.
“Mysterious Scent of the Mountains,” said Khieu, who owned an inn with his wife and spent his spare time painting poetry onto the inside of rice-paper sun hats. Had it not been for winter, / the falling snow / might have been cherry blossoms. One day he would close the inn and just sell the hats whose words could be read only when they were raised to the rays of the sun.
His suit was the same type of linen as Georges-Minh’s except that Georges-Minh’s was ironed. His knees sloped, and the collar of his white shirt, where it met the dark line of his stubble, was wrinkled like the rings of a pineapple tree. Smaller than Georges-Minh’s, his thin mouth appeared somewhat lecherous. His powdered hair smelled like jasmine.
He sat to Georges-Minh’s right, so close their knees touched. Georges-Minh stared at his best friend’s thick betel-nut-coloured hands rolling a cigarette as he shielded the tobacco from the wind of a small oscillating fan, wondering why he hadn’t spoken of his wife in so many months.
“No, no, no. I still like Fighting Dragon,” said Trinh Van Phuc, the musician of the group, in an accent that sounded like he was chopping vegetables. Rumour was he’d been married, though he never talked about his wife.
“Or, like I said before,” Khieu said, staring straight at Georges-Minh, “we can make a poison.” He looked at the back of his hand, examined his nails.
Georges-Minh’s cheeks grew hot. “How’s your brood, Khieu?” Georges-Minh asked nervously, trying to change the subject.
“Don’t know.” Khieu lowered his gaze, picked up his hand of cards.
“Mysterious Scent of the … whatever is too … too …” Phuc waved his teacup, trying to catch the right word.
“Don’t know?”
“Haven’t seen Mai in months,” Khieu said sheepishly.
“Perfume sounds like something from a song,” Phuc said. “We’re a revolutionary group—not minstrels.”
“Perfumes are transcendent,” the third man, a horticulturalist, said. The fellows called him Bao, though at his shop he responded with equal ease to Bao or Victor or Mr. Le.
“Not even the kids?” Georges-Minh said. Mostly they kept their private affairs private. Still, the revelation shocked him because Khieu had been married to his wife, Mai, for seven years; they had three children together.
“These things happen,” Phuc said and shrugged.
How did they happen? Like a storm that washed your memory of a family the way a rain washed a road in a sudden burst? Or did they happen the way a thief with a bludgeon attacked a family, leaving death in his wake? He imagined Mai running the inn alone, looked down at his cards as if it was his hand that troubled him.
“How many soldiers can there be?”
“Thirty or forty?”
“I heard fifty,” said Khieu.
“You’re both wrong. The exact number is eighty.”
“Do you know nothing? They number over two hundred!”
“We will drive out the French bandits.”
“We will restore Vietnam.”
“We will create a democratic republic.”
“No, a monarchy.”
Their hearts were in the right places, these members of the MFYM, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, who didn’t yet have a name, perhaps because most of their meetings were spent drinking and playing cards. They discussed lofty ideals. Drank. Outlined what a free and democratic Vietnam would look like. Drank. Compared international political systems. Drank. Cited historical precedents. Cursed the French.
Each man held some playing cards and a glass of mulberry wine. They were teacups, not wine glasses, and none of them matched, but Georges-Minh wanted people to believe he didn’t care about such trifling details. He could have afforded matching wine glasses, but only shallow men cared about such worldly things.
“If we can’t agree, let’s move on,” suggested Bao, who raised moonflowers and other exotic flora for an exclusive clientele.
Le Bao Victor’s father was the junior minister of the Annamese cabinet of Cochin China. As a child Bao had travelled with his father to the Dutch East Indies and France, when his father had still thought he might follow in his footsteps and enter the cabinet himself. But the junior minister’s power was in name alone. Had the family any jurisdiction at all, perhaps only the alleys knew it. The jackfruit trees. The sewers and opium dens. Delinquents with slingshots. Women at the market. Shoeshine boys.
The Les flaunted their material wealth as if in spite. Tennis lessons for the children. Rowing. Elocution. Music appreciation.
Bao’s wife, Mimi, married him not because she wanted a better life. Not only because. But if she’d known a few rooms next to a flower shop awaited her? He turned his back on politics two years after their marriage. Began wearing a bicycle chain for a belt. Fell in love with orchids, chrysanthemums, bellflowers, hibiscus. After reuniting with his elementary-school mates Georges-Minh and Khieu in a bar.
“Let’s talk about what we’re actually here for,” Bao said, “as our esteemed colleague Khieu suggested when he brought up a rather interesting idea. Wh
y don’t we talk about that?”
Khieu and Georges-Minh had been best friends since grade school, when they’d run loose around Saigon’s back alleys, climbing trees and scaring cats.
Khieu, whose family lived in one of the many shacks built over the river, hated the sellout, the collaboration of his family with the enemy that included his Christian name, Henri, but he stopped short of hating the urchins who called to him across the alleyways of Cholon—“Hon-riii, Hon-riii, give us a tien, give us your school tie”—who worshipped anything French, giving themselves French nicknames for fun.
“Chosen well, a good name helps define a group’s beliefs, bestows desired traits,” Georges-Minh said, because Khieu was the kind of person who as a child had given away his pencils and schoolbooks to those same urchins, and now sat with a cracked teacup of wine in his hand goading him. Even as a child Khieu had cared about things. Georges-Minh couldn’t have cared less. Georges-Minh was too busy lusting after a new mechanical boat or model train. Khieu, who’d had nothing, had ideals, and hadn’t even wanted his French name. Georges-Minh shrugged. “Look at all the fuss and divination that goes into choosing a child’s name.” He would go to as much trouble when he named his son. When he had a son. When he found a woman. When he got married. Which he would. Any day now.