Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  Mai stayed home for fear of running into them. She didn’t know what she’d do and the fear took on a life of its own.

  She and her children lived in a converted laundry room on the main floor of the inn, squished together like fish in a net, close enough to feel each other’s heat, one of the many costs of marrying young.

  If a tally forced its hand, could she break it?

  Now on the porch that wasn’t a porch, the baby suckled at her breast, drawing a thread of milk, this habit of afternoons. Because he no longer ate, not really. This comfort for both of them, looking at the sky, the occlusion of clouds, the air at four o’clock, at five, at six, waiting for night, the comfort of sleep and oblivion. What else was there?

  She tried not to hear the beating of her blood. Flexed her hand, her arm, what else was there? The boy’s heat. A thousand-year-egg pot decorated with dragons. A bougainvillea bush. It had blossomed for the second time this year and into the greenery hummingbirds came now and then in arrows of red. From a little after four o’clock until well into the dusk of the sweet, hungry monsoon autumn she and her baby son sat on the porch and the storm clouds greyed on that side of the inn, which had begun to show signs of decay just like the porch.

  On went the buzz of hummingbirds. Her second-youngest, Trang, ran by spinning fistfuls of lemongrass in the manner of a propeller. For the last year she, Thu, and Crazy Auntie Number Three had constructed their survival, sculpting a war of defiance against her husband’s truancy. Survival in his desertion meant winning—never forget life was a contest from which only the most cunning would emerge. Her survival was an armour for the day she saw Khieu again, for one day it would happen, and she didn’t want to crack. If she cracked, all her pieces would fall out. Something terrible might be let loose. Like a vicious animal escaping from its cage.

  Mai’s own mother had wept behind a closed door. Because of her husband. In spite of his drinking and womanizing, Mai’s mother continued to set a place for Mai’s father at the head of the dinner table. Mai, a child, easily distracted by the lustre of her father’s gold tooth, the sheen of his hair oil, and intoxicated by the scent of the cologne he wore only when he went out to meet his mistress, could be forgiven for listening when her father argued that love was a gift. And that to love just one thing, or one thing at a time, was selfish and minimized the worth of the thing loved. She saw his point, partly.

  Mai’s mother saw herself charged with promoting established traditions no matter the personal price. “Traditions are the skin in which we are born.”

  “The ox stands its ground.”

  “There is a right way of behaving which is not pride or stubbornness. One should never bow or meet the world halfway,” she said, unable to see, or simply refusing to see, her own complicity in the matter. She would not distort her shape to move more easily through obstacles. She was too stubborn to move, rather pretending the floodwaters weren’t rising all around her. She refused to acknowledge that bowing and meeting the world halfway was exactly what she was doing in allowing her husband to carry on with his mistress and letting “tradition” take its course.

  Her mother, who had respected her husband and raised her children, on the day of her death, sang an old lullaby. “Sleep, ghost, sleep. Come afternoon, I stand in the backyard, looking toward my mother’s land.” And, rather than murder her husband, swallowed the pills and killed herself instead. The vengeful ghost she became begged worship.

  Mai didn’t blame her father for the suicide, nor for the haunting, nor for sisters who slunk to the ghost in fear, wilting in its presence, seeking its advice on everything from homework to hairstyles to boys. But she couldn’t stand the sight of a man who prostrated himself below a shaking altar to beg her forgiveness, who pulled out his own gold tooth for more snake liquor, who drank in a yellow undershirt. Not when his cologne had once made her giddy.

  Now he talked to a ghost for company—when he wasn’t running from it in fear. She’d once begged her father to take her to the opera. In her seven-year-old heart she was his only princess. His mistress had laughed and said to bring her along.

  Ten more years Mai lived in that house. Her father continued to destroy himself, drinking and losing the rest of his teeth, pawning his suits, and she watched.

  If she did not have the courage to face a father who had let himself slide into pitifulness and tell him so, how could she defeat a ghost? Caught between the straitjacket of the past and the open horizons of a modern future, Mai agreed to marry Khieu, the owner of a local inn who had asked for her hand, though rumour had it he was a philanderer and simply needed a maid.

  Last week Thu had found the baby Cong with his fist in his mouth, eyes open, as if he’d seen something during the night hideous enough to make him ram his own scream down his throat. Ideas escaped her. What evil hunted Mai now? She engineered her luck: Snuck through doors backward. Never swept on auspicious days. Stayed put on inauspicious ones.

  Though not wanting to become her mother, she hadn’t travelled far from superstition after all. Donated what she could to the ritual specialists who called to the wandering souls. The cau chu experts travelled the country living off donations, especially from people who were being haunted by particular ghosts, those who’d died sudden violent deaths, or who’d died without anyone knowing and far from home. Mai never stopped hoping that one day her mother’s ghost would join them, would be lured by the cau chu’s offerings of fruit nectar and rice porridge. She could only hope as she watched them parade through the market. “Why are you standing in the middle of this empty tennis court? Are you afraid? The call of the rooster in the morning frightens you, doesn’t it? Come to us, those whose burdens are heavy, who’ve died without heads, who’ve died at sea, who’ve died without coffins, who’ve died so lonely,” a ragtag procession of the undead behind them.

  Sometimes the ghosts would follow for a while but then turn their backs laughing, having made fools of the cau chu experts after pretending to eat their porridge and fruit nectar, only to return to stealing and marauding for another day. But the ritualists always persuaded one or two to receive their offerings and stop wandering, and Mai kept wishing that one day her mother would be among them.

  Her oldest boy, Vinh, had waves of hair that lapped the middle of his back. Thu explained to her that cutting one’s hair was a political message everyone from peasants to intellectuals could send to resist the French. “The hair,” Mai shot back, “has the soul in it.” Mai refused to cut her sons’ locks; she felt the danger of it in her gut. But despite her designs, Cong got sicker.

  Crazy Auntie Number Three held a slice of bean cake between her fingers, the kind of cake Mai had loved since she was a child. Already they were eating the leftovers of guests, combining what remained of their dishes into stir-fries, mixing pancakes with pork, eggs with fish, rat with turnips, anything and everything, it didn’t matter, Food was Good Food, Mai told her children.

  “Is your toe healing well, Auntie Number Three?” Mai asked.

  Crazy Auntie Number Three wiggled the culprit ingrown nail. Blackflies lifted and hovered before trying to settle again on the open wound. “Thank you, dear, for asking and yes.”

  “Something bad’s come,” Mai said. “And now it’s in the house.” As if on cue wind rustled the blinds. “She’s here,” Mai said. “I can smell her.”

  Storm clouds pulsed. Shadows drifted over the crumbling inn, and moist droplets, which Mai thought of as tears of the gods, began to fall.

  “Have you smelled the reek of rotten potatoes lately?”

  “Relax, niece,” Crazy Auntie ordered.

  The clouds had clutched their anger too long and Mai heard the raindrops pummelling the roof above them, washing the chipped porch boards outside, too, landing also wherever her husband Khieu was. Maybe she had angered the gods somehow.

  “I’m trying to appease the gods, what else can I do about it?” Mai said. “The time has come to square things.”

  “Have you burn
ed incense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Offered prayers?”

  “Of course,” Mai answered. Naturally she’d tried these things.

  “Buy some dog,” Crazy Auntie said.

  Mai sent Thu to the market in the storm and Thu, as diligently as she did everything else, came home with a mutt the size of a watermelon. She tied its throat, cut it from ear to ear, and bled it. She boiled off its fur, then grilled it on an open fire under the porch that wasn’t really a porch but which Mai called a porch because Khieu had called it that.

  Mai, who didn’t want to get her hands dirty, watched from a window and her mouth watered.

  Hoping for luck, they ate bites seasoned with lemongrass and garlic.

  Sometimes Cong’s healthy spells lasted for hours, and Mai dared think perhaps he was recovering. Then, from one moment to the next, he’d fall into a stupor, catatonic as a doll, his skin lustreless as old silk.

  One day the ghost knocked the cleaver out of Thu’s hand as she chopped off a chicken’s head for lunch. Another time she threw Mai’s comb into the mud of the koi pond. Then her mosquito net was soiled with pig’s manure. As during Mai’s childhood, when her mother’s ghost had roared through the house smashing things, the inn’s altar was buffeted while Mai tried to light the incense.

  Mai offered Cong her nipple, a vain hope. Even when he managed to coax milk from her puckered breast, minutes later he would vomit and collapse into another bottomless slumber. Heartsick, Mai retreated to her bed.

  Was she being recruited? Spirits summoned the dying as mediums because from the edge, they could better see.

  Hadn’t she always had a sixth sense? A sign, this, as were her dreams about flying, her mother had said. She’d always known she was special. So had her mother. And her father, even drunk, had made her believe it.

  If a ghost entered her body, what would she do? An erotic quiver shot downward from her head. She played with her hair, remembering how when she was a child it had once tangled itself into knots. Another sign.

  What a terrible time her mother had had combing them out—to cut them free brought bad luck.

  Women mediums left pigs’ heads as offerings and danced. Women, to tempt the spirits, danced with sexual movements to channel their power. And the spirits mounted them, and possessed them. They were wanton, and charged a great deal to be possessed, to be mounted, to consort with spirits and be enabled to answer questions of all sorts, such as where someone’s son, lost in battle or at sea, might be found. The exact location of his corpse.

  Some mediums were merely looking for an excuse to dance in the Western way, only saying they’d been possessed. They writhed with the spirit and gave advice and charged money. Some people, like Thu, accused all soothsayers of charlatanism. Destroying morals. Copying French bawdy-house acts.

  A soothsayer had once told Mai’s friend not to leave her husband, a cheater. A pyromancer advised the same friend to leave him. Some people simply waited for the answer they wanted to hear and visited medium after medium until they received it.

  Mai saw no reason one had to lie on coals or skewer one’s nipple with a blade to summon a spirit—as men did, and had done for hundreds of years—when Western dance moves would do just as well.

  A woman’s touch had more finesse.

  Not all female mediums were charlatans.

  Mai could be a good one. She knew it.

  At the very least, she’d pick a good one when it came time to consult one about her dying son.

  3

  The morning glories had been varnished to the inner sole of Thu’s shoe to protect the paint and keep the flower from fading under the sweat and grime of her heels. A present from Birago, her Senegalese soldier. She liked to say “Se-ne-ga-lese” as her feet clapped down the hall.

  Birago was a skirmisher. A “tirailleur sénégalais,” an artilleryman conscripted from Africa to man an 80 mm field howitzer under the command of a Lieutenant Colonel Janvier. Officially he was a tirailleur, second class, but Lieutenant Colonel Janvier, who had taken an exaggerated shine to him, affectionately called him “gabier” when no one was around. The word meant “sailor,” but also referred to a small bird that lived high in the treetops known for its sweet singing voice.

  She timed the words to the drumbeat of her feet as they scratched the floor, driving Mai crazy. No whispered steps as she clomped and stomped. No echo into nothing, not her. Clonk and pace, delivering a bowl of shaved coconut with ice, these long days between visits from her Senegalese, her African, with scars on his cheeks like a second pair of eyes.

  “Thu, are you wearing those shoes again?”

  Thu refused to temper the racket because Mai refused to get out of bed this morning. Where Thu came from a person got up when they got kicked. Those who didn’t died.

  Teak frame holding her up like some kind of queen. Milk skin and melon lips.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Mai said. “It’s not like I mean to be sick.”

  “Like what?”

  Last week Thu had seen a serpent eagle at the market on its side. Its head was cocked at a strange angle, maybe it had fallen from one of the vendor’s crates, and it lay with one wing splayed like a fan. When the feral cats began to play with it and batter it to pieces the bird looked at Thu unable to save itself and it was still alive as they began to eat it, starting with its crested breast feathers. Thu had crouched on an overturned basket and watched with her chin in her hand, disgusted. Only the foolish counted on rescue.

  Instead of finishing the coconut Thu gave her, Mai put it on the nightstand. “Sit with me, please.” She patted the bed.

  Thu sat in the rocker.

  Mai shared this room, this laundry, which in better days, more prosperous days before Khieu had left, one could never have imagined serving as a bedroom, with her four children. They slept on rush mats on the floor, a window overlooking the river, Mai’s the only well-woven mat that had a teak frame. The river flowed in front of the inn, moving, yet not moving, for as it travelled from the mountain highlands to the central plateaus to the lowland deltas, the river god was the most clever of all, managing to be adventuresome yet belonging to no one. Everywhere at once, yet staying rooted to the land at the same time.

  Thu eyed the room with envy: bigger than the closet she shared with Crazy Auntie Number Three. Mai still had a few nice things left, more than Thu: a flask, a letter opener, a feather with blood dried in the tip of the hollow quill, a perfume decanter, a silver picture frame, a tortoiseshell hair comb, a green silk ao dai with lilies embroidered from the hem to the neck, all on a wooden shelf.

  As things mildewed, rotted, were neglected, what was nice, what was clean, what rats hadn’t gnawed, what cockroaches hadn’t chewed, what dirt hadn’t soiled went into the guest rooms. What was spoiled, what needed mending, what could do for family use but couldn’t be shown, what wasn’t usable but could be gotten by on, what was last season’s, what had a hole, what whistled, what leaked, what was loose, what cinched, what pinched, what made one cramp, ache, what had fleas, what was unsafe, unfit for human consumption, these things became Thu’s and Crazy Auntie’s and Mai’s.

  What was left behind by the guests, a bottle of shampoo, an old pair of stockings that could be laundered, a box of chocolates with a few left, a long cigarette butt, half a bottle of wine, these things were greedily savoured by Thu and Crazy Auntie.

  Thu figured Khieu had married too young, and the shock of having three children in quick succession had pushed him over a cliff. A painter. Ha! On street corners, selling hats. So, he saw himself the leader of some sort of hat-selling empire and by the wayside fell his family, moving into smaller corners of the inn. Who did he think he was preaching to? Just an excuse to get out of the house.

  At first Thu shared the riches she found. But poverty had made them greedy and Thu had a bottle of Mairie de Chasselay perfume in her room that she thought no one knew about.

  Crazy Auntie had adopted Thu—she’d r
aised six street kids as her own—when Thu was thirteen years old. Thu’s own mother had lost her mind in the market one day and lined as many men up as could pay her and with her children to one side had done business until the police came. Thu barely remembered her. She felt she’d been on her own forever by the time Crazy Auntie found her “like an alley cat” one day.

  To maximize their earnings by freeing up as many rentable rooms as possible and minimizing wear and tear by allowing the children free rein in only a small fraction of their own house, Mai lived in the laundry and Thu and Crazy Auntie lived in what had once been a large walk-in closet on the top floor. Barely enough room for two beds and hardly enough space to turn around.

  Thu caressed the blessed find, the perfume bottle. Inhaling the sweet fragrance, raising the glass stopper to her nose—inhaling—slowly—Mother asleep—as close to her nose as she dared not because she feared Mai’s yelling, her slaps or silent treatments or looks of hurt for at the start they’d been friends—but simply because a secret was made more powerful by the swirling currents that danger kept hidden in its depths.

  Thu rocked in the chair by the bed. The rockers squeaked. Absent-mindedly, she lifted the bowl of shaved coconut with ice from the bedside table and began eating.

  “Yesterday,” Mai said, “I was having a bath and some man was banging on the door.”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you listening? He was rapping on the door insisting on his tea. I can’t do this alone. Where were you? I had to get out of the bath, dripping wet. Make him tea!”

  “I was with your kids!”

  “I had to make him tea. I was dripping wet! He kept saying, The inn promises tea. I was in the bath saying, But I’m in the bath—can’t you make your own tea? The kitchen is right there. He says, But your advertising promises tea. I think this is a case for the magistrate. If you are going to advertise tea, then you must make me tea. He was leaning against the door, I could hear him breathing. I was trapped in that bathroom, I was naked.”