Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  The military pulled the guillotine with deliberate, theatrical plodding in another open-bed cart from the jail on Lagrandière Street to the square of the night market. More public speeches delayed the newest set of executions. Then they forced the prisoners to kneel one at a time at the guillotine. Their heads rolled into a basket, one after another. The guillotine blade was carefully wiped with a cotton cloth. Until only soldiers remained. They set the newest heads next to the other in front of the butcher shop, placed the severed ears in a dish and put them inside the pagoda.

  A girl, maybe seventeen, wheezing on the clinic’s back steps, wore a chemise, now ruined, a blouse with embroidered buttons, a robe whose brick colour made the dirt on the sleeves appear black, and a hat with a ribbon. The way her mouth opened and closed reminded Georges-Minh of a fish.

  Her eyes were opium-glazed and she couldn’t focus on his hand when he offered it to her. She seemed to be trying to measure its length with her eyes; the poor had nothing but dreams and suspicions, he thought. Again he offered her his hand, trying to trap her fingers.

  “Stand up, sister.”

  She looked up suspiciously.

  “Come on. I’ll take you inside.”

  She shook her head no.

  When he tried to take her by force, he was surprised by how cold her hand was, like a cement wall at night. She jumped up. Her anger, he speculated, must have nothing to do with him but perhaps something inside of her. How could she be angry with him when he was only trying to help her?

  “Who the fuck are you?” she yelled, looking at him for the first time, utter incomprehension in her eyes. “Who the fuck am I? Huh? Who the fuck am I? Get away. Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

  Then she hit him and ran.

  He held his cheek where her nails had dug in. A round stain clung to the tile where she’d sat. He glanced down at it, then up at her retreating figure. Should he chase her? He saw now that what he’d thought was mud on her chemise had in fact been blood, but only endless doorways of opium houses remained and little boys inching from the shadows, rail-thin beauties who’d been there all along, hoping to find favours, a lover, money.

  “Bad moon night,” said one of the street urchins. He had the look and confidence of a mixed-race child.

  “Why didn’t you catch her?” Georges-Minh said, exasperated.

  Something passed in front of the boy’s face. A sadness. Skin the colour of tea. Eyes like a deer’s. “You coulda caught her—if you’d been faster.”

  Georges-Minh rubbed his cheek where the blood was flowing more freely now. Goddammit, where was his handkerchief? He dug in his pockets, applied pressure to the wound.

  The boy’s friends giggled. Not because of Dr. Nguyen, but because some of them were only eight or nine and one of their group was applying some lipstick and making kissy faces. They walked like women, the real woman who had escaped already forgotten, a door opened and closed, someone threw something into the street, some garbage, life moved on.

  The boy looked at Georges-Minh as if to say he should move on too. “You don’t even remember my name, do you?”

  Georges-Minh had his hand on the door handle. “Lippy one.”

  “Ha, wrong.”

  “Slow.”

  “Wrong again.”

  Georges-Minh shoved the door open. His co-workers barely looked up. Would it kill them to smile? Did he care? No one even asked about his cheek. A couple of the nurses nodded at him and resumed their duties. He was still pissed off, about the boys with the giggles, the lipstick, the sloe-eyed one with skin the colour of tea, the doorways, the blood stain, the girl. He’d dealt with violent patients before so perhaps last night had made him grumpy—his head felt wrong.

  The young prostitute’s fish mouth and yesterday’s pepper spots had disconcerted him. His temporary memory loss. The paintings’ erasure, the disappearance of the tiles—his father’s wealth, yes, that was always on his mind—but it was more than that. He was definitely coming down with something. Maybe a flu. His skin itched. God. He hoped whatever that man who’d also lost his memory had brought into his home wasn’t contagious.

  He hadn’t been sleeping enough lately. People sometimes suffered bouts of amnesia in times of stress. He’d been under a lot of pressure lately. He should eat more. Take better care of himself. No wonder his mind was performing somersaults. Between the clinic’s viral diseases and Khieu’s poisoning plots, Georges-Minh would be lucky to escape with a mental hiccup.

  He dressed the scratch on his cheek, washed his hands, and settled into a working rhythm under the gaslight’s glow. Two fishermen straggled in carrying a body. One carried the shoulders and one the feet. The middle swayed between them, wrapped in a white shroud.

  “Where do you want her?”

  Behind the two men followed an old woman, cawing and pulling at her hair. Behind her trailed a crowd like the train of a wedding dress.

  The old woman said, “Leave her. I told you to leave her.”

  “Heavenly Father, bless me for I have sinned,” said a Catholic in the group.

  “I told you, she’s evil,” the old woman said. “Don’t look, don’t touch her. Now what have you done? It’s too late!” She pounded her own head. She tried to push the others out of the clinic; when they didn’t budge she wailed and slavered. “We’ll all be cursed.”

  If Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh had not been busy trying to clear off an examination table for the fishers to lay the body upon, he might have said to the woman or such people like her, “I understand believing in curses is your way of making sense of a world that is often hard and cold. But I’ve never been one for genies and magicians.”

  But instead he said, “The only curse is here, in the real world.”

  To which the old woman responded, “The whore is evil.”

  The men told Georges-Minh they had cast their carp net into the Saigon River and fished out the body. “We couldn’t tell if she was still breathing.”

  When Georges-Minh unwound the white shroud, a mosquito net, the smell of weeds and mud rose from her body and permeated the room.

  The whole group vortexed to the clinic’s centre, dizzying the doctor.

  “She’s only a girl,” he said.

  “I know,” the old woman said. “I know.” Her voice was not unkind now. She rubbed Georges-Minh’s shoulder. “And then someone”—she shook her head vehemently—“cursed her. Not even death can purify her now.”

  The girl’s body, necklaced with minnows, writhed. She sat up and reached. Her fingers groped, sightlessly, for something to hold. Her clothes, a silver gyration, jewel-scaled, blinded as they caught the light in flashes. Georges-Minh staggered, never having seen a mermaid. Minnows in her left eye socket, her hair, mixing with her blood and pooling in the shallows where she’d been stabbed. They slipped from her wounds onto the examination table. From her mouth when she opened it, tried to speak.

  The onlookers fell to their knees. “It’s an omen!”

  The Catholics among them made the sign of the cross.

  Others looked to the ceiling fan and wept. A woman pleading for her soul recited the Vedas.

  “What will become of us?”

  “What do I do with what I’ve seen?”

  “Pluck out my eyes?”

  The pandemonium rose. Two medical officers corralled the group, begging for calm in the tone of voice one uses to calm oxen during a thunderstorm. They motioned the people toward the exit.

  How could her body be so infested with fish yet still hold the breath of life?

  In the surrounding mayhem Georges-Minh inserted two fingers into her mouth and scooped out the minnows. He cleared a passageway so she could breathe.

  “I’m fourteen,” she said. Her panicked voice cut the back of his neck like a small razor.

  “Tell me who did this.”

  “I’m fourteen.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “Fourteen.”

  To each questio
n she repeated the same answer. He’d watched flies paralyzed by spiders, drained of life in webs while fully cognizant. What a way to go—aware of life leaching away, unable to do damn about it. How he felt. Did the fly respect his foe or spend his last minute cursing God?

  Yet such things happened all the time. He saw them. Their society, their lot, no matter how much they hollered to convince themselves otherwise.

  Then, a new lucidity. “Am I going to be okay?”

  “You’re fourteen.” Georges-Minh tamped her wounds with gauze that reddened in seconds. Gauged his losing battle by the fading meter of her heart. “You’re strong.”

  This calmed her. He repeated it. “You’re strong.”

  She smiled.

  “I think you’re going to be okay.” He stopped bandaging. Stroked her fish hair and told her what she needed to hear, until she took her last breath and died on the examination table.

  The vacuum of her death sucked him in. At the instant of her death he lost his breath, and in the days to come he remembered thinking, perhaps when a soul left its body in trauma, it snatched the air from the room, from the building, and the lungs of the people in it out of revenge and spite.

  After a quick trip to the underworld, a hungry ghost returned, impelled by bitterness.

  He would never know if she’d been beaten by her pimp and left for dead on the banks to roll into the river herself. Maybe a bamboo’s sadistic matron had beaten the girl and thrown her into the river, where two boatmen had then seen her body floating and fished her from the current. Had it been an unsatisfied customer? Or had she tried to kill herself, far from home?

  Georges-Minh sank to the ground where fish surrounded him, beating their tails against the floor.

  If only he had a girlfriend. Someone to talk to. When he reached for his handkerchief, a minnow slithered between his fingers. He threw it against the wall.

  5

  Later that night a woman in an uncha​racter​istic​ally expensive European jacket walked into the clinic. She told Georges-Minh, “You’d never know it to look at me but I was coughing till I thought my lungs were going to come out of my mouth!”

  “Has this happened to you before?”

  She waved her hand. “All the time.” She’d coughed for twenty minutes until she couldn’t breathe. Normally she took syrup of poppies, an opiate. Her prescription had run out. “I was afraid of having another fit. Otherwise I’d have waited till morning.”

  “What are you doing in this neighbourhood?”

  It was forward to ask. But it was forward of her to be there. In her clothes, shoes, haircut, swinging that purse. Who did she think she was with that audacious skin? Those pupils? That grin? Those teeth, fingernails, that chuckle? Acting so flippant about her cough, tossing her hair, he could snap her wrists like that. Her capacity to make good choices was suspect. Certainly, in the months to come, as he questioned the singularity of his decision, he would wonder how much the mermaid wheeling round the clinic ceiling had to do with it and if the ectoplasmic blur may have tricked him into seeing silk where there was merely hair, a gait more seductive than a woman’s real-life walk, teeth whiter than white, a gaze more piercing. In hindsight everything appears twenty-twenty, so they say. At the time one choice seemed all he had: one alluring smile, one stunning creature in a European jacket. The mermaid had left him with an empty hole, raw as the socket of a tooth.

  Indeed, when the clinic door opened it suddenly became easy to rise from the floor, surrounded by flapping fish or not. He ran his hands through his hair and greeted her. Invisible threads, something like kite strings that had been connecting his body to the mermaid’s, now transformed into silken threads and grew thinner and snapped. The circling banshee grew diaphanous, disappeared. The remaining mist refreshed them. A moment ago he’d believed he deserved to be haunted. Now he was looking ahead. Already he could hear Chang asking, “Don’t you think you’re rushing things?”

  “Like a speeding bullet,” he’d say.

  He put her up on the pedestal of his examination table. This alone made her deserving. For now it was enough to idealize her shoulders. Wasn’t it? Never mind analyzing the feeling. The kite strings were gone.

  Funny to think how one’s world unravels a certain way because someone picks this clinic instead of that, takes a stroll by the water—imagine if she’d come tomorrow instead of tonight, he would have been sitting at home listening to the Messiah on his fold-top Victrola.

  Her collarbone showed through her blouse; the silk pussyfooted there. (He gleaned in a matter of seconds that the chuckle was a facade—but the silk, she couldn’t make that up, that wasn’t bravado, that was real.) When you left a summer house and draped the furniture with sheets, the feeling when you shut the door: this was her. “I’m Dong.”

  “What are you doing in this neighbourhood?” he asked again. He needed to know the truth.

  “Are you cross-examining me? I saw the lights of the clinic …” She trailed off when she saw his expression. “I like the water.” She stared back at him, a what-are-you-going-to-make-of-it look in her eyes. Something passed between them.

  “There’s lots of water”—his tone implied in other, safer places. Why was she coming down where poor people lived? Was she like him? Were they kindred? Did she resent her money? He wanted to learn how those less fortunate lived, wear it like a suit. Then he’d know who he was. When he spoke their language people would call out his name: not Dr. Nguyen, but Georges-Minh.

  He didn’t comment on the designer jacket, though he wanted to. He examined her. In a tone of authority asked her to lift her blouse, his voice cracking with nerves.

  “You could drive me home,” she added, “if you’re worried.” She touched his hand and he nearly choked on his own saliva. “That is your car parked out front, isn’t it?”

  Georges-Minh and Lieutenant Colonel Janvier, head of the French garrison at Saigon, owned the same type of vehicle, a Panhard Levassor, though Colonel Janvier’s was the newest six-horsepower model while Georges-Minh’s had been his father’s and state of the art only when it came out in 1891. Still, the two men shared the distinction of owning the only two imported Parisian automobiles in all of Saigon and it was for this reason alone that Lieutenant Colonel Janvier had once summoned Dr. Nguyen Georges-Minh to his quarters at the garrison.

  Janvier motioned Georges-Minh over to the shade of the cracked fortress wall creeping green with geckos and dillenia. The colonel ran his hands against his car’s open sides, the flat roof like a parasol with silver tassels, the black-cushioned driver’s seat, the rumble seat. Georges-Minh was admittedly impressed.

  “Notice the brass.” Janvier’s passengers sat not under a canopy of fabric, but beneath a teak roof, sleek as a ship’s. “I make sure it’s shined daily by my gabier, my right-hand man, whom I’ll introduce you to later.” Georges-Minh’s yellow-painted wooden wheels a farm wagon’s in contrast to Janvier’s rubber tires, whose rims were painted candy red.

  “It sold for thirty-five hundred francs at the time,” Georges-Minh said of his own vehicle, in apology, “when it was new.”

  “Come, come, let’s have a drink.”

  Janvier owned a home in the same neighbourhood as Georges-Minh but never spent the whole night in his own bed. His overly cramped quarters made him claustrophobic. He had trouble sleeping most nights and often lay down on the couch in his office, asking his gabier to stand guard. Because of his erratic sleeping patterns it was not unknown for him to fall asleep in the day, suddenly, in the middle of a conversation.

  A highly devout man, it was also not unknown for him to wake up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night and decide to interrogate someone, but not before waking up his entire staff for prayer circle.

  An amateur filmmaker, he directed his own movies. He once pulled all the fingernails off a suspect and titled the series “The Separations.”

  Colonel Janvier’s health problems included ailments to his heart, stomach, and liver
brought on by drinking, stress, and rich foods, for which Dr. Nguyen prescribed a daily regimen of medicines including detoxifiers and tonics. He also tried to prescribe regular exercise and an increase in the colonel’s intake of fruits and vegetables, advice that Lieutenant Colonel Janvier followed only marginally.

  Her skin was the colour of fried ginger when you first throw it in the pan. When the oil has just become hot enough to scent the air and cause tiny bubbles to appear around the base of a wooden chopstick lowered into it to test the temperature. If he placed his thumb between the second and third vertebrae he knew exactly how her flesh would feel against his thumb.

  Rub marks crisscrossed her back, which smelled faintly of jasmine oil. A jade coin had been dragged along either side of her spine: the crime of traditional remedies for pleurisy on such a fine body. Abuse, if you asked him. Smooth strokes on either side of the spine moved out toward the shoulders, crimson line upon line, reminding him of the structural composition of flower petals.

  He asked her to take a deep breath and watched her chest rise and fall, the outline of each rib, and recalled the cages he had seen at the market that housed songbirds. Birds with bones filled with air. Like bamboo. The chief thing was to pay attention to the task at hand. He told himself to refocus. His face flushed.

  “Turn, please.”

  But the truth was more obvious than the pupils and lashes and the brightness of her eyes combined. The reeds could bend with every ripple but here she was, more beautiful with every inhalation, and here he was again. Blinking, looking away, reprimanding himself. He tapped her chest with the flat of two fingers—a percussion of muffled sound.

  This small, subtle physical event between them, this examination, was provoking him so, to such a degree, and without warning—it must be the fish girl. There was no other explanation. Still, he was a doctor, a professional. He had to get hold of himself. Otherwise he should excuse himself. Leave her in the care of a colleague. And go home now.

  The area below his stomach burned, and the heat swelled, radiating outward. Flustered by the scent of jasmine, still reeling from the fish girl, he envisioned himself asking the woman to dinner. Running his fingers through her hair the colour of spilled ink.