by Yasuko Thanh
He listened to the pump drip, concentrated on his fingers’ movements, centring his consciousness to the singular, focused point of the teacup, the tea leaves, the teapot. He steeped his mind in blue-painted porcelain, tried to focus away from his approaching fatherhood.
The last time they’d talked as lovers do under the bas-reliefs that decorated the windows had been months ago. The columns of white stone around the main entrance carved with flowers, leaves, and a human face had missed their presence as they fed each other strawberries grown in the night soil of Saigon’s outskirts by Chinese farmers to pamper Europeans and tempt the natives.
Dong never cried, but she never gave him the satisfaction of complaining, either. She complained only to her mother and held her tongue in his presence, so she wouldn’t have to meet his eye over the dinner table when he gazed at her with annoyance.
He was no better than other Vietnamese husbands, but no worse, either. His growing taste for opium caused him to withdraw from her and, perhaps since he’d always secretly regarded himself as superior to other Vietnamese because of his education, he felt himself better than her as well. Her pregnancy caused two things to happen: her lung fever to go into remission and her outrage to strengthen her constitution, so that when he ordered her to pick pebbles from the rice, her hands moved with the ease and speed of hummingbirds, and when she was done she could look him in the eye and say, “What next?” She completed every task he gave her. And, unlike Georges-Minh, deluded by the false sleep of the drug, she slept in sweet exhaustion every night. Sometimes they held each other, but this was all.
Most men drank, cheated, beat their wives. Abandoned them. Kept other families. Returned at will to their first wives. Free to help or not. Contribute at whim. This was his proud culture. No, Georges-Minh wasn’t so bad. And if he sometimes acted out in ways he knew he shouldn’t, at least he could take comfort in knowing that he was better than most. Still, there was a time he’d loved her. There was a time he’d seen more. Wanted more. “Your hair’s the colour of a moonlit river. I could drown in it.” She had once stirred him.
Dong was on her cleaning rounds when she found something in his office. A postcard submerged deep in the pages of an anatomy book made the image of a half-naked man in his swim trunks more suspicious than Georges-Minh’s blushing face.
“Why are you saving this?”
“A postcard from the Côte d’Azur?”
“I can see that. I’m not an idiot.”
“Stop yelling.”
“I’m asking.”
“Then why are you yelling? You said you could read.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“So why are you asking what you already know?”
She circled around to face him. No matter where she stood, trying to capture his eye was like trying to stand in front of a revolving door. “Is this the ghost I’m competing with?”
“Do you have a point? If so make it because some of us actually work around here.”
“Fine. I think the postcard reminds you of a time you could actually still get it up.” She wanted to say more. To talk of libido and youth—his lost libido and youth. That maybe she represented chains in his mind, and that the postcard represented some kind of freedom Georges-Minh believed she’d stolen. That perhaps Georges-Minh had wanted to prove to himself he could merely get a wife like so many other little boys. But simply wearing the ring didn’t mean it fit. What she did say was, “If you weren’t so high, I bet you could get it up.”
She wished she could pluck desire from her chest and throw it out the way Georges-Minh threw out the used bandages and swabs at the clinic.
He was shaking. He was found out. Chang, and their secret parties; the blow jobs, the anal sex.
“Hah. You thought I didn’t know. Your lack of desire? The fact sex was great and now it’s not? Face it. You’re an addict.”
He’d seen the guillotine blade coming down, then he saw her mistake. Quickly, he had to mount an offensive. “Goddammit!” It was all he could muster. He walked to the window. Stared out.
“Chang. Him and Khieu. The meetings.”
He lit a cigarette, wished his legs would stop trembling. “Okay, shit, you’re right,” he said. “We’ll talk, but later.”
“You have a problem.” She meant the opium. The revolutionary leanings.
The brown water of the Saigon River coursed by. He shook his head and after taking only two drags tamped out the cigarette in a plant pot.
“It’s the stress of the clinic. It’s been getting to me. Just need a little help. Soothes my nerves.”
She reached for his hand and held it. They stood silently together looking at the river. “But it’s getting worse.”
Marriage to Georges-Minh was paddling upriver. Dipping oars into brown water, her arms tiring of the work, shoulders burning from the sun. The lies hurt worse than the journey. “What’s going on with you? I just want the plain truth.”
“Nothing.”
“Do I still make you happy?”
He thought of the children at the clinic. He’d often pictured their faces as buds pelted by a sudden winter, rotted on the vine. “Here’s what you’re not. A flower that’s bloomed before her time.”
“You never talk to me like that anymore.”
Her voice brimmed with pain—knowing he was the cause made it hard to answer.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
16
Thu came often to visit. He took her out for lunch and as they walked through the market, they window-shopped. The children ate lemon grapes and banana candies, unable to believe their luck, filled their bellies with duck embryo, banana-flower salad, mooncakes, steamed buns, yam fritters, sizzling crepes with turmeric and coconut milk, spring rolls with dried shrimp and jicama, catfish, field rats, clam rice and tapioca pudding for dessert. Even the baby had stopped crying in Thu’s arms.
“Go on,” he said, pointing to the expensive jade comb that lay on the jeweller’s display case. “Try it on.”
She blushed. He was too extravagant. Did she dare? She smiled at him and felt her cheeks grow even warmer, because of the way he gazed right back, his eyes piercing through her coyness with something approaching hunger. Yes, he was like a wild animal stalking its prey. His smile was warm, but suddenly she was frightened by him—yet in a delicious sort of way. She lifted her eyes to meet his again and then shook her head, laughing.
“I don’t need anything like this.” She pushed the comb across the countertop, back toward the jeweller, using the tips of her fingers, feigning a look of disinterest. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were trying to bribe me.” She lifted one eyebrow suggestively. She’d found an easy “mark,” as Gigi called them, men with money smoothly parted from it, certain ones without even demanding sex. She returned once a week for vitamins, once a week for money.
“You deserve pretty things,” he said.
His voice had an odd edge of desperation, she thought.
“Will you also buy one for my daughter?” she said, touching the girl’s shoulder. Her voice was still coy, playful.
“I’ll buy you whatever you wish, whenever you wish.” He chuckled and asked the clerk to wrap two combs.
On the way back from the doctor’s, with the vitamins in her purse, two jade combs wrapped in red tissue paper, money, Thu felt better, as she always did, for having done something. For having tried while Mai just lay in bed, malingering, and stared at the ceiling.
17
Dong’s resentment—whatever modicum remained after her muscles burned—she channelled into ancestral ceremonies for the dead. Believing she had hidden her true purpose from Georges-Minh, she lit incense for her dead birth mother, asking for her help in getting her husband back. Her offering of the frangipani flowers that she’d picked behind the villa on the riverbank would bid her mother come to her aid now.
It didn’t matter that her mother had abandoned her as an infant. Her last act before dying—havin
g hauled her failing body off the migration route to give birth—was to find the breadfruit stall and place her baby in it and say a prayer to the gods.
Her mother would accept the flowers. Would have to accept them in exchange for future services, forced by the rules of the ancestral ceremony, summoned by her daughter through ritual, whether she’d actually wanted to leave the spirit world or not. And after having taken the flowers (forced to, by ritual), she would hear Dong’s prayers and become her ally.
Perhaps Dong’s alive and betel-chewing adopted mother would not stand by her side against her new tyrant of a husband who must be going through a personal hell to be acting this way. But an ally from beyond the grave was better than no ally at all. Together they would drive out the curse that had befallen them. Where it had come from, Dong had no idea; all she knew was that evil had taken up residence in the villa—in Georges-Minh himself—and with her dead mother’s help, everything would return to the way it had been when she’d first fallen in love with the man whose seed she’d begged for inside her.
18
Thu scurried home with the children before Mai missed their presence, the taste of duck embryo lingering on her tongue. A limping dog trotted with a dead rat in its mouth and the body looked like a furry black piece of sausage. Little Trang gave it chase.
“Get back!”
“I want to pet the dog.”
“Come back here now.” The older daughter, Phung, pointed to the shops where mannequins wore apparel imported from Lille. “Women could win hearts in clothes like that,” she said. Boys with large round baskets waited in front of the market for women to come out with their purchases so they could carry them home for a penny. “Let go my hand.” Phung almost yanked away from Thu, who clung on while the girl pulled toward the shops. It’d be a miracle if she got home intact.
“Come on. And remember, don’t tell your mother a thing. Then we can do it again. You like the candy?”
“Can I keep the jade comb?”
“Don’t be silly. Do you know how much food we can buy with that?”
They approached the intersection. A man in uniform, a drunken soldier, lay on his side, almost on his stomach. Thu was having trouble holding the baby while clutching the hand of the youngest boy, who wanted to pet the stray dog, and while making sure the girl didn’t wander away to gaze at dress displays. The midday cannon detonated, signalling the time for afternoon nap. It startled Trang, who thought he saw a rickshaw in the road, and in an effort to leap out of the way, was hit by a real rickshaw.
His body lay crumpled under the wheel. Thu’s mind went blank. She lifted him and put him on the sidewalk next to the drunken soldier. Her next thought was to find someone. She left the children and not knowing where else to start, put one foot in front of the other, blood on her hands, and yelled, “Mai! Khieu!”
Only then did she notice the others, also hollering. So many people. An old man bellowed on the corner. So did a turtle vendor, a fishmonger, a letter writer, a little girl with a basket of bread on her head. Their limbs, as if they’d been burned, were covered with ash-like flecks. They wandered, immune to the physical pain of their pocks, their eyes like rain. A young deliveryman glanced at the breasts of a woman next to him, drank deeply of his beer, placed the half-empty bottle on a stack of orange crates, and yelled. A child shrieked to the heavens from the centre of the road. How had she not seen them before? The city was full of them, these invisibles. And now that she was one, she felt clouded by it all, the child’s beauty, his closed eyes, his tongue held out as if to catch the sweetness of raindrops, wanting, waiting for more. She heard men screaming for fallen comrades, women for missing husbands; children, lost friends, people repeating their own names. Everyone searching for something they had lost.
Thu tried to press through the crowd that had gathered around the man who had hit Trang. It sounded like he was trying to defend himself against accusations of being drunk. She felt herself caught up in an angry wave, pushed on all sides and pulled against a storm. In the melee she lost the combs Dr. Nguyen had bought for her. Enough, she thought, and turned back. Let the furious mob deal with him.
She leaned over Trang and stroked his cheek. “There, there.” An older woman squatted next to him, held a bowl filled with water and had been trying to administer careful sips to his closed lips. “Give me that!” Thu took the bowl and moistened the boy’s forehead with the drops that fell from her fingertips. She splashed a larger amount across his whole face and finally dumped the entire bowl on his head. This made the bloodstain that had started to grow on the sidewalk expand more quickly. The old woman jumped back and Thu started to panic. She shook Trang, and kneaded his arms and legs. “Wake up. Wake up! What are you doing? Come on, honey, we have to go home. Your mother will begin to worry about us soon.”
Fathers, uncles, aunts, mothers, daughters, sons petitioned gods, hometowns, memories. She scratched her pocks. They wanted forgiveness, understanding, retribution, castigation. This was a mania that could be tasted. This flavour, unlike a drink of deep, sweet water, parched and burned the taster. It was a thirsty kind—drinking of itself, eating and eating, remembering freedom, until it left only bone and parchment behind. “Khieu!” she called, trying to overpower the wishes, regrets, hopes, and destinations of others that rode the scorching air, the smell of oranges in crates, the sharp drone of mosquitoes, and the menacing hiss of cyclo wheels. “Khieu!” They screamed, she screamed.
On a day such as today one could pass a mirror and not recognize oneself. Bump into a friend of twenty years in the street and not know his name.
Love itself is an oblivion, a forgetting, a fugue, and its inevitability does not cloud our anticipation or change what we hope for. Would that she could find a love that fed; it would be benevolent, ripe. A warm and swelling thing that made the fullness in one’s own heart want to offer itself, to belong to everyone who had also ever hungered. “Khieu!”
19
The police entered the clinic and ordered Georges-Minh and the nurses into a corner and left the patients shaking in their gowns where they stood, bleeding if they were bleeding, crying if they were crying. An old woman wearing tattered clothes kept her head down, as if the police would find her guilty of something if she dared meet their glance.
Georges-Minh’s chest felt like it was being crushed by a hot and heavy stone, yet he called from where he stood, “What can I do for you? Can I help with something?” They’d already found Sing Sing’s box under some bandages, vials of camphor, and flats of coriander seeds, and ignoring him, pulled it down from the shelf. They pried the lid off with a folding knife.
“It’s not mine, whatever’s in there. Just so you know.”
The two officers rose immediately, at the ready, shoulders squared, one slightly in front of the other.
“No, no, the thing is, I, I know this boy?” He raised his hands over his head. “In fact, if you look in the alley he’s probably there now, this junky kid, it’s his, the box.”
He thought about it later, when he realized what he’d done. Maybe that was part of why he’d turned Sing Sing in. Sing Sing was not to blame for what Georges-Minh had done the night Chang had taken him to the opium den. Could he even say the words? Assaulted a boy. But looking at Sing Sing, dealing with him, forced him like a leper to look at his own sores. No one wants to see that which they’ve hurt. Who.
Sing Sing’s sidekick had set him up. Pimp or no pimp, infection or not: Georges-Minh didn’t owe him anything. That’s what the boy’s outburst the other day had been about, his guillotine-talk and his bad dream. He’d been running from the police. They’d been on to him and his buddy had led the police right to Georges-Minh’s clinic. Goddamn him. Whatever fatherly feelings he may have begun to cultivate for Sing Sing were now gone.
“So what do you know?”
Georges-Minh wasn’t going to let his group go sliding like a ring down the drain. Everything they’d worked for. The plot. His relationship with Khieu. Until
Dong, his whole life had been that one man. Working to build himself up in that man’s eyes. Hands up in front of him, palms out, Georges-Minh said, “I can tell you the whole story. This kid, he saw me up to something.” He smiled in a way that he hoped conveyed “man to man,” and added a slight lift of the shoulder, a sheepish but not too apologetic shrug to indicate contrition at the same time as knowledge of his rights, and how sadly fate intervenes and we sometimes get caught—but by no means are we wrong, just unlucky. “You see how it is. How it came about. So, he forced me to pay since it was something I know my wife might not have appreciated. I know now I should have taken care of it,” as if to say this is what a better man would have done, asserting his manliness, was it working? There were grunts and nods, possibly of approval, and if not, at least they weren’t sounds of outright dissent.
He worried that his words would trip from his mouth at the wrong speed or in the wrong order. For that matter, had he brought any opium to work today? Usually he kept it stashed at home, but every now and then, especially if he was feeling unusually stressed, he wrapped a gram or two in hell money and slipped it into his sock, where his body heat warmed it slightly and made it the perfect consistency for melting into his tea at lunchtime. After a while being in there, it became so pliant he could no longer feel it, and at this precise moment he couldn’t remember whether today he had brought some with him or not. He began to worry that he’d get searched. He’d better hope he didn’t stutter.
“So, fuck me, I’ve got a soft heart and I let him put that godforsaken crate in here. I wasn’t really thinking about it. We were swamped with the junkie vermin we get in here. The lousy whores. I treat them for free, you know. Because I want to stop their spread of disease. I didn’t even really see him bring it in. I mean, I did but I didn’t—so busy you know dealing with this riffraff”—he thumbed his patients, huddled in various parts of the clinic, looking at the floor—“and then I kind of forgot, till you came. Anyway, take it and I’ll show you where he is.” Thank goodness he’d spoken clearly.