by Yasuko Thanh
The man hadn’t finished?
“He couldn’t get it up. So technically, he didn’t even start.”
Another soldier had saved her, had pulled the milk-skinned man off her. She remembered to grab her shopping basket.
Her shopping basket?
“Why lose all your shopping, have to do it again?”
Had she been to the police?
Which police? The French? “What’s the point? I’m fine.”
“So because there’s no penetration it doesn’t count?”
“I’m just tired. I only wanted to come home.” She started to cry.
Burn the clothes, she’d said. So he did.
He felt as insubstantial as the smoke rising from her kerosene-sodden clothes. He poked the mess with a stick and didn’t know what to do. He should ask Khieu. Khieu would know.
Every action he now proposed to himself, to kill or not, seek revenge or not, met its counter. If he bloodied his wife’s attacker, he’d get bloodied. If he killed him, he imagined dying by a bright-bladed guillotine for his crime, his head rolling into a basket.
There were no guide books for plotting revenge. He fell to the ground in front of the dying fire, rocked with his head in his hands. His own wife on an examination table. Fate understood. If they could rape his wife, he could kill a man. If he killed a man it could barely be his fault.
Khieu brought a stray dog to the next meeting which wandered around licking sticky patches on Georges-Minh’s bedroom floor while Khieu said, “We sit here and spend just as much time talking about what we should call ourselves as what sort of actions we should take. We have a month before our supposed action and well? Doesn’t anyone see a problem?” Khieu looked around. “Are we playing? Is this a game?” More calmly he added, “It’s not just a matter of revenge but of coming up with solutions, pragmatic ones, even simple ones. Small steps in the right direction. Direct action. The death of eighty soldiers, or a hundred, two hundred.”
“Yes, but suppose we did. Take this … this action you suggest.” Chang made a circular motion with his hand. All he could think of was the baby inside Dong. Circular like a toad. Circular like an egg. “How would this direct action take shape? By stealth?”
“Think about it,” Georges-Minh said. “Our ranks are thin. We can’t afford any measure that will compromise our numbers. Like I said before, if I hit Janvier, I can make it look like an accident.” Though he hadn’t told Khieu about the rape, his anger about it had made him steely. Most of the doubt was gone from his mind now. He was quite certain he could kill a man. Part of him was looking forward to trying.
“Mixing deadly brews?”
“The clinic has those,” Georges-Minh said, “or I could make as much as you need. See that flower there, the whitish-yellowish one? I’ve made twenty-seven poisons out of it. The poison is not the thing.”
“Too much thinking, not enough action,” Khieu said. “The poisons, what have you done with them?”
“Well, I made them.”
“That’s my point. Where are they?”
“In my lab.”
“If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times, demoralizing.”
He supposed he could have poisoned his wife’s rapist. Khieu was right: at heart nothing had changed. Georges-Minh prized security above all else. Valued safety. His own interests. His own health. His own life. Khieu was speaking to the group but really he was peering into Georges-Minh’s soul. Diagnosed his weakness.
If Khieu’s wife had been raped, Khieu would be in jail by now for having killed the son of a bitch.
“Let’s ring an alarm bell!” Khieu shouted. “We’re a nation of sleepwalkers.”
“We are a nation of sleepwalkers.” Let him stand up for himself now. “Demoralized. But how will we know if it’s the right time to make the hit? What if the people don’t stand with us when we need them to?”
Khieu looked at Georges-Minh as if to say, I expected as much. And will you find yourself a backbone? “Maybe that’s our reason for being. Our gift is our capacity to lead, the burden of the father.” He chuckled, pleased to view himself this way. “So then … to light the first candle, strike the first sword.”
Phuc said, “Okay. Let’s say we go ahead. Georges-Minh gives us the poison, we kill the soldiers. Then what? We kill a handful of French soldiers. This makes them leave the country?”
“I know,” Khieu said suddenly. The energy within him bubbled up like gases in hot springs. “We’ll do both!”
“What?”
“Kill both, yes! All the men at the garrison and Lieutenant Colonel Janvier. The act will inspire so many. Wait and see how our ranks will swell.” He ran his hand down the stray dog’s back. “By the way, it defeats the whole purpose if we make the murder of the colonel look like an accident.” He glanced at Georges-Minh the way one looks at a silly child. “Our group takes responsibility. Georges-Minh, you will sign our name! Long live MPYM!”
“Wait,” Phuc said. “I don’t think it was completely decided yet. The name, I mean. I had proposed Fighting Dragon. I still like that best.”
“Well, what about Mysterious Scent of the Mountains?” Khieu said. “That was my vote.”
“Mysterious Perfume of the Yellow Mountains,” Georges-Minh reminded everyone. “I thought that’s what we’d decided on.” He sighed. Could it have deteriorated back to the ridiculous so quickly?
“Long live Vietnam! You have access to him. You can get into his quarters.” Khieu raised his hand. “I know. I have it. Listen. After you commit the murder, paint this in its entirety on the walls in blood: ‘The Mysterious Perfume of the Yellow Mountains Shall Rise, Long Live Vietnam.’ What do you think? Is that too long? Maybe just ‘We Shall Rise’? No, too vague. Maybe just ‘MPYM.’ In blood. Yes.”
“Fighting Dragon,” Phuc said. “MPYM is even more vague than We Shall Rise. If we’re discussing vagueness positionings.”
“I say we put it to a vote,” Georges-Minh said.
“Good. All for MPYM, raise a hand.”
“No, I mean who to kill.”
Over the coming weeks the debate over whether to murder Lieutenant Colonel Janvier as the figurehead of the garrison or all the soldiers continued to rage.
Now that Christmas was approaching, they voted by casting ballots into a teacup. The sigh of relief Georges-Minh breathed when the count came up in favour of poisoning just the colonel was short-lived, for his satisfaction at knowing that fewer lives would be lost was followed by a shudder. The administration of the poison, the suspicion, would fall on his shoulders alone.
24
Birago shadow-boxed in a jungle clearing surrounded by hibiscus hedges. Thu sat on a bamboo stool drinking basil tea from a tin cup. He hadn’t told her he might have killed a boy: he jabbed the air trying to forget the smashed mouth, the bleeding eyes. The doll haunted him; he kept secret his wakeful nights, his nightmares when he did sleep.
He’d blacked out. So was he supposed to turn himself in? Go to his superiors and tell them the story? Ask his buddies what the hell had happened, the ones who’d abandoned him? Besides, his “buddies” weren’t really his buddies. It wasn’t like that.
He couldn’t tell Thu. Not a woman.
For the moment Thu’s mouth was busy with a cup, thank God, because otherwise she was an expert on everything. “Birago, I don’t want to speak out of turn …” “Birago, I know it’s none of my business, but …” Her eyes would pretend to be angry with him but she would kiss his swollen cheek in that way that only women could express love and judgment together as one emotion. She’d taken on the unofficial role of his manager after his last fight against Ca Ong, “Sir Fish” after the ancient whale sharks that grew to immense size on the muddy beds of the East Sea.
“You orgueilleux,” his father had said, before Birago had joined the Bataillons d’Afrique. Proud. “You like to be gblazhou, spending so much money on clothes. A dandy man in zouzou—how you buy a purple silk tie for thirty fr
ancs when you don’t have five francs for a toaster?”
Maybe he was arrogant, even vain. The truth was he’d been thinking about retiring from the ring long before his losing streak began. He considered his verdict neither fatalistic nor defeatist: giving up boxing simply didn’t mean the same thing to him as it did to Thu.
He viewed his fights as simple money-making performances. Sure, he relished the elephant ka-pow of a knockout, the satisfaction of a cheering crowd, but ultimately he was an actor; the ring, his stage.
Before each match, he combed and styled his hair. The mirror was his true audience. He played for it, posed for it, preened and pranced, saying his own name over and over while he flexed his oiled muscles, which were every day taking a bit longer to warm up, his joints constraining him from deeper within. Ever since he was a kid, when he felt bad or sad he would remind himself of himself, say his name, and it would bring him back from whatever chasm the bullies had pushed him into.
After he’d lost to Sir Fish, Thu had poulticed his bruises while discerning his flaws and prescribing remedies. “Birago, it’s not your fault you lost. Now if you just look at it like an army general would … I know it’s not my place to say, but …”
“You know what, girl? You got no idea when it comes to boxing.”
It wasn’t that he loved Thu less in the ring. He just couldn’t take her nagging anymore. Birago, Birago, Birago, he said. His stomach, an octopus with tentacles, hunted from the inside, clouting his centre. Moreover, she always acted the lion in bed: tossing her mane, roaring so loud. Why couldn’t she have chased his octopus centre away when she made love to him? Roared it from him, bitten it from him, fucked it out of his body.
Could have if she wanted. But she didn’t. She left a little piece of that octopus jelly behind. What could she gain by letting a jelly piece live on?
Did she leave a piece of nervous jelly because she was inept: an artless doctor who on finishing surgery forgets the scalpel? Did it on purpose like the witch doctors in Senegal so she could control him like a dog? Train him, teach him to stay close, stay alert. Straight, true. Heel. Yank him on a chain. Tie him up. Let him loose. Whenever she felt like it?
“What are you thinking, Birago? Why are you so quiet tonight?”
Punch, punch, jab. He shadow-boxed under the growing shade of the hibiscus hedge. Jab, jab, straight. The bare field of plain water across from where Thu sat reflected the setting sun and made her face glow green.
He wouldn’t lose his rhythm, not because of her.
“Me so quiet?” he said. “You the one who sitting there not saying a word.” Apart from the chiding, she’d grown into herself lately, cat-eyed, critical, hyper-focused on his mistakes but unwilling to talk, to open herself the way she used to.
She wiped away strands of hair that sweat had glued to her cheek, and the bangles on her wrist tinkled.
A hook, a cross.
“Birago?”
Women. In a way he was glad. The last thing he needed now was heavy talk.
A cross. A hook.
She touched his shoulder.
He jumped. He pushed her away. Couldn’t he demand a little respect? He wanted it in the ring. From his woman, too.
Who knew why the French needed Saigon, a nothing town with two dirty streets that ran the length of a river. Maybe its strategic position at the water’s mouth explained something.
Still, it was enough for Birago to know the country he was fighting for, even if it wasn’t his own country, had to have it, and that they were on a mission along with a shipful of seamen and cannons and field rifles and engineers to replace the soldiers presently holed up in the garrison and dying of marsh fever. He’d do what they needed him to. Artilleryman today, captain tomorrow.
He’d journeyed over from Shanghai with Lieutenant Colonel Janvier. Once ashore, he’d become Janvier’s go-boy. The colonel had called on Birago to complete all sorts of personal chores for him, and Birago had done everything he’d asked, including polishing the brass on his automobile, even unclogging the mechanism of his favourite fountain pen to get it working again.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Lieutenant Colonel Janvier had said, “but it was a present. My daughter’s in France, as you know.”
Birago found human skin blocking the ink.
“Can you believe he stabbed his own neck? I was getting a confession. Right there in front of me. In the jugular. What a mess.”
Birago got the pen working again. Anything as a stepping stone to a promotion.
The chores forced him to miss other duties in the barracks, and this, added to the favouritism shown to him by the colonel, caused even more resentment among his fellow soldiers than did his black skin alone. His captain was not immune to feelings of wrath due to this preferential treatment, either. Everyone hated Birago. They suspected the older man of having a gay affair with him. They suspected the younger seaman, the dandy, of having seduced him.
Nothing but evil could come of such an unholy union. Such liaisons were not unheard of in the French Navy—but among men of such vastly different ranks, and between two such different skin colours?
Birago felt a spiritual bond with Lieutenant Colonel Janvier because of his skills as a fencer and as a sharpshooter (Birago once won a competition in Monaco, though he kept silent to the colonel about his boxing, knowing the sport was illegal). Birago found the colonel had the most exceptional hand-eye coordination he’d ever seen, which made him not only an excellent torturer but explained his wonderful dart throwing.
Every time Birago glanced at the colonel’s rank insignia he told himself the only thing that separated him and that man was respect—so Birago made a deal with himself. He’d do whatever Janvier asked of him, even if it meant wearing an apron and scrubbing his dishes, because each day he did so was a step closer, he figured, to having the same rank insignia on his own chest.
“Birago, I need to tell you something. I don’t feel like myself. I feel fuzzy. Like my head’s been hollowed out. My head’s like a cavern. I feel like I’m watching myself do things from a distance but I don’t know who I am. Do you ever feel this way, as if I can watch myself from space, and nothing makes any sense? None of what I do makes sense, makes any difference. As if there’s no point to it all. I may as well be a corpse, a walking spirit. Invisible—I sit in a crowd and I feel I’m invisible. I know that others can see right through me. That nothing of what I do will have any consequence, therefore I can do anything. I have been given the gift of invisibility. Of being able to do whatever I want. Of invincibility, because nothing I do matters. Because I do not matter. Because I am nothing. I am no one. I have no memories. I am not real.”
Thu scratched at her arms and continued, “Are you real? Are you a person? I am not a person. Right now I am not real. That’s how I feel. So I can do anything. I can kill someone. I can eat someone. I can make love to someone. I can turn into someone else. I can fly. I can jump from a building. I can be a boy. I can be a girl. I can stop eating. I can stop breathing. I can stop sleeping. I can sleep for days.”
“Hell, girl. What?” Crazy. Heavy talk. “What you telling me this shit for now? I got to fight.”
Before the fight, Birago tried not to hear the beating of his blood. He tore the tape with his teeth, fraying the edges before flattening it down around his wrists and knuckles. Men climbed into the palms and fastened gaslights to the treetops. As he shadow-boxed in the ring, trying to keep his muscles warm and ready, Birago could see spectators from the corner of his eye snaking down the rugged road strewn with mulberry leaves, carrying chairs, beer, wine, food toward the makeshift ring. It never mattered where the fights were, in a gymnasium, in a courtyard, in a hastily drawn circle in the dirt shielded by spectators who themselves watched out for police, he’d always felt at home in a fight. The same way he felt when he rode on top of a wave and the sun reflected on the water and time stopped, and for a moment the world felt right. The bushes hid poinsettias that peeked here and there the sam
e colour as Thu’s lips and the way her face looked when it glowed green in this light, in a stand of palms reflected in the pond water, made him feel some kind of right too, if only for an instant.
He remembered a conversation they’d had on the porch of Mai’s inn where she lived in one tiny room no larger than a broom closet. Her room would have been too small to fit both of them, along with Crazy Auntie, who treated him like a son even though they’d only met a handful of times. They lay on the crumbling porch that Birago had often offered to fix and Thu had never obliged him to repair. A blue cottony mist perfumed the afternoon: the cat, skulking along the stone path that led from the door to the gate, smelled the approaching thunder on it and wrinkled her nose. An impromptu thunder shook the cabbage palms and the cat scurried under the house and a heavier rain bathed the ground which began to steam, fog rising. Birago sang a popular refrain into Thu’s ear while she watched the clouds draw in.
“I like the sound of your singing,” Thu said, taking off the morning glory sandals he’d bought her, and she let the rain fall on her feet. Her toenails, cut straight across, were dusty.
“Is that why you like me? Because I sing?” He lay down on the wet wood.
“You like me because I’m black. I’m the forbidden fruit.”
He could see her blushing, even as the light slunk away. Thu, the rebel; he knew she was embarrassed to admit that she loved his blackness because it made her sound shallow, as if her love were skin deep.
“And because you are a rebel,” she replied. “Your people are like my people.”
“A rebel? Like, which people?”
“Black people. Trod down.”
“I fight for your people,” Birago said.
“Not those people, I’m not talking about the soldiers. I’m talking about the rebels in the hills. The ones in Dak Lak.”
He didn’t want to discuss politics with her. He’d rather know if they were going to have sex or not. He sat up and his body on the porch slats left an outline on the wet wood, like a face pressed to a mirror.