by Yasuko Thanh
He’d bought a newspaper, which he sat down to read, but instead held his head in his hands, suddenly exhausted. Though he’d been noiseless, Dong stirred. Her hair cascaded over her face and her body turned toward him, eyes closed. The baby shifted and began to snore. Then the baby shifted again, and the shifting turned to fussing and then the baby awoke, swinging his head to the left and right searching for a nipple. Georges-Minh tried to wake up his wife, first by kissing her cheek, then by gently jostling her shoulder.
“Dong, wake up, wake up. The baby’s hungry.”
It became clear this wasn’t just sleep.
“Dong? Dong?”
The infant mewled with hunger.
Her eyes flickered open for a moment, her gaze locked with his, and he could see that she recognized his face. Then the eyelids fluttered closed again.
He clutched her limp, warm body, rocking her to his chest, urged her to fight back, to push against the thing that was pushing her. “Wake,” he said, “wake up, do you hear me?” But the hand smothering her was stronger than the both of them.
“Chang! Chang!”
44
With the water lapping the sides of their narrow wooden boat, to Thu and Mai the day seems almost peaceful. Seems instead of is, because in the jungle on each side of the murky brown waterway, nationalists are cleaning rifle barrels and packing the food provisions that wives are busily making over open cook fires whose spires can be seen rising over the tops of the palm trees.
In circles, fighters discuss plans and go over maps gone over a thousand times already but once more never hurts and besides it gives the restless mind something to focus on, nervous fingers something to hold.
In one hut a man packs away into his knapsack, heavy with ammunition and rice pancakes, a stone given to him by his daughter. Who knows why a stone? But the daughter, only four years old, handed it to him on one of their many walks along the shores of this same river, where two women and a baby boy now paddle, after first polishing it against her skirt, gave it to him as an offer of love and gratitude, and, smiling, he took the stone from her hand for what it was, a stone, no more, no less.
Now he places it in his pack next to the rice pancakes and he wonders briefly if he should have wrapped it in cloth first before it got lost among the metal shell casings and other accessories of war, but it’s too late. He lets the stone drop and he closes up his pack and leaves by the door of his hut and goes to join the men, ready and waiting, in the circle with the map.
Thu imagined the impermeable darkness of the jungle as she had seen it the other night, and the activities of the people within it, and this line of reasoning caused her to contemplate for a moment that other impermeable darkness that awaits us all, and she quickly cast a look at Cong, as if afraid that while she was daydreaming of a man with a map and a stone he might have disappeared, but Cong was still there, lying peacefully at the bottom of the sampan on a blanket, or so she told herself, because it was easier than thinking of any alternative, such as he’d fallen into a coma from which he would never awake. She wondered how the nationalist struggle was going in general, how it fed people’s hearts, and she dipped her hand into the warm, murky waters that lapped the boat’s sides and her movement shifted the prow slightly—the boat and its passengers yawed in the water, something slipping, then regained—and Mai looked up from her own languid daydream, glanced away from the water skimmers and the hovering mosquitoes whose presence added to the brown liquid apathy of the day, and contemplated Thu as if for the first time.
“Khieu,” Mai said, as if continuing some earlier conversation, “whatever else his faults, at least he had some ideals. In his way he is a brave man.” Like many other words Mai had spoken in her relatively short lifetime, they simply fell out without rhyme or reason.
“You mean because of his art?”
“Well, he chases a dream.”
“Like us now.”
Mai dipped her finger into the water. “Maybe bravery is a trait easier to discover in others than to see in oneself.”
“Or maybe bravery is just easily confused with stupidity. Bravery and stupidity often walk hand in hand. Are the same trait, really. Bravery is stupidity, just seen through a favourable lens.” Thu looked away from Mai, out over the water. “Some might say I’m stupid for following you through the jungle.”
After all her time in Mai’s service, Mai still cared nothing about her, would plunge her into the heart of danger, for all she knew, to make her find some good-for-nothing man. Had Thu married Khieu, he wouldn’t have left in the first place—not that she would have married him—that oily-haired man, that gap-toothed smiling man—get that straight, she had never been attracted to him! Oh, he’d been hot for her. White teeth and all. Dared to put his hand on her knee more than once while his wife was in the other room.
Thu figured Khieu had hooked up with the wrong girl and her husband had gotten wind—that’s why, if the fortune teller was right, he’d been forced on the run, because some cuckold was on the warpath. Rotten luck for Thu: what did she ever have to do with any of it, except to try and be a good surrogate mother to Mai’s children?
It wasn’t that she was jealous of Mai, of her having a husband, a son. She’d get married someday. And just why couldn’t a Senegalese man and a Vietnamese woman get married? Just because one was black and one was not? Just because it wasn’t often done didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
In addition to the letter, over the past three days, Thu had secretly sent Birago two postcards: one with a haiku about the landscape, another with a little free-verse erotic poem, dirty-talking him as if whispering into his ear.
“That again. Will you ever be done with him?” Mai’s face grew red.
Thu wanted to say, As long as there is still a man waiting for me in Saigon. Every fresh mile between her and Birago unlocked a different ache in her heart. “This fight is ongoing in more ways than you can know,” she said finally, thinking of the postcard in her dress ready to mail. Then, with a note of resignation and a faraway look in her eyes, she added, “And it won’t end soon.”
They had been rowing along the water’s edge using the hanging overgrowth for protection: the branches grew out over the water and they could use them for shade from the sun, and to hide, if needed.
From out of the mangroves a man grabbed Thu’s tow rope. A little girl stepped into the boat and took Thu’s hand and bade her rise and began pulling her into the forest of cinnamon and black varnish trees. Thu panicked, reached for Mai who had scooped Cong from the bottom of the boat and was clutching him to her chest.
45
Khieu shuddered against the cold of the mountains, the fog and the mist, trying to find some warmth in his thin shirt by clutching the sleeves and trying to pull them more tightly around his body while the Montagnards inhaled from the pipe and tilted their faces to the falling rain. Smoke stung his eyes when the breeze blew it toward him. He coughed, though the villagers didn’t. Even the children seemed unaffected.
The villagers were epic storytellers, and even though the language was foreign to him, their talk sounded holy, as if they’d connived a direct line to the spirits.
So far his life’s talk had been bluster, meant to sound like something meaningful. And fool people it had—he’d even believed what he’d said himself at times.
He missed his wife, his children.
He didn’t speak Cham and only one villager spoke broken Vietnamese. The villager talked of an armed uprising, a revolt against the French.
In the following days Khieu watched the daily habit of children sprinkling water on the ground to draw tactics onto the dust with sticks. In the land of lychees, loquats, and longans, the villagers shaved bamboo spears and sharpened wood into halberds and swords. They built crossbows and taught younger boys and girls how to shoot. Children trained and ate hibiscus seeds on breaks.
The gum-lac like small black ears in the branches of trees waited to be gathered as salve while boys machete
d paths through the woods. Elders ordered maps, though who needed them, Chams understood the forest like their own callused feet. Their water buffalo trained for battle. The village perfected the art of patrol, the advance and retreat. Let the French think they were unorganized and untrained. They travelled to other villages. Discussed, palavered, composed attack cries and war songs.
Even the youngest helped, cleaning rifles and boxing bullets. They laughed as they readied for battle, and their casualness in preparing for death drew Khieu into himself.
He imagined the French soldiers. “Tran Khieu, you’re under arrest for the Saigon Poisoning Plot.” They’d drag him to a wagon, transport him to a city’s market square and a guillotine.
He took a deep drag of marijuana mixed with tobacco from the pipe passed hand to hand. A lame grandfather with cloudy pupils stared at him across the fire. Khieu turned away and looked at the watercress-covered fish ponds cloaked in darkness, thinking how they were kind to take him in, but maybe he’d search for somewhere safer to hide, at least until the battle was over.
46
Georges-Minh rocked her, clutching the boy in the crook of his arm, while Chang tried to balance the turtle soup. Wobbling on the mattress, Chang almost lost his balance. “God, Georges, what did you do to her?”
“What did I do to her?”
“She’s totally out of it. Did you drug her? She’s good like this. Pretty. Quiet. I didn’t know you liked them so inanimate. Had I been the one to think of it I’d be congratulating myself right now.”
“I’m not playing. Really, I can’t wake her.”
“Obviously. Hello, sweetheart. Hello, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Don’t give him that.”
The shock made Chang spill some of the soup, barely missing the baby’s head.
“Don’t you know he’s too young for anything but breast milk?” Dong held the boy to her breast, her upper lip sweating. “Why are you two fussing over me? And why are you trying to feed my baby turtle soup? Get your hand away from my forehead. What’s wrong with you, Georges?” She pushed his hand away. The baby made sucking sounds at her breast and a bead of milk dripped from his lip to his chin.
“You wouldn’t wake up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I thought you were getting food. I’m starving.”
“I did get food. It’s right here.”
When Dong got upset her nose curved like a parrot’s and she raised her lip enough for her incisors to show. “Careful what you eat,” she said. “They may be trying to poison us.”
Georges-Minh wanted to rejoice at her return from the dead, but narrowed his eyes. “Who?”
“Who’s trying to poison us?” Chang said.
“The soup. The poison’s in the soup.”
They hadn’t misheard.
She pushed herself upright. “God, I have to piss.”
“Come on, I’ll help you to the bathroom.”
“Help,” she said, reaching for an empty vase on the top of the table, “by passing me that.”
“She’s mad,” Chang said.
“It’s on the floor, too.”
“There’s nothing on the floor.”
She strained in the direction of the porcelain vessel, tangling her toes in the white sheets until Georges-Minh had no choice but to help her balance over the vase or she would have soiled the bed.
Chang slipped out of the room while she relieved herself.
Georges-Minh helped her back onto the bed and under the covers.
“I think the floor has poison on it. I think my shoes do, too. I want you to make me some new ones.”
“Some shoes?”
“Yes. Shhh. Quietly. The walls hear you. You can make them out of napkins.”
“What’s wrong with yours?”
“I told you already. I can’t be sure they don’t have poison in them.”
“Oh. I could check them.”
He had never negotiated this kind of territory before. Khieu had his days, but in a different way: his craziness was based on needing a distraction from the politics and so he pulled rickshaws or studied the stars. Georges-Minh didn’t know what to do or say to ease her mind. Part of him thought playing along with her would comfort her. The other part believed that corroborating her fantasies would prove that indeed something did lie on the floor waiting to harm her.
“Look,” he said, deciding on the latter. “I’m walking on the floor and I feel fine. If there was poison I think I’d be feeling sick by now. Maybe you’re mistaken. Maybe it’s okay. Why don’t you try.”
She said, “So perhaps it’s me they want. Not you.”
“What poison is so selective? Think about it. Have you ever heard of a drug that metabolizes in one person but not another? I haven’t. It’s not possible, Dong. I’m a doctor, I should know.”
The irony didn’t escape him: that he had poisoned Birago and Janvier, and now his wife was seeing poison everywhere she looked. “Now look. Look at me. I’m going to remove my shoes, and even my socks.”
He glanced up. Her eyes widened. He went back to peeling off his socks now that he’d gotten her attention. Vindicated. He walked a circle around the bed, then back again the same way he had come. His feet left prints on the tiles. “See? I’m fine.”
She swung her hair back and tucked it behind both ears; the motion made the baby bounce on the mattress.
“All that proves is my point. Exclusive poisons do exist. A poison made for me or maybe me and the baby. But I’d never put him down to crawl around on the floor anyway—what kind of mother would do that?”
“Who would go after the baby?”
“Oh, you know, people.”
“What people?”
“Bad people.”
“Monsters.”
“Monsters?” She giggled. But it was neither friendly nor flirty. It patronized, and accused Georges-Minh of wasting her time. “Who would be trying to stop us? Think about it.”
His head hurt. He needed to eat. To eat and to think. He massaged his temples, circling his fingers around and around.
“Soldiers. Who else? After all you’ve done to us. How could you forget? How could you ruin our lives?”
On their wedding night Georges-Minh had caressed her body. Her lung fever had made her so thin that he could fit his finger in the spaces between her ribs. He’d started kissing her neck, her breasts, amazed her body could be so loosened with trust. Loose as Birago and Janvier had been when they’d brought the cognac glasses to their lips.
They used to be the kind of couple that made people stare, good-looking, confident. Her full lips, so much like Chang’s, were always smiling, even when her eyes were worried or sad. He liked how forgiving she was; how he could do the most insensitive things and she would carry on as if she hadn’t noticed until receiving his apology, always acting surprised when he said sorry, as if she appreciated it but it was unnecessary for him to beg her pardon because she loved him that much.
“We should think of a name for the baby,” Georges-Minh said. “Don’t you think?”
She picked him up. “Look at you. Big boy. I grant you peace, luck, longevity.”
“We could, I suppose,” he said, “name the boy after my father. Do you like the name Tan?”
She furled her brow.
“Or we could choose another family name. What do you think your father would like?”
She raised her eyebrows, shrugged. “I choose freedom.” Laughed.
“What do you think of Long?” he said. It meant “dragon,” and he didn’t think she knew it was Khieu’s middle name.
He poured them both some tea in silence, the amber liquid burbling into the cups, steam rising from the surface. The baby burped and spit up a little. She wiped the milk that dribbled from his mouth with a corner of the bedsheet, and a smile crept across her face at the novelty of performing this motherly duty. Maybe she was getting better. Maybe everything would be fine, after all.
Georges-Minh suddenly wished Chang woul
d knock on the door, but Chang never did. He thought about going down the hall and fetching him.
Georges-Minh hadn’t really the liberty to leave, though, for Dong took every absence as an insult, a conspiracy. She’d become far too skittish to be left alone, even momentarily.
So he took a sip of his tea. He swallowed the wrong way, coughed and set down the cup.
Dong left her cup untouched, gave Georges-Minh the baby, grabbed his newspaper from the bureau, and began making paper hats from the pages.
Or were they sailboats? He remembered crafting them, too, when he was a boy and sailing them down the Saigon River behind the house where he’d grown up, where his mother and father-in-law lived now, from which he would remain in exile how long, he didn’t know.
Her eyes continued to focus on her paper-folding task. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth the way children’s sometimes did when the activity at hand absorbed their attention.
“Are you making hats or boats?”
She stopped folding. “The difference is what you decide to do with it in the end.” Unfolded the paper. Brought it close to her nose as if she was going to smell it. Was she switching to flowers? Maybe an origami lily. She held the small print to her eye, as if looking for something, until the article in question was nearly under her nose. She read quietly at first, to herself. When she looked up, her face was pink. “What’s this? What is this?” She shook the paper toward Georges-Minh as if in accusation. Then she read out loud. “In Hai Phong twenty elephants were killed by two tigers in a wondrous display put on for French officials.” Her shoulders shook and she looked as though she was going to cry. “How did they do it? Get so few tigers to kill so many elephants?”