by Yasuko Thanh
Well-behaved children charmed their parents into buying candy or small cheap toys not meant to last more than a week. He could see the pride of their fathers, men with big-chested embraces. Their virile sense of ownership bestowed a level of care upon the owned. Mothers who knew how to be demure, knew how to let themselves be protected. Outside, lives were lived; inside, shadows flashed indigo.
He went down the hallway to tell Chang that he’d decided he was right, they should move on, but first they should drop Dong off at a hospital. He’d carry her there if he had to.
“Everything’s ending,” Georges-Minh said, sitting down on Chang’s bed.
“No, it’s not. This is just a beginning.”
How could he still be optimistic. At a time like this? “So why does it feel like the walls are closing in?” He wanted to tell Chang he’d just come to the realization that he loved something, for the first time in his life.
“Georges, you’ve been stuck in a ten-by-ten cell with a crazy person for almost two days. You’re not thinking straight.”
“I have a bad feeling.”
Chang punched his shoulder. “You don’t believe in omens.”
Georges-Minh started to sob.
“What’s this now?”
“I do.”
“What now?”
“That night at the den.”
“The boy.”
“And then the mermaid, the one I killed. She was fourteen. It’s all related.”
“You didn’t kill anyone. The difference between killing someone and not saving their life? It’s significant.”
“You made me violate the kid.”
Chang wrinkled his brow. Sat down and smoked a whole cigarette before he spoke. “Because I asked you to go, you blame me.”
“I’m sorry,” Georges-Minh said quietly. “I never would have gone there if it wasn’t for you.”
“Why won’t you just admit the real reason you can’t love me back? You love Khieu. It’s not a crime.”
“Shut up. Khieu was a bastard who left his wife and kids.” He couldn’t say he loved Khieu because doing so would break his own heart in two. “Khieu betrayed us.”
Hell was not a person waiting for his revenge. Hell was learning other people existed. Instead of being a man he could respect, the kind who protected what was his, he’d put at stake a pair of small hands, a smile, and hair the colour of night.
“We voted,” Georges-Minh said. “It was a sacred trust.” He hadn’t rescued himself from cowardice. In fact, the colonel haunted him. He saw him everywhere. At the head of the bed when he went to sleep. Following him when he went to buy food. When he shut his eyes at night. The colonel never spoke or tried to touch him. But there he was. Just staring.
“Two men or two hundred,” Chang said, “they’d have had our heads either way. Makes no difference. Except to the struggle.”
Georges-Minh felt nauseated hearing the same poetic drivel Khieu had fuelled his speeches with come from Chang’s mouth.
“I thought we’d win,” Georges-Minh said.
“He never forced us to believe,” Chang said. “Hey, you feeling okay? You’re shaking.”
“Do you think those we hurt are waiting for us when we die?”
“Who?”
“He’s waiting for me, so he can get even. The colonel, who else?”
Chang followed Georges-Minh back into the room, blabbering that this was for the best. They should go into Laos, then Thailand, and then?
“And then what?” Dong said, waking at the sound of their footsteps rushing around her bed. “Where are we going?”
“On a vacation,” Georges-Minh told her. “You like vacations, right?”
“What if people try to chase us? The people who are trying to poison me, for instance? Don’t you care?” Her high-pitched voice pierced the room’s aqueous humidity. She tried to get up but collapsed back onto the mattress. “I’m not leaving here. I know they have this place surrounded. I can see through walls. You can’t. I know there are soldiers out there. Right now, waiting for us.”
Because she was struggling so much, they decided to leave the luggage behind.
Georges-Minh held her up by the waist. Chang took her hand. Georges-Minh, with the baby in the crook of his arm, led the way down the stairs.
50
Forest eyes watched Khieu collect vines and bulbs and trap rodents. On a good day he killed a large rat or a small pig. The eyes never blinked. They belonged not to the Chams, not to the Moys, which were what he thought the tribesmen in the next village were called.
The beastlike eyes carried with them the musk of apes. They stared from the bushes while he collected food. Tonight they watched him pick mushrooms. So long as their eyes stayed where they were, he had other things to worry about. Like his wife, his children, his own death, and when the French were going to find the Chams and when their battle was going to start.
He untucked his shirt and made a pouch to collect the long-stemmed brown ones. He’d collect enough so he wouldn’t have to leave his cave for weeks: let the bullets fly over his head. The moonless night made telling tan from brown from black impossible. He devoured them as he picked, too hungry to wait, the dirt mixing with their flavour though everything tasted bad without salt.
He usually foraged away from the Chams because he didn’t want to run into any of the villagers by accident. Mime, How go the battle preparations?
Then what? An awkward shrug? He felt the coward, ate more slowly, thinking about a woman who had sponged the sweat from his brow when he’d once been poisoned; he began to sweat as he picked some more mushrooms, his hands shaking. He could still remember the curve of her hip barely covered by the brightly coloured shawl that she wore wrapped around her waist, and how she’d giggled, and the way her tongue had clicked in her native language every time he’d slipped his index finger between the fabric and her flesh trying to move the fabric aside, teasing her. As he returned to the cave his hands kept trembling. Last time he’d eaten undercooked rat and gotten sick for two days. Had he poisoned himself yet again?
Now he was sick and it wasn’t like the ordinary bouts of diarrhea he’d contended with before, and as he began throwing up he considered walking to the Cham village, but his legs were trembling so, and he began seeing more eyes in the trees, and when he tried to stand he collapsed again and all he could do was retch blood and crawl back into his cave. He was dying for sure. He knew it.
The Moy village was closer than the Cham village but he’d had no contact with the people who lived there. They wore caps decorated with metallic coins. Men, women, and children wore bracelets on their arms and legs, from their wrists to their elbows, from their ankles to their knees. Wherever they walked, in the jungle and in their village, a boy clutching a handful of red weeds, a girl feeding the red weeds to a duck in the pond water, they made a tinkling sound. For all he knew they were at war with the Chams, had hunted each other for generations. Maybe they’d seen him with the Chams and considered him the enemy. Too weak in any case, Khieu put his head down on the soil.
Voices spoke to him all night long. The cave walls came alive, spoke like the hooting of a night bird in the trees. The bird seemed to be telling him time was not on his side and the eyes knew it. He covered his ears. He refused to open his mouth. Eyes stared at him all night. The eyes blinked—brown or black, tinged with green, encircled by a hazel ring, long-lashed, thick-lashed, short and straight-lashed, crying, or red-eyed and dry. He tried to make them melt but they wouldn’t go away, no matter how often he blinked. Dammit, his eyes burned, he was coming unglued. He tried to make them go away. Still, the eyes blinked and batted and flickered and forced him to remember Mai’s eyes gazing deep into his trying to share the love she felt the night they were married. The eyes that haunted him with their blinking were not showing any kind of feeling; they blinked for lack of anything else to do.
It took Khieu days to recover. He didn’t want to be poisoned again. What was left? Not f
oraging.
He’d steal it. Not from the village, where they knew him. He’d steal food from the Moys.
One step, two, toward the closest village. He’d watched the men bring home their catch from the lake in the evening. The night followed him and allowed him to steal some vegetables from the sill of the first house and half a rat snake in a basket from the entrance of a second.
The next night and the next he snuck through wooden houses with roofs of dwarf palm leaves and wondered if he would hang according to highland codes if he were caught.
So it went until the fourth night. Pulling himself along on his stomach where early Tagalogs from Manila, who had been part of the Spanish expeditionary corps, would have also pulled themselves through mimosas, creepers, and long-tailed lizards. There was a snap, a jolt, and suddenly Khieu was ten feet in the air hanging from a net of vines in an elephant apple tree.
Below him a group of men pointed spears. Some of them looked African, which could only mean one thing: soldiers. Even in the moonlight Khieu could be sure of one man’s kinky hair. He heard three distinct languages: French, Vietnamese, hill tribe. Children too, now. Underfoot. Laughing.
He landed with a thump and the voices stopped as the hill tribe cut him down. Now that the moonlight shafted the right way he discerned their uniforms. He could neither speak nor run. After everything, this was it. He wet himself as the children poked him. Now the men laughed. White eyes in the moonlight. Women came too, to look, to stare.
They didn’t pull their children away. Some of the children sat, as did some of the adults, in a circle around him. An old man yanked Khieu’s ear through the netting in which he was still trapped.
Khieu whimpered.
A French soldier said, “They thought you were nguoi rung.”
A few of the men helped him out of the net. The villagers told him someone had been stealing their food for the past four days. “We were only protecting ourselves, and caught you instead.”
The soldier explained he and the other soldier were deserters from the Bataillons d’Afrique originally from Morocco and now fighting with the Vietnamese independence movement.
Too stunned to comprehend his luck, Khieu shook the leaves from his hair. “They thought I was a forest monster?”
“And before that another nguoi rung kidnapped a villager. Held him for years in captivity, forced him to give her children.”
“I was hungry, that’s all,” Khieu said.
“You mean it was you?”
The elder of the village came forward and offered Khieu some tea and boiled peanuts. He spoke Vietnamese very well. “That’s why all the children wear bracelets on their wrists and ankles. So that if the nguoi rung grab them, they can slip out of the bangles and run. Ever since our villager was kidnapped we have done so. There is an old woman, she is a seer, she lives on the outskirts of our town, and she lets us know when evil nguoi rung is coming. The reason she did not alert us to your presence is now clear.”
Khieu laughed. He told them he’d been on the run from the French. He put on an ape’s face for the children, clawed the air and roared.
An elder shrugged, making the crazy sign.
51
Thu placed the fifth postcard into the postmaster’s hands and paid for the new one she was buying. She’d left Mai in the forest suffering from some kind of diarrhea.
Hunted was how Thu felt, as if everyone suspected her of something. Haunted. And maybe she was. By the death of the boy. Could that be it? Guilt? Was his ghost following them, waiting for her to slip up? She told Mai she was going to buy some fruit for breakfast, something to settle her stomach. So Thu did her rounds, buying a few provisions with the pitiful little money they had, what few coins remained that wouldn’t last much longer, the proceeds of Mai’s wedding ring and some other odds and ends still of value.
In the market, close to the train station, while Mai leaned with her head against a makeshift pillow in the forest nursing a sick baby, knees to her chest, agonizing over her own stomach cramps, Thu found a shady spot on the patio of the courthouse, and with her meagre groceries beside her, began to compose a new postcard to her lover. She repeated the oft-recited syllables to herself as she withdrew a pencil nub from her inner clothing. She could keep the precious tool free from harm close to her breast. Bi-ra-go, her Senegalese soldier.
Next to the post office, a line of French deserters was escorted by a soldier from the police station. The deserters had been shackled by their necks to one another. Their captor led them through the street as another group of soldiers emerged from the station and waited for them to assemble in the courtyard. Thu could see it all from her perch: the street parade, the patrons looking up from their coffee, a window shutting its blinds, a bread-seller lowering her head, the station courtyard, the fence line and deserters being led back to it. The waiting soldiers pulled out their pistols. The deserters, up against the fence, were killed one after the other. Each bullet still ringing in the ears of one before the prisoner shackled to his neck was shot down.
Mai picked at the shale stones as if she hadn’t heard what Thu said. One on side of them, thick forest; on the other, granite outcroppings. Everything was the colour of mud puddles.
“I know you’re alive,” Mai said to the sky, pale and weakened from her cramps. “I’m sure of it, Khieu, I can hear what you are about to say. Around this fire you always open your mouth. You’re about to say the name of the village, the jungle hamlet …”
If Mai mentioned the fortune teller one more time, Thu was going to hit her. “I told you what I saw in town.”
Mai turned to her. “But before he tells me where he is, the conjured image disappears.”
“The Montagnards are at war with the French. We’re playing for keeps now, Mai. This isn’t a joke. We could get caught in the crossfire, confused for spies, we could die, do you get it?”
“I know he’s alive. I’m sure of it. But when I try to conjure his image, sitting around a fire with men who speak a language foreign to us, it fades.”
“Mai, you said that already. Damn.” She squinted her eyes shut. “Have you ever considered how much trouble he’s put you in? If you honestly think he’s here, what do you think made him come up to this godforsaken place? What do you think he’s doing up here? Really?” Still no answer. “He might be involved with politics. You’ve got Cong to think about, you know,” she said, grabbing her hand.
“Okay. If he’s not here, we’ll turn back,” Mai said, almost inaudibly.
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I have faith. Not like you. I can say it because I know he’s here. I know we’ll find him today.”
Thu shook her head. “That’s it.”
“We’ve come all this way.” Mai burst into tears. “Let me complete the ritual.”
“It’s been five days.”
Pillars of stone the colour of ashen skin pushed up from the ground between old foot trails in skeleton shapes, like embedded fossils, holding up the weight of ages. There were so many ways for a road to end. Thu could see herself wearing out, like flesh grown papery and thin over time trying to find the right path to follow. The wind in the carved channels and rain-sculpted grooves of the ashen cairns echoed like bells and was filled with the loneliness that always inhabited such vast spaces. Bats flew from their hiding places, disturbed out of sleep. She missed her bed, even if it was in a closet. She knew she shouldn’t be leaving a trail, sending Birago postcards. But the thought stole her breath. She knew that without the lead of a pencil nub, without the paper itself, she would waste away.
Thu, tucking Cong under her arm like a chicken from the market, dug in her bag and found the bamboo-handled knife wrapped in cloth. She handed it to Mai, who unwrapped it and put the cloth in her pocket. She rubbed it against her chest until it shone. She lifted the blade to her lips, blew on it, steaming each side, then kissed it. She held it up to the sun, what light emitted through the clouds that lidded the sky.
Thu felt tra
pped by the heavens, oppressed by the gods, their cruelty and absurd rituals that humans were compelled to call life. Perhaps she and Mai and Khieu and Birago, the lot of them, the whole human race, were nothing but insects in a jar, humanity and the earth upon which it spun nothing but a god child’s elaborate experiment, a science project watched over this very moment by its teachers, their current undertaking being graded.
A wind kicked up, blowing Thu’s hair about.
“Feel that?” blurted Mai. “It’s a sign.”
Thu vaguely remembered the soothsayer’s words. To throw the knife into the wind. Mai must have remembered the same thing because just then she did. And called his name. “Khieu.” But the knife misfired, rambled into the hood of grey. It meandered over the two women like a reluctant drunkard, wavering at its peak, unsure which way to fall, and landed in a crooked position near a rockslide of shale.
“Now, we dig.”
“I’m not digging. Do what you want.” Thu began to walk away.
In spite of how ill Mai was, anger made her strong. She ran over to Thu and pushed her down from behind. “You owe me.” Thu tried to get up on all fours but Mai toppled her over with her foot. The postcard fell from her bodice.
Mai picked it up from the mud. To my Senegalese Soldier, My anger is as strong as the ocean, as steady and patient, too. It will wipe out everything, leaving behind only a clean slate.
Mai looked down at her. “You betrayed me. How could you?”
Thu spat.
“That’s why we haven’t found him.”
Thu hoped she never did.
“Your bad luck sabotaged us.”
Mai dug. All afternoon, Mai dug. Sick and sometimes retching, she dug.
Thu watched her struggle with the shale, her ivory hands scrabbling. Mai deserved to struggle. Because if Khieu had married Thu instead of Mai, he never would have left the Paper Flower Inn. Khieu was not Birago, uncompromising, complicated, hard to please. Khieu was malleable, easy.