by Yasuko Thanh
And yet. She pushed Mai out of the way. Cong lay asleep on a pile of rags near malevolent creepers and strangling figs. “Tend to your baby,” she said. Because of a jade comb. Because of a kind doctor. Because the consequence of her presumption had been the sin of pride.
Sweeping her hair off her face, Thu began to dig.
She imagined returning to the inn. Birago, waiting to meet her. Would Birago be happy, or would there be a bitterness in his voice as he welcomed her home, a stiffness in his embrace? Would he blame her for leaving so abruptly? The bougainvillea in their pots, blooming for the second time. Crazy Auntie in her usual place, the children running about the yard. For a moment would it feel as if she’d not been gone at all? She missed kissing Birago’s knuckles, his bruises. She missed the salt-sweat taste on his skin. She would tell him so.
Thu was sure she had heard a bird hooting in the trees. Some would have called it an omen. And there was something, too, about the old woman’s sunken mouth.
The old woman, holding a basket, wearing a banana-leaf scarf, had said to Mai, “I know where your husband is.”
The old woman saw it, and Mai saw it too: the distance in Khieu’s eyes, the faraway look that meant they would not be going home soon, not to Saigon, not south.
Bad luck, this reunion, at least for Thu.
Khieu said, “If it wasn’t for her, we never would have known about you two. She lives on the outskirts. Talks to spirits.”
Mai held her hands in the air. She fished for words to fill the gap. “I don’t know what to say. I wish you’d never left me.”
“I missed you,” Khieu answered.
How could it still be he had a wandering gaze?
Awkwardness filled the space between them.
They weren’t like Thu and Birago. They reminded Thu of the stones placed around a campfire. Meant to contain the flames they held, certain stones with cracks exploded. They protected nothing, but damaged all those around them with shards. Such stones, split down the middle, could never be whole.
52
A migration, leaving the north, with Phuc headed against the flow. The road as wide as an ox cart was full of families, bone-thin donkeys, clanging cookware. No forwarding addresses. No ex-wife anywhere. Though why should Phuc look? Dao Ly had left him.
They headed south with their oil lamps, bedding, pots and pans. Grandmothers switched at flies while the healthier children played in the road. Amid all this Phuc spotted a melon, lying to the side of the road. Wrapped in brown paper. Why would someone leave food behind? Unless it was poisoned, or a trap. Yet there it was. Sitting by the ditch, covered with road dust.
He looked over his shoulder, then above himself and behind. He approached slowly. He couldn’t remember how many days it had been since he’d tasted a melon. Sweet, a hint of citrus, setting the teeth on edge.
People walked away from Phuc, people who in spite of having no leads hoped for a better life in Saigon.
Phuc drew near to the fruit. Nudged it with his toe. Flipped off the brown covering and smelled something sour.
It wasn’t a melon.
“Jesus.” He rewrapped the infant’s swaddling. Everyone around him looked tired.
The infant, about four weeks old, opened its eyes, closed them again. “Jesus,” he repeated.
No going back now. He’d picked it up. He knew enough. That you didn’t leave a baby abandoned, for dogs to maul, birds to peck out its eyes. Wrapped in paper, disguised as fruit. He glared at every passerby.
Phuc, who knew nothing about babies, tucked the infant under his arm the way he carried his pipa case on his way to a show. Would the infant die before morning? Probably. In a way, the thought reassured him.
He waxed poetic to his friends about the north. But in truth, he’d spent every passing year trying to burn away every vestige of it from himself. The country bumpkin.
A rough voice with shale around its edges snapped him out of his thoughts. “Hundred baht for your lute.”
Phuc bah’ed him away.
“Hey, buddy. Buddy.” A hand gripped him.
A voice like a rice mill said, “Friend. Wait up. You a musician?”
They were two teenaged boys. Their flat cheeks, sunburned noses, and half-empty shoulder baskets marked them as farmers. Broad hands that could have knocked Phuc out with one blow. Their feet, stinking of earth, were muddy and bare.
“Hundred baht,” said the taller one.
Phuc doubted they’d ever seen a hundred baht.
“Hungry? Trade you for a bag of rice.”
The core of the Confucian canon exhorted in the Book of Rites, A gentleman does not part with his pipa without good reason. Phuc looked down at the infant in his arms.
“The baby looks hungry. How about two?”
They corralled him, one on either side. “Where you headed?”
Phuc pointed north and began walking again. They joined him.
“Who you going to visit?”
“Van,” said Phuc, making up a name. He had to admit, they were scaring him a little.
“We know Van.”
“Yeah, we do, and he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, that’s right. An asshole. Why you going to see him?”
Phuc sped up. The rhythm of their words fell upon his ears like a cleaver chopping vegetables. What the fellows had said of his own accent, teasing him, so many times. He could hear it, now that he’d been gone so long.
“Come on, give us a try.” They reached for his pipa. “You come from the land of so much. Look at your shoes.”
Only Phuc’s life was more important to him.
He began to run. He didn’t even stop when something hit the back of his head.
Only later, when he’d gotten off the road, found somewhere he’d be safe from bandits, did he raise his hand to feel the bump. Coin-round and swelling. On this pine-covered hill, a mountain goat clung to a ledge. He would build a fire, spend the night, and head northward again in the morning.
His instrument’s history went back to Confucius. Even further. To the Yellow Emperor, founding father of China who, legend said, had invented it.
Phuc could play floating sounds or crisp. Notes clear as the full moon. He could play a mountain wind moving through pines, a hundred hills without a footprint, a thousand rice fields and no bird; red-river silt, an old woman fishing, the stir of heat in an iron stove.
On visits to the city, instead of immersing himself in his father’s activities, tools for the farm, the trade of rice, Phuc would marvel at the Citadel of Ho, ancient, rivalling China’s finest buildings.
His father, a man of great ingenuity, had perfected the husker and the mill. His mind, every villager agreed, where they lived on the Dragon’s Belly by the Hong River, was beautiful. He could blend shape, colour, and function. Make poetry from golden rice. And Phuc hated it all.
Country life depended on one thing. A most important thing, which could be neither substituted nor controlled. Rain.
The word for “water” and “country” was the same, a fact that puzzled Phuc as a child. During a drought all the plains became one. Boats dredging the riverbeds for gold pitched uselessly on their sides. Flood and famine. Drought and famine. Hailstones. Fire, storms, wind. Corrupt officials. Abusive politicians seizing the land. Rumours abounding of the French destroying crops.
Though iron oxen were placed in rivers to ward them off, rivers, streams, and tributaries joined to become one during a flood: plain soil joined plain soil. A stone moved from one river to another. A tree branch broke and resurfaced somewhere else. Everything looked the same when the flood waters ebbed, but it wasn’t.
Water, like blood, flowed downhill. Aggression, like anger, flowed downhill. From the north, from the highlands, they flowed downhill. Shifting as they flowed. The country could shift shape. Had always been forced to shift shape, from the Chinese onward, for the last thousand years. Perhaps that’s why, concluded Phuc, the word for “water” and “country” matched.
He’d left the north wanting to control his life. Left a father who’d moved water like a god.
He awoke to growling. Stiff and curled in a semi-fetal position, the infant was sheltered in the curve of his chest.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. The growls grew louder. He clenched his jaw.
Could he play dead? Ridiculous. Soon the dogs would pounce, dead or not.
He reached into the embers. Grabbed the only branch still burning. Jumped up with his tiny torch. Held it aloft like a spear. Pipa under his other arm, he left the baby where it lay and vaulted into the darkness.
Counted the eyes thin as slender knives. Two small dogs, one medium. Skeletal bodies. He could beat them back with the stick.
One of the dogs leaped and when he swatted it on the nose, the other two drew back. But then they jumped too, snapped at the stick, springing toward the flame, unafraid. Ashes flew like butterflies into the moonlit darkness. He cast, thrust. Barks punctuated the growling. The stick broke.
Phuc threw down the stick. The dogs circled. One nipped at his calves.
All he had left was his pipa case, which he swung like a boulder, smashing, pounding. His sudden viciousness scared them. Phuc got one down, kicked it. The other two ran.
Phuc lay his pipa case on the ground. In the moonlight, and what was left of the burning embers, part of him already knew.
The baby was crying.
Had the crying preceded the growling?
He imagined his pipa like a thousand puzzle pieces in the seconds it took him to force his fingers to unlatch the three rusty locks and open the battered black box.
He picked up the baby.
The beaten dog was taking shallow breaths. Phuc returned to the dying fire and thought for a while. Having made up his mind, he killed the dog. When the dog had stopped breathing, Phuc stopped shaking.
“Not bad for a city boy,” he said, still wishing he was.
He gathered more wood and rebuilt the fire. He pulled some meat off the dog with his bare hands and cooked it. If he could keep the fire going, stay awake …
Morning would come soon. He chewed the meat to a pulp and laid his lips on the infant’s. Let the food dribble in.
Eyes gritty with sleeplessness, he began walking again the next morning. In Saigon he’d wondered about his mother and his father many times. His father had once taken him to the Jaw Bridge, a beach full of tiny crabs. At Porte d’Annam the two of them had ceremoniously read a poem inscribed on a rock by a long-ago emperor near a Ming dynasty gate.
Now, so close to home, as if pulled by a beacon, he dared not ask about his village, his family, not a single question of the people he’d passed on the road.
He’d lost weight, gone a little grey. As he walked, he imagined his parents meeting him at the gate. “Stranger, where are you from?” He felt homesick. But for here? Did he have a right to feel homesick for here?
Every day as a child he’d visited the Hong River. Rivers materialized as dragons at night. Slithered from mountains two hundred feet long. Every village had its own shrine to the river goddess. He loved her, but not for the same reason as the rest.
The goddess from which all flowed, the goddess of knowledge, the goddess of poetry, was also the goddess of music. So when the sun had risen and serpents came to warm on stones near her statue, he prayed to her.
To play in the Royal Theatre of the Imperial City for the Son of Heaven. Done with bamboo thickets and grey and red dust. To play for mandarins, scholars, and poets. Courtiers, bodyguards, and princesses. How could he survive any longer in the narrow valley of the Hong River? When in another universe the Son of Heaven’s wives and his errand boys revelled in his music. His one hundred concubines and one thousand eunuchs, all listening. Done with silt-burdened streams. His sisters nagging him to collect snails in the water. Others were already enraptured by his notes resounding off red-painted ironwood columns with golden dragons.
And he’d given everything he had—the black hairs on his head, the food from his belly. Music thieved his nights, made them sleepless. Never mind. He was happy to pay the river goddess, his muse. He gave her joy and peace. His heart, his dreams. Typical appointments, accolades, quiet moments, such as can be had. Children he’d forfeited. Dao Ly. Or was she stolen? No matter. Music would soothe him and attack on his behalf. He gave, she stole, a matter of semantics. Because you gave yourself away for art.
Art swallowed you whole. Like a river into whose mouth you must gladly throw yourself. This was the price the true artist must pay.
“You still here?”
The boys from yesterday’s high foreheads and flat faces reminded him of his own. Whose hair smelled like soil, clothes like chicken shit. He realized he’d been walking in the opposite direction, toward their shack. On the dust road, dumb. Dumb as a farmer.
The shorter one said, “I think you hit him too hard.”
“Cat got his tongue.”
“You want breakfast?”
He couldn’t answer. The boys from yesterday. The baby seemed a flimsy shield.
Any words he spoke would come out stupid. Would come out a story about the dogs. About how the shaking one looked before he killed it. How he couldn’t get the whimpers out of his head all night. Did they want the infant? They would laugh at him.
The brothers slung their arms through his.
“I’ll take that.” The shorter one grabbed his pipa case.
Phuc followed.
Sitting in their shack, he looked out at a hillside dotted with apiaries. Terraces sculpted from the mountainside, like ladders to the gods. His father’s land. The earth where his mother was born. Que cha. Dat me. An old saying.
He’d never noticed how beautiful it was. As a child all he knew was dunces had shacks in the country. Nha que was what he heard whenever he went to the city in his rice paper hat, his bare feet. Farm boy.
The mother prepared rice gruel, a traditional northern dish, and his stomach growled.
He’d come north to save his head from the chopping block. But why had he really come? To find his ex-wife Dao Ly? Or?
As the smoke from her cookstove rose he remembered last night’s sun setting on the valley, fireflies filling it.
The taller boy set down a bowl of gruel in front of him.
“So where do you go from here?”
“Que cha. Dat me.”
“I thought you were from here. I heard your accent.”
“Play something?” the shorter one asked.
“Nha que!” The mother swatted him on the head. “He’s eating.”
Phuc opened the case, displayed the damage.
The brothers looked at each other.
“I don’t care.”
“Give me a turn.”
“Me.”
Taking away his empty dish, she smiled kindly. “You have a lucky name.”
His songs were the colour of the tree and the sky. Something in his throat was not meant to be there. He wanted to thank her for her hospitality. He had to hold back and simply nodded. He wondered how long it would take them to notice his pipa on their dirt floor after he left.
53
Birago’s ghost had been trailing Thu and Mai for days. He’d felt especially heartbroken when the gunboat was shooting and he’d discovered there was nothing a spirit could do.
He’d made a decision. If he searched deep down, he knew the answer had always been there. The difference between the man he should be and the one he’d turned into. Or maybe in essence had been all along, the way a swan will hold an ugly duckling forever at its core. The kind of man who left a doll on a street or could never really love a woman because he loved himself more. A ghost. He’d suspected himself of these things and flashed on the truth in the Dien Bien Phu highlands, watching colourfully dressed tribespeople descend the hills to look for marriage partners in a field where flowers decked the earth like gowns. He’d admitted it in a plain surrounded by mountains, in an ancient pagoda where one room held a clear still
pool, the other a shrine with poetry carved on the walls. The pool mirrored his sorry reflection, sorry in that he was forced to accept that he had never been the man Thu thought he was—not a spiritual man, not a political man, just a shallow materialist, no more, no less. His head ached. This truth, compounded by the new transparency of his joints, forced him to confront another, much harder situation: to transcend this life, Birago would have to learn to give up shallow pursuits and shallow pleasures.
Transparency was something new to him. It ached in a different way than the pain of battle, pain he could deal with. Truth was new. He could feel himself on the verge of losing it. Passing out, the way he might feel in the last round, his legs wobbling. He took roost in a banyan tree with other souls of the dead, among them the broken doll.
The boy’s shoes hung ridiculously off his feet, like buckets hanging from fence posts, the leather uppers stitched back to the soles with fishing line.
Certain memories came to him clear as the bottom of a holy water font; others appeared then escaped, guppylike, distorted as if moving at the bottom of a fast stream. He’d gained extracurricular knowledge since his death, but it was selective and he was still trying to decipher the logic of what he remembered.
“I know you,” said the boy. “I think. From the sidewalk, but I don’t remember exactly how I got there beside you. It was after I heard the cannon. Maybe I slipped, maybe it was these shoes. There was a light. Then I saw us both. Then I was in this tree with a big headache. Did you get hit by a rickshaw, too?” He looked at the blood on Birago’s uniform. “Does your head still hurt?”
“You don’t remember?”
Birago stroked the hair away from the boy’s eyes and held him.
“My head hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
While continuing to rock the boy, Birago began to work at his shiniest shirt button, pulling at the threads. The thread was good quality and held fast. Birago used his thumbnail, sawing across the fibres. The hollow at the back of the doll’s head was like crushed ice and fit as perfectly as a puzzle piece against Birago’s forearm.