by Yasuko Thanh
“I miss my mother.”
Birago did, too. He missed his whole family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Nephews, nieces.
Free from the shirt, the button looked like a gold coin. He gave it to the boy.
The boy looked at him, puzzled.
Birago shrugged. “Maybe you can pay the ferry man.”
Birago, who’d always been a man of shallow pursuits and shallow pleasures, felt himself drawn to the Perfume River, its call, his hunger for vengeance.
The French wanted the coal mines of Hon Gai. The miners paraded the head of the corporation on a stake. The French brought in tanks. More leaders went missing. The miners weren’t giving up their tunnels: the caves filled with ghouls and ghosts. From Lao Cai to Hanoi to Hon Gai, every rock had a spirit. Towns joined by the death of twenty-five thousand conscripted railway workers. Bound by wood and iron railway ties. The ghosts took up residence at the foot of mountains, inside Shan Tuyet tea leaves, crops of cinnamon. Wagons of tin shuttled from the earth’s bowels at the foot of the hill, beneath two vessels of gold and silver, like ceremonial rice plants, ensuring a prosperous harvest.
The River of the Dead, which trickled celestial green on its way from the Realm of the Jade Mountain down to the Infernal Region, was known by three names: River of the Dead, River of Forgetting, or the Perfume River. Birago gazed upon the Perfume River now, where hungry ghosts ebbed and flowed.
It was said that men had seven souls. Maybe souls were split open at death, half occupying the Infernal Region, half waiting. No one lit incense at an altar for Emperor Hiep Hoa’s troops killed when French fleets opened fire here. How could they? So many ghosts. Look around. In the last weeks he’d circled the country.
He flew like a white bird and saw chemists, tailors, boot makers, ironworkers, trunk makers, candy makers, seed vendors, women with tiny bound feet on which they could barely move, Chinese shopkeepers with imported goods from France, and little Min Huong Chinese half-breeds running around everywhere. Vietnamese men wore their hair in a chignon covered by a turban like the Malay, while Chinese men had long pigtails that hung freely down the back like a whip. Those from Hainan in the south had skin the colour of rice, while those from Canton had skin the colour of a European tea biscuit.
He saw time fold and expand like an accordion. He saw a few stone houses with red tile roofs. A woman emerged from a house on bound feet like cloven hooves. The path from her house was neatly swept. She tottered on her cloven child’s feet down the path lined with cabbage palms to meet a man, a vegetable seller from Fukien. Birago suddenly knew all sorts of things he didn’t before. His skin the colour of soy sauce. A basket of dragon fruit in hand.
He circled a needle woman he’d once donated a few pennies to, who sat on a street corner opposite a man fixing eyeglass frames. She wore a paper nose to hide a face ravaged by syphilis. She was mending someone’s buttonhole, a basket of rags at her feet. He saw grocers, fortune tellers, and cyclo drivers. He saw women just like Thu waiting on merchants and officers. Girls with waist-length hair walking on men’s backs in rooms fragrant with coconut oil. Babies wailing next to breadfruit in the market and girls with bread baskets on their heads singing the lullaby, “Sleep, ghost, sleep. Come afternoon, I stand in the backyard, looking toward my mother’s land.”
He saw coal mine ghosts, railroad ghosts, vengeful ghosts. Birago had seen them all on his way here. Some small as cats. Spirits made of teeth. Spirits who wore clothing made of wind. The living left rice porridge and wine sweetened with honey to settle their bitterness, but still the Perfume River ebbed and flowed.
So far he’d made black rain fall on his shooter. Made red rain fall on the officer who’d signed his death warrant. Struck down with cholera the families of those who’d bound his hands with rope.
He knew that to move on he’d have to abandon such desires, move beyond the pleasure of harming those who’d harmed him. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
54
Outside the hotel in Hue where Georges-Minh, Chang, and Dong had been holed up for thirty-six hours, the Perfume River flowed and the Marble Mountain stood watch. The light blinded them.
A group of French soldiers was drinking on the corner on the patio of a French restaurant called La Rotonde, not far from a man fixing eyeglass frames and a scorpion vendor’s table littered with bottles of elixir. Beyond the soldiers, another French restaurant, and a letter writer’s booth, as well as a bath house, a cane liquor stall and one selling stir-fried crocodile, as well as two rows of palms corseted with tree guards. Dong rested her hand on Georges-Minh’s arm and they proceeded down the street.
The soldiers stood up and began singing “Le Bon Roi Dagobert,” clinking glasses, swaying arm in arm.
“We need to find a rickshaw,” Georges-Minh whispered over Dong’s head. He tried to communicate to Chang with his eyes what he couldn’t say. The soldiers mustn’t see their faces. Their wanted posters would have been put up all over Vietnam by now. Where was a rickshaw? They needed to tell the driver to take Dong to a hospital, before the soldiers spotted them.
Dong’s arms trembled. “I can’t go on.”
Chang’s eyes scanned the street.
“I have to sit,” Dong said.
Georges-Minh tried to stop the baby from slipping as he held Dong upright. “Not here. A little further.”
Dong salvaged her balance and leaned against a lamppost. One soldier in particular had mean eyes, red and watery, the kind that belong to the sort of person who takes pleasure in torturing others. He seemed to focus then lose focus on the group, squint as if they’d grown invisible before his eyes.
“Hurry,” Georges-Minh whispered.
Dong had grown pale and she’d barely made it fifty feet. Part of Georges-Minh wondered if he’d get out of this alive, if he deserved it after what he’d done, to her, to his son, to unlucky Sing Sing, probably in the penitentiary by now.
If he had to choose, better to turn himself in this moment than watch his wife succumb on this corner. She could barely stand and was too weak to speak. Her hair fell across her dirty cheek as her eyes locked onto a white bird in the sky.
At last Chang found a rickshaw and Georges-Minh pushed Dong toward it, releasing her from his grasp as he should have long ago. But Dong stumbled, and he with the baby. A woman selling roasted scorpions emitted a “Woop!” The soldiers stared as she said, “Don’t drop that package,” and the ensuing commotion as the baby flew up in the air instead of down made a few pedestrians suck in their breath, dart out of the path of the falling woman and the baby.
The soldiers abandoned their table.
Perhaps because the soldiers were drunk, they pulled out their revolvers sooner than they ordinarily would have.
The drunkest began shooting and the group ducked behind a shoe repair shop.
Dong threw her body over the baby, draping herself over him like a blanket, her blouse already reddening at the shoulder.
Chang and Georges-Minh crouched over her. “Take him,” they heard her whisper. “Take the baby.”
To run with both her and the child would be suicide. Georges-Minh pictured himself running with them both under his arms before the soldiers rounded the corner of the shoe repair shop; they couldn’t see him, not yet, but he saw the next years of his life, the running, the hiding, stealing backward glances. This is what he’d brought his family.
Bullets whizzed, pinged when they hit the ground. Chang wanted nothing more than to leave the baby and what he represented where he lay on the dirty ground. Better yet, let him die. Why not?
Then he could run with his lover to the Marble Mountain near Hue. Chang would finally have Georges-Minh to himself. They could read Verlaine.
Leave him under his mother’s body. Why not?
A human’s venom is ten times stronger than a snake’s. Drawing a snake, adding legs. An old proverb for making things more complicated than needed. Dog dies, story’s over.
It took all he had not to grasp Georges-Min
h’s hand and say, Run. Rather, push his body and yell, “Go!”
Thinking not of Dong, nor of the baby, but of Georges-Minh telling him love couldn’t be captured like a songbird in a cage, he lifted the baby away from Dong. Standing up with the infant in his outstretched arms, he walked as slowly as he could toward the soldiers, holding out the baby like a talisman, and surrendered.
“Yes!” he said with his every action. “You were wrong. See, love can be captured.” He wanted to shout to Georges-Minh, You only had to believe that it could.
Georges-Minh bent toward Dong, shaded by the shoe repair shop’s white clay wall.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, imagining picking her up and how he could have run, somehow gathering up her weight, somehow carrying her to Laos and a reality different from this. Then he ran. Not seeing the soldiers who glanced at the flesh wound and lifted Dong and took her to their headquarters for questioning. Who, later, took her to the hospital where she rejoined her infant son.
He didn’t think that she would be better off without him, even though it was the truth. Not now that his son would never know him.
He’d never imagined kissing her for the last time. Not once. He’d never imagined last times for anything.
He simply ran. Ran until he felt as thin as wind and until his teeth grew cold, past doorways empty and full, two monks in orange robes, a circle of children playing with pot-bellied pigs, a field covered in fallen coconut trees. He ran until he could no longer feel his legs. He ran until he couldn’t remember whether he’d told Dong he was sorry or if the thought had only risen like a plume of smoke and then disappeared.
55
Georges-Minh waited on an abandoned rowboat platform upriver from a Cham village for a transport train to take him to Atouat, in Laos. He was setting out to cross the mountainous humpback ridge of Vietnam and Laos and into the green basin of Siam. From Siam he could travel westward through Burma and Bengal. He felt a breeze, and Birago appeared next to him.
His ear had been shot off. The ghost silently stared out at the valley and lake below. Georges-Minh shuddered, and to avoid looking at the bleeding wound, gazed at the mountain above.
When the train came, rebels filled the boxcar, as well as Montagnard men, women, and children, goats and pigs.
“Khieu was planning to go to Atouat, too,” Georges-Minh said. “At one point, he’d tracked Nguyen Du’s verses to the top of the mountain.”
“No kidding.”
“Something to do with the polarity between a concubine from an anthology and people from another planet.” Georges-Minh looked out the open door. Even from the corner of his eye he could still see Birago’s bleeding bullet hole.
“These hills are rich in spacecraft sightings,” Georges-Minh said. “Healers speak with them. Ask the new gods for blessings.”
Below, the ground sloped into a valley. A plowed field, a thatch-roof hut, cows, a river. Next to the river, an ao dai was drying on a bamboo fence. On the other side of the fence was a field with pigs, and over the water, a wall of flowering grass.
“That what Khieu told you?”
A temple stood beyond a hill on a road that bumped into a village, past a fork that led out of town to cities Georges-Minh had never seen but knew existed all the same. At the fork in the road, the ground was tamped down; donkeys had stopped here, their riders weighing which way to go. Ox carts groaned as their drivers deliberated.
“I got shot,” Birago said.
“They thought you did it?”
“If I had, why would I go back?”
“But I wrote a note.”
Birago snorted.
“Why didn’t you go home?” Georges-Minh asked.
“That’s what my woman would have said.”
The transport ground to a halt. Sunlight the colour of egg whites shone on rebels more haggard than the ones in the transport. At riflepoint, the rebels ordered everyone off—soldiers waited up the line. They would go no farther today.
“She came to you,” Birago said.
Georges-Minh and Birago stepped off the train.
People constructed makeshift lean-tos.
“I can see many things. It’s like having more eyes than I used to.”
“Your woman?”
“Her name’s Thu. Little shoes. Flowers on them.”
Georges-Minh nodded, staring down.
“Let’s climb,” Birago said.
The mountain upon which spacecraft landed and healers worshipped wasn’t far. The landscape changed the higher they went. Lowland fruit and waterfalls gave way to the authority of highland areca nut trees.
“The only part I don’t get,” Birago said, “is were you sleeping with her?”
“I’m married.”
Birago laughed. “So are a lot of men.”
“I, also. I prefer men.”
It took them just over an hour to reach the peak.
A patchwork of plowed fields spread out beneath Georges-Minh. High above him flew a white seagull. Not a sound but the wind in his teeth, the rushing of his own blood in his ears. Up close, the view morphed: a square foot of pebbles, a snake’s view, every blade of grass unique, both more imperfect and more beautiful for its imperfections.
Birago was standing over him now.
The hungry ghost dealt not in justice but bitterness that biled the heart. Feasted on it, gnawing from the inside out until all that remained of what he was or had been was hunger.
Georges-Minh pulled his hell money from his sock, unfolded it, and took out the opium. Ate the whole thing. Shortly the bitterness under his tongue paved the way for his floating. First the sharpness, then the sweetness. What his mother had said of bitter melon. He was a phoenix, riding the thermals. He licked clean the centre of the large paper rectangle.
There were different types of hell money for different purposes. Some money was made of rice, some of bamboo. Some had gold-cut overlays, some silver, some copper squares elaborately designed to appease the spirits. If one didn’t use the right kind of offering, the spirits became angry. An army official ghost might punish you; a close relative might cry in frustration.
Georges-Minh did not light the hell money. Rather than set it on fire and let the wind carry the smoke to Son Tinh, the God of the Mountain, he lifted the money to the breeze. Made his wish over the paper as it swayed in the air.
“You sure you got the right kind of ghost money?” Birago said.
“Want to check it?”
“What are you praying for?”
“A gold sedan chair.”
“Not a spacecraft?”
“Just a chair.”
Birago laughed. “Is it coming? Do you see it?”
What did Birago care? “Yeah, I see it. Don’t you?”
“Know what I see?”
“A homosexual?”
“A coward.”
“Maybe you just need to open your eyes.”
“Maybe you have a little help,” Birago said.
Let him mock Georges-Minh. He no longer felt any need to argue with anyone. “So when are you going to kill me?”
“Are you ready?”
He stood up.
Georges-Minh had heard of the mountain god making water fall. The great limestone cliffs would open for a river to ferry away souls who’d earned it. Tin workers, coal miners, men who’d died building the railway. A friend of his father’s had even claimed to see the cliffs close on a cascade, leaving not a drop behind.
“Is your chair coming to take you away?” Birago asked.
Georges-Minh gave the sky his full attention. The gathering clouds, the claps of thunder, the rain pattering the areca palms.
“There’s no chair there, Georges-Minh. No chair.”
“It’s okay.” Georges-Minh tossed the hell money into the air. Stepped off the cliff.
Between when he jumped and when he hit the ground, the mountain god would receive the hell money he’d released. Then he could mount the clouds, rise into the sky. As h
e fell, the paper fell with him, fluttering with its square inlay of gold.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Grant Buday, Laurie D. Graham, Mary Kimak, Shaun Oakey, and Jim Wong-Chu. I’m indebted to Frank Proschan for his paper “Syphilis, Opiomania, and Pederasty: Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases,” as well as to Barley Norton for the book Songs for the Spirit: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam, and to Nguyen Khac Vien’s epic work Vietnam Une Longue Histoire.
Thank you Denise Bukowski for sticking by me, Nicole Winstanley for seeing my vision and taking a chance, Jet for your cooking, my parents, Paul and Hanna Thanh, Maisie for eating your supper and being good, and Hank for your soundtrack to our crazy lives.
I’d also like to thank the Writers’ Trust of Canada for their generosity and for providing me with a Woodcock Fund grant in the nick of time.