by Camilla Gibb
They set out for the shantytown just after 9 p.m., Maggie riding the Honda Dream II with T’s parents, T, Phng and his little sister on Phng’s bike close behind. They cut their engines on the rise just before the shantytown, flicking the kickstands down and leaning the bikes into the dirt.
A boy suddenly appears out of the dark. “How much you pay for that bike, Mister?” he asks T’s father of the Honda Dream II.
“Hey, I know you,” says Maggie.
“Did you bring a cake?” the boy asks her.
“Not this time,” she says. “Listen, have you seen Old Man Hng?”
“No,” says the boy.
What is Maggie doing bringing cakes to the shantytown? T wonders.
“Do you want to watch these bikes for us?” his father asks.
“Five thousand đng,” says the boy.
“Five hundred,” says T’s father.
The boy stuffs his hands into his pockets and kicks the dirt.
“And I’ll bring you some cake next time,” Maggie says.
“Yes, sir,” the boy says in English, transformed by this sweet promise.
T feels exhilarated by the slight menace of the quiet night, a tension heightened by volunteering for the route that covers the most dangerous streets and the presence of Maggie by his side. They call out the old man’s name every few steps, looking in doorways and peering down alleyways and seeing more than a few homeless people wrapped in cardboard along the way. A dog lunges toward them and growls, forcing Maggie to retreat, and in one street a woman shouts from above: “It’s late, you drunks. Go home!”
On another street there are shameful things going on, though thankfully it is not bright enough for them to see anything more than the outline of a woman on her knees.
Maggie clings to T’s arm and says, “I didn’t know Hanoi could be so depressing.”
“Imagine Saigon,” T replies—but oh the delicate grip of her hand, the sweet smell of her skin reaching through the briny mist of the crayfish they had for dinner. He wishes he could reach out and squeeze her neck, that sacred place where the spirit resides. He’d inch his hand up and touch her hair, which he imagines being as silken as the feather back of a dove.
“I wonder if this is what it feels like to have a brother,” she says, and the sudden swell of romance within him subsides.
It is well after midnight by the time they finally reach the bridge. They are trailed now by three drunk young men who spilled out of a hidden bar in an alleyway half a kilometre ago and have been mimicking them ever since. “Hng! Oh, Mr. Hng! Where are you, Old Man Hng?” they drunkenly mock.
The moonlight is beaming down through the clouds. They can hear Phng singing under the bridge. They listen to him filling the space with a tenor voice so glorious that it even silences the drunks. This is no rap but a ballad, blooming petal by petal until it explodes into flower, at which point Phng belts out a chorus of rising words. He lands on a single note so pure it should cause the trucks on the bridge above to kill their engines. He holds the note for a full breathless minute, at which point the drunks, in their enthusiasm, resume shouting.
Phng stops singing and emerges from underneath the bridge. “Who the hell are these guys?” he shouts.
“We can’t get rid of them!” T yells. One of the drunks burps and slumps to the ground. The other two collapse in a laughing heap beside him.
“Phng,” says Maggie, “that was beautiful.” Phng snorts. “I thought you didn’t like my singing. You said it was like a disease.”
“What?”
“That day in the van. You said my rap was ‘infectious.’” “But I meant it in a good way,” she says. “Like something that takes you over, possesses you. Honestly, I could listen to you for hours.”
“Huh,” says Phng, sneering at T.
“What was that song?” Maggie asks.
“The one I’m doing for my audition.”
“What audition?” asks T.
“For Vietnam Idol.”
How could T not have known about this? He hadn’t realized just how far apart he and Phng had grown in recent weeks. “But what about Hanoi Poison?”
“Dead for the time being. Got to make it past the censors. But after that? Once everyone’s listening? Hanoi Poison will be back,” he says with a wicked laugh.
They all turn their heads at the sound of footsteps. T’s father is running toward them. Out of breath, he stops, bends at the waist and clutches his kneecaps.
“We found him,” he says, pressing a fist into his lower back as he straightens up. “He’s not far, but he’s been hurt. He can’t walk. Anh is with him. Who are these guys?” he asks of the drunks in a heap. “Oh, who cares. Can they help?”
Hng’s leg is throbbing as if his heart has decided to relocate; his throat feels as if he has just drunk a bucketful of sand. He opens his eyes and blinks at the blur of lights out a window. It would appear he is lying in the back seat of a taxi, his head in Bình’s lap as if he were a child, though not any child he remembers being.
What the hell is happening? he wonders. Please tell me I haven’t been in another accident. He remembers heading over to the Metropole with news for Maggie a couple of days ago, the rain so torrential that he abandoned his cart by Hàng Da Market, paying the bird seller a good amount of đng to keep an eye on it. After that he remembers very little: a great wave of water rolling over his shoulder, the sound of skidding cars, being bounced against a fender, flying through fog, the great pain in his body from the waist down as he lay twisted in a muddy ditch, one of his feet facing an improbable direction, drifting in and out of sleep.
Bình is saying something about going to the hospital, which causes a surge of panic in Hng’s chest. “No no,” he cries out, “not the hospital. It’s full of dead people.”
“What’s he talking about?” T asks.
“Perhaps he hit his head. He seems to be confused about the year.”
Confused about the year, thinks Hng, but the year that the Americans bombed Bach Mai Hospital was a year of confusion. He just wants to go home to his shack. “Bình,” he says. “Are you taking me home?”
“No.”
“Not the hospital,” Hng repeats.
“You’ll come to our house. We’ll send for a doctor.”
“But my flower,” says Hng.
“Don’t worry about your flower,” says Bình. “I’ll go and check on all your plants tomorrow.”
“Lan,” says Hng. “I mean the orchid.”
“Yes, I know,” he hears Bình reassure him as he closes his eyes.
The Rainbow That Fell to Earth
Old Man Hng’s body is broken, but there is more energy in his voice than T has ever heard. He is yelling something from T’s bed, where he has been resting for nearly a week now, his leg tied to a splint Bình made in his carpentry workshop.
Hng was hit by a car, but he doesn’t remember what the vehicle looked like; the rain was heavy that day, the fog thick. T just wishes he could tell them something about the vehicle because he’d find that car and make the driver pay.
In his confusion, the old man’s stories are frequent and revealing, and T wonders if he might get him to talk about the lady who lives in the shack next to his.
T’s bedroom smells musty with woody teas and ointments and general old-manness. T feels guilty every time he comes in here, ashamed by the thought of Old Man Hng lying on a mattress that has absorbed thousands of T’s fantasies, a good percentage of which lately have involved Maggie. He absolves his guilt by thinking of these nocturnal acts as practice for married life. He needs to develop lasting power and can only do so by training the muscles. Thus far he can’t manage to hold on for more than two and a half minutes, and only then when he deliberately conjures up someone ugly.
The old man groans, rousing from sleep, as T rests a bucket of soapy water on the floor and sits down on the edge of his mattress. T peels back the bedcovers and unties the straps of Hng’s splint. It looks awful: a pur
ple bruise runs all the way up his leg past his knee, the foot is so swollen the skin is stretched taut and the ankle is slightly twisted.
T squeezes excess water from the sponge. “We spoke to the lady who lives next door to you the other day,” he ventures, as he washes soap from between the old man’s toes.
Old Man Hng sighs. “She sings to herself sometimes. When she’s bent over washing her pots in the pond, I can hear her. She’ll turn around and smile for a moment, a smile just for me. It really is the most beautiful thing a man can see.”
“She said you have not spoken to her in some time.”
The old man raises his head and looks at T through his milky eyes. “Ðạo?”
“Yes, Hng?” says T.
“She was so beautiful, but not like your Amie,” he says, sinking back into his pillow. “Her beauty was only on the outside and I was fooled into believing it was something deeper.
“She could not read herself, but I read to her, I read everything you wrote and she drank in your words and she used to say that maybe one day I would have a restaurant again, and there you would be, surrounded by the men who so admired you, and she would work for me and all would be as it had once been, only even better because you would be free to write and the girl would always be beside me. And then she shattered this most perfect dream.
“It was my fault,” Hng continues. “I failed you.” How could Hng, the one who has acted as patriarch of their family, guardian of the ancestral shrine, possibly have failed Ðạo? T has seen him do nothing but protect and keep alive the memory of his grandfather.
“You did not fail me, Hng,” says T.
“Ðạo?” Hng says with less certainty this time, the clouds in his head parting.
Hng arrived home that fateful morning after peddling his pondweed noodles. Just a few days before, he’d dared suggest to Lan that they might join their shacks, and he was preoccupied and pained by his inability to read her reaction. He wondered if she was quietly deliberating or discussing it with her grandmother. He would simply have to wait the agonizing wait until she spoke her mind, though he could not resist embarking on a certain amount of reorganization inside his shack in anticipation.
It had been such a fine day, not a cloud or a plane in the sky, he felt giddy returning home with a new trowel thanks to a customer who was a blacksmith. He parked his cart and made his way down to the pond with the first two of his pots. As he was squatting on the muddy bank rinsing the second pot, something caught his eye—a sudden flash of light, a display of colour, as if a rainbow had just fallen to earth.
He turned his head to see Lan, standing such that from where he was squatting, her head blocked out the sun, standing as if her head were the sun. He raised his hand to his brow so that he might take in the full length of her beauty. He gasped at the sight of her in a luxurious áo dài, just like the one he’d always imagined she should wear. She was wrapped in sky-blue silk embroidered with gold thread, perfectly tailored to hug her small breasts, her narrow waist, the slight curve of her hips.
“You always said I deserved it,” she said.
He was speechless, enraptured, beaming with a happiness unlike any he had ever experienced before. He felt it burn through every inch of him.
But as she stepped aside, her head no longer blocking the sun, her face became visible. His smile faded. Had she given herself away to a man? Had she been lured into prostitution?
“Who bought this for you?” he asked tentatively.
“I bought it myself,” she said.
“But however did you get the money?”
He watched her grow uncertain. She batted her eyelashes, then quickly glanced away, just long enough for a terrible gaping hole to open up in his stomach. He turned and stared through the doorway of his shack.
“Hng,” she said, reaching for his forearm, but he shook off her hand, marching stiffly toward his shack.
He stood on the threshold and cast his eyes about the room. He scanned the ceiling and the walls. He fell to his knees and rifled through the piles of his few clothes and belongings, then lifted the corner of the mattress. He crawled under the mattress, suspending it on his back.
His papers were gone. The journals, every issue of the magazine, every poem Ðạo had ever written out for him or Hng himself had copied down.
Hng threw down the mattress. She’d taken the words of these men, taken all that was left of them and sold them to a stranger? And then clothed herself in silk?
“Who did you sell them to?” he shouted through the door of his shack.
“The man who sells firewood,” Lan said, stepping backward, beginning to cry.
Hng’s eyes darted left and right as he considered running in search of the man and retrieving those papers before they fed someone’s fire, but the truth was she was the fire. She would set light to whatever she needed to keep her flame burning. She had been using him in much the same way.
“Get out,” was all he said. “Get out.”
A week later he found four pillows on his doorstep—four plump, sky-blue silk pillows stuffed with duck down. But Hng could not forgive her. He could not forgive himself. He could not even acknowledge the pillows, leaving them to weather on his threshold, bleached by the sun, drenched by the rain until they were mildewed beyond recovery, much like his heart.
How had he begun speaking of the girl next door? Here he is with Bình now, propped up against the wall, telling the man who is like a son to him about the moment when he felt the last of humanity’s goodness slip away. With the loss of those papers he gave up hope, spending years in silence, wondering whether anything left in the world mattered. It was only with Bình’s appearance in the shantytown all those years later that he had recovered the sense that anything did.
“I was such a fool, Bình,” says Hng. “I lost everything because of a foolish heart. Am I dying? Why else would I even consider regret?”
“Shh, Hng, it is not your time yet,” Bình says, passing him a bowl of pickled eggplant, the only thing Hng has had any appetite for since his accident.
Hng raises his chopsticks to his mouth.
Old Man Hng is revealing secrets. He is teaching T exactly how to make his ph. It is late at night, and he is yelling the instructions from T’s bed, the words floating down the staircase to the kitchen.
“I can smell the caramel!” the old man yells. “Those onions are done.”
T pulls the first batch of browned onions and ginger away from the heat. He is beginning to see that this is not simply a cooking exercise, but one in patience. For a truly superior broth you need to boil the beef and bones gently for hours, skimming the grey film off the surface of the water before adding the lightly browned onions and ginger, carrot and radish, cinnamon, cloves and star anise, then returning it to a soft boil for several more hours before straining the broth and adding a pungent splash of . But why has the old man ordered T’s mother and father out of the kitchen? It is as if Hng has decided to skip a generation and pass this legacy directly on to him.
Old Man Hng wakes T for the final preparations well before sunrise, banging a cane against the floor above. T rises stiffly from the table where he had fallen asleep, the air dewy like a spring morning after heavy rains, and removes the broth from the heat over which it has been simmering all night. He strains it bowl by bowl through a sieve. He skims off the fat that rises to the surface as it cools, and when he sees no more evidence of shine, he adds salt and fish sauce, testing it for taste. He chops the herbs, slices the beef thinly across the grain, and places a handful of fresh rice noodles in a sieve, ready to be immersed in boiling water.
“Lastly, prepare a cup of ginseng and say a few words of prayer,” the old man instructs from above. “If you have any doubts, ask Bình to taste the broth. He will tell you the truth.”
T’s father peers into the pot and inhales. He studies the surface before dipping in his spoon. He stares at the broth on the spoon from all angles, examining it for clarity and colour, mak
ing sure no fat is visible as it cools, then finally slides it into his mouth. He savours it, then inhales through an open mouth to see how long the flavour lingers.
“Good,” he declares.
Does he mean okay, good enough, or really good? Where on the spectrum of good does it land?
There’s no time to adjust it in any case. They hear the footsteps of the first customers in the courtyard. Word has travelled throughout the Old Quarter: the sun has only just lifted over the lip of the coast and a lineup has already begun to form right out into the alley, the familiar faces of people carrying the bowls, spoons and chopsticks they have brought from home.
“Hah,” they say when they see T in the kitchen, trying to conceal their looks of disappointment, “the apprentice.”
“Temporary situation,” he assures them as he deposits the noodles into their bowls and ladles in the broth. He lays down the slices of beef then adds a sprinkle of chopped green herbs, trying to perform this gesture with the same dramatic flourish as Old Man Hng, though in his first few attempts more green lands on the floor than in the bowls.
It is hot and steamy in the room, a dozen people now squatting on the floor and occupying all available chairs—including the seat of the Honda Dream II—slurping and burping and chatting away to one another in T’s family’s kitchen. There’s a lot of creaking overhead, as half a dozen people have carried their bowls upstairs to pay their respects to Old Man Hng, and there are still a good number more customers lined up in the courtyard outside. No one comments on the ph, but they empty their bowls before rinsing them. T can only interpret this as praise.