by Kim Thuy
gương
mirror
DURING SERVICE, I WOULD see him going from table to table trying to persuade diners to use their hands for the crepes, which were at once majestic and so fragile. Even if the place was packed, looking up from the three crackling woks for even half a second would inevitably make me lock eyes with Luc, who would be opening a bottle of wine at a distant table or greeting a faithful customer at the entrance. I recognized myself in those eyes as I’d have recognized myself in the mirror on our bedroom wall, where we had stopped time. I had only a few mirrors in my house in Montreal, one too high, one too hidden away, and a tiny one my husband had hung at the front door to drive away evil spirits. Like them, who are terrified by their own reflection, I jumped whenever I saw mine because it didn’t correspond with the image I had of myself. Yet next to Luc’s face, mine resembled me, like something obvious. If I were a photo, Luc would be the developer and the fixer of my face, which until that day existed only in negative.
ngã
falling
AT THE END OF THAT STAY, I cried for six hours in the horrible airplane cutting me off from him, from us, from me. I had lost my footing three times during the journey between airport and home … a step too high, a door too small, a word too long. Luckily, I arrived in the usual hubbub of every day: homework, dance class, hockey practice, restaurant. Life caught me when I fell and Luc’s letter on the desk in the workshop helped me regain my equilibrium. In the envelope, one sentence: “You have arrived,” written inside a pencil tracing of his left hand. He had sent it the day after I arrived in Paris, hoping it would cushion my landing in Montreal.
Over the next days and weeks, he sent me photos: of the street where he’d stopped to help an old lady lift her grocery bag off the sidewalk; of a newly installed doorknob; of a café table outside a refinery bordered by poppies in the background. We had tried to be ubiquitous by fitting our worlds together and moving the continents. We drew up scenarios for preventing the tornado that was engulfing us from ravaging the land and destroying the nests that we’d built, twig by twig, over nearly two decades.
sinh nhật
birthday
ON MY BIRTHDAY, a date Maman had chosen at random in the office where birth certificates were issued, Luc gave me a gift of twenty-four hours. He came to join me in Quebec City, where I was giving a culinary workshop. We spent the night measuring again and again his long femur against mine; counting the number of kisses it took to cover my body compared with his; and, above all, making fun of my impatience for his arrival. I had burst out of my hiding place behind the dressing gown hanging in the bathroom as soon as I heard the click of the door. Without a run-up, I flew into his arms.
Julie once took me to a class where one of the exercises consisted of climbing a ladder and falling backwards, to be caught in the arms of the other members of the group. I’d tried several times, in vain. If I were to do it again now, I would lean back eyes closed, with the same heedlessness that had allowed my body to collapse against Luc’s.
I am still angry with myself for having dozed off several times during that night, as if a life together were already established before us, entire and possible. I think Luc spent a sleepless night, because every time I half-opened my eyes, my gaze was met by his, waiting for it with the tenderness of certainty. At dawn, we went outside to smell the dew and the aroma of carrot muffins, my favourites except for the tarte Bourdaloue with pears and pistachios that we’d sampled together on the steps of St. Eustache church in Paris.
He left again the following afternoon, asking me to sew one of my hairs into the weave of his jacket and another into the bottom of the right-hand pocket of his jeans. On the station platform, he wrote on my palm that he promised to love the cold and the whiteness of sheets that mattered so much to me. And then, with no warning, he got down from the train to announce that he would take a taxi to give us half an hour more, and also to plan my return to France in response to an invitation from two restaurant owners in the countryside.
ruồi son
birthmarks
THAT VISIT AND THEN two more gave me time to kiss and baptize each of Luc’s beauty marks with the name of a place where we would exist without wounding any family or friends, our first raisons d’être. I counted each of those ruby spots as attentively and proudly as most Vietnamese, who conferred on them the role of good luck charms and saw them as precious because they were so rare on dark skin. I showed him the yellow colour of my palm and he talked to me about the grain, or texture, of my imberbe, or smooth-cheeked, skin, two words Luc had added to my vocabulary by placing them next to dependence and gluttony, old terms that had been given a whole new meaning.
va-li
suitcase
THE LAST TIME WE SAW each other in Paris, when we were hastily closing my suitcase, Luc asked: “If I showed up at your door next week, what would you say?” Instinctively, without even taking the time to stop what I was doing, I replied with one word, “Disaster,” kissing him. It was a real question and I hadn’t understood it.
đinh
nail
I DIDN’T KNOW THAT a lot of tears had flowed at his house, that unspeakable words had been flung and wounds inflicted. When I finally grasped the scope of his question and the impact of my reply, it was already too late. The final nail had been driven into the lid of my coffin when his wife, without reproaching me, announced her intention on the phone: “I’m staying. Do you understand? I am staying.”
I received that declaration when I was preparing red snappers to be steamed with ten condiments (cá chưng) for a wedding anniversary party. On the work table, vermicelli, cat’s ear mushrooms, shiitakes, soya beans in brine, minced pork, finely grated strands of carrot and ginger, sliced peppers: everything was ready but the lilies. I knotted them one by one so the petals wouldn’t come undone while they were being cooked. That repetitive act allowed me to hear in my head Luc’s voice whispering sentimental songs without anyone being aware. I was absolutely not expecting that call from his wife, which petrified me. I remember seeing my hands continue to remove the pistils from the flowers, to garnish the fish and place them in the enormous bain-marie with the big holes, but I’ve forgotten the rest, what came next.
xé lòng
heartbreak
MAMAN HAD BEEN EDUCATED by Catholic nuns all through her childhood. She knew a lot of stories from the Bible that she would tell me to back up a message or a lesson. That night, I took charge of cleaning and closing the kitchen. She stayed with me and slipped in the story of the Judgment of Solomon before disappearing up the stairs.
I washed the kitchen floor on my knees, holding a scrub brush and weeping profusely. I sharpened the knives on the whetstone. I went out back with a flashlight and removed the wilted flowers and dead leaves from the garden. And most important, I held my breath—to cut myself in half, to amputate Luc from me, to die partially. Otherwise, he would die entirely, torn in two, in seven, in shreds, making his children into collateral injured.
thu
autumn
MY SAFE HAVEN LAY IN cooking elaborate, time-consuming dishes. Julie supported me in these extravagant projects by lightening my schedule and cutting down on my usual tasks without my knowledge. For Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, I spent nights at a time boning chickens without tearing the skin, then stuffing and sewing them up. I also gave the local Buddhist temple a large plant covered with mandarin oranges hung one by one on the branches. Each fruit had a wish wrapped around its stem, intended for the one who would pick it on the stroke of midnight. For the Moon Festival in August, I made bánh trung thu, mid-autumn moon cakes that the Vietnamese savour while they watch the children walking down the street with their red lanterns lit by candles. The fillings vary according to taste and the time we spend on them.
I had all of eternity because time is infinite when we don’t expect anything. And so I had decided on a stuffing with many kinds of roasted nuts and watermelon seeds that I husked by crack
ing the tough bark of each one very firmly. To avoid touching the delicate flesh inside required a lot of control to stop at the right moment. Otherwise, the flesh would break like a dream on waking. It was painstaking work that allowed me to withdraw into my own universe, the one that no longer existed.
Fortunately, there are no verb tenses in the Vietnamese language. Everything is said in the infinitive, in the present tense. It was easy, then, to forget to add “tomorrow,” “yesterday” or “never” to my sentences to make Luc’s voice ring out.
I had the impression that we had lived a lifetime together. I could visualize precisely the position of his right forefinger pointing up when he was annoyed, his body relaxed in the shadow of the shutters, the way he wrapped his long royal blue scarf around his neck when he was running after his children.
thẻ bài
dog tags
LUC’S ABSENCE HAD LED to the disappearance not only of himself and of “us,” but of a large part of myself as well. I had lost the woman who laughed like a teenager when she tasted the ten flavours of sorbet at the oldest ice-cream maker in Paris, as well as the one who dared to look at herself lingeringly in a mirror to decipher the reflection of the word written in felt pen on her back. Today, when I stand on a stepstool at the bathroom mirror, I can sometimes find the blurry remains of the letters ruoma if I read from the top of my spine to the bottom and amour in the opposite direction.
I don’t recall exactly how much time passed before Maman intervened. In the absolute dark of her bedroom, where she had asked me to spend the night, she put a small metal plate the size of a tea biscuit into my hand. It was one of the two dog tags belonging to Phương, the young boy who’d become a soldier and who had given her a poem when she was a teenager. The tags embossed with the same essential information about him had to be worn around his neck at all times, unless he fell on the battlefield and a comrade in arms pulled one off to take back to the base. Before he left, he’d gone to see her in uniform and given her the plate to offer her “the life he hadn’t lived” and his dream of her that would be eternally a dream if he didn’t come back to retrieve it.
For many years, every time Maman saw a military helmet abandoned by the side of a rice paddy or in some reeds, turned right or wrong side out, empty or filled with rainwater, she thought she would collapse from inside. If her feet hadn’t been obliged to continue advancing in her comrades’ footprints, she’d have knelt beside those helmets and never got up again. Fortunately, the silence of the single file kept her upright, for a false move could trigger a mine, endangering the lives of all those soldiers ready to stop the cannons from sliding down a muddy slope by lying in front of the wheels: sacrificing themselves for the cause of a nation.
hy sinh
sacrifice
WHEN SHE CAME BACK from the jungle, she went to find Phương, who lived in the family house with his aging parents and his child, who was still at his mother’s breast. He had become a doctor, a man respected and loved, according to the people in the village. She had observed him settle down for the noonday siesta in his hammock in the shade of the coconut palms. Bare-chested, shirt hanging on a branch, army chain still around his neck. She had watched him sleep and wake. She had expected him to get up when he moved his arm, but he had stayed motionless amid the rustling of leaves and the plashing of the tails of the carp in the pond. It was in that peaceful, everyday calm that she had noticed Phương’s hand hunt for the clasp on the chain wrapped with ribbon that she’d removed from her hair to give him on the night he left. The ribbon was not satin like those of her young half-sisters, because she’d had to create it by weaving and twisting very tightly the hundreds of bits of embroidery thread her stepmother had thrown out.
Maman made Phương’s head turn not by advancing towards him but by walking two steps away from him. She stood with her back to him until he left for his medical clinic. Out of love, she never returned.
ăn sáng
breakfast
NEITHER MAMAN NOR I slept that night. The next day, I fixed the children’s breakfast as I did every morning, as quietly as possible so as not to waken my husband, who preferred his mornings to be calm and solitary. I handed them their lunch boxes on the doorstep as I did every day, but that morning I sensed Luc’s hand stroking my upper back so that I would bend down to their level and kiss them, as he would have done if he’d been there, as he did with his own children every morning.
And two days later, I slipped a tiny note into their sandwich wrappings, the same one Luc wrote to me at the end of every message, like a signature: “I love you, my angel.”
Since then, I comb my daughter’s hair with the same movements as Luc, who cherished each strand of mine. In the same way, I apply cream to my son’s back, stroking the nape of his neck.
Then, one afternoon, with Julie by my side, I went to see the Vietnamese beautician who had told me that her clients claimed she had the power to thwart destiny and give them new fates by tattooing red beauty marks in strategic spots recommended by “destiny readers.”
yên lặng
silence
ON MY FIRST VISIT, I had a red dot tattooed at the edge of my forehead, a centimetre to the left of my nose. I made a second appointment for a second mark at the top of my inner right thigh on the day I needed a reason to look at the blue sky and wait to see the trail of a plane. The third time, it was in honour of the leaf of a Japanese maple found by chance between two pages of a dictionary that Luc had sent along with the ring we had chosen together. There was an interior garden in the jewellery store, home to the miniature tree. The owner had allowed Luc to take a leaf when he went there a month later to pick up the ring that had been adjusted to fit my finger. The fourth time, it was snowing very lightly. A large flake settled on the tip of my nose that morning, in the same place where Luc had taken another one away with his lips.
Those visits to the beautician allowed me to reproduce on my body those red dots of Luc’s that I knew by heart. I think that on the day when I have all those red dots tattooed, if I were to join them, I would be drawing the map of his destiny on my body. And maybe on that day he will show up at my door, take me by the hand as he always did instinctively, and stop me from saying “Disaster” as he kisses me.
PERMISSIONS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
this page: From Cứa đã mở, Thơ by Việt Phương, 2008.
this page: Nguyễn Du, lines 1–8.
this page: Rumi, Bridge to the Soul, translator Coleman Barks. Copyright © 2007 by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
this page: Edwin Morgan, New Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2000.
KIM THÚY has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant owner. She currently lives in Montreal, where she devotes herself to writing.
SHEILA FISCHMAN is the award-winning translator of some 150 contemporary novels from Quebec. In 2008 she was awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts. She is a Member of the Order of Canada and a chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec. She lives in Montreal.