I smile, taken aback, but her gaze doesn’t waver.
‘Before I left to come here, my boyfriend told me he had fallen in love with someone else. We’d been together for five years. I thought we always would be.’
She remains expressionless and I think how indulgent my grief is beside the lives of her boys, the city I am in. Then she says, ‘Ella, your heart is sad, but this is good what has happened. He told you the truth. He gives you your freedom.’
I nod slowly and frown at the same time, trying to work out what this means, but I don’t really get it and I feel unexpectedly let down. What’s so good about the truth if it’s devastating? And I really, really didn’t want my freedom.
We finish our glasses of tra da, iced tea, and then go up the front to pay Madam Nhu for the soup.
She and Co Ngoc chat for a while in Vietnamese then they both turn to me. ‘I told her you are my teacher,’ Co Ngoc says.
‘Yes, and you’re my teacher too.’
‘Every person can teach. Every person can learn.’
‘Your English grammar is actually better than mine,’ I confess. ‘I don’t think I’m a very good teacher.’ I am smiling but she frowns.
‘Ella, why do you say this? You are a good teacher. Your students are very lucky. You should not say you are not.’
‘Do you think so?’ I am surprised.
She looks perplexed, as if I am perversely complicated. She makes things sound so simple.
Outside, as we’re parting on the street, she holds her arms out to me. Her robes hang at her sides like big grey wings. We hug, for the first time. She is large, thick and unwavering. I savour the solid feel of her, her incense smell, all the way home.
On Saturday night, Suze, Dave and I go to the opening of a new bar called the Blue Dragon. We get there at about ten and the place is packed. Instead of the usual bamboo and potted greenery, there are chrome tables, blue velvet drapes and deep-pink silk light shades.
‘There’s certainly a strong Phap feel,’ Dave says.
‘And some strong young Phaps,’ adds Suze, winking at me.
‘Don’t! Please,’ I say, laughing, because I am nervous, stupidly nervous.
The Blue Dragon’s French investor met Ariel through the bank and last week offered him the job of managing the bar so he could stay on in Saigon now his national service is over. That’s great! I gushed when Suze told me. She just laughed. In the nine days since Dave’s birthday, I have thought of Ariel often, remembering the intensity of our eyes meeting, the eerie feeling of some kind of recognition, understanding.
We take turns buying rounds of drinks. Because it’s crowded we only catch glimpses of Ariel during the first hour but twice when I look over he is looking back at me. My teeth chatter with excitement.
Suze has been up in Hanoi for a couple of days at the Vietnamerica Expo ’94, and she talks about meeting with the reps for IBM, Pepsi, KFC and General Electric, hearing their plans to storm the Vietnamese market. She says the Kraft Foods stall was popular, that everyone stopped to exclaim over the fluorescent yellow of Cheezwiz. Dave suggests this commercial storming of third-world Vietnam, all those cheap resources to plunder, is just a new kind of invasion, a kind of cultural colonisation. And yet, I argue, doesn’t Vietnam need all the investment it can get? And isn’t it an old and wise country with a proven capacity to protect itself? But then I see Ariel coming over and I forget everything else. Just watching him make his way towards us across the bar gives me butterflies like I haven’t had in years.
‘Bon soir.’ He leans down to kiss Suze on each cheek then turns to me and seems to hesitate before kissing me too. ‘I have been wanting to join you for some time but it is so busy. Merde! I am not absolutely sure I am perfect for this job.’ His speech is slightly stilted, like he is working hard to find the right words.
‘I saw you circulating out there. You’re a natural,’ Dave says.
Ariel laughs. ‘Anyway, I cannot stop for long. I just wanted to welcome you to this fantastic new bar. Actually, I have now a problem in the kitchen.’ He explains that a few of the cast from Cyclo – a French movie being filmed in the city – have ordered something from the menu that requires the oven, which hasn’t arrived yet. His staff are in a panic. ‘I will try to come back.’
He apologises and heads back to work and I haven’t exchanged a single word with him. ‘He likes you,’ Dave says. ‘I can tell.’
‘Do you reckon?’
I buy another round of drinks and we spend the next half-hour trying to pick out the actors in the crowd. There seem to be as many Vietnamese patrons as foreigners. It’s a nice change.
A little later, on the way back from the toilets, I see Ariel chatting with a couple of rugby blokes in white slacks. I plan to walk straight past but our eyes meet and he steps away from the men and towards me. We face one another, pushed up too close by all the people. ‘Are you enjoying your night?’ he asks. It seems formal and somehow intimate at the same time.
‘Yes! It’s a really nice place, great atmosphere.’ I can’t believe I have said something so inane.
‘I have been wanting to tell you, we have rum – many bottles. And if we have to run out, I have my motorbike.’
I laugh. ‘You have a good memory.’
‘It was a good night.’
There is a pause where we are looking into one another’s eyes and I realise I have stopped breathing. I reach into my bag and take out a cigarette.
‘Maybe you could show this to me some time,’ he says. ‘Your café with the very good waiter.’
‘Sure.’ And then I say, without giving myself time to think, ‘Actually, I have to go to a wedding in a couple of weeks – my boss’s niece. Would you like to come? I’m not going to know anyone.’
‘Yes, I would like to.’ He says it without hesitating. Then he lights my cigarette, which is good because I don’t trust my hands.
‘Sorry, I didn’t offer you one,’ I hold out the packet.
He takes it from my hand and studies it. ‘Boy Boy Boy. I like that. Boy Boy Boy and Vietnamese rum.’ But then his eyes are caught by someone behind me and he nods and puts up his hand, as if to say ‘wait’. ‘I am sorry. I think I am expected to, how you say, circling?’
‘Circulating. But circling is good too.’
‘Can I take your number? To make our plans?’
‘I’m staying in a hotel. I don’t always get messages … maybe I should call you.’
He gives me his business card. ‘I will be here most nights. For these first weeks, at least.’
We stand there another second or two then say goodbye, awkwardly, still smiling, and I hurry back to the couch. I feel like I could sprint around the block fifty times without stopping. ‘I just asked him out,’ I hiss to Suze and Dave. ‘To a wedding! I’ve never done that before in my life.’
‘Right on, sister,’ Suze says, grinning. ‘I was watching. You should have seen his body language.’
‘I knew you two would get on,’ Dave says, sighing. ‘I have a flair for this sort of thing.’
I write, at last, to Mum. I do it on a morning when my head is clear, when the washing is done, incense burning, things nice and steady around me.
I write, of course, that things are going well; because that’s what we’ve always relied upon, her and I – my holding it together. I describe, at some length, the layout of the local market. I write about the street of flowers, always bursting with red gladioli, Nan’s favourite. I write about pho for breakfast and the sinh to stand where I get my daily juice. I’m enjoying teaching more than I expected, I say; I mention Co Ngoc. Then I recount, in detail, my excursion with Hugh, but I make it a generic beach on the South China Sea, nothing that will alarm her. I wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, for next month; I send her my love.
On the way back from the post office, I stop in at my favourite poky second-hand bookshop to see if anything new has arrived. They only have one shelf of English-language books but often I go in ju
st to be off the street, and to listen to the proprietor, Thien, and drink the iced coffee his daughter brings. Thien is eighty-three and has long, thin white hair, milky eyes, and the Ho Chi Minh goatee so popular with old Vietnamese men. As a young man, he was at the forefront of experimental theatre in Saigon; he speaks fluent French, Russian and English. What will become of my country? he asked, last time I was here. All the people want now is to catch up. I understand this, of course, but at what cost?
This morning Thien isn’t around; his daughter is dusting books. ‘Good morning, Miss Ella. You have caphe sua da?’
‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’
She goes back to her job and I flick through the English-language books. I pick out a couple of paperback thrillers, a book of Vietnamese folktales for Hugh, and a very shabby, worn, pocketsized phrasebook – Easy Vietnamese. Maybe I’ll surprise Co Ngoc with some new words.
I have another hour and a half to kill before class so I go and sit at Free Time with a dish of chocolate ice-cream. I start one of the thrillers and eat the ice-cream, but I can’t concentrate so I open the battered orange phrasebook. It was produced by the University of Saigon and the paper inside is brown and mottled with age. Then I notice, with a start, a date handwritten in the upper right corner of the first page, in blue ink that has faded to green: 3.2.70.
I suck in my breath. My father would have been here then, four months into his tour. This could have belonged to him, to someone like him.
I race through the short blurb. This handy phrasebook gives everyday expressions in Vietnamese, and includes many phrases suitable for combat conditions. It has been specially written for the foreigner who needs to speak with the people of Vietnam, but who cannot spare the time to study the grammatical details of the language.
I turn, with a growing urgency, and unease, to the first section, ‘Emergency Expressions’:
Help! Cuu toi voi!
I am lost. Toi lac duong.
I am wounded. Toi bi thuong.
Please help me. Xin cuu toi.
I am thirsty. Toi khat nuoc.
What is this place? Day la dau?
A tiny involuntary whimper slips from my mouth. I slap the phrasebook shut. I can almost hear the ragged breath, smell the mortal fear. It’s like peeking through a window at something ghastly and obscene and it is sucking you in, it is calling you down. Help! I am lost. I am wounded. Please help me. I am thirsty. What is this place? What is this place?
I stand up. For a second I consider leaving the phrasebook on the table and walking out, but I shove it back in my bag and head for the door, and the distractions of the street; knowing, already, that it will go into the inside zip pocket of my pack with the dogtag, and the old blue marbled cardboard folder secured with stretched elastic hair bands, filled to bursting with stuff I can no longer look at but cannot leave behind.
What does it mean to miss so much something you barely even knew? I only had five years with my father but he left such a gaping hole. He was my hero. I never conceived of letting him go.
As I grew older, I stopped feeling his eyes on me and it made me afraid. He seemed to recede or maybe I felt his absence differently. I started to look for signs of him, evidence; it was a secret, illicit obsession. I’d sift through the house when Mum wasn’t there. I found a letter from our GP in her filing cabinet that noted his poor response to combat conditions. I copied this down though I didn’t understand what it meant. In a box in the attic I found a pair of black army boots. I stroked them and put them back carefully. At the bottom of a drawer in Mum’s dressing table, a birthday card from him to her – from before the war, before me – signed, Your Precious Pete. He was a jigsaw I tried feverishly to put together.
I knew a couple of kids at high school with fathers who had been in ’Nam but I could never share with them my curiosity about the war, or my shame. Their fathers were real; mine was a bundle of papers, a toy, a toothbrush, a little girl’s hallucination.
I devoured, furtively, guiltily, every book I could get my hands on about the war and Pop told me things too, when Mum wasn’t around, all of which were added to my growing file. Those boys weren’t given a fair go, he said, and, They promised your father the kitchen then gave him infantry. Pop confided once that my father had encountered trouble in Operation Hammersley. He may as well have been speaking Chinese. Had my father had an operation? And one that always haunted me: Vietnam changed him, love. It was a dirty war. I’m sure he said this last when we were eating white bread and Nan’s sweet coleslaw, and that the day outside grew suddenly dark and ominous. Pop knew all about war because he’d fought in World War II and had two medals in a grey box in his bedside table, next to his heart pills and leather-bound bible. Mum said he’d had a temper ever since.
I remember being at a party in high school and leaving the room when Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ came on. Walking down a crowded, smoky corridor into a backyard strewn with empty bottles; standing alone out there without really knowing why except that the song made me sad and lonely; it set me apart.
But none of this brought him back to me. None of it made him real again.
You have to talk to your mother, Tim said to me, not long after we’d booked our tickets to Vietnam. You’re an adult now. You’ve got to bring it all together.
I can’t! She won’t. It’ll make her worse.
I think it would be good for you.
I don’t think I could stand it. Anyway, my life is good now. I don’t need to go back into all that. Maybe I know enough.
Then keep your eyes closed, he said, peculiarly irritated. Stay happy and blind.
TWELVE
On Tuesday, straight after class, Miss Jenny takes me to the An Dong market in Cholon to buy material for an ao dai – she insists I must wear one to the wedding.
‘Ao dai will help you find boyfriend,’ she says as we’re parking our bikes. ‘Vietnamese woman don’t need short skirt and bikini like American woman. Ao dai much more sexy.’
‘But I don’t want a boyfriend,’ I tell her – I lie.
‘Every woman want a boyfriend. How they say in America? Mr Right!’ She grins menacingly beneath her implausible beehive.
‘Have you ever been married?’ I ask her.
‘No!’ she says, ‘I don’t want a husband!’ I think of her passion for her snake-charming lover and I believe her.
We make our way slowly to the fabric section where the air is dense and smells like hot, damp cotton, as if the roof were an enormous iron pressing down. I follow Miss Jenny as she works her way systematically through the stalls, asking questions, fingering materials. Whenever I stop to admire something she pulls me along to the next one. It reminds me of the searches Mum would take me on for off-cuts for her collages. We’d go to huge fabric warehouses to find a particular thing – a square of green velvet, gold suede – and spend what felt like hours sifting through table after table, box after box. Sometimes I’d pick out my own treasures but they always ended up mixed in with hers. She was the creative one; I had to be practical.
After half an hour of trawling, Miss Jenny stops at a stall that looks the same as every other. ‘Which one you like?’ she demands.
I scan the materials and point out a dark blue and red paisley. The stall-holder says something and then laughs through betel-stained teeth. They both shake their heads in disapproval.
‘No, no,’ Miss Jenny says, ‘this for old lady. Look, this one much better.’ She points to a buttercup yellow.
Eventually we settle on a shimmering burnt orange silk, which is measured, cut and wrapped in brown paper.
We ride back into the city to a tailor she knows. In a room cramped with dummies, up a narrow flight of stairs behind a pho shop, a young woman takes my measurements. She and Miss Jenny talk and I catch the occasional word or phrase but not enough to understand what they are saying. I feel like one of the dummies.
‘She says you have nice breasts,’ Miss Jenny explains at one point.
‘We
ll, that should help me get a boyfriend shouldn’t it?’
She cackles. I think of Ariel and the adrenaline shoots through me.
When I get back to the hotel, there is a letter waiting for me, from Jess. I dash upstairs so I can read in private. I wait until the tea is made and I am comfy on the bed before I open it. It is eleven pages long. I’ve never been so excited by a letter before.
She writes that she has met someone. A boy who was meant to teach her blues guitar. They’ve already stopped the lessons. He’s Greek and a bit wild. They’ve kissed and that’s all but it was a good kiss, it boded well. She writes about the state of her vegie patch and her terrible PMT. At the end, she writes: I hope you won’t hate me for saying this, but I think breaking up with Tim was the best thing that could have happened. Sometimes it felt like when you were with him you were kind of fading away. I’m glad he’s gone.
‘Really?’ I say aloud. ‘But you said you were jealous.’
It’s not that I mind her saying it; it’s that I am floored. I was always sure, absolutely, that Tim and I fit together perfectly, like mint and peas, like Edward and Mrs Simpson. I thought it was obvious to the world. It was what I built my life upon: the luck of our perfect union.
I put the letter back in its envelope and light a cigarette, inhale deeply, stare up at the spinning fan. I wish Jess were here and we could talk. Instead I sit up again and start writing a rambling reply.
For the rest of the week, I teach my classes and daydream about the wedding. My pleasure at the notion of it has become almost an end in itself: easier, safer perhaps, to enjoy from a distance. When I am not teaching, I cycle around the city, more confident after three weeks in the saddle. I enjoy the new freedom the bike gives me to go anywhere, for no reason at all. I plan little expeditions, and carrying them out gives me a small sense of achievement.
One lunchtime at the Smiling Café, I sit down with the paper and some oppla then let my eyes travel up to meet Allan’s.
He smirks and I snort in response, Laurel and bloody Hardy. I brace myself for an assault but then he says, ‘You take things too seriously.’
The Rainy Season Page 11