I wake in a sweat in the late afternoon. Co Ngoc is pouring tea. I have the vague sense she has been out and come back again, and even though she is right there beside me a wave of loneliness washes over me, left over from the dream. Ariel was so close again, so real, but there was nothing I could do to avoid the terrible ending.
I sit up and drink some tea. ‘I can’t believe how much I’ve slept today.’
‘You are tired, but it is better for you to sleep when it is dark,’ Co Ngoc advises.
I shrug. ‘I think I’m just catching up.’
We leave the hut and spend another hour wandering through the property with a nun who has a sad face and good English. At dusk we eat soup with leafy greens and then, as the sun drops down behind the jungle, the nuns disperse for the night.
We go back to our little hut and light the kerosene lamp; there is no electricity on the property. We brush our teeth outside using boiled water then lie down on our mats on the hard ground under scratchy blankets. It is incredibly uncomfortable.
I’ve taken my book out but before I’ve even opened it Co Ngoc turns off the lamp. It can’t be much past eight. ‘Do you have enough blankets?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, thanks. I’m fine.’
But within minutes Co Ngoc starts to gently snore and I find myself wide awake. Now I get what she meant about not sleeping too much during the day: nights here must last a long, long time. I shift about, repositioning myself. The wooden floor is punishing. I imagine again that we are at war and this is ‘the ’Dat’. Restlessness skitters through me like ants. It’s darker than it ever gets in the city and – apart from the sound of Co Ngoc’s breathing – dead quiet. I try consciously relaxing different parts of my body – toes, feet, knees – but I can’t stay with it. I shift about some more. I think, longingly, of the Smiling Café, of a bar full of music and people. My fretfulness grows. It would be great, at least, to be able to turn on a light.
If only I could be back in Ariel’s bed now, his body to hold onto through the night; his deep, murmuring voice, his loving hands. The impossibility of it fills me with sadness. How did I reach this impasse, where all I want is to be with him and yet somehow I can’t? Did he say he had fallen in love with me? Is that what he meant?
I lie awake half the night, tossing and turning, sighing into the silent and inky black space. At some point, in the early hours, I hear chanting, strange words and sounds that seem to come from some other place entirely.
Breakfast has been left on a tray by my mat. It must be late.
I sit up, tired and aching, and pick at cold rice soup. I pour tea. The walls of the hut are bare but outside one of the open windows is a vine covered with small white flowers; behind it, a grey sky. Utter silence.
Suddenly, ten days in this beautiful place feels like a life sentence.
I consider dressing and going to find Co Ngoc but she will be studying. I should go and help out in the garden but few of the nuns speak English and I lack the will. I take the newspaper out of my pack and sit stiffly with my back against the wall. It starts to rain. I read the paper from cover to cover. No one comes; I am left completely alone.
I read that city authorities have given the green light to a Taiwanese company to build a thirty-eight-storey tower – it will be Vietnam’s tallest building – right next to Ben Thanh market. Dunkin’ Donuts have announced plans to establish outlets in Vietnam; they hope to be the first American fast-food chain to open franchises here since the end of the war. France has rescheduled Vietnamese debt; Spain has offered a US$80 million loan; the EU is ‘moving closer’. Ho Chi Minh City banks have run out of cash to lend investors.
I wonder, in this whirlwind of change and growth, what will remain. Hugh says the Vietnamese don’t dwell on the past, they look to the future, and the future looks brighter than it has in a long time, with new money and taller buildings, bigger motorbikes and faster food. Half the current population was born after the fall of Saigon, they have no direct memories of the war, but what if the past is what you’re looking for? Where do you find it? Who are its keepers? Movies and books, themed bars and war museums, men like Allan who will never share their secrets?
After what feels like an age, Co Ngoc returns to the hut to announce lunch. I am grateful to see her round face. We go together to the gazebo. Rain tick-ticks on the roof. I eat more rice and some mango. The nuns don’t try to talk to me, though they talk amongst themselves, and laugh boisterously. I feel like I’m in a bubble.
Afterwards, we go back to the hut again for the afternoon nap. I wake several hours later, alone again and disorientated. I can tell it’s late afternoon by the soft glow of the flowers outside the window. Hot tea has been left by the mat.
I sit up against the wall. Shit! My body is stiff and sore and one of my teeth has started to ache. It is only day two and already I am starting to feel like an inmate.
Co Ngoc returns with a bunch of bananas. She smiles brightly. ‘I will take a walk before dinner. Will you come?’
I get up sluggishly, pull on shoes and follow her out. The ground is muddy; we trudge along.
‘It isn’t how I imagined it would be here,’ I say. ‘I thought everyone would be more serious. The nuns are always laughing.’
She smiles. ‘The nuns enjoy their life here. They are very independent.’
Co Ngoc chats about the routines of the nunnery. She says she spent the morning studying and the afternoon picking dragon fruit. She explains that all jobs – indoor and outdoor – are rotated on a regular basis and that the day is structured around prayer, meditation and chanting. I can join in as soon as I feel well.
‘Last night, I couldn’t stop my mind from racing,’ I tell her. ‘It’s so quiet here – I wish my mind could be quiet too.’
‘Saigon is very busy. It is easier there not to think.’
‘Do you ever have difficult thoughts, Co Ngoc?’
‘Of course.’
‘I think I am always trying to escape my thoughts.’
She smiles. ‘Yes, you are human.’
We have soup again for dinner. The nun with the sad face, Co My, is sitting next to me. I learn she has three adult children. Once a year she leaves the nunnery for two weeks to visit them. She squeezes my hand and confesses, quietly, that she misses them very much.
The sun sets and the nuns scatter. Co Ngoc and I walk slowly back to our hut. We change, silently, into pyjamas, brush our teeth, wash our faces, stretch out on the mats. I would kill for vodka and a cigarette.
‘Do you miss your family?’ I ask Co Ngoc, in the dark.
‘Sometimes I miss my mother and father, but when I have free time I go to visit with them. They are too old now to travel.’
‘They must be very proud of you, of what you have done.’
‘They think of me still as a child.’ I hear the smile in her voice. ‘When I go home my mother still washes my clothes.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it. My parents still seem larger than life to me. I would like to shrink them.’
Co Ngoc doesn’t respond; soon she starts to snore. It seems she can just turn herself off, like a television.
I try to make myself more comfortable on the hard ground. I shove my robes under the pillow to make it higher. I curl up on my side with my backpack between my knees. I try lying on my stomach with my head resting on my arms. Nothing works. I consider feeling around for the matches to light the lamp – I could at least read for a while – but I don’t want to wake Co Ngoc. So I lie on the wooden floor, trapped, again, by the dark and quiet.
I have an image of Mum. I picture her at the swirly-pink laminate table with her tumbler of riesling, TV on loud, heater on high, coarse bread and tinned pea and ham soup. Her eyes, if you look closely, register passing thoughts – regrets. The rest of the house, cold, dark and closed off, just this small, warm, brightly lit kitchen: an incubator for her loneliness.
Then for a long time I think about Tim. I sift through memories of our first months together
, when everything seemed possible. He said I had turned him into a prince and that he was going to love me forever. I was so happy.
I turn onto my back, rub my hands all over my face. It is wet with tears.
I drift off for a while and imagine I can hear a man crying – my father? – then when I come to, the nuns are chanting. It seems to go on all night. It feels like a vigil.
In the confines of the nunnery, I lose track of the days and nights, waking and sleeping at all the wrong times. Unconscious from dawn till late morning, dozing again throughout the afternoons, alert and on guard each night on the mat, as if manning the guns: fenced in by the dark and the solitude and the bottomless dread that there is no way out of this prison I have built for myself. A couple of times I try to join in with the activities of the nuns but I am half-hearted and ineffectual and end up back in the hut. It only makes me feel more ashamed.
On the morning of day five, Co Ngoc wakes me from a dead sleep. ‘Ella?’ She is squatting beside me, fresh as the day. I can barely lift my head off the pillow. ‘Will you join me for breakfast? I think it will be good for you to come outside.’
‘Yes,’ I mutter, ‘you’re right.’ I groan as I heave myself up from the floor. I feel worse, in every possible way, than when I arrived, and I am only halfway through this hellish retreat.
During breakfast I am too tired to speak to anyone. I drink tea and suck on lychees. Then, when a few of the nuns have started clearing the table and the others are heading off to their jobs, the head nun approaches. She addresses me through Co Ngoc. ‘She says you look tired,’ Co Ngoc explains. ‘She wants to know how you are sleeping.’
‘Badly,’ I admit.
The head nun says something to a younger nun, who walks off purposively towards one of the huts, returning minutes later with a thick blanket. The head nun refers to it as a mattress, says it will make me more comfortable. I doubt it.
I’ve taken the blanket but they’re all still watching me, patiently, and suddenly I get a glimpse of myself from the outside and I am ridiculous. ‘Cam on nhieu lam,’ I say to the head nun, smiling apologetically, then to Co Ngoc, ‘Can you tell her it’s not really the floor. It’s just my head – I can’t turn it off.’
Co Ngoc translates and the head nun smiles slightly and says something else to the younger nun, who hurries off again. She returns with a bubble pack of Diazepam.
I laugh. ‘Wow. Thank you.’
‘One of the nuns used to be a doctor,’ Co Ngoc explains.
Then the head nun imparts one last piece of advice. ‘She says you should sleep on your right hip to keep your heart free,’ Co Ngoc translates, ‘to stop nightmares.’
‘Thanks, I will try it. And this morning, could I come and work in the garden?’
I spend the whole morning amongst the pumpkins. The gardens are so beautifully kept that all I can find are baby weeds. I pick them out, each tiny one, and though I am dizzy with fatigue it’s better than being alone in the hut. I really hate to be alone.
After lunch though, when we go back for our afternoon nap, for the first time I can’t settle. Co Ngoc falls into her usual deep slumber but I toss about on my mat, muttering under my breath, too tired now, too agitated, to doze off. In this peaceful place, with no cigarettes or vodka, no roosters or beeping horns, no Hugh or Suze or Hien, there seems no way to avoid my own ugliness, the slow creep of despair. But what if, I suddenly think – almost delirious – what if, right now, I was to stop running?
With a great sigh, almost a death rattle, I stop twisting and turning. I can feel a breeze from the window and hear Co Ngoc’s gentle snores. I let my body sink heavily onto the hard floor. I close my eyes. Then, in the stillness, I turn and take a long look back.
I picture myself perched at the bar in the Apocalypse Now, with my mascara and my stiff drink, scanning the room for someone – anyone – to take me home. I watch myself being fucked by the gentle American just because he wanted to, because he asked. I see myself crouched over Ariel like a cat, watching him sleep, as if he might disappear the moment I took my eyes off him, loving him too much and also too little. And there I am, see? With my teacup full of vodka in my seedy hotel room, desperate and alone, at last my mother’s daughter.
And then I go back further, because, what choice do I have? I have hit rock bottom. I have nothing left to lose.
I start to remember what I worked so hard to forget: that I never felt safe, not even with Tim. Not really; not even in the beginning. That was a lie I told myself. We made all our plans – the cottage, the bees, the babies – but the fear was never far away. Even inside our tightly wound cocoon, I was always checking: making sure we were still okay, that he still loved me, that we were never going to part. I wanted him to love me and hold me forever, he gave me his word, but on that hot afternoon when he walked into the living room and my world crumbled like a piece of stale cake, there was a part of me that wasn’t surprised at all, that had just been waiting.
I sit up and reach into my pack for the cross-eyed lion, circa 1969, and hold it to my breast, and a terrible sadness washes over me, a startling truth: no one is ever going to be able to love me enough. Not Tim or Ariel, not the next man. Not while I’m still the same frightened little girl waiting for my father to come home and rescue me from the loneliness and the drinking and the world swinging wildly loose on its axis. But my father is never coming back for me. He is never coming back. And until I realise this I will still be waiting, looking for him in every damned man I meet; begging for their promises and not trusting a single one.
Co Ngoc stirs. She rolls over to face me. ‘You are crying,’ she says, her face empty of judgement.
I snuffle. ‘Yes.’
She reaches out and lays her hand on my back. ‘You will learn to be happy again,’ she says in her plain way.
‘Yes.’ I cry some more. Her hand stays on my back.
For dinner there is fresh tomato soup with bean shoots and herbs and chilli, and some light blossomy tea I’ve never tasted before. Afterwards, I wash up with the nuns then ask Co My if I can take a shower. She finds me a spare lamp, a towel and some fresh robes; I take them to the communal washing area. A nun is there rinsing some towels. She hands me a bucket of water pulled up from the well, a plastic scoop and a bar of soap then directs me to a wooden stall with an open roof. The sun is going down fast.
I go in and hang the lamp on a rusty nail; undress. Bare dirt beneath my feet, a flaming sky above me. I ladle the cool water over me. I keep looking up at the red sky; I drink in the quiet. I soap my black hair, my face, my body worn thin with longing. I keep rinsing until I’ve emptied the bucket then I dry and get into the clean, well-worn robes.
Back at the hut, Co Ngoc is already in bed. I brush my teeth, take a sleeping pill and stretch out on my mat. She turns off the lamp and we are covered in darkness, but I don’t feel quite so afraid. We say goodnight and I curl up on my right side, heart free.
I recall how Mum would come into my room sometimes, late at night. She’d land heavily on the bed beside me, start stroking my head. She’d be singing Janis Joplin or I’d hear her small, strangled sobs. I remember how much I wanted the alcohol smell to go away. I would always, always pretend to be asleep.
Co Ngoc snores, and it reminds me of Book’s purring; the peaceful feeling spreads through my arms, my fingers, my stomach, down my legs. And as my thoughts start to drift and soften – and I leave my mother behind once again – I realise, with a sudden, spotless clarity, that whatever happens now is up to me. Only me.
For four days, from dawn to dusk, I work harder than I’ve worked in all my life and, even without a pill, I sleep. I make rice soup, chao chay, for sixty-seven nuns. I pick custard apples and mangoes, plant new tomatoes and herbs; mop the floor of the pagoda and help scrub a whole set of robes in big metal tubs. I feel like my hands have been untied.
Preparing lunch one morning, I chat more with sad Co My. She explains she only became a nun six years ago, when her husban
d of twenty-two years left her. She says her heart was broken but that Buddhism is teaching her not to be sorry for the past or worried for the future, because life is only ever what is happening right now – this is all we have and it is always changing. The rest is just dreams in our head. I look around at the nuns chopping and stirring, feel the sweat trickle down my brow in the tropical heat, and think this – right now – is not bad.
After lunch, Co My takes me to her little hut to show me a photo of her children. She wants to talk about music and books, confessing she still misses these things. It starts to rain so we sit inside on the floor and drink tea and sing Beatles songs together – she knows all the words.
Another morning I join Co Ngoc in the pagoda. Thirty-odd nuns have congregated to kneel on the shiny wooden floor to pray. I kneel next to Co Ngoc and close my eyes. The air is full of incense and the nuns’ chanting – so close now and yet even more ethereal. It sounds as if they are communing with ghosts. And yet it strikes me that this is the first place I have been in Vietnam where there is no echo of war.
I wake at dawn on our last morning, groggy, tooth aching. I feel fantastic. The white flowers outside the window bob gently in a breeze. Co Ngoc is already up and gone and I am just stretching, preparing to rise, when a great thrashing starts up right beneath me, beneath the hut. I jump up and go to the door and open it just a little way. A two-metre-long brown snake slithers out with something in its mouth. I watch it, transfixed, as it makes its way through the grass with its prey, towards the jungle.
When the snake is out of sight, I dress in my habit and make my way to the farm kitchen. A group of nuns are preparing fruit for breakfast. None of them speak English but I mime the snake to them – I don’t know this word in Vietnamese – and they laugh and shake their heads: no problem. They give me some of the sweet grapefruits to quarter.
After breakfast I pick a bag of fruit to take home and I am having a last stroll through the rice paddies, throwing crumbs to the ducks, when a nun I don’t recognise approaches and grabs my hand. She pulls me away from the ducks, muttering, ‘Hurry, police, hurry.’
The Rainy Season Page 21