by Lan Cao
My stomach churned. In the billowing wind, the air smelled sour and yellow. I lay flat on the boat’s bottom, one hand instinctively gripping Quy’s ankle. The needle on the compass quivered without direction. No one on board was truly skilled in navigation. I heard the raised, desperate voices of the others. Our boat hit a swell and was inundated. We used pots, bowls, and our cupped hands to bail out the seawater. We jettisoned suitcases. Then night fell and it turned cold. Darkness gloated and pitted itself against us. We huddled close and felt the sea’s black lappings against the skeletal frame of our boat.
On day three, food and water had to be rationed. I received this news calmly. I hadn’t wanted to eat or drink for days. But others began to lose hope. In the early morning hours, we sighted an approaching boat, then another, heading straight toward us. The captain hoisted white flags to capture their attention and signal our helplessness. Everyone screamed and cheered, doing our best to engage their interest. Flashlights signaled dots and dashes of Morse code. The ships’ hulks got closer and closer to us and then to our astonishment veered away. But a part of me was not surprised. The world was tired of our continuing exodus. People moaned, their excitement superseded by fear and desperation. The departing ships grew ever smaller, losing their geometrically lined shapes until they became dots and disappeared over the horizon.
Hours later, as the captain surveyed the remaining containers of diesel fuel, a sleek, fast-moving ship headed toward us. This one did not avert course, even as we came directly within its sight. Instead, it altered course to intersect with ours. It even blew its horn, as if that were needed to signal its presence. A man in dark glasses looked down over a railing, staring at us with impending urgency. A flashlight put out a somber glow, revealing a row of gun emplacements visible from the ship’s edge. And then quickly, with punitive swiftness, a thick rope was thrown over our steering wheel and then looped over the captain’s torso, holding him in place. Ten men wearing headbands and sarongs, each buttressed by batons and guns, jumped onto our boat, screaming incomprehensible orders. They swept through the boat and onto the back, then front, deck. They spat curses in our direction and leered at the women. In the ensuing minutes, the six or more women on the boat were separated from us men. Quy was the first to be taken away. Your brother-in-law and I tried to hold her back. Immediately we were punched and kicked. Our attackers opened our mouths, inspected our teeth. My hands were held behind my back by another. I looked at the long thick scar running down my attacker’s left cheek. I looked at his horsehair goatee. I smelled his stale breath. Grimy hands shoved a pair of pliers into my mouth and yanked my four upper and lower back molars with gold fillings. This instantaneously produced long bloody welts on my inside cheeks and gums and I collapsed in excruciating pain. Our boat was searched, belongings seized, jewelry ripped from pierced ears and snatched from wrists. From the other end of the boat where the women had been taken, there were moans. The frightful sound still haunts me.
The pirates left as quickly as they had appeared. The rope tying our boat to theirs was slashed. When Quy and Thu and others emerged, I saw right away their afflicted faces. Quy held her body perfectly vertical, her fists clenched. Her mouth was slack and slightly open. Her hair, knotted and tangled, was damp and pasted to her forehead. Blood trickled from her soiled trouser legs down to her feet. Quy’s and Thu’s arms were tied together by rough straps. The men gasped and rushed toward their wives. Slowed by dizziness, I nonetheless managed to undo the straps on Quy’s and Thu’s wrists. They both began to cry soundlessly. One of the men hired by Quy’s Chinese friends to help us slipped one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees and carried her to a blanket. Her brother limped toward her and caressed her face. We whispered into her ear, as one would to an injured child. I dabbed a few drops of eucalyptus and camphor oil on her tongue. Her brother draped a sheet over her, parted her legs, and looked. Quy was breaking out in a sweat and shivering. She covered her eyes with both hands, her fingers tightly gripped into a fist, shutting out the world to enter fully into her state of simultaneous existence and nonexistence. When her brother removed his hand, I saw that it was covered in blood. Dry sobs broke loose from his chest.
“She is hemorrhaging,” he said.
Clean clothes were located and thrust toward us to use on her wound. He wet a washcloth and squeezed water onto her face and neck. Her skin was cold and pale. The three of us huddled around her. She was our hopeless angel. Her eyelids quivered rapidly as if she were in a state of frenetic dreaming. I pressed my ear against her chest and a finger against the pulse of a submerged vein.
At the edge of my vision, I saw our fellow passengers congregate in a huddle, their faces ashen and grave. Men held their wives’ hands. Waves rippled softly. Your brother-in-law and I and Thu took turns watching over Quy. At midnight a fever raged through her body. The sheet between her legs was soaked red. We feared it was hopeless. As she alternated between consciousness and deep sleep, Thu gave her a change of clothes. In the first, red-orange light of dawn, her eyes flickered open and followed the slow blink of a few moving silhouettes.
“I have a funny feeling on the left side of my body,” she said. “It’s heavy, as if I have put on weight.” She saw confusion and concern on my face. “It is all right?” she asked, drawing her whisper out as she pointed to the long-simmering waters in the sea.
She slept most of the next day. We put a cool wet cloth on her forehead to fight the fever. Your brother-in-law put his face next to hers, absorbing her heat into his cheeks, infusing her with his reserve of life. She vomited several times.
Once, in the middle of the night, she tugged at my shirt and pointed to the sky. Look, she said, stillness in her eyes. The ascending moon shone a beneficent glow, turning the sky’s harsh edges into a soft silver.
“I will stay here,” she said, pointing at the sea. Her glare was permanently fixed on the water. Here, where land could not be glimpsed or felt, the ocean was an infinite expanse of blue and a place of faith.
“Promise me,” she said. “Let me be here, with Khanh.” She pointed to the ocean beyond the boat. “I won’t see Mai again. Let her forget me. You can help.”
I waited for an explanation but silence took over. Her face had become a mute blend of concern and focus. She wanted to make sure I understood. Her body arched and then flattened itself against the deck. She heaved. Her eyes stared into mine, searching for assurance. Your brother-in-law faced the water, his hands dangling by his side.
I sat opposite her and watched. We were hard against the edge of the boat. The moonlight slid across the sky.
“A mad mother belongs here,” she murmured.
I lay by her side and said nothing, abandoning my usual desire to coax others into seeing things my way. I just listened. We had known each other for years but I knew none of her intimacies. I listened to her half-murmurs and the slow phrasing of her half-finished sentences as they spilled from her mouth. I put a comforting hand on her outstretched arm. She did not move it away. I looked and realized she had slipped back into the twilight of sleep.
The next morning she was dead. How do I explain it to you? A mane of heavy hair fell over her shoulders. Her face was as alive as it ever was. But I knew she had died. Not by the face or the body but by an uneasy void that hung in the air.
I felt a larger darkness enveloping us. The last stars shone above. The shock of her death ran through my body. Right away, for me, everything became unhinged. After her death our fate hardly mattered to me anymore. What would I write in my letter to you if I survived the ocean?
Then we covered her body with a blanket and had a silent ceremony and slipped it into the sea.
Later, when it seemed to matter the least to me, an American submarine appeared out of nowhere with its horn blaring and its megaphones aimed in our direction. I knew the end of our desperate navigation was over. This was around the time when President Carter ordered
the Seventh Fleet to pick up boat people. Their lookouts had seen our bedsheet tied to the mast with the word SOS on it. An inflatable raft was thrown into the waters and two Americans rowed it to our boat’s side. We were given water and food. Against slim odds we were rescued on that windy day and taken to an island in Malaysia. And for all of us, it was a way station toward new places, new possibilities.
It was the island everyone had heard about. It was the island from which many had been towed back to sea a year or two before. It was the same island on which, after years in the jungle and after the hardship of prison and the South China Sea, your brother-in-law was beaten to death. Of course there had been no formal disclosure of his Vietcong past but somehow word had gotten out in the camps. It hadn’t mattered among the prisoners in our reeducation camp. They had no belief in a future, so nothing mattered to them. But in Malaysia, everything mattered. The future was before us. Newfound security did not edge out the desire to exact revenge, to put order to unresolved grievances.
When he was not in his tent in the early morning one day, I went and looked for him. I found his body at the foot of a giant tree trunk, among a flutter of petals and leaves. There it was, in the curled fetal position, seemingly suspended between dreaming and being awake. He might have been blameless. History might have been responsible. But history followed us to Malaysia and beyond. The words “Viet Cong” were carved into the tree’s bark, the silent backdrop to a cruel masterpiece.
25
Forgiving
BAO, 2006
This is where I live because our father and Mai chose it—this two-bedroom apartment overlooking an enclosed garden. The complex is tucked slightly in, away from the street, and I have become fond of the garden and its stabilizing presence. From the balcony, I bear witness to the passage of time. The seasons have a habit of announcing themselves clearly here. After a few warm days, sweeps of white and yellow have broken through the wintry hush and carpeted the grounds beneath poplars, elms, and oaks, adding color to what was but a few days ago a denuded landscape of simple monochromatic brown. Today, as Mai drives to visit our father, she convinces herself she will remain in the room while our father is visited by Uncle Number Two. This will be the second visit, following the failed attempt a few days ago. He is already there when we arrive, a single figure outside our father’s door.
Mai comes toward Uncle Number Two and shepherds him into the room. When our father sees him, his face clenches up and he recasts himself somberly. He maintains an obvious distance, his eyes widening into a reproving glare. He lifts his arm as if to wave, reaching out in a small, compressed gesture. I know he is concentrating on pulling air into his lungs. The exaltation of national struggles and the sacrifices of victory and loss have been reduced to this: an elderly, sick man confined to his bed, struggling for breath. To help his circulation, I move his arms and legs.
Uncle Number Two wastes not a moment this time. “Why have I come again, you want to know?” he asks, trying, perhaps, to preempt Father’s hostility.
Father stares into space, uninterested. I sense the physical barrier he has erected. I see the prosecutorial eyes, the hardened jaw.
“Thu killed herself.”
Silence engulfs the room. “Last week,” Uncle Number Two adds with a sob. “I thought you would want to know. I thought I should tell you. In person.”
“How did this happen, Phong? Why?” Our father is rapt with anticipation. “Oh, Theo,” he says, calling Uncle Number Two by the term of endearment used in the early years, when their friendship was unfrayed. “She is really gone?” our father asks, as if there were yet an obscure hope that fate might be appeased and she somehow spared.
Now that he has dispelled our father’s detachment, Uncle Number Two stands taciturn. His cold knee clacks metallically against the metal bed. Our father’s face is strained, his eyes moist. I think it pains him to see the cut-down size of their lives.
Uncle Number Two says, finally, “Pills,” as if the word alone signifies a finality that can clarify everything.
Our father is quiet. Mai moves toward him and places a comforting hand on his wrist. Father arches his eyebrows and tilts his head, trying to make sense of the news, preparing himself for the contingent shock of additional details. He goes through the various alternating propositions. “Was she sick? Was she depressed?” he asks, without pausing for an answer.
Uncle Number Two’s face registers a sequence of mixed emotions. He puts a restraining hand on our father’s shoulder. There they are, together at last, neither man speaking, each inside the other’s reticence.
Finally Uncle Number Two says, “You are right to have harbored your doubts about me.” He nods his head for emphasis. “All these years. It’s my fault.”
Our father shakes his head to deflect the comment.
“No,” Uncle Number Two insists with an admonishing shoulder grip. “You always had a bit of contempt for me. I’ve always known that.” He lets out a mirthless little chuckle. “I cast your judgments aside because I convinced myself you were too meek and sensitive, you with your yoga and French poetry, to understand what had to be done.”
Our father releases a breath and nods. “All right, yes,” he says. His admission surprises me. He gives Uncle Number Two an appraising look.
“With good reason, as it turns out,” says Uncle Number Two.
Our father’s eyes widen, unblinking. “Now is not the time, Theo.” He reaches over, in the most natural way in the world, to touch Uncle Number Two’s hand. “And what does it matter now? Tell me. What happened with Thu?”
“What I am about to say won’t endear me to you. But at this point in our lives it has to be done.” He rests his palm against his head, readying himself for the grave revelation. His eyes start to tear up.
“Listen, I’ve been a Vietcong all along.”
“A Vietcong?” A frown darkens our father’s face. His head must be teeming. “All along?”
The revelation pains, as if it were a dissolution of vows. I look at Uncle Number Two standing by Father, checking the ghostly sacraments of friendship against the shock of this new discovery. I have a vision of Uncle Number Two at our house in Cholon, smiling at Mother, sharing stories with Father. Everything drifts as if into a darkened nullity and then explodes into a kaleidoscope of terrible events, starting with Tet—its hurtle and hurl, its untunable sounds. I see myself hiding in a jar. There is a Vietcong sniper behind a chimney. I hear the click of metal. I hear James calling Mai’s name and then I hear the sound of a body falling to the ground. I watch my mind scuffling and I see the world bursting red. I can almost feel the gun in my hand, its black metal warmed to life by my body heat. Each image is replayed inside its own slow retraction, backing over itself again and again inside the clotted space that is my head.
I imagine James lying there like a wounded animal waiting to be reached. Mai stares from a great, supercilious height, affixing blame on me.
Quickly, I shut my eyes and suppress the memories. Uncle Number Two’s presence keeps me anchored in the here and now. I concentrate on not blotting Mai out, on not sending her into lost time.
Father sighs, then takes long, deep breaths like those he takes when he is alone with his yoga and meditation.
“Yes. All along. Ever since we first knew each other,” says Uncle Number Two, his eyes reflecting a sadness that breaks my heart. I look at Father, and I see the downturned corners of his mouth, the grave face, and the eyes that rest with singular defenselessness on our surrounding space. The pronouncement seems scarcely credible. I fear our father’s sadness and his anger. I look at Uncle Number Two, and I am confused.
Then Father goes right to the heart of it. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks.
Mai shrinks inside herself. For once, she understands him. She too looks warily at Uncle Number Two. She wonders if every memory of him has to be revised.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know. When Thu killed herself . . . ” Uncle Number Two stammers, his eyes fixed on his shoes.
Our father says something inaudible, then reverses his thought—a small indecision and revision within a larger one. He keeps quiet instead. Mai is motionless, receding into the oblivion of her statuelike private self.
Uncle Number Two looks at Father searchingly, eyes asquint. They cannot unstick themselves from the past or from their collusion in mutual recrimination. Uncle Number Two is the only one who talks, dragging with him the appurtenances of their common proprietary past, even as Father closes his eyes and says nothing. Having taken the plunge, he now has the momentum to keep going. With a show of resignation, he declares that there must be an end to deception. Here he is, at last, revealing himself to us, in an effort, perhaps, to be fully known. He asks ineffectual questions, hoping for a reaction from Father that will formally release him. “How shall I tell you everything now?” He confesses he has nothing left that he wishes to conceal.
“I wanted to drive out the foreigners,” he said, his voice faltering. “As one is taught to believe.”
“As one is taught to believe,” Father repeats skeptically.
“I did not know that a small country has few choices. It cannot control its own destiny. It is not a question of whether foreigners come but of which ones.
“I did not know how they would destroy the country,” he confesses. “I wanted something better than Diem and all those who followed. I could not have foreseen the scale of retribution.”
His body slouches, as if he were unable to carry its weight. He steadies himself on our father’s bed rail. He looks at Father as if the possibility of leniency and compassion lies only with him. But Father is still quiet, as if he were sifting these declarations inside his head.