by Lan Cao
“All along,” Father repeats. “All along a Vietcong. Living in the South but working against it.”
“Please,” Uncle Number Two implores, but Father ignores him.
“You were so involved in your work, in your pacification work. You were so proud of your work. All those conversations we had about the Vietcong . . . How upset you were when the South wasn’t devoting sufficient energy to the nonmilitary aspects of the war . . . What did it all mean?”
“Once you manufacture a lie, you have to continue with it . . . Each half-truth spawns another,” Uncle Number Two explains. “And there were even moments when I felt a true affinity to the southern cause.” He is about to continue but our father shakes his head. He has had enough.
“It hardly matters anymore. I don’t need to understand, Phong,” our father says. A suspended silence hangs in the air that is heavy and enigmatic. Finally Father releases a labored sigh. When he speaks, he utters just one word. “Thu?” His voice shakes without control. “What does your story have to do with Thu? I only want to know about Thu. Did she know who you really are?”
Uncle Number Two wraps his arms around himself and starts to explain, head lowered before Father’s sternness. It is his plea for leniency.
Uncle Number Two ignores our father’s question and continues with the story he wishes to tell. “Thinking back about my life, I see I had such little sense of proportion,” he continues. “After 1975, all the Vietcong operatives in the South surfaced. Your brother-in-law and I used our history to protect my wife and yours. And for some time we did, until it became clear that we and other Southerners must be made to suffer as well. By then, all the neighbors, even Thu and your wife, had learned of my true allegiance. As my side claimed all the power and advantage and authority in the country, it was in Thu’s interest to forgive my secret. It was this secret about my identity that saved us initially.”
He pauses, trying to assess Father’s silence, searching for some slight gesture. “Since our escape in 1978, and especially given what happened to your brother-in-law in the Malaysian camp, my fear has been that someone in Little Saigon out in California would recognize me. After a few years had gone by, I thought that the danger of being discovered had diminished and that my secret life as an impostor so many years ago could be left behind . . .”
“Someone found you out?” Mai interjects.
Uncle Number Two bows his head and nods. His face turns complacent and pensive.
“Someone, I don’t know who. Six months ago we began getting anonymous letters that threatened to reveal me as a Vietcong—not just from thirty years ago, but as a continuing operative planted by Hanoi. One had a photo of me in 1976 with a top Communist Party official. They have become hawk-eyed, some Vietnamese in Orange County, always ready to sniff out a Communist, especially after that Ho Chi Minh poster incident in the video store. The letters demanded nothing but merely threatened. They were of the sort that makes one feel most afraid. They arrived at irregular intervals, sometimes as a letter sent by mail and other times as a handwritten note tacked to our door.”
I am surprised to see that Father’s face softens as he takes in Uncle Number Two’s sad perspective. For the first time he fixes his eyes to Uncle Number Two’s face and leaves them there. He leans back, his head inside the floating light of the room. I am astonished by his gentle demeanor. I wonder if he understands what Uncle Number Two has been saying.
“The strain was too much for Thu. There were phone calls at night in which the caller muttered, ‘Traitor,’ and hung up. Thu would shake, each call sucking the resilience out of her. A week ago a reporter for the Nguoi Viet newspaper called the house and asked if the rumors about me were true. Thu was the one who answered the phone. She took it very badly. I think that was the fatal phone call. Her private humiliation would soon be publicly disclosed. She must have felt she had no other choice.”
Father strains to breathe. Using long, deep strokes, I rub mentholated oil onto the concavities of his chest. Mai steps in and instructs him to take deep, slow breaths. I put my ear to his chest and feel the enfeebled beat of his heart. His eyes glint. He clears his throat but asks no further questions of Uncle Number Two. He does not appear to have the strength for further confrontation. The two men are face-to-face, each edgily watching the other.
Uncle Number Two puts a hand on his metal leg, lifts the creases of his loose-fitting khaki pants, and slowly steadies himself on the back of Father’s wheelchair. “I am sorry,” he says, offering an eerie reprieve. “I will go in a few minutes. After a little rest.” He points wryly to his metal leg.
Father’s breath rises and falls. He shakes his head vigorously, almost aggressively. I fear anger is catching up with him at last. I think that for sure he will spurn Uncle Number Two’s apologies. But to my surprise, Father taps Uncle Number Two weakly on the shoulder and places an improbably proprietary hand on Uncle Number Two’s arm. Father then points to the chair, inviting him to stay. Uncle Number Two sits, inclining toward Father, watching his friend who is also a stranger go through the simple task of breathing. They are brought here together, side by side, by a difficult but common past that still binds.
26
Arpeggios
MR. MINH, 2006
Under a sequined sky, the ocean sways and shimmies. It glows in the evening’s early flickering light, whitecaps glistening a silvery gray. In a stir of wind, currents ripple like arpeggios, swift and soft across an ivory keyboard. A flock of seagulls rises off the water and lifts skyward.
This must be the South China Sea. It is green, blue, and lushly textured. I can make out the outline of houseboats clustered along the distant shore. Beyond that unbroken line of moored, wooden barges, rice fields flourish in a bloom of deep emerald green. A half-moon offers its oblique silhouette faintly etched against the sky. A small, slender boat floats nearby almost within reach of the undulating land. And the shadow of yet another beckons. I bring myself completely to the serenity offered here, watching the ocean do what it has always done, rising and falling inside a larger finality. I am sitting alone, knees drawn up to my chin, awash in rivulets of light, inside a nebulous dream.
I feel a hand on my head, fingers combing my hair, and another hand caressing the scar that has closed over my old wound. I am eager to absorb the touch into my skin. There is a residue of memory transfigured. Is it an abstraction? Or is it real?
The soft twilight will soon slip away. I am caught inside this feeling of leaving and returning.
The sea wind shifts. Through a partial segment of my consciousness, I notice the change in direction. The water responds in turn. Its waves surge and fall, white-stippled and wind-whipped. For hours the ocean, besieged and battered, tosses and turns in counterpoint until it is becalmed once more.
Finally the burdensome quiet is broken by the humming of prayers, each chant synthesized to the next. The sound reverberates, flowering, expanding, unfolding. It calls for me. I bolt upward into an exquisite emptiness, searching for it, knowing immediately that it is what I have been looking for. The sound that is calling is momentary but delicious. Its familiarity engulfs me. I visualize overlapping memories. I see a woman in a purple ao dai praying and I see a child being born and I see a child dying.
Here, inside this warp of space and time, we are at last facing sadness and remembering our dead child together. We stop casting blame. We let go of rancor and accusations.
Shapeless clouds drift and dissolve into a purple evening. Everything returns, precisely configured and without effort. Blackbirds scatter in flight, going to school, or leaving and returning. I am in another land of once-familiar trees, tamarind, star fruit, mango, their leaves brushing against my face. A woman sings. A woman prays. I turn myself over to a profusion of purple, wholly tinged with expectation.
Quy. I whisper to her. I feel her name run through my body, like a wish and its immediate fulfillment.
The reply comes back in a shimmering glow. The moment lingers, holding itself together on a pinprick of perfect grandeur. It is possible to leave where I am and join it.
Quy, I say, tentatively, then loudly. She is a beam of light, moving through an unimaginable sweep of time and space like a wave that dances. She is like a guardian spirit, bright and warm and undispelled by death. She is within reach right here, determined and unfaltering, a perfect picture of herself.
The world expands for the sake of the heart. I am capable of more risk and more magnanimity.
Quy. She is by the door, giving me a farewell or maybe a welcoming bow and smiling. Joy spreads through me. Quy. The moment I say her name out loud, however, I am awake, and immediately, a cold, stark despondency overcomes me.
I close my eyes and hardly dare to breathe. Through the window I see the moon sinking. I am determined to return to where I was, but it is not to be. Instead, I remain here, in the present, inside the tantalizing shape that she once occupied.
I am back in my room in the nursing home, restless, and caught inside the adrenal surge of the dream I wish to prolong. My heart is too weak and irregular to remove fluid from my lungs but I can feel it surge when I think of Quy. There is a deep symmetry inside this backward-flowing time, like a return to the beginning, like watching the gestation of the earth.
I dream of it as a lover would. And I know this dream for what it is. A warm thrill runs through me and I am still prolonging the bliss.
I know I am expected. It is a knowledge born of a sudden, piercing consciousness. I am bathed in it, in this feeling of home, which was once barely imaginable. There is a place for me to go toward. There is a time when that will occur. And this recognition opens up into a sense of peace that envelops me completely.
I think of Phong’s arrival by my bedside the previous week, spilling confessions. The stories he had harbored that I knew nothing about. I was overwhelmed by his admissions and his collusion and treachery, his scheming and connivance, his deceit underpinning more than fifty years of our lives together. Countries betray other countries. Why should I have been surprised that friends betray friends? There he was finally, inside an expectant silence that enveloped us like a ghost fog—like the white phantom fog that covered my paratroopers and me when we were set up by a local scout as we headed for enemy sanctuaries inside Cambodia. So many of my men were killed that night. I squeezed my eyes shut. I smelled the faint tang of cigarette. I wondered if Phong had anything to do with that ambush. But I will never know.
He was about to leave. He moved lopsidedly toward the door. The metallic hinge in his leg creaked and he almost stumbled. And suddenly, I could see his frantic search for absolution. It was clear to me. His face, his spirit, and his very being were rearranged in a way that pled for forgiveness. His life haunted him. He was still there, weary and used up but caught inside a deep regret.
I am thinking now not of his first two visits but a later one, the private one between him and me, without Mai’s or Bao’s knowledge. There was a knock and then he materialized by my bedside, watching me with dark, foreboding eyes. I have more to tell, he declared simply. His lips quivered as he mustered a tight-lipped smile for my sake. He was shivering. I steadied him with my hand and gave him time to regain his composure. His head was cocked, his face determined and fixed with a warrior’s gaze. Then he began to talk, all in an unadorned rush.
Do you understand, he asked almost too aggressively when finished. His hands were pressed against his chest, fingers interlocked.
Do I understand? I pushed the bedcovers aside and steered my thoughts back to each revelation. This is what he said, I told myself as I combed through each of his astonishing disclosures.
“I left out something important in the letter I wrote when we landed in Malaysia. And I wanted to tell you about it yesterday but Mai was here.”
“What more could you have told me after you told me about Thu’s death and your true face, Phong?” I asked.
My heart pounded erratically against my chest. But then immediately, I knew. I knew whatever hard little packet of news he had to share would involve not politics or war but my wife.
“Quy was pregnant in 1975. No one knew. I am quite certain you did not know yourself.” He paused. “She delivered the baby after the fall of Saigon.”
A sticky, panicky doubt took over. My first impulse was to pretend I had heard nothing, that this newly revealed truth had not touched me in the least. I could stare at the whitewashed walls and allow my eyes to take in everything and nothing at the same time.
Of course the child could not be mine. It must be Phong’s, was my first thought. The bastard. I wanted to knock him out with a quick left hook.
He finally got what he had for so long wanted. My goosefleshed arms went cold and rigid. I recalled that brief interlude from the day before, the scintillating sense of peace that enveloped me when Phong’s confession nudged us toward the path of reconciliation. But now I flashed him an angry, accusatory look.
“Her brother and I were there to help the midwife when the baby came in November. It was only seven months after the fall of Saigon but it was clear by then—a mixed-race child was out of the question.”
Phong covered his face with his hand. He looked at me in his obliging way to gauge my reaction to yet another volley of confessions. I could feel my mind drift, as if I were looking down on Phong and myself from an immense distance.
“It was not merely a sense of precautionary anxiety that made me do what I did,” he said in a husky voice, his hand clenching and unclenching. “These children were considered half-breeds, disreputable reminders of the much-hated Americans. I don’t have to tell you any of this. I saw it all with my own eyes. These kids were being rounded up, their families became pariahs. Even our long-standing credentials with the Vietcong would not be enough to keep trouble away.”
His eyes narrowed and teared. His story was still unfolding, and in the middle of it, he let out a sob. He then began speaking at a furiously accelerating pace.
“She suffered a terribly hard labor. Two full days of contractions. I still remember how her skin was hot to the touch, flaming from within, how the muscles and tendons were stretched taut, and how she collapsed after the baby slipped with a damp, sucking sound into the midwife’s hands. Then I saw the baby’s scandalously half-American face. I caught the midwife’s faintly pursed lips, the darting eyes, the snickering up-and-down appraisal. And I knew. I could feel it down at the molecular level—it would be suicide to keep this baby. All of us would suffer. I watched as it nuzzled against its mother’s chest, fingers searching for nipples and breasts. Quy’s eyes flicked here and there as she took in her child’s face. Our eyes met for one anguished moment, and almost immediately after, she curled up and fell into a deep sleep.
“The silence was ruthless, unbearable. I did not have the vocabulary or the ability to tell her my fears. The baby stared at me glassy-eyed, its head cocked to the side. I must admit I felt drawn to it. But your brother-in-law and I knew what we had to do. I want you to know it wasn’t from hard-heartedness. We had to do it. We took the baby from Quy as she slept, knees still drawn to her chest. I felt feeble in my legs. This little girl. Her round waxy head lying against my palm. Less than one hour old and already she could grab my pinkie and squeeze it. I washed the baby in our tub, her eyes peeking at us with a sparkle and glint. We took her to an orphanage in Vung Tau that very night.
“The next day when her brother told her what we had done, her body shook. She let out a long, sustained scream. Night after night we could hear her silky whisper, ‘My baby, my baby,’ her body a tightly curled inert mass, like that of a sleeping animal that refuses to budge. What could he say after? What could I say? We both struggled against the numbness of what we had done. But we were convinced it was the only way. For the baby’s sake, not just ours.”
Phong paused. �
��Not just ours,” he repeated almost hysterically. He was watching me intently, his breathing hushed, his eyes unblinking and impenetrably dark. Perhaps he was asking for forgiveness. I could not tell. How perverse, how ironic, how sad, I thought, that even the most calculating and ruthless act—taking a child from its mother—couldn’t save them.
“This memory still haunts me. Loosening the baby’s grip, taking each of her fingers and prying it from her mother’s breast. Quy’s long wail and the forlorn look on her face afterward.”
By what dispensation of force and authority did he think he had the right to do what he did?
“We were cowards,” Phong finally said softly, shaking his head. He stood there like a penitent hoping to be redeemed. “Of course you are right to have harbored contempt for me all these years.”
I swallowed hard. I tried to shrug it all off. His terrible predicaments—Thu’s suicide and his Vietcong connections—were immediately unimportant. What struck me with a fury in the small hard center of my chest was Quy’s baby deposited in an orphanage somewhere in Vietnam. A part of my wife, now a whole being, roaming the streets. I imagined her, lost and alone. The follies of thirty years ago interleaving with the here and now. Perhaps she is a street vendor in Saigon. Perhaps she has escaped Vietnam and is living somewhere in the United States or Canada or Australia.
An old grief coiled and uncoiled inside me. Phong let out a barely suppressed sigh, his hand resting tentatively on my shoulder. I cupped my hand over his. A long sadness defined him. Although it is almost unsayable—we are so far apart from each other—I too know the feeling, though in a different way, and I felt myself oddly bound to him. There is no cosmic perch from which to watch and judge, and I too have mourned for a world that is vanishing or already gone. Our true business has been with the past. But there before me stood this broken man. “Phong,” I muttered. He heard me call his name. I looked into his eyes and saw a man at the desultory end of his life, going over what should have been done differently and wishing perhaps for the proverbial second chance, to re-create the past for the present. Despite our different paths, we are here, bereaved and together, facing the essential elements of life in our final days. Despite our divergent and disjointed lives, they meet in the here and now, in a single point of pathos, inside this bleak nursing home.