The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  If only he saw the potential of retaining walls, these seemingly modest structures. Because something small can fail just as spectacularly as something big. Nobody told Paul this either.

  The day he quit engineering was the day his father died, and he left Montreal soon after. If asked why he would want to trade Montreal for Vancouver, the Canadiens for the Canucks, Paul will never mention all the strangers he met in Montreal whose first question to him was whether he was his father’s son. He will never mention the last straw, that woman he picked up at a bar in the Old Quarter, that night in his apartment when, in tearful gratitude, she lifted the floating edge of her left breast to show Paul the scar that his father had left on her as a child. He will not speak of the odd satisfaction he gets for being paid in Vancouver to teach something that he never really had to learn.

  And anyway, he still keeps his Canadiens key chain.

  The statue of General Tran is hollow. Thuong could have carried it himself down Fleming Street to the bus stop on Kingsway, but he got Christian to help him. It is time for the boy to taste labour.

  Thuong and the boy carry the statue outside with the General gazing skyward. The boy has the General by his heels while Thuong cradles his upper shoulders with his palms. The boy has to walk backwards. As soon as Christian turns his head so that he can see the way ahead, Thuong stops.

  “Don’t lose your focus,” says Thuong. “Keep your eyes on me.”

  Neighbours stare from their yards as the pair take delicate steps down the sidewalk. Thuong has walked this path many times before, but now it feels much longer. He starts to count the number of blocks.

  Sweat forms around the boy’s temples. It’s his mother’s fault, putting so many layers of clothes on him. “Don’t you dare drop it,” says Thuong, and the boy nods. Four blocks, five blocks, six, and he sees the sweat come down the boy’s face. Or is it tears?

  At the bus stop, they set the General back on his feet. Thuong strokes his son’s ear. “Well done,” he says, just in time to see the bus with the twin sparkles of its BC Hydro livery.

  They get off after only a couple of stops. The outside of the temple looks like an autobody shop, with its corrugated siding and flat rooftop. The inside smells otherworldly, but what Thuong first thinks is incense is actually plaster dust. The space was used briefly as a tae kwon do dojo, but the business was unprofitable. The lowered rents have provided an opportunity for the Vietnamese community’s first Buddhist temple.

  The abbot greets Thuong with a hug. “We’re still renovating,” he says.

  “It’s already better than gathering to pray in someone’s basement.”

  The monk laughs. “It has been too long,” he says. “Are you here for a favour or a blessing?”

  “Not a favour, but I could always use a blessing. I am here to make you an offering. General Tran Hung Dao.”

  “That is a gift no man can give.”

  Thuong takes the monk outside, where Christian is guarding the statue. The General looks no more out of place on this intersection with its gas stations than the monk in saffron robes.

  “You’ll agree he is entitled to a more suitable venue than my study.”

  “But we are making a house for Lord Buddha,” says the monk.

  “Of course. The General won’t usurp Buddha. Perhaps give General Tran a small space for people who want to make him an offering as well. You’ll get more visitors.”

  The monk shuffles his sandals. “If we let the General in, then who’s next? We’ll open a floodgate to more statues of deities.”

  “You shouldn’t worry.”

  “This is to be a serious place of contemplation and enlightenment.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want it to become a place where men go to make offerings to get rich, or where women go to light incense to get pregnant.”

  “It shouldn’t come to that,” says Thuong. “Besides, it’s the deity Me Sanh that the women pray to in order to get pregnant, not Tran Hung Dao.”

  “I suppose you’d want a share of the offerings,” says the monk.

  This makes Thuong smile. “I could always use a blessing.”

  The monk agrees to reserve a small space for General Tran, perhaps near the front door to ward off evil spirits. Before leaving, he gives Thuong a box of joss sticks made out of the best aloeswood from their homeland. Josephine should be relieved.

  It is turning out to be a fine afternoon, and so Thuong walks home the whole way, carrying Christian on his shoulders.

  “What would you do without me?” says Josephine. Today she has untangled two girls fighting over a toy, consoled another boy, wiped another tear, kissed another bruise, plugged, once again, the floodgate of hell.

  “I don’t know,” says Paul.

  “Maybe you can pay me a salary.”

  Paul smiles. “As if that was possible.”

  “Then private lessons, for my son?”

  Paul nods. He has noticed how much further Christian has advanced than the other children. Josephine has been tutoring Christian at home. While the others are still learning single words, Christian is already making sentences with properly conjugated verbs.

  “You’re a teacher too,” says Paul. “What could I offer?”

  “Your voice,” she says. “Your Parisian accent. Not my Vietnamese French.”

  “Your accent is fine,” he says, but puts up only weak resistance.

  Paul takes from his desk Goscinny and Sempé’s Le Petit Nicolas. They find a booth in a White Spot down the street. Josephine orders all three of them mushroom burgers even though Paul didn’t ask for one. He has a sandwich at home. But when he smells the mushrooms, he is silently grateful for it.

  Paul gets Christian to read the Goscinny. He has heard Christian’s voice rise above the others during class, but has never heard it alone in close quarters. Although Paul cannot take credit for the boy’s sudden grasp of the language, he can hear in Christian faint echoes of his own street joual, something he has been trying to purge since his first summer in Paris, the way he still runs his words together. Christian’s voice is also layered with a wavering musicality — the Vietnamese accent that Josephine has imparted to her son and now wants to get rid of.

  “He reads beautifully,” says Paul.

  “Then it’s something worth working on?” says Josephine. Paul nods, and Josephine sees the little frayed threads on Paul’s collared shirt. If only she had the money, she would buy Paul a new one.

  The Doberman breaks through the wooden fence while Josephine is picking mint leaves in the backyard. The landlord forbids any garden, but has not noticed the mint grove that she planted. The dog heads straight for Josephine, who is on her knees with her back turned. She does not register the Doppler effect of the oncoming muzzle.

  Thuong gets in the way just before the dog lunges. She has no idea where Thuong came from, but that’s nothing new. He slams his thin bare arm lengthwise between the dog’s open jaws, like a crowbar, to the back of the dog’s mouth. The dog’s teeth drip saliva, then blood. No longer barking, it wheezes like a broken flute and retreats back through the gap in the fence.

  “Your arm.”

  “It’s nothing,” says Thuong. “It’s the dog’s blood. I broke its jaw.” Still, there are teeth marks on Thuong’s arm that Josephine has to clean up. The noodles she made are now waterlogged, wasted.

  The problem is not Thuong’s loyalty but his wisdom in exercising it. Like when Josephine had heard a loud clapping and climbed up to the rooftop of her school in Saigon to survey what seemed like a thunderstorm in the middle of a sunny day — the quiet hush of a single blue-and-white Renault taxi coasting past the line of baby palm trees on the street below, the orange-tiled roofs of the villas dotting the neighbourhood, and the blue sky in the far distance turning grey from crackling storm clouds of smoke. She had been up there so long, standing in the dizzying sunshine and mesmerized by the firefight on the outskirts of the city, that Thuong went after her
and carried her back down, thinking she was going to jump off. On the last flight of stairs he tripped and they both fell. He broke her fall and his arm in the process.

  Or the time he came home with a broken thumb. He said he had just won them a flight to Hong Kong on a diplomatic carrier by beating a colonel at cards. Later, Josephine was told by Thuong not to pay attention to the rumours that he had shot a private because the colonel had ordered him to, and was sent away to shut him up. “Don’t question fortune,” Thuong said. He never explained how he broke his thumb.

  Or that night in Hong Kong when Thuong had a crisis of conscience and jumped into the harbour to swim back to Vietnam to fight for his country. The Hong Kong Marine Police fished him out and found nothing on him except for his toothbrush and a wallet with Josephine’s picture.

  It has become routine for them to convene after school at the White Spot. Paul looks forward to the post-classroom calm of listening to Christian’s lone voice as he reads, and to helping prune the boy’s voice to its sharper, truer self.

  On this day they do not meet after class. Josephine has to take Christian to the dentist. Paul, though, insists that they continue the lesson later in the day, so that Christian will not lose his momentum. In the meantime Paul naps in his studio apartment. He does not feel like pulling out the mattress, so he sleeps on the couch, surrounded by posters and knick-knacks acquired from all the places he has been to: a Monet print from the Louvre, sand in a bottle from Mauritius, replica Lewis chessmen from London. Paul had travelled mostly with his father. He hasn’t done much since. Just hasn’t had the time, or otherwise hasn’t been able to afford it.

  The three of them meet, this time, in the late afternoon. Paul wears a freshly ironed shirt. She wears, for the first time, lipstick. Christian seems more withdrawn. Everyone acts more gingerly around each other. It has to do with the break after the class, the change in the angle of sunlight.

  Yet she can ask questions that she would not during the day. Like: “Are you a Roman Catholic?”

  “Yes,” says Paul, which is not a lie, because he was baptized.

  “Which church do you attend?”

  “The one at school, sometimes,” he says, which is a lie.

  “We usually go to St. Joseph’s, but we’ll try the school’s. Then we’ll see you this Sunday?”

  “Sure,” says Paul, then steers them back to the lesson. He pulls out from his vest pocket his paperback version of L’Étranger. “Christian can read from this.”

  “Oh no,” says Josephine. Paul has never seen her blush before.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s too young.”

  Josephine takes a deep breath and smiles. “That’s fine,” she says. “He can try.”

  Christian puts his fingers on the page as if trying to find the words by touch. To help him along, Josephine reads: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” She is more uncomfortable reading French out loud than just speaking it herself, feels that her instrument is too blunt for Camus’s words, that she is tone-deaf to his music. Paul nods and smiles. Christian repeats his mother’s words. Under Paul’s forgiving gaze, Josephine finds it in her to continue to read and to wait for her son’s echo.

  They read until she looks up at the clock and gasps. “I’m late for work.”

  “You work at night?”

  “Yes, downtown. I have to take Christian home first.”

  “I can take him,” says Paul.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No problem. Is someone at home?”

  “His father and grandmother.”

  “Okay then.”

  Josephine darts off. Later, Christian leads Paul down Fleming Street, keeping two steps ahead, past stucco houses and wooden hydro poles. Paul sings “Ballade à la lune” to cut the silence. An oncoming car has its high beams on, narrowing his pupils, and when he adjusts to the night again, Christian is gone.

  Christian must have turned the corner into a side alley. Paul starts running. When he reaches the next turn to the back alley, he sees Christian pumping his legs beneath the lamplight. He catches up, puts a hand on Christian’s shoulder. They are both panting.

  “This isn’t a game,” says Paul.

  “This is my home,” says Christian. Paul follows him down concrete stairs to the back door. Thuong answers the door wearing an unfortunate wife-beater. He has to crane his neck to meet Paul eye to eye.

  “Did Tommy send you?” says Thuong, then notices Christian. “Where did you find him?”

  “I’m his French teacher,” says Paul.

  Thuong smiles. “I’m a teacher too. Well, almost. I study economics.”

  Thuong rubs the dressing on his arm. His eyes are red and slightly bulging, and Paul thinks at first that Thuong is drunk, but his stare is too steady and lucid. With the look of murder, but lucid.

  “How is my son doing?”

  “He’s wonderful.”

  “I’m so relieved,” says Thuong. “A good teacher is so important in a young man’s life.”

  “I agree,” says Paul.

  Thuong seems to be staring at Paul’s forehead, maybe trying to look him in the eyes.

  “You need a haircut,” says Thuong, “and a shave.”

  Paul brushes the back of his scruffy head. “Maybe so.”

  “Commanding respect begins with a good haircut and a close shave.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Stay for tea.”

  “Thank you, but no,” says Paul. He heads back to the alleyway.

  Josephine works at the top of a thirty-storey building. Or at least that is where she starts, before making her way down one storey at a time, in her cleaner’s uniform and cart with the dual mop bucket. Her luxury is a silk handkerchief that she wraps around her face, the same one that shielded her from the sun in Saigon, and which now spares her from dust.

  The top floors are occupied by a law firm with varnished rosewood offices, its founders memorialized in oils hung on the walls. These offices are more lavishly appointed than any church she knows, yet they fall short of achieving the grace to which the firm no doubt aspires.

  She lingers at a wall-length window facing north. She rests her chin on her mop, eye level with the lighted ski slopes of Grouse Mountain. She has not been in a building this tall since she was in Hong Kong, where she saw the New Year’s fireworks. Gaudy dragons lighting up the night, which reminded her of the firefight she saw on that rooftop in Saigon.

  Up here her mind lingers on Paul and her son together, Paul’s voice, his freckled hands around L’Étranger. There is no way that heaven can be located in the sky, with what she has seen from this vantage point, considering what she thinks of when she is up this high.

  Professor Jennings calls Thuong into his office overlooking the North Shore Mountains, tells Thuong that his efforts to debunk Communist economics based on his application of game theory simply cannot be defended.

  “I’ll try again,” says Thuong. “Another hypothesis.”

  “There’s no point,” says Jennings. “It’s been five years. You’re brilliant, in your own way, but you aren’t meant for economics. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to realize this. That is the department’s failing.”

  “I’ll do anything,” says Thuong.

  By the time they are finished, both men are shaken. Thuong stares at the ground all the way to the bus stop. He will not head home. Not straight away. Somewhere is a card game to take his mind off things. Just penny-ante fare.

  On Sunday morning, Josephine wakes up alone in bed, thinking that Thuong has been spirited away. When she gets up to look for him, opens the back door, and sees what stands before her, she does not hear herself shriek, does not feel her heels leave the ground as she trips over the loose threshold, her chin landing on a clay pot on the concrete step.

  Outside stands the General. His expression, Josephine has finally decided, is of someone betrayed.

  Thuong, as always, appe
ars out of nowhere. “You’re bleeding,” he says. He pulls her off the floor. “You need a bandage.”

  “Why is he back?” she says. “I thought he had come for me.”

  “You have a guilty conscience.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Josephine goes into the kitchen for a white towel, which she presses to her chin.

  “I went to the temple. I found him in storage. The monks never intended to give him an altar.”

  “What were you doing at the temple?”

  “Praying.”

  “To whom?”

  Thuong ignores her question. “I couldn’t leave him there,” he says. He carries the statue back to its corner.

  “Wake up Christian. We should get ready for church.”

  “Go without me.”

  “Why?”

  He smiles apologetically. “I have to study.”

  Josephine and Christian walk to St. Maurice’s under cloud cover. Its church has no bells to greet the parishioners, no steps to ascend to the nave. The service is in English and so Josephine has difficulty understanding much of it. Paul arrives during the Universal Prayer in his Sunday best — a pair of navy-blue dress pants and a blazer, an orange bow tie with navy-blue polka dots — although he is shaggy around the ears and sporting a two-week growth on his face. He kneels beside her. He hasn’t knelt since he was a child. When they drop their chins in prayer, he feels as though they are play-acting. Before the prayer is over, Paul cheats, opens his eyes, and takes in Josephine’s profile while her eyes are closed. Her expression is beatific from this angle. He does not notice the welt on her chin until she turns her head.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Just an accident,” she says. The blood has dried, but the bruise on her chin is still blooming.

  “Your husband did this?”

  “I fell.”

  “Let me see.” Paul cannot help but touch her. It is the first time he has done so, two fingers on the boundary between white skin and violet. He tilts her bruise up like a jewel to the dim, yellow stained-glass light. It is a perfect oval. Nothing shaped so precisely can be by accident.

  In the pews they wish peace on their neighbours, many of whom are familiar children from the school and their parents, who smile among themselves, as if confirming a truth about Paul and Josephine that they have always known. Then they walk up together to receive Communion, while Christian receives a blessing.