“Yes, sometimes when we have too much choice it’s hard to make even one,” Henry said.
“That’s exactly how it is for me, Henry. But Ben always knew what he wanted. He never felt like the water encircling Campobello Island was going to drown him, the way I did. Ben always said the ocean simply meant there was an enormous world beyond and it made him appreciate the world he was actually living in. Ben has always blamed his father’s death on his need to see the world. So I understand why Ben is content at home.”
But her voice had caught then and Henry tilted his beautiful head to the side, knowing there were some things she couldn’t speak of easily. It had broken Viola’s heart to leave Ben behind but it would have broken her spirit to stay. It was easier to at least try to forget Campobello Island and everyone on it.
Henry asked about Viola’s boyfriend, Ralf, who was a software engineer. He’d been married once before and had a twenty-three-year-old daughter, the same age as Viola. She lived in New York and would call sometimes, usually hanging up if Viola answered. I don’t recognize you, the daughter said once. You are just one more. Don’t think you are the only one even now. Ralf said his daughter was jealous. She was insecure. She refused to grow up. Ralf did research on how to use the internet to make telephone calls. It was the way of the future, he said. He travelled frequently, so Viola was studying German, something to keep her busy while he was gone. She had no work papers, no official status. “I might have to fly back to Canada if we don’t sort something out. Ralf wants to get married but that seems so final.”
Henry’s face relaxed into what seemed to Viola to be a look of solace. “It might be a good idea to go home, Viola. There are worse places to live. I have a great affinity for Canadians. They’ve been kind to me.”
“That might be the case for you, but Canadians aren’t as nice as everyone seems to think. It’s easy to be a coward underneath all that beer and bacon.” Viola told him the Canadian embassy in Saigon had closed up shop in the night and fled just before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. The Vietnamese who’d worked for the Canadians found an abandoned building in the morning. “That wasn’t very compassionate,” she said, looking at the sky.
Henry’s voice was serious, what Viola imagined it would sound like if he were addressing a group of students. “Viola, no one puts their best foot forward when the army is advancing. Things did not go as Ho Chi Minh planned. He was hopeful after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in the First Indochina War. But the negotiations at the Geneva Conference in 1954 were not what Ho wanted. Zhou Enlai was the Chinese diplomat involved in these negotiations, assisting the Vietminh. Zhou Enlai was brilliant.”
“Is he why you became a diplomat?”
Henry laughed. “Oh, Viola, I was selected and told I would be a diplomat and that, like Zhou Enlai, my job would be to think of my people. You know, nearly a quarter million Chinese died in what you call the Korean War.”
“I can’t imagine so many people,” Viola said.
He closed his eyes. “Zhou’s main concern was keeping the Americans away. A permanent partition of the Vietnamese peninsula suited China.” Henry paused and then opened his eyes and looked at the pigeons. “The freedom of my people suited me.”
Viola slapped a small puddle with her shoe.
Henry looked at her foot and then at her face. “We have a saying: The general sees with only one eye, the diplomat with both. War may be the domain of soldiers, but resolutions are always the purview of diplomats.” Henry smiled. “Uncle Ho discovered even hope must be negotiated. But Vietnam was his home and he would not abandon it after he had returned from so many years in exile.”
Viola made tiny ripples in the small puddle with the toe of her shoe. “Ben’s father was an American photojournalist and now he’s buried on Campobello Island. He was a combat photographer and died on a helicopter shot down near Danang. He was twenty-nine when he died and Ben was just a baby. Ben puts flowers on his father’s grave every Sunday afternoon even when it’s snowing. He’ll never know his dad, but he tries at the grave. He really believes by staying on Campobello Island he can somehow be close to him and have the life his father threw away. Ben won’t leave the island, not even for me.” Viola squeezed her eyes shut to keep the tears in but they dripped down her cheeks anyway.
Henry took her hand. “I understand your Ben. In China we pray to our ancestors. The old ways are slow to pass. My father was sad when I went to Beijing. He said to complete the circle of life one must bury one’s father. I laughed at him, Viola, but I laughed less as I grew older. It is our history with the people we love which binds us together. Being close to the graves of the dead has life in it even if you cannot see this.” He took out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and cheeks, and kept holding her hand.
She moved closer to him and he put his arm around her. “Ben puts silk flowers on the grave in the winter, not real ones because they’d freeze. I wasn’t very diplomatic when I said I wouldn’t marry him, how I left the island so fast.” She could feel the warmth of his leg next to hers. They both laughed and Viola felt warm then. She rested her head on Henry’s shoulder and his voice was very quiet as he leaned toward her and whispered with his lips on her ear, “Regret is never worth the price, Viola. We pay for the rest of our lives.” They sat together without speaking for another fifteen minutes. When they walked to the subway a large flock of pigeons at the other end of the park lifted up into the grey sky.
* * *
On most Friday afternoons some of the students ate lunch at a cheap Yugoslavian restaurant near the school. Henry was the only Chinese student who ever joined them. After, they would walk together to the subway, the U-Bahn. It was always Mary, Viola, and Farzad who would walk together, but these days Farzad and Kwan-Sun had been walking in the other direction, holding hands.
Henry began to wait and walk with Mary and Viola. He and Mary would board the train on the left and Viola would take the one on the right to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and then take the S-Bahn commuter train to Darmstadt, back to the empty apartment. Ralf would be home on the weekends and they’d eat and then ride his motorcycle through the countryside. He knew she was homesick and hoped the adventures would cure her. He would take her to medieval castles in the hills and as they’d climb the turrets he’d tousle her hair and tell her she was gorgeous.
Ralf never approved of her housekeeping. He’d unpack his suitcase and then vacuum. It wasn’t a criticism; it was how he relaxed. You had to stay on top of the dust, he’d comment. And then he’d tie her to the bed and take a feather duster to her, from her toes, up her legs, over her breasts, her face, feathers soft on her eyelashes. And he’d pack again on a Sunday evening, gone before she awoke, alone.
* * *
The day she went back to Henry’s apartment they’d been swarmed by an army of pigeons in the park. They had gone back to the park after lunch, just the two of them. The pigeons of Frankfurt were nasty and knew no discretion. They didn’t wait quietly for crumbs but hopped and leapt about in a frenzy, even the maimed birds, things with one eye, one leg, bald heads.
She wondered how they got their injuries and Henry laughed. “What is significant is how they survive them.” He joked they were ancestors of war birds — while the bomb-flattened Zentrum of Frankfurt might be nothing more than a replica, the pigeons carried the DNA of the survivors. They could withstand an apocalypse now. There were pigeons in China, he told her. But having pets was now considered bourgeois. “They are not in the parks like this,” he said.
Henry always wanted more stories of Campobello Island, and she told him it was near Maine, near Passamaquoddy Bay — it was easy to talk about the geography. Her hands fluttered in front of her face, in front of her breasts, up over her head, as she drew him a map in the air. She told him of Ben and the goats, and the summer market where they worked together. “He thinks if his father had been a farmer and not a combat photographe
r, he wouldn’t have died. I went away to university, but I came home every holiday, every summer. The autumn after I graduated I went to Saigon. I went because I saw his father’s photos. They spoke to me. Ben said I’d never come back. And I haven’t. The island felt as though it was growing smaller every day.”
Viola asked Henry why he was in Frankfurt. He was so easy to talk to and yet shared so little. He’d been at Tiananmen Square, he told her — still watching the pigeons, his voice matter-of-fact. He’d been in prison and then under house arrest. The Canadians had negotiated on his behalf, for his safety. His voice became faint and she bent close. His father had died during this time.
“Could you ever go back?” Viola asked, holding her arms up as she shook her cold hands.
Henry’s eyes followed her fingers as though they were wings in the sky, and he reached for them, clasping her icy hands in his as he told her no, he did not foresee it. “Nothing yet in the tea leaves,” he said, grinning.
Henry wanted to know again about Campobello and she told him of the beaches, of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer place which was now part of a park. Viola’s family home was now an inn. Her father was ill. He had frontal lobe dementia, something Viola never knew existed until the doctor called a family meeting. He would have to be institutionalized. It was only a matter of time, her mother had written in a letter. It was easier to be away, Viola said.
“It is nice you have a choice, Viola.”
She closed her eyes then, but there was no judgment in Henry’s voice and he held her hand tighter.
It was now late in the afternoon and they got up and walked toward the subway. Viola asked about the camp he was staying in. Henry let out a big guffaw sort of laugh, which was unlike him. He never let out more than a quiet chuckle. When he regained his composure, he told Viola his accommodations were not actually in a refugee camp. It was not what she saw in the news — the tents and jeeps, aid workers doling out bowls of rice. Viola’s naïveté was endlessly amusing to him, and to Viola herself. “Housing is perhaps a better word than camp.” He said her island view of the world was charming.
They had not discussed how Viola would come home with him. This week Ralf was away in Poland until Saturday evening. They rode the train together and both stood up as it slowed at Henry’s stop. The door had slid open and he held out his hand.
It was a tall, generic building. Henry and the two other Chinese classmates shared the small, tidy apartment. Two bedrooms, with one of them sleeping in the living room. The roommates had not been in class — away for the weekend, Henry said. Viola did not ask where.
Henry led her by the hand to a little bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a tiny table beside the bed, on it a photo of a smiling young Chinese woman holding a baby, and beside it, a black-and-white picture of a young boy and his father and mother, standing by a cow.
Henry turned to Viola and took her face between his hands and kissed her, sucking her breath inside of him, her fingers all over his flesh, mapping her way to him. They made love on the thin mattress, his long hard body pressed down and in on hers, spreading over her as the shadow from a tree would. Henry was silent and when she cried out he covered her lips with his mouth.
He asked her, after, as they lay there drinking tea, if she would stay and marry Ralf. Or if she would go home to her young man with the flowers. Frankfurt was not a city for her, he whispered. There were no beaches. “As the Germans say, Zu Hause ist es doch am schönsten,” he said with a smile. The late-afternoon sun tunnelled in through the small window. “No place like home,” he said.
Henry told Viola they’d said his wife and daughter would be safe, but only on the condition he go into exile without them. It was the Canadian embassy that had arranged things with Germany. Henry hoped he could one day go to Canada. They were working on this possibility, but it would be years, and his life was in exile now, he knew this. There would be no visits to his father’s grave.
Henry cooked noodles for supper and early the next morning he brought her persimmons and tea. Grey sky filled the window and she imagined she was on the shores of Campobello, the traffic outside the surf breaking on the sand-and-pebble beach. Henry touched the necklace that draped over her collar bones, the tiny silver starfish perched near her shoulder. He straightened it as Viola held up her hand and spread her fingers out. “Did you know the starfish is a symbol for safe travel?” Viola asked.
She thought of Ben and his goats, and his armful of wildflowers for his father on Sundays in July, her father now drooling in a wheelchair, his quivering fingers and small, grateful smile when she took his rough hand in hers, conversation an incomprehensible clamour to him but finding reassurance in this touch — as though Viola was still a little girl and they were sitting on the dock together while he mended his lobster traps.
Viola remembered running on the beach with Ben when the evening sky hung before them in muted oranges and banners of crimson clouds. A hot afternoon in the boat and the wind snapping the sail with that crack she loved so much. The sun rising on the Bay of Fundy, delicate solar yellows staining the glassy waves on a June morning as salt-spray roses bloomed at the top of the beach. The quiet of dawn, a quiet Viola realized she carried with her wherever she went, a solitude in which she carried Ben and her father. This was Henry’s gift of perspective, a restoration and appreciation of the past which had been so brutally cut away from him.
“Viola,” Henry whispered, taking her hand in his, “home is something we must sometimes negotiate. But it is always worth the negotiations, no matter how complex. You must not send yourself into exile when you can return and make your way. We Chinese have a saying: Your heart will lead you to a path and if you do not follow it, you will find, as the years pass, that you are still at its beginning.” It was then he glanced at the photo on the small table. He shut his eyes and was quiet for a moment before he took Viola’s hand and kissed the palm, his lips soft and warm on her cold, pale skin.
Full Bleed
It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into the world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision . . .
— Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
Adam has no idea why he agreed to take his ancient in-laws on this stupid outing over dirt roads through the Valley and up into the distant hills they call mountains. He feels like he’s changing into someone else, reckless, with no appreciation for caution. They’ve been driving for an hour on tiny roads that make Adam think of another time, of early settler days. Adam is from Vancouver and hates rural life on the East Coast. There’s too much wild nature here. Big trees in city parks with groomed, accessible paths are more to his liking.
Still, he picked up Grandma Charlotte and Great Aunt Doris-the-Spinster after lunch, for a drive in the country. As soon as the women got in the car, though, Charlotte insisted that they visit the site of the old abandoned homestead. She had no interest in his little Sunday drive to see the autumn foliage. “I’m no tourist, Adam, not like you,” Charlotte said.
But Aunt Doris didn’t want to do the trip to the homestead this year, she said, and why was Charlotte insisting they go today? They usually went much earlier in the season, she reminded her, when it wasn’t almost dark in the late afternoon. “And besides, I’m done with going up the Mountain to keep the family memories alive, Charlotte. We’re old now and the past is past. You agreed we’d be normal old ladies for once.”
Charlotte began sobbing and Doris finally agreed just to get her to be quiet. Doris had worked as a clerk in the town office until she retired and if ever asked about it, she said the job required a specialization in handling idiots. Charlotte clutched her purse and giggled, pleased as a conniving child, her tears gone as quickly as they had welled up. “Due north, Adam,” she said.
Now Adam is driving north toward the Mountain and he has a choice
to make. It’s up to him to refuse to take them north to the homestead, decide not to take them anywhere after all, or to insist on just a short afternoon drive as originally planned. But, smiling like a fiend, Adam suddenly shouts “Yes!”
He starts up the Mountain thinking of how his wife had always described the annual outing as taking the ladies on a short little drive to see the pretty leaves. She never once mentioned taking them to the ancestral place deep in the back country and he has no idea where on earth they are going. Charlotte is so sure of herself, though, that Adam assumes he can find it with her directions.
As they reach the top of the mountain there is a bad omen of a house, a decaying Victorian with an enormous rotting verandah and boarded-up windows.
“Right there is where your wife’s childhood best friend lived. Seraphina was her name. She was the one who put the idea of going to university into Bethie’s head,” Doris says in a clipped, sombre voice as she waves toward the house. “No one lives there now. That’s what happens when you learn more than you need to.” They continue on for another forty-five minutes. There is not another house in sight, just thick forest on either side of the small country road.
As the car bumps over the deep potholes Adam clings to the steering wheel, wondering why his wife might have lied about where exactly she took the old ladies every year. A part of Adam thinks he should turn around immediately. It is too late in the day for a long outing. It will get dark soon. The old ladies aren’t dressed for a walk. They should go home. The old sensible Adam would do this. But the new Adam keeps driving.
He is a graphic designer turned publisher of graphic novels, everything unfolding in his mind in carefully structured grids and panels. All his days storyboarded. As they drive along the dirt road with dense forest on either side, Adam observes how the autumn leaves are Pantone colours and part of the grid. The forest floor is a swatch book. Those long branches are PMS 1375. That massive leaf PMS 032 and the tree to the left is a brilliant PMS 101.
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