Longings, page 20
It wouldn’t be difficult for her to stay a few more days because her visa was still valid for three more weeks and Janet could help her rebook her return flight. And Chiến, who was always so supportive, wouldn’t question it if she told him she needed to interview Australian veterans for her incipient novel.
Anthony’s fingers gently weaved into hers like small waves.
“You must be exhausted. Have a good sleep, and wake up refreshed. I’ll be back here at 7:30 in the morning. If you decide to go to the airport, I would be delighted to take you there. But I hope you’ll accept my invitation for our getaway in Lorne.” He kissed her cheek and continued, “I’m such a fool. I want to tell you I love you very much, Lan.”
Lan sat in the taxi as it sped down the highway. The sky was blue and peppered with clusters of white clouds. In the winter, these white clouds floated lower and poured down heavy rains. During her college years, the downpours had drenched her and made her feel tremendously homesick.
Lan took out her cell phone and her fingers trembled as she texted, Chiến, I love you. Then she turned it off. In front of her, the driver was silent. It was 7 a.m.
In thirty minutes, Anthony would be at her hotel. He would be shocked to learn she had left. She would soon be at the airport for check-in. She had to return to Sài Gòn, to her family, because she knew that was where she belonged. Sài Gòn was crowded and polluted, but it was there that her hopes and inspirations bloomed.
She hoped that Chiến wouldn’t be surprised when receiving her message. It had been a long time since she had last shared such amorous words. It was high time that she cultivated her marriage so that new buds of love could open into flowers.
She also hoped that Anthony would appreciate her novel, which she had left at the front desk. On the first page of her book, she wrote, Anthony, please let the halcyon past rest. I wish you happiness. She believed that after reading her novel, he would understand why she needed to go back to her homeland so that she could continue to write stories about her people.
She lowered the taxi’s window and let the wind ruffle her hair. Spring was coming. Though she was far away from home, her heart was filled with euphoria as she thought about her kids’ chattering words, the melodies coming from her husband’s guitar, and the aroma of boiling bánh chưng and bánh tét.
The Smoke Cloud:
Nguyễn Thị Kim Hòa
“Mom, are you leaving?”
Little Đen rushed to the green grass on the side of the house where his mother, Năm Thúy, was squatting, burning leaves. The hill was quiet. Thin smoke rose from the fire in a single thread, streaking across the sky. The boy scurried in front of her and crouched down so that his shadow blurred into the smoke.
“Mom, did you hear me? Are you leaving?”
Năm Thúy looked up at her son. His dark skin colored his name, Đen, or Black, which could never be wiped off. He herded cows and cut corn for the expansive collective farm that stretched to a mountain village. Bare head, naked all day long, his pubescent body was wilted like a dehydrated tree and his messy hair was bleached from the sun. Wiping again and again the sweat trickling down his face and neck, Đen gazed into his mother’s face.
He was waiting. Philip was probably still in the camp in the mountain also waiting.
“Leaving or not?” Năm Thúy asked the smoke that was drifting apart into dull plumes above. Those plumes of smoke aroused memories that wouldn’t dissipate into the sky but instead joined her beside the fire. Smoked-filled fragment after fragment of memories fell next to Năm Thúy on the yellow-green grass.
The memories stunk of smoke. But all the smoke looks the same when she tries to picture it. So when Năm Thúy tries to rummage through the memories in her head, she never makes it all the way home again.
Smoke was everywhere. It rose high like giant pillars connecting the earth with the sky. The pillars did not stand up straight: sometimes they twisted, sometimes they slanted, sometimes they jumped up and down with every bump of a three-wheel auto rickshaw. Năm Thúy, just a young girl back then, leaned out from her seat to look at the smoke.
“Mom, look at sister Năm Thúy! She’s falling,” her brother sitting next to her grunted.
Her mother said nothing, just raised one arm to grab Năm Thúy’s shirt, and pulled her down. The rickshaw passed a neighborhood that must have been bombed or hit by artillery. The thatched roofs were shriveled due to the hot smoke.
In that same village, just a few days before, another fire had burst up, smoking like that. Walking, hopping on a bus, and walking again and then being jostled in this rickety rickshaw on the road, Năm Thúy couldn’t remember how many plumes of smoke they had passed once they left their village. It was as if the smoke had been placed along their path to show them the way.
They traveled to an intersection near the airport where three Chăm towers thrust into the sky and blended in with the trunks of the surrounding trees. Năm Thúy’s mother told her to stay put while she took her brother to the market across the street to buy water. The sun was hovering above the tops of the towers as the market closed up for the day. But Năm Thúy stayed at the fork in the road, dehydrated and alone.
An old woman named Mrs. Ba who was carrying trash bags found Năm Thúy and led her back and forth through the market several times, but not a single soul remained. Thúy bawled uncontrollably. Mrs. Ba was bewildered. She had no idea what to do with the child who clung desperately to her, so they both dragged themselves toward the neighborhood next to the market. Mrs. Ba had looked after her ever since.
It was then that Thúy learned what an airport was. The barbed wire that circled it reminded her of the fences in her once-burning village. Inside, a heaping pile of rubbish grew higher every day. In the mounting heap they would find canned food, half-used rice bags, beer cans, steel mugs, and sometimes, if lucky, even a watch or a brand-new pair of glasses. But they had to be careful to avoid the sharp edges of the barbed wire fence. Bình, the boy who lived in a rickety hut at the end of the neighborhood, usually bent the barbed wires. His hands at times had bloody gashes—the familiar red of old bandages, rotten rabbit carcasses, and food scraps.
Living on the trash field near the airport, one’s nose was good only for filtering out smells rather than for breathing. Children like Bình and Thúy, even after going all the way to the intersection, could still smell the trash, whether it was new or days old and reeking like hell. Although Thúy had a keen sense of smell, she could never smell the way back to her home village.
When she had to fill in for Mrs. Ba and sell something salvaged from the pile of trash, Năm Thúy often lingered in front of the market. She stood there with limbs thin as sticks and a scrawny belly until the day her cheeks became full, her waist lithe, her eyes dreamy. In those days, Bình still waited for Thúy at the top of the hill for her to finish her day’s work, eventually going God knows where. Năm Thúy’s mother and her little brother still hadn’t returned.
From that hill, one could see the intersection where Thúy stood waiting for her mother. From up there, perhaps I will look down and see Mom, Năm Thúy thought.
One day Năm Thúy walked to the top of the hill with several other girls who worked up there. Some of them cleaned rooms, another washed dishes, some waited tables. Their eyes were alluring, their waists tight, their cheeks full. Năm Thúy walked into the Starlight. Its lights lit up the entire hilltop.
It wasn’t about putting on a Western dress and wear high heels. It wasn’t about sliding on the wooden floor to music. And it wasn’t about shaking off the old name, Năm Thúy, and taking on a new one, Diễm Thúy, which sounded like the name of a celebrated dancer in Sài Gòn. It wasn’t about receiving dollar notes pressed into her cleavage. It was just because the Starlight was the only bar on the hilltop that kept all its windows open.
Loud music blared and the sound of high heels striking the floor echoed in the bar. But that didn’t bother her. The only thing that bothered her was looking out the windows and seeing the intersection.
Only once did Diễm Thúy look out and not see the intersection, but instead, the mountain in the distance. That was when Major Thọ pressed her against the wall for what felt like ages, his hands groping underneath her dress up to her breasts and down to thighs and hips again. The dollar notes fell out of her bra and stuck in her hair when he pulled her to the floor.
“Your foster mother raised you to be a Việt Cộng, and she supplied them in the mountains for such a long time. Don’t think I’m blind. If I want, I could send the MPs up there to bring them to the station anytime.”
Diễm Thúy twisted and struggled on the floor, stale whispers filling her ear. Biting her lips to swallow a miserable cry, she saw the mountain through the window above her head. The mountain was not gloomy—there was no haze in the darkness. The mountain glowed with hundreds of thousands of eyes. Each eye was a light that shined on her naked, helpless body as it trembled on the floor.
“Thúy . . . please wait for me!” That pause after the first time she had held Bình’s hand by the hibiscus fence was a piercing, throbbing toll. The boy who used to untangle barbed wires softly for her, the one who, rumor had it, recently had been seen holding an AK-47 and going up the mountain—why was he suddenly looking at her through a window obscured by smoke?
Major Thọ mistook the fearful tears streaming down Diễm Thúy’s cheeks. He lifted his whiskered face and laughed uproariously, the stench of wine and self-gratification oozing out of him.
“Come on. I’m just saying. If you’re as sweet to me as you were today. You could become the boss of this bar, honey.”
“The boss of this bar” had to hold her tongue while dying to scrape the entire varnish off the dance floor where, each time dancing with clients, she imagined stepping on the stain of her own blood.
Ever since the night Diễm Thúy lay there on the floor beneath Major Thọ, she had to serve powerful figures in ornate outfits, coming from mysterious, far-off places.
“Here! I want you to meet the prettiest flower in our airport,” Major Thọ had once said as flattering laughter fluttered out from behind his drooping whiskers.
Diễm Thúy was mortified when her first customer, an old bald man, laughed as he stared at her cleavage. But the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that, eventually she became familiar with the laughter and was no longer embarrassed, but simply disgusted. She was so nauseated that she wanted to vomit right in the middle of the dining table, or on one of the Starlight’s crisp white bedsheets.
Whenever the bald man came and dropped onto a bed, Diễm Thúy closed her eyes. Not all of the rooms in the Starlight had windows. But maybe the bright mountain eyes could gaze through the walls.
When the girls who moved to the top of the hill saw Diễm Thúy in a glamorous dress every morning, holding a handbag, sitting in Major Thọ’s jeep on the way to a coffee house, they couldn’t conceal their envy and admiration.
“That slut has good karma. She’s taken a step toward becoming a lady,” a girl said.
But that good karma didn’t bless Diễm Thúy for long. Major Thọ’s wife flew straight from Sài Gòn to give her a slap on the face that left Diễm Thúy reeling as she descended from his jeep.
“Slut! How dare you sit in his vehicle?” she asked.
A crowd flocked to the Starlight only to regret having missed the moment when Major’s Thọ’s wife grasped Diễm Thúy’s hair and dragged her indoors, slamming the door behind them.
Since the major’s wife often appeared unexpectedly, and Major Thọ sporadically came without notice, Diễm Thúy could only sleep on temporary beds, sometimes in the attic or the dimly lit wine cellar. The men also varied from those in crisp uniforms with fine cologne to those who were more rough, their sweaty skin stinking of the government-supplied Bastos cigarettes.
It was strange, but Diễm Thúy experienced only the slightest feeling of revulsion in her throat when encountering their cigarette smoke. Only once did the familiar burning odor of a young officer’s hair shake her soul to its core. When she smelled it, she leaped up and grabbed the blouse she had just dropped to reveal her breasts. She stared at the client in astonishment.
“What’s your name? Did you once live on a village farm? Did you lose a sister at an intersection?” Diễm Thúy couldn’t help blurting out a torrent of questions.
A burning smell rose to her nostrils. She shivered when she realized what kind of smoke it was.
“Get out!”
The young client was embarrassed and confused by Diễm Thúy’s yelling at him. He grabbed his pants and ran out of the wine cellar.
Dropping onto the not-yet-wrinkled bed, she shakily opened a full bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured the whisky directly into her mouth. Its acidic flavor slipped down and down, carrying with it the scent of smoke. The smoke that wafted from a thatched roof, consumed by the fire. The smoke that rose from the village their rickshaw passed through. The smoke that clung to the hair of her younger brother, who had been sitting next to her.
“No!” she screamed.
Diễm Thúy flung the whisky bottle into the haunting shadow of smoke. To hell with the skin-stripping squint of the major’s wife when she would see half the cellar smashed into ruins. After that, Diễm Thúy refused to let certain men enter her room. Sniffing their fragrance, she always searched for the scent of smoke. Some men even had to endure her endless rant about some mini pancakes sold by a kapok tree across from a thatched house.
Those mini pancakes by the kapok tree across from a thatched-roofed house rippled in Diễm Thúy’s mind once when she happened to go home and see Đen squatting by Mrs. Ba, who was peeling an overcooked pancake off the pan. Đen’s cheeks glowed and his eyes opened wide. As she gazed into a molded clay pot another little face flared up into her memory. That child’s face also possessed full cheeks like Đen and showed the same anxiety.
“Sister Diễm Thuý only messes things up,” Đen grumbled.
Her heart racing, Diễm Thúy saw a little girl standing in a corner being punished, her arms folded. Above her, strips of white clouds floated past.
Staring into Mrs. Ba’s pot of rice flour, Diễm Thúy saw puffs of white foam. Clumps and clumps of white swirled in the pot: the same little clumps of flour that little girl, in her memory, tossed into the pot by accident and ended up being punished as they became lumpier.
A slap on the hand from Mrs. Ba snapped her back to the moment.
Đen climbed up the bed to sit next to her, stroking her arm, babbling, “Did Mrs. Ba hurt you, Mom?”
Holding her little son gently, she sniffed the scent of his soft hair so the wistful fragrance could more vividly conjure that thatched-roof house to which she never could return.
On weekends when Đen came up the hill to see her, Diễm Thúy would show him the intersection marked with the three towers.
“When I grow up, I’ll find Grandma for you!”
As sweet as a tiny piece of candy, Đen had learned how to console and hug his mother while embracing the way her eyes looked longingly to the three Chăm towers.
That sweet piece of tiny candy had also learned to sit still at the ice-cream cart, waiting for his mother.
Diễm Thúy sometimes had to remain on those beds forever; and when done, she would find that the ice-cream cart had rolled elsewhere, leaving empty jars scattered behind. But Đen was still sitting where his mother told him to wait for her, chin propped up in his hands like an old man.
Diễm Thúy felt the burn of memory when she saw her son waiting for her at the corner across from the Starlight every weekend the same way that she had waited for her mother. How could she stop the major’s wife from grasping her suntanned son and scrutinizing him from brows to toes?
“Let me see. What bastard do you look like? Or are you a dead ringer of my major!”
The major’s wife’s saccharine voice would rise to a pitch when Diễm Thúy passed by, screeching like grinding teeth, making her dizzy—the same way it felt to have her hair grabbed, in great clumps, or when her cheeks were swollen by piercing sores.
Women in the bar adored little Đen’s wise tongue. They loved how he crouched down, his chin cupped in his hands, waiting for his mother across the street. On weekends, they took turns walking him around the neighborhood near the Starlight when Diễm Thúy was stuck with clients.
On one weekday evening, when she went to pick her son up from the side of a theater down the hill, she was awestruck to see a strange, blond man in a black jumpsuit. She was even more shocked to see her son riding on the man’s shoulders with a great big grin.
“Are you the mother of this little angel?”
That was the first question she heard from Philip. It came in broken Vietnamese, which was quite a surprise. She turned mute, nodding her head perpetually like a machine.
“Yes . . . yes,” Diễm Thúy replied.
She nodded her head to whatever Philip said but understood nothing, no matter how the young pilot and Đen tried to translate. One kept rattling in English, while the other offered babbled stories that sounded like riddles.
Mrs. Ba was the one who disentangled the confusion. Stirring her betel leaves, she yelled, “Ah! That Philip. You’ve stayed up on the hill for a month without hearing about the incident. That bastard American! What the hell was he doing? His parachute dangling up in the apricot tree at the end of our neighborhood. He dared not cut his parachute strings for fear that he would fall onto land mines and explode into pieces. From the apricot tree, he kept calling, ‘Help! Help!’ I intended to stay indoors and ignore him like everyone else in this neighborhood. Screw him! Their land mines crippled our people, so if he blew apart, I wouldn’t care less. But because of this little dog.” She then glanced at Đen who ran and hid behind his mom’s back. “He scurried back and forth, calling ‘American! American! The American is calling for help!’ And the other kids in the neighborhood started yelling. I had no choice but to knock on the door of the village chief. The American was untangled. I thought you knew about it.”
