Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  “Dong.”

  A sharp intake of breath. “God.”

  “What the hell, Dong.”

  “A whole piastre for the whole night?” She shrugged, trying to make a joke. “Oh, come on.”

  Georges-Minh began to pace back and forth.

  “I followed the advice of a supposed friend,” she said. “Just wanted to find work. Respectable work, but I ended up in a godforsaken dance hall, serving drinks, forced to dance with customers. Hell, one thing led to another, here I am—Will you quit pacing?” She held open the mosquito netting for him, but he didn’t enter the bamboo bed. “You know, my mother has the cough, too. Her health hangs on a change of climate said this other doctor we saw in Danang. We haven’t the money to move. But I’m determined to try something. Anyway, who are you to judge? Who’s never had it hard.”

  He was stunned.

  She glared at him. “Don’t look at me like that. Won’t you at least say something? God. I’m not going to hold the mosquito net open forever. If you’re going to be my friend, fine. If not, get the hell out. Which is it?” She let the net fall. “In fact, if you’re going to have to think about it, get the hell out now.”

  “I’m sorry, Dong.” He went in and hugged her, then hugged her harder. He almost said, I forgive you. “Forgive me?”

  “Yes.”

  They clutched each other, two bodies on a bobbing boat. There were more rooms upstairs and the floors squeaked and men grunted and the sounds carried through.

  “So, what do we do now?” she said.

  He shrugged. “What do you want to do?”

  He confessed to Dong his marriage plans, the ones he’d been saving since the afternoon he’d invited her over for tea. He’d never felt her equal, and something about the bobbing of the boat and the scent of the flowers gave him the courage he needed.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to spend your money on the house, and buy furniture and plants …?”

  “And books,” he added. “And bedding.”

  “And more pets, and pet food. And absolve you of … how did you put it, your guilt at having inherited all your parents’ money?”

  “Well, yes. My guilt, and my self-disgust at my cowardice at not being able to do anything about it.”

  “Oh.” She grew serious. Looked at her hands in her lap. “Is this a proposal.” She didn’t ask it like a question.

  “Yes?” He posed it.

  “Hmm.”

  “And soon, we would have more mouths to feed?”

  “Which would …” She scratched her head, because now there was an extra component to deliberate on. “Make it easier to spend even more money.”

  “Yes, not to mention breed an improvement over the prior generation. Our children could certainly be no worse off than us, I hope. My political duty to my country being to give it sons who will stand up to the French.” Sons who would become heroes.

  “Hmm.”

  Her hmms worried him. What on earth had he been thinking? What foolishness had possessed him? But didn’t she say she was worried her parents would no longer go on supporting a grown daughter? What options did she have?

  PART II

  Sleep

  15

  A month later, on the hillside where Georges-Minh and Dong sat side by side looking down at the forest, she presented him with a cigarette case, a box of tobacco, and a jar of betel. The jungle spread out before them as they gazed across the unmoving treetops so like the crests and valleys of the South China Sea. “A child is a testament to the parents’ love,” she said.

  “A child is a political duty,” he said.

  She slapped at his arm.

  He kissed the top of her head.

  Later, in their bedroom, her things on his—their—dresser where before there had been only a collodion print of his grandparents in a brass frame: a tortoiseshell bracelet, the cigarette case, the jar of betel, now empty, but he had saved the jar, the things she had offered in exchange for his taking her as his wife, he kissed her again.

  His villa clamoured now with the domesticity he had once only imagined: the long dining room had been taken over by the pigeon coops, the python cages, Dong’s cats. Her mother and father had filled it with gardening equipment, clay pots, and mounds of earth. He had expected release. But his days oppressed him and he volunteered more often at La Dhuys, where he witnessed case after case of scourges caused by the colonial evils which he told his wife about each night, because they continued to talk, as husband and wife ought to, though she accused him of spending too much time at work. Or in his home office. Or manufacturing pharmaceuticals in his laboratory just to get away from her, and from the rest of her family. “Are you working or hiding in your practice?” she said, taking the tone with him.

  Now, at times, she wondered, thinking back to how they had first met, the ghost of the mermaid, the unplanned pregnancy, the rush of the marriage, if she was competing with the ghost. His baggage. Or, more properly, why she should. There were other fish in the sea. She was young and beautiful. Why was she still hanging around?

  At first, before their marriage, they’d had sex all the time. Now he barely touched her. Since they’d last made love: fourteen times the ants had ridden down rainwater streams like tiny villagers past coconut husk and rotting papayas on boats made of fallen leaves. Thirteen times she’d listened to tamarinds hitting the roof during windstorms. Twelve times he’d gone out to collect them and eleven times he’d forced her to come, too pregnant to be useful at anything but holding the kerosene lamp.

  After supper they retired to the veranda, as they did every night, and she sensed his boredom and his distance from her. “Georges-Minh, where are you?”

  The purple sky smelled of wind and the calm before the storm. He’d eaten too much opium. She pointed out the beauty but he couldn’t see it. For him there was no night smell of the earth’s steamy heat and rich fallen fruit. No smell of wet palm leaves or rainwater dripping from the eaves. Just a swelter of jungle. A circular driveway revealing itself like a snake. Petals lost among the dirt.

  “You never touch me anymore, Georges-Minh.”

  “How can you still want it? You’re pregnant.”

  “How can you say that?” She tried to keep her tone steady.

  “Sex fiend.”

  “We used to like each other.”

  He continued to charge no one at home, turning no patient away who couldn’t pay. He saw paddy fever patients, lotioned their blackened arms and legs but remained untouched himself. Patients took advantage, claimed to have not a tien to their name, and then went drinking with his fee. Thanks to his father’s equity, which continued to bring in money, Georges-Minh could afford the luxury of not feeling duped.

  The widow named Thu continued to visit with her four children, needing money. He played the trumpet and the children danced. She tugged at her children bidding them behave, though all they did was sway to the jazz.

  Women who needed money, they came in daily, whose need made them desperate. They all wanted what he couldn’t give them: hope.

  The opium he did in the pharmaceutical wing of his villa melted away the tension between him and Dong. Also, the things Chang had said the night of the party, the fact they might be true. Anxiety about his true nature, his hypocrisy. After the bitterness on his tongue subsided, only dreams remained. Smoking the paste smoothed the experience too much; eating it was better. No wisps of sweetness from a pipe on his tongue this way. Only bitterness. Pure acrid taste to jolt him away from his delusions and into a better world. What he deserved.

  All his doubts about himself faded from a blare into a distant hum. He hallucinated about the den he’d been to with Chang. Men and women with sexless faces, everyone in silks, silhouetted by candlelight on flower boats that bobbed in the water. He closed his eyes and slept, but it wasn’t true sleep. Everything was lovely in this world where he could be anyone but himself for a time. He floated above his own predicament and viewed
himself with a detachment and a sense of humour.

  Since the light hurt his eyes he would walk, heavy-limbed, to the windows and draw the blinds. If it was night, and most often it was, for he waited until Dong was asleep so she wouldn’t know about his growing habit, he would extinguish all the gas lamps and illuminate the lab with one single candle. As the drug turned him into someone else, the candle appeared to burn brighter until its halo seemed as bright as a sunlit window he could let himself fall into.

  He could become a child again. A baby.

  A nobody.

  The opium lent a beauty to everything. The datura blossom of his garden, by moonlight or daylight, it didn’t matter, its egg-yolk hue. He saw beauty in the oscillating toothed margins of its petals, in the reflective surface of his glass test tubes, in the shape of a bottle of ethyl alcohol, in the orange flames of his Bunsen burners when he was coherent enough to perform experiments and create new and better poisons to kill the French. Everything was new and magical. The blossoms released their fragrant scents for minutes or hours—time lost all meaning—and a world of possibilities, with or without the French, gyrated for him like an exotic dancer.

  Addicts in opium dens gave themselves up to perversions. He soared to revolutionary heights. Young boys like Sing Sing refilled pipes and submitted to men with weakened moral wills. Georges-Minh became a hero.

  He’d gone to such a den before he’d gotten married, coerced by Chang, and ever since he had held a secret disdain for all opium boys. He’d tried to banish from his memory thoughts of what he’d done.

  Chang certainly had wanted a different outcome. He’d told Georges-Minh he loved him. Spoken of songbirds. Put his hands on his body.

  Georges-Minh had laughed and pushed him away.

  Georges-Minh had lain down and inhaled from the pipe; the sweet honey air rested heavy on his limbs. Lewd scenes surrounded him. His dreams spilled and scattered like seeds from the trumpet flower pods on a white sheet. The opium made his nose itch and his private parts tingle. So quickly did he have an erection in his thin trousers that he had no time to hide it from the boy refilling his pipe. His desire ambushed him. He was an innocent victim of his own genitals.

  In the low light of the den it was almost impossible to tell apart the women attendants from the boys, their long hair and slender hips. Georges-Minh raised his head, grown so heavy, from the mat. “What’s happening to me?”

  “Go with it,” Chang said.

  Mainly soldiers and a few officers filled the den, attended to by their boys. His own “boy” became more alluring to him. He lay down his head, suddenly occupied by a thousand sexual fantasies, some delightful, some grotesque. He watched his boy’s beautiful hands, the fine, neat fingers at work adding more opium to his pipe, and without realizing it started stroking himself. The next thing he knew he could feel his boy’s caresses and he was giving himself up to them. The boy, no more than eleven or twelve, smiled so sweetly. Before long, Georges-Minh held him in an embrace and the child submitted passively to all Georges-Minh’s whims. Their romp ended in a barbarous convulsion. Georges-Minh left the opium den without saying goodbye to Chang.

  He never returned to a den. His desires when on opium became less frequent over time until fantasies took over completely. What replaced true desire was the idea of desire. When it came to Dong, his erotic fantasies were twisted but his means were weak. He still became aroused from time to time but his body had long ago ceased to cooperate. He’d smoked himself to impotence.

  To help with the anger he made new and better poisons in his lab—he was up to Poison No. 27 now—and he ate increasing amounts of opium to forget.

  Outside, other people, victims of paddy fever, continued to forget as well—their names and birthdates, the number of children they had, their professions and lovers. Some forgot their favourite foods or the months of the year. Others professed to forget the Four Noble Truths and other Buddhist teachings. Some omissions seemed more convenient than others.

  Even Dong forgot things: one day she forgot to take in the wash and left it hanging out all night. As a result, a ghost crawled into one of Georges-Minh’s best shirts and it took two days, 150 tien, and three priests to get it out of the house. By the time it left, it had broken four vases and sucked the flavour out of every single mango.

  In exchange for her carelessness, Georges-Minh ordered Dong from one room to another, past windows that cast curly wrought-iron flower shapes. Dong, who’d once walked into his clinic and given him clear moorings. It could have been anyone, but it had been her. The euphoria of her was gone, replaced by a weight on his shoulders, head, and heart. Barking or cajoling, entreating, whispering, wheedling, shouting from the cool of the lush garden to the heat of the service courtyard, pinching her moon belly, but always demanding something.

  The monster inside him told her to hull the rice and wash the rice, and after she’d cooked the rice he grimaced his disapproval. The duties weren’t new—she’d always picked out stones with her bare hands—but the orders he gave made them seem so.

  He played with his poisons, the opium and datura, in his lab.

  He, too, began forgetting things. One day he forgot to wear his hat to the clinic. Then he forgot to wear his tie. One day he forgot to get out of bed and to his surprise a colleague from the clinic showed up and asked him if he had a cold. His co-worker gave him an examination, concerned at the pallor of his skin, and the next day Georges-Minh’s boss requested he take some time off work.

  He imagined a hurricane on the horizon. The wind tangled around his limbs. He dreamed his bedsheets were eating him and he woke in a sweat. He shouldn’t have gone back to sleep. Dong had covered the bed in pillows with embroidered cases from Paris and linen sheets imported from the best European shop for such things—he had to admit, the first time he’d slept on a sheet, he’d loved the cool of the fabric, but did she need so many frilly accessories?—and he’d paid the price. He’d slid off the pillow as he slept, a fussy elaborate thing, rooster detailing at the centre, and a spirit, sensing his opportunity, crawled into bed with him. When Georges-Minh awoke, he was next to one of the most hideous ghosts he’d ever seen. It had black eyes and fangs. Its breath smelled like corpses.

  Again, it took as much trouble as it had the last time to rid their villa of the spirit that, once again, had been invited in by Dong. Everyone, including children, knew spirits were tempted by extra pillows on the bed, and could only enter a house when asked.

  Perhaps the rising conflict within him caused the stranger’s face to greet him in the mirror. He no longer recognized his smile. Couldn’t conjure his good-time face, as if his mouth had disappeared. And when he viewed himself at an angle, something about his silhouette seemed odd, as if his whole demeanour were contrived. Not only that, the voices he heard were unfamiliar. Were they in his head? Or in his house? He stopped, listened, pressing his ear to the door. He drew back. They were in his house. Beyond the door.

  However, when he listened with more attention he could detect only the voices of his mother- and father-in-law, and their daughter—his wife. Patience, patience. A mystery to unravel here. For instance, were they in fact who they claimed to be? There was a gap in his understanding. A hole in his head. How had he, in fact, got to this place, with these people? He couldn’t remember. Who were these people in his house? Did he really know any of them?

  The remembrance of his previous fugue rose like an object from the water and sank back down again. Had he been given the opportunity for a fresh start? Khieu would see it as life presenting Georges-Minh with new possibilities. Khieu wanted to hurt the French dogs. As soon as he thought it, his stomach flipped. Georges-Minh had not yet decided if he possessed the strength to kill.

  Yes, something was happening. Now, in front of the mirror—he was sure of it. He paused, closed his eyes, concentrated. Unbelievable as it sounded, he could feel the change—he could will it, right now. If only he was sure what he wanted to change into.

 
“Dong!”

  He stepped away from the mirror, cold, clammy panic rising within him.

  “Dong!”

  He retreated back to his bed for safety and watched his room shrinking until it was exactly the size of his mattress.

  “What’s wrong?” Her hair fell about her face and the sweat above her brow framed her expression, concerned, slightly irritated, as she peeked at him through the doorway. The rice flour on her hands had left a smudge on her upper lip, from wiping her face, from moving away a strand that had fallen.

  “Look at my face. What do you see?”

  “A whisker.”

  “No, look closer.”

  A sigh. “Your breakfast is going to burn. A chin. Brown skin. Red lips. More whiskers.” She rubbed his cheek with the palm of her hand. “You should shave.”

  He bared his teeth. “Can’t you see?” His frustration was building, mixing with his affection for her.

  “Your smile. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s not the same as yesterday.”

  She frowned. “Neither is my stomach. So, does this happen, like, to people when they get a certain age? Are you under some kind of pressure?”

  He knew of no such precedents, though he knew of a man who’d killed himself on the eve of the birth of his son.

  “Our country is in crisis,” he said. “Men abandon their families and leave their wives in charge of feeding the children. The women have no money and they do what they must to survive. This country was the possession of the Chinese, and now is the mistress of the French. For a thousand years we’ve lived under the dominion of others. It’s why everyone’s going mad.”

  She kissed him on the nose, and left the room with wide eyes.

  When no one was around, namely Dong and her mother—and he double-checked to be sure—he made himself some tea in the foreign country of the kitchen. Its white tiles ran the long side of the house. Here, the women would fortify their bastions against his growing insanity.