Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  He grabbed his overcoat before they had time to think twice about it and before he knew it he was leading them down the street and praying Sing Sing would be in his usual spot.

  The boy was too high to run. Georges-Minh pointed at him, leaning up against the alley wall with his friend. Sing Sing’s arm was leaking a putrid substance, and he stared at the doctor, dog-eyed and weary.

  Georges-Minh knew it was the last time he’d ever see the boy, and the boy seemed to know it too because when he gunned down Georges-Minh with his finger, his trigger finger was slow and sleepy and sad.

  Sometimes Sing Sing would press himself to the glass watching Georges-Minh at the clinic, and Sing Sing remembered how he’d dream of being asked to join them. Just once, for a plate of sausage and baguette.

  In the next life, he and his friend Luc would have a house. They’d have four walls. Imagine making yourself at home, never having to watch your back. Imagine, the doctor had two such places: his house and the clinic.

  I’m the boy who looks to the insides of things,

  Because I can speak with the Emperor Duy Tan,

  Because our beautiful Buddha comes with me,

  Because we will go up to heaven.

  20

  The first thing you do is reach around for your sunglasses on your head. If they’re broken, the other person started the fight. If they’re intact—you did. Birago rolled onto his back on the hard sidewalk, squinted his eyes to shut out the sun poised above him like a flamethrower. He didn’t think he’d killed anyone but couldn’t be sure. His head hurt. He was alone—apparently—apart from the circle of people staring down at him, including two kids. His battalion buddies had left without him. The thought of the walk back to the barracks made Birago spit. He rotated his neck and wrists, flexing muscles, checking himself for injury. Nothing seemed broken. He had a terrible itch on his back and he felt a bit feverish. He was close to the harbour. Nearby were some Hindu shops, wealthy, shrewd owners, moneylenders or pawnbrokers, too, well dressed always, how he wanted to be someday in handsome linen jackets. And ooooh, their women—full of refinement, those ones, hair piled on top of their heads.

  A broken doll asleep at my feet.

  Birago’s bloody hands.

  When he looked up he saw the shops and the fine Malacca women. When he looked down, the boy doll by his feet, blood more black than red. A split canvas. Unreality.

  It couldn’t be. Was it his imagination or was the group of people standing over the doll’s body by his feet growing tighter, corralling him?

  … and I don’t remember a thing. Two kids staring at me, my hands bloody.

  He wasn’t going to stick around to find out who the doll belonged to.

  He got up and ran.

  21

  “What’s all the racket?” Crazy Auntie limped down the stairs. Mai followed, rubbing her eyes.

  The boy’s body lay in the entrance hall. Blood pooled from his head and stained the hardwood floor beneath him. Mai ran the rest of the way and Thu closed her eyes.

  Mai rocked the boy in her arms: “You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be fine.”

  Crazy Auntie tried to calm the children who leaped and pounced on each other in their shock. Thu couldn’t bear to witness a scene of spontaneous human combustion, too brightly lit, the horror of something exploding and burning up from the inside out.

  “It’s not my fault,” Thu said, but no one heard.

  A rank odour of rotten potatoes emerged from between the floorboards. Two shoes rose along with the smell and circled each other as if duelling. A planter flew from the shelf and kindling sticks joined it, spiralling from the wicker basket near the stove, and more items followed the shoes: a pillow, a plate, a half-eaten melon, all trailing after the shoes as if on parade. A water glass, the water still in it wet and cold as eyes, the liquid danced, the beads in turn, each one a pupil, watching; then a book, a chessboard and all its pieces, a statuette of a dancer with a red grass skirt, a photo in a frame, an oil lamp, a pipe of Khieu’s that Mai had not had the heart to throw away with all the tobacco burnt and in the air, a pair of Crazy Auntie’s slippers all spun around the room. A vase hit Thu, knocking her unconscious. Crazy Auntie shrieked and held her hands over her ears.

  PART III

  Names

  22

  On his lunch break, Georges-Minh liked to observe people. Today, having bought Thu and her daughter jade combs, while letting the extravagance of his feast settle, he watched two men sitting nearby, waiting for a soldier to get up and leave before they tried anything, and Georges-Minh wondered about their faces, what they hid behind their expressions—what needs—before accosting the soldier as he was thronging with the rest of the pedestrians.

  Lately he and his friend Khieu had taken up amateur detective work because their duties with the group required them to be vigilant at all times, to make sure they weren’t being watched, to determine they weren’t being followed, and as a sort of hobby.

  Personally, though, Georges-Minh felt attracted to the pastime because he wondered about people’s pasts and what voids they might be trying to fill, and detective work seemed as good a way as any to find out. What things they regretted doing or wished they’d done might be revealed by looking closely at what they wore or tracking their movements; the ways they acted said a lot about who they were, what they’d been through, and where they were going.

  Now he prided himself on spotting a flash of something under their table: a knife. What action Georges-Minh would take when they attacked, he’d not yet determined.

  The soldier’s head pitched from his hands and rolled forward onto his table. He was too inebriated to know the two muggers had been talking about him for the last ten minutes, since they’d observed him lunge across the marketplace and tumble into a seat, an easy target.

  One of the muggers laughed and wiped the blade on his pants, put it back in his pocket. Georges-Minh glanced around. A common robber, but as part of his hobby Georges-Minh made note of his every aspect: he wore shoes a size too large and had lime powder on his palms; his peasant’s pants were loose and dark blue; atop his head he wore a bowler hat. The other mugger wore dirty beige pants and a jacket with only an undershirt beneath it. Georges-Minh’s heart beat faster: no one else had noticed the knife, or if they had, they ignored it.

  A moment later the soldier pushed his chair away from the table and the two who had been watching him did so also.

  The soldier was still weeping as he stumbled into the lane. The men walked behind, closing in quickly. The knife glinted in the open now.

  Georges-Minh hopped up from his seat, hurried into the lane.

  “Brother,” he said, reaching the soldier before the two men. “Long time no see.” He hugged the man. He looked familiar.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Hey, don’t you remember me? I’m your long-lost relative from Thao Dien. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

  “I don’t have no relatives in Thao Dien.”

  Georges-Minh hugged him again and whispered into his ear, “Those men are following you.” He slapped him on the back and said loudly, “You drunkard, you do have relatives in Thao Dien. You got to slow down on that stuff. The reunion? Uncle Quy? Don’t you remember?” He shook his head for all to see. “You don’t remember.”

  The men had retreated to a print shop, keeping a low profile under New Year’s banners and paper monkeys as well as other cut-outs in various shapes hanging from the ceiling in reds and golds.

  “They’ve been watching you for some time. They’ve got a knife.”

  The soldier looked around.

  “Don’t look now!” Georges-Minh hissed.

  “How do I know you’re not some part of their fucking scam?”

  Georges-Minh tipped his head. “They’re right there. Just a heads-up.” He slapped the soldier’s shoulder. “So good to see you! Come by the house and visit the wife and me. It’s been too long. And lay off the sau
ce!”

  23

  “I’m a balloon-body,” Dong told her dead ghost mother. “A misshaped pumpkin. I’ve got stick-thin praying mantis legs with the balance of a stool or water jug some days while other days I tip over easily. There’s no telling which will happen. Buddha forbid I try to pick up a shirt from the floor.”

  “Oh, honey, you and every other pregnant girl,” her dead ghost mother consoled her.

  Georges-Minh stood still before the window, watching. Butterflies cut as if from a bolt of rainbow silk soared over the breeze, over the river, tumbling in the wind. They mocked him outside the window of his practice.

  Dong’s adopted mother and father tramping through his house annoyed him. Too much of one thing and not enough of another. Putting his books back, but not in the correct place on the shelf. Buying his newspaper, but the weekly instead of the daily.

  One day Dong would succeed in picking up a piece of taro root fallen from the chopping block. The next day she’d tumble collecting kindling in the yard. Even when her parents insisted on cutting the firewood she pushed them away and persisted vengefully in her chores. A contest of strength, because she could not allow Georges-Minh to one-up her.

  He rubbed the binaural stethoscope as if it were a talisman, watching her. Fighting with her moon belly, she grasped the shard of wood that had flown away from the axe handle. Hands on her knees, taking a deep breath, she straightened herself up and put the pieces in a woven carrying basket, the same one she used when she went to the market to buy pork belly or live chickens.

  As always he knew his irritation was wrong, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t make his emotions fall in line with his intellect. And there was a sweetness in letting one’s feelings run as free as street children. The opium had begun to affect his digestive tract—why did everything affect his stomach so? he whined to himself, to God, to no one in particular. He never wanted to get out of bed, yet the river kept flowing by, reminding him of movement, of all there was to do, and he thought he could well imagine how the patients in the asylums felt, strapped to mango trees for their own safety, crazed by the screaming in their heads, while fresh air blew around them.

  Her fingers aimed and then flailed at their mark. Above her swung her songbird in a cage. Should he go out to help her? Aiming and flailing, failing, aiming again. He was relieved of the responsibility of having to decide whether to help or not by a patient entering his practice.

  The week before, Dong’s father had asked to speak to Georges-Minh man to man. Her father had offered him a quid of betel his wife had rolled, and the two of them sat side by side on the porch swing rocked by the breeze under the trellis. Above them squash vines crept greenly and the foot-long fruit hung down like bells, also swaying in the breeze. The vines needed pruning and the garden beds cried for attention, too, pungent with mint and basil.

  The prickliness between them was tangible. Sunlight shone down between the squash vines and the light hurt his eyes, he may as well have been looking at sun flashes, knife shafts thrown from the sky. Dong’s father wanted to offer advice. He took Georges-Minh’s hand and held it. Georges-Minh recoiled inside.

  “There are two kinds of women in the world. And you can tell them apart by the way they treat their men. Their husbands. Every woman treats her husband the way she treats her father. Or how she treats her son. Act like her father and you will get respect. Act like her son and … well. You think I’m here to tell you to treat my daughter better. But—I’m here to say don’t become the kind of man whose wife has gained the upper hand. But be kind about it. Do you understand? Don’t become the kind of man who’s treated like his woman’s son. Or,” he paused, chuckled, “postpone it for as long as you can.” He squeezed Georges-Minh’s hand. “But, be kind.” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a dirty rag from his pocket. He rubbed his eyes, smiled, and sighed. “Only illicit lovers are treated as men. And that’s the hard truth.”

  Georges-Minh muzzled the sound of the man’s heart with his stethoscope; magnified thusly, the sound of its beating almost overpowered the creak of the door as it opened. “What do you need?”

  “What do you need? From the market?” Dong asked. Without sounding as though she particularly wanted an answer. “Anything?”

  “Nothing I can think of.” He could think of things if he had the time to think. “Right now I’m a little busy.”

  She drummed her fingers against the door frame, leaning there. “I should go to the market.” She paused, as if just for a moment she’d forgotten why she was standing in the doorway of his office in the first place. “Should I go?”

  One could train oneself to ignore anything. “Go if you want.”

  “If you want anything, I’ll go.”

  “I’m fine,” he answered. One could ignore anything, but at what price?

  “I could wait.”

  “So wait.”

  She cocked her head, thinking some more. “But if I don’t go now, I won’t have time to hang the wash later.”

  “So go now.”

  “Well, I could go now. Do you want anything?”

  In her absence he’d think of her, long to be with her. He’d want to reach out and embrace her. Tell her how he loved her ears, her eyes, her smile. But why, oh why—couldn’t she see he was working? “Mung bean cake, then. Hurry back.” He turned back to his patient as quickly as possible.

  She closed the door. His chest panged. Had he heard her quickly murmur “I love you” before the door shut? The steel cup of his stethoscope had marked his patient’s chest, leaving a red ring. “Sorry about that,” he said. When Georges-Minh pulled at the back of the man’s hand, his skin remained raised, Georges-Minh’s fingerprints remained behind on the tent of parchment as if the man was made of rice paper: possibly dysentery, or perhaps cholera. “Does this hurt? Does this?” Georges-Minh massaged the man’s abdomen in a circular pattern with his palm, trying not to feel guilty he hadn’t said “I love you” back.

  Within minutes he was lost in work.

  An hour after Dong’s departure to the market, a teenage mother carried a squirming baby into Georges-Minh’s office. His cheeks were mottled by tiny red lesions, the same colour as the cheeks of the model in the sandalwood soap advertisements that decorated almost every corner of Saigon. If it was paddy fever, it would have been the first case in a child. On closer examination, the rash, though similar in its constellation, presented in a different colour. While he was thinking about whether this may be a mutation of paddy fever, the door opened.

  When Dong came home Georges-Minh did not say “How was the market?” He did not say “I’m glad to see you. I missed you,” or “When I’m working I love you. Isn’t that amazing?” Though these feelings burbled from deep within him and began to rise as words, he just looked at the tiny lesions under a magnifying glass and noted the shaft of light the open doorway made.

  But when he did raise his head, there was something askew about her like a familiar picture on a wall having slipped on its nail. Just crooked enough to make you feel you might be looking at a completely different picture. Or the same one through new eyes. She struggled to hold a smile on her face but it appeared more a grimace, someone in pain trying her best to be stoic.

  The first thing was her hair. The pieces in it—bits of something, the stub of an old lottery ticket, maybe. And the hair was slightly tangled. The way it sometimes appeared when she’d tossed and turned at night.

  Second thing—if he hadn’t looked closely, he might not have noticed at all—something stiff in her posture. As if her body itself was holding a secret. Her muscles keeping something in. Keeping something from him?

  “What is it?”

  Finally, she said, “I need to talk to you.”

  He examined her himself. She was not bruised. Hardly dirty. Her left cheek dimpled when she tried, again, to smile. The soldier hadn’t touched her jewellery. Did the French not like jade? Or the amber Buddha around her neck? He must have been a Christia
n. It had been broad daylight when she was at the market. Georges-Minh said lamely, “You were raped in broad daylight. At the market.” His wife, lying on an examination table lit with yellow. The baby’s contours jutted defiantly, a triangle created by an elbow, an oval indicating the foot that kicked him through her uterine wall.

  She’d returned with all her groceries. Oranges, some eggs. Sitting absurdly in a wicker basket on his office floor, undamaged. His practice now bore a Closed instead of an Open sign. The patients in the waiting room all sent home.

  Maybe she’d lied about the whole thing? I’ll pull his leg. We’ll have a good chuckle. That’ll get him for how he’s been acting.

  “His skin smelled sour. He told me his wife was in trouble.”

  She had followed him into a muddy alley strewn with fallen roof tiles behind an opium den, and she’d ignored the market women who were hissing at her in warning even though Dong had heard of women who’d been raped by gangs of soldiers—who hadn’t?—but his wife needed help and she’d thought: If he’s married he must be a half-decent man. He’d gripped her by the elbow and said, “My wife is in trouble, she’s just back here.” Besides, he was alone.

  “He wore silly shoes, these rubber-soled things.” Half running, because he trotted her along toward the alley past the boys with their baskets begging for a penny to carry someone’s groceries home, and she followed him, naively, not wanting to lose him …

  “Who gets raped on a Tuesday morning?” she said. “Who gets raped carrying oranges?”

  It was only afterward that she’d realized he was drunk, when he breathed on her, cheek to cheek.

  “Before he had a chance to do anything … he passed out.”