Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  “Not a monarchy, a republic,” Khieu said. “Haven’t you read Rousseau?”

  “They should die like dogs.”

  “They should die like a snake under a rickshaw driver’s wheels.”

  “They should die a bad death. Not a ‘death in the house and home’ but a ‘death in the street.’ ”

  “They should die like an iguana in the mouth of a hungry dog, swelling at head and tail until they burst under the pressure of his powerful jaws.”

  “Poison the lieutenant colonel of the garrison with gan cong mak coc, liver of a peacock, bile of a frog.”

  “No. People should use a beautiful woman to kill a king.”

  “Yes, love them to death.”

  “You’re suggesting a strategy?”

  “Poison doesn’t always kill. Did you hear about the guy who was dying? Of cancer. So he took liver and bile and the poison started to cure his cancer.”

  “Actually?”

  “Actually.”

  “They can die like a lover in the arms of a woman,” Khieu said. “I don’t care. So long as they die.”

  Making a poison strong enough to kill a man is easy. Remove the seeds from the stamen. Crush with a mortar and pestle until the dry seeds stop crackling. The powder is now so fine as to be invisible and weightless. Season chicken, shrimp, or buffalo with the dust. Steeped in fish sauce, the poison is tasteless.

  Because he was a little drunk, Georges-Minh fell against Khieu. He righted himself and dabbed with his thumb at the spilled wine on the wooden bed slat. “I don’t mind talking about the group name some more. A thing becomes its name and vice versa. Can you imagine a militant group with the word ‘bananas’ in its moniker?”

  “Bananas is definitely out.”

  “I second.”

  “Third.”

  “Obviously.”

  “This is absurd.”

  “What was that name you said? Mysterious perfume …”

  “Mysterious smell.”

  “Fragrance.”

  “No, it was mysterious scent, but I like perfume better.”

  “Me too.”

  “Perfume then,” said Chang. Chang was an ethnic Chinese, born in Cholon, a court translator and lover of books. “But mysterious is the important part, because it’s how we must remain. Elusive. Who said elusive? As in impossible to catch. By soldiers, police, any and all enemies.”

  “Well, perfumes are important, too,” said Bao, who would have said such a thing. “And sweet, right, because that’s what we want to be. But the transcendence. That’s the part that’s important. When something becomes a perfume it transcends its lot as a fragrance to become something else. See?”

  “Maybe you’re not that much of a blockhead,” said Chang, the translator with the thick and beautiful lips. “Sweet as a flower that rises in the spring. In the spring there’s hope. Especially in the north.”

  “Where at present,” said Georges-Minh, striking a serious face, “the news is one in three women are now prostitutes because of the regime. Did you know they’re starving in Tonkin? Picking individual grains of fallen rice from between stones with their fingers. Eating farm animals dead of disease.”

  The men sympathized with silent nods.

  “Invisible as a fragrance,” Chang continued. “Invisible as hope, invisible as a guerrilla fighter. Mountains, of course, are a symbol of strength. Where were we then, mountains?”

  “Don’t forget, prayers are invisible, too,” Phuc said, chain-smoking. The rich ate, the poor smoked.

  “True,” said Georges-Minh.

  “Like the fart I just let out?” Phuc said.

  “God, Phuc. Will you ever grow up?” Bao said.

  Khieu took a sip of his wine, then drained the cup, avoiding the chip on the rim. After lighting a cigarette he said, “If we’re not going to move on to the poison until after we choose a name then I say let’s add ‘yellow’—Mysterious Perfume of the Yellow Mountains. Makes us sound more poetic.”

  Was Khieu playing it straight with the group? Yellow? Georges-Minh couldn’t tell much about the man these days. Khieu had always dreamed of travelling to distant places, Africa, Borneo, and Antarctica, and carried maps with him wherever he went. Then one day he’d thrown them in the river. He had recently started growing his hair long again, like some of the Hindu holy men in the marketplace. He had discarded his topknot and traditional turban in favour of clipped hair long ago, but now he no longer kept it sleek, no longer washed it. He wore his hair unkempt and ran around the marketplace pushing a broom or borrowing rickshaws that didn’t belong to him. This, in itself, wasn’t completely new. But he’d changed since the hauling of those French contraptions of horror into the square, the guillotines.

  Georges-Minh hated the French—he could say those words. But could he write someone’s name in poison? Georges-Minh didn’t know if he could kill a man. Maybe one man. But could he poison a whole garrison? Poison. Khieu’s earlier words hung in the air along with his cigarette smoke, waiting for Georges-Minh’s response.

  The truth was, ever since that day as a schoolboy, when Khieu with his one green eye that emphasized his craziness had stood nearly naked in the marketplace in Cholon, Georges-Minh had admired him because he was everything Georges-Minh was incapable of being by nature, lacking the inner rigour. Or thought he had admired him because at least he stood for something. A few years later, as a teenager, when Khieu stole a driver’s rickshaw one afternoon and pretended he was a coolie, returning the rickshaw and all his earnings to the rightful owner that evening, Georges-Minh had wanted to be him. Khieu, who had a neck as solid as an ironwood tree, was strong. Even now, as an adult, when he returned to Cholon and swept the streets with a broom or collected garbage with his hands, barefoot as a peasant—for the love of work or to prove a political point, Georges-Minh wasn’t exactly sure—everyone knew him by name. Now Khieu was looking at him and Georges-Minh could feel whatever small admiration he’d built up for himself in Khieu’s eyes over the years slipping away by degrees like a small village down a waterlogged hillside during the monsoon rains. Khieu, looking again with that provocation in his eyes Georges-Minh decided was his friend’s way of mocking him, for being weaker than him, teasing him for his reluctance to get involved. Provoking him into being more than the wimp he always was. Taking a stand.

  Khieu still enjoyed mathematics, detective novels, astronomy, searching with his telescope for alien life in the skies, but another part of him had evolved into something Georges-Minh no longer recognized after hearing men screech nationalist slogans, watching the blade fall, heads tumbling into baskets. The heads were collected and mounted onto spikes as warnings to others. Punishments were distributed to Vietnamese who tried to remove the heads too soon. Even as he sat there now, with Khieu waiting for his response—would he or would he not make a poison to kill the soldiers stationed at the French garrison of Saigon?—he knew he was disappointing his friend. And his country by extension.

  He was the natural choice. The doctor of the group. Private doctor to the lieutenant colonel of the garrison.

  Georges-Minh looked out the window. Subterfuge. An irrational ploy. Smile and no one will bother you. Look away and what you don’t want to see turns invisible. Gazing at the river that flowed out back. Now the shade of a ball bearing. Now the shade of dirty cotton. Now the shade of belly button lint. He could pretend the river was something fleeting. A minnow, a swordfish, a dragon. Then the dreaded thing happened. It must. It had to.

  “Yes, of course. He could make the poison.”

  “Naturally, he’s a doctor,” Bao said, scratching his eyes. His lids were swollen again. Last night, he’d gotten drunk and sat with the cuttings, singing to them. “March to victory, sway, sway.” Using the wine bottle as a door knocker, he’d tried to wake Mimi. She, angry as usual, had refused to join him in the room where he nurtured the rooted plants, encouraging them to grow.

  Who knew this was something he’d be good at? If sore eyes wa
s the price? He stumbled to each pot, ensured the proper mix of soil versus food. His own blend of which he was proud. Sang to them, while Mimi hollered he would wake the dead.

  “What do you say?” Phuc said.

  “Georges-Minh?”

  “Aren’t you listening?” Phuc said.

  “He’s drunk.”

  “Could you or couldn’t you?”

  “Daydreaming.”

  “No, I was paying attention. Poison.”

  “Well?”

  “There are many ways to poison a man.”

  Georges-Minh stared into Khieu’s one green eye. Mulberry wine made all the fish in the near dark leap out of the river and hover over the water. They spun and danced and galloped through the air, a synchronized ripple, the way the water puppets shimmer and perform boisterous art over Saigon River currents.

  Georges-Minh heard a knocking before bed. At night the street may be filled with wandering spirits, common marauders looking for what they could steal—a bicycle, a garden rake. When Georges-Minh had kept chickens and pups for a short time, he’d woken up one morning to find all his pullets removed from the henhouse and his puppies placed inside. The pullets were running loose all over the yard—the ones who hadn’t been picked off by foxes. The door to the henhouse had been locked (he still had the key), so it couldn’t have been neighbourhood kids. It was the ghosts, for the third or fourth time; they liked the Thao Dien neighbourhood, and why not? They rambled around in packs, like hoboes, carrying off what they could find, then abandoning it along the way. Since the northern famine decades ago, which caused the migration of peasants and a million dead by the side of the road, too many men and women had gone without good deaths in their homes. How could a soul go to heaven without the proper send-off: the ritual words, the money burned, offerings of clothing and shoes? Even the government admitted the problem was getting out of hand. Add more recent deaths and ghosts were popping up everywhere; once five or six ghosts startled Georges-Minh by rising from the ground at a crossroads and nearly crashing his car. Georges-Minh locked his shutters at night because the cockiest ghosts would crawl across his rear garden and come into his house through his kitchen.

  The worst scare he’d ever had was accosting a confused prisoner with a mutilated body and a flicking tongue one night when he’d been too drunk to shut up the house properly. The spirit, similar in appearance to Mau Ma, the seductive Water Spirit who sometimes appeared as a woman, with bare chest and long hair, and summoned people to their deaths, was licking the mangoes Georges-Minh had lined up on the counter for breakfast. A girl Georges-Minh had known in school had seen this spirit and lived in the care of her mother to this day, catatonic as the afternoon she’d beheld her at the lake.

  Georges-Minh wanted nothing to do with ghosts. Spirits. Necromancers. Geomancers. Pyromancers. Palmists. Astrologers. The mythology of people who believed their Monkey God had been shit from the bowels of a rock. Whose emperors ate immortal peaches. Who made clay dolls and channelled into them the souls of the dead.

  The French had stirred his mind like a great hand stirs the clouds, infused it with strange notions, and Georges-Minh’s clarity became the occupation of Western medicine. Embracing all that was European meant denying his father’s Purple Emperor Fortune book, his spirit lens, shameful keepsakes, now dusty on his office shelf.

  The knock persisted.

  Georges-Minh opened the door a crack to find a dishevelled man with a goat tethered to his arm.

  “I can’t remember a thing and I don’t know how I got here,” the man said. “You’re a doctor, right? I read your sign.”

  He looked so pathetic that Georges-Minh led him to his home office even though he was already wearing his pyjamas.

  Georges-Minh sat him down on the examination table and got him to remove his shirt. “Have you been smoking opium?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like my head’s going to break open and a thousand ants are going to come spilling out.”

  The man’s eyes were clear, not red. His skin, however, was covered with fine black marks as from a pepper shaker. Georges-Minh conducted a quick exam of his nose and throat before asking the man to lie down.

  Georges-Minh wiped his own forehead with his forearm. Whether it was the heat of his office or a contagious illness the man had brought into his house, Georges-Minh didn’t know. He thought he felt a little queasy but maybe the earlier conversation about poisons had given him a nervous stomach. Maybe he’d merely had too many glasses of mulberry wine. His head spun.

  The man, lying on the examination table, clenched Georges-Minh’s hand. “I itch, I want to tear off my skin. What’s inside wants out. I’m burning inside.”

  “Like indigestion?”

  His eyes were panicked. “I have a monster inside me.”

  In old-fashioned spirit possessions, a priest beat the patient with a mulberry stick. If that didn’t remove the spirit, the priest put a spell on the spirit, to divine what it needed. If the spirit was lonely, the priest provided friends, however many, made of papier mâché, built on bamboo frames. Hungry, the best food would be provided. While still under the spell, the spirit would be forced to sign a piece of paper. In this manner, the spirit was contractually obligated, having had its needs met, to exit the body.

  The patient sat up. “Don’t you see?” Yanked the hand he held toward him. “Or do you see?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to let go.” Georges-Minh pried the man’s fingers off him.

  “I see a monster inside you.”

  “Calm down, please.”

  “If you try to push them down and bury them they’ll only get angry and crawl back out. These monsters are like hungry ghosts that way: the country is full of them. Invisible monsters living inside people, only the people don’t know it, or they do and try to ignore it. They come out most easily when you’re sleeping, or when you forget yourself for a moment. That’s why drinking is so dangerous. Don’t you see? Conquerors want you to do that. Drink. Do opium.”

  “Let me give you a sedative.”

  The man kept fighting him. His fever, whatever illness was causing it, made his delirium peak to the point where Georges-Minh was beginning to feel truly afraid.

  “No sedative!” the man shouted. “Listen to me. The Chinese wanted a nation of addicts. How much of yourself can you hide before you no longer recognize your reflection? It’s in the opium. I’m trying to tell you. Warn you. They’re coming for you too. The monster’s already inside you. It’s happening now. The country will die in its sleep. Lulled by false promises.”

  “Everything will be fine, I promise.”

  “You tell yourself lies, covered by more lies, and then more lies till you forget what part is the truth. That’s how the oppressor has always taken over the oppressed. They put the country to sleep. Please don’t put me to sleep.”

  When the man was safely asleep Georges-Minh sighed deeply, then he sat in his chair and looked at himself in the mirror.

  The man had mentioned opium. He shook his head. How could he know?

  He would contact Infectious Disease Control in the morning and they would chat about the usual things, lack of resources, lack of infrastructure, lack of hygiene among the peasants and working class.

  It was the third man he’d seen in as many days like him, and all three had yet to regain their memory. As with the others, he wondered if it might be some kind of new rice paddy fever.

  He was filled with a deep sense of unease.

  2

  Mai sat on what she still called the porch because Khieu had called it that, although it was really just a flat lonely weathered landing with stairs leading up to it that had grown rotten and pockmarked in Khieu’s absence. He didn’t know about the baby. Nor the blackness of her nights. The clawing brightness of her days.

  “Let him go already,” Thu, her maid, said. “What are you waiting for? Permission? Absolution?”

  But Mai couldn’t. Because her baby, Cong, was dying by d
egrees and he was the last thing Khieu had bestowed her. The last time Khieu had come in the night had been over a year ago. Now his baby was expiring with all the drama and tragedy of the theatre, or so it seemed to Mai, for when his fever broke, he’d play with his toes as if he hadn’t been sick at all; an episode could last for hours, or days, and Mai would sit at the edge of his rush mat on the floor, afraid to breathe, thinking perhaps, yes, this time surely he’d stay well. But then his eyes would close and he’d tumble into another sleep from which no one could rouse him.

  Her father had once taken her to a Chinese opera when she was a girl. She remembered the seats and how large they were in comparison to the size of her bottom, the noise of the audience, her excitement at having her father all to herself, a handsome man she believed made people’s heads turn because of how intelligently he spoke and his suit’s shine. When characters died on stage, unlike in life they were reborn: first they went down, clutching at their throats, screeching like stabbed pheasants, only to rise in health and stroll around. It happened again and again, death in slow motion; they sang, slapping their chests, then dropped to their knees, then rose, then fell, then rose, then died, dying and rising. Cong, too, ailed and recovered, ailed and recovered. The baby’s fever spots clouded him in purple and red, as when one takes a brush and flicks it toward waiting rice paper. Mai prayed and wailed during her own year of small deaths and adjustments. Running the Paper Flower Inn, just her and Thu and Crazy Auntie Number Three. Not to mention her row of children, their waiting mouths.

  After six years she’d grown used to Khieu’s comings and goings, as used to it as someone could, but this last time he left after getting her pregnant, and he hadn’t returned, except while she slept to collect the money she kept hidden under the vase in the front room. Sadly she felt no anger. Her hammering heart reminded her only that she was alive, knowing he’d been in the house; this was enough. Who was his latest mistress? “The Portuguese,” she had heard. He was painting hats and she sold them in the brothel where she worked.