Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “For forty-five minutes this went on.”

  “Well, why didn’t you just get up and make him tea?”

  “I did. But I was scared to get out of the water.”

  “To make him tea. Now you are being melodramatic.”

  “I was scared that he was going to rape me.”

  “So did you make him tea?”

  “Yes. With cookies.”

  In former times they would have laughed.

  “I can’t be everywhere at once,” Thu said. “Auntie’s been in her bed for a month. Since Cong got sick, you’re in your room with him half the time, too. The other day Trang grabbed a wallet. A guest left her purse on the floor. I made a joke. I said, ‘Did you get the money?’ She didn’t laugh.” Thu shook her head. “The boy’s only three. I handed her the wallet back. Some people, no sense of humour. My point is.” Thu waved her hand, then brought it to her forehead and rubbed the creases. She sighed.

  “You’re more than a maid to me, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Don’t give me that.” Though it might have relieved Mai’s conscience to call her sister, Thu knew better. Raised as an “adopted” cousin, Thu would never be considered a real relative.

  The room filled with silence.

  “You know, Birago is your inferior. Not good enough for you,” Mai said.

  When Birago visited the inn, Mai’s eyes walked all the way up his fingers to his face then slid back down his biceps to his feet to the floor. She disguised her flirting now. Protected herself from feelings of guilt as some sort of racial animosity; for all her educated talk about freedom for the people, imitating her flown-the-coop husband, she was no better than the rich who kowtowed to anyone in power.

  As if reading her mind, Mai said, “I’m not talking about his race.”

  “What, then?”

  “I love you like a sister.”

  Thu snorted. “As if.”

  “What?” Even in the throes of her supposed illness Mai managed to prop herself up on her elbow.

  “I can’t be all yours. That it? You’re jealous.”

  “All mine? What are you talking about?”

  “You want what you can’t have.” Her tongue was a rebellious thing, wilful and obscene.

  Mai’s eyes could have reduced to ashes anything in their path. If leaping from bed and throttling Thu wouldn’t have ruined Mai’s game of pretending to be ill, Thu was sure she would have done so. Instead Mai chose the worst way to be hurtful. She said in a forced whisper, “You really are insane. Just like your mother.”

  Thu hadn’t felt sad until she entered Mai’s room. Maybe it was simply the darkness falling that made her miss Birago more.

  Birago was fond of saying, “The night is more foolish than the day.” Everything would seem better in the morning, she told herself.

  “Look in a mirror,” Thu retorted.

  The silence thickened.

  “Do you hear me, Mai? You’ve been brave—ever since Birago started visiting.” Thu stood up from the rocker. “You get so angry. Whenever you don’t get your way.” She stomped from the room. Clonk-clonk-clonk. Bi-ra-go. She scraped her shoe Biiiiii-ra-go on purpose.

  Cong lay at the head of Auntie’s bed on the pillow, which had smelled of medications ever since Thu was a teenager. Thu fought the urge to crush her head against it. Instead she flopped down onto her own bed, so close to Auntie’s she could stretch out her arm and touch Auntie’s rimpled skin, and sighed. “I haven’t seen Birago in a week.” She kicked off her shoes, picked at her toenails. Part of the Bataillons d’Afrique, he was often given assignments no one wanted. Thu didn’t think his boss liked him very much, his immediate boss, the captain, anyway. His captain as well as the men in his barracks were jealous of him because the lieutenant colonel preferred him over the others. When the colonel wasn’t around they mocked his tribal scars, the blackness of his skin.

  Thu, on the other hand, worshipped Birago’s black skin, made blacker by the wet of the water and the blaze of the sun—they met at Long Hai Beach: both of them deified the blue mindless distraction from the polluted streets. The way he rode on the top of the wave that day, arms spread wide like the crucifix over currents and riptides, thrilled her. Asphyxiated by housework, she felt if she didn’t do something out of the ordinary, she was going to explode. His stomach was lean. She could fit her fingers into the washboard spaces while he giggled, clutching her fingers. She pulled them out of his grasp.

  “Try to catch me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My fingers—too slow—missed me.”

  “Cha monkey.”

  “You’re the monkey. At least our teacher said so in kindergarten.” She poked him playfully. “He had a picture of African monkeys and black men side by side. Catch my fingers—too slow.”

  He stopped and kicked at the white sand—speckles on his black toes, the grains—and the beads of ocean water in the tight black curls made rainbows of light like tiny prisms. Suddenly she felt ashamed. When he finally raised his fine head and turned to face her, he was grimacing a grotesque ape-like grimace. He raised one arm above his head and scratched his armpit in parody, hooting, “Oo-oo-oo, girl, I going to show you go-ri-lla.” He scooped her up under his arm and loped along the shoreline. “I gorilla!” he roared. “Birago gorilla. Oooooo!” An ice cream vendor leaped back, a family tittered, hurried in the other direction with their towels. Birago padded the length of the beach bellowing, and Thu, half his weight and height, screamed and laughed under his arm and pounded on his back. It frightened her at first how hard he felt, like something not human. She could run her hands up and down his torso for hours, thinking how no one would approve of their eventual marriage, because that’s what she wanted—marriage, fuzzy-headed mulatto children. His race allowed her to play the good wife while simultaneously breaking away from the role. He decorated her rice-paper hat, stolen from Khieu’s stash, which Mai never would have allowed, with flowers, fresh and dried. The country was against them. It didn’t help that local women had been raped by black soldiers, the cases reported in all the newspapers of Saigon. He made money on the side boxing. The matches were illegal, he said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me,” he said.

  “Half of what happens in Saigon is illegal,” she said and laughed.

  “If I want to move ahead with the military,” he said, “I have to be careful.”

  But she knew, sensed, there was more to it than that.

  “What about Colonel Janvier?”

  “My captain hates me enough as is.”

  “Colonel Janvier doesn’t hate you.”

  “He doesn’t know about the boxing. He’d probably want to go. Or box himself. He’s a sharpshooter.”

  “See? You should tell him. What’s a sharpshooter?”

  Birago shrugged. “Pistols. He won competitions in Monaco. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a boxer in his day. It’s just if you want to move ahead with the military”—Birago had a funny look on his face—“you can’t have everyone hate you.”

  Thu rolled over onto her stomach now and looked at Auntie. “We’ve only been together seven months, Auntie, and you know, it feels like we’ve been married a lifetime. Has that ever happened to you? Love, I mean?”

  Crazy Auntie Number Three snorted. “I’ve brought up how many children and you’re asking me if I’ve ever been in love?” Her eyebrows were raised so high they nearly touched her hairline. Thu wasn’t sure if that meant yes or no.

  “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything,” Birago said the first time she saw him fight, when she was kissing his knuckles afterward, as was to become her habit.

  “You need something to love that much and I’m it,” Thu said, already suspecting he had a hole, and that when he punched a man in the ring he was trying to fill it with something that had nothing to do with her.

  4

  Georges-Minh told himself i
f not for the trappings of his parents’ wealth, his life would be better. He hated the opulence of the place. More lavish than the French governor’s, the terrace was large enough to fit a troupe of Siamese acrobats. His father had handpicked the paintings that hung on the walls, original works depicting former emperors in royal apparel, reproductions of Goya. Georges-Minh preferred a minimalist look.

  Most days he felt as though he was being crushed under all the black lacquered furniture decorated with good-luck symbols, ornately shaped ironworks that flaunted means and status. He suffocated under gold and red cushions. No matter which room he entered, his father’s things and his mother’s too reminded him of their grand and reckless love of spending money equalled only by their grand and reckless love of life. Georges-Minh told himself he was different. Looked for evidence that ever since childhood he’d preferred simplicity to ostentation. Hadn’t he loved crossword puzzles and building blocks? He craved clean lines, how he liked to keep his mind: uncluttered, free of passion.

  Yet an invisible hand stopped him from getting rid of even a single gaudy landscape, or one of his mother’s flowers on the terrace, a solitary climbing trumpet vine, a nelumbo with a head the size of a showgirl’s headdress, an orchid spilling pornographically from its planter. Here was a grown man, both his parents gone, smothering to death in a house with lotus buds in fluted vases.

  Was it the denial of his true nature that caused him to awake one morning to clots of dawn through his mosquito net? He sat up, kneaded a lumpy head. He thought he must have a cold, a terrible, terrible cold. He couldn’t remember his name. He ran his fingers through his hair: drenched. He ran his hands over his skin: clammy. He searched the rest of his body for other clues. His private parts appeared to be male. He put his hand over his chest: his heart flapped like a broken bird’s wing.

  He could hear a river roiling outside—but which river? Breathe, breathe. He listened for footsteps. Did he have children? Did he have a wife? Thoughts raced one on top of the other. All this in a matter of seconds.

  Paintings hung on the walls: reproductions of masterworks by Giotto, van Eyck, Wang Hui. Was he an art historian? He sat on his bed drenched in sweat for fifteen terrifying minutes unable to remember who he was, where he was, or how he’d come to be here.

  He massaged his temples, encouraging his mind to return. Little by little it did, with the shame of an itinerant lover. As it did so, he realized something. Sometimes the universe gives you what you want, but not in the way you wanted it. Or maybe it’s that you don’t know what you want until it’s too late.

  So, in Georges-Minh’s case, it wasn’t until he came out of his amnesiac fugue that he understood: in order to break free from his past he would need to start with a mind wiped clean. He yearned to return to his amnesiac state, his mind an empty canvas on which he could create anything, for that was the only way to become the man he wanted to be. To leave behind the security his father’s properties continued to provide for him, polished Athangudi black-and-white floor tiles and cold, smooth rosewood carvings of lucky elephants and colourful egg plaster walls.

  Yet how to do so was the question, when the income his father’s rental properties brought in allowed him to volunteer at Clinique de la Dhuys, the badly funded clinic with no beds, limited to providing frontline care. And what of his home medical practice, where his father’s rents permitted him to accept chickens as payments? And, dear God, just how was he expected to think of a solution with an imported Italian chandelier staring him in the eye?

  And then the solution came to him. He would get married! As soon as he got married he would no longer be solely responsible for his parents’ wealth and he would have a wife who would take charge, buy silks and furniture and vases and whatever else it was women bought for houses. The thought thrilled him. He’d be set free from the burden of living life for others, even if they were dead ancestors, and finally could begin living life as his own person. That’s all he’d ever wanted. To be loosed from this feeling of having a yoke around his neck. To finally feel he had permission to live his own life. Could getting married finally allow him that? Yes, yes, yes. Now all he had to do was find a woman.

  Georges-Minh had no girlfriends to speak of—the cause of which wasn’t snobbery but shyness. A loner with the reputation for standoffishness, he never knew what to say to members of the opposite sex and found chit-chat an effort, even to smile so the nurses smiled back. He found no lightness in small talk, no release in it. For Georges-Minh it was work. His awkwardness kept women away: they could count on his dullness.

  A girlfriend? Keep dreaming, others might have told him. He longed for a wife, a normal family.

  Too bad. He liked to think he was handsome—people besides his mother had said so. A girl at the lycée, once. And a woman in the Swedish foreign exchange program who’d whispered a certain word in his ear. And third, a man, a botanist working as an academic assistant at the French Preparatory College where Georges-Minh had studied for a term. On a field trip in a banana forest, strangler figs overhead, legs entwined, words against the nape of his neck. “Your member is like a massive liana vine.” Massive, he’d said. Oh, yes. No prude, the botanist. A libertine. And Georges-Minh too, so the botanist had thought at the time.

  Not a libertine, Georges-Minh had corrected in his head, not a simple hedonist either, so much as a man who wouldn’t let his sexual choices be dictated by the establishment. Who would have sex with another man simply because it was frowned upon by traditional Vietnamese society. He told his libertine lover none of these things but secretly prided himself on his politics and moral superiority.

  Yet since his parents’ death he’d sublimated his desires. In other words, he worked. All the time. Calmed by the sight of his fingers among the sutures and bandages. He decompressed by working. His only safety valve. How he coped against occasional loneliness. Occasional, well. He went carousing with Chang but their intimacies didn’t count for much.

  He drove to work in his Panhard Levassor and the crowd parted, many never having seen a car before, patting the hood respectfully. They pulled back their burnt palms.

  His father had been laid to rest with all the proper rituals demanded by his standing, had therefore become a satisfied ancestor and not a hungry ghost. Tonight he would offer his father and mother incense and fruit and tell them of his plans to get married.

  They would be pleased. Nothing was valued so highly as family, and nothing within the family so much as a son, the eldest son, who would carry on the family name.

  The irony, of course, is that volunteering at La Dhuys had been a way for Georges-Minh to escape his father’s influence, which he’d always felt as acutely as hands around his neck. He’d become a doctor in the first place out of spite. Rebellion. An “I’ll show you” exuberance. To make a point about his worth to a father, it seemed to Georges-Minh, who measured everything against the size of his bank book.

  Though Georges-Minh had long ago stopped attending the soirees of French ministers, attended by the attractive sons and daughters of wealthy businessmen, he’d always faltered before donating all twenty of his father’s rental properties to the monks who begged with alms bowls, reciting sutras in the market, saying prayers for lost souls trying without success to banish the dead back to the underworld. No one would have noticed his absence from Saigon’s social circles anyway. The trickle of invitations after his return from university, followed by his parents’ death, had less to do with his status as a doctor and everything to do with his family’s name.

  On the banks of the river floated a city. Many of Georges-Minh’s patients worked in brothels called flower boats, after the lavish Canton custom of strewing the rooms with flowers, decorating the deck with lanterns. He did what he could, then sent them on their way. The children who had been stolen from highland hamlets, with candy treats or thin dried slices of sugar cane for sucking—they were the saddest. Their faces, after a few months in the city, rotting before they bloomed, as when a peanu
t vine wilted under winter, the flowers dying before their time to open.

  Other patients worked at “bamboos,” so-called because they contained only bamboo beds and bamboo walls. No furniture. Maybe a lamp that burned coconut oil. He treated them for beatings, venereal diseases, marsh fever, cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and diarrhea.

  The lucky ones married businessmen. Most retired to street corners, scarred by disease, having lost noses to syphilis, and became needle women waiting to mend a tear in someone’s clothes or fix a buttonhole, wearing a paper nose and big glasses to hide their deformities.

  He passed the promenade café that served beer and bitters, a French theatre in the Rue Catinat—a hall that dwarfed even the Buddhist pagoda on the same street, constructed of bamboo, filled with plants and cut flowers that were replaced the instant they withered—florists, milliners, dressmakers, booksellers, jewellers, ironworkers, trunk makers, seed vendors, dealers in curiosities from Japan and China that included phallic symbols, erotic books and engravings, as well as poseable puppets the size of a man’s hand made from porcelain or ivory.

  An execution had taken place; the head was still on display in front of the butcher shop, mounted on a stake, stinking and covered with flies. A French official decried the nationalists, describing the slaughtered soldiers as family men, and emphasizing his point by displaying the posters printed by the military of these fathers with their children.

  A flatbed cart pulled by a pair of mules transporting the rest of the rebels cantered past. Whenever the driver went around a corner the prisoners, shackled one to another by their necks and strung like the lights that decorated the street, lost their balance and leaned against each other for support. They were towed through the streets like that, the whites of their eyes bright as mirror shards, paraded, in shame.

  Bystanders lowered their heads, melon sellers, cyclo drivers, lawyers with street-facing offices, shoeshine boys, those who were walking the streets, or selling kumquats at the market, or cutting hair at street stands.