Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  She bowed in prayer, this direction and that, the incense sticks aflame all the while.

  “Are you almost finished?” Georges-Minh asked. “I’m worried about you there.”

  She laughed. “Good thing I know a competent doctor.”

  “Cheap vendors! One day someone’s going to catch fire,” he said. “Someone’s coat’s going to go up in flames because of a second-rate incense maker with no care for his art, only concerned with profits.”

  “Are you always so serious?”

  He let her complete her obeisance. When she was done she fed the flames by throwing the remnants of her incense sticks into them.

  Right now she was working as a nanny in a French household, she said, brushing the ash off her hands, but she would like to get a job working as a tour guide or even as an interpreter at the law courts. Maybe, in time. She adjusted the bag slung over her shoulder. “My parents are overprotective. I like to come down to the harbour. Take a walk on the wild side.” She winked.

  “I admire the poor,” he said. “Like the cork from a bottle of wine, no matter how you push them down, they keep popping back up, again and again.”

  “Isn’t that a little romantic?”

  He flushed. He’d made himself sound like an ass. He was talking to someone just as smart as or smarter than himself, not some simple schoolgirl. He’d wanted to impress her with his kind heart. Now he looked the fool.

  She play-punched his arm. “Just teasing.”

  Peeking from the top of her bag was a volume of poetry by Phi, a revolutionary, member of the Tonkin Free School.

  “I went to the French Preparatory College,” she said, noticing him look.

  He wondered about never having seen her there, but the place was so large, and they weren’t exactly the same age. “Me too.”

  7

  Thu had heard about Dr. Nguyen from Gigi, who turned tricks in “The Church of Rome,” once a chapel used by Catholic missionaries. In the fancy quarters, houses were identified by their blue venetian blinds, and so were sometimes called Blue Houses. The houses may have had names such as “Brilliant Field of Flowers” or “Club of the Mandarins’ Ducks” or even “The Dwelling of the Singing Nightingale.” Lately, in order to get out of doing her chores at the inn, Thu told Mai and Crazy Auntie that she had a friend, a poor single mother, who was in trouble. It wasn’t really a lie. In a sense these girls lived on the cusp of danger all the time. And wasn’t Thu thinking of putting herself there, on the brink of menace just to help out her sorry little family? Maybe. Look at the clothes they wore: white, blue, and black silk chemises; green, orange, or yellow silk robes; a hat with a chiffon ribbon; Chinese varnished shoes—such an outfit would cost thirty piastres at least! One gold bracelet would set you back three hundred. Gold earrings, a silver leg bangle, a jade ring, another hundred and fifty each. Not bad at all. Did they ever worry about going hungry? Did they ever worry about being old and poor? Maybe. Maybe less than she did.

  Thu carried water for foot-washing, prepared alum solution for the girls to disinfect with, replaced the coconut oil in the lamps, or refilled the pipes with opium when the customers ran out. Madame, who owned The Church of Rome, paid Thu a few tien for her troubles but only because her leering eye was on her to soon take her place among Gigi and her friends with their pomaded hair elaborately styled into place once a month by a professional who also made for them a wooden pillow to sleep on at night with a carved-out space for their curls. For how much longer Madame would let her work Thu didn’t know because Madame also had men who acted as bodyguards to do these chores.

  “This dupe, this mark with too much money and a heart, all the girls have had a turn working him at one time or another—too bad he’s got a girlfriend now.” Gigi was a half-breed Portuguese with an aquiline nose and eyes the colour of amber. She always wore silk dressing gowns with elaborate embroideries of Asian landscapes that her boyfriend bought her. He wasn’t a customer but a real boyfriend who paid for her apartment. “He never wanted to sleep with any of us. It was awesome.”

  “Cute?” Thu asked. “The doctor, I mean?”

  “I guess. Round face, little glasses like this. I guess you could say he’s cute. Like an owl.”

  “That’s not cute.”

  “You know what I mean. Not that kind of cute. The other kind. Like a stuffed toy.”

  “Hey, can I ask you something? Why do you still work if you have a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t want to upset the power balance,” Gigi said. “I need my own money. Besides, he doesn’t care, he’s progressive, bohemian, a painter. Anyway, I make more money than he does.” Gigi shrugged. “If you’re seeing Dr. Nguyen, if you still want to give it a try, don’t go to the clinic, go to his house. It’s easier to play the sympathy card on their home turf, where they feel more powerful. On the other hand, if you’re going to try the sex angle, which, with his type, wouldn’t have worked anyway, the clinic’s the better bet, away from reminders of where he and his girlfriend last did the dirty. You’ll get more than most either way—you’re his type.”

  “His type?”

  “Sorry-ass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seriously, downtrodden’s a good angle. But bring the kids. Definitely bring the kids. Hell, borrow some if you can. He’s a sucker for kids.”

  “What did you mean, his type?”

  “Likes boys, but doesn’t know it.”

  After a moment of silence they both laughed.

  Thu borrowed Mai’s children and bribed them with sweets to keep their mouths shut. She had to wait until Mai took her mid-afternoon nap to smuggle the baby out of the house; Thu figured the baby would bring her luck. Her mission was twofold: to get needed funds but also to have Cong examined. Mai wouldn’t: too superstitious, she still believed her herbs and spells would do the trick. And Thu truly believed the baby might be sicker than she had once thought. She loved the baby as if she’d given birth to him herself and if Mai wasn’t going to do right by him then Thu was going to have to take action herself.

  The doctor turned out to be just what Gigi had promised. He chose from a jumble of trumpets that hung on the wall and played music, to which the children swayed while sucking the sugar from their fingertips and trying to hum to the beat. “Stop that,” she shushed them, tried to jerk them still. Tugged their fingers from their mouths. It was important he think she was innocent of raising wild children who were suddenly behaving like street urchins, acting as if they’d never seen sugar cane sticks or heard jazz music before. But the oldest boy still wore a topknot and there was no way around Dr. Nguyen believing she was a backwoods mother, even if only a pretend one. When the boy turned twelve, Mai would cut his topknot, and not a day before.

  He listened to the baby’s heart with a specialized device.

  “Can you tell anything yet?”

  He turned the baby over. “The symptoms are nonspecific, I’m afraid. At this point I can’t be sure, it could be any number of things.”

  Thu felt a sinking in her chest.

  The baby needed more tests, he said. Some things took time. Some things required patience.

  Thu would find a way to sneak the baby out of the house again, and the other children too if she needed to. She agreed she would return, next week? But for now, was there anything the doctor could give them? Especially the infant?

  He fetched a bottle of syrup from the shelf and Thu listened to the thump, thump of the bottle and the doctor returned and placed the bottle in her hand and said, “Try this. It’s an all-purpose vitamin. A fortifier.”

  “Thank you, you’re so generous.”

  “Normally I write a script, but I can see, in your case, a widow. This isn’t from the clinic. I manufacture my own supply. I have a clinic in my house. In Thao Dien. Are you familiar with the area?”

  When Thu further explained their dire situation, staring not at him but at the documents in frames behind his head, Dr. Nguyen dug into his pocket and pulled out his
wallet. Then he drew a little map and pressed it into her hand. Although he was naive he was beautiful in his round glasses, and a piece of her heart began to love him. She promised she would return next week, and he smiled with just enough of a twinkle in his eye that Thu believed she may have provoked his manhood, and she knew if he wanted her to she’d have offered him and his trumpet a harbour for his soul.

  8

  Georges-Minh invited Dong for tea at Khieu’s urging. Georges-Minh, who was used to playing it safe, even when it meant missing out on life, had to fight every cautious tendency he had. Because for weeks his emotions had ridden him, leaving him exhausted, a faceless man caught in no man’s land. Georges-Minh would have thought, in his case, money would have substituted for charm and that by now wealth would have brought him marital happiness. But in fact it was exactly his father’s money and the problem of its many branches that seemed to be making it harder for him to talk to the fairer sex, weakening him from the inside out.

  The problem of his father’s money would not go away overnight or without planning. This problem called for a practical solution—and Georges-Minh had found one. He would ask Dong to marry him. Dong could deal with the deep red cushions and imported tiles and rosewood carvings. She appreciated nice things—expensive European jacket—and when children came along, his absolution would be complete.

  He chose a tea set that had been his mother’s. She came, this creature he’d seen on the examination table, and then in the temple, who came on with the force of a monsoon. Too brash. And she spoke out as if words did not bear thinking over first. He was drawn to her the way one might be to the panther in the Botanical Gardens, but there were no bars between them.

  She was just what he needed, he told himself. Maybe she could absorb some of the chaotic confusion within him the way a cloth whisks away spilled wine from a dinner table and you never have to look at it again.

  They drank jasmine tea in the shade of a potted tree with shadows to hide in when he blushed, as when he blew into his cup, drank, and scalded his tongue anyway.

  Sipping, he thought to himself: this woman has two souls. She who wore clothes tailored to fit her body, nurtured pythons, and read Tonkin Free School poetry. The other part of her, the one he’d seen on the examination table, contrasted sharply with the opinionated creature who spoke her mind out of turn: a creature whom illness had hallowed, consecrated, sainted. Opinions fevered her mind. He could get very used to her as a wife.

  He took her on a tour of his estate. The house, the only one in Thao Dien with a circular driveway, had a wing in which he saw patients and another where he made his own pharmaceuticals near the garden and the cabbage palm trees. The villa boasted a dining room the length of a tennis court on the second floor, as well as one on the first. Sometimes, the sheer vastness of the space daunted him. Though his villa was his sanctuary, he imagined what it might be like with a delirium of domestic energy to fill it. The living room spanned the length of the kitchen, which was a row of planted bamboo, and along the wall stood ornamental urns big enough for a small boy to hide inside.

  They spoke about the ideals they shared, turning the words justice and equality into Cupid’s arrows and aiming them at each other.

  Two souls: part angel, part witch. An enamel of civility coating a spirit of earth, like the enamel around an iron teapot—but she was not a teapot, why was he thinking of cookware? He was losing his head. Because of her. The realist and the dreamer. He did not doubt her intellect. Only such a woman could find elegance in market pigeons, tame a python.

  “Did you know prostitutes, these Brown Hollands, are so-called after a coarse fabric of the same name?”

  “No, really, Mr. Information of the strange and useless kind.” She smiled and stretched out her leg, putting her toes in his lap.

  “I don’t charge anyone at the clinic.”

  “You charged me.”

  “No—I mean my home one. If they can’t pay, I don’t turn anyone away. Thing is, the Brown Hollands, they can’t afford anything. Not really. And that’s the problem. But they want what the French have, things they never heard about before or cared about before: chocolate, caviar, asparagus. Status symbols. These things cost money.”

  “Do I hear some passion?”

  Dong believed that because he had never been poor, had never had to share what little he had, he could feel nothing but glee at the prospect of sharing. Which, she reminded him, was different from being actually poor and forced to share half of nothing. She was not reprimanding him. She spoke with tenderness, and with the pleasure that one person experiences when beginning to understand the soul of another. But she had never really been poor either, she made a point of telling him. Her father, born a peasant farmer, had gone on to pass the triennial mandarin examination and had become a judge. “So what do either one of us know?” she ribbed him.

  “I don’t mean to be harsh,” she said, “but isn’t it shallow to confuse poverty with self-worth? Just as it’s equally shallow to call a poor man a sinner and a rich man a saint simply because they are rich or poor? Naturally, stated this way, the value judgment seems ridiculous. Anyway, what stops you from selling all this junk and just living the life you want to live?”

  Georges-Minh, wanting so badly to justify himself and seem worthy in her eyes, said, “We’re plotting, you know.” The words just slipped out. The next thing he knew he was telling her all about their group. Datura stramonium. The French garrison.

  It was well known within the group that still had no official name that Georges-Minh had ethical difficulties with the killing of so many men. As a way of saving lives he had suggested to Khieu killing just a single man—a symbol, a figurehead: Lieutenant Colonel Janvier. Bao, because he had a wife, and Chang, out of loyalty to his friend, sided with Georges-Minh. Those with less on the line, like Phuc, preferred the bravado of Khieu’s plan—kill every last soldier in the garrison.

  It has to be stated that even as the suggestion to kill Lieutenant Colonel Janvier came out of Georges-Minh’s mouth, deep down he believed it would never happen. How long had they been meeting and drinking wine, playing cards, stumbling home? He said it mostly to impress Khieu. None, other than Khieu, were motivated by a desire to save the world.

  Georges-Minh was a pillar of the community. A doctor. Son of a wealthy businessman.

  “We hit the French at the top and send a powerful message to our people,” he said, “giving our side the ideological boost they need.”

  Georges-Minh said the words and didn’t think of them again. Instead, he thought of his friends, looked at each of them in turn, Phuc, Bao, Khieu, Chang, the lowering sun, the river outside, teacups filled with mulberry wine. Had he gotten through to any of them? Khieu took the fish eye from the cod they were sharing and sucked the gelatinous mass, excitement on his face.

  “Not all of us want to run for our lives,” said Chang.

  “What did you think you were signing up for?” said Phuc, the pipa player. He hadn’t worked for a month and lived in a hovel with barely enough space to turn around. No one in the south wanted to hear the folk music he played. He’d fled a famine in the north five years ago. Now his wife was gone and he lived in a city where pipa music was considered quaint but passé. When he’d tried to work construction, the foreman had nearly beaten him with a hammer for his clumsiness. He’d tried his hand at cooking and burned himself. He’d tried to kill himself drinking snake wine and had woken up in an alley covered with vomit. He failed at all things but pipa playing.

  “It’s not like they know who the members of our group are.” Phuc blew one smoke ring into another smaller smoke ring. “What are you scared of? The hit’s going to be anonymous.”

  “But we don’t want it to be,” Khieu corrected. “They will know us soon. This act of rebellion will put us on the map. And into the hearts of the people!”

  Khieu was tougher, always would be. Sometimes, next to him, Georges-Minh felt like a bit actor in his own life. Georges-
Minh’s best friend had long been hooked on animistic beliefs, creation legends, and searching the sky for old earth and water spirits. He’d also reworked his beliefs to include new magical systems. For him, spacecraft in their circularity were nothing other than God. Georges-Minh envied Khieu. His pseudo-research gave him a connection to something larger than himself and a lifeline to place.

  The irony was that spaceships shattered his idea of the known world—so the lust for unity became a destructive force. It was a riddle without end, a fatal disturbance for them both. Still, Georges-Minh couldn’t help but respect Khieu’s commitment to a cause. Khieu was dying to be impressed.

  In the evenings, Khieu would sit on a cushion in Georges-Minh’s expansive living room and do research. He wrote about the famous mandarin poet Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu. Nguyen Du, an eighteenth-century Vietnamese treasure, an orphan, poet, prisoner, diplomat. Georges-Minh thought of Nguyen Du as Vietnam’s Shakespeare, and yet didn’t precisely understand Khieu’s obsession with him, at least as far as trying to correlate Nguyen’s verse patterns to spaceship sightings in the southeastern provinces.

  In the Central Highlands there was a rock called the Pleiku. In the legend, Buddha raised the first peasant from this rock, but a few healers now believed the peasant was an alien. Rocks were a symbol of deep stability, and spaceships had recently been spotted by these traditional sites. When Khieu got sick he wrote in code so that his findings would be safe. The hill tribes believed shooting stars were the gods flicking their cigars. Khieu saw the stars as transportation in the ocean of night. He believed the stars spoke to him. Khieu had loved the fantastical since he was a child, but since the public guillotining had begun, Georges-Minh knew, something in those beliefs had darkened, become violent and twisted. Georges-Minh refilled his glass of mulberry wine.