Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains Read online

  “Georges-Minh never talks,” said Chang, who sat right next to Georges-Minh. “There he goes again. Daydreaming. Our boy.”

  “He’s our shy boy,” Khieu said, grasping Georges-Minh’s hand and holding it.

  “But I want to hear what he has to say,” said Phuc. “Do you have something to say?”

  “I have many things to say. All the time,” Georges-Minh said. “I’m just thinking about the best way to say them.”

  “Well then, why are you staring out the window? You in a trance?”

  “What I want to know is, are we still playing cards or aren’t we?” Bao, the horticulturalist, said, his swollen eyelids making him appear sleepy. At home his moonflowers had grown so large their blossoms bent downward like tired children, bending their stakes. He and his wife would sell them soon, at which point he would thank each and every one of them, before slicing off their heads with a razor blade.

  “I’m waiting for you,” said Phuc.

  “It’s not my turn,” Chang replied.

  “It’s not mine,” Bao said, rubbing his eyes. It was silly to get sentimental over plants. Yet what choice did he have? He had no children. His plants were his children. Nor would he have his own family until he made peace with his father—Mimi refused to have children with a man who’d given up a career in politics to grow plants.

  “Whose turn is it?” Chang asked.

  “Who’s not paying attention now?” Phuc said.

  “I think one man at the top is the way to go,” Georges-Minh said. “A solid message.” They were a group that had never done anything, not even handed out pamphlets. Was Khieu playing it straight or being ironic?

  Khieu shook his head. “I appreciate what you are saying, my friend. And the design is we’re paying the cooks at the garrison to put poison in their food.”

  “No. I appreciate your heart, my friend,” Georges-Minh said, “but not enough to change our plan. We stick to the design. I’m the one that’s making it. I’ve taken an oath not to harm.”

  “But what harm are the French pigs doing to our country?” Phuc said. “Sometimes I wonder if they’re even human.”

  “In the end I don’t know what I think,” Georges-Minh said.

  “It’s going into their Christmas meal,” Khieu said.

  “Wow.” The coquettishness, the playfulness, the flirty laugh, the toes in the lap, all of it was gone. “What the hell are you going to do? Or should I say, what the hell were you thinking, old man?”

  Dong got up from her chair, dragged it next to Georges-Minh so they could sit side by side. “I want to tell you something. Something I’ve never told anyone else in my life before. Are you ready? Ma and Ba rescued me from a market stall,” she said. “Ho Dong isn’t my real name. Mr. and Mrs. Ho adopted me. I don’t know who my real parents are.”

  “Your parents abandoned you? In a market?”

  “Babies, unwanted, next to the breadfruit.” She started to cry.

  “Like a watermelon,” he said, putting his arm around her.

  “Like a live chicken,” she said. She leaned into his embrace, drying her tears with her knuckles.

  “Like a leather pair of shoes,” he whispered.

  “I always imagine this: my parents, from the north, escaping poverty, walking south toward hope and work.”

  “They could have taken home a dog but they chose you.”

  “Dog is lucky. Do you like dog?” She was smiling now, though her eyes were still red.

  “I didn’t know women ate dog. Isn’t the meat too strong?”

  “I imagine a restaurant kitchen, where my mother gave birth to me on the road, in the storage room where they kept the bags of rice. She lies in a makeshift bed of kitchen towels, I watch her give birth to me, bloody sheets and rags and clothing, bloody everything … I tell myself: Be glad you were left at the market.”

  “Yes, be glad. Your parents left you to the mercy of the gods. They were benevolent.”

  “I could have been killed,” she said, pleasantly horrified. “My mother could have squeezed my nostrils shut.”

  “Until you were dead,” he added.

  “Babies have been eaten during famines,” she said in confidence.

  “I know.” Co-conspirator.

  “Babies have been devoured during times of need. This is,” she said, playing with him now, affecting the tone of a teacher, even wagging her finger in time with her words, “this is a documented fact.”

  Behind the house, they walked along the river; the night air sounded with insects. In the near dark, in the scent of the jasmine and frangipani, neither one thought of it as escaping.

  When they got to the end of the jetty they sat.

  “I like walking at night,” Dong said. “It helps order the images of the day.”

  “Quiets one’s thoughts.”

  “Look at the fish.” The fish swarmed the jetty’s piling under the toilet. “Pleasant thoughts replace the less pleasant ones, until all that’s unwelcome lies near the bottom, just like that.”

  “Ugh. To which process are you referring? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.” He laughed, waved her next words away.

  She giggled, too. Could he tell? Should he?

  “The night you came in. A girl died in my arms. It wasn’t the first time. But it was the first time like this. She’d been thrown into the river and when they pulled her out she was still breathing. Just a girl.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like the police know either, or care. She haunts me. I’ll never find out if she was beaten by her pimp and left for dead on the banks. It could be she rolled into the river herself. Two boatmen saw her floating by on a current and fished her out. I couldn’t save her.”

  “What was different about this time?”

  “I don’t believe in magic. But after that. Her body was covered not by disease but by fish. To tell you, to say it out loud seems like nothing now. But if you’d been there. I feel like something about her infiltrated me that night. I just want to be the kind of person I can respect. Nothing more.”

  He thought then about what Khieu often said, anger without action demoralized, words recalled so often that it was as if Georges-Minh had swallowed them. The question was: Would he let them sit inside him or would he do something?

  Somewhere between the rebel Georges-Minh’s words and the foundling Dong’s confession he lost his nerve and the proposal remained a fantasy. He held fast for so long he became stiff. This he was good at: nurturing feelings, ideas, even words as if in a petri dish. The lactation of language. How long had it been there, this thread of a voice winding itself around the banister like a baby’s thin wail alone in a room at the end of a hall? Slowing down, examining what you say, letting it have conversations with books like the Bible, Dostoyevsky, dog-eared collections of poetry by Phi or Nguyen Du. Above all, never speaking from the heart.

  He treated her for lung fever at her home on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her family lived by the river a distance from Georges-Minh’s neighbourhood but he thought nothing of the mileage the tiresome trip put on his car nor how he pulled at his collar in the heat most of the way. On these days, he knocked on the splintered wooden door that hung on rusty hinges. He drummed his fingers and fidgeted in the shade, watching the ripples under the home’s stilts while listening to the coughing through the wood in the shade of a diseased cabbage palm that shielded the porch in anticipation of the splintered door opening.

  While he treated her, her mother and father rattled about the house, never directly intruding, but never out of earshot.

  “Mother, pass me the hammer,” Georges-Minh heard her father say.

  “Get it yourself.”

  “Buddha on an elephant, woman, can’t you see I’m holding the picture?”

  “Then, love, you should have thought of the hammer before you thought of the nail.”

  “Give us a kiss, then get us the hammer.”

  Georges-Minh worked eff
iciently but self-consciously. He stretched her onto the mat. Painted iodine on her chest. Turned her over. Rubbed her back with coins, since her father was paying him to do so. While the menagerie behind the house in cages or tied to ropes, green pigeons, golden tortoises, drongos, rat snakes, skinks, agama lizards, goral goats, slow lorises, peafowls, gibbons, porcupines, sunbirds, bulbuls, canaries, toads, langurs, seraws, and a sambar deer made almost too much noise to speak over.

  Too much wind in the body. Her fever could be cured by a long sweep of the coin along one side of her spine. Then the other. The imbalance of elements in the soul. Abrading the body would return harmony. Her parents were sure of it. He was no better than a witch doctor, he thought to himself while he worked. Also that the house was shabby for a judge: perhaps the man gambled. He spared Dong the insults and said nothing.

  “It hurts.”

  “I know.”

  “Ow.”

  “Lie still.”

  The coin was worn on the side. He’d found the smoothest coin he could from his pocket, though her parents had offered a bowlful—to least snag the skin, to cause the smallest amount of pain. He poured more camphor oil onto her skin. The smell made his eyes water but the coin could glide better now. Lubricated, he ran its plane edge over her flesh. Steady hands, sweeping motions, away from the heart. Blood began to flow to the surface of the skin.

  She moaned.

  His marks looked like the claw marks of tigers.

  They would last for days, the marks: when he next saw her he would feel guilty for the damage he’d done.

  He followed the ridges of her ribs and repeated the procedure on the other side, frustrated that if he wanted to see her at her home he had to carry through with this charade. Why not just make a clay figure and bury it in a jar, calling on the demon responsible for her illness to come out and leave her?

  “Almost done,” he said.

  Across the wickerwork wall that didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling he heard her mother and father.

  “I smell wintergreen,” her father said.

  “Eucalyptus,” her mother said.

  “Wintergreen. It’s one of my favourite smells, I should know.”

  It was clear to him that her parents loved her, though in keeping with tradition they did not taint their love with exuberance. The father chewed quids of betel. The mother rolled his cigarettes and lit them before handing them to him.

  The mother loved in the way mothers often do, through her criticisms and admonishments. Her yelling a kind of loving. Don’t look at your shadow or you will be haunted by darkness. It’s bad luck to hit your bowl with chopsticks. Making this noise is a sign of poverty. As if you’re asking for more food, which is a sign. And signs of poverty herald poverty.

  The days she was ill, they brought her tea in bed, to speed her recovery. Mother washed the dishes. Mother scrubbed the floor.

  But when Ho Dong was well, her mother treated her as more than a slave, but somehow less than a daughter. Her name, which meant “winter,” suited her. Her fragile body may have reminded him of winters in the north and famines he’d heard the old people tell stories about, when starvation sometimes forced parents to feed children who’d died to children who hadn’t to keep them alive just a little longer. Her spirit, on the other hand, was the promise of spring, the buds that pushed up past cold dirt and hard wind. He was reminded of Grimm’s Cinderella, and his knowledge of the tale made him feel superior to other Vietnamese, unique, as a man who’d been educated in Europe. It gave him an outsider’s perspective on his own culture. Though this outsider’s perspective was also what made him feel alone.

  Dong’s duties included: buying the chicken, killing the chicken, plucking the chicken, cooking and cleaning up, sharpening knives, sharpening axes, polishing handles, polishing shoes, drawing the water, boiling the water, picking the tea, making tea, and washing the teacups. When he was there, he offered to help.

  Mother had many quirks, the most entertaining and terrifying of which was her habit of bringing stray animals home from wherever she found them. The father protested, but the lack of force in his voice intimated he had capitulated long ago. Mother was a fat, jolly, aggressive woman with a laugh that shook the house when she got her way—until she began coughing, and then Georges-Minh saw that her stance was part bravado also, for she was stricken with the same illness that consumed her daughter.

  9

  Street urchins often begged at Georges-Minh’s lunch table. “You’re so rich and I’m so poor, a tien for me.” “Buy a flower.” “Gum for sale.” Some stared, eyes black as lakes, and didn’t say a word. Georges-Minh had learned one couldn’t be too sympathetic. You’d buy a flower and they’d ask you to buy another. If you told them you’d already bought one they’d say you could afford one more. Or they’d say you hadn’t bought one in the first place, even though the proof lay on the table. Or, with the proof lying on the table, they’d begin to swarm. “If you bought one from him, you can buy one from me.”

  Georges-Minh, wise to their ways, ignored them all.

  “You got a cigarette?” said a boy, sitting down at his table.

  “You’re too young to smoke,” Georges-Minh replied. The boy stretched out a dirty hand, which had a missing pinkie finger, and he looked familiar to Georges-Minh, though Georges-Minh couldn’t place his face.

  “So how’s about that smoke?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Ah.” The boy waved him off with a look of disgust across his face that, Georges-Minh remarked, at his young age already bore the telltale signs of the opium addict: the lines around the mouth, eyes like coins sunk deep into cheeks of an old man, no elasticity, waxy.

  “You should have me look at that for you,” he said, pointing at the boy’s infected arm. “I’m a doctor, you know.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” the boy said.

  “Am I supposed to?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. The rich really do have shit for brains. I’ll give you a hint: Sing Sing.”

  “Sing Sing?”

  “Very good.” The boy clapped. “Straight A’s for you. He can remember my name after he’s been told.”

  A lame beggar pulled his way past Georges-Minh’s table on a wheeled wooden platform, his knuckles wrapped like a boxer’s to pad his hands against the pavement. His shirt was stitched together with four different colours of thread. This was the kind of toughness Georges-Minh admired. He did like the poor. The right kind. Not this kind, the cocky kind, the do-no-work-and-expect-to-get-paid kind.

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, many things. Many things.”

  It dawned on Georges-Minh that the boy did look familiar, from the night of the death. When the fish girl had passed away in his arms, when the prostitute had scratched his face in the street and run away. Yes. He’d been short with the boy. Is that why he was here? Because he was angry about that?

  “I do know you. And I’m sorry I was cross with you, back when.”

  The boy’s eyes at first uncomprehending, filled with a gleam, and then his features hardened. It was Sing Sing’s turn to be surprised. “Oh, that. Ha.” He turned his hand into a gun and fired it at Georges-Minh. “Funny.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “You think I’m choked about that? Nah, I want something else, some information.”

  This was getting ridiculous. “What information?”

  “Information that I have”—he emphasized his inflected words with head nods—“that your girlfriend doesn’t want, about you and a man who likes to drink brandy.” Sing Sing squeezed Georges-Minh’s thigh under the table. “I think a couple hundred tien will do for tonight.”

  “I don’t carry that much on me!” Georges-Minh was shocked—outraged—that someone had been watching him that night, that he should fall in love and have his love threatened by a meaningless fling, that he was being blackmailed by an opium-addled boy!

  “But you can get it.”

  “Maybe, b
ut …”

  “So get it.”

  “I can’t now.” The boy exasperated him.

  “Why not?”

  “I have to work. It’s not as though I can just do whatever I want when I feel like it.” His tone implied: the way you can, you louse, even though you are twelve.

  “When, then?” Sing Sing asked coolly.

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “After. After work.”

  “I’ll come with you. For now buy me a soda.”

  What he needed was a good slap. From the dirt on his cheeks to the sweat running crooked paths through it, Georges-Minh had seen it before, this kid’s life, cheap and cliché.

  But he bought him the soda. As if merely to annoy him, Sing Sing took the small paper napkin that had come with the drink, unfolded it and draped it on his knee like a cloth dinner serviette. Georges-Minh followed his finger as it traced the lip of the bottle, ran up and down the glass side like the feelers of a moth.

  “You complain yet you’ve had it so soft,” Sing Sing said.

  He drank the soda with slow, careful sips. Having finished, he winked at Georges-Minh. “I know where to find you.” His saunter was part sway, part swagger as he walked away, shoeless.

  10

  Georges-Minh took Dong for a drive so they could have some privacy. He’d bought her a little gift, something he knew she enjoyed. He reached between her legs and fetched them from the icebox he’d placed on the floorboards by her feet. He felt like he had something to prove. She liked strawberries. The sweet-sour sophistication of them. The way, when they were a little tart, they bit you back. Perfect specimens, he thought, grown in the night soil just outside of Saigon, tended by Chinese gardeners along with other European vegetables and fruits, such as those found in the markets of Paris or London.

  He retrieved the kitchen knife out of his front pocket. She waited patiently, cross-legged now on the cushioned bench seat like a little girl. The air of Long Hai Bay was fragrant with frangipani. He held the bowl and knife behind his back in one hand and turned up the flame on the oil lamp. Now that the light was brighter he could show her.