by Paul Yoon
Motorcycle collection, he thought. He realized only then, in the silence afterward, that he was in the arms of the Tobacco Captain’s brother.
* * *
Alisak lay awake in the night. The narrow window overlooked the fields where there was once the vineyard. A sliver of the barn. He was in a second-floor room of the stone house on the ridge. Living a year in the chaos of the farmhouse, he knew when he was the only one awake. Or believed he did.
He would never get used to this new silence. The new noises. The creaking and the broken parts of a house that he was told, hours ago, was now a clinic for the people who lived in the mountains. His role would be similar to what he did at the farmhouse. He would walk down to the converted barn every morning and help. He would sleep upstairs in the main house.
He left the room, headed down, found himself in a kitchen. On a counter there was a cloth covering a plate with bread and some food that looked familiar to him—like wet grapes—but that he couldn’t identify. He slipped one into his mouth, trying to recall what it was, having no memory of its taste. The salt of it shocked him, the pleasure of the oily layers, of biting into the meat before his teeth hit the seed. It was delicious. He ate another, suddenly ravenous. Unsure what to do with the seeds, he pocketed them, tucking them into a fold in the handkerchief.
It had been days since he had eaten. He tore off a heel of bread and poured the water that was in a clay jug into a mug and drank. Scanning the moonlit room, drinking more water, he oriented himself: a wall with a framed map of somewhere, the faucet dripping and making a hollow noise as the water hit the sink. A frayed towel folded carefully on the counter and a bowl of lemons. Old books someone had shoved into a gap in the wall where there were once stones. He leaned toward the leather spines bloated by the weather, reading the French, not knowing all the words. Through a narrow gap in a window frame, the air came in. The night.
In the room beside the kitchen, by the end of a long table, there was a piano. It was identical to the one at the farmhouse. For a moment, he believed it was the same one, that somehow it came with him on the plane, and so, holding the piece of bread in one hand, he knelt and popped open a wooden panel under the keyboard and stabbed his arm into the upright’s insides, his fingers searching the dark space for the mementos they used to hide in there.
Then, still eating, Alisak headed outside, not noticing in his hunger and his new surroundings that the door was already ajar. The night was clear. He was met by a low, enormous moon the color of fire. It brightened the entire length of the land in a paleness, and he stood in front of the house aware of his surroundings in a way he hadn’t felt since he had arrived.
He was aware of the pair of shoes sticking out into the moonlight on the bench across from him, the rest of the person in the deep shadow of a tree. He had smelled the cigarette earlier and now in his periphery he could make out the pinpoint glow of the bud in the dark like a slow heartbeat.
He sensed no threat in that corner. He understood the person wanted to be alone. So he focused on the fields as the sound of a faint engine cut the air, recognizing it as belonging to a motorcycle. He gripped his hands together. Then with an open palm he hit the side of his head.
“Good,” he said. “Okay.”
He made a soft noise and hit the side of his head again. He continued talking in French, practicing some phrases out loud. Then, in English, he sang, briefly, Moon river wider than a mile… The shadow on the bench kept still.
From somewhere far he pulled the knowledge that it was his birthday soon. It was his birthday, but he couldn’t remember in this moment what day exactly. Whether it mattered. As he felt the moon on him, the cool of the elevation, his birthday made him think of his father. It surprised him, that he thought of his father at all.
Alisak searched for the thread in his mind that created that bridge. Before his father began working in the opium fields, he had been, for a time, a land surveyor. For Alisak’s birthday one year, his father made him a map of an imaginary town on an imaginary mountain. There were endless streets and alleyways. A maze of buildings and doors that led nowhere and everywhere, up into the sky and down.
Some need for that, suddenly. Something plucked from a child’s dream.
He hummed: I’m crossing you in style someday…
The left shoe under the bench shifted.
Yves, he thought. Yves, the Seabird. Karawek. Vang. Prany. Noi. He repeated the names. He walked across the ridge toward the tree. He approached the bench and picked up the shoe on the grass and slipped it on the person’s foot. Sitting on the bench was the young woman who had come in to talk to Karawek earlier in the day. He recalled nothing about her other than she worked here, too, and that she was older than he was, already in her twenties.
She had not moved. She offered him her cigarette.
“Mostly they come in for broken bones,” she said, in French. “They fall off their horse or their tractor. You wrap up their torsos and tell them there isn’t really anything we can do with ribs. If it’s something we can set, then we’ll set it. If it’s something we aren’t equipped to handle, we’ll call the hospital in the city.”
“What do you call this here?” Alisak, who was speaking back to her in French, took out a seed from his pocket.
“C’est une olive. An olive seed.”
“And what is your name?”
“Marta.”
“Marta,” he said. “Olives.” He poked the side of his head and counted with his fingers: “Yves, Karawek, Vang, Prany, Noi, and Marta.”
“What?”
“And Khit. I think that was a name. Yes. A name. The weaver. The basket weaver. She said a name. I wonder if she’s still there. Lying there. We left her, you know. We left her there. I should have given her some food. Rice. Bread. We had bread there. Someone could make bread.”
“You’re tired.”
“Yes.”
“Go back to sleep. There’s nothing to do tonight.”
Her voice was slippery to him. It was as though she were slowly moving away from the bench even though she wasn’t.
“The olives,” he said. “They’re so good. Where are they from? I want to eat them every day.”
“You can. It’s okay here. You’ll be okay here. We promise. You’ll be safe.”
“Safe.”
“Yes.”
“This is France.”
“Yes.”
He suddenly remembered the game they used to play. About where they went to at nights. He looked up at the sky, trying to remember his answers.
“Where are the others?” he said.
“Asleep.”
“I really must find them.”
“The patients? They’re asleep. They’re down there in the barn. Only a few farmworkers in the area tonight.”
Marta stubbed out the cigarette and looked up at him from the bench.
“I don’t think so,” Alisak said. “Not the ones I’m looking for.”
“Who are you looking for?”
He leaned forward so that their faces were almost touching. He hadn’t yet bathed and he could tell she was trying to ignore the smell of him. He could smell her soft cigarette breath, could feel it brush against him, could almost hear her heart as he cradled her face and squeezed a little, tilting her chin up toward him.
“Did you know?” Alisak said. “I am a Bedouin.”
Marta remained silent. Her bottom lip trembled. She stayed where she was, without turning, as Alisak walked around her, down into a field, leaving the house and the property.
He entered the woods and began, in the late night, to climb the mountain.
AUNTIE (1974)
In the mountains, when she was hungry, she sewed.
There was often a basket of clothes nearby wherever she was staying, and so the woman who was called Auntie would pick out a pair of trousers or a shirt and spend an hour mending some tears in the fabric or sewing on buttons.
It was easy to find clothes. You took it off
the bodies. Or you found them hanging from what was left of the trees. Or they were on the face of a boulder, spread out and weather-faded, as though someone had been in the middle of a wash only to vanish. Other times, they were in perfect condition, wrapped up in waxed cloth in the corner of a hut, perpetually ready for a journey. Clothes of all sizes. Clothes a decade old or a few days old.
With the good shirts, Auntie cut off the bottom button and saved those, because it was harder to find buttons. And yet, over the years, she had managed to collect an assortment—dull wood, pale bone—and these she carried with her at all times in a pouch on her waist.
She had no appetite this morning but Auntie crossed the space of the hut and selected a shirt, unfurling it in the air, the snap of it breaking the silence. Early daylight leaked through the wall slats, catching the cloud of dust that hung heavy around her. The shirt, a boy’s shirt, was torn in places and stained—even a wash couldn’t get some of the splashes of color out—but it was wearable.
So as Auntie waited for news to come up the mountain, as she knew any moment now it would, she sat on the floor and laid the shirt across her lap. From a pouch, she took out a handful of buttons and spread them out beside her, looking for a few that might match.
She leaned forward a little and then leaned back. She could see the dirt under the raised floor of the hut better than she could see the buttons. She wished she had a pair of reading glasses. She wished it because four years ago she had tried a pair on for the first time in the camp where she had been in hiding with Vang and Prany before it had been raided and burned. That distant fire was visible for days as she trekked across and away from that high mountain as quickly as possible, not knowing who had managed to escape, whom she would see again, or how.
She could no longer remember whose reading glasses they were or why she had tried them on. Only the clarity and the sudden joy of it, even then.
That was the last time she had seen Vang and Prany.
It felt like she had been collecting buttons forever. In the hut, she selected one that had the shine of bone and began to thread it into a space where a button had been. It was badly matched, but it fit the hole and would hold. She worked slowly, being careful with the needle that she kept hidden in the cuff of her own shirt because it could work just as well as a weapon.
Movement came from outside, then a shadow passed under the hut, navigating the stilts below. Too small to be a child. An animal, perhaps. Then, footsteps. The splash of a cup in the plastic buckets of rainwater they had been collecting.
Auntie kept sewing. She pricked her fingertip, wiped the blood on her trousers—a pair she had found one day on the body of a man who had starved himself hiding in a cave, his body embracing a boulder, as though desiring only that embrace—and finished the button and started another, picking up a darker one, coconut, perhaps. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, knew she should eat, but she didn’t want to head outside just yet.
She had woken this morning wanting to stay in the privacy of some dream, if she had dreamed.
In all this, through the years, through the chaos and all that they had lost, always the surprise of wanting, for a moment, to be alone.
Or the surprise of suddenly remembering that there was a time when all that made her miserable was simply her height. Growing up in Vientiane, she was almost always a little taller than anyone she knew, her age or older, and she was never sure how to navigate the world in her body, as though her true self was in fact inside of it somewhere, undiscovered.
Then, during the war, she would notice the ease with which people listened to her. The quickness of them following her, or stepping aside if she wanted to pass. As though they found some kind of faith in her stature. They began to call her that name, “Auntie.”
Even Vang did, this childhood friend of hers who didn’t remember, when they met each other again in an empty farmhouse three decades later, ninety seconds before a bombardment, how he used to tease her. On her way into the mountains, she had stopped to bring supplies for a doctor who had started a field hospital for civilians, unaware it was Vang she was bringing supplies to. “Auntie?” he said, perplexed by the name, standing in a dilapidated room with a long table. Then he smiled. She was trying to recall how long it had been. Before she could speak, he took her wrist and told her to hurry, and she had frozen, noticing for the first time, and amazed by, the wrinkles that had formed around her old friend’s eyes.
Now, a lifetime later, she had settled into this new name as much as her own body.
Auntie lifted up the shirt. She was finished. Another shirt with mismatched buttons. Another with a tear in the back of it. And then she heard another noise, and through that tear in the fabric, she watched as a shadow climbed up the steps, knocked, and opened the door.
She didn’t look at first to see who it was; she already knew. Then, when he didn’t speak, she did look.
The man—it was an older man, thin, they were all so thin (that never failed to surprise her, too, as though each day she was determined to forget not only their hunger but their tiredness)—was out of breath but calm as he stepped in without asking, leaving the door open. Behind him, she spotted the small cluster of huts they had come upon abandoned and had been living in. That sudden intrusion of morning light.
Auntie stayed where she was. She cut the threads with her pocketknife. Then she slipped the needle back into the fabric of her cuff and folded the shirt across her lap.
“This is for the child,” she said. “Do you like it?”
It was as if the man hadn’t heard.
He stepped closer to her, into the hut, and said, “We found them.”
* * *
Was it Vang who first told her that the warriors who once roamed these mountains had spirits to protect them? That each house in the villages they conquered had one, too? And that when you died, those spirits went with you?
Through the years sometimes, she would look for the wooden posts in front of a home where people placed offerings, but she had yet to encounter one, or one that had survived in the small, abandoned communities she passed through. She had seen the ruins of stone temples built for Buddhas, from both this war and ones from centuries ago—their identities unrecognizable in the maze of vines until she stepped inside, or what was once inside the remnants of a great hall or a room, the air smelling different in there, as though still carrying what it once held—she had seen all this but she had never encountered that world of spirits she and Vang used to think often about.
As children, they lived next door to each other. She would climb up to the roof of her Vientiane house to wait for him. There was a shared wall that went up to her chin, where her father, and Vang’s father, had glued pieces of broken glass to the rim of it to ward off thieves from climbing over.
So she would sit back against the glass-topped wall, facing the laundry her mother had washed hanging over a braided rope, and wait for him. This boy who would appear not long after and slide himself down against the same wall on the opposite end and begin, almost immediately, to talk.
About what? School assignments, music, the old man down below who sold poppy flowers and who fell asleep on his stool; the French café they weren’t allowed to go to, but Vang went to anyway, walking by and slipping into his hand a small piece of bread left on an empty table outside; and the men who sometimes tossed him a coin from afar to run an errand, thinking he wouldn’t catch it.
But Vang always did. Even then, his days and his character seemed to be formed by his hands. More than any other part of his body or sense. The touch of some part of the world. Of someone. The yearning for it. The way, when they parted, one of their parents calling from below, they would stand on their toes to look a little bit at each other, and how he would reach across the broken glass to examine her palms and fingers to make sure she was taking care of them.
All those clothes swaying on a rope. And the sound of the busy street below.
That empty sky.
&
nbsp; * * *
What did they know back then? When she recalled their families and that neighborhood now, she thought of the optimism in that small corner of the country, so many of them unaware of the poverty and the lack of infrastructure in the surrounding provinces. The appearance of American aid. The North Vietnamese slipping in, wanting access to mountain roads.
She was, back then, nine at most. Vang a year younger. No older than the duration of the bombings that had finally finished so that the war existed these days, it seemed, only in name. There was the occasional raid and skirmish. And those who had survived and who had not yet fled to other countries were still being hunted.
They had caught Vang four years ago. Prany, too.
Four years.
Where were they now? What was happening to them? She didn’t want to hear about it just yet.
“Let’s walk,” she said to the man who had come in.
She picked up the mended shirt, and together they stepped outside, walking down the hut steps they had rebuilt with stacks of wood and a pair of upside-down buckets.
It had been fifteen months since she had seen or heard a bomber approaching. She was still not yet used to the silence. Neither of them was. His name was Touby and he walked slightly behind her, to her right. He had picked up the rifle he had placed outside and slung it back over his shoulder. There was also a pistol on his belt. Tomorrow, he would cross the Mekong and hike into Thailand along with the family they had rendezvoused with in the night so that he could look again for his teenage son.
Touby had been doing this every two weeks. He had managed to get his son out a year ago, but the boy was no longer in the camp outside of Chiang Mai. Touby had lost track of him. And so far, every time, he had come back with nothing, no trace, no clue. His son could have gone to one of the dozens of nearby camps. He could have gone into Chiang Mai. Farther. Somewhere wonderful. Or it was possible he was nowhere at all. Even then, Touby needed to know.
