by Paul Yoon
He kept his eyes shut and walked deeper into the unknown field, following an imaginary line, knowing that something might happen. He listened and waited for it. Heard his pounding heart. The swaying of the doctor’s coat and then a distant animal. He kept walking across and waited, waited for the years to slip out of him, and this thought, like a hook caught inside of him, that his life had been formed by departures. Other people’s. His own. How it was impossible for him now to define a home. To carry some sense of it. To feel some center to his day.
Prany opened his eyes. He had reached the edge and turned. All this quiet. The clear night. The pale coat on him. The house in the distance, and the ward, and the window behind which, he presumed, the girl was asleep.
He breathed. Again, he listened. He held the folded piece of paper in the coat pocket as he crossed the field once more, back.
* * *
Someone tall was waiting for him outside the house.
“You’re all grown up,” she said to Prany as he approached.
She stepped into the moonlight and greeted him. For a year, until they were caught, he and Vang had lived with her in the mountains on the Thai border.
“It’s actually a bit cold, isn’t it,” she said. “But I like that feeling. I want it to last a little longer before the day starts. I like shivering. That sounds silly. But I look forward to it. You must be tired.”
She reached for him and he flinched. She ignored this and kept talking. “This morning, I remembered how you learned to weave baskets. When you and Vang were hiding in the mountains with me. You would sneak them down to another village and try to sell them. Bring back food. Most were too scared to, but not you. We were still living seeking cover from an air war that thought so little of us, all of us, weren’t we? Our allies. What did the American president say? If you save one country in the middle of this nightmare, then maybe you stop the dominoes from tumbling against each other… What is a fucking domino? A Cold War? So many didn’t even know the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist, they just wanted to survive.
“I’ve missed you, Prany. We’re strangers to each other now, yes? Well, I’m here. This has been my life. I send people away. I give them new lives. But I can still think of you much younger, submerging yourself into the river to collect pebbles or watching me behead a chicken on a tree stump. I can think of your laughter and your crying and the smell of you, but it isn’t you, is it? That is another life. Four years. It took me four years to find you and then another year to plan how to get word to you, and then two to plan all this, and seven altogether, as you know, for you to come back here. And in that time, I thought of you and Vang every day because I never said good-bye to you both. Because I escaped. Because I was lucky. And so tell me: Who am I to you? Who is it that you think of every day? What do you imagine your life will be like when I take you across? What were the days like there in the prison for seven years? Whom did you think of? Am I less of a person for fleeing when our camp was overrun? For refusing now to ask how Vang is? Did he ever talk about me? Does he look as unrecognizable as you are now? Is the person I remember still inside him?… I refuse, I refuse… Tell me: Was it worth what you just did? Was that for you or for Vang, whom you could not protect in there? Was it for your sister?”
Prany had been by the water fountain that was filled with dirt. Now he rushed toward her, entering the moonlight, and reached for her neck. He began to squeeze and she let him. She hung her arms down and stood there, facing him.
“Was it you?” Prany said, squeezing harder.
A wind came and blew across the valley. He watched her eyes well and he asked again if it was her who gave them all up. He felt her go weightless, and he let go. He faced the valley, listening to Auntie collapse and cough. She rubbed her neck. She spat and wiped her eyes.
Prany took out the envelope with the money and dropped it beside her.
“There is a young girl,” he said. “Upstairs. Take her.”
Auntie got up. She pocketed the envelope, rubbed her neck again, and looked over his shoulder. Prany turned to see Khit standing by the open front door, suddenly shy. He wondered how long she had been standing there.
“What does that girl mean to you?” Auntie said. “One of thousands who want to go across.”
“I’m staying,” Prany said.
“For what?”
“I’ll stay and help.”
“You’ll be caught. You’ll be caught for what you just did.”
“Then I’ll help until I’m caught.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
Prany couldn’t tell if she meant what she had just said. He walked back toward Khit and leaned down. He said to her that it was time to go. That if she wanted to, it was time to go now. And he told her he remembered her mother and remembered the good day her mother had selling seven baskets at the market. That she got along with the potter and loved the smell of the night like the one now. Deep grass. That her mother was never afraid.
And then Prany said Alisak’s name. He made Khit promise that she would remember that name. That wherever she went, she would remember that name. That she should always ask about that name.
“Promise,” he said, and Khit, who had begun to tremble, unable to meet his eyes, did.
And to Auntie he said, “Look for me when you come back across.”
And then he took off the doctor’s coat. He put it on Khit. It was too long, the hem covering the ground, but she didn’t take it off as she hurried across the courtyard.
“Was there a message for me?” Auntie said to Prany. She meant a message from Vang.
He shook his head. With Khit beside her now, Auntie walked over to the fountain and said, “No, Prany. I didn’t give you up.” She sank her hand into the dirt, came up, and wiped her fingers against her trousers. Then she looked down, regarding Khit.
“Auntie,” Prany said. “Do you still have your knife?”
She took out her knife and tossed it to him. Then she tossed him a canteen filled with water. Prany went back inside as the two of them walked across the tobacco field, following the sticks. He picked up the can he had left on the counter. The knife had a can opener attached to it, and he used it, pausing once, his good hand sore. The can had beans inside. It made him laugh a little. They were inedible, dry and sour, but he ate them anyway.
He was no longer shivering. He felt stronger. He felt the emptiness of this house that had survived and thought about the Tobacco Captain somewhere, perhaps alive. He drank the water Auntie had given him and scanned the broken ceiling that was filled with moonlight. He heard the coo of a bird and the wind.
He had forgotten he could weave a basket.
Prany approached the tapestry once more, pushed it aside, and slid open the door. He went in the way he used to, consumed again by the stale, dusty air that made him cough. He looked straight ahead, ignoring the hall of six mirrors that caught his emaciated, hollow reflection, and entered the ward.
Inside, there were four rows of metal bed frames. Some of them were empty, others had mattresses, and there was one in the middle with a white sheet draped over it like a tablecloth. A metal tray lay flipped over on the floor. Scattered about the tray was a cup, a pair of scissors, and a ball of suturing thread.
The air came in through the broken windows. Everywhere there was moonlight.
From another room, the grandfather clock tolled. And as Prany counted the beats, a shape sat up from the bed with the sheet over it. The man—it was a man—swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his back to Prany. He had gray hair and he was wearing a hospital gown. He slipped his feet into a pair of slippers and walked to the center of the room, where he proceeded to pick up the scissors, the cup, and the sutures, and place them on the tray, which he returned to a table on the far wall. Then he picked up a broom and began to sweep. He moved down the aisle between the beds, past the first one, where Vang used to perform minor surgeries, and headed toward Prany. Prany heard the broom slide across the
floor. Footsteps. A strand of the man’s hair fell from his forehead and the broom swept it away.
Before he reached Prany, the man stopped.
“Am I done?” he said, looking over Prany’s shoulder at the hall of mirrors.
In whatever world he existed in, someone answered, so the man returned the broom to the wall and lay back down on the bed.
It was silent again. Out the window, there was a view of the courtyard, the tangled vines and grass. One day, all of this would be gone. It would be another farm. A room for something else. Prany wondered in what form this man he had just witnessed would exist. If the man would exist at all.
Prany stepped farther in. He passed the bed with the sheet over it, then passed the one where Khit’s mother had been. Through the tall windows he spotted the shapes of Auntie and Khit. They were now far, faint in the valley, but he could make out the paleness of the doctor’s coat. Something in Auntie’s hair, like a firefly, caught the night. It occurred to him the girl never told him what she had found in the stone jar, if she had in fact found something.
A droplet fell on his wrist. He thought it had begun to rain, that he was standing in the far corner where there was the gap in the ceiling. But it was his nose. It was bleeding again. He let it drip, staying by the window frame until he couldn’t see Auntie and the girl anymore.
For a little while longer, Prany kept watch. He tapped the wall and reached into his shirt pocket, remembering that the piece of paper with a circle drawn on it was not there but in the doctor’s coat. And then Prany walked across the ward, slipped into the last bed in the last row, and slept.
NOI (1969)
Some nights after she finished her duties in the ward, she would slip out and wander the farmhouse the way she once had, years before. She walked through what had been the great rooms and the corridors, through all the moonlight, stepping over a nurse asleep on the floor or lying against a beam that had fallen but was too heavy to move.
All that time unaware that she was spinning the ring on her thumb until she happened to look down or felt the cold of it suddenly, as though it had just appeared like some gift from a ghost who was accompanying her.
It was, in fact, a gift from the Frenchman who owned this house, though she never told anyone that, not her brother or Alisak. They figured she had found it or poached it from somebody, and she didn’t correct them.
At first, she kept it because it was probably worth something. But that changed over time. She thought of how they had once crossed a rice field only to return a week later to that same field gone, one corner of it turned into a mass grave someone had stopped covering, as though they had changed their minds halfway through, the shovel sticking up from a hill of dirt. So they had finished it themselves, as quickly as possible, taking turns while the others kept an eye on the road, all of them avoiding looking down.
How they never spoke about these things, but kept going, day after day, for as long as they could.
And for Noi, this growing need, the more they witnessed and came upon, to keep some part of herself from a long time ago. Some record of it. This one thing. And the private, inexplicable fear that if she were to lose it, she wouldn’t be anyone anymore.
Noi, whose recurring dream at the farmhouse was that as she passed that hall of mirrors, hurrying to find somebody, something—what was it?—she wasn’t there in the reflection.
She wondered, too, what proof of herself, of them, would remain in this house after they were gone. The motorcycles, perhaps. The piano with its loose panel and those pouches and their fingerprints on each and every key they touched but never pressed down. There was the dirt stain from her shirt against a closet wall as she and her brother sought cover from a bomb. The mop she used in the ward without realizing how bloody the water was until she saw it all over her palms. So she had pulled up the hem of her shirt to clean herself as she kept walking through the house, awake—she could never sleep here—recalling what it looked like back then, which falling wallpaper or piece of broken furniture had outlived those years.
She was still surprised she had found herself at this house again after so long. The three of them had jumped into a jeep for the first time, trusting two strangers, and as they sped toward the Plain of Jars, her brother and Alisak leaning out and luxuriating in the cool rush of wind—when was the last time they had been in a vehicle together?—Noi suddenly knew where they were going.
She had been walking with Alisak when a car appeared on the river road one afternoon, slowed, and a man, leaning across, rolled down the passenger-side window. Two girls a few years older than Noi were seated in the back. She was twelve, Alisak a year older. In six months, the town would be taken over and they would begin wandering the country.
They had never seen the driver before, this foreigner, didn’t know who he was then. They had never seen the girls either. The man spoke in a mix of French and some Lao words he had learned. He said he needed help for a party and revealed the money. It was more than they had ever seen. He said it was only a night’s work. That he was in a hurry and if they didn’t want the job he would go on.
Alisak shrugged, reached for the door, but the man held up his hand.
“Just her,” he said.
Noi looked at the girls and at the money. The girls waved for her to join them. So she told Alisak she would see him later and got in, the two others in the back sliding over for her. Then they drove past Alisak, who was tossing a stick on the side of the road, their eyes meeting briefly, and then they were heading across the valley and the tobacco fields to the house.
At the house, she was given a uniform—the fabric so clean and crisp it made her shiver—and for the rest of the evening she moved back and forth from the kitchen to all the rooms, refilling a silver tray with food and glasses of wine.
It wasn’t odd to her that there was hardly anyone there because she had never been to a party like this. Or perhaps it was that the house was so large, the rooms felt empty. What she realized was that he—the man who had been driving—was the only Frenchman. And that no one noticed her. She recognized a local policeman. He was speaking about a thief whose identity the group around him was guessing.
I think it is that mean-spirited restaurant owner. No, it is most certainly a fisherman.
In another room, she heard a man talking about food shortages. The changing temperature of the river.
The hours passed, Noi catching moments of conversations and, coming from somewhere she never found, distant music. Then the party was done and she was told to help clean up, putting away the food, washing and drying the dishes, which she stacked inside the kitchen cabinets using a stepladder, promising herself she would not trip and fall.
When she was finally excused, she stepped out into a hall to a vast silence. Some of the lights still on, but dim. She had no idea what time it was. She was exhausted and hungry, but there was also the understanding that there was enough money in the back pocket of her pants to last months. And that she was still in these fresh, new clothes.
Standing by the entrance, alone, she realized she was supposed to walk back to town. And she almost did walk out, but instead she turned and crossed over to the other wing of the house, following a long corridor with paintings and a row of small chandeliers. She had walked down here a few times in the evening—it was those small chandeliers she had noticed, the way the light fell, it seemed, in a multitude of directions—and even in her tiredness, she luxuriated in the strange light, knowing that she might never walk down a corridor like this again.
She walked wondering if she could come back. And what she would tell Prany and Alisak when she returned to them. She reminded herself to tell them about the changing river temperature. Then she wondered if they were there by the river or with the boat woman or somewhere else, somewhere new, like her.
She was thinking of the way she had caught Alisak’s eyes outside the car window, the two of them looking at each other the way they had begun to, silently and often, as thou
gh each of them wanted to tell the other something but didn’t know how—she was thinking of that moment when the car had sped away from him when she entered the enormity of the dining room with its long table, its paintings and high-back chairs.
She was ignoring her exhaustion, her eyes wanting to consume everything, but slow to find, in the back corner, the two girls she had come in with. They were lying on the floor, asleep, without their clothes, curled up like two animals by the feet of the Frenchman, who was in a corner chair, wearing a loose robe that revealed his own nakedness. It appeared he was also asleep.
She stayed quiet, startled, as the Frenchman opened his bloodshot eyes, sensing her presence there by the long table, and then focusing on her. He smiled. Then he stood—he was tall and extremely thin and pale, she could see the ridges of his rib cage—and he dragged the chair over to her. He motioned for her to take a seat by the table and Noi, terrified, did what she was told. Then he brought his own chair close enough so that, facing her, their knees almost touched. He leaned forward a little, staring at her, and she could smell the deep stink of his breath, the smell in between his legs. She could hear his heavy breathing as he leaned back and tightened his robe, covering himself, and placed his hands behind his head. There was a sudden clarity to him that surprised her.
And when he spoke, it was like in the car, the man using a mix of French and Lao again: “Did you know? In France. There used to be parties where everyone wore masks. Centuries ago. It was supposed to bring people of different classes and histories together. The anonymity and equality of it. A countess could dance with someone, say, of the middle class and neither would be the wiser. It was also, of course, an invitation for recklessness and criminality. What do you think? What if I had masks at my parties? Would it be equality or criminality?”
