A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  “You explained that to him?” I asked, feeling my stomach churn.

  “Yes,” said the stationmaster, his worried look returning. “Would you like me to fetch your suitcase for you? Perhaps that would help your mem—”

  I found the strength to smile, the corners of my mouth quivering, my eyes blurring again, and interrupted him. “You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry to have been such a bother, Monsieur Dat. You’re right about everything, I’m sure. I must just be remembering incorrectly. Perhaps I’m unwell.”

  “May I fetch a doctor?” he asked, stepping closer, but I shook my head and backed away from him. “I’m unwell,” I repeated. “I must be. I’m terribly sorry.” I turned around and ran as fast as I could in my brand-new, barely creased shoes toward the nearest exit.

  I hurried to the left wing of the station, to the corner door that Lanh had pointed out to me on our first journey there, and slipped out, past the cars heading to the main entrance, past the line of coolies and the calls from the vendors, into the shadows of voie A. It was a narrow road that ran parallel to the large avenue that the station was on, the route Mandarine. Voie A, like the other narrow roads surrounding it, was full of Annamite workers shading themselves with newspapers or sheltering under tattered store awnings. I paused to catch my breath, my throat dry and aching from thirst, and shut my eyes tight, imagining Lucie’s little voice, her hand on mine.

  I wasn’t unwell. I wasn’t forgetting anything. My family had disappeared.

  TWO

  Jessie

  September 2, 1933

  “It’s the hoa sua flowers. The lovely smell. That’s what you paused to sniff, yes?” Trieu’s pleasant voice came at me slowly, mimicking the breeze drifting in the open doors. “Milk flowers, in your language. But we say hoa sua.” She overemphasized the pronunciation and nodded as I repeated the words, trying not to catch my tongue on the S.

  “That’s it,” she said approvingly.

  I smiled at the smooth, oval face of the girl who was employed as my personal servant. She was thin as paper and startlingly beautiful, her body managing to curve in the places that mattered, despite her slight size. When we were introduced in front of the house just that morning, I assumed she spoke almost no French. I had assumed wrong.

  In the six hours that Victor, Lucie, and I had been in Hanoi, I’d already realized that I had incorrectly assumed many things about the country and its people. Or perhaps they were just described to me incorrectly by Victor’s friends in Paris.

  “At this time of year, they start to bloom everywhere,” Trieu continued. “Even if there are no trees near, the smell is so strong throughout the city that it’s as if they are growing in your own garden. Do you like it?”

  She moved to the window, the skirt of her white ao ngu than, which was cut straight but slit high on either side, floating up behind her, a striking contrast to the black pants she wore underneath. She leaned forward and pushed the glass pane wide open. The wind responded by blowing in, and she breathed in slowly, moving her hands like a circulating fan to waft the smell closer to her face.

  “I like it very much,” I said, still surprised by her outgoing demeanor and perfect French.

  “I will cut some and place them on your dressing table this afternoon. There are two trees that should be flowering in the far end of the garden,” she said as she walked back to the bed. “They might not be fully open yet, but they can bloom here in your room.” She unlatched the last of my trunks and continued folding my clothes, spraying them with floral perfume and placing them in the room’s deep closet.

  Victor had said that Annamite women were docile. Meek, he’d said. Do not expect the servants to speak more than a few courteous phrases to you, he’d advised. Just thank them and say no more. Do not wish them to become your friends or confidantes. They are employees; you are the employer. Their behavior will reflect that arrangement. But since we had arrived at our house in Hanoi that morning and Victor had left me alone with my servant, Trieu had not ceased talking, seemingly delighted to walk me through all three stories of the beautiful house. She had even chased Lucie down a hallway with Lucie’s own servant, Cam, while the late-afternoon sunlight danced across the floor with them, following their laughter like tagalong children.

  “When do the flowers die?” I asked Trieu as she motioned for me to sit in the intricately carved ebony chair at my dressing table.

  “In December. By your new year they’ll be gone. By our new year in February, Tet Nguyen Da, you won’t even be able to remember the smell,” she said. “They are not a cold-weather flower, so you must enjoy them now. Tomorrow, if you have a moment, walk around Ho Hoan Kiem, the lake,” she said, gesturing to the dark blue water just three hundred yards from our house. “They are the prettiest when they lean toward the water, and something about the wet breeze awakens them earlier there than in the rest of the city. Close to Kiem, they should be nearing full bloom already.”

  She took a silver hairbrush off the table and started to brush my straight blond hair, placing a hand on the top of my head to keep it still.

  I turned back to look at her, but she kept her eyes steady on the mirror. “Oh, no, thank you, but that’s not necessary,” I protested. We had servants in Paris, but physically they always kept their distance. They never touched me unless I asked them to, never locked eyes with me, let their gaze linger, or raised their voices. I could already tell that it was different in Indochine.

  “It is necessary,” she said, her voice still light and friendly. “You will dine at the Officers’ Club, I am sure of it. The French always do on their first night. You will have to wear your hair like this,” she said, holding up a strand and folding it in waves. “I will use the tool.”

  She went to the bathroom and brought back the iron rod that I had never learned to handle well, preferring to wear my shoulder-length hair straight and simple.

  “Whatever you think is best,” I replied, feeling that it was right to let her take the lead. Victor hadn’t mentioned the slightest detail about our plans for the evening, but after our journey, I was hoping they involved a hot bath, a few stories with Lucie, and twelve hours’ sleep.

  “This is best for your thin yellow hair, Madame Lesage,” Trieu said pleasantly. “It will make it look like there is more of it.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to take offense. “I’m sure you know better than I do about these things.”

  “No, Madame Lesage,” she said, positioning the wand in her hand. “But about the Officers’ Club etiquette, perhaps I do. I worked for the last mistress of the house before you. Madame van Dampierre. She also went to the Officers’ Club on her first night.”

  “How long did the van Dampierres live here?” I asked, trying not to move my head. Trieu tilted my chin up, and I fixed my gaze above. In the living room there was an intricate pattern in the coffered ceiling, but in the master bedroom the ceiling was smooth, high, and painted a fresh white, adding to its airiness.

  “Four years,” Trieu replied.

  “I hope we will be here as long.” I paused and looked at my reflection in the mirror, thinking about how many times Louise van Dampierre had done the same thing. “Were they happy here?” I asked.

  “They were very happy for a time,” she said thoughtfully. “And four years is not a short time in the colony. Many French women don’t last more than a year or so in Indochine. Some, much less. They say it’s too hot in summertime. They miss their food. They miss the European way of life. They want their children to grow up like they did. So they return.”

  “I’m not French,” I said, pointing out what was obvious to the French but might not be to Trieu. “So I think I’ll quite like it here. Food, heat, and all.”

  “Yes, Madame Lesage. I hope you do,” she said, gently lifting another strand of my hair.

  Lesage. I liked the way she said it, so differently than the Parisians, who paused between the E and the S. Trieu strung the syllables together like Christmas lights.<
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  I leaned back, quickly growing more comfortable in her presence as she spiraled my hair with the wand.

  Before this year, I hadn’t thought much about our name. Not since my wedding day in 1925, when my last name was changed from Holland to Lesage. But on the boat ride over, Victor brought it up several times.

  “Our last name is Lesage,” he’d said, “but in Hanoi everyone needs to know that my mother is a Michelin. That she is a close, though much younger cousin to my uncles Édouard and André, may he rest in peace. She isn’t Agathe Lesage. She is Agathe Michelin Lesage. Please remember to say her name that way.”

  He had reminded me of this detail in Paris while we were packing our trunks, again on our journey over, when a sleeping Lucie was curled at my feet like a cat, and yet again when we saw the white shores of Siam, the sand as fine as sugar. I thought he had done enough reminding, but he had whispered, “Remember, Michelin,” when we were about to meet our household staff.

  “They’ll respect us more if they hear the Michelin name,” he’d said as our new driver, Lanh, made his way through the narrow streets, our car gliding through patches of shadow and sunshine.

  I was still shaken from the boat journey and too taken with the new world around me to care what my name was or wasn’t. But as we pulled up to the handsome house with its center turret, and I saw the row of young Annamite servants waiting outside, their faces beaming, I’d put my hand on Victor’s leg and said, “I think they’ll respect us most if we are nice and pay them well.”

  “I’m always nice,” Lucie had chimed in, which was mostly true.

  “And I always pay well,” Victor added. “I’m paying them all a quarter piastre more a day than the van Dampierres were. That’s what people expect from the Michelins. Even in a global depression.”

  “What is the Officers’ Club like?” I asked Trieu now, thinking that she already seemed so different from the person I’d stared at as we pulled through the iron gate. “Is it really so important that we go on our first night? Doesn’t that seem a bit rushed?”

  “I’ve never been inside,” she said. “It’s only for the French. But Madame van Dampierre seemed to care about it very much. It is where all the French go, especially the women, even though it was built for the men, I think. You will go there often with your husband, and nightly when your husband is away. You’ll see.”

  “There are no Annamites there at all?” I asked, surprised. Victor told me that the French had created their own world inside a world, but from what I’d observed on our drive in, Indochine and its people seemed difficult to ignore.

  “There are Annamites working inside,” she clarified. “My cousin cleans dishes there. And a boy who worked here for the last family now serves drinks in the bar. But that is all they are allowed to do. Serve.”

  “What do the French women do at the clubhouse then?” I asked, imagining one of the beach clubs Victor and I had frequented on the Riviera.

  “The club, never the clubhouse,” she corrected me. “And they eat and drink too much. I think there are several tennis courts and a large swimming pool. They never bring children, even though their children would like to swim there, I think. There are rules against it. No children, no dogs, no Annamites.”

  “That seems a rather outdated policy,” I said, holding my breath as the curling wand approached my ear. “I’m sure Lucie would love a swimming pool in this heat.” I would ask Cam to find her one elsewhere.

  As Trieu continued waving my hair, I tried to inhale the scent of the milk flowers the way she did, moving my hands slowly when the breeze came in. But after a few breaths I realized that what I was enjoying as much as the fragrant scent was the city’s humidity. It was upward of 80 degrees outside, even in the late afternoon, and the air was thick with moisture. It was a dampness that was very familiar and never failed to remind me of being young. It felt like the summers of my childhood, like home.

  Not Paris. If I closed my eyes, I was breathing the air of the small town of Blacksburg, Virginia. In that hilly southwestern corner of the state, where mountain laurel and black huckleberry bloom in the shadows of the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, there wasn’t much to do but get lost in the wilderness and daydream about a bigger version of yourself.

  I was never going to see Blacksburg again, and perhaps because I was so certain of that, I clung to little reminders of Virginia whenever I encountered them. Humidity was one of those memory triggers. On this evening, eight thousand miles away, I felt closer to my birthplace than I had in years.

  By the time I was thirteen years old and the oldest of seven children, I knew I’d never stay in the South. Two years later, seven became eight when another girl was born. Girls were about as valuable as stray dogs to my parents. Another mouth to feed that would never be enough help on the farm. The house was crowded when we were three; when we were ten, closets had to be turned into bedrooms.

  We were no different from the families we grew up around, all with too many children and not enough money. Except for one thing: our language. My mother was originally from Quebec, though she had spent most of her life in Virginia, having moved south with her father so he could work the tobacco farms. She had not passed on much to us, but she had given us French, spoken with a strong Québécois accent. She preferred to do her shouting in French, and the only reason we learned was because she was almost always shouting. Perhaps she would have restrained herself if she’d known that in the end it would greatly help to hasten my departure.

  As soon as I could leave, I did, running down a path I’d carved using nothing but willpower and a fierce hatred of my circumstances. After I turned twenty, an age that felt like the true mark of adulthood, and had finished studying at the small teachers’ college one town away, I traveled to Manhattan, a city that immediately started feeding my hungry soul. I spent two years teaching French in a high school above Central Park, too far north to be fashionable, and then used my savings to travel to Paris. In New York, I had lived in a boardinghouse for women near Grand Central Station, which allowed me to put aside enough money for my passage, as well as enough to survive on in Paris for exactly three months.

  Just as I expected, New York helped me start shedding my skin, but I still felt too close to home there. Paris allowed me to embrace a new version of myself. It was the city that my dreams were made of. Before I sailed, one of my fellow teachers had gifted me a small leather writing journal and on the first page had written, in her beautiful looping hand, “Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes,” a quote from her favorite writer, Henry James. I didn’t have enough money for material joys, but how right James was about lust of the eyes. Everything in Paris was beautiful. The people, the clothes, the food, but mostly just the city itself. The limestone buildings sitting tightly together along the Seine, the cathedrals commanding entire city blocks, and the river that you could walk along for miles, which seemed to exert a gravitational pull for the two banks it commanded. If Blacksburg, Virginia, had a complete opposite, it was Paris, France.

  I went for a summer trip, I stayed for eight years, and now it was all oceans away. I had a new world to find myself in. Indochine.

  I watched as Trieu worked magic on my hair, the soft waves she was creating, and had to admit she was right. It did look more polished. Fuller, too. I was going to say so when I caught a glimpse of Lucie’s reflection in the vanity mirror. She was peeking in the scarcely ajar bedroom door with her beloved porcelain doll, Odile, in her arms and Cam right behind her.

  “It’s too bad we will have to send Lucie to boarding school now that we’re in Hanoi,” I said in a loud voice. “It’s the only way she’ll learn to be a proper French girl.”

  “No, maman!” Lucie cried, pushing open the heavy door and revealing her hiding place. “Don’t send me away! Please let me stay!” Her little face contorted in panic, she threw Odile to the ground, causing the doll’s big brown eyes to close. I laughed, motioning her over. />
  “Oh, Lucie, I’m kidding. I just wanted to see how accomplished you are as a spy. Turns out, very.”

  “Don’t make me leave, maman. Please don’t send me away,” she begged.

  “Don’t cry, chou. I would never send you away,” I said, opening my arms for her to run into. “You can be a wild little animal for all I care, play in the garden until nightfall and never read a thing, in French or any other language, as long as you’re near me.”

  “I want to stay here,” Lucie said, throwing her arms around my neck. She rubbed her face against my dress and hugged me. “I won’t spy anymore,” she promised.

  “You can stay here,” I whispered in her ear. “And you can spy all you want. But try spying on your papa next time. He’s less observant than I am.”

  Once she was sure I wasn’t about to ship her back to France, she pulled at my still warm hair and said, “Actually, Papa asked me to fetch you. I was fetching, you see. He wants to see you on the terrace. We didn’t have a terrace in Paris,” she added, rightly. “Now we do.”

  “Come,” I said, taking her hand as soon as Trieu dismissed me from my chair. “Let’s go together.” Lucie held my fingers tightly as we walked down the wide corridor with its twenty-foot ceilings. In the upper foyer, where the tiles were a patterned black-and-white ceramic, she tried to hop from one square to the other. She gave up to descend the grand, half-spiral staircase, jumping from step to step.

  “It’s this way, maman,” she said at the bottom, leading me to the double glass terrace doors with brass handles curled like figure eights.

  “I remember,” I responded, letting her drag me to Victor.

  When he saw us emerge from the house, Victor folded his newspaper in four and said, “Merci, chérie,” to Lucie. She sat next to him on his chaise longue and let him kiss her head. “For your hard labor, I present you with this cake.” He lifted a blue porcelain plate with a pink pastry on it in the shape of a flower and handed it to her. “It’s a mung-bean-and-rice pastry called banh com. A local delicacy, I’m told.”