A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  “Lanh,” I said quietly, trying to focus on him. I stretched my hand out to him, and he helped me climb out of the car and steady myself on the dry reddish ground. He pointed to the rock and I shook my head, still feeling too unstable, so we both sat on the ground next to it instead, leaning against it for support.

  I looked at him, hoping for answers.

  “The woman who prepared your pipe at Luong-Vuong,” he began. “She saw your identity card in your bag. She went to the hotel next door and telephoned the house. I answered. She robbed you, I think, but at least she telephoned.” He gave me an anxious look. “Are you feeling like yourself now?”

  “I don’t even know what that means anymore,” I replied. “But the world seems to be calmer. I think. And I feel less sick. The opium helped.”

  He nodded, his eyes still on me.

  “What time is it?” I asked, looking up at the sun directly above us.

  “It’s almost noon,” he replied.

  It wasn’t even midday and I felt like I’d already been to war.

  “Lanh,” I said, turning to him, suddenly remembering where I’d been before Luong-Vuong. “Did you take me, Lucie, and Victor to the station this morning?”

  “Of course,” he said without pause.

  “Of course,” I repeated, feeling the familiar, stinging sensation of tears ready to flow. I buried my face in my hands.

  “I’m so utterly confused,” I said through the sobs that needed to come.

  “Do you not remember?” he said, inching away to give me some room.

  “I do,” I said, opening my eyes again. “I think that’s why I’m crying. Because I do remember. Today, yesterday, all of it. I do remember, but everyone is telling me I’m wrong. That something is very wrong with me. But I don’t think there is.”

  I glanced at him and he quietly said, “Who is telling you that you’re wrong?”

  I repeated the same story I had told the stationmaster. “But he told me I arrived alone. Without Victor and Lucie. And then he called the house and Trieu told him that they weren’t in Hanoi at all. That they had gone to see the caves in Trang An together. Caves, of all things. I wasn’t convinced by what he was saying, but I just don’t trust myself lately, so I agreed and ran out of the station. As you can imagine, I was very distraught. All I could manage was to lose myself under a cloud of opium for a while. But then you found me, thank God. I knew I wasn’t wrong. I don’t know where they are, but I know they are not in Trang An and they did not disappear.”

  “Come,” said Lanh, standing and helping me up. “I think I know what’s wrong. We will find Lucie and Monsieur Lesage soon—I’m sure they are worried about where you are, too—and they may just be at the house. But there is something else that’s even more important than the whereabouts of your family.”

  He helped me into the car, and we traveled in silence toward the house. I was still processing Lanh’s words. The stationmaster had lied to me. But more importantly, my family had not disappeared.

  Lanh turned toward our neighborhood, maneuvering the car around the usual potholes, but turned off before our street. He parked the car near the lake, in a quiet spot, and turned to me.

  “Madame Lesage. Jessie,” he said. It was the only time he’d ever said my first name.

  “Lanh,” I said softly, as if our relationship had somehow just shifted by him saying that one word.

  “I know why you’re feeling the way you are,” he said, his hands in his lap, fidgeting. “And why you were too distraught to find your family.”

  “Victor would say it’s because my mind is broken.”

  “Your mind is not broken,” he said very quietly. He tilted his head up and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time.

  “What is it, then?” I asked, searching his dark eyes.

  “You are a woman being preyed upon.”

  “By Victor?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.

  Lanh looked away but said nothing, letting the silence sit with us for a moment.

  “Do you remember when we drove back to the yellow house after I took you to the hippodrome? After the horse race? You were very upset.”

  “I was,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Red. Of Marcelle.

  “I asked Trieu to bring you something to eat and to make you very hot tea. Something to soothe you.”

  “I remember,” I said, though it was blurry.

  “I stayed near you that day because I was worried, and you’ve always been very kind to me. To us,” he said, indicating his sister without saying her name. “When I wasn’t by your side, I was in the shadows, not far away, making sure you were being taken care of. Trieu brought you what I asked, but you didn’t drink all the tea she’d prepared, maybe only half, then you fell asleep. Trieu pulled all the curtains closed and then took the half-full cup downstairs with her when she was clearing your dishes, and I followed. When she was in the living room, on her way to the kitchen, she separated the cup from your plate and placed it aside. Lucie, who had been playing in the living room with her funny doll, that one with the pale face—”

  “Odile,” I whispered. I had bought it for Lucie before she was even born.

  “Odile,” he repeated. “Lucie left the doll and picked up the cup, smelling its contents and then lifted it up to drink from it. But before Lucie could drink the tea, Trieu, who was coming back from the kitchen, rushed over and knocked the cup out of her hands, causing it to shatter on the floor. I think she was as startled as Lucie was, in a way. It was forceful. She didn’t think anyone saw it—I was in the shadows, like I said. She stared at the mess and then quickly apologized to Lucie. She said that her mother was quite sick and that if she used the same cup she could fall ill, too.” He paused and looked at me. “I’ve seen you with your daughter. You share everything. You’re a good mother. I knew you wouldn’t have minded about the cup.”

  I looked at him, my layers of confusion multiplying.

  “But Lucie never mentioned anything to me about that,” I said, thinking back.

  “I think she’s very sensitive about your being sick,” said Lanh.

  I nodded, thinking of her words earlier that morning.

  “With Lucie standing there, shocked, Trieu ran to the kitchen for a broom and rags to clean up the mess, and then Cam came and pulled Lucie away to wash her.”

  “But you were still there.”

  “I was, watching from the dining room. When they were gone, I quickly went over to the shattered cup, took some of the herbs out of the fragments, and wrapped them in a napkin.”

  “Why did you do that?” I asked, looking at him quizzically.

  “I had a bad feeling. Trieu has never been anything but kind with Lucie. For her to push the cup like that was strange. It was out of character.”

  I nodded. It was true that Trieu was fond of Lucie. I had felt very lucky that they all pecked over her lovingly.

  “That tea,” Lanh said slowly, looking out at the river. “I had never seen those particular herbs before. Or I didn’t think I had. So I took them to a doctor that many of the local people like me, servants, rely on. A Chinese herbalist. A highly regarded one.”

  “Out of concern for Lucie?” I said.

  “No,” said Lanh quietly. “Out of concern for you.”

  “What did he say?” I asked, searching Lanh’s face.

  “It didn’t take him long at all,” said Lanh. “He smelled the small bit I brought, then he ingested a little of it. A trace amount. As soon as he’d swallowed it, he said it was without any doubt an herb called ky nham. Langdang in his language, in Chinese.”

  “Ky nham?” I said numbly.

  “Ky nham,” he repeated. “Henbane in French. Hyoscyamus niger is the medical name. It’s a poisonous plant. And a very strong hallucinogen.”

  “A hallucinogen?” I said, my stomach churning. “They’ve been giving me a hallucinogen?”

  “I don’t know who has. And I don’t know if it was once or m
any times, but that day, when Trieu gave you that tea, that’s what was in it.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said, thinking back to the tea I drank that day. It hadn’t tasted strange. It tasted just like the tea I drank nearly every day. The one she had been serving me since my second day in Indochine—the day I’d seen the dead man. The king’s herb, she called it. It had had no effect on me then. I’d been fine then. But when had I stopped being fine? It had all been so gradual. When was the line drawn dividing the Jessie Lesage who’d been able to handle her nervous energy into a woman who was consumed by worry, and much worse?

  “Why would she give that to me?” I asked, my heart starting to pound.

  “I don’t know,” said Lanh. “That’s what I’ve been puzzling over.”

  “But when was that? The afternoon I spent at the horse race, that was six days ago.”

  “Yes,” he said, apology in his voice. “I have known for a few days, but you were dealing with your own matters and I haven’t been able to speak to you alone. But when I received this phone call today, I knew. Something was terribly wrong, and it had to do with Trieu and that herb. I was sure of it.”

  Trieu. I thought of my relationship with Trieu. Don’t try to befriend them, Victor had said. And I hadn’t, but it didn’t mean I hadn’t grown fond of her. More than that, I had come to rely on her. She had seen me naked, bathed me, spoken to me at my most vulnerable. She must have been going up to her room every night and laughing at me. Me, the foolish woman, yet again.

  “How long has Trieu worked in the house?” I asked.

  “Not long. Madame van Dampierre hired her a few months before you arrived. That caused me to worry even more. Unlike Diep or Cam, she is still not very familiar to me.”

  “What else does this ky nham do?” I asked.

  “It’s a hallucinogen. That’s what the herbalist said. A very strong one. The effects can last hours, he said, but can linger for days. In your case, I’m unsure. It depends how much she was administering. He also said that if ingested with alcohol, the effects could be worse. And drinking, it’s something that all French women seem to do more in Indochine than they usually would,” he said. “Alcohol aside, this herb, even in small doses, could cause confusion, problems with the memory, stomach illness. All things that perhaps you’ve been suffering from for some time?”

  “Yes,” I said, gripping my hands together. “But I thought it was just me. Just my mind refusing to cooperate with the rest of the world. A repeat of something that happened to me years ago. After Lucie was born.”

  “I don’t know much about you, beyond what I see, but I don’t think you’re sick. Here or here,” he said kindly, pointing to my heart and then my head.

  I nodded, letting his disclosure sink in. In the past few months, what had been real and what hadn’t been?

  I was scared, and I was angry. My whole experience in Indochine felt stolen from me, as if I’d been living the way someone else had wanted me to. Ever since I’d left Virginia, I had done everything I could to have the freedom to choose my own path, to direct my life the way I wanted it to go. Trieu had taken that from me, just as my parents had when I was a child.

  “I know I brought it up before. But those posters you described. The house of a hundred suns. You’ve really never seen them since you were a child?” I asked. More than anything, that’s what I wanted to be true. To have seen the poster in the station.

  He looked at me gravely and slowly shook his head no.

  I bit my lip and thought about the words. If I had never seen them on a poster, how did I know them?

  “When I traveled down to Saigon, just a few weeks ago, I thought I saw one of the posters you were describing hanging above the timetables. I have such a vivid memory of it. The image was of a station just like the one in Hanoi, and above it, it said, ‘Pour aller loin, pour payer moins, pour être bien, prenez le train.’ But just my mind playing tricks on me, I suppose. Or Trieu playing tricks on me.”

  The instant I uttered her name, my sadness started to bleed into another rush of anger. Where were Victor and Lucie? We needed to return home and see if they were there. And if they weren’t, we had to find them and, together, confront Trieu. They had not disappeared, and now we had to make sure that Trieu didn’t, either.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Marcelle

  November 20, 1933

  “A letter came this morning. It was brought by messenger from Hue,” said Khoi as I fell against him in the midday sun that illuminated his backyard, making the grass look electric.

  “From Sinh’s father?” I asked, looking at it in his hand.

  “No. From Anne-Marie,” he said, allowing himself to smile.

  “From Anne-Marie?” I said, eagerly reaching for it. Khoi handed it to me and I shivered, looking down at the ink on the envelope. Sinh’s father’s address was in front of me, written in her beautiful, large looping hand. I gripped the page, bending my neck and placing my face against it. “Across an ocean and more and I swear this envelope smells like her, Khoi.”

  He smiled at me and nodded.

  “Does she know we found Paul?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” said Khoi, cocking his head. “How could she? Did the angels bend down and whisper it to her?”

  “Then what did she say? Why didn’t she write before? It’s been years.” I looked at the envelope again and started to cry.

  “Maybe she could sense it,” said Khoi. “That we needed to hear from her now. Maybe we are all still linked in that way, even without Sinh.”

  I nodded, not able to stop my tears from falling.

  “Let’s read it before we cry,” said Khoi, running his hand across my cheek. “For so long we’ve been afraid that she was dead. That she was gone like Sinh. And now, look, we have this. So don’t fall apart until we read it at least three times,” he said, carefully opening the envelope and taking out the pages.

  “You read the last letter that made me cry,” I said, taking the paper from Khoi. “This time, I’ll do it.”

  “I think it will be a happier letter,” said Khoi.

  I started it, hoping he was right.

  My dearest friends,

  It has been a week now that I’ve returned to Paris and I finally feel strong enough to write to you. I’m sorry it’s been such a long while. I’m sure I made you think the worst with my silence, which I never intended. But in truth, I have been close to the edge many times since I last wrote. I’ve been in Italy, in Rome and Milan, which started out well, but this past year, I got quite caught up in some awful things. Violent protests, a few very dangerous decisions to try to push the fascists out of power. I had so much rage swimming through me, and it just refused to leave.

  I had to flee Italy this year. I don’t think I would have lived much longer if I hadn’t. But I’ve found happiness since. I’m back in Paris, and I’ve taken up other interests. Now, I’m fighting to win the right to vote as much as I’m fighting for workers’ rights, and the anti-colonial movement. I’m very involved with UFSF, the French branch of the international alliance for women’s suffrage. I firmly believe that when women can vote, we can change the country, and the colonies. The women in UFSF are trying to convince me to be more reformist and less revolutionary, but don’t worry, they haven’t succeeded. I still wear a tuxedo most of the time, but they have insisted that when I attend their meetings, I wear a shirt underneath. I’ve agreed, for now. But I did also convince the president to take up the ukulele. Charming instrument. I refuse to let its popularity die out with the jazz age.

  Our plan is to get a woman into the government in the next few years. Some of us are convinced that it will happen sooner than that, and maybe it will. Maybe that woman could even be me. Now that would cause my father to have a stroke, wouldn’t it?

  I have not seen my family in two years. I wish things could be different, but there are some things which are not forgivable. What they did to Sinh is one of those things. If they ever want
to try to right their wrongs, they can find me, but until then, I’ve decided to hold on to that part of my anger. But that’s all I hold on to. I’ve forgiven the man who shot Sinh. I came to believe that while he played the role of executioner, that’s all he was. I hope I’m right. Maybe one day, you will tell me you have the answer to that.

  Sinh’s father told me the last time we exchanged letters that you two were both in Indochine still. It made me very glad.

  I hope you will stay there and live Sinh’s life for him. But I also want you to come find me one day. My heart has been half empty for so long, but I know that when I see you again, it will feel less so. I have finally allowed myself peace. I hope you’ve done the same.

  All my love,

  AM

  “Oh, Anne-Marie,” I said, running my hand over her initials. “How I wish you were here.”

  “She’s right. It’s time for us to find peace, too,” said Khoi, resting his head on my shoulder. “We won’t stop trying to change things, but perhaps we can let ourselves breathe easier while we do.”

  I thought of the picture of Anne-Marie and Sinh hanging on the wall upstairs. We could perhaps have peace, but we could never again get back that joy.

  “Yes, perhaps,” I said softly. “But not quite yet.”

  We lay against each other then and stayed quiet for a time. I thought Khoi had drifted off to sleep, but when a cloud came through and covered the sun, creating momentary shade, he started speaking again.

  “We are not perfect people, you and I,” he said. “No one is. Even Anne-Marie and Sinh. I know we hold him up on a pedestal now, but he wasn’t perfect. We all have moments of weakness, of strength, of stupidity. But if we’re lucky, we have even more moments of love. We’ve had what feels like millions of those moments, and I know we have more ahead of us. We may not look it to outsiders, to your countrymen or mine, but we are, without a doubt, a perfect pair, despite our mistakes. We have been since the day we met. They were, too, but we are still together. Still alive. So we do deserve a little rest, Marcelle. Even you.”