Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  She closed up the soap box, picked up the rag and the bottle of wood oil. As she ran the cloth over the scratched wooden surface of the armoire, she realized she had never looked inside before because she’d always been so sure of what she would find: suits like her mother’s, work clothes for cleaning, dresses shaped like duffel bags, and snoods to cover hair that had been set in pin curls no matter how much her mother’s fingers ached from scrubbing, because to do otherwise would make her no better than “a common Turkish cleaning woman.”

  The wardrobe door creaked as she opened it. She noticed a blue suit jacket first and brushed the dust off its shoulders. The boys’ distant voices carried through the open window, wafting in on a breeze that smelled tangy with manure. She held her fingers on the shoulder of the coat, letting them linger there, imagining the man outside with the cows and milking machine as a whole other man, inside this jacket, with Sigrid here in this bedroom.

  One of the dresses was red with pearl buttons. The suppleness of the brightly coloured silk between her thumb and forefinger surprised her. She had pictured Sigrid in dreary wool, like every woman she’d ever known. She pulled the dress from the wardrobe and held the red fabric against her chest, twirling a little to see how the skirt flared.

  “There you are.”

  Herr Müller stood in the doorway of the bedroom, his frame blocking much of the light that streamed down the hall, casting his face in shadow as he took a step toward her. She imagined he might touch her body. Instead he reached out and flicked lightly at the earrings.

  “Those earrings look very nice on you,” he said, smiling. “Do you think your boyfriend would like you wearing them?” He let his hand drop.

  “I have work to do,” she said, quickly hanging the dress back on the wooden rod. “I was just dusting.”

  “Go on then.” He chuckled, crossed his arms, and turned his body, as if to let her pass by, but did not move from where he stood. As he shifted his weight, a shaft of sunshine fell across his shirt and over his forearms, as thick and brown as loaves of bread. At the base of each hair was a golden freckle.

  “This boyfriend of yours,” he said. “He will be trouble for you.”

  In alarm, she sat down on the bed. To prove she wasn’t scared, she looked up and held his gaze. “I know how to handle myself.”

  “I know that, I know.” He sat down next to her. He paused for a moment. “But it’s complicated.”

  She ran her hand over the quilted triangles of the spread. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He’s not like us. People can be, so – unaccepting.”

  She remembered walking from the train station with Da-Nhât that day in Hamburg, how a mother had made a small tschick noise with her tongue and hurried her children up the street as she noticed Elke holding his hand, and how, by contrast, an Albanian grocery store clerk had gazed toward Da-Nhât, then at Elke and her brother before looking at Da-Nhât again and grinning with surprise and admiration – and a kind of hunger.

  She knew that even outside Rendsburg, there were few foreigners living in Germany. Those who married Germans were still considered foreigners. Their children, too. She knew Hamburg: the harness races at the Trabrennbahn, the Altona, and the pretty Elbe, the harbour with its tiered promenades and tall ships. How many foreigners had she ever seen on the promenade? And how much Ausländer raus, “foreigner out” graffiti? She recalled a newspaper article about a Turkish tulip seller from the Grosse Elbstrasse market who was followed from a nightclub by a group of teenagers on Goebbels’s birthday. He had been left unconscious and bleeding, his delivery truck set aflame.

  “Are you cold?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re so slim. You should eat more.”

  She imagined him moving closer. Pushing her down onto the bed with his palm flat against her chest. His hand moving over the buttons of her blouse. She imagined crying out. His lips solidly halting her exclamation. But he stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. At the door he turned and gave her a lopsided smile.

  As soon as he was gone, she yanked the earrings off so hard her skin burned.

  A month before she left for Herr Müller’s farm, Da-Nhât had visited her for the first time. They’d been corresponding for seven months, ever since she’d seen Da-Nhât’s passport-sized photograph in a pen-pal magazine over the caption, “Seeking English-speaking partner.” She didn’t speak English, but admiring his photo she was reminded of how she’d always wanted to learn.

  He was ten years older and she could imagine him sitting at outdoor cafés with sophisticated women who wore gold sandals and could talk about art films and exhale cigarette smoke through their noses like dragons.

  Elke and her older brother Peter had met Da-Nhât at the train station in Hamburg, a city eighty kilometres south of Rendsburg. His designer clothing oozed Parisian chic. She’d never seen hair so black, or so thick. She was tempted to reach out and wind her fingers through his pomaded waves – would they feel hot from the sun like black stones in the summer? She touched her own hair then, usually plaited into two girlish braids her mother tightened for her every day, but which she had spent the morning teasing into a beehive instead.

  “Hello, Elke? Peter? I am happy to see you,” Da-Nhât said in enunciated German. His face broke open into a grin when he shook their hands and bowed.

  “Wo-ow,” Peter said, eager to practise what little English he’d learned during his first year of youth military service. “You are speak German.”

  Elke had been studying English language cassettes she’d asked her brother to buy for her while he was in Kiel.

  “Hello,” she said, feeling silly and self-conscious. “I am pleased to meet you.”

  Da-Nhât pressed her hand between his.

  “Can we go shopping?” He held out a piece of paper.

  “What for?” she asked. “What are these things?”

  He explained in English only slightly less broken than his German that it was a grocery list he had prepared on the train. “For cooking,” he said.

  Peter laughed and said in German, “You’re not planning on making lunch, are you?”

  “You will see,” he said. “You will see.”

  Garlic? Tamarind sauce? Heaven knew if the things on his list even existed. Elke hadn’t heard of half of them. She was all the more surprised when Da-Nhât succeeded in obtaining them in the third grocery they visited.

  The ride back was peppered with conversation about family; Elke told Da-Nhât about their cocker spaniel and the feral one-eyed alley cat they called Morley and left their food scraps for on the fire escape. Beyond the car windows, inner-city buildings changed to factories, then farms, and by the time they reached the family’s apartment building on Prinzessinstrasse, back to brick again.

  While Elke set the table, she watched her mother hovering over Da-Nhât in the kitchen, asking him the names of each dish and inquiring where he had learned to cook. Elke could hear the twins squealing outside in the courtyard and the sound of a rubber ball hitting a wall. Both sets of voices wafted into the room where they’d set up the table, and mingled in what Elke hoped was a harmonious way.

  Though there was still a high pitch to her mother’s voice, she seemed more relaxed than when Da-Nhât had first arrived. Through the kitchen door, Elke listened to her mother’s questions about this spice or that marinade and Da-Nhât’s answers about their exotic ports of origin.

  “That one looks strange,” she heard her mother say. “What does it taste like?”

  “Oh,” he said. “This one taste very sweet. Very good.”

  An unusually long pause made Elke look up. Da-Nhât was holding out his hand, his finger covered in a thick sauce the colour of clotted blood. Her mother looked at Da-Nhât, a spoon in her hand, her lips pursed into the shape of a small, tight bud. A breeze blew in and rippled the table cloth against Elke’s leg. No one spoke. Then her mother opened her mouth and licked his finger.

  “Gu
t!” she pronounced.

  She went back to chattering about her own cooking and Da-Nhât wiped his finger clean on a kitchen towel and, just like that, the rift that had opened up for an instant closed again.

  Later, Elke’s father sat down at the head of the table in his nicest slacks, coughing. He was a man who took pride in clean white shirts, collars that were always pressed, and wearing silk ties on weekdays. He had contracted tuberculosis in the Russian mud before Elke was born, during the war. Afterwards, the military hospital had sawed open his sternum, renting his body wide, and removed one of his lungs. The operation had left him with a hollow space in his chest as large as a child’s fist, which he hid under impeccably maintained clothes, shamed by his disfigurement.

  But sometimes her father would let her touch the scar. As small children, she and her siblings had lined up at their father’s bedside to place their palms in the hollow, giggling as their flesh was swallowed up by his. She would feel his heart beating, and touch the expansion of his breath where he’d been cracked open, until finally, in exasperation, he shooed them away.

  As he continued to cough, Elke stared at the grandfather clock, at the roses carved into the wood, the anchor, the rooster. There were two clocks in every room. Tick-tock, like her father’s coughing. Her father tried to say grace, and while they waited for the coughing to subside, her mother rested her hand over top of his. Finally, he finished giving thanks, and everyone said, “Amen.”

  Elke had not looked at anyone’s face as she helped Da-Nhât bring out the food from the kitchen: greasy cigar-sized rolls with wrinkled skin through which shredded carrot shone, cucumbers with a black sauce, pancakes the size of dinner plates, a whole fish with the eyes still in its head! Now she studied the expressions of her parents, who were eating with small, polite bites, but her mother’s face was a mask Elke couldn’t read. Under the table, the twins fed the cocker spaniel. Her father, drinking more than eating, questioned Da-Nhât on matters of education, family, and ambition, while the twins giggled and her older sisters elbowed each other.

  “Tomorrow I will go to Hamburg for job interview at bank. I like Hamburg. Nice city. Job at bank will be good, very good. I am glad to be able to stop here, visit Elke on the way.”

  “You’ve applied for a job in Hamburg?” her father asked. “Why Hamburg?”

  “To be close to my Elke.”

  Her father coughed and looked into his beer.

  Her mother laughed and hid another piece of food in her apron.

  “You know,” Da-Nhât lowered his voice, “in my country, when the moon is full my people go outside to write poem. Play chess. Sit under its light. The Vietnamese say the moon is full with blond-haired womens, beautiful, like your daughter, and that is why it is so bright. It is where all the blond-haired people live and why all the young men dreams about it. My ex-girlfriend was dark hair, the daughter of the French ambassador to Iraq, rich with too many parties in her apartment on the Champs Elysées. Drugs. Bah.” He shook his head. “Not like Elke.”

  How could he speak so openly, without a hint of embarrassment or reserve? Was it Paris that made men this way?

  He touched her hand across the table. Her sisters blushed. The twins snickered some more. Her father coughed.

  “What are you studying at the Sorbonne?” her mother asked, giving the twins an admonishing glance.

  “Business.”

  “Your mother must miss you terribly.”

  “My parents want me to travel. Even before war. In my country, the bombs destroy beautiful temple, art.”

  “Is that why you left? The war?” her father asked.

  Da-Nhât shook his head.

  What was it like, Elke wondered, to leave a whole life behind the way a snake sheds its skin? Did Da-Nhât feel free?

  “I’d like to travel,” Elke said. “In Rendsburg, the farthest people travel is a daytrip to the North Sea for picnics. Once, a teacher of mine went to Tunisia for two weeks. Of course, that’s not the same, really.”

  “Good adventure.”

  She raised her glass and took a drink.

  “I am happy,” Da-Nhât said, emphasizing his words with his own personal pair of chopsticks, “to meet you all.” He plucked the fish eye from the head of the cod; then, to their amazement, and her mother’s obvious disgust, he swallowed it whole, looking as satisfied as if he’d swallowed the moon.

  Elke was beating a rug on the front step when she heard car tires crunch to a stop beyond the hedgerow fence. She heard a voice ask for directions from the neighbouring farmer who had been walking down the road.

  “Elke Schröder? The Müllers?”

  The farmer answered he knew of no such people.

  The lilting rise and fall of his syllables had always reminded her of a galloping horse. She dropped the rug and ran to the road. “Da-Nhât!”

  As Da-Nhât stepped out of his car, the farmer grunted and smoothed his beard before turning away. Still holding the stick she’d used to beat the rug, she threw her arms around him, and in her excitement, hit his head with her own. She pulled away at precisely the same moment he hugged her back, a jerky push-pull of movement that made her self-conscious, and the words that followed came out hesitant and faltering.

  “I look for you one hour,” he said, surveying her at an arm’s length.

  “How long can you stay?” she said, looking straight into his eyes. She had remembered him as much taller.

  “I can stay until evening then I must leave again. I lose much time because no one tells me where you are. I have to stop at four farms.”

  She glanced around. Herr Müller would soon come out of the house.

  “I was at bank in Hamburg this morning.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a curtain flutter.

  “Then I go see your mother. But she not gives me the address.”

  “You didn’t get my letter?”

  Their exchange, in English and German, was similar to their hug, stop-and-go.

  When she turned around again, Herr Müller had come out into the yard, Joachim following two paces behind him, while Daniel stood by the door of the house.

  “Herr Müller, this is Da-Nhât Nguyen,” she said, hoping she had pronounced it correctly. Nya-Nyuck Wen. She had practised it over and over, after he’d corrected her, much to her embarrassment, at the train station.

  “Yes, I know.” Herr Müller grinned at Da-Nhât and they shook hands, Herr Müller as stocky and platinum-haired as Da-Nhât was lissome and dark.

  “Where are you from?” Daniel asked, moving aside on the threshold. “Do you like airplanes?” He was already holding his favourite fighters and bombers. When Da-Nhât responded yes, Daniel said, “This is a Messerschmitt. Brrrrrrrrrrr.” He flew the plane across Da-Nhât’s path as Herr Müller steered him inside.

  Joachim nodded coolly at Da-Nhât, looking through him in that way of his, fathoming the possibilities. He trudged behind his father, maybe resentfully, as Herr Müller placed one hand behind Da-Nhât’s back to guide him. Elke followed them into the kitchen, where Herr Müller set down a beer in front of Da-Nhât.

  Elke began to prepare lunch, her jaw tense, as she peeled the skins off the boiled potatoes. Daniel played at the table with his chair pulled close to Da-Nhât’s. Running a tank over Da-Nhât’s place mat, he knocked Da-Nhât’s fork to the floor. Da-Nhât picked it up and skimmed it over Daniel’s arm, making the noise of an airplane.

  “Berbyl,” Herr Müller called, “we have a guest. Come out of your room and be polite.”

  She emerged holding a dirty stuffed cat. “This is Cream Puff,” she said, letting Da-Nhât pet its matted fur. “Watch out. She bites.” Berbyl pulled the toy back. “Cream Puff is a little sensitive, right here, around the ears.” Then she reached out and touched Da-Nhât’s hair. “Eew. It feels like a Brillo Pad.”

  “Berbyl,” Elke said, “sit down!”

  She sat down, seesawing in her chair. “Is lunch ready?”

 
“Not yet,” Elke said.

  “Now?”

  Daniel retrieved some colouring pencils from his room and asked Da-Nhât if he knew how to draw a Panzer.

  “Elke tells me you’re studying business,” Herr Müller said.

  While the men talked, Elke brought the food to the table. “Toys off the table, Berbyl.”

  “Not Cream Puff. She wants sausages.”

  “She can eat yours.”

  “So she can stay?”

  “I have thirty-seven cows and two milking machines,” Herr Müller continued. “If you like, I’ll show them to you after lunch.”

  “I hate milk,” Berbyl said.

  “Berbyl,” Elke said, pointing at the filthy toy next to Berbyl’s plate. “Cat.”

  “It’s not fair. Daniel has a pencil at the table.”

  “You should see the milking machines,” Elke said to Da-Nhât. “They’re quite new.”

  “I like very much,” Da-Nhât said.

  Herr Müller laughed and slapped Da-Nhât on the back.

  Joachim still hadn’t said a word; he’d shovelled in his food, and now he was drumming his fingers on the table, pretending to be interested in the view out the window. Finally he said, “You like music?”

  “Oh, yes, very good. Paris has the most romance music in the world. And movies. You know Brigitte Bardot? She is my favourite actress.”

  “What do you think of the foreign occupation of Vietnam?” Herr Müller asked Da-Nhât.

  “The fighting. It is terrible what it is doing to my country.”

  “Are you a soldier?” Berbyl said.

  “I’ve heard about the demonstrations in Paris,” Joachim said. “All the students in the streets.”

  “Young people have rights. The right not to lose everything. The future belong to them.”

  “And what about the old?” Herr Müller asked.

  “Old have rights, too. But young people are future.” Da-Nhât looked at Berbyl. “You’re right. War is very bad.”