Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  “She doesn’t speak Vietnamese,” the man said, returning from a shower. He spoke to his mother in an indigenous tongue and then said to Maia, “She’ll show you where to sleep tonight.”

  With a kerosene lamp, the old woman led Maia and Na into the longhouse to a plank-bed next to the window that looked out into the front yard. She swept the dust off with a pillow and released the sides of the mosquito net. She dimmed the lamp and left it on the family’s altar.

  Maia and Na crawled under the mosquito net. They exhaled as soon as their backs touched the polished plank đi văng. On the thick wooden beam that ran across the A-frame ceiling, they could see a carved inscription in the flickering kerosene light. They read the words in unison like two schoolchildren.

  Đồng bào Kinh hay Thổ, Mường hay Mán,

  Gia-rai hay Ê-đê, Xê-đăng hay Ba-na

  và các dân tộc thiểu số khác

  đều là con cháu Việt Nam, đều là anh em ruột thịt.

  —H.C.M.8

  “Do you believe that people in the lowlands and highlands are brothers and sisters, all children of Vietnam?” Na yawned and turned on her side, her back to Maia. “What would Nobodaddy say about a half-blood?”

  “That’s the creation myth, isn’t it? Fifty children on the mountain, fifty in the sea?”

  Na seemed to be asleep.

  Maia lay awake, watching the evening sky through the window, remembering the man in her great-aunt’s photograph and the initials H.C.M. She was now convinced that he was none other than Ho Chi Minh. She recalled the poem penned on the back of the photograph.

  Mountains enfold clouds, clouds mountains,

  The river heart a faithful mirror.

  Restlessly wandering the Western Range,

  I look back at southern skies, missing old friends.

  Great-Aunt Tien and Uncle Ho. How did they know each other? What was their relationship?

  “Hey, girl,” a voice called softly through the window. “Are you awake? Come join us!”

  She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She kept count of those who came through the gate that squeaked and rattled like a timeworn accordion on its last legs. One by one, the guests greeted the host in an inaudible minority tongue. The men feasted and afterward fell into a hushed conversation. She did not understand the content but heard fervor in their voices. She suspected that she and Na had traveled into an area where the remaining members of the Front Unifié pour la Libération des Races Opprimées continued to operate. Sometime during the night, she realized Na had gotten up and gone out. She peeked through the window at the group of men sitting cross-legged on the dirt ground. Na sat with them. They were young and old but all appeared strong and resilient, conversing across the fire that still burned bright.

  Mother Medium

  MAIA’S NIGHT WAS full of voices that vanished when Na woke her. The voices had clarity in her dream but their meanings now blurred. Na had not slept, yet she seemed wide-awake.

  They explored the empty longhouse and surroundings and ate the mung bean glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaves that were left on the table for them. They found the Minsk fixed and a note on its teardrop tank: Follow Route 14 southward if lost.

  From Loc Ninh, they rode eastward along the watercourse and arrived at Lake Waterfall Dreams. “Is there a prison somewhere before the Be River empties into Lake Waterfall Dreams?” Maia asked the man at the hydropower plant. As soon as she repeated Auntie Mao’s words aloud, Maia realized she needed more details. After whispering these directions, Auntie Mao had only added, “I visited your mother once, and that was over ten years ago.”

  “The Be River flows from north to south,” the hydropower plant worker corrected Maia, “from Lake Waterfall Dreams through the southeastern provinces. You’re lost, aren’t you?”

  He pointed them to Route 14.

  When the Ho Chi Minh Trail was renovated after the war, people began to settle along the newly paved thoroughfare. Route 14, an alternative to National Highway 1 on the coastline, connected the South and North through the Central Highlands. The former trails of human sacrifice now attracted resettlement, local businesses, and international golf course development.

  Following Route 14 southward, they passed roadside eateries, garden cafés, sundry stores, bicycle and motorcycle repair shops, and building supply factories. There were gas stations with adjacent bright castle-like homes and gold shops with lit-up display glass cases. They passed houses that were shacks, others were bare redbrick, and some had sleek wrap-around tiled porches. Open doorways and curtainless windows faced the thoroughfare.

  Na steered the Minsk off Route 14 and onto a red dirt path cutting through lush fields of coffee, black pepper, and durians. Away from the main access were mostly thatched huts. They passed a woman on a bicycle, whose face was shaded by a straw cone hat. They went by an old man pedaling a rickshaw with a heap of wilting root vegetables in the front wooden cart. They sped by people carrying baskets full of assorted wares, all walking toward the main road.

  They came upon the edge of a rubber plantation. The paved road leading into the cultivated area was wide enough for large vehicles. Everything lay in shadow under the canopy of rubber trees, whose trunks were slashed diagonally about four feet above the ground, where metal pipes had been inserted to drain the latex into half bowls. They passed a truck with three large metal tanks and came upon a group of workers. When asked for directions to the prison, no one knew. The workers’ accents told them they were from northern provinces. Following the road, Maia and Na emerged from the plantation onto another dirt path, looping back to Route 14.

  At a one-pump gas station, they learned that the prison had been closed. The station’s owner, the town’s highest-ranking official, pointed to the rubber forest as the prison’s former location.

  “Mother is ready!” the official’s wife called from the brick house behind the station. Through the open door, Maia and Na could see people huddling in the living room, transfixed by a white robed dwarf sitting in a lotus pose.

  A battered van swerved along Route 14. A young girl swung from its open side door, slapping on the metal panel to clear motorists and pedestrians from the van’s path. The van came to a stop at the station, and the girl leaped off and scurried in her flip-flops to open the back door for an old woman. The girl scaled barefoot atop the vehicle, untied a large covered basket, and balanced it on the woman’s turbaned head. The woman hastened away, anticipating the afternoon storm.

  “Going to the Central Highlands?” the girl called, grabbing Maia’s bag.

  Maia pulled back on the bag.

  The girl held on. “Buôn Ma Thuột? Pleiku? Kon Tum?”

  “Hurry!” Na pulled Maia’s arm the other way toward the house. “The dwarf is going to mediate with the dead!”

  When the driver beeped the horn, the girl let go of Maia’s bag and chased after the van, jumping on as it set out northward for the highlands.

  Inside the house, red electric candlelight from the altar lit the living room. A six-foot-high shelf, the altar extended from wall to wall and displayed two gilded portraits: an elderly couple in traditional Chinese gowns and skullcaps, and a young man in a heavily decorated uniform of the Peo ple’s Army. The young man had the same fine features as the town official.

  The dwarf climbed onto the table that had been pushed against the wall beneath the altar. He stood no more than three feet tall but now gazed directly into the eyes of the old couple and young man. The town official remained beside the dwarf, waiting for directions.

  “They were comrades-in-arms during the war,” someone whispered. “He was escorted from the City of the Soaring Dragon.”

  Smoke from burning incense filled the room. People shuffled sideways, forming two single files, their backs against the wall. The town official beckoned the first woman to approach and told her to address the dwarf as Mẹ.

  Na’s eyes were glued to the altar. Maia watched the solemn ritual wh
ile listening to the rain outside. Another express van heading to the highlands stopped for fuel.

  “Mẹ,” said the young woman, palms clasped and eyes looking up, “when is the appropriate time for me to remarry?”

  The dwarf replied in a high female voice from the back of his throat, “The eighth month of the Lunar Year of the Water Monkey.”

  “Mẹ,” asked a thin man, “what is the course of the lotus, the palm, and the desert?”

  “You play ball—rough and hard.”

  When Na’s turn came, she spoke softly so that no one but the dwarf could hear. He placed his big hand on her left breast and responded in a barely audible whisper, “With you.”

  The earnestness loosened Maia’s guard, and the question she had carried since she left Vietnam as a child with her father surfaced. “Thưa Mẹ, má con bây giờ ở đâu?”

  The room became a blur in the haze of incense smoke. The dwarf lit a leaf of paper money and waited for it to burn. After gazing into the faces of the old dead and the young dead, he drew on a square sheet of paper at length with wild gestures.

  He held it over the flame. A corner began to curl and darken, but before the sheet caught fire, loud gurgling rose from the dwarf’s stomach, and his eyes rolled uncontrollably, showing their whites. He fell off the table onto the tile floor with a thud. His body convulsed, his hand still clutching the square sheet of blackened paper.

  Women gathered around him, untied his robe, and rubbed White Flower Balm on his body, from his broad chest downward. Fragrances of camphor, wintergreen, and eucalyptus filled the air. A woman massaged his short legs and big feet, another his arms and hands. The dwarf stopped convulsing, his breathing long and deep.

  Someone gasped. Another giggled.

  “Flip him over,” Na ordered the group, and they quickly turned the dwarf onto his stomach. A few proceeded to knead his muscly buttocks and thighs. Na directed two young women to carry the dwarf from the room. Maia got up to follow.

  “You stay.” A man grabbed her hand.

  The television and VCR were pushed back into the corner, and a karaoke bar with large speakers was set up. Women entered with round aluminum trays of food, and men lugged in cases of Tiger Beer, snake wine, moonshine made from glutinous rice, and a block of melting ice. A clay charcoal stove was placed at the center of the room. The official’s wife lit the charcoal briquettes, fanned them to a slow burn, and began grilling dried squids, fresh mussels, and a snakehead wrapped in banana leaves.

  “What’s your business at the prison?” the man asked Maia.

  “I’m just visiting.” She kept her eyes on the doorway where Na and the women had exited with the dwarf.

  “You look like Đêm Đông,” he said.

  “‘Winter Night’—the song?”

  “An inmate. You two could be related.”

  Maia turned toward him.

  “I delivered beer and cigarettes to the prison guards,” he said. “There was a woman called Đêm Đông because each night you could hear her sing ‘Winter Night’ in her cell. You have her eyes.” He hummed a few bars and gazed at her. “The warden was in love with Đêm Đông. The last I heard he opened a nightspot in Ho Chi Minh City and called it the Winter Night Café.”

  Past midnight, Maia and Na huddled outside the one-pump gas station, waiting for daylight. They had refused the town official’s invitation to crash on the living room floor with other intoxicated guests. Instead, they propped themselves against the pump under the drizzling rain and a waning crescent moon.

  “Time for yourself,” the Independent Vietnam Coalition had agreed, “to visit family and resolve whatever questions you might have. Whatever you do, be at the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.”

  This time for herself had not resolved anything but only made her more confused. Route 14 would take her to the peak via Buon Ma Thuot. But Ho Chi Minh City beckoned. She wanted to confront Uncle Mao.

  Na, glowing after leaving the dwarf, looked blissfully vacant.

  “Why did you carry him from the room?” Maia asked.

  Na smiled.

  “Oh no,” Maia said. “Don’t tell me.”

  Na lifted her face, closed her eyes, and opened her mouth to catch the cool raindrops.

  “Okay,” Maia said. “Did you . . . ? Is it true that . . . ?”

  “It’s so hot, Mai.” Na gathered her long wavy hair and twisted it into a loose knot. “Are you cold? You should’ve come with us, the girls and me. It opens and vibrates and releases you to our inter-be. JP said that you’re—” Something fell from Na’s bra. “Oh, here.” She handed Maia a crumbled piece of singed paper.

  “What did JP say?” Maia smoothed the wrinkled square on which the dwarf had made an elaborate drawing.

  “Oh, I forget.” Na flicked her hand. “He doesn’t understand you.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Can you read that?”

  Maia examined the script of overlapping characters. She could not tell whether they were Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, Cyrillic, or a combination of all those scripts. The writing was indecipherable.

  “Mother said my father is with me,” Na said.

  “Your mother said your father is with you?”

  “No. Mother Medium, the dwarf, said my father’s here.”

  “In Vietnam?”

  Na took Maia’s hand and placed it on her chest. “He’s here.”

  They listened to the wind howling through the deserted streets.

  After a long silence, Maia said, “My father is with me, too. I have his ashes.”

  “Now I understand,” Na said. “Your father, I saw him, a big black man.”

  “My father’s Vietnamese, a small man with light skin.”

  “No. No. I saw a big black man with you the first time you walked into the café with JP.”

  “Sing us a song, Na. Sing us ‘Đêm Đông.’”

  In the early morning, Na sang of an evening that had not gone, yet the night curtain had fallen. She sang of a winter night on which a soldier longed for his homeland, a wife waited across the river, a poet listened to his soul, and a singer sang to her mirror reflection.

  Winter night, I yearn for the road that leads to the distant past.

  Winter night, I dream a dream of a loving family.

  Winter night, I drift through the wind and dust of a foreign land.

  Is there someone wandering on a winter night without a home?9

  Three

  Sacrifices

  ON THE EVE of the Year of the Rooster of 1981, everyone was on the road. The living visited gravesites to converse with the dead, and the dead returned to places where they could commune with the living. The sky blue Vanagon, traveling north on Route 14, jostled heavy night traffic. Squinty, the driver, reassured the group that he could navigate the old Ho Chi Minh Trail blindfolded, having marched south during wartime. Beside him, One Arm, the mechanic, picked at the festering hole in his chest and worried about unexploded ordnance until Hai asked, “Why care? We’re already dead.”

  The woman had drowned in the South China Sea, and Hai in moonshine. Phuong died of a head injury after jumping off a moving train en route to prison, Squinty and One Arm in war, and Slit-throat, the rooster, on a sacrificial platter for his human ancestors.

  The woman did not hesitate when the boys offered to accompany her to the Central Highlands. One Arm fixed her husband’s Vanagon and gave it a fresh coat of paint. Squinty proposed taking the mountainous Ho Chi Minh Trail rather than the coastal Highway 1. Hai, paralyzed since birth, wanted to go for a ride. “Free and easy wandering,” he said and invited Phuong to come along. The rooster, who had not left the woman’s side since she returned from the failed sea escape, stowed away in the van among the transported odds and ends: bottles and jars of seeds and cuttings, a barrel filled with water from the man-made pond and fish swimming in circles under lily pads, and a Phoenix Salon hairstyling kit.

  Traveling on Route 14, the van
would pass the new economic zone where the woman had spent the last years of her life. She no longer felt fear or sadness, now understanding the freedom she had experienced while imprisoned. All her desires for all that was life had dissipated the moment she had let go.

  “No blood pudding?” Squinty asked.

  The rooster eyed Squinty and then One Arm, following the conversation.

  “We skip the blood pudding,” One Arm said. “We can boil the innards for rice gruel and shred the meat for chicken salad.”

  “The rooster had been sacrificed,” Phuong said. “We can’t offer our ancestors the same rooster twice.”

  “We are the ancestors!” Hai exclaimed. “The living make us the offering.” He turned to his sister-in-law, who had stayed quiet while they debated preparing chicken as the main dish. “Wasn’t that what you’d said? The living should buy flowers for the dead. We’re now the rightful receivers of the living’s sacrifices.”

  Camel, Seven Styles

  FROM THE BE River, Maia and Na returned to Ho Chi Minh City, where Na said the Maos usually spent their weekends. As they neared Ox Alley, the two women could hear what sounded like the monotonous knocking of a wooden gong. They saw smoke and smelled barbecue and a whiff of blood and rotting meat.

  “Charlee Camel,” Na said matter-of-factly.

  Maia maneuvered the Minsk through the narrow maze of the alleyway to the Winter Night Café. At the gate, they met JP, bleary-eyed with a hangover on a Sunday morning, and No-No, slinking through the Ochna integerrima hedge meowing oddly. The orange stray had grown lanky in the days they were away.

  JP hugged Na, hesitated, and then awkwardly shook Maia’s hand. He updated them on what had happened following Charlee’s death on the very morning Maia and Na left the Mekong Delta. He had recorded and sketched the string of events in minute detail in his travelogue. The camel’s death had altered the travelers’ route. Instead of continuing to the southernmost tip of Vietnam and sailing across the Indian Ocean to Africa, they decided to travel overland, taking the northbound train from Ho Chi Minh City.