The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  “Thank you. I’m fine here.” She smiled.

  She was soaked and shivering, purple-lipped from the cold. Her fine black hair lay matted across her forehead like a wet silk scarf, the wind lashing droplets onto her face. It wasn’t going to ease. This was the middle of the wet season. I smiled. She looked confused when I made no attempt to go.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she insisted through chattering teeth.

  I held my umbrella closer to her. I couldn’t leave her standing in the miserable January rain. It was the sort of cold that bored into one’s chest to dwell. She must be new. Most girls didn’t bother waiting for clients in this bad weather.

  “Miss, would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s very cold out here, if you ask me,” I said.

  “At home, we worked the paddies in weather worse than this. We just got used to being wet the whole season. At home, this would be just an afternoon shower.”

  “Around here, people accept a cup of tea when offered.”

  Old man Nghi lifted the rain flap of his kiosk and cried, “For heaven’s sake, go sit in the inn, you silly girl! It’s going to rain through the night. I want to close shop and go home. Quickly, quickly, before both of you catch an ill wind.”

  She stood up and smiled awkwardly.

  The afternoon passed with jasmine tea and biscuits in the lounge. The inn was nearly empty. We sat cozily on the sofas as though it was a normal social visit. Wrapped in blankets, she was an ordinary peasant girl. The rain had washed off her makeup. There was no perfume on her. Mai had weathered farm hands and big brown eyes like giant longan seeds. She had perfect doll-like lips. In from the cold, her cheeks turned rosy like freshly steamed dumplings. When she giggled, her eyes went squinty. She was a country girl. Emotions lit up her face like primary colors. Her expressions were untutored, somehow still uncorrupted. It was like talking to a girl from my village.

  Mai’s sharecropping family had lived in one of the villages recently ravaged by the fighting. Her father and older brother had been killed while working in the paddies. Separated from relatives on the other side of the front, her mother had fled with Mai and her younger sister into Hanoi. They had lost everything. Her story was not so different from the hundreds of girls working these streets, but Mai was unique. She seemed unaware of her beauty, and she loved books.

  I was the only reader in my family and had a whole library to loan.

  WHEN we first opened the inn three years prior, a group of six girls and two pimps came and sat at the beverage kiosk in front of our place. There was one tall stunning girl from Ninh Binh named Ly with shiny river-stone eyes. She was eighteen and had the sort of striking looks that in peacetime would have made her a star of the stage regardless of talent. Tan and I were sixteen then and smitten. We vied for her attention, not caring that we were making fools of ourselves. We behaved like silly pups, so Cung, our inn gofer, took it upon himself to free us from our romantic notions.

  At the time, Cung was a lanky seventeen-year-old. He was an orphan from Hai Phong. Sharp and street-smart, he came and asked for a job a week before we hung up the inn sign. Father hired him out of pity, and Cung soon showed that he had a talent for communicating with the soldiers and placating the drunks. Within weeks, Cung made himself indispensable. He became intimately familiar with the running of the inn. While Tan never talked casually with the soldiers, and I avoided all but the nice ones, Cung was everyone’s friend and confidant, from the French regulars to the North African legionnaires, to the sub-Saharan legionnaires, to the girls and their pimps.

  One day Cung said he had a surprise for us. He led us upstairs to the linen closet at the rear of the villa, put a finger to his lips, and winked. The hallway was empty. Cung unlocked the door, and we crowded into the five-by-six-foot room. It was pitch-dark and stuffy, reeking of cleaning solvents. Muffled noises from the next room came through the wall. Cung struck a match. Tan was grinning excitedly. Cung reached for a small wooden dowel jammed into the wall and then smiled at us. We bobbed our heads vigorously. He blew out the match and removed the dowel. A thin finger of light passed through a hole in the wall. Cung peered into the opening and sighed with pleasure. Illuminated, his eyeball looked like it was floating in space.

  Tan was next. He stayed glued to the peephole until I shoved him aside. Ly was in the next room. I felt a distinct sharp pain in my chest. It was the first time I saw a naked woman. The legionnaire was behind her, rising above the pale sweep of her back like a dark shadow. Pain twisted her features. His grunts passed right through the wall. Suddenly, I could discern—and understood—the vibration I felt through the floor.

  Somehow, any virginal idea I had about sex was destroyed at that moment. Here, a few feet away from me, was an act of depraved needs, of desperation—a sort of carnage as horrible as the Algerian raping the women in our village.

  Cung’s breath was hot in my ear. He whispered, “It’s shocking at first, but once you get used to it, it’s the best show in the city.”

  With the strand of light between us, I could see Cung grinning, nodding, enthusiastically proud of the hole he had drilled in the wall. I felt robbed, betrayed, soiled. At that instant, I loathed him profoundly.

  Tan and I turned away. We left Cung in his peeping closet. Tan and I never talked about what we saw, but neither of us could look Ly in the eyes again.

  Our ways parted from Cung’s after that day. For him, it was the beginning of a headlong dive into gambling, whoring, drinking, and smoking opium.

  MAI didn’t wait outside our inn again. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of other places in the city, and I didn’t ask where she worked. But she did visit me every few days to return a book and borrow another. She had her pride and would not accept gifts.

  We wandered the city’s lakes and picnicked on little pâté baguettes sold from pushcarts. We discovered a common passion for food. She allowed me to take her to my favorite ice cream shop. I introduced her to chocolate ice cream, peach melba, and crème fraîche. We spent many misty, languorous mornings at the waterfront cafés listening to Johnny Mathis. We chose places without foreigners. She never talked about how she spent her days or nights; I never talked about our inn.

  Mai dreamed of becoming a teacher. Extremely bright, her mind leapt from topic to topic with ease. Although her family could not afford to give her more than a primary education, Mai had continued to study on her own. She hadn’t given up, even in her current situation. Each time we met, she had a list of questions for me. I never had to explain anything twice. We slipped into the roles of tutor and pupil. It was a constructive charade that created a space where there was no pain, no history, and no expectation, as if on some unspoken level we understood or agreed that this was all we were allowed: a stroll around the lake in the pearly drizzle, a poem read on a park bench, a moment of early morning stillness sitting side by side.

  AFTER his second marriage, Father slipped deeply into his familiar opium currents, content with his new wife. And he found that she was, indeed, a good woman, competent with her household duties and raising his younger children. He left Tan and me to manage the inn and its staff of five workers. With his inattention, Tan and I had access to as much spending money as we wanted. We went to cinemas, boxing matches, soccer games, shows, and new restaurants. We went sculling on the lake. On holidays, we cruised the countryside on rented motorcycles. Once, on a whim, we caught a bus out to Hai Phong for our first glimpse of the ocean.

  We were young, educated, and eligible. Tan was handsome and powerfully built, like his father. He was confident and could talk to girls with ease. I was tall and fair-skinned, like my father. Academically, I was at the top of my class, which in the competitive French system had a certain prestige. We could have courted pretty girls from good families, but we felt unworthy. We were ashamed of our family’s business, and couldn’t imagine how we would explain it to girls’ parents. We ran a modest inn, but the soldiers h
ad turned it into a whorehouse. There was no polite way around it, and no way of denying the ugliness that pervaded everything.

  It was very difficult for Tan. Since childhood, Tan was raised to succeed his father as head of our clan and magistrate of the domain. Serving thugs and mercenaries was demeaning work. At the inn, Tan never smiled, joked, or chatted with the guests. He became obsessed with bodybuilding and fashioned himself a fierce image to ward off any friendly overtures from the soldiers. Tan never said it, but I knew he resented Father for getting involved in such a lowly industry, unbefitting of our station.

  “I hate this business. We shouldn’t be here. We should be out there!” Tan told me late one night as we cleaned up the bar. There had been a brawl between French regulars and African legionnaires, and we had to call the French military police. The place was a wreck. “We should be shooting these bastards instead of serving them!”

  I was fed up with the inn as well. It was ridiculous trying to keep full-grown men from smashing each other to bits. I said, “Maybe we should have joined Hoi’s group.”

  “I’ll fight the French, but I’d never join those treacherous Viet Minh,” Tan growled.

  Neither of us could stomach fighting on the side that had murdered his father, Uncle Uc, and my cousin Quyen. But if we were in Tong Xuyen now, we would have been drafted into the Resistance. Aunt Thao sent news from home that there were only children and old people left to work the fields. No boy or girl over fourteen years old remained in the village. Anyone capable of carrying a gun had been drafted. They were all gone—all our schoolmates, boys and girls, even poor Chau, the estate’s buffalo boy.

  “It’s terrible that the Nationalists can’t reorganize themselves,” I said.

  “Forget it!” Tan snapped. “It’ll never happen. The Nationalists have turned into a bunch of living-room revolutionaries like your father’s friends. They talk themselves silly while Ho Chi Minh outwits them on every front.”

  I sighed. “True, the Communists assassinated all their best leaders.”

  The Nationalists had degenerated into a hopeless cause. The Viet Minh, masquerading as the Resistance, was our only option, but Tan and I were infected by our elders’ distrust of Ho Chi Minh’s brand of Communism, the Viet Minh’s deceit, and their political rhetoric. Alternately filled with impotent rage and general apathy, we trusted no one; we couldn’t even be proud of our own country. Furthermore, it was impossible to feel very patriotic working in the inn and serving the enemy.

  Tan chewed his lower lip. “This war won’t last much longer.”

  Running the inn was like having one’s finger on the pulse of the war. For the last several months, French forces had been returning from the front looking ragged and beaten. Their swagger, so prevalent two years ago, was gone. In the bars and clubs catering to foreigners, a sense of agitation had replaced the usual festive air.

  As the war crept closer to Hanoi, more troops and refugees moved through the city. Hundreds of wounded soldiers wandered the streets, waiting to be shipped back to France or Africa. Half our guests were convalescing wounded. Even the healthy soldiers on leave were in bad shape. Fear and exhaustion showed plainly in their eyes. They drank and spent money with reckless abandon, making the girls happy and nervous at the same time. The soldiers were more generous, but they also had hotter tempers. Brawls were a daily occurrence at our inn. The French regulars fought with the African legionnaires, one unit against another. Blows were exchanged over the slightest provocation: an attractive girl, a spilled drink, or an insult.

  One had to be blind not to see the coming of the end.

  THE last time I saw Mai was late in the spring. She hadn’t been by to visit in two weeks. I was very busy with school exams and didn’t think much of it. That day I was on my way to a friend’s house. I almost didn’t recognize Mai standing outside a hotel four blocks from ours. I had never seen her with full makeup. She wore a red Chinese dress. She was with three French soldiers. They were laughing, pawing at her. One draped a proprietary arm around Mai, his hand straying down to her buttocks.

  I was nineteen and had begun to wish for the ordinary. The cosmopolitan faces of the city, its French villas, bistros, nouvelle gadgets, and fineries, no longer impressed me. I would have given anything for carefree days in the fields, the sun on my face, paddy mud between my toes, a fishing pole in my hand. Perhaps someday I would meet my love somewhere out there on a creekside beneath a full moon. I would serenade her at the Mid-Autumn Festival. I was a man-child, waiting for that first kiss.

  It was difficult to breathe. The city had become a vacuum. I pedaled down the wide avenues, gasping. The mist was burning away. Sunlight tumbled between the tree boughs. Strangely, there was a scent of guavas. There were no birds in the branches.

  I came to the lake outside the city, dropped my bike on the pier, and climbed into a boat. I put my back into the oars, my legs, arms, my whole body. In mighty strokes, I sculled across the glassy water, gliding to escape velocity. I could not see where I was going, but I saw what I was leaving behind. Marvelous, inexhaustible youth. There was so much of it to burn. Incandescent.

  Pull-exhale, glide-inhale; pull-exhale, glide-inhale. Lap after lap after lap. The water could go on forever and it wouldn’t be long enough.

  Far from every shore, I lay down at the bottom of the boat. Spent, nothing left in my limbs. In the womb of the lake, the world faded away. Above my face, a blue ceiling; lazy, puffy clouds; a caressing breeze. It was like being held. I felt my mother’s spirit there at the center of the universe.

  THE SOUTH

  1975

  34. REEDUCATION

  Tin said, “Surround him. Careful, he’s poisonous!”

  “The bush!” Tung shouted as the snake slithered toward me.

  I slammed my shovel into the ground in front of the snake. It coiled up, hissing.

  “Cobra! Cobra!” someone shouted.

  Tung and I stepped around to block its retreat into the paddy, our shovels ready. It was more than four feet long and as thick as a man’s wrist. Tin had found it under the brambles we were clearing. Within moments, half a dozen other inmates converged to help. There was no way we’d let that much meat escape us.

  Tin lured the snake to him with a stick. A machete was poised high over his head. The snake struck at the stick. Tin swung and missed.

  I came from behind and pinned the snake with my shovel. It squirmed violently to get loose. Tin brought the machete down and severed its head. The body writhed, flopping and gushing blood.

  Tung reached for the snakehead, but Tin batted his hand away. “You don’t want to do that. It can still bite and pump you full of poison.”

  As was the custom, Tin dug a hole, scooped up the snakehead with the shovel, put it in the hole, and filled it with dirt. We all went back to work, grinning. More often than not, we considered ourselves lucky to get mice or frogs. A snake this big meant that there would be a few bites to go around. A year ago, I would never consider tasting the snake meat that was offered as a delicacy in the top Chinese restaurants, but now a cobra looked as tasty as a rope of sausages.

  I picked up my shovel and rejoined the crew in the irrigation trench. The sky was blue, the day just beginning to broil. We were outside working in the fresh air, waist-deep in creamy mud. I felt very lucky to be here.

  I had thought my life was over when the guards took me from the cell that night in Rach Gia. But instead of putting us on trial as they normally did, they loaded us into a tarp-covered truck bed and drove us out of the city. We had expected to be executed at a mass grave in the woods. The truck bounced over the rutted road for half an hour and delivered us to Minh Luong Reeducation Camp.

  Our new home was an old South Vietnam military training site. It was where the Viet Cong kept “low-grade” traitors like South Vietnamese regional soldiers and former low-level officials. Compared to Rach Gia and other prisons where they sent the “high-grade” traitors, Minh Luong was a resort. The doors of our
cells were not locked and we were free to move around within the compound. We worked outside daily and had opportunities to scavenge in the fields and streams.

  Forgotten diversions of my countryside childhood came back to me. I remembered how to snatch grasshoppers from rice leaves, how to flood crickets from their burrows, how to spear frogs in the ponds. Fellow prisoners taught me how to catch mice, snakes, small fish, and small blue paddy crabs. We picked wild berries, greens, herbs, yams, onions, morning glories, and sour leaves. Some things we pocketed to be cooked later, others we popped in our mouths like candy treats. My favorites were crunchy termites and buttery sparrow eggs.

  AT lunch, the guards let us build a little fire. Tin tossed the snake onto the flames. The smell of burnt meat soon drew in the crowd. He gave everyone a small piece. We ate it with our tin of rice.

  Tin, Tung, and I sat downwind from a cow grazing the grass on the side of the dirt road. It smelled so sweet and milky that the snake meat tasted just like steak in my mouth. Tung said he could sit here breathing cow-scent all day long. Tin and I laughed at the thought of Tung pining after the cows like a lovesick puppy. Tin and Tung were my two closest friends at Minh Luong. Tung was an army corporal, married with a son. Tin was in his early thirties and single. A recent arrival at Minh Luong, he said he was a government official in Saigon. I suspected he was hiding something because he was very intent on finding a way to escape. He discussed his plans with us, trying to convince us to go with him. Of all his plans only one had any chance of success, but it was such an obvious route that every prisoner already knew about it. I had noticed it my first day inside.

  Situated on a rice plain, Minh Luong Camp was enclosed by two layers of barbed-wire fences. The back side of the camp had a creek about three hundred yards from the rear fence. One of our first tasks as inmates was to clear the minefields surrounding the prison, so if a prisoner could get past the fence and stayed unnoticed by the guards, he could reach the creek and float away for miles. It was as clear as an open door. It left me wondering why our jailers hadn’t bothered to erect some sort of barrier.