She Weeps Each Time You're Born

by Quan Barry

  THE THIRD TIME LEVKA TOOK HER TO THE HOUSE, SHE TOLD him everything. They were lying in bed. Outside, the water was rising in the streets. The daily rains had been harder than usual. Together they had waded through it to the house. At one point Levka had carried her on his back. Now in the sparsely furnished room on the second floor he was telling her about the fields of Dien Bien Phu, the little orange flags dotting the valley. He walked his fingers down her belly. The ring winked on his finger. You have to be careful where you step, Levka said. She smiled as he got closer. He made a noise with his mouth. The way he shook his fingers, as if he’d burned them, she knew it was supposed to be an explosion. One wrong move, he said. He pulled his hand away and rolled over.

  Moonlight tangled in the sheets. Rabbit knew he was lying in his own world far away, that he was thinking of Mikhail running to help with the red-hot iron glowing in his fist, the smell of Levka’s flesh burning as Mikhail cauterized the wound. Mikhail who was always running to help. Running through the shadow of the Urals where they had grown up together as boys. Running out into the sector of Dien Bien Phu the French had called Huguette, near the old airfield, to help with the excavator, the machine’s left track jammed up with rocks, the little orange flags flapping in the wind as far as the eye could see, then an old wound opening up in the earth, the air transformed into a hammer, the hammer striking Mikhail.

  Rabbit could feel a tension in the mattress. She knew Levka was still awake. She didn’t expect him to understand. He was the perfect audience. She reached over and kissed his scar, saw the little boy in the long shirt running away, the grenade sailing through the air. There was a man on fire, she said. I could hear him screaming. We were below deck, but I could hear him. For me, to hear something is to see it. The flames raging off him like the sun.

  It has always been like this, Rabbit said. Even the three days I lay in my mother’s arms in the ground, her fingers slick with honey. Maybe it started because I had no sight. I could only hear the sound of my own heart filling the dirt, the sound like water dripping from a great height.

  Those first years I listened. The world was full of them. Everywhere we went. In the paddies. In the ditch beside the road. In the temples. In the rivers. A nation of people who have been dying from war for over a thousand years. Everywhere their faces buried in the road.

  Levka was still lying with his back to her, in the window the moon cocked like an ear. She closed her eyes. I don’t understand it myself, she said. I hear them stretching their voices out to me. They call to me and they tell me things and I say, I hear you. The simple act of someone hearing them, an acknowledgment, and then they can go wherever it is they go.

  That dark week I almost became one. All those families swept overboard. The Cambodian who left the earth for good. The doctor lying with his broken god in his arms. The pirates’ boat exploding. Then the hold was filled with the brightest light I have ever seen and I felt a thousand arms lifting me up. All around me the waters becoming as glass.

  When I woke, there was a lump on my forehead and it was night. The moon was out. It looked full, the rabbit with its long bright ears as if stamped on a coin, but I knew it couldn’t be full. We had just celebrated the Harvest Moon the night we escaped. Then I saw Son and Qui drifting on a piece of wood. Son was staring at me. There wasn’t a single wave in the ocean. The moonlight shone on the water like a white robe stretching to the horizon. It does look full, said Son, but yes, it can’t be.

  We drifted for three days, each night the moon as if whole, the three of us adrift, Qui almost naked where the explosion had ripped her clothes off, her milky-white skin without a single bruise. When the sun rose that first morning, Qui climbed onto my piece of wood, shielding me with her body that never burns, the sun hammering down on us all day without pause, Qui’s body always the same ghostly hue. I imagined from a distance her body flashing like a mirror in the sunlight.

  On the second day Qui lifted her head and pointed. A boat, Son shouted. I looked up. It was so close I could see the people on board. The boat was riding low in the water. I couldn’t see the boat itself for all the people spilling out on every surface, a ship made entirely of people. I know they saw us. I could see the desperation in their faces. They didn’t stop.

  How did we keep going? When I was thirsty, I would take Qui’s breast in my mouth. It tasted like mountain air passed to a man floating hundreds of feet below water. Sometimes I would pass the milk from my mouth into hers.

  The second night I heard something chittering in the waves. Then I saw them—a family dancing in the watery light of the always-full moon. Dolphins, their skins like silver. All night they stayed with us, keeping watch.

  The morning of the third day the dolphins disappeared. One minute they were singing their high-pitched songs, then I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the waters were empty. I could see seabirds circling in the distance. I watched them get closer. Among them there was one dark bird, the others white as salt. Then the dark bird left the group and flew toward us. None of us said anything even after the bird landed by my shoulder. I put my hand on the elegant S of her neck, her feathers fully formed. Binh, I said. The bird that had been traded for a red wedding dress. Rabbit looked out the window. She died just last year, Rabbit said.

  Toward afternoon we heard the boat. None of us had to look. It took more than forty minutes before they reached us. The waters were so calm we could see it a hundred waveless miles away. The sailors pulled me up first. When they pulled Qui on board, I gasped. I hadn’t noticed while we were drifting on the ocean. Standing on deck, her skin was still as pale as the underbelly of a fish, but over the course of three days lost at sea, her long black hair had turned white from root to tip.

  Someone brought us a blanket. I can’t say they were unkind. On top of the boat the red flag waved with the yellow star, a single lidless eye.

  Where’s Son, I said. I became frantic. One of the sailors put his arms around me to keep me from jumping back into the sea. Where is he, I shouted. A sailor came and handed us a burlap sack and a pale blue rice bowl. This is all that was out there, he said. The sack rattled as Qui took it. I could hear voices chattering softly. I knew it was full of the bones of generations.

  Levka rolled over and ran his fingers through her hair. A few pieces got stuck in his ring. Gently he freed them with his other hand. With his finger he traced a pattern in her freckles, connecting them one by one. She could see tears glistening in the corners of his eyes. Почему ты всегда молчишь? She lifted her head as he inched himself into her. She was fifteen years old in the ancient system of reckoning. The way they moved together she thought of the ocean. Why are you always so quiet, he cried. You never say a word. She felt the wave cresting in her body, and even then she stayed silent, every muscle in her body screaming. The gibbous moon hung in the window, the long bright ears of the rabbit just starting to show.

  TOWARD THE END OF THE SUMMER RAINS VAN DISAPPEARED. Each day Qui searched for him across the street in the concrete pit, but he was never there, a figure with muddy feet coming toward her bearing a red chrysanthemum. A light seemed to dim in Qui’s face, the flowery perfume on her breath receding. The few nights Rabbit slept in their one room by the bus depot she could hear Qui shivering, her bones rattling in their sockets. Rabbit thought of the year the two of them had spent in the reeducation camp after the government sailors pulled them out of the sea. How one night Rabbit watched a new arrival, an old Chinese woman deprived of her nightly tar, the woman shaking uncontrollably, spit running down her chin.

  The final night when Qui’s sickness was at its worst, Rabbit got up off her mat. Qui, she said, placing her hand on Qui’s forehead. Let it pass. Qui put her hand on Rabbit’s neck. After a while, Rabbit let herself be pulled down to Qui’s chest. It was the first time since the long days floating off the tip of Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand almost seven years before. Air where there shouldn’t be air. Light spilling out of the darkness of the body.
Rabbit had forgotten how sweet it tasted.

  In the morning Qui was bright as a star, the pain of withdrawal long behind her, her skin and hair the same unearthly white. In the days that followed, Rabbit began to find small gifts left in front of their door or under the cinnamon tree on Duong Khiem. At first Rabbit thought they were from Van. Then early one morning as she returned from the Russian quarter, she saw one of their neighbors leaving a bowl of rice. The woman bowed her head and clapped her hands together in front of her face the way people did in the temples. It was obvious she was praying, but for what, Rabbit wondered. Then the woman scurried off.

  Two weeks after Qui pulled Rabbit to her breast, Van appeared on Duong Khiem just as they were packing up their supplies for the night. His mangled hand was heavily bandaged. Just by looking, Rabbit could tell he had only one finger left.

  Van kept himself in the shadow of the cinnamon tree. Qui put down the basket of leftover lemons she’d been packing. I have to leave Hoa Thien tonight, he whispered. Qui took his hand in her hands and held it to her chest. The blood seeped through his bandages. She let go and disappeared behind the iron fence. A few minutes later she came back with a jar filled with milk. Tell him to bathe his wound with it, said Son from his perch in the tree. Bathe your wound with it, Rabbit said. Qui handed Van the jar. He touched his forehead with his one remaining finger and disappeared down the street.

  Years later they would see him again in Hanoi’s Old Quarter on the shore of Hoan Kiem Lake, Rabbit’s fame having spread all over the north. At first she didn’t recognize him, his shy smile, his finger fully restored, the finger warm to the touch but heavily scarred at the knuckle. He had come to ask Rabbit of his wife and son. After all these years, had they made it to safety? Were they alive? Van would tell her of his fears, the smugglers always searching for him, constantly ratcheting up the price of his family’s escape. In her grand house on the Street of Shoes, Rabbit will wrap both her hands around the two fingers Van has left and look him in the eye. Your son lives, she will say. Your wife and your enemies are dead.

  THEY WERE SITTING UNDER THE CINNAMON TREE. RABBIT, QUI, Son. It was two hours past noon. A bird was singing in the branches, the sound like a man whistling. The three of them were drowsing peacefully by the fragrant trunk, each with their own thoughts, the smell of the cinnamon perfuming their blood. How do you think it will end, Son said suddenly. The question floated up into the air.

  Rabbit thought of the planets spinning wordlessly in space. She knew nothing was permanent, Levka’s body arcing over her as he cried in his helplessness, the skin trembling by the corners of his eyes. She repeated Son’s question. End? She looked and saw the wetness growing on the front of Qui’s shirt, the stain expanding like a map. Maybe Qui knew. Maybe they all knew. End? That instant, forty miles away in the scrubby brush of Anne-Marie, it was ending.

  The French named everything after their mistresses. Anne-Marie. Beatrice. Claudine. Dominique. Eliane. Flavie. Gabrielle. Huguette. The whole of Dien Bien Phu feminized and quartered. 1954 and we saw men we had never seen before—the Senegalese with their skins like night, the Moroccans and Algerians with their centuries of mixed blood, their bowing down to a fixed spot on the horizon in the middle of battle five times a day. After us, the Africans would also take up the gun against their oppressors, but we did it first though in our war many of our colonized brothers put down their weapons and lay back in the trenches, even the Black Tai who had allied themselves with the French slinking off into the hills. And at the end of two months, we won. Then the Americans, the Cambodians, the Chinese as it has been between us for a thousand years. But those months in ’54 on the plains and in the valleys of Dien Bien Phu, our bodies mixed unintelligibly. Black, white, yellow. We whisper together. There is so much we know that we cannot say. So many of us are still here sleeping in the earth until someone decides it is time to sort us out and take us home.

  IT HADN’T RAINED FOR DAYS. NOW IT LOOKED LIKE IT wouldn’t. The season was still some months from the deepest cold of a temperate winter. At the foot of the cinnamon tree Rabbit sat studying the cloudless sky. The red-breasted parrot from earlier in the day had flown away. Overhead the stars were beginning to appear. She always missed the rains when they stopped. There was something comforting about the sound of water hammering the roofs, the sound as if you were being given a second chance, the world washed clean.

  The trucks began to return at the usual hour. Qui had already left for home, her body floating down the street as if the moon were walking the earth. Son was sitting in the highest bough of the cinnamon tree. The bats were beginning to appear, overhead Venus turning on in the twilight. Rabbit was sitting with her back against the tree, the scent of cinnamon filling her head. The first truck was off-loading. She didn’t pay it any notice. Levka was always in the last truck. Any minute now the last truck would come barreling up the street, loose grit swirling through the air. He would leap off and sneak up on her, running his finger over her freckles. She was thinking of the way she had taken him in her mouth for the first time the night before, the intimacy of his cries as she hummed. She played the moment over and over in her head, the secret moments between two people. Just the moon in the window and all over the walls.

  There was a deafening crash. Rabbit sat up. A tree branch was lying at her feet, a cloud of dust kicked up in the air. Son was standing by the dead limb. The trucks were gone, Duong Khiem utterly still. Rabbit rubbed her eyes. The stars were out in their entirety, Venus already starting to set.

  Son stood toeing the branch with his foot. Rabbit didn’t understand. She had simply fallen asleep, the cinnamon like a soporific. Maybe Levka was tired too, maybe he had seen her sleeping there peacefully under the tree and decided not tonight. No, she said out loud. The moon was already halfway up the sky. She jumped up and ran through the gate.

  At the top of the stairs she pushed open the door and entered the dormitory where the Russians slept. The corridor was dark. She could see a blue glow flickering from a room at the end of the hallway. Then she was running for it. Crying please, anyone, the corridor growing longer as if extending. She felt as if she would never reach it, the glow flickering like moonlight on the ocean.

  In the room at the end of the hall an old samurai movie from Japan was playing on the TV—the men’s topknots blue-black and gleaming. There were a few sofas and chairs scattered around, a refrigerator humming in the corner, the room some kind of lounge area. The smell of cigarettes was etched in the upholstery, even in the dark the walls tobacco-stained. Giang was propped up on a small counter by a sink with her shirt still on as a man stood pumping between her legs, his body with the same sun lines as Levka’s, the same patches of light and dark.

  The man didn’t stop even when Rabbit came running in. Giang kept panting, her eyes closed, grimacing as the man moved faster. The secret moments between people. The man moaning and Giang answering, his movements faster and faster, a sheen forming on his skin. Then the man shuddered. Rabbit could see the muscles go slack, the urgency melting away. Giang opened her empty eyes. She seemed to know she and the man weren’t alone, but she didn’t hurry. The man disengaged and turned around, lit a cigarette before pulling up his shorts. Just then another man walked into the room. He looked at Rabbit and then at Giang and then at Rabbit again and smiled.

  They picked Rabbit up off the floor and carried her to a sofa. When she opened her eyes, there was a small group in the room. She didn’t remember collapsing. Giang was sitting on the arm of the couch squeezing her hand. There was a spot in Giang’s eyebrows. Rabbit realized it was lipstick. Someone must have kissed her lips and then smashed his stained mouth all over her face. Rabbit could hear two voices rising off Giang’s skin, the voices faint like a campfire in a vast canyon. Rabbit’s ears began to tickle, but then Giang pulled her hand away.

  Most of the Russians didn’t even know anything was wrong. They were only hearing about it for the first time. The last truck had only just come back. The
men in the earlier trucks were already sleeping. One man from the last truck sat smoking by the TV. On-screen a woman was singing in a white dress, in her wide sleeves her arms floating up and down like a moth’s. The man said they had sat waiting and waiting for Levka and the two others to come back from the trenches of Anne-Marie, but they never did. What do you think happened, someone asked. The man lifted his eyebrows and opened his face the way Rabbit noticed their people did when something was of little concern to them.

  The man perceived Rabbit staring. His name was Anatole—daybreak—though the others called him Grischa. His hands flew as he spoke. The others understood the theatrics, the heavy sighs. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that many of them were soldiers. They had seen things, which they’d lived through and then put from their minds. In their time they had all known men who had cared too much. It was hard to explain, but when you cared too much about one thing, it made you careless elsewhere. Vietnam was a respite, the Hindu Kush still looming in their dreams. Vietnam with its white-sand beaches, the girls with waists you could put your hands all the way around until your fingers touched, who would lie with you for only a few rubles. Why come here to help these people extract the long dead from the earth and then die yourself? Maybe they had seen this coming. There were always men like Levka, Levka running into the arms of this child when his friend Mikhail was killed. As if he could find what he needed lying between her legs.

  They didn’t come back from Anne-Marie, Grischa said. Levka and Andrei and Little Vadim. Anne-Marie was just north of Huguette at the end of the airstrip. We went out looking for them, but then the sun went down and it was too dangerous. Grischa lit another cigarette and closed his face. I remember Levka saying something or other about a deep pocket, he said. Proof of atrocities. Grischa raised his eyebrows again. I tell him why bother. Yes, there are probably bodies there. So what? There are fucking bodies everywhere. The other Russians nodded.