by Quan Barry
Overhead Son was sitting on the railing of the third-floor balcony, his legs dangling over the edge. It was one of the grandest houses on the street. There were others like it, houses with air-conditioning and western appliances, running water, tile floors, teak furniture. Foreign money flowed in from the overseas Vietnamese who had left years ago. Families who just decades before were peasants now built pastel-colored confections all through the thirty-six streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, each house tiered like a wedding cake.
Across the table the baby began to coo. Qui ran her finger along the fontanel at the top of the baby’s head where the bony plates had yet to close. In the lemon tree the female parakeet was still weeping. A single tear rolled off the end of her beak and fell on top of the baby’s head. All her life the baby in Qui’s arms will insist that she can hear voices coming from the trees, though no one will believe her. I do too understand the language of birds, the grown-up baby will tell herself when friends scoff at her assertion. The landscape will be empty except for the pied kestrel sitting in the nearby eucalyptus, the kestrel sympathetically vocalizing klee klee klee, pay them no mind.
In the courtyard the strange woman sat smoking, her shoes lying in her lap. After each inhalation, a thin gray cloud hung on the edge of her upper lip before she fully exhaled. If I tell you what you want to know, said Rabbit, it will cost me everything. Overhead in the lemon tree the female parakeet continued to cry. The woman made no sign that she’d heard what Rabbit had said. And if I don’t help you, Rabbit continued, it will cost me even more. Lightly the woman ran a finger around the rim of her empty glass. She bent over and stubbed her cigarette out on the ground but managed to keep the smoke cycling a few breaths longer, blowing a stream of it out of her mouth and inhaling it back in through her nose.
In the lemon tree the male parakeet fluffed his wings. When Gautama Buddha cut His long princely hair and left the palace of His father, said the male bird to his mate, legend has it Kanthaka, His milk-white horse, openly wept.
Street of Wooden Bowls, Street of Instruments with Strings. Street of Sandals, Rafts, Cotton, Sails. Street of Hemp and Paper. Sweet Potato Street, Street of Tin and Oils. Street of Pickled Fish, Pipes, Sugar, Silversmiths, Street of Baskets and Brushes. Scales. Street of Hats, Fans, Aluminum, Combs. Street of Pipes and Bottles. Street of Thread, of Onions, Mats, Incense, Bricks. Street of Worms, of Shoes, of Silk. Street of Bamboo Screens. Street of Coffins, Medicine, Jars. Street Strewn with Salt.
ON THE STREET OF FANS THE VAN CAME TO A HALT. TWO TOURISTS went running by with their cameras jostling around their necks. Rabbit sank back in her seat. Outside the window the storefronts were cluttered with icons. Since the government had begun modernizing the economy, Hang Quat was rife with religious images, row after row of plaster figurines. There was Quan Am with Her multiple hands, statues of Mary and the Christ child, the baby Jesus with the face of a grown man, Mary’s eyes almond-shaped and heavy-lidded, eastern. The sidewalk in front of one store brimmed with images of the seated Buddha, His earlobes elongated. But who hears the hearer, Rabbit thought.
Then the funeral procession came around the corner. She was surprised to see a band with instruments. Usually a woman’s recorded voice warbled like a bird over a sound system as someone plucked the long strings of the dan bau. Today the musicians walked dressed in matching uniforms. One man was playing a long flute pocked with the markings of an actual bone. The musicians were all white-haired. Young people weren’t interested in learning how to play traditional instruments, though in Vietnam there is a saying: the living need light and the dead need music.
In the van Rabbit could feel Linh’s eyes on her, the child hungry for an answer. Rabbit remembered the day last year when they had woken up to find the parakeets nesting in the tallest of the lemon trees. Linh had stood underneath the bough and pointed. Lady, said the male bird. We have come to serve you. Did you hear that, Rabbit said to Linh. The bird opened its wings and flapped them a few times, the sound grand and majestic as if coming from a much larger creature. Hear what, said Linh.
Rabbit ran her hand down the leather seat. The air-conditioning was on, but Linh had opened a window. Up ahead Rabbit could see a large flatbed truck crawling along behind the musicians. She knew the family would be up at the front. There might be as many as a thousand mourners wailing behind them. On auspicious days the Old Quarter could host up to four funerals before noon. How each one would stop on Hang Giay before the great wooden doors, the closest living relative entering the courtyard and bowing before Rabbit with a pained look in the eye.
All right, Rabbit said. There was a weariness in her voice. Linh slid open the door and scurried out into the crowd.
From the backseat Qui put a hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. I’m okay, said Rabbit. For the past few years she knew what the local people had been saying about her, the rumors that flew about the city, that she herself no longer took earthly food. She was afraid Qui might lift her shirt and pull Rabbit to her pale breast right there in front of the driver and this strange woman who was the sole reason for this trip. In the backseat next to Qui the woman was staring out the window, her jaw working a piece of gum. Yesterday when she had walked into the courtyard, they had learned her name was Tao. Apple. It was difficult to determine the woman’s age, but Rabbit figured she was in her late thirties. And now, less than twenty-four hours after meeting her, they were all in a van headed south to the small hamlet just outside Hue where the woman said it had happened.
When she had held Tao’s hands under the lemon trees, the taste of dirt had welled up in Rabbit’s mouth, her ears stinging. Quickly she pulled her hands away. I have to see where it happened, she’d said. There are so many voices. During the past year her encounters had become more draining. Every time she listened, she became less herself, the dead filling her with their own stories—tales of betrayal, murder, loneliness, and pain. In September it would be ten years since Anne-Marie, the Black Tai lying patiently in the ground waiting for someone to acknowledge them. And the one thing she had never considered as she walked the scrubby earth of Dien Bien Phu that first time long ago was the politics. Which stories the world is eager to bring into the light. Which stories it doesn’t want told.
When Linh came back to the van from the funeral procession, Qui and Tao and the driver climbed out. Linh held the door open and nodded. It was a widower, a young man, his suit white as salt. When his mother tried to climb in after him, Linh shook her head. Rabbit slid the door shut.
The space was so small she didn’t even need to take his hand. His suit and jacket and vest were all the same blinding white. She noticed his tie clip was a small jade figure of the goddess, Her arms posed around Her head like a spider. The clip looked overly smooth from wear. Maybe he thumbed it when he felt nervous. No, it was something else, the ridges of his thumbprint whirling over the goddess’s face, yes, the man thumbing the clip whenever he thought of the one who had given it, his thumb working the small jade figure like a tongue worrying a sore in the mouth.
She was your cousin, said Rabbit. The man nodded, blinking back tears. Rabbit began to open herself, the silvery room in her head coming onto her, the room as if descending, the moon plunging toward her and swallowing her whole, the orb all around her with its silvery light and Rabbit like a candle burning brightly in the center of a lantern. Yes, she was there in the silvery room where no one else could enter, and she was waiting for the other to arrive.
She was my cousin, the man repeated. She was the daughter of my second aunt. For a moment his face seemed to brighten. We had never even met until a few years ago, he said. There was so much pressure on Xuan, the man whispered. We are both the last of our bloodline. I am afraid for her in the next life. The man was thumbing his tie clip. Rabbit couldn’t be sure if Linh had told him what would happen. Some people were eager to tell their loved ones something or to ask one final question. Some people tried to slip dong into her hand as if it were only a matter of persuasion. Okay, Rabb
it said. She closed her eyes and waited.
Sometimes they came to her instantly and sometimes they were shy as deer. The experience like kneeling by a river and slowing her heartbeat to the rhythm of the landscape. The sounds of water lapping on the shore, waiting for the creature to come and drink, then raise its head.
Before I met Nhat I knew it would be difficult, said a voice. In the silvery room Rabbit opened her eyes, her ears tingling. I’ve known it my whole life, the voice continued. There was neither happiness nor sorrow in its intonation. Everything about my monthly blood was haphazard, it said. When it would come, how long it would last, the color and thickness. Everything. The words hung in the silvery air. All those years Nhat coming home from the company every day at noon. On auspicious days the two of us lying down on the floor in the old way because the doctor said western beds were too soft. My tailbone bruising.
It had been a long time since Rabbit had spoken with one so young. At the end of the first year I made a pilgrimage to the Perfume Pagoda, said the woman. All the way down the Swallow Bird River I tried to imagine my body as a nest. I imagined lining it with bits of paper, clumps of hair. I spent a full week on Huong Tich Mountain walking from temple to temple and touching every lucky thing I could touch.
Then Rabbit began to see her. She had shaven her head and was wearing a plain white robe, her sleeves long and breezy. Rabbit knew that under the robe every one of her ribs would be articulated, her rib cage jutting out like the prow of a ship. On the front of the robe there was the spot where she had aimed for the heart. The stain was not unbeautiful, like a red chrysanthemum pinned on a sheet.
Rabbit stood in the silvery light and listened to the voice of the woman once named Xuan explain herself. Each time she found herself listening to yet another soul, Rabbit wondered at the marvel of it all. In ten years’ time she had become a national treasure. The government trotted her out when they needed to know where their soldiers were buried, where to erect another monument for the northern martyrs. In the American war alone there were more than three million dead, and the end of the war was more than twenty years behind them. But as long as there were unnamed dead left in the ground, it would never be over. What the dead know. What you remember shapes who you are. The government was trying to create one memory, one country, one official version of what happened. Everything else was allowed to disintegrate and fall off the bone. All over the countryside southern remains were going unacknowledged. One side had been victorious. The other was turning into earth.
When almost two years had passed, I went to the grave of Grandmother Phan, said the woman once named Xuan. Grandmother Phan’s burial mound in Lake Bien was accessible only by elephant. The woman patted the red flower on her chest as if checking to make sure it was still there. A boy brought a ladder and helped me up, she said. I remember he wasn’t wearing a shirt, his young back already dark and leathery. I climbed up to the spot just behind the head where there was a dirty blanket and a place to sit. Rabbit began to feel herself melting into the voice until she too could see it, the boy momentarily walking away with the ladder across his shoulders, the elephant’s mammothness between her legs, the bristles of the great animal’s hair scratching her skin.
When the boy came back, he hit the elephant with a stick with a metal hook on the end. Together we waded into the water, said Xuan. It took us forty minutes to get there. Sometimes the boy would swim. Mostly we tramped through the tall grass, but when the boy swam, the elephant swam, too. In the silvery light Xuan began to play with her long white sleeves. Then we came to the island where my ancestors are buried in mounds, the grass green and thick, and at the head of each mound there’s a small hole boring straight down. Grandmother Phan’s resting place was under a camphor tree. I poured a bottle of rice wine down the hole. I left a cassette player made of paper along with a paper tape of Grandmother’s favorite music. Xuan was sitting on the ground running her hands over her scalp. Within three weeks of my visit to Grandmother Phan’s grave, my blood stopped.
I don’t know which is worse, Xuan said. I only know what happened to me. For six months my body was home to someone, the nest I’d visualized for so long finally full. Which do you think is worse, she asked. Rabbit knew the question before Xuan even posed it. To lose it before the blood has had a chance to form or to lose the form itself?
I tried to keep going, Xuan whispered. Everyone said there would be others, but I knew. I’ve always known my body wasn’t meant for it. We never should have married, she said. Rabbit was beginning to lose her in the glow of the silvery light, the light growing brighter and brighter until Rabbit would find herself back in the van. I didn’t do it out of grief, said the voice. We were cousins. He was the son of my only uncle, our blood from the same line. Through the children he will someday have, I will live on.
I hear you, Rabbit said. She opened her eyes. He was sitting next to her in the van. His thumb rested on the green tie clasp carved with the goddess. She turned to him. The dead live in us, she said. From outside Linh opened the door. A wave of air rushed in. The man let out a deep breath. So many of them expected a conversation. Time and again people sought her out for their own sense of closure. But it wasn’t about the living. The man jumped out of the van and disappeared into the crowd. It was perfect. He didn’t even thank her.
The old songs seem so foreign to us now. Like Soldiers of Vietnam, forward! / The flag’s gold star fluttering in the wind / Leading our people, our native land, out of misery and suffering / Our efforts unified in the fight for the building of a new life / Let us stand up and spiritedly break our chains / For too long we’ve swallowed our hatred / Keep ready for all sacrifices and our life will be radiant / Ceaselessly for the people’s cause we struggle / Hastening to the battlefield/Forward! All together advancing / Vietnam is eternal.
JUST BEFORE SUNSET THREE MOTORCYCLES PASSED THEM ON the highway heading south. On each a Vietnamese man sat up front driving, a foreign woman in a tank top and shorts on the back. Ever since the country had opened its doors to western tourists earlier in the decade, there was money in places where there’d never been money before. From the passenger’s seat Linh waved, her dimpled cheeks shining. One of the women raised her hand. All the way down the highway the woman remained with her hand in the air until she was gone. Her long blond hair streaming from her helmet.
Just this morning they had closed up the house on Hang Giay. When the policeman arrived for the first shift, Linh told him they needed a van and a driver. Tong looked confused. There were no official events scheduled. It wasn’t the day just after Tet when every year they threw the doors open and allowed anyone to come and sit under the lemon trees, though the visitors were screened ahead of time and asked whom they wanted to contact. Every year Tong knew what happened at the end of that day, though out of politeness he never said anything. How Qui would close the doors of the house and pull the weary Rabbit to her chest, the official hearer of the dead limp like a rag doll. Then Qui would fill Rabbit back up with her own silvery light.
The parakeets were preening themselves in the lemon tree. Tong was still mulling over Linh’s request. A van and a driver, he repeated. She is too important to just disappear. Linh began to pick something out of her teeth. Child, Linh said, the top of her head just reaching his navel, her chubby cheeks pink as if painted. She looked him square in the face. Do as you’re asked. The year before Rabbit had helped Tong’s cousin find her son. The child had been trapped in a fire as he was playing in an abandoned factory. In the courtyard Rabbit told them the boy died instantly. His soul was so bright, said Rabbit. He will come back to the world as whatever he wishes. Linh stood by the wooden doors still picking her teeth. Tong got back on his moped. In less than an hour a van pulled up out front.
And so there they were heading south to the city of Hue. The sun was in the west. The highway stretched before them. The driver called over his shoulder. We should eat, he said. They had brought food with them but had eaten it all for lunch. The
driver’s name was Viet. On the left side of his face a piece of his nostril was missing. All that was left was a clot of white scar tissue, all day long the sound of his breathing whistling in and out of his nose. Linh didn’t even confer with the others. Okay, she said.
They pulled off the highway. Within a few miles they came to a village. The sun had gone down, but there were still people out on bicycles and mopeds. Along the main street the shops were still selling. They passed what looked like a school, then a community center with a great thatched roof and a series of loudspeakers ringing the grounds. Viet pulled up at a small restaurant. In front there was a sign with the number 7 painted on it.
Inside a teenaged girl sauntered over to take their order. The girl’s hair was bleached a brassy orange color and boldly cut in what looked like a western style often worn by tourists. Rabbit realized how long she’d been living in the north. The girl’s accent sounded strange to her ears. Technically they hadn’t crossed the Ben Hai yet, but the girl pronounced several letters in the southern style. It reminded Rabbit of the years she’d spent living on the Mekong, the way the people spoke as if they were singing.
It’s a delicacy, said Viet. He sat systematically rubbing his knees. This town is known for it, he added. Even outside the confines of the van Rabbit could still hear the air whistling in and out of his nose. They were sitting at a corner table in an array of small plastic chairs suited for children. There were a few other families crowded around tables, a group of workers up front. A day’s worth of trash lay strewn all over the concrete floor—scraps of food, dirty squares of coarse gray paper that the restaurant kept piled on the tables as napkins. Shall we order it? Viet lit up a cigarette. Tao reached over and took a cigarette out of his pack without asking. Linh didn’t know what Viet was talking about. Yes, she said eagerly.
