by Quan Barry
Their food came quickly. Bowls of rice. A plate of morning glories for Qui. A steaming bowl of pho ga. Viet slurped the soup down loudly in the way Vietnamese men did, the noise like a drowning man struggling for air. The teenaged girl came over with the tray. There were a few greasy vegetables arranged around the meat. Viet spit on the floor, then picked up his chopsticks and began portioning it out. Qui shook her head. Tao accepted a plate but kept smoking, blowing the smoke out through her pursed lips before inhaling it in through her nose as if to make it last twice as long.
Rabbit ate just enough to be polite. Do you like it, Viet asked. She nodded. It’s salty, she said. Viet nodded. But tender, he said. Yes, said Linh, lightly pulling a piece of meat off the bone. This little one eats like a man, laughed Viet. He reached across the table and put more meat on Linh’s plate. When she finished it, he spooned out some more.
Linh wiped her lips on a slip of paper and threw it on the floor. The teenaged girl pointed her through a doorway at the back. When Linh didn’t return after ten minutes, Rabbit went to look for her. Rabbit had been sitting with her back to the other diners. As she got up she noticed them staring. Some of the men were eyeing Qui. Others sat watching the smoke scroll endlessly through Tao’s face. One young boy sat studying Rabbit and her map of freckles. Chào buôi tôi ông cụ, Rabbit said. Evening, child, an old man replied. Rabbit could see he didn’t have any teeth.
The bathroom was in a stone building out back. When she entered, a cord hit her in the forehead. She pulled it and a bare bulb flickered on, the light scarcely stronger than a candle. The room was mostly empty with a concrete floor and a trough running the length of the wall. In a corner there was a water spigot and a plastic bucket with a small pail. Quickly Rabbit approached the trough and pulled down her pants. When she was finished, she filled the bucket and poured water on the spot where she’d squatted.
Back outside the moon was beginning to rise over the trees. Linh, she called. She could see the light from a fire dancing in the distance behind a wooden shack. She went toward it, almost stepping in something along the way. Rabbit bent down for a closer look. Scattered on the ground were several shallow tubs filled with water, the plastic tubs like something one might wash dishes in. In each, two or three big black fish were swimming in circles. One of the fish was too big to swim, its back sticking up into the air, the fish lying in just a few inches of water, the sound of its gasping strangely human. I hear you, Rabbit said.
Linh was standing by the fire, her eyes as if stuck open, the dimples erased from her cheeks. There was a black cauldron in the center of the flames. A young boy poked the fire with a stick. It was happening off to the side. Again and again a shirtless man lifted what looked like a tire iron wrapped in a towel over his head. At first Rabbit thought he was beating an old blanket, the dust rising in the air from the pale and dingy thing heaped at his feet. A few small children squatted around the fire without pants. One child seemed in charge of the others. In the firelight the muscles of the man’s chest glistened with effort.
Rabbit put her arm around Linh and tried to pull her away, but Linh was rooted to the spot. The sound of the tire iron whizzed through the air as the thing lay whimpering in the dirt. Surprisingly there was no blood pooling around the body. The man was careful to avoid the head and set the hot blood loose. Mostly he worked the haunches, the ribs, the sound of each dull thud strangely wet. Rabbit couldn’t believe it was still alive. Its back was obviously broken though its hind legs kept twitching.
Then the teenaged girl who had waited on their table was standing beside them, her hair a shade of gold in the firelight. It’s a local secret, she said. It’s what makes the meat so tender. The man beat it until it stopped whimpering. He put the iron down and wiped his brow. The dead dog lay in the moonlight on the edge of the fire. Rabbit imagined the dog was nothing more than a skin filled with dark soup. It was the ancient method of tenderizing meat. If you beat something to death, the softened meat separated from the bone even before you cooked it.
Linh reached for Rabbit’s hand. On their way back to the table they passed the tubs with the fish circling in the dark, the sound of the one gasping fish still tinged with the human. You don’t hear the suffering of animals, do you, said Linh. Overhead the moon hung like a mouth. Anyone can hear that, said Rabbit.
When they got back, the others were waiting by the van. Linh pointed to something across the street. What’s that, she said. Viet took a small flashlight out of the glove compartment. Okay, captain, he said, handing it to her as they all crossed the road, Tao with a fresh cigarette clamped between her lips.
The object was perched on a wooden post. Linh turned the light on it. A bat went sailing over their heads. It was a temple the size of a dollhouse, the structure perfect in every detail. Linh ran the light over it. Rabbit could see it was painted with red lacquer and topped with a black tile roof adorned with a stone dragon running along the peak. There were tiny Chinese characters painted over the doors and windows in gold like the temples in Cholon or even like the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. Rabbit looked closer. Inside there was a bowl full of rice and a small trough filled with sand and the charred remnants of joss sticks. Dried husks of a few dead water beetles lay scattered on the polished floor.
Qui clapped her hands together three times and bowed her head. When she finished, she began picking the joss sticks out of the sand and sweeping up the insect husks with her pale fingers. Did someone die here, asked Linh. Rabbit could barely hear the question through the tumult in her head, her ears throbbing. Voice upon voice upon voice. It’s a refuge for wandering ghosts, Viet said. Anyone who dies away from home out in the open. They can come here at night and rest, he added. Qui put a hand out to steady Rabbit. The voices were so loud Rabbit thought her eardrums might burst. She leaned on Qui as they walked back to the van.
Within an hour they came to the Ben Hai. The moon was up, the light shining on the river. A monument stood next to the riverbank, an obelisk recessed in a circle. At the front of the statue a worker stood in a Soviet-style uniform. Let’s keep going, said Linh. Viet looked in the rearview at Rabbit. She nodded. Okay, said Viet. They continued south. The 17th parallel, once everything and nothing, grew distant and farther behind them.
They were coming up on the first stone gate into Hue, the ancient capital. Linh was sleeping in the front seat, in the darkness her face smooth as porcelain. Gently Viet put a hand on her shoulder. The moon gleamed on the Perfume River like a layer of silver. Let her sleep, said Rabbit. The sound of Linh’s breath sawed in and out of her mouth. She should be seeing this, said Viet. All Vietnamese should see the great works of the emperors. There will be plenty to see when we get there, said Rabbit. There will be nothing worth seeing when we get there, Viet mumbled. What, Rabbit said, but he didn’t repeat himself.
They crossed over a narrow bridge and turned left. On the corner a few cyclo drivers were stretched out asleep on their passenger seats. Within minutes the van floated past Flag Tower. The whole structure appeared surprisingly flat like a grounded barge. Even in the night the flag of Vietnam was lit up bright as day. They say that’s the biggest Vietnamese flag in the world, said Viet loudly. There was hardly any breeze. The flag hung limp, but its size was still evident. The one yellow star in the field of red, the sun and the blood of the people.
The ancient Imperial City closed at sundown. Even from the street Rabbit could catch glimpses through openings in the wall that ran the length of it. Most of the buildings had been constructed during the Nguyen Dynasty a few hundred years before. During the war the Vietcong had occupied Hue for four bloody weeks. The American bombings that retook the city destroyed much of it, the Forbidden Purple City completely razed. Recently Hue had been designated a World Heritage Site even though there were places where there was nothing left to see, not even rubble.
They passed another of the grand stone gates leading into the Citadel. It’s magnificent, said Viet. The streets were empty, the s
tonework adorned with intricate carved designs, mythical animals covered in scales with the haunches of lions and the faces of unicorns. Beyond that is the Forbidden Purple City, said Viet. I hear it was even more beautiful than the one in China. He slowed the van down. It must be more beautiful, he said, because the foreigners call it by its rightful name. Purple after the North Star, which was the Emperor’s celestial home in the sky. Viet’s voice went soft and dreamy. The Forbidden Purple City, his home on earth.
There were women born in the Forbidden Purple City who were never allowed to leave, said Tao. Her intonation was flat, but Rabbit knew rage when she heard it. Through the darkness her words filled the van. Rabbit didn’t turn around to look. She knew if she did, she would see Tao’s face still as an icon, only her lips moving, a lump of gum tucked in her cheek. My great-great-grandmother was one of them, Tao said. A woman with feet small as fists. They say she had to be carried everywhere. Viet stepped on the gas, gunning the engine as if trying to outrun something.
From the backseat Tao kept talking. When the emperor died, his concubines were killed and buried with him, she said. Everything he would need in the afterlife heaped with him in the earth. Trusted advisers. Favorite horses. Even illegitimate children. For a moment Linh shifted in her sleep.
My family comes from the stars, Tao said. I am the last of us on earth. Ridiculous, said Viet. In the rearview Rabbit could see the anger brewing in his eyes. Tao continued untroubled. My great-great-grandfather was a eunuch, she said. As a child, his father didn’t have the money for a surgeon, so he took up the knife himself. In the firelight the boy’s face was stoic even as the sweat dripped down his chin. Afterward his mother rose in the middle of the night and slipped out to the trash heap by the animal pens to find them. She wrapped them up in a soft cloth and placed them in a box, which she gave Great-Great-Grandfather, who kept them through the years as he passed his examinations and was accepted into the imperial household, his body not a threat to the emperor. His mother told him when he died, he would be buried with them. He would be whole.
Rabbit found herself growing sleepy. In the seat next to her Qui had closed her eyes. The van floated along like a boat gliding downstream. They say he loved her from the very moment he saw her, said Tao. The girl with the feet small as fists. They say her feet smelled like roses and that she was the favorite of the man destined to become the sixth emperor of Vietnam. The other girls kept their feet bound and spritzed with cologne to hide the unnatural smell of bloodless flesh, their feet discolored. But Great-Great-Grandmother’s feet were pink as health, her long black hair sweeping the ground when she sat, her tiny feet resplendent as flowers. She never wrapped them a day in her life.
You are ignorant, said Viet. All the old families in Vietnam make outrageous ancestral claims. You lost everything in the war because it was never yours to begin with, he said. Tao continued as if he’d never spoken. He was her attendant, she said. He gave her baths, braided her hair, wrung out her menstrual cloths. One night she caught him staring at her in the mirror as he oiled her shoulders, his eyes burning. I think you are not what you appear to be, said Great-Great-Grandmother. He made his face into a blank slate. If you are honest and hardworking and you believe in something strongly enough, she said, it will come to you. Then she covered her shoulders.
Great-Great-Grandfather gave himself a year. Each night he opened the box his mother had handed him and unwrapped the soft cloth, kissing the shriveled skin and holding them up to the starlight in his palms. In the purple light of the North Star, the skin looked fleshy again, warm to the touch.
It happened one year to the day after Great-Great-Grandmother had first noticed his look in the mirror. At the same hour of the same day they lay together for the first and only time. It was she who beckoned him into her chambers, she who lay down on her back on the red and black silk duvet and pulled him into her, whispering have you wanted it enough? The room filled with a soft purple light. In the window the stars salted the sky. For both of them the pleasure was as it should be, Great-Great-Grandfather gasping at the simplicity of it. That you could want something badly enough and your disfigured body could respond.
When Great-Great-Grandmother began to show, she cloaked herself in rich tunics, the fabric enough to clothe ten women. The one who would become emperor never noticed, his mind full of other things, the empress dowager and the regents plotting for power. He never noticed the changes in his concubine’s weight even in the brief moments when he was with the girl with the redolent feet, her body swelling and then unswelling months later, her breasts loose with milk. Her lover never noticed even through August of 1883 when he became the sixth emperor of Vietnam, the Son of Heaven, his emperorship lasting only four months.
In the end the French navy was too much. At the signing ceremony, he could feel his ancestors crowding the room. What choice did he have? The French had made it clear they would keep blockading the Perfume River, bombarding the coast. His signature felt like ashes in his mouth. Sign and become a French protectorate or be destroyed.
What an emperor will do for his people, keeping them from the worst possible harm. Even when his imperial court turns on him. Even when his own regents demand it. In the end you do what you have to do and you do it with honor. The Son of Heaven lifted the cup and drank. Opium and vinegar. Like so many emperors before him, he felt the poison burn all the way down.
But the story doesn’t stop with the suicide of the emperor. In the days that follow the entire household is killed, all those loyal to the Son of Heaven. They say my great-great-grandparents drank from the same cup, Great-Great-Grandmother tottering to the spot on her own two feet when their turn came, Great-Great-Grandfather standing beside her with his treasure tucked away in a small velvet bag hung around his neck. The sudden realization as the poison aerated his blood that he’d always been whole.
With her finger Tao lightly traced the outline of the moon on the window. But their daughter, my great-grandmother, had been smuggled out of the palace months before, she said. My great-grandmother, a little girl with a stony face and the sweetest-smelling feet. She was raised in an orphanage. Rabbit could see a vein beginning to bulge in the side of Viet’s temple. Then how do you know any of it is true, he hissed. Even in the dark Rabbit could see his face twisting in strange ways, the dark blood lumping under the skin. She watched as it grew bigger and bigger, the vein knuckling on the side of his face to the size of two, three, four fingers, five, and counting. How do you know, Viet screamed, the lump bright purple and half the size of his head.
Rabbit bolted upright in her seat. Outside a series of paddies floated by, the rice gently waving as if underwater. Inside the van was silent. Up front Viet peered off up the road. Tao was slumped asleep in the back, mouth closed, the moon in the sky following them south.
Hours later, just before dawn, after they had walked the muddy fields they had come all that way to stand in, Rabbit will see for herself. It will happen on her way back to the van that will carry them back to the thirty-six streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, the portraits of the dead rolling through the district. As Rabbit, more tired than she has ever been, is about to climb in the van, she will look over at Tao standing in a nearby stream, Tao humming to herself, face calm as a cloud as she balances on one foot while washing the other, each of Tao’s feet perfectly formed but small as fists. Even from where Rabbit is standing she will catch the scent on the wind. Tao rubbing the dirt from her soles, her feet fragrant as roses.
From the Latin for “terrible,” “cruel.” Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man’s teeth down to the gums. And what happens if we don’t remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not re
cognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing.
ON THE WAY BACK TO HANOI, RABBIT WAS SURPRISED BY HOW many wandering ghost temples they passed. In the daylight each one was clearly visible. A few of them looked weather-beaten but still intact. The intricate scrollwork flared off their roofs in the Chinese style. In the night she hadn’t realized there were so many, each one a sanctuary for the dead. How long do they stay, said Linh, turning around in her seat. Rabbit was tired. She could barely bring herself to answer. It had taken them thirteen hours to get to My Kan. It would take them another thirteen hours to get home. As long as they need to. Qui looked at Linh and nodded. In the front seat Linh turned to Viet. Uncle, she said quietly, please pull over. He glanced in the rearview. I will find us a spot, he said. Eventually they came to a banyan tree growing by the side of the road, the one tree sprouting several trunks as if it were a whole grove. Viet pulled over and parked the van in its shade. After the others climbed out, Qui pulled the curtains shut and unbuttoned her shirt. Rabbit was so weak from the few hours spent in My Kan she could barely lift her head.
Listen. There are things we know that we cannot say. For example, if you were to ask him, Viet will say he has never been married, that he has never had a child, but in the last room of the museum down in Saigon there are shelves lined with jars, pale bleached things held in suspension. The room is overwhelmed with them, in places the jars two deep, each different in its own way. Some contain two-headed cows, others dogs and cats with massive deformities—prehensile tails, the stumps of extra heads growing out of odd places, one a fetal pig, but the moony thing has flippers. Work your way toward the case that contains human fetuses, somebody’s baby preserved in formaldehyde. The children are grotesque and seem to shine, their skin luminous and unfinished. Many are conjoined, some at the head, others in the body, their shapes alphabetic and strange. Because of the long years of defoliants, unnatural clouds sprayed without mercy, ours is a land with the highest rates of deformity. How these creatures must have killed their mothers, torn them open in the long hot night of their births. Rest assured that there is no one in there, each one just a vessel, nothing more. Pick a jar off the shelf and clasp it in your arms. Sing to it. Rock it to sleep, the liquid softly sloshing like blood through the heart. Despite their monstrousness, they are unmistakably human; one with his intestines on the outside of his body floats sucking his thumb.
