by Quan Barry
Rabbit couldn’t believe the raft would hold all of them, but it did. As they boarded, a white cormorant dove into the water as if to make room. All the way downriver the bird swam beside them under the light of the full moon. Rabbit sat watching the cormorant, the bird an icy white. Suddenly the bird swung its head toward her. She felt its red stare pricking her skin. They need you, a voice said. Rabbit closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the bird was still floating by the side of the raft, its eyes locked straight ahead into the night.
At the front of the raft Linh was holding the little girl’s hand. What’s it like, she whispered. She and the little girl with the uneven braids were sitting crossed-legged, a parakeet on each of their shoulders. The little girl shrugged. How would you describe this, the girl said, waving her hand at the landscape. Were you scared, asked Linh. The little girl looked off toward the mountain. There wasn’t time, she said. Qui tapped Linh on the back and shook her head. But I want to know, Linh whined. Qui shook her head again.
They came around a bend in the river. The old man paddled them to shore, his gray beard almost touching the water. The little girl pointed toward a copse of trees, her new tooth flashing in the moonlight. A fish jumped, a streak of iridescence rippling outward. Tu stepped off the raft and helped pull it closer to land.
Rabbit was the last one off. She turned and bowed her head to the old man and the little girl, beside them the white bird floating in the water like a cloud. In the next life I will serve you, she said. The old man laughed. In the moonlight his head seemed to shine as if radiating its own brilliance. Sister, he said. It’s all one life.
When she stepped onshore, Rabbit felt corporeal in a way she hadn’t experienced in years. The old familiar freckles on her nose and cheeks began to shimmer. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, a spark trying to catch in the dark. It felt strange to be walking on land, as if all those years at the foot of the mountain she’d somehow only been floating.
Linh stumbled on her first. The woman was lying facedown in the tall grass along the riverbank. It was obvious she had crawled there. She had no pants on, a large swatch of earth black and sticky under her pelvis. Her body was twisted in an unnatural shape, her hips displaced from their sockets, the agony of her final moments apparent. Rabbit scanned the grass for clues as to what had happened. The blood trail ran up the bank and into the woods, though the thing that had killed her was nowhere in sight. Qui pulled Linh to her and buried Linh’s face in her chest. What happened, asked Linh. Already Tu was moving off to find a suitable spot. Quickly Qui followed, taking Linh with her.
Rabbit picked up the woman’s wrist. The arm was stiff and cold. In the light of the moon the skin looked ghostly. The stain on the earth still seemed to be spreading. Rabbit could smell the dark blood. Wandering Mother, she said. Speak. Carefully she wove the woman’s fingers into her own. Rabbit sat by the body for the two hours it took Tu to dig the grave. From time to time a breeze rustled the grass, but the world remained silent.
It took another twenty minutes to put the body in the earth. Rabbit walked silently beside Tu as he carried the corpse to the spot he’d found upriver. Qui and Linh trailed behind. Together they stood watching until it was done. Tu patted the earth with his shovel. The parakeets stirred the muggy air with their wings.
At the sound of the shovel tamping the dirt, Rabbit felt dizzy. Her limbs filled with the sensation of lying on a stony breast in the dark. She held her hand out to steady herself. Qui reached over and slipped something in her mouth. It was a piece of the honey comb, the comb melting on her tongue, honey the first thing she had ever tasted long ago in a box in the earth.
The moon came out from behind a cloud. Rabbit turned to look at the Mountain of the Fragrant Traces, searching it for even the faintest pinprick of light. The blood began to pound in her ears, the rising wind tinged with voices. In the moonlight, shadows seemed to ebb and wane, each one suddenly unattached to its object.
He was standing on the other side of the river searching the ground at his feet as if he’d been always been standing there, his body still lithe as a sapling, the water like a country between them. Even after all this time Rabbit could see the scratch forking down his face, the mark as if a god had touched his cheek with a finger. He didn’t look at her but kept on scouring the earth. Finally he picked up a small stone, palming it in his hand, and when he seemed satisfied it would do, he stepped up to the river’s edge and skipped it across the water, the gesture simply the act of a young boy at play. Rabbit watched the stone skim the dark surface, kissing it three times before sinking. She could feel the rooms flooding in her heart. The taste of honey lingered in her mouth. After the ripples faded, the river once again glassy, she looked back across the water. The air shimmered as if distorted by heat, but there was no trace of him.
Then Rabbit’s ears began to itch. How many years had it been? In the night she could hear something stirring from a long ways off. She let herself be drawn toward it, the sound pulling her along. The dead woman had crawled all that way, a quarter mile down to the river in search of help, and the treasure she’d left behind was inland, secured in a spot where the trees didn’t grow. Rabbit began to run, Tu and the others following, the song floating through the woods. Our Lady of the Fragrant Traces, watch over us in the darkness.
It was lying in the moonlight in the middle of a clearing. Rabbit picked it up and took it in her arms. Every inch of its skin was free of the gore she had witnessed down by the river. She had never seen anything like it, the woman’s agony now fully apparent, though how she had gotten it out of her body was a mystery. It was shaped like a T. It had two arms and two legs but at the top of its torso its body branched like a banyan tree into two distinct necks with two distinct heads, two sets of eyes shining in its faces, a single small sea horse lumped between its thighs.
Already Qui has lifted her shirt and taken the bifurcated creature in her arms, but both heads refuse. Then Rabbit feels the spark catch in her chest. Here, she says, and Qui hands her the being. Rabbit lifts her shirt and cradles a head to each breast. The clearing fills with the voices of the dead, tens of hundreds of thousands of millions. Through the gathering roar she can hear voices crying listen as the two tiny mouths pull the light from her body. Something shoots down the vault of the sky. I hear you, she whispers. Under the full moon in her thousand thousand arms Rabbit holds the new life closer to her chest.
Bibliography
Balaban, John. Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
Cargill, Mary Terrell, and Jade Quang Hunyh, eds. Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000.
Doan, Van Toai, and David Chanoff. The Vietnamese Gulag. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Back Bay Books, 1972.
Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Seattle: Black Heron Press, 2001.
Tran, Tu Binh. The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation. Athens, OH: Ohio University, Center for International Studies, 1985.
The insights into life and death on this page are quotations from the Buddha.
The poem etched in Little Mother’s conical straw hat on this page is taken from Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry, translated by John Balaban.
Much of the language in the interludes “Baby, sleep well” on this page and “Beloved, stay with me” on this page is taken from Vietnamese children’s songs that can be found at http://www.mamalisa.com.
On this page the line “After life there must be life” is taken from Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem “After the Grand Perhaps” from the book A Hunger.
Specific incidents in the chapter “And the Water Was Made as Glass” come from Hung Nguyen’s escape narrative titled “Coffee Shop from Two Spoons” in Voices of Vie
tnamese Boat People. An’s experiences in a reeducation camp draw heavily from Huu Tri Le’s Prisoner of the Word and Van Toai Doan and David Chanoff’s The Vietnamese Gulag.
The interlude “The old songs seem so foreign to us now” on this page is the Vietnamese national anthem.
On page 256 the opening line is taken from C. D. Wright’s One with Others.
Some language, which occurs most often in interludes, originally appeared in Quan Barry’s poetry collection titled Water Puppets, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011.
The language of governmental charges against Rabbit was taken from the 2011 International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) report “Rule of Law or Rule by Law? Crime and Punishment in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” which can be found at www.queme.net/eng/doc/Crime_and_Punishment_in_Vietnam.pdf.
