by David Bergen
When she returned to the house, she ran a bath and soaked for a long time, looking up through the dusty window of the skylight above her. After, she ate cold cereal from the box and sat in the living room and paged through a photo album. The couple who owned the house had two children, a boy and a girl, and in the photos the whole family appeared bright and earnest.
She had called Jon in the morning, leaving a message on the machine, and when he finally called, waking her, she fumbled for the phone and believed for a moment that she was back in her hotel room in Danang.
“You’re sleeping,” Jon said.
“No. No.” She sat up, the duvet ballooning around her legs.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming. Where are you?”
Ada looked around her room. She said, “I’m in this gorgeous place in a suburb close to the Daewoo Hotel. It’s the house of some friends of Elaine Gouds’s. She arranged it for me. It’s free and I feel spoiled. The whole setting is vulgar.” She said that she had come to Hanoi to bring him back with her to Danang.
“We’ll talk. Let’s meet tomorrow for lunch. Andries will join us for a while. Is that okay?”
She heard, somewhere beyond Jon’s voice, the lilting sound of another man’s voice.
Jon laughed, not with Ada but with the distant voice. Then he said to Ada, “Tomorrow, okay?” and he gave her the name and address of an Italian restaurant. It was near the area where the embassies and consulates were.
“Okay, Jon.”
When Ada arrived at the restaurant, Andries and Jon were there. Andries was a tall balding man who spoke English very well. Ada liked his easiness, his forthrightness, and could see why Jon liked him. Andries talked about Hanoi and literature and various artists he had gotten to know over the years. Then he talked about his work with the UN and about malevolence and the woeful state of the world.
He asked Ada why she was staying so far away from the center of town, and Ada explained about Elaine Gouds and the Australian family. She said that the house was large and too quiet and one night she had seen bats flying past the window.
Andries said that he knew of Jack Gouds. He did not indicate whether he and Jon had spoken of him, rather he said that Jack had some connections to some United Nations workers in Hanoi. “That man has many acquaintances,” he said. Then he said that a man like Jack, whom he didn’t know other than his type, was possibly the most dangerous kind of man. He believed in doing good, and those who tried to do good, Andries said, were inevitably dangerous, especially in a country like Vietnam. “Jack and his kind see the world as fodder for their beliefs. As if a person were a seedling and all you had to do was stick the seedling into a particular soil, water it, give it a special light, and it will grow into a Christian. A Buddhist is always a Buddhist, even when converted.” He raised his glass and drank.
Ada asked Andries if he had heard of the artist Hoang Vu.
“Yes, of course,” Andries said. “For years he lived in the hills with the farmers and did drawings of rural life. Very romantic. However, he is too outspoken and so he’s disliked by the authorities. There is a wonderful story about him. Next door to his house in Danang there is a piece of property that was supposed to be used for a factory. Hoang Vu didn’t want a factory next to his house, so he sculpted a bust of Ho Chi Minh and placed it in the middle of the land. The digging for the factory couldn’t go ahead because no one is allowed to take down anything to do with Ho Chi Minh. Hoang Vu does things like that.” Andries paused and then said that Vu was known to like foreign women. “Though that might just be the small gossip of less famous artists. Pure jealousy.”
Ada smiled bravely and remembered Hue, and Chi’s drunken midnight recitation of the bawdy poem, and the rain driving in through the open doorway and the warmth of the candle as she cupped her hands around the flame. And how later, Vu had lain outside her mosquito net and whispered, “I am some small animal.” And an angel, too. That was what he had called himself. One of those safer angels.
Andries had taken out his wallet and laid money on the table for the check. He picked up his briefcase and said that he had to get back to the office. He shook Ada’s hand and said he hoped they would see each other again.
Ada and Jon left the restaurant and walked through the streets. At one point Ada took Jon’s arm and said that she had missed him. She told him that two nights ago she had woken from a dream and called out his name. And then, not waiting for his response, she described the dream. He said that he had very few memories of their mother. In one she was standing at the kitchen counter mixing juice. She was wearing jean shorts and he leaned his head against her bare thigh and she reached down and touched his chin and her hand smelled of lotion. In the other it was dark. He had had a nightmare and had come into the living room to look for her and had found her lying under a man on the couch. “That’s what I remember,” he said.
“Dad told me once that he loved her terribly,” Ada said. “I was maybe twelve or thirteen and I didn’t know if he meant that theirs was a terrible love or if he loved her so much that there was nothing to replace it. I didn’t ask.”
They had come to a small park, where they sat, silent for a time, and Ada felt no discomfort in the quiet. After a while, she said, “We can’t put it off forever.” Then she said that she felt she was still looking for something, perhaps the thing their father had been looking for. “But maybe that’s misguided. You remember the artist, Hoang Vu? He calls me naïve and innocent, though I don’t think he means innocent in a complimentary way.”
Jon smiled at this and then said that they would fly back to Danang together and they would take care of their father’s ashes.
THE NEXT MORNING SHE WOKE EARLY AND MADE HERSELF COFFEE and she stood on the balcony and looked out over the lake. A blond woman pushed a stroller along the path. A little white dog followed. The clouds were gray and low in the sky and the air smelled of rain. The return flight to Danang was the following day and she saw the time before her as both scarce and never-ending. She thought of Vu and how once, in the darkness of his room as they had sat on his thin mattress and talked through the night, he had said that from a certain point onward there was no turning back and that it was important to reach that point.
Midmorning, she walked out to the main street and took a cyclo downtown to the writers’ association. She had taken with her the name of Vu’s brother and the address. The air was cool and she had only a thin sweater; she hugged herself to keep warm. The night before she had woken and the objects in the room had become shapes of animals and men, and she had stood and gone to the bathroom and then, back in bed, she could not sleep and so she had read and she had thought about her father and for a brief moment she had seen her father and Kiet standing side by side. And then the image had disappeared and she could not retrieve it. It had left her shaking and confused.
Her father was dead.
The writers’ association was located in a hollow-sounding building with sparsely furnished rooms, and at first glance Ada was bemused by her foolishness as she imagined a series of strangers pointing her down various dismal corridors into inevitable dead ends. However, she was told, after several inquiries, that Mr. Phan Quoc would be glad to see her. He appeared and welcomed her into his office as if all morning he had expected her visit. He asked her to sit and then poured tea.
Ada said that she was a friend of his brother, Hoang Vu, and that he had given her this address. She moved her gaze around the room as she said “this address.”
Quoc smiled and said that she must not misunderstand, but Hoang Vu was using brother in a general way. “We are not related. You see? But he is right, we are like brothers.” Quoc poured himself tea and asked if she was happy in Vietnam. “Does it please you?”
Ada said it did. Then she said that she was curious about the Vietnamese writer Dang Tho. She thought, if it were possible, that she would like to learn more about him. Quoc nodded and said that he knew Dang Tho and he would be glad to give her inf
ormation. He waved a hand, happily. He had very white teeth and graying hair. His movements were quick, marionette-like.
Ada saw beyond the window in the room the branches and leaves of an enormous tamarind tree. A woman in a short blue dress appeared in the doorway. Her hair was long and straight. She dipped her head, entered, smiled, and sat down on the couch.
“Miss Vinh,” Quoc said. “She is my assistant.” He turned and spoke Vietnamese to her and then turned back to face Ada. The mood in the room changed. Mr. Quoc smiled more and showed his bright teeth. Miss Vinh asked Ada how old she was. Ada told her, and she nodded. Her eyebrows were thin lines, neatly plucked. She asked Ada why she wanted to meet the famous Dang Tho.
“Oh,” Ada said. She looked at Quoc and then back at Vinh. “I don’t know if I said that. I was only looking for information. My father fought in the Vietnam War and recently he had read Dang Tho’s novel and was very moved by it.” Ada paused. She was aware of Quoc’s eyes. They were more gray than black, and this was disconcerting. She had lost her thought. It had been an important thought, but she had lost it. She took in a quick breath and then said that her father was no longer living.
Quoc said something to Vinh.
“Do you want to go dancing tonight?” Vinh asked. She fell back against the couch and crossed her legs.
Ada looked at Quoc, who smiled hopefully. No one seemed to have heard what she said about her father.
Quoc nodded at Vinh. “Tonight,” he said. He spoke to Vinh in Vietnamese.
“About your father. We are sorry,” Vinh said.
Ada acknowledged Vinh’s comment, and then she said that she would not be able to go dancing that evening. She was sorry.
Quoc did not seem surprised. He leaned forward and said, “I will be honest, it will be very difficult for you to meet Dang Tho. There are formal letters you can write and there are requests for government help, all of this will not help. Unless you write for the Time magazine, you will not meet him.” Quoc then scribbled something on a piece of paper. Slid it across the desk and said that this was where Dang Tho lived, flat 3-B. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Dang Tho was awarded a prize in 1991 for his novel about the war. Many famous writers have honored him. However, there are many different opinions on the book. My feelings are that Dang Tho is perhaps a talented writer but he did not represent the reality of the war. People died but not in the depressing way that is shown in the novel. The war was very long and the cost was great. Three million people were killed. There are thirty thousand Vietnamese missing in action. Two million people were wounded. One million women became widows. Millions of mothers lost their sons. Five large cities were thoroughly destroyed.”
Quoc’s forehead looked as if it had been polished. His hands fluttered through the air, grabbed at his knees, fluttered again.
“The sorrow of war depicted in Dang Tho’s book is right. Of course, we see that sorrow. However, the writer didn’t show the reasons why the sorrow took place. It was Americans who invaded Vietnam. It was not our desire to fight.
“Suffering produces art. And we have suffered a lot. Through the years we have had the influences of France, China, Mongolia, USA. There is a saying, Keep the fire in the kitchen to see if it outlasts the storms and rain outside. Vietnamese history is full of storms and rain.”
Quoc’s sentences ran along one after the other and Ada had the thought that she should reach out to trap them, but she didn’t know how. Vinh was sitting, legs crossed, smiling and seemingly content with what Quoc had just said. Ada could not imagine Vu sitting down and talking with this brother who was not really a brother.
She stood and said that she did not need anything. She wasn’t even sure why she had come. Still, she thanked them for their kindness and then said, “Sorry.” She said “Thank you” again, and she turned and walked outside. There was the sidewalk beneath her feet and there was the gray sky above her. In a nearby park children played and called out and their cries mingled with the noise of vehicles and hawkers and the solitary ring of a bicycle bell. A cyclo passed by and Ada lifted a hand and called out.
She went to the old city, where the streets were narrow and there were coffee shops and small restaurants, and vendors selling Zippo lighters and watercolor paintings and trinkets. This was where Kiet had come when he returned from the war. He had walked down this street, lived in this building or that, sat by the lake. Ada was conscious of time having passed, that what she was seeing was not what Kiet saw, or even what her father might have seen or found important if he had been here now.
As she sat close to the lake, she thought that Kiet could have been sitting in this same spot. And then his lover, Lien, joins him. She wears a dark and worn coat. A child flies a kite. Lien talks and talks. She talks about an old man whom she will marry. An old man who, because she slept with him, saved her life during the war. From her mouth spill words that slip away, past the kite, and into the air, and they are the words of a woman who has betrayed the man who has come back to her. And they are not unlike the words between another man and woman many years ago. There is the head of the man bent over his glass, low voice, a moaning, and then the woman, gasping lightly, as if she were worried or tired, and Ada remembered the shape of the man in the dark, kissing her and Jon and Del good night, the sharp smell of him. Then he was gone.
Ada sat up and looked about. The light was dull, the air was still cool. There was no accordion music, no child’s kite, no thin lover in bare ankles and small black shoes. A few birds swam in the distance. Loneliness invaded her.
She sat for a long time, aware of the breeze that came and went, and aware that nothing is ever as true or as faithful as when it is imagined. She knew that she wanted to look for the place where Dang Tho lived, and so she hired a cyclo driver to take her to Le Thanh Long. There was some confusion about the address, and Ada was dropped off at the wrong place. She walked up and down the street until she finally found what she thought was the right building. It was painted mustard yellow and was five stories. In the courtyard a grandmother watched over two children. Laundry hung from the French windows. There were parapets and iron railings. At the topmost parapet a woman leaned out, called to someone, and then disappeared. A few people entered the apartment building. One person came out. He was perhaps the age of Dang Tho, but he did not resemble the photo she had seen on the dust jacket. Ada found the directory on the wall by the entrance. There were a few names, though most of the slots were empty. The slot for 3-B was blank. She was aware of her own breathing. When she found apartment 3-B she stood and listened. Silence. She knocked and waited. Knocked again. When the door opened she saw an old woman in a pale blue ao dai. Ada said hello. The woman looked past Ada’s head.
“Do you speak English?” Ada asked.
The woman waved her hands vigorously.
Ada reached into her bag and pulled out the novel. She held it up and said Dang Tho’s name and then she said her own name. “Dang Tho,” Ada repeated. She poked a free finger at the novel. “The writer of this book. Does he live here?”
The woman shook her head. Her face was in the shadows. She said, “Va, va.” Then she spoke quickly in Vietnamese and her hands moved with her words. “Xin loi,” she said, and then said it again. Then she stepped backward as if to say good-bye. She glanced into the air and then smiled, said xin loi once again, and shut the door. Ada looked at the door and the number on it. She put the book back into her bag, then descended the stairs and went outside.
She wandered through the streets, past vendors selling cigarettes and fresh guava, past an ice-cream shop, and on past a small market where flies rose and fell to the thump of a butcher’s cleaver. She walked aimlessly, unaware of the traffic or the men who called out to her. She found herself in a deserted part of town, walking down a narrow lane that led to other narrow lanes. A man stood in a small doorway, holding his hands over his mouth, picking his teeth. His eyes followed Ada as she passed. When he called out to her she ran, turning corners
at random until, finally, she stumbled and fell against the wall of a house.
It was dark now and rain had begun to fall. She stood under a ledge that offered little protection and the rain quickly soaked her shirt and jeans. A man in a green raincoat passed by on a bicycle. Ada saw his brown feet in rubber flip-flops. A teenage girl, holding an umbrella, stopped before her and then, without speaking, took her arm, and Ada allowed herself to be pulled down the lane to a small house where she was offered a towel and a plate of milk fruit. She used the towel to dry off her hair and neck and arms. There were small flies crawling on the green fruit. An older woman appeared and leaned forward to serve tea. Ada drank slowly, testing the flavor. The girl did not speak English. She smiled and pointed at herself and said, “Huy,” and then picked up the milk fruit and put it into Ada’s hand. Ada said no thank you and placed the fruit back on the plate. Music, sharply mournful, came from somewhere at the rear of the house. Ada stood and gestured that she would leave. The girl called out loudly and a young boy appeared, holding a camera, as if he had been waiting for this moment, and at the doorway, before Ada left, he took a photograph of her standing between the mother and the daughter.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, ADA DRESSED BEFORE DAWN, LOCKED up the house, and took a taxi to the airport, where she and Jon had arranged to meet. He was waiting for her. They took the early flight out of Hanoi and arrived in Danang in time for a late breakfast at their regular spot. Ada was wearing her father’s ring on her left thumb and she twisted it now, studying her brother. She told him that the night before, in the grand bed in Hanoi, in the three-story house, she hadn’t been able to sleep. There had been strange noises downstairs near the entrance, and she had been afraid to go down to check. The fear, and the way it had found a space somewhere near the top of her throat, was how she had felt just before she had looked at their father’s body.
