by David Bergen
“Dad loved us,” she said. “I believe we are most alive when we are being thought about by others who love us.” She paused. “Do you understand?”
Jon said that it could be true.
She said that she pictured their father as a mirror giving them back a reflection of themselves, and now that he was gone their reflection had vanished. “And so when Dad died, part of us died too. Or me. Part of me died. I feel that way. You don’t have to believe what I’m saying.”
Jon stirred his coffee. Lit a cigarette. “Your thoughts,” he said. “They go into strange places.”
She said that her friend, Hoang Vu, seemed to like it that her mind went into those places. She told Jon that Vu had met their father and seemed to understand something of what he was feeling. Vu drank too much, but he was a tender man, and his vision for the world was generous. She said that she had stayed at his house for a few nights, after Jon had left for Hanoi.
“He likes you,” Jon said. “I’m happy for you.” Then he said, “Ada, listen. I’m not going back with you. I’ve decided. I’ll stay on for a bit in Hanoi and take some time to sort things out. You know.”
Beside them, a young woman dropped sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a tin spoon. The soft hair on her forearms reminded Ada of Del. She watched the woman and then turned to Jon. “I want to get flowers. Not too many and not too colorful. A subdued bouquet.”
Jon smiled. “Subdued. We will get a subdued bouquet.” He paid for their breakfast, and they left.
THE MAN THEY HIRED GUIDED THE BOAT OUT THROUGH THE mouth of the Han River and around the coastline past Monkey Mountain. A cool wind came in off the open water, and the man asked Ada several times if she needed a jacket. She shook her head. When they had reached the bay of My Khe, the driver slowed the engine and puttered in circles. They had gone to the hospital to collect their father’s ashes, and Ada sat now holding the cardboard box.
She felt a looseness and then a clarity, as if a lens had been placed before her eyes. She looked at Jon, who nodded, and she tilted the box over the water. The ashes caught in the wind and some came back to rest on her skirt, a light dusting. The driver said something, gesturing with his hand at the box and the water.
“A funeral,” Ada called out. She placed the flowers they had bought on the water and they floated away, caught on the swells.
The driver did not understand. He laughed and gave Ada a thumbs-up. Jon pulled a bottle of whiskey and two glasses from his bag. Opened it and poured. He gave a glass to Ada and then offered one to the driver, who waved his hand, then took it. Jon raised the bottle and said, “To our father.” Ada felt the spray of the water as the boat hit a wave. Jon refilled the man’s glass. “Don’t get him drunk,” Ada said. “We need to get back.” She brushed at her skirt and then looked at her hand, then leaned forward so that her words would not be taken by the wind and asked Jon if he was able now to cry.
He did not answer. He looked at her and then he looked out at the sea and his mouth appeared to move and then he said, “No.” He said it softly and at first Ada was not sure if he had spoken at all.
She asked him if he had cried at all since their father’s death and he shook his head and said that he had taught himself long ago, when he was young, not to cry.
“Oh, Jon,” Ada said.
In the distance, closer to shore, a small round boat appeared and disappeared.
IT WAS ONLY THE NEXT DAY, WHILE SHE WAS SITTING ALONE ON the rooftop of the hotel, that Ada cried. The evening before, she had said good-bye to Jon, and the finality of everything now came to her as a vast emptiness. She was alone, with her face raised to the sun, and at some point she became aware that only several weeks earlier she had been sitting in this same spot and she had not known, at that time, that her father was dead. Now, she knew. And she wept. She wept for her father and for his sadness that she once thought she had understood but could not now, nor ever, comprehend. And she wept for herself and for her loneliness, though at this moment she would not have wished to rid herself of that loneliness, because it came with a certain startling beauty.
In the afternoon she took the bicycle from its storage place on the main floor of the hotel, washed it, and then rode it to Vu’s house. When she got there, his sister Thien said that when she had come back to Danang, her brother was gone. She peeked at Ada from under the shadow of a straw hat that had a blue ribbon at the crown, and the blue reminded Ada of Vu’s socks.
Ada asked where he had gone.
“Away. I do not know.” Thien shrugged. The dog lay in the dust behind her. There was a trellis above the dog and vines grew from the trellis. Someone was running water behind the house. Ada looked beyond Thien toward the back.
Thien lifted her eyebrows and said, “My daughter. She is washing the clothes.”
“I want to give Vu his bike,” Ada said. She pushed it toward Thien, who stepped backward and said, “He wants you to have it.”
“I don’t need it,” Ada said. “I’m going back to Canada.”
Thien considered this, then she said, “Keep the bicycle. We have others.” Then she said that Vu had gone to the town of Quang Ngai and she smiled and shrugged.
Ada asked for an address. Or a phone number. Thien disappeared and came back and said the name of a guesthouse. The careful movement of her hand as she spoke, the shape of her fingers, mirrored Vu’s fine bones, and for a moment Ada was unsettled and wanted to reach out to touch Thien’s wrist.
“Thank you,” Ada said. And then she said good-bye.
ON THE WAY TO QUANG NGAI, HER DRIVER LIFTED A HAND AND pointed at the roadside and spoke for a long time in Vietnamese and then he fell silent. There had been a group of girls in colorful ao dais and a woman holding flowers and a man and a photographer and behind this scene she saw tables and people and food and children throwing bright streamers into the air. And then the view had passed.
It was late when she arrived in Quang Ngai and she knew that she would not look for Vu that evening. Her driver took her to one of the hotels that accepted foreigners and she took a small room on the third floor. Her window looked out over palm trees onto the entrance of a dimly lit café where four men sat at a stone table playing cards. She saw herself as standing at the edge of some great maw and the four men were on the far side, distant and unapproachable. Unable to sleep, she sat on the balcony and waited for the sun to rise. Everything, the stars, the half-moon, the palm trees, seemed placed upon a great and implausible backdrop.
In the morning, using the map the desk clerk had drawn for her, she set out to find Vu. The guesthouse was a string of dark rooms located next to a vast, French-style building in disrepair. An old man sat on a chair holding a heavy book, and she approached him and said Hoang Vu’s name. Because the old man seemed not to have understood, she repeated Hoang Vu’s name, this time with a different inflection. Still, nothing. She tried again, attempting the lilting tones that she had heard so often in the mouths of others. She found it absurd and disheartening that she could not speak correctly the name of her lover.
Finally, the old man said Hoang Vu’s name and he sighed and rose and led Ada down a narrow passageway to a closed door. He stepped back and bowed his head. Ada knocked. There was no answer. She knocked again and waited and looked down the dim walk and then at the old man beside her. She tried the door, it opened, and she stepped inside and called Vu’s name. He was not there. The room had a cement floor and a small cot. There was a mirror over a sink and a chair beside a wooden table. An open closet revealed a few articles of clothing. The old man hovered. Ada touched a shirt and pushed her nose against the cloth. Smelled Vu. She closed her eyes. Sat on the cot and through the open door she saw that the old man had disappeared. There was a candle on the table.
She lay back, and after a bit she heard footsteps and she sat up and saw the old man standing in the doorway. Because of the way the light fell behind him she could not see his face. In his hands was a tray that held a teapot and two cups.
He poured the tea and held out a cup for her. She took it and said, “Thank you.” They drank in silence, and after, the old man poured her more. Again, she drank, the clink of the cups, the splash of the tea, the wordlessness strangely soothing. She left the room and the old man left with her. Ada thanked him and then said the name of her hotel. He lifted a hand from his thigh and waved.
She spent part of the day walking the streets of the town. Once, in a small lane, a man who was squatting at the side of the road rolled a rock at her feet. She ignored him and hurried on. She circled back to the hotel and passed through the lobby and climbed to her room.
That night, Vu came to her. When he knocked, she opened the door and he looked at her and said, “You are sleeping?”
“No, no. I’m reading.”
He was holding an unlit cigarette. He said the old man at the guesthouse had told him that a beautiful woman had come for him. Vu smiled. “The old man told me that I would be a fool not to hunt you down.”
She hesitated and looked back over her shoulder at the small room and then turned back and asked, “Should we go for a drink or something?”
They went down to the lobby of the hotel and sat on the vinyl couch close to the front window. The night clerk brought them whiskey and glasses. A rooster crowed, the clerk shuffled away on rubber sandals, and Vu poured drinks. He raised his glass and then drank. His suit was rumpled and he looked tired. He said, “I’m here with other artists on a government project.” He lit a cigarette for Ada and as he handed it to her their hands touched.
She said, “There are many things I love here. The rooster calling in the courtyard. I love that. Or having tea with that old man today. We didn’t say a word, just sat there.” Then she told Vu that she and Jon had let their father’s ashes go off My Khe two days before. She said that when she had been out in the boat with Jon, and she had looked back at My Khe, she had realized she didn’t really know this country. “But,” she said, “I have met people here who I will remember for a long time.”
Vu did not speak and Ada looked into his eyes as if to divine an answer to a question that had not been asked.
“Come,” he said, and he took her hand and led her up to her room, where they made love on the small bed beneath the mosquito net. The balcony door was open and the light from the streetlamp fell like a narrow shaft across their bodies.
At night it rained and the open door banged in the wind and when she got up to shut it she saw the single light from the café across the street. This time there were no men and the light swayed on its string and cast shadows across the empty table. She came back to the bed and sat on the only chair in the room and she watched Vu sleep. When she lay down beside him, he stirred and mumbled something in his own language.
The following day, after breakfast, they took a taxi up to the beach a few miles outside town. Ada swam far out toward the waves that broke against the reef. Vu stood in jeans and shirt at the edge of the water and waited for her. When she returned, walking wet and tired out of the ocean, he said that the sea was dangerous.
They lay in the sand, side by side, and they shared a bottle of water and ate papaya that Vu cut with a knife he had borrowed. Vu fed Ada small pieces and the knife seemed an extension of his hand. The seeds from the papaya were black and they lay in the sand like beautiful and strange pearls.
When they got back to the hotel, they went up to her room and sat for the last time on the balcony and Ada said that, soon, she had to leave. There were things to be done in Danang and then she would be gone forever. “I know,” she said, “I am being sentimental. At least that is what you think. But, that is me, that is how I am.” She paused and then said she had realized the other day that he knew nothing about her. Not really. He did not know that she was a good cook, and that she could shoot a gun with accuracy, or that she had raised her brother and sister, or that her father’s darkness had come to settle in some small way on her own heart. She stopped talking.
After a while, Vu said that he didn’t need to know the facts of her childhood or the details of her life. The evidence of the goodness of Ada Boatman was standing before him. “I am not blind,” he said. “I can see. And so, to talk too much about Ada would reduce Ada. This is what I think.” He smiled. “And it is different than what you think.”
She shook her head. She said that life had been real once, and it would be real again. This in between time, the voyage out and back, all of that was a dream. It was like when she had been sick with fever, lying on her bed in the bright room of the hotel, and the world had passed by in clear quick images that, when pieced together, had appeared to mean something but she had not been able to decipher the meaning. She said that there would come a day, back in Canada, when she would be married with children and she would think back to this time. “Perhaps then I will understand.”
Vu lit a cigarette. He did not speak.
They drank warm beer and watched the sun set. It went down orange and then red. Beyond the palm trees in the courtyard, down the lane, Ada saw a woman riding a bicycle, her back straight, one arm steady at her side. Vu said that it was important to live without hate and bitterness and fear. “This is possible,” he said. In the dusk, a butterfly passed.
Later, he slept on her bed and at some point she went down to the front desk and negotiated the price of a driver and car to take her back to Danang. “As soon as possible,” she said.
The desk clerk called up half an hour later to say that the car was ready.
“So soon?” she asked, and then she said that she would be down right away.
She did not wake Vu. She stood in the doorway looking back at him and then she picked up her pack and walked down the wide staircase to the lobby where she collected her passport and paid her bill. It had begun to rain, a light warm shower that raised a smell of barely sprinkled dust. She got in the backseat of the car. As they pulled out onto the street she did not look up toward the thirdfloor balcony of the room where Vu still slept. The rain fell harder and by the time they reached the main road it was falling so heavily all she could see from her window were the vague shapes of houses and cyclists and a boy herding goats and once, in the doorway of a welder’s shop, an arc of light offered a father cradling a baby.
THE NEXT MORNING IN DANANG, THE BOY FOUND HER SITTING IN a café. She was drinking coffee and eating dry bread, looking out at the rain as it fell.
“Miss Ada,” he said.
She looked at him and then looked away.
“You don’t want me here?” he asked. He sat, cleared a place on the table, and put his elbows down.
She shook her head, said it was fine.
“I have the perfect tour for you,” Yen said. “We’ll go up to Hoi An and walk through the museum and then take a boat cruise on the river. You will love it.”
She said that she didn’t have time. She was going home the following morning.
Yen was surprised. He said that her visa could be extended, she just had to ask the right people.
“And I guess you know the right people?” she teased.
He was hurt. “Of course,” he said.
“I have Hoang Vu’s bike. He doesn’t want it back,” she said. “Would you like it?”
“Is this payment for something?” he asked. He took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. His hands brushed at his shirt and over his head. He said that he could not take payment from her because he had not done anything for her. She had not allowed him.
She was all of a sudden tired. She said that he could do what he wanted. She wasn’t going to beg him to take the bike.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take it.” He leaned forward as if to inspect her face and said, “Your heart is broken.”
She laughed.
“See. I am right. The artist has broken your heart.”
She shook her head. She told him that her personal life was none of his business and that if he persisted in talking about it, he should leave. “Perhaps you should leave anyway,” she
said. She made a shooing gesture with her hand.
He said, “I would have loved you better than that artist.”
She laughed again. Said, “You’re fourteen, Yen. What are you talking about?”
“Sixteen,” he said. He looked mournful. “You don’t take me seriously.”
“Of course I don’t. Not when you talk nonsense.”
He said that he too could draw. In fact, if she liked, he would do her portrait. It was a simple thing that required only a blank piece of paper and some ink. He had learned this from his father. “He is gifted. I have watched him. I have watched many men. And some are better at seduction.”
“Oh, Yen. Poor boy. You should be in school.”
“Do not pity me,” Yen said. He said that he might be only sixteen, or fourteen, but he was able to recognize pity.
Ada said that she did not mean to show pity and she was sorry if she had. She picked up her bag and said she had to go and she didn’t know if she would see him again.
“I’ll be available,” Yen said. He stood and took Ada’s hand and shook it. “Good-bye, Miss Ada.”
That evening she walked down to a restaurant on the harbor front for a beer. Two old men sat at a corner table playing a game that looked like checkers. She watched them and heard the click of the pieces and an occasional exclamation. She ordered another beer. Earlier she had gone to Thanh’s house and said good-bye. He had given her a book of Russian poetry in English translation. Had apologized for the binding but claimed that the words inside would make up for it. He asked her in for a cup of tea, stepping sideways and gesturing at the house, but she said that she was preparing to leave. She had to pack and see to things.
He said that he felt he had failed her.
“No, no,” she cried. “You haven’t.”
He’d taken off his glasses and cleaned them briskly, shaking his head. He said he hated farewells.
