‘I have to go,’ I said, slapping the ticket and my passport on the table where Zhuan could see them.
‘I am sorry things have taken this turn with us. I had hoped we would always be friends.’
I stood up and walked away.
Dusk had arrived by the time I was on the street, and when I walked to pick up my bike I had an inexplicable feeling that I was being followed. I turned and saw the shape of a Caucasian man step into an alley and out of sight.
Later that night I rode to the bridge that crossed to District Four. A black Citroën pulled up beside me. I did not turn from the water to see who got out. I felt his presence behind me.
He lit a cigarette and came and leant on the balustrade. I did not give him a chance to speak. I got on my bike and rode back to the edge of District One. At the foot of the bridge I stopped the bike and looked over my shoulder. I thought he was making it easy for whatever thug pursued him to exact the revenge of the gang he had betrayed. I was a little surprised that he was still alive – I think he was waiting for death in the form of a bullet in the back of the head, so that he might fall into the river. He must have been trying not to imagine the less graceful forms in which death might come to him. We had been back a fortnight already. I wondered if he had begun to hope death would pass him over. Like me, he probably wondered that it was taking so long. There could be no such thing as mercy in the hearts of the men who pursued him – but, like any businessmen, perhaps they too had problems of logistics, and the thing was postponed or momentarily forgotten amidst other more pressing concerns.
I was jealous that we both shared this place, this bridge and the running water. Zhuan stood staring down at the fast-flowing waters of the Ben Nghe Channel and perhaps like me noted the irony that this transient place of dark water that gave no reflections, that destroys every image, that forgets everyone, remembered her best.
I waited and watched until he got in his car and drove away.
37
I sat at a bar in Bui Vien watching the traffic flow around a corner in the direction of the park and Binh Thanh Market. A little girl in school uniform came in and tried to sell me a rose. Then a boy with a cropped head marched up to my table and sat down. I smiled at the boy who was from a happier time and asked him if he wanted a Coke.
Peter Pan shook his head.
‘I have a new girl for you.’
I looked away to the street.
‘Oh yes.’
‘But only one problem. She is girl on the bridge.’
‘No. She is dead.’
‘Not dead. She on the bridge.Very late at night.’
‘I mean the girl who–’ I did not feel like explaining it. I doubted I could. Explain that the archetype was gone, that looking for the counterfeit amidst shadows no longer even possessed the virtue of hope.
‘But this girl look just same-same like the photograph.’
‘Yes, of course she does.’
‘Truly!’
‘You have spoken to her?’
‘No. I got nother boy.’
Now my boy had a boy. I wondered what part of the meagre allowance I gave Peter Pan was passed on to his employee in order to find girls. What a wonderful little economy I had launched, built of broken dreams and desire. I imagined a dollar coin broken into a million pieces, for all the street boys of Saigon, to go looking for a girl of memory who finally could not be found as the searchers had forgotten what it was they had first set out to discover.
‘I tell my boy say her you meet her on the bridge, yes? At nine clock.’
I handed Peter Pan a 50 000đ note that he presumed meant I had answered in the affirmative though I had no intention of meeting his girl.
I walked alone that night. I had not meant to go to the bridge. But the roads of the city always led to the river, and finally, if you walk them long enough, to every crossing. I stood at the railings of the bridge and watched the water, neither waiting nor hoping for anything. A man in a raincoat stood leaning against the rails further down and his face flashed in the bridge lights and I wondered if I knew him, but perhaps the lost and lonely are given to recognise their kin. I saw a pair of bridge-walking girls moving toward me and I looked away. I did not want to meet a girl who was just enough like Thuy to remind me of what I had lost. I walked back along the bridge away from them. Rain slanted across the dark. The rain fell quietly on the black Ben Nghe Channel and gloaming city and a girl who came along the bridge with face lowered to protect her make-up looked up at me out of her hood.
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘It cannot be.’ But I stood looking into her hazel eyes. ‘I saw you dead in the river. I laid you under the water. You were shot. I laid you in the river!’
She fell to her knees.
‘Thuy,’ she cried, and put her hands together in prayer and then I realised what I should have known long ago.
‘God, you are not the same. You were sisters. Twin sisters.’
She did not hear me. She knelt praying to the dark water.
And I remembered the classic poem she had sung that first night we sat together on the river:
Even the flowers are jealous of she and her sister; bodies like slim plum branches, rain-pure souls; each her own self, each perfect …
I sat down with her with my back on concrete and looked up at the stars.
‘Em tên gì … What is your name?’
‘Phuong,’ she said.
Phuong. The phoenix that rises from the ashes. What a name, I thought.
I took the green butterfly clip from my pocket. When she saw it she wept again.
‘It is hers? Or yours?’
‘Hers, I suppose. I gave it to her.’
I shook my head and laughed at myself and tried not to let the bitter tears welling in my eyes fall.
I put the clip in Phuong’s hand. What a clever ruse. She thought I would remember a green hair clip better than a soul.
‘I loved her,’ I said. ‘I could not save her.’
We sat in silence and Phuong’s hair became heavy with rain and hung across her face in blades. She pulled up the hood of her coat and stood up as though to leave and I grabbed her arm.
‘Why do you walk the bridge like this? How do you do it with safety?’
But I knew the answers.
‘I do not know where the manager of Club 49 has gone. The owner too. All of them have gone away.’
‘The manager is dead. And the owner will not be troubling you anymore.’
‘He never troubled me. He was good.’
‘Perhaps.
‘I met him some nights.’
‘I know. Did Thuy ever meet him?’
‘No. But I told her about him. He stopped her beatings. She hoped, I think, that he would help free us. But I put my hope in you. Like you he thought we were one, and I did not tell him different. You know, there is a certain kind of man that can only love what is wounded, broken. A man filled with guilt.’
I lowered my eyes.
‘How can you recognise such a man?’
‘It has been my work to know men. It is how I have survived.’
‘Yes.’
I lowered my eyes.
‘Anyway,’ said Phuong. ‘I have police protection now.’
‘From who?’
She furrowed her brow.
‘From a man.’
‘How did you get it?’
She glared at me.
‘So you are owned once more?’
She scowled and I lowered my eyes. ‘No one owns my heart. No human being.’ She made the sign of the Cross.
I wondered then at the strange communion there has ever been between prostitutes and the God of Israel. The first words He spoke to Man after the Fall were to Abraham’s mistress when she was banished to the wilderness. The one and only time he wrote, in the sand at Canaan, was to unwrite a law to save the life of a prostitute. Truly His kingdom could not be of this world – the kingdom where prostitutes would be the first to enter. They were the last to Man’s table
on earth.
‘I should not have said what I said about you being owned. I am sorry.’
‘But you are right to think I am terrible.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘On the day God opens the gates of heaven even the saints must step aside to let you pass.’
She shook her head.
‘That is true of Thuy. But I am a monster.’
I told her I did not want to hear it, that she did not know what she said.
She stared at me blankly.
‘You once said you were willing to follow me to the gates of hell.’
‘I have.’
‘Chưa … Not yet. Here is the key.’
She went to her coat pocket and produced a small brass key without a ring and put it in my hand.
‘What is this?’
‘The key to Hell. The key to the darkest little room.’
‘You told me that was just a figure of speech.’
‘The darkest little room is not just another name for Club 49, or for anything else. It is a real place. A house over the river in Binh Thanh. Motorbike taxis take you. You enter it from an alley and this is the key.’
‘You stole it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The place is on the road to Vung Tau?’
‘Yes.’
She held my waist and the wind was cool at speed beside the water and it blew the tears back into my eyes and I wiped my face with my sleeve. We rode along the Saigon River esplanade where pleasure boats and tankers were moored for the night, then onto the Thu Thiem Bridge and into the dark of Binh Thanh. In the distance was the nascent Sky City modelled after Chinese urban development projects. Inchoate towers and the ethereal arms of cranes hung over it. Then came the church and its plaster saints and the neon cross. A girl on the edge of the traffic refused to get on her boyfriend’s bike and he rode along behind her. She pushed him away and swore but still he crawled after her and she threw her helmet across the road and walked down a dark lane. We came to houses and rode down a narrow alley amidst a labyrinth of concrete walls and French doors lit by festoons of red lanterns. We walked to a set of darkened doors. There were pot plants on the steps. A child played with a water tap across the lane.
‘Put the key in the lock.’
‘What will I find?’
‘The room where she was hurt.’
I looked again at the pot plants. In a window across the way a teenage boy was doing homework and his father lolled in the heat of the night watching a large-screen television.
‘It is a normal house.’
She nodded.
‘This is the place.’
I entered. It looked like a hastily prepared karaoke room. I do not know what I expected to see. Perhaps razor wire. Chains. What instruments the human heart could conceive to indulge its passion for destruction.
‘Can you see the bar?’ Phuong pointed. ‘The bar on the wall was where they chained her. They chained her there naked so she would be cold. Then they whipped her. There was one other girl, but she–’
‘Was killed. I know. I saw her on the river bank back along the road, weeks ago now.’
‘Yes. That was her.’
But tonight the chains and whips were gone and the floors were clean. There was, I thought, a little dried blood on the skirting boards, but perhaps it was cooking grease. The police could not make any kind of case based on this house, even had they wanted to.
‘You knew this was happening to Thuy?’
‘Yes.’ She broke down.
‘How could you–’
‘Fear. The manager favoured me. In every brothel there is one selected girl. A favoured one who reports on the others, who keeps secrets. I courted his favour.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was powerful and I was not. Such is survival. And I survived. But Thuy refused. She kept refusing. She refused the manager when he came to her at night.’
‘Tan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why was Thuy here?’
‘She tried to flee with clients. I warned her we must plan if we were to escape. Do such a thing properly. But she tried twice to flee with clients. After that the manager had this special job for her. For a special clientele. You are horrified? But I brought her rice and water when I could. Sometimes a blanket. I borrowed things from the woman next door. Disinfectant. Bandages. Finally she would not give them because she was afraid so I stole them from others. I did this at great risk,’ she whispered. ‘I threatened suicide and made the manager free her and send her back to the club for we were worth much more to a man together, both for a night or for good. And then Thuy would anger him again and … But I cannot be forgiven. There were nights I went to sleep knowing she was down here in this room. If I had gone to the police – run away – rebelled, it would have been worse. At least, I told myself that. But now I think it could not have been worse. Perhaps I would have died, but that is not worse. Finally all I did was pray. I prayed that somehow she could be delivered out of here, and I prayed I might take her place. But somehow she knew my prayer. Do you remember that first night she vanished from your room? I had promised her I would meet her in the coming weeks, when you had taken her away. It was foolish to believe she would not know what I planned to do while she was with you; perhaps she had even heard me praying. She could hear things that were spoken in silence. But,’ Phuong smiled, ‘at last I did take her place. When I ran away from Zhuan Li.’
She showed me her ankles and wrists: faint healed wounds that were the mirrors of her sister’s. That last time she went to you I came here with the old woman’s help and the help of a motorbike-taxi driver … to give you time to get away … I was chained, but no one came to hurt me.’
‘You see, I had prayed for her freedom. And then you came into Club 49 claiming to recognise me. I do not know what poor girl you knew in the north. But it was neither Thuy nor I. And you spoke about rescuing me. I saw the chance I had been given. And I told you I was her. I could see that you wanted this girl so badly your desire would defeat your memory.’
‘But your eyes?’
‘I have eyes like this because I am the daughter of a whore who was the daughter of a French soldier. Though her mother was the daughter of a princess.’
‘Thuy knew the places. She knew the country around her house. She even answered to her true name “Ny”.’
‘It is true, we were from Thanh Hoa. But you talk in your sleep, Joseph. Especially when you have been drinking. Has no one ever told you this?’
I remembered Phong’s sister spying on my dreams at night.
‘I have many bad memories. But the hairclip – you had it with you the first time we talked.’
‘Your boy … the one you sent the first night.’
‘Peter Pan.’
‘What could not be learned from you yourself could be learned from him.’
I almost laughed. At last Peter Pan had wearied of the search and gone out and brought my ghost to life. He probably thought it would do me good. His lying, however much trouble it caused, was always meant as a kindness. His lying, however much trouble it caused, was always meant as a kindness.
‘One night,’ said Phuong, I went back to Club 49 and it was closed. I rode out here on a motorbike taxi and Thuy was gone. I asked at your guesthouse and you too were gone. I was happy. And then tonight I met you.’
I stared across the dark street to that lonely child who was crying now.
‘How do you come to have this key?’
‘I stole it. The motorbike-taxi driver helped me: the same who brought clients here.’
‘The scarecrow in the yellow shirt? The one who loitered outside Club 49.’
‘Yes.’
God, I thought. That first night I went looking for her I had brushed him aside.
‘And he would have brought me here?’
‘If you had come to the club two or three times and made no trouble. If it was late enough at night. That was his way.’
‘Why
didn’t you tell me how to find this place?’
‘Because before it was guarded. You would have come in and been killed. And I could not let you know there were two of us. I wanted you to believe you had found the girl you were so desperate for – perhaps then your love would be sufficient to take Thuy away.’
‘Sufficient? God, how I loved her.’
‘Perhaps you would believe,’ Phuong said quietly, without accusation, ‘how many men fall in love with a prostitute only to think better of it at last. They imagine her in their own country with their own people … and they wonder how they will explain her.’
A tear ran down her cheek and I thought my heart would break.
We walked back out of the house. At the top of a lane was a man whose shape I almost recognised. He was standing at the door of a taxi beneath a stuttering mercury lamp on the empty street, but when I kick-started the bike he got in the taxi and was gone. Surely I was paranoid. Zhuan would not have given my name to anyone. He had said so and I believed him.
We rode back through the city.
On the bridge to District Four Phuong asked me to stop. We stood and stared at the water.
‘You will not believe me,’ she said, ‘but I knew Thuy had died. A week ago, I dreamt I was wet and freezing cold, lying in the bottom of the river, looking up through water. But in truth I did not know if it was she or I and it did not matter.’
‘That is how she ended.’
‘She does not end.’
I thought of Zhuan.
‘And now–’
‘Now leave me here,’ she said.
I did not know what to say.
A man in a grey suit beneath an umbrella leaned on the bridge further down. My God, I thought when I saw Zhuan. How alike we were, as though, like figures in a dream, we took turns watching for Thuy’s memory in the water when the city was asleep. What strange and hopeless sentries.
He turned.
I did not need to call out for he saw us. A look of anguished joy came to his face. I think he held onto the bridge rail to keep from falling. I had forgotten what seeing us would mean, forgotten he did not know about Phuong, and in that moment he must have thought all my talk of the miraculous whore and saint I had discovered in his bar were true. No, I wanted to say, seeing the rapture on his face, you have misunderstood. But the moment did not last, or perhaps I should say those moments were to be eternal, as they would never be replaced, for another man had gotten out of a taxi and was on the bridge with us. I turned and saw the ragged desperate middle-aged face, the thin hair blowing clownishly off his scalp in the storm-wind, and I knew who he was and that he had followed me on Bui Vien a night ago and out to Binh Thanh tonight.
The Darkest Little Room Page 19
