The Journey Prize Stories 30

by Sharon Bala

  “It’s a thatched roof,” I said. “The smoke rises right through it.” Even after what she must have seen each day at the hospital, Ngoc still had the energy to look at me with her wide eyes of disbelief, but she did not argue. This discussion of porousness made me think of the Communist invasion, and I talked of how the Communists weren’t bringing us a revolution but, like the French, were just trying to “civilize” us in their own terrifying ways. Ngoc replied with a purr of breath. She had left me for her dreamland, and soon I fell asleep as well. Amazing how still those nights were, with that many people under one roof, the only noise the soft burps of distant shelling.

  When we returned to Hue after the month-long siege, my home remained one of the few in the neighbourhood that was still standing. Outside, bicycles wobbled over tank tracks. Before entering, we paid our respects to the Spirit of the Soil as if we were building a completely new home. Everything inside the house was destroyed. Books and photos were ripped down the middle, as though by a petulant child. The wires of anything electronic were torn out of their guts. By this, the Communists were saying what they would have done if they could have laid their hands on us. I followed Ngoc into our bedroom like we were newlyweds—carefully following the tradition of not letting the bride step on the groom’s shadow. It was only much later that we realized the extent of the civilian massacre during the occupation, that the hastily turned soil of some of the bare fields in Hue hid mass graves.

  * * *

  —

  We were only days away from the New Year’s concert and I was left to do everything. Tiet Linh and I used to have a clear division of labour: I was in charge of the venue, and she would take care of the musicians. I booked the high-school gym or the community hall, rented the sound and strobe machines, called up Ba Chau for the banh mi sandwich catering, made sure enough glossy New Year’s tickets were printed. Tiet Linh made sure that the musicians were happy. I preferred my job.

  Now that they could not reach Tiet Linh, the artists started calling my cellphone at all hours of the day. One diva called me while I was on shift in my cab, demanding to know why she was in the lineup right after another diva who sings in the same tea-gargling style. How should I know? Then there is Ong Cho, the civil-engineer-cum-balladeer, who called me while I was at peace with my bowl of bun bo Hue to remind me to bring some marbles, with which he plugs his ears so that he could better concentrate on stage. Why doesn’t he just supply his own marbles? I tried to keep my composure, but the last straw was when Johnny Nguyen called, our sole remaining homage to the New Wave that we have on retainer, though he has gone bald and continually defies our ban on Styrofoam cups.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Just saying chao, Bac Gia. How’s it going?”

  “How would I know? I’m on the stool.”

  “That’s cool.”

  Tiet Linh oi, wherever you are, you must come out of your hiding.

  * * *

  —

  All that Hue is for me now is the Forbidden Purple City, that centre within the nested squares of fortresses of the Citadel. It’s all that my memory holds. For instance, I’ve been having the hardest time remembering the tamarind tree that grew outside my home, the only one miraculously still standing on my block after the siege. I’ve tried to locate my neighbourhood on Google Street View, but it has completely changed, and what I saw in its place was shiny, bustling. Most of the videos on YouTube about Hue are of the Citadel and all the nostalgia that it provokes. Or rather sentimentality, for I recently learned that the word nostalgia pertains to memory, and most people who use YouTube as a resource have no real memories related to the Citadel. If forgetting about the Forbidden Purple City would mean that my other memories of Hue would be uncovered, then I would choose forgetting about the Forbidden Purple City.

  But then again, perhaps I am also guilty of “sentimentality,” because the palaces of the Forbidden Purple City had long burned down by my time, even before the siege of Hue. I had seen it only as bare ground marked by loose foundations.

  It was once the Emperor’s inner sanctum, and during the siege the Communists used it as an operations base. Most of the surrounding palaces were also levelled by the siege’s end. This was the state of the Citadel as I remember it best: the crushed bricks within the piles of timber, the scent of ancient ironwood columns split down their seams, releasing an oddly fresh smell of pine. This was the smell of my livelihood.

  I managed to escape being drafted by the South Vietnamese Army, and a couple of years after the siege I was employed by the provincial Restoration Committee. I spent most of my days, nights even, within the Citadel’s stone walls. By this time the floating bodies had been pulled out of the moats, and peasants were cultivating a water-borne spinach in the Royal Canal. I camped on these grounds as part of my work, though restoration may not be the right word. The war was still on and resources were scarce. Preservation is perhaps a more suitable term, as it was not so much a matter of rebuilding, as trying to clear the rubble into coherent piles throughout the palace grounds, vo bricks and tiles on one side, timber on another—mindful that some of the peasant volunteers were just there to run off with ironwood to warm their hearths. I carried a French service pistol to wave at marauders and slowly built a team of men I trusted. Anh Binh was one of them. He volunteered on weekends to erect scaffolding to hold up the imperial roofs, and kept the young men in line. He was paler than most of the labourers, having spent most of his days indoors, but he had a solid build and a greater stamina for hardship.

  We did what we could. Under my watch the old palaces did not rise again, but neither did any of them fall. Everything changed once again in 1975, when the Communists took over for good. At first they wanted to destroy all the remaining palaces as symbols of imperialism, but Ho Chi Minh himself saved the Citadel, saying that because it was built on the backs of peasants it belonged to the peasants. As a restorer I was suddenly doing the People’s work. My life was preserved. I had hope.

  I worked for the Communists until I fled the country in 1980. This was before UNESCO became involved, with their Western standards of original materials and ancient means; instead the Communists favoured jerry-rigged methods with whatever was available. By this time most of the original ironwood columns had been reaped by the marauders (I was helpless to stop them—they knew I wouldn’t shoot), and the Communists were now replacing most of the wooden beams with a type of ferro-concrete and painting over whatever original gilt was left with an industrial paint from China.

  Ngoc was always worried I would shoot my mouth off at a cadre with a bourgeois remark and be hauled off to the re-education camps. The way the Communists were handling the project did make me feel like I was standing on uncertain ground, and this feeling manifested itself one morning in 1977, when, during a rooftop foot patrol, I tripped over a piece of jutting concrete. I broke my ankle. Ngoc, so busy at work, now had to set my bones for free while I lay on our bed biting on a rolled-up reed mat. She rubbed a paste made from her father’s secret recipe over my heel and up my shin that dried into a cast, then secured my mess of a foot with bamboo splints and bandages. I had made it through the whole war without breaking a bone in my body. Now I stayed in bed for several weeks—the worst time in my life. For my wife it was the best time, she said, because for once she knew exactly where I was.

  Once my ankle healed and I was able to hobble on my own power, I returned to the Citadel. My absence had done nothing to stop the onward rush of restoration by the Communists. I still slept on the grounds of the Forbidden Purple City, but now it was once a fortnight and largely for nostalgic reasons, with the marauders more or less gone. The palaces were more beautiful at night, when their perfect forms were backlit by the moon and one didn’t notice the broken roof tiles of the Emperor’s Writing Pavilion or the bamboo scaffolding holding up the roof of the Palace of Supreme Harmony. At night the workmen’s laundry hanging from the moon-shaped windows turned into horse-dragons.

/>   One night I was standing in a minor pavilion overlooking a lotus pond and contemplating its eerie stillness when, through the beating horn-song of the cicadas, I heard the approach of footsteps. I was hobbling on a cane, did not have my service pistol, and thought my ghost had come for me. And then I heard a familiar sniffling.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  It was Tiet Linh. She was carrying a lantern, royal yellow and diamond-shaped. The size of a pineapple. She held it out toward me—a gift.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said. “Hobbling about in the dark. You’re going to break your one good foot.”

  I didn’t believe this was why she came, of course, but I received her gift all the same. I put my lighter to the wick inside the lantern, and hung it off the lip of a carp-shaped rain sluice on the roof. I had not realized how dark the night was until that moment. Now I could see the flicker of the dragon-flies just above the lily pads. “You didn’t come here just to give me a lamp, did you?”

  “I came to see the restoration.”

  Again, I didn’t believe her; why would she come at night? “Why are you interested?”

  “History students don’t have a monopoly over history,” she said, referring to our ongoing quibble over which of our respective subjects was the superior undertaking.

  “The Communists are building an approximation,” I said. “Which is the same as a desecration.” We looked out into the darkness toward the flag tower. The cicadas were getting louder, as if closing in.

  “It’s a desecration now,” she said.

  “No, it is in ruins now,” I said. “That is something completely different.” All the destruction around us was a result of war, which in Vietnam was a natural occurrence. What the Communists wanted to do was unnatural. To reclaim the past they were willing to sweep away reality.

  “Are they going to rebuild the Forbidden Purple City?”

  “Goi oi, don’t get me started,” I said.

  We went into the altar space of the pavilion and looked out into the flat grounds that were once the Forbidden Purple City. Rice paddies took up a good part of the grounds now.

  She was smiling wickedly at me. “Imagine what it must have looked like,” she said.

  “I can’t even begin,” I said. There were no blueprints left of it, no photos. I feared that the Communists were just going to make something up from thin air. Probably just a copycat of the Beijing palaces.

  “You can begin with this,” said Tiet Linh. She pulled something out of her handbag: another gift, this time with a royal yellow fringe. It was a National Geographic. “I found this in my grandfather’s bedroom,” she said. “It’s from the 1930s.” She opened the pages, which crackled as if new. “Here, look. They took pictures of the Forbidden Purple City before it burned down.”

  I held the magazine and took my time turning the pages for each photo, then looked back out to the rice paddies. I could see it all clearly now. The court of honour where the stone mandarins and horses were aligned, the covered walkways where the eunuchs tiptoed toward their conspiracies. The imperial chamber with its posh linens over smooth, hard beds. Even now I see these rooms in my dreams and wake up holding my stomach.

  Then, as quickly as her spirits lifted, Tiet Linh’s face cracked. “Anh Binh is leaving me,” she said. She was tearing.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t trust him anymore,” she said.

  (At the time I had no context for her statement, but the next year, in 1978, Anh Binh disappeared. Tiet Linh kept mum about his whereabouts, even let us believe he was dead, until we found out that he had re-emerged on the other side of the ocean, in Vancouver. He had escaped by boat under cover of night.)

  “You must have had a fight, that’s all,” I said. “You should go home. I’m sure Anh Binh is worried about you.”

  “He can wait,” she said. She wanted me to show her the grounds as I knew them.

  I took her to a little pontoon boat hidden in the corner of the lotus pond, and I pretended to be the Emperor and she one of my eunuchs. I paddled, we serenaded the moon, and Tiet Linh recited her favourite lines from The Tale of Kieu:

  Due to my dismal generosity in past lives,

  I have to accept much suffering as compensation in this life.

  My body has been violated as a broken pot,

  I have to sell my body to repay for my mournful fate.

  “How depressing,” I said, though she sang the lines lightly, like a summer lullaby.

  “Do you remember during the siege, when your wife and my husband would come home together, always tired and silent?”

  “It was another life,” I said.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder about them?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Never.” And I meant it.

  * * *

  —

  I love the English word hope. My English sentence-making is very good, though to this day my passengers sometimes have trouble understanding me because of my thick accent. I love the English language though, how irreducible it is. Hope is true English, unlike optimism, which is an immigrant from the Latin world, with its messy roots in sight and whatnot and its mutt pedigree with other terms, like optics, option, etc. Such a pure word is hope that it cannot be broken down any further and stands for only itself—like those primal words meant to invoke animal sounds. Meow. Ruff. Hope. Even the Vietnamese term for “hope,” hy vong, isn’t so pure. Taken alone, hy can mean “rare,” and vong can mean anything from an “echo” to an “absurdity.”

  A rare echo. A rare absurdity. That is “hope” in Vietnamese.

  * * *

  —

  There was a knock on my door the night before the New Year’s Day concert. I grabbed a Club before answering. I keep a few extra Clubs around for they are handy beyond securing the steering wheel of my cab. I rent a laneway house in East Vancouver with tin-thin walls and about two cab-lengths long, with my bedroom window hugging the property line by the back alleyway. One can never be too cautious.

  It was the musician—the man—hugging one of his instrument cases, the one in the shape of a small coffin. The danh bau. The overhead lamp illuminated scratches on his face, a wicked play of shadows deepening the grooves, darkening his tears into blood drops.

  “Bac Gia,” he said, “I apologize for the disruption. But I was given your address, and I—”

  “Your wife did this?” I knew the answer, but took some satisfaction when he nodded to confirm my insights into the artistic temperament.

  “May we stay the night?” he said. I let him in, though there was no room for both of us to sleep unless I moved my kitchen table outside, which I was loath to do. I surrendered my bed to him, and after he took his shoes off he quickly fell asleep, his instrument by his side as if he had always lived here. I tried to sleep in my cab but soon gave up and turned on the ignition.

  I drove to Tiet Linh’s house. I parked in the back alley and jimmied the gate to the yard. I knew that it would be futile if I rung any of the doorbells—her daughter would surely answer the door and shoo me away—and so I reached down to the ground and gathered some pebbles. I took the back-porch stairs up to the second-floor landing, stopping at the sight of black metal gleaming between the wooden steps. It was a new Broil King, completely untarnished by charcoal dust or oil splatters. Anh Binh must have bought it just before he died.

  At the top of the landing I tossed the pebbles one at a time at Tiet Linh’s bedroom window (like the way I throw bread at the swans in Vancouver’s Lost Lagoon). Her ghostly pallor was undeniable as she drew back the blinds. In the moonlight haze she looked just as she did that night in the Forbidden Purple City.

  “I didn’t come here to serenade you,” I said. “And I’m not here to offer you any pity.”

  “That’s fine, as long as you’re not looking for any from me.”

  “You can’t just disappear.”

  “If it’s about the musician, he has nowhere to go. You can send him
to a hotel and bill me.”

  “I knew it was a bad idea to get these young people pretending to be old-time musicians,” I said. “It’s unnatural.” I could tell that what I said enlivened her, because her cheeks darkened into what in the daylight would have been a bright vermillion.

  “Unnatural! You always claimed to be a historian, but you never had an appreciation for the old crafts. You have no ear for it.”

  “Oh! Oh!” I said. “Don’t get me started!” But by now we couldn’t stop from entering that dark debate about whether vong co music had any value. I argued more vehemently against the music than I actually felt. Tiet Linh’s daughter came to the window, only to be waved away by Tiet Linh, who was in mid-volley about some esoteric point. We were waking up the dogs in the neighbourhood, but we didn’t care. It was quite some time before I walked back down the stairs to my cab, and I took one last look at the Broil King.

  “You can’t just disappear!” I said again, but by now Tiet Linh’s window was closed and all the lights were out.

  * * *

  —

  Among the four of us, Tiet Linh and I were known as the dreamers and Anh Binh and Ngoc were known as the schemers. Anh Binh was the first one to escape Vietnam, and Tiet Linh followed him the next year. Anh Binh then came up with a plan to sponsor me to Canada as his brother, even though we were unrelated. We shared the same last name—Nguyen—and it didn’t matter that about half of Vietnam shared this surname because his scheme worked. I would just have to find a way to get to Vancouver.

  When I told Ngoc to pack her things, she told me to go ahead without her. I was furious with her. She said she had a few things to tend to first with family and work, but that I shouldn’t delay in going and that she would join me soon thereafter. I left by boat with an uneasy feeling in my stomach—one that didn’t go away during the five months I spent at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, nor when I finally arrived in Vancouver. I had forgotten to bring a picture of Ngoc, not even a little wallet-sized photo. I thought it a funny occurrence then. No matter, I thought, I would see her soon enough.