Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  “I don’t think I really know what you’re talking about.” He put his arm around her.

  She raised her voice. “The nationalists are very brave,” she said. “The women polish rifles alongside the men and the men sew buttons alongside the women. Everyone shares in the work. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Most nights he got beaten or spent his time beating others and it was nothing he’d tell Thu about—what could he say that she wanted to hear? She should know what the barracks were like. But maybe because she’d once again leave that octopus jelly piece inside him, or because he felt uncertain, like a nervous schoolboy, he said, “They share and share alike, your nationalists. Your revolutionaries in the jungle hills. Everything will become communal someday—even husbands. Is that what you want? You want to share your men and pass around women? You want me to sleep with everyone?”

  He relished her shock, the hurt. He had no idea what the rebels were really like. Only talk he’d heard among the soldiers. It was probably all propaganda they were being fed from above, but at that moment he’d wanted to pass it on. Had wanted to be nasty, without really knowing why.

  Birago had no men in his barracks to joke with, always got ready for his dates with Thu alone. No one slapped him on the back. No one punched him in the shoulder or stole his hair oil. For his dates with Thu, he wore civilian clothes, a silk suit and tie, and he splashed on some jasmine cologne. His commanding officer looked at him and said, “Très chic. Très féminine. I believe you like being the centre of attention, n’est-ce pas?”

  In the battalion men took “wives.” He was embarrassed to have been one. Like the fact he’d broken a doll, this was a secret he’d take to his grave. Not for Thu’s ears, his forcible maidhood, sewing the shirt buttons of his fellow soldiers while they circled him ready to pounce, among other things. That trying to fight back had earned him black eyes, cuts and bruises. He tried to complain to the captain.

  “You’re comme tous les Africains,” the captain said. “Whining too much, wanting too much out of life. Ton idea of military service doesn’t match la réalité of military service, and you need to get used to it. Tu as problems, you’re probably asking for them. The boys are just having fun with you.”

  He thought now, in hindsight, Thu had brought up politics on purpose, to elicit a disagreement, in order to deliver the following speech. “Your lack of ingenuity, Birago. Your lack of smarts. You don’t think about things. You have no inner resources. You live for the moment. That’s why you’ll never be able to shape life to your will. Are you listening to me? This is what stops you from having things go your way: ignorance, weakness, frivolity.” Using what his mother had called five-dollar words, and to what point? To prove she was more intelligent? To make him feel less of a man? To force him into a corner, like a boxing opponent?

  “Does analyzing me make you feel smarter than me, woman?”

  “You are careless, Birago,” she said.

  “Yes, woman. I am,” he said. “And proud to have no cares.”

  “Childish.”

  “Childlike.”

  “Do you know many have already left? How many conscripts are fighting with the nationalists? They’ve made rebel camps in the mountains. You’d move forward in life if only you opened your eyes.”

  “Maybe I am innocent. Better than those minds who care too much. Or who care not at all.”

  “You think you know so much. In reality what do you know?”

  She closed her eyes and sat across from him while he counted the seconds, five, six, seven, before she opened them again, her body quivering with rage.

  “I was joking,” he said, trying to salvage something. A night together. A chance to touch her breasts, perky as pears.

  She ignored him.

  “You like the sound of my singing, right?” He reached for her arm.

  She yanked her arm away.

  Finally, she stood up but avoided his gaze by looking at the porch slats. She picked up her shoes and went back into the house.

  “I was just joking,” he hollered.

  For two weeks she pushed him away each time he touched her.

  He knew a secret. The red blouse like a bloodstain that day they met. She hid her arms, the slash-mark scars on her wrists. They walked avoiding razor-sharp palm fronds hidden in the sand.

  With the innocence only children and the kicked-around possessed, she told him her secret. “Have you ever hurt so bad you wanted to die?”

  He told her what he thought she wanted to hear. He thought she meant a heart in pain and nodded. Said he understood.

  She shook her head. Explained the man who ran the brothel had beat her so bad she could hardly walk. “I physically hurt that bad. So I tried to kill myself. Isn’t that ironic? But I got up. I got up and ran away. The rich sell their pets. The poor sell their children.” She laughed. Only her eyes cried out save me, save me. “I was eleven.”

  He told her then he was a boxer.

  He looked around the makeshift ring, at the gaslights, the gathering spectators. For the last while he’d boxed only because of her. The excitement of her lips, not the ring, not the lights. Her lips on his skin. Not the audience—her.

  For the last while he’d done it in spite of the losing, boxed for her, because of her, just for her, the way she kissed his torn knuckles every time, even when he lost. The way she admired his stamina. But now he would quit boxing if he had to, and he wanted his woman to agree with his choice. Understand him. He just wanted her to shut her eyes, because he wanted to keep her and he wanted to go out a winner. He wanted his cake and to eat it, too. Why not? He was willing to be a man. He just wanted her to be there for him. So far he’d let her keep that little jelly piece, wrapped in paper, on a chain. Shown her he could be domesticated. Maybe he’d been playing a game with her. It was almost as if he’d never been tested before. Maybe he’d never loved her. Maybe he’d never been put to the test.

  Two things could happen to you in the ring: you got sharper, or you froze. Acuity was all about fear. Fear could be your friend because it made a knife blade of all your senses. Honed them till they were keen-edged. On the other hand, the opposite could happen. You could lose it. You could get so worked up about this or that, you wouldn’t know which way to turn. This is how women made you, if you let them. One was fear, one was worry. Birago wouldn’t let Thu do him this way. If boxing had taught him anything, it was that fear sharpened, worry paralyzed.

  Yet the unpleasant tangle of his ambition was somehow wrapped up in his lust. Or love. Had he ever been in love? He wasn’t sure. So he didn’t know if he’d recognize it, if it ever happened. A maid who liked to put on airs with existence, but who, like him, had nothing to protect from the world’s hazards. All he had was his black boots. And his fists. He’d never been good at anything. But maybe he’d be good at living the high life.

  This fight would be his coin flip. Win, he’d keep fighting. Lose, he’d go after all things good.

  “I don’t want to go out a loser,” he mumbled. It meant taking his jelly piece back from her and putting it where it belonged. It meant being a man.

  “What do you say, Birago?” She entered the ring, too. “You don’t know what being a loser really is. Making a mistake, that’s for keeps. Really screwing up. Do you know what that feels like?”

  “More a loser than I already am. I’m going to quit, Thu.”

  People watched a man and a woman arguing in a boxing ring in a jungle clearing, a light shining on them.

  She looked at him like she’d been hit by a streetcar.

  “Anyway, what’s it to you?”

  Her eyes reflected two separate images of himself: Birago the soldier and Birago the boxer. Birago in a sloppy uniform, Birago with his black skin glistening. Birago the conscript, Birago with a bare chest.

  “Prove to me your love,” she whispered in his ear. “Show me.”

  He nodded, less because he cared, more to get her off his back.

&n
bsp; Women had prepared their men quids of betel and rolled them cigarettes, even lit them, and a boy sat atop a palm keeping watch for soldiers and a man with a loud voice wearing a chain for a belt took bets and the crowd, grown restless waiting for the match to start, chanted, not the names of the boxers, but the names of the towns they were from.

  “Sai-gon, Sai-gon.”

  “Hai-Phong, Hai-Phong.”

  The fight began. No gloves.

  Smack, a right, then a left, then a right. A right, then a left, another right. Birago delivered two more blows. The other fighter’s name was Jack Lee. Already his legs wobbled. Jack Lee’s sweat smelled like sandalwood and his black hair reflected the gas lamps in the palm trees.

  The doll floated behind Lee’s right shoulder. The doll laughed, and a rambutan’s white pulp spilled from his mouth. Birago’s legs quivered. The boxing match turned into a brawl.

  Birago swung but missed. Lee landed a hard left hook.

  Next round Birago opened with a combination inside. Birago knew since his losing streak he’d been sitting down on his punches a little more. The broken doll floated in his sight line and he wanted to punch that, too, but part of him simply wanted to stop fighting.

  His opponent wouldn’t stand still, wouldn’t allow himself to be hit. Birago threw another bad left hook. The crowd tittered; someone threw a mango. It bounced off the ropes and glanced off Birago’s arm.

  But Birago learned something new from every fight. Some bodies crumbled. Others moved toward pain. Tonight something awaited, a different power, on the mat. It had to do with the mango, how it had bounced off his skin, and he could see it among the spit and blood. He picked it up, not for Thu, but knowing somehow he would not sew another damn button at the barracks anymore.

  His opponent flicked his jab. Birago swelled with a familiar but newfound strength, the feeling akin to being down in the dumps and running into an old friend on the streets, taking heart from their heart. He landed a wide right. The crowd roared. Then Lee landed a short right and a hook to the ribs. Birago punched his opponent. Lee backed up.

  Lee began pumping his jabs. A good one-two. Double jab. Birago docked three rights.

  Lee backed up.

  Birago got him with a straight left.

  Lee jabbed but his jabs were short. He wobbled.

  The crowd cheered, “Birago!” Lee threw a three-punch combination.

  Birago spun into the circle of spectators and when he regained his balance Lee got him with a straight left to the chin.

  Now the crowd cheered, “Lee. Lee!”

  Double jab. A left snapped back Lee’s head. Lee bled from under his eye. He tottered.

  They were still trading jabs when Lee went down.

  After the fight Birago craved a shower. His skin burned. During the fight he could have flown to the stars and back. But now he just wanted to rinse off the sweat that prickled his skin. He’d won, and ironically, now that the fight was over, he suddenly cared little about whether he would keep boxing or not. He just wanted to wash and forget.

  25

  “Not another blasted ghost. Whadja do this time, Dong? Leave some nectar on the doorstep and the window open?” The knocking had taken Georges-Minh from the river he’d been dreaming about.

  If it was a ghost he could ignore it. Maybe it would go away.

  The knocking grew louder. “Shall I get it, dear?”

  Dong rolled over, covering her head with the blankets. “So go already,” she mumbled.

  He pulled his sleeping coat around him. What was wrong with a little respect? Georges-Minh had made three more experiments in his lab, each more deadly than the last. At times like this, poisoning his family didn’t seem like a bad idea.

  His stomach growled. The smell of burnt rice still clung to the air—if he tried he could still see the cloying smoke layered just under the ceiling. At dinner she’d burned the bottom of the rice pot. How was it possible that, since she had become pregnant, she had forgotten how to cook rice? Even he knew how to cook rice. Though the rest of dinner may, in fact, have been edible, he’d pouted like a child and refused to eat any. He’d gone to bed hungry and now he was starving.

  “Coming, coming.”

  He opened the door to a man with ridges that ran across his cheekbones.

  As he woke up a little more, Georges-Minh recognized him as the drunk soldier he’d warned earlier. And then it clicked. He was the same man, the gabier he’d seen a few times at the garrison with Janvier.

  “Come quick,” the man said. “Colonel Janvier’s dying.”

  They drove to the garrison while the man named Birago explained that Janvier had eaten a large dinner of duck and red wine and had woken with chest pains. “Like from a heart attack. I’m scared. He didn’t look good.”

  “He’s lucky to have you for a friend.”

  “We should hurry.”

  “He’s lucky you were there.”

  Georges-Minh drove as fast as he could and tried chit-chat to calm Birago down. “There’s only so much you can do when someone won’t improve their diet. I keep telling him.” He got Birago to tell the story of the first time they met. He asked him for details, to distract him.

  “I met him because I was the only one with a bird in my hand. I found a stupid bird in his bunk.” Some days now Birago wished he’d killed the bird. He’d caught it, and rather than kill it, he’d cupped it in his hands. He’d climbed to the upper deck with the bird still clasped in his palms, pecking to be released. He’d opened up his hands and the bird had flown free right in front of Lieutenant Colonel Janvier, whom Birago hadn’t noticed standing by the starboard-side anchor chains.

  “Ah, like a magician!” The colonel had laughed.

  “I don’t know why he takes such a shine to me. That’s all I can come up with.”

  Birago said nothing else the rest of the short ride, looking out at the scenery, the blind nothing.

  The colonel was pale and moaning when they arrived. “Am I going to die?” he asked from the floor, looking up at them like a scared boy.

  Georges-Minh examined him, took his pulse, which was steady and strong.

  “Belly gas can feel worse than death. Put this pill under your tongue. And you should lay off the duck, which is what I told you in the first place. Will you listen to me now?”

  He groaned and rolled onto his side, pulling his knees toward his chest. Georges-Minh stroked the sweaty hairs off his forehead and told Birago to fetch a pillow to place under his head.

  PART IV

  Ghost

  26

  Mai and Thu summoned a rickshaw to head into the fray of Cholon and careened through the streets. “We don’t have enough to eat and you’re taking us to a soothsayer?” Thu accused. “How do you plan to pay?”

  Mai had taken her boy’s broken body into her bed. She’d taken the money kept beneath the vase in the front room with her also. She’d been shattered upon the shores of his death.

  The children avoided the room and huddled with Thu and Crazy Auntie. Their mother had been possessed, had slipped into madness as one slips into a channel of water, her boy a stone around her neck.

  She let the loss lie next to her. She stroked it, held it, wept into the crook of its neck. Khieu had not once returned since the birth of the baby, so let her do all she could to prevent him from mourning the boy’s death. Thu and Crazy Auntie argued through the closed door of her bedroom that Khieu had a right to know about the accident and they should go out into the streets to find him.

  The money she’d once upon a time let Khieu steal she would no longer let Khieu steal. What she’d once left hidden under a vase in the front room she clutched between the corpse and herself. She realized that love was about sacrifice, what you were willing to accept, but it wasn’t to be wasted on a man. It was a woman’s burden not to speak out. This was the measure of love, the open country and the jungle of it, what you were willing to suffer for it and how you suffered it—but you could not measure stren
gth this way for a man. For a child, yes. Oh, yes.

  Only she deserved his blessed blood, the sheets redolent with it, the gathering flies, the privileged suffering of his scent.

  “I’ll kill Khieu if he comes,” Mai hollered back, “the instant he sets foot in this house.” Let that be the universe’s poetic justice.

  Days later they did wash and bury her son. But coming out of her room involved believing that her suffering had been for something, that her cup of grief was no longer filled with loss alone but something holy. The heavens aligned chaos, like the stars.

  The practical furniture in the soothsayer’s shop—a low table, an oil lamp, a mosquito net, a rolled-up sleeping mat—contrasted with the lavish paintings that decorated the walls, of the royal family on bamboo-leaf paper, mountain landscapes done in vegetable dye, other assorted masterpieces in garish colours. Thu waited in the doorway bouncing Cong on her hip. He squirmed, feverish, fussing. The old woman squatted next to some rolls of dried-up sugar cane.

  Dust streaked the widely spaced floorboards through which one could see to the earth below, rats chewing on piles of rotten mango. Next to her, a wooden trunk.

  Mai kneeled. She bowed in respect. “It’s my baby.” She pointed at the doorway. She explained everything, told the soothsayer about her alcoholic father, her mother’s suicide, the vengeful ghost she’d become. If her mother had it in for her family, the soothsayer needed to know.

  “Where is your husband?” the soothsayer countered.

  “My husband? But I think it’s possession.”

  The old woman lifted the lid of the trunk. From it she pulled a bag of sand and a map. She spread the map on the floor.

  “You mean today?” Mai said. “At work.”

  “Five baht for me to tell you if he’s safe. Ten baht if you want me to tell you his exact location.” She waited. Her eyes were dark blue lenses, a little milky.

  Mai answered by reaching for her purse—she was here now, after all—but she shook her head as she passed her the coins.