Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  Mai knew she needn’t have asked the woman to do any divining at all; she could have answered all on her own: with his Portuguese, somewhere in Saigon, kicking around in a brothel. If she’d wanted to do the legwork she could have hunted down the address herself. Rumours abounded. It was just a matter of plucking one from the flotsam.

  The old woman threw a handful of sand onto the map. She studied the pattern of its falling. On her haunches, she circled the piece of paper, looking at the sand design from different angles. Finally she smacked her hand down on the paper, making the sand bounce. “The Central Highlands,” she said. “Dak Lak.”

  “Dak Lak?”

  “Where the Forest People are.”

  “Who are the Forest People?”

  “Monsters of the green corridor.” She pointed to where the sand had gathered in a rivulet. “Take the sea route, then cross overland. He’ll be somewhere near there, where the Montagnards bang sticks together to talk to the gods.”

  “What for?” Even Thu looked up from where she waited in the doorway.

  “Take a knife.” The woman sketched a new map and drew an X. “Before you call out his name, throw the knife into the wind. Take this knife for only twenty more baht. Such a good deal. It will guide you.” She wrapped Mai’s hand around its bamboo handle. In answer to the question in Mai’s eyes, she added, “Listen closely, listen again. Throw this knife into the wind. Call his name before it hits the ground. Where it sticks into the earth’s belly, where the shadow falls, a crooked shadow, where sunshine balances on the darkness, you will find your husband nearby.”

  “Look, I’ve already lost one son. I’m not going to lose my baby, too. Thu, bring Cong.” Mai motioned. “This is why we’re here, you haven’t even seen him yet. Thu, come here!”

  “I know. Find your husband. Your baby needs him.”

  Mai swallowed hard. “But how will I know where to look if he’s hiding?” she said, reaching for more money, knowing she would have to ask Thu to add water to the soup tonight. “How? He’ll just … appear?” she asked.

  “You’ll have to dig,” the fortune teller responded, as if she was just as puzzled, and asking questions of whomever was spooling out her answers from above. She shook her head.

  “For a body?” All Mai could think of as she paid for the knife was her dead son, his clothes and little bloody shoes. Even as he’d grown rigid, she’d not let go. She wasn’t the type of woman to let go. “I know he’s alive.”

  “Who’s going with you?”

  “My sister.” Mai looked toward the door. “She’ll come, if we decide to go.”

  “What do you mean if you decide?” the old woman snapped. “You have to go. Or the baby will die.”

  27

  “Why can’t you do it?” Bao said.

  Phuc’s best suit hung loose about his shoulders. His fingernails, trimmed and filed, stuck from sleeves too long and sheened with wear. His bicycle, propped against the wall of the flower shop, dripped with falling rain, as did the pipa case in his hand.

  “You don’t play until tonight.”

  “Set-up. Rehearsal.”

  Bao nodded toward Mimi standing behind him in the kitchen over a dish of steaming noodles. “It’s Christmas Eve,” he whispered. “How’d you get this gig, anyway?”

  “Their regular guy got food poisoning.”

  “Just go if you’re going to go.” Mimi glared at both of them in the doorway, the steam rising from the plate in her hands. He’d seen the defiance in her eyes before. “I’ve already poured the sauce on.” She lifted the plate. “Now they’ll get soggy, but what do you care.”

  Phuc waited in the doorway, desperate. “It’s a personal favour for a friend of Khieu’s. It has lucky money for the children.”

  Mimi slammed around the kitchen. “You were the one who wanted to celebrate Christmas. I don’t even see the point in it.”

  Phuc said, “Look, we’ve never played together before. If they like me, it could lead to something.” From the rat trap of his bicycle he took the package wrapped in brown paper. “If it wasn’t for the rehearsal, I could make the delivery myself.”

  “I thought you hated the French.” Bao leaned against the door frame.

  “Money’s money. Please?”

  28

  When Dong went into labour at three in the morning, Georges-Minh was preoccupied with the poisoning plot. So much so he didn’t hear Khieu break into his office to steal vials of toxin.

  Nothing had alerted Georges-Minh or his wife that her pregnancy would advance in an atypical direction. Dong would stay pregnant for the right length of time. Her morning sickness and cravings, her aversion to strong smells, her aches and pains would lead to a birth with just the right amount of agony.

  “Georges-Minh,” she cried hours before he was to slip poison into the colonel’s cognac.

  She stood in the bathroom, stooped over, one hand on the small of her spine. Could it be true labour two months early? He ran to Mother’s room, roused her.

  Mother steeped roots in ginger tea for Dong.

  Khieu had insisted Georges-Minh poison the colonel on Christmas Eve, for he’d said everyone would be too busy with the festivities to notice what was happening until it was too late. It seemed a reasonable assumption.

  While Georges-Minh’s wife continued to scream and, between labour pains, concentrate as best she could on her deep breathing, a flute player of some renown had come knocking on Phuc’s door.

  Within the hour Phuc was begging a favour.

  Bao ate Mimi’s long life noodles. Then he took a cyclo and hand-delivered the brown paper package with lucky money for the children.

  In the nick of time a package arrived for two cooks, who mixed datura into the soldiers’ coq au vin.

  Georges-Minh went to Lieutenant Colonel Janvier’s house to gamble.

  In the mess hall, someone had decorated a jade plant. Homemade streamers and foil decorations said “Joyeux Noël,” making the garrison cheery. Two hundred soldiers sat down to eat: garlic and morels, glazed carrots with parsley, a rich brown sauce made of chicken blood. Not every soldier liked the Brussels sprouts and pushed them to one side of his plate. Some ate these diligently, remembering their manners. Some dove in, devouring the entire meal.

  A soldier rose to his feet and, clutching at his gut, stumbled to the washroom, swayed, and fell into a puddle of his own vomit. Other soldiers tumbled one by one, clutching their stomachs, too. They writhed on the floor, moaning, spitting up blood.

  As the soldiers thrashed and jerked on the garrison floor, two cries were heard from within a villa, a pair of razor yelps.

  By then Georges-Minh, in another house, with Lieutenant Colonel Janvier and Artilleryman Birago, had reduced himself to a nervous wreck, watching the two men drink and play cards, wondering when he should slip the poison into their glasses and how.

  Once a week, the doctor and the colonel played cards, only on this particular evening, Birago was in the colonel’s den as well.

  “Mix us some drinks,” the colonel told Birago, who obeyed with a quick nod and walked stiffly into the kitchen. Birago appeared humiliated. Something about the way he turned, the way he held his shoulders.

  God, how could Georges-Minh kill him, paint the walls with his blood? When Khieu asked him why he hadn’t done it, why their group hadn’t been credited in the newspaper, Georges-Minh would look Khieu in his one green eye and say not even Khieu could have done it had he been there. His friend was passionate, he had deep convictions, but God, he wasn’t the clearest-thinking man. Paint the walls with a man like Birago’s blood? What was this? Theatre? Khieu’s emotions were a horse that dragged his logic on a rope behind it.

  Georges-Minh waited for his drink in Lieutenant Colonel Janvier’s expansive and handsomely furnished library while the elder man took up his fencing sword and began to joust the air in front of the bookshelf, thrusting the tip toward copies of Byron and Proust. Birago returned with the drinks on a tray. Georges
-Minh leaned back in his chair and, trying to act casual, gratefully sipped his cognac. He desperately needed something to take the edge off. He tried breathing deeply. He tried clenching all the muscles in his feet and then relaxing them.

  He’d concealed the poison in his front pocket, held his hand over top of it, which grew sweaty there. He realized if he didn’t release it from his grasp, he ran the risk of clumping the powder, which might then refuse to leave the envelope when he tried to sprinkle it out. He quickly removed his hand from the envelope and pulled his fingers out of his pocket. The haste of his movement caused the colonel to glance his way.

  He forced himself to relax, cross his legs, slouch into his chair. He took another sip of his drink and polished off the entire glass by accident. How could he distract the two? He hadn’t thought that far. Could they play charades, close their eyes? Could he get them dancing? His vision blurred. He should slow down with the drink. He felt unnatural. Out of body.

  He had to remind himself that what he was doing was just and true.

  Anger without action was demoralizing.

  He needed to engage. He needed to be all business.

  Birago took the tray back into the kitchen and threw it into the sink. The noise made all the smaller muscles in Georges-Minh’s body go numb, as if he’d spent too long in the cold. He had the capacity to move large muscles, but those for lighting his cigarette, for instance, had stopped working. He put down his lighter before Birago, back from the kitchen, noticed. Thankfully, Janvier was too busy jousting to notice Georges-Minh start shaking.

  He’d only agreed to kill one, not two. The deal was off.

  “You’re a married man, aren’t you?”

  Georges-Minh nodded.

  “You like a little on the side?”

  Georges-Minh laughed to mask his worry.

  “Join us, Birago. You like women. Tell us about some of yours.” Janvier motioned for the black man to sit down. “Pour yourself a drink.”

  What if Georges-Minh’s nerves gave him away? What if they found the poison in his pocket? If he got caught, what would happen to Dong?

  “I like big women.” Birago motioned breasts with his hands.

  Janvier laughed.

  Georges-Minh could run but another part of him knew if he did he’d never stop. To plant his feet and strike from where he stood, to focus his thoughts, to trick himself into visualizing Janvier as nothing more than a robot—that’s how he’d get this done. Flicking the contents of an envelope over the liquid in a glass was just a fucking motion, for God’s sake, like waving goodbye, tipping your hat.

  “And you?” Janvier poked him with the tip of his sword.

  “Little ones.” He winked. “More than a champagne glass is a waste, as they say.”

  Janvier said, “I propose a toast.” He raised his glass. “To women.”

  “To women,” Birago said.

  “Women,” Georges-Minh said.

  “Most Vietnamese aren’t like you,” the colonel said. His shirt was damp with sweat. He put down his sword.

  From Janvier, it didn’t feel like a compliment. “I was educated in Paris.”

  The doctor and Birago and the colonel gambled and drank and Georges-Minh played cards and knew if he could get the colonel and Birago to drink another and another, he could more easily sprinkle the poison in. Get them drunk. The ironic part was Georges-Minh’s medical advice to the colonel had been to cut down on his liquor. Would the colonel notice Georges-Minh’s lack of admonishments? No. His type would be happy for any excuse to drink more than his allotment.

  The colonel shuffled the deck. “A franc picked up on the road gives us more satisfaction than a hundred worked for, n’est-ce pas?”

  The colonel was trying to drink Georges-Minh under the table. Georges-Minh was pretending to drink as much as he by pouring his own into the potted jackfruit next to the colonel’s desk. The plant was large and the planter stood on the floor a mere foot away from Georges-Minh’s thigh; he hadn’t planned the seating arrangement, but pouring the drink out bit by bit between pretend sips had worked so well that Georges-Minh dared let himself believe for a moment the plan was meant to be.

  Beyond the window, the steady humming of cicadas. People sometimes knew in moments of truth what they were capable of and what might kill them. Suddenly, Georges-Minh realized that until now, he’d been acting the part of the murderer, the plotter, the spy. He now realized he didn’t have to pretend. A part of him truly hated this man before him. Blood ran inside his mouth where he was biting.

  The longer Georges-Minh waited, the worse the waiting got. He needed to make his move. Georges-Minh leaned forward, tossed in his francs.

  No one man wanted to be shown up by the other, so more rounds were had. The cognac bottle had long ago been brought into the den and ice dispensed with.

  Birago and the colonel had been singing all the songs they knew and had been for the last half hour.

  The only answer, as far as Birago, was to become someone else. Only a monster could kill an innocent man. To allow that door to open, even for a second, would mean he’d have to step outside of himself and become one. No more thinking. Just doing. The two men weaved, knocking the desk.

  The door would be ajar only a moment.

  “I got to piss,” Georges-Minh said. “Hey, the bottle’s empty. I’ll get a new one.” In a motion, reaching for the empty bottle, shielding their drinks from view, he dropped the poison into their glasses. “Luck disguises itself as genius, gentlemen, but it’s only luck,” Georges-Minh said.

  Lieutenant Colonel Janvier had raised the stakes by putting in twenty more francs, thinking about his daughters back in France, soon to enter university. Unfair he’d missed so much of their growing up. His own father in a nursing home back in Provence got to see them all the time. Life was a fast-moving stream. All you could do was capture small moments from the outward flow.

  Georges-Minh watched them vomit. He watched their eyes. Georges-Minh feigned illness, too, lest Colonel Janvier pull a pistol and shoot him. Angry eyes grew scared, then empty: too sick to fight, the men convulsed on the floor, reminding Georges-Minh of minnows.

  When they were dead he penned a note. He left it on the desk. He considered its contents, thought again, placed the paper beneath the colonel’s hand.

  If they believed the colonel had murdered Birago over his shame at an affair between the two, then Georges-Minh’s action was revolutionary, too.

  29

  Georges-Minh froze. The tipped-over basins of water, the blood, the carnage of sheets. And Dong twisted tight as a pretzel in the crooked bed where she lay, staring blankly at the wall. His mother-in-law sat in the corner of the room, shaking her head, her eyes closed, hissing at Dong to take her child, love it how a mother should.

  He reached out to touch Dong, overcome by an urge to make love, to be alive inside her. He thought back to the powder dissolving in the cognac, the looseness with which Janvier and Birago drank, limbs full of trust. Alive one second, dead the next, their bodies thunking to the ground, the jackfruit spreading its green leaves in the hot wallpapered room. His ironic urge for Dong’s life to surround him now made him wonder about death and desire: nothing was strange on a day like this, opposites could tie together.

  Dong rolled onto her back, trying to affect a casual tone, but her words came out thin, strained. “I’m tired, leave me alone.”

  “She won’t hold him. Not even hold him.” Dong’s mother held up a head of black hair for his inspection. The baby squawked. “She hasn’t even fed him yet, I keep getting her to try.” She put her finger in the baby’s mouth. “Put him on the breast, I said. He needs you, I said. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Her father approached the bedside with a tea rag soaked in eucalyptus water and stroked Dong’s forehead. “Shh, Mother. Leave her be.”

  “Maybe it’s because you weren’t here. I never saw a mother treat her baby this way before, except for once, when the child was unwante
d …” She frowned at him. “Where were you, anyway? Drinking with the boys? You should have been here.”

  “Enough, now,” said her husband.

  Georges-Minh took the baby, placed him on Dong’s chest.

  Dong, stony-faced, let a tear trickle down her cheek. She pushed the baby away and crossed her arms over her chest. She wept and her face swelled. The tears came in a torrent. Once she started crying she couldn’t stop.

  30

  Georges-Minh stood on the veranda of his villa and listened to the crickets, looking out at the black and imagining the dangers that lurked in the countryside.

  “None of the soldiers died,” the messenger said.

  “The soldiers?”

  “They clenched their guts, vomited blood, and maybe even prayed for death. But none of them died. The French general declared martial law. The cooks are in jail. The officials’re waiting till morning to chop off their heads. Both cooks are Catholic. They’ve asked for a priest. I think they want to confess.”

  “But soldiers weren’t supposed to die.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone got their wires crossed.”

  “An order was sent out.”

  “Then someone made a mistake. Someone gave the wrong orders.”

  “No mistake. The cooks received the poison.”

  “But I never sent the cooks any poison.”

  “They received it.”

  As soon as the messenger left, Georges-Minh went to his lab and saw that his medical cabinet had been jimmied. The thieves had left their crowbar behind. It lay black and sullen looking surrounded by broken glass. His experiments had been stolen. Powdered and liquid, pill form and paste. Pieces of the brown paper in which he’d wrapped the bottles lay torn among the shards of glass. He’d been double-crossed. By who?

  If the cooks confessed, it would be only a matter of time before the jig was up. To wait now might cost them everything. He’d have to pack. Run. To hike, travel by rail, boat, navigate river ways and jungle paths.