Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  He saw her then, met her eyes.

  They forced him to kneel over, pushed down his head; the wood crushed his neck, rasped his skin; he stared into the bloody pannier.

  A crowd had turned out. It tittered, shuffled. Some people had come in support of Bao. Most had not. When the blade fell it made a whooshing sound. He saw the basket, the wicker weave, felt his eyelashes blinking against it. He felt no pain. Was surprised, even shocked, that at first no darkness fell and that hearing remained. Enough to make out Mimi’s voice, not calling out his name, but howling the battle cry of revolutionaries, offering forgiveness, absolution, and mercy. “Vietnam, Vietnam!”

  36

  In the end, Khieu didn’t wait for the police to knock on his mistress’s door. Nor did he wait to see how his fellow Perfume of the Yellow Mountain members would hold up to interrogation under duress. After he sobered up, he thought about how the cooks at the garrison had been taken into custody and had confessed, and he waited until his mistress fell asleep after they had made love. He waited until she had turned over in the bed of the small apartment they shared and he lifted her thin opal-coloured arm off his thigh, kissed her eyelids one-two-three times as she snored, oblivious of the part he had played in the drama unreeling itself, and he wished it was a film such as one they’d talked about seeing that he could put back on the spool, start over.

  Why hadn’t he said anything about Bao? He didn’t know.

  “Goodbye,” he said. He wanted to add, I hope we meet again, but he felt like a character in a book and looked around, self-conscious, as though someone had caught him mid-thought, already hunted. He took one last glance before shutting the door.

  In the south of the country, resembling two rice baskets at either end of a pole, each had fought the French invaders in a dozen quiet ways, or had wanted to believe they had, had soothed themselves with this thought. For the last twenty years, the French had failed to suppress the Montagnards of the Central Highlands, who returned like a rash that could not be controlled. The French would extinguish one outbreak and the rash would reappear on another limb, just as virulent as before. The forests were too deep, too dark. Neither the French nor the Chinese had ever conquered any of the ancient wandering tribes in whose direction Khieu would now head, hoping to find some shelter, some prospect, for what he didn’t know—he travelled blind, lost, had no direction, clothes, supplies, no idea what would become of his life.

  The tribes spoke their own languages. Lived in houses on stilts high above the ground, so he’d heard, and still hunted with arrows and crossbows. They wore loincloths or went naked. He’d run to the hills and hope their people would take him in.

  37

  A soldier knocked on the door to Dr. Nguyen’s villa. He looked beyond the river at the brambles and tapioca vines edging the opposite slopes. A canal system ran between houses not situated directly over the river. Only the rich could afford to be right over the river, and residents on the smaller, artificially built tributaries—in houses such as the one he’d grown up in, such as the one his parents still lived in—used the water that flowed between their smaller, more primitive houses for drinking, bathing, and washing, as well as going to the bathroom.

  In the villa he found only an old woman and an old man. On each side of the door bougainvillea spilled onto the ground red as blood. A songbird sang in a cage above them in the entrance hall. The old woman told him about the blessed event, the birth of the child yesterday, and said that Dr. Nguyen, accompanied by his wife, had left to show off the infant to relatives in another province.

  38

  Mai heard the gate clap shut. She struggled up on one elbow from her bed to see Thu’s open basket filled with catfish, rice, soursop, beansprout: where on earth had she gotten the money?

  Mai wished many things: that Cong wasn’t sick; that her husband wasn’t vagrant; that her son wasn’t dead. Mai let her head fall back onto her pillow. Mai knew that bitch Thu was dying to accuse her of dramatics. Mai could see it every time Thu came into the room. Thu loathed anyone in pain.

  Maybe night simply made her miss her husband more.

  A star. Could he see it, too? White. The colour of mourning. At this moment, she felt he was training his gaze on the same star as her. By looking at the same star in the same instant, their spirits were becoming one.

  She rose from bed and drew a tunic from her wardrobe. As she put it on, the fabric shimmered, reflecting the oil lamp’s glow. The way silk mirrored light the same way a black lake did stood as a metaphor for something. Had she less sadness to dwell on she could have put her finger on it. Husband gone, son dying, one more in the grave.

  At night even childhood heartaches came back. Tragedies, because of their size and bulk, should have erased them, the sad little moments, the tiny mournings, the nothing pains. Yet the moment-to-moment sufferings, the unkind looks, the harsh words were a burnt offering unto them. They fuelled the memories of the shores upon which she’d been shattered. Kerosened them. Stoked them.

  She had clutched Trang’s body and refused to let go. She’d become what surrounded her, the stinking space, the sheets covered with dried blood, the mustering flies.

  Even as part of her knew she was wrong, a more powerful part claimed control and said, You will do what I want.

  As if she was riding a bull, a bull she couldn’t control, after a while it had become easier to stop trying, to let herself go and pet the boy’s hair if that’s what the bull wanted, if that’s what felt right. To cuddle up to his body, even as it had grown rigid, because—because after all, who was Thu to suddenly speak of rights?

  She let the loss lie under her body, beneath her softly, so she could sleep and dream.

  In her dreams she saw Khieu shave. The water dripped from his fingertips into the bowl beneath the mirror. His hands on his chin, his neck, pulled the skin taut. She loved its smooth tea colour. The gleam of the straight razor.

  A drop of blood, red as a pomegranate, bloomed on his cheek. He blotted it with his index finger and then licked it. As he shaved the other cheek, the blood mixed with the water like rain on a windowpane; it meandered a path in the wind.

  She dreamed about his arms. She leaned her head against them, cupping her head in the nook of his chest. How deeply she inhaled, dizzying herself with the memory of his cologne. She could still smell him. Some part of him must have been left behind, in his books and his papers, his clothes and his shoes.

  Their baby was dying. Was it Khieu’s hand smothering him and not her mother’s? She clutched his body, rocked him to her chest.

  Loss flew through the persimmon trees.

  Mai forced Thu to agree to search for her lost husband. Never had the decency to pose the “Come, now?” as a question but said “Come, now!” as an order. Made her cross her heart and promise to gouge her eyes if she told anyone, even Birago, especially Birago, they were leaving.

  The two women stood in the front room that absorbed sound, creating an amniotic sort of silence. Thu clenched her fists, ground her molars. Outside the other children were shaking water off the trees because the branches were wet from the rain. Children who’d have to fend for themselves, with Crazy Auntie upstairs, while she and Mai were gone. Who did Mai think she was?

  On the table, in the room that hadn’t heard any laughter since the day the dead boy had lain on that floor bleeding from his ears and eyes and nose, stood a teak-and-china bowl pushed up against the wall filled weekly with cut flowers. A fool’s chore.

  These days it was even worse than disliking cut flowers: it was no longer just a matter of seeing the waste in it, watching the greyish water stain underneath the bowl expand and thereby mark how long you had been filling it with something like hope; no matter how well tended, the blossoms yellowed and rotted and mildewed and stank and died. The sentimentality of trying to keep them alive churned her stomach in even her best moments.

  These days Thu couldn’t look at a bouquet unless willing to face her greatest fear. She’d
start crying. Not because flowers were inherently depressing, but because the buds looked so beautiful, their heads bowed. Beauty had been popping up everywhere, it seemed, since Trang had died.

  Mai said, “It’s not as though the gods haven’t told us where he is. Besides, you owe me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I have to say it? My son was alive when you left, dead when you came home. My baby is dying, Mai.”

  The only pure joys were echoes now.

  Dragon shadows danced in the corner by the ceiling. Thu shook her head to banish the dread of impending loss. Birago was just a man.

  How long before lonesomeness made him decide to fill the empty hours where she was not? Just a man who would succumb to a man’s temptations. What man would wait for her? What man, given her absence, would remember her, a plain Jane, after she left the room?

  He would find a lover, but not in sorrow, nor to fill any empty hours or arms. He would find her from a selection of others, the way one found a new pair of shoes, without fanfare or forethought—not to fill a hole Thu had left behind, but for fun, in a moment of frivolity. That’s why Thu’s presence near him at all times was imperative. She was the kind of woman who was easy to forget and she knew it.

  Thu would have to send Birago a letter explaining what had happened as soon as possible, whether Mai liked it or not.

  She would send a postcard from every single stop. Every town on their journey. Each postcard, poetry. Birago liked poetry. Dirty poetry, erotic verses. In place of her presence, at the very least she could supply him with carnal tidings to remind him of who she was, the kind of woman easily forgotten, therefore willing to fulfill his wildest dreams, do anything he asked, without hesitation.

  “I’ll go with you for one week,” Thu said. “If we don’t find him, I’m coming home.”

  39

  At the station Georges-Minh and Chang pressed into a siphoning heat, children trying to ferret Georges-Minh’s pennies by hawking bags of peanuts or offering to shine his shoes. Sweating in the dancing waves that rose from the tile floor, he passed his money through the wicket and bought three tickets to Hue. Dong, dressed in a conical hat and loose pants, looked like a schoolgirl; the baby boy could be her brother. He fed himself with the hope that Dong and the baby would be protected travelling with him because those investigating the poisoning plot were searching for single men, not a family.

  Georges-Minh had told his mother-in-law that he was taking them to visit his uncle in another province. “So soon after the birth?” Mother had enquired with a furrowed brow. Yet she knew better than to press, for even those strong by nature realize by instinct when not to push.

  He wiped his brow with his already soaked hankie while Dong waited in a cooler corner with Chang and the baby. When the girl behind the counter said, “Where to today, sir?” for a moment he had stared, not recalling his name, and when his senses docked like a ship in port he found himself stuttering, “Hue,” for no reason other than the man in line beside him had spoken it, and when the teller in front of him asked him to repeat it he found himself saying the single syllable again, “Hue.”

  His wife waited with suitcases at her feet in front of an altar furnished with lotus flower and mooncakes. He patted his brow. The shadows were so heavy they seemed clothlike, starched.

  Bread sellers, coconut vendors, civil servants, and conductors rushed by. They moved through the streets as wind, putting him in mind of a mystic who was preparing a potion to turn his men into an invisible army. “In the mountains there’s a general,” Khieu had said during a meeting, “and his followers practise ‘flying scissors to the neck’ and how to fight with their hands. They say he’s making an army of ghosts. They’ll march into Saigon.” He moved his hand like a banner. “Invisible, they’ll attack the French and succeed. Because who can fight the wind?” Georges-Minh had thought Khieu was having them on (to believe it himself!) or perhaps wishful thinking was making Khieu lose his mind. But now, in the corner of the train station, he longed for such a cloak of invisibility, thought of the mystic general while French police and soldiers sauntered past.

  The trip from Saigon to Hue would be four hundred miles—eighteen hours. Besides all the mundane supplies they would need for the trip, he had also packed Dong’s medicines. Her eucalyptus oil and her Tiger Balm, her tincture of opium and capsicum, her rubbing coins, which he’d wanted to leave behind, though he hadn’t said so, afraid of hurting her feelings when she’d insisted on bringing them, tears in her eyes because they reminded her of her parents.

  After they boarded the train, the sky greyed to the colour of congee rice gruel. People rushed with the determination of millipedes with their shopping baskets, or sold mangoes and hairy red chom-chom, as the peasants called rambutan, bananas and star apples, durian, pineapples, pomelos, lychee nuts, papayas, persimmons, egg-shaped sapodillas, and jackfruit.

  He looked out the window, suddenly sombre. “What’ll we do?”

  “What can we do?” Dong said.

  Georges-Minh shivered.

  “Don’t cry,” Dong said.

  Georges-Minh kept shaking his head. A tear fell from his nose onto his lap. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He felt so cold. He wondered if he was having opium withdrawal.

  Chang wished Georges-Minh hadn’t brought Dong. The military hunting them might have provided the best chance their relationship ever had: united against persecution. The two of them, against great odds, on the run, all alone, against the world. Georges-Minh would break down in the hotel, and Chang would be there to stroke his hair.

  “Hey, who’s hungry? I’m hungry.” Chang dug through one of their cases. “We have salad rolls, spring rolls, duck meat, eggs. What would you like? Some guava juice? Coconut?”

  Chang’s enduring infatuation was too much to fathom. Was he acting now for the sake of the baby? The little innocent who’d done no harm to anyone, and thus deserved none of this suffering?

  Reclined, they had each sucked a pipe at the opium den.

  Chang had reached out. Said, “I love you.”

  “You’re just high,” Georges-Minh had said. The den’s smoke obscured the hand, the mouth Georges-Minh pushed away.

  “So?”

  “Love isn’t a songbird. You can’t cage it.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Set it free.”

  Chang passed Dong a few items on a napkin and she handed the boy to Georges-Minh. His head smelled fresh. They passed rice fields dotted with white birds. The rice plants swayed and mountains rose in the distance beyond the fields, the mountains a darker green intersected by dirt roads that, from a distance, looked like snakes. An unfamiliar feeling surged through Georges-Minh with the force of a monsoon. Suddenly he and the baby were a world of two. He felt anchored to something real, sure that an earthquake, a tidal wave, the sands of time couldn’t have moved them. In a thousand years the two of them would still be there, locked together, steadfast as a mountain. Was this what people meant by unconditional love?

  Georges-Minh had fallen in love with Dong because of the wheeze in her lungs, her hallowed beauty, her viper tongue. Or was it because she could have been anyone, but it was she who walked through the clinic door that night to supplant the guilt and shame he felt over having caused the mermaid’s death?

  This mountain feeling of I-shall-not-be-moved, the weight and heat of it, that he felt for the baby he was sure would remain forever. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket, jostling the boy, who giggled.

  Dong looked up from her salad roll. “Are you still crying? Don’t worry, I think it’s sweet. Men should cry when they hold their children.”

  After her meal she said to Georges-Minh, “Your pupils look funny. They’re really big. Are you feeling okay? Why are you so sweaty?”

  He managed to slip some more opium under his tongue without Dong seeing. He’d only brought a small supply. He wondered how many days it would last.

 
The meal had revived her, but not in the way he might have liked. Georges-Minh worried about the rabid energy with which Dong began to twist her hair into coils and replace her hat on top of them, point out the scenery, remove her hat, brush her hair, restyle it, replace her hat, remove her hat again. At least she was breastfeeding the baby, but he was glad he’d brought her with them so he could keep an eye on her, and the boy.

  “Take a rest,” he said.

  “I don’t feel tired.”

  It wasn’t like her to act so frenzied. Still, what had been ordinary in the last twenty-four hours?

  “Once upon a time a man collected tiny sea-swallow nests,” Dong said. “He collected them from cave roofs with candles on his hat.”

  The train’s clacking overpowered her words.

  “I can’t hear you.” He smiled at her and wrung his hands.

  The train rumbled and the ocean, when it appeared, was as blue as glass. Boats flecked the mouth of the bay.

  “He had a bamboo ladder that he built with his own hands,” she shouted. “He climbed up and down it every day. But one day his ladder broke. His work to find the swallows was already dangerous, you see, but without a ladder he couldn’t make soup at all. So where do we go after Hue?”

  “Soup?” Chang said.

  A haze rose from the water, obscuring the horizon. The shadows of faraway islands were painted in shades of grey. At times the train hugged a coastline with such a sheer drop from the cliffs to the beach below the train seemed to be flying, the tracks poised on the edge, a cutaway beneath. Dong leaned her head on the window. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.