Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

by Yasuko Thanh

  They went through a tunnel. Georges-Minh spoke loudly to control his tremors, to project confidence, and to compete with the unbearable screeching of the train. “We’ll go north to be safe. There are nationalist sympathizers there. We’ll hide in the jungles of the Central Highlands, in Dak Lak, until things cool down.” If they could make it to the Srepok River, an arm of the Mekong, it would flex through Dak Lak province to Stung Treng town. There were few roads in the diminished area, but the Lao traded with the Khmer upstream. He’d heard that the area’s tribal leaders had birthed a strong resistance movement. Then, who knew? Maybe Thailand? Switzerland?

  How to wrench someone from their life, then reveal they’d never get it back? He could feel the cracking in his own heart, a piece of himself drifting away like a peninsula cast adrift from the mainland.

  40

  Squatting on the forest floor, Thu shuddered with cold, though the night air was not that cold at all. The spiderworts along the ground tickled her thighs. In Cam Ranh, their first stop along the coast, all the hotels had been booked for the holidays and so, afraid to sleep on the beach, where they were open targets for muggers and pickpockets and rapists, Thu and Mai hiked toward the bamboo forest to spend the night where they’d heard the Cham villagers lived, because it was said the people of the bush were friendly.

  After setting up camp, Thu skirted the bigger river creek with large, smooth granite rocks and sandstones, and went into the bushes, saying she needed to urinate. She removed the writing paper she’d stuffed down her bodice.

  We had to leave in a hurry, she wrote Birago, balancing the paper on her knee. Remember I told you Cong was sick? Mai went to a fortune teller, and now we are looking for her husband. I’ll tell you more when I get back, but for now all I can say is there are things between me and Mai that I regret ever having happened. I’m sorry I had to leave and I hope you’ll forgive me for not saying goodbye. If I could explain to you why I need to look after Mai it might make more sense but my mind has been clouded of late, except for there’s the one sure thing on which I can count as if on a hitching post in a storm, to which I can tie myself, so I don’t get lost, don’t drift too far, don’t fall too deep, don’t wander too long, and that’s I love you more than anything. Even more than my own eyes. Please understand I owe her.

  She thought about crumpling up the letter before she’d even finished it. What drivel. If only the prickle of the pocks would leave her alone. Worse than lice she’d had as a child.

  How could it be they’d looked all over Saigon and not found Khieu? She couldn’t believe, wouldn’t let herself believe for a moment, the fortune teller had been right.

  She thought about Birago’s strong arms around another woman and where would she be then? If she could only make him understand she hadn’t wanted to leave then maybe he wouldn’t be mad at her. The only reason she’d followed Mai from that room that swallowed light and sound, was acting as if she was one of two spies on a mission instead of one of two women off to find a wayward husband, was that she’d given Mai her word. The Portuguese woman had no idea where to find Khieu. She’d help Mai for a week, make the situation clear to Birago, and all would be well.

  He thought her childish. Petulant. She didn’t want him to think ill of her now, lest he think his consideration to quit boxing had angered her. Like the time they’d fought over some silly question of politics and she’d refused to make love to him for a week. Or was it two?

  Men cheated at the drop of a hat. And this distance between them! An excuse to leave her was the last thing she wanted to give him now. And her too far away to do anything about it!

  The giant bamboo and forest trees blocked the light and made it too dim to write—indeed, in places, they did not even permit light to enter, and it was said that in some of the remotest regions of the jungle, certain tribes of people lived in complete darkness, hunted by darkness, made love by darkness, were born and died without ever seeing the sun, and had done so since the beginning of time.

  She heard footsteps and a branch crack. Maybe it was a nguoi rung forest monster. She put the letter back into her dress and saw Mai’s shoes through a gap in the underbrush. Thu adjusted her breasts to better hide the piece of paper.

  “Mai. What do you want?”

  “I thought I heard an animal, saw some eyes in the forest. I got frightened. With the baby asleep, I finally had time for a rest, but …”

  Back at home, Mai had been spending hours in the baby’s room nursing, letting him suckle even while she slept. Her exhaustion had been manifesting itself in plum-coloured circles under her eyes. Her skin looked wan. A rash had broken out on her cheeks. She had lost at least thirty pounds.

  “Did he drink much?”

  “Hardly a thing. He dribbled out more than he swallowed.”

  “I need to pee. Give me a minute.”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying to give you your privacy. But suddenly I’m scared of the dark,” she whimpered. Her lack of sleep had made her jumpy, and since her emergence from the bedroom with the stiff body of her middle-born son in her arms, Thu had become increasingly worried about Mai’s dwindling hold on her sanity.

  Thu pushed her way through the ferns, and holding Mai’s hand, led her back to the clearing where they had lit a small fire. She sat Mai down and then perched on an overturned log next to her. The bamboo thicket nestling the kapok trees gaped and grinned at them, animated by the moon.

  Thu crossed her arms over her chest, concealing the letter. They sat there until Mai calmed down. If Mai discovered she was writing a letter to Birago, who knew what conclusions she might jump to.

  “Still night,” Mai said and stroked the baby’s head absent-mindedly. “Too still, almost.” Then she spotted a movement. “See that?”

  “You mean the shadow?”

  “Yes. Someone?”

  “Cloud in front of the moon. You know what the imagination can do.”

  “Say, what do you know about Forest People?” Mai asked. “What the fortune teller was saying.”

  Thu pulled the bamboo-handled knife from her bag and began polishing its blade on her skirt. “Well, I heard a story once.” She waved the knife. “But it’s disgusting. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “I do,” Mai implored.

  Thu wrinkled her nose. “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t!”

  Mai giggled like a schoolgirl. There was an ease between them that felt good.

  “Well, then. The story goes that a woman, a nguoi rung—”

  “A what?”

  “A Forest Person. Forest monster. Haven’t you ever heard?”

  Mai shook her head.

  “More or less, furry, bigger than us, but they don’t have the capacity of speech. Anyway, she kidnapped a man. This forest monster needed a lover and she’d found the perfect one. So she brought him to her cave and she tied him up and made him do things. And she held him there, captive and—”

  “They’re like us?”

  “Sort of. And she forced him to, you know …”

  “No.”

  “Have sex with her. She made him give her babies, and she raised a family with him. For three years she held him captive before he escaped.”

  “Ugh! That’s awful.”

  “I know. Auntie told me.” She brought the map out of the bag and opened it up against her lap, smoothing out the creases in the firelight. “And all of that happened right … right there.” She stabbed the centre of the map with the blade point. “Oh! That’s where we’re going. Look, right here.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “This is where she lives.” She dragged the map through the air like a bullfighter’s cape. “Thi-i-iis is whe-e-ere the Forest Man who wants some babiee-e-s li-i-ives, and he-e-e’s coming to ge-e-t you.”

  “Seriously!” Mai pushed the map away. “What do you really know about where we’re going?”

  “Seriously, that’s all I know.” Thu he
ld the knife to her face. The flames danced off the silver-coloured shank and reflected in the black pools of her eyes.

  “So the nguoi rung,” Mai said. “They’re not human?”

  Thu lowered the blade and drew an X in the soil. “They’re ape-like, so they say. They grunt, or have a garbled speech. Even the rebels, the Montagnards, are scared of them.”

  She thought of Birago then, that first day at the beach, the way she’d embarrassed herself, mentioning her silly kindergarten teacher. Birago’d put her in her place, mocking her racism, her ignorance. She flushed, shook her head. “Anyway, why are you asking me? I’m not a fucking nguoi rung expert.” A mosquito buzzed around her head and she swatted at it.

  “Do they eat people?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe in fairy tales.” Thu yawned. “Anyway, sleep while the baby does. How long since you slept well?”

  Mai sighed. “Who knows? Maybe I haven’t slept well since before I was born. Before he was born, I mean. I feel like I haven’t slept well my whole life.”

  “What about dreams?”

  “I’ve been having nightmares lately. What about you?”

  “No. Never. Or I don’t remember them. Now I don’t dream at all. Isn’t it better that way? Anyhow, I didn’t know you had nightmares.”

  “Well, a recurring dream where nobody will take me in. I’ve always had a mother and father, not like you, but in this dream my parents are dead. I’m an orphan, like you.”

  “I never think about my parents,” Thu said.

  “But you think about ghosts.”

  “I don’t pay attention to ghosts.”

  “I believe in many things we can’t see,” Mai said.

  “Not me.”

  “Gravity? The rotation of the planet?”

  “Makes no difference,” Thu said. She didn’t look behind her, fighting the feeling she suddenly had that someone was watching her. The wind pushed clouds across the moon’s face and Mai’s face was alternately glowing the way angels did and was then black as a demon. “I don’t think about things I can’t change.”

  “What about love? What about destiny?”

  “What difference do they make to my life? To how I put my pants on, or how I eat my breakfast?” She shivered.

  She sat there, jungle behind her, looking at the fire, fingering her chest where the fabric of her dress hid the letter that she would find a way to mail to Birago tomorrow. She wished she could take it out, feel the paper, touch the words upon it. Bi-ra-go. Bi-ra-go. Bi-ra-go. Just this moment she needed something to hold.

  Thu rolled herself another cigarette. She watched the moon unfurl itself from the clouds. It was nearly full, which meant her own sleep, when it came, would be fitful. And as its light shone down on her, the more anxious she became. Alone, even though Mai had finally fallen asleep a few feet away, memories of what she had left behind began to flood her—unimportant things, Birago’s always-bitten-down cuticles, the lemon scent of his cologne, the sunshine on the river’s lapping water. Tasting a tear, she reprimanded herself for indulging in memories.

  41

  Khieu had never been so far out of Saigon, making him feel anything could happen. The next day, another river. He rented a sampan. The rain had fallen all night, and the estuary rose as the deluge continued with no let-up in sight.

  Water lapped the sides of the narrow wooden boat, and dead rats floated on the brown water. In the jungle that bordered both banks of the murky waterway, Khieu saw men cleaning rifle barrels, wives busily making food over open cook fires, and children playing in the trees. He could see the spires of their woodsmoke rising over the tops of the palms. He imagined the men discussing their plans and studying maps.

  Khieu’s trembling fingers clutched the oars, dipped and stroked in and out of the water. Maybe for them the map was something to hold at a time when something to hold counted for everything. Some said the French were building a detention centre in the area, others said a military base. Khieu hoped it was only a rumour—Vietnam was a country where rumour built upon rumour. All that held Vietnam together was fairy tales, like coarse thread holding together a fishing net.

  The sun moved in the sky and the day turned gloomier. His shoulders began to ache and his arms burned. His body throbbed everywhere. The water was full of fishing boats, tea boats, houseboats, flower boats, canoes, outriggers, junks, other rafts. A peddling barber had hung a mirror from a tree branch to shave faces and give haircuts. The barber had brought straight razors and scissors. A villager with a traditional turban wanted a short haircut. He unrolled the thin strips of cotton tied to his head. More than a few men were shearing their locks as political statements these days—in with the new, out with the old. Khieu approved wholeheartedly. Khieu had not worn his hair in such a style for a long time, though he did have a memory, as a child, of his mother, who had once upon a time favoured his long hair, who began every day by combing it. Khieu looked forward to beginning his day in this peaceful way, the feel of the comb tugging at his cowlicks, his mother’s fingers on his scalp. He let the current carry him. He drifted on the river past birds and rice paddies cut out of the mountainside.

  He ate lunch with a family who reminded him of his own: Khieu’s family was not rich like Chang’s, or cultured and influential like Georges-Minh’s. His family had owned a shack over the river, with a rowboat out of which they sold food, like the family he’d offered five baht to for some fried fish. Their beautiful daughter had a paralytic arm and she burned his fish while swaying her hips, winking at him when he smiled. They brought out a bottle of whisky, and the grandma emerged from the depths of their floating house with little cups and a toothless toddler on her hip.

  “Time is a fleeting white colt,” said the old man.

  “You’re right,” said Khieu. “There it is, galloping past my window.”

  The old man, who was drunk, laughed. He had as few teeth as the toddler.

  “If I wait, I’ll see it run. If you’re lucky, you’ll see it crack.” The old man couldn’t stop laughing. He slapped his wizened leg, his eyes watering.

  Khieu left twenty baht behind, where they’d find it after he left, and returned to his sampan.

  By evening, refreshed by the encounter, he was travelling overland. He snuck through French-owned banana plantations, rubber, coconut, pineapple farms, hot and humid. Wary of being captured as a spy, or killed by the Bataillons d’Afrique, he plastered his face with mud. If someone saw him ducking through the field, would they think he was a political friend? Or the enemy?

  42

  Birago couldn’t believe they’d shot him.

  “Bad luck.” The cigarette peddler offered him a smoke from his pack, bent at the tip. When the man exhaled, the smoke came out of the hole in his chest where he’d been stabbed to death.

  “Are you dead, too?” Birago asked.

  “We all are. Look around.”

  Birago began to notice the deafening, pervading noise all around him, barking dogs and shouting men, women hawking wares as they’d done in life, even children hollering, “You’re it, you’re it!” and throwing stones at each other while they played. A whole world of the dead that existed in tandem with the world of the living, like a world of shadows, one on top of the other.

  “You came a bit early for lunch,” the peddler said.

  “Lunch?”

  “Minh over there?” The man pointed. “She makes soup.”

  “I got to go.” When Birago stood up, his ear fell off. He picked it up off the ground and held it in his palm.

  “Here, let me,” the man said, coming over to him, but Birago didn’t give him a chance to help, or touch him or bite him or whatever he planned to do. Birago couldn’t be dead. He must be hallucinating. That was it. He was in hospital somewhere hallucinating. He’d had too much to drink with Colonel Janvier and this was all a bad dream he would wake from.

  43

  They found a hotel with a view of the Perfume River on Le Loi Street in the ancie
nt city of Hue, surrounded by pagodas and imperial tombs.

  Chang stood in the doorway of the family’s room while Dong went to sit on the bed with the baby. “Well, here we are.” He grinned. “We made it.”

  “I think you’d best get a room down the hall.”

  “What did you think I was going to do,” Chang said, “stay with you?”

  Chang, who was still carrying the family’s suitcases like a porter, and had been since the train station, let them drop to the floor. “Unbelievable,” he said.

  Georges-Minh had to admit he was. He didn’t know what had gotten into Chang. He went to call after Chang, but the man was already halfway down the hall, his oiled hair black and gleaming.

  “What was all that about?” Dong asked.

  “Nothing. Forget it. Want something to eat? I’m starving.”

  Georges-Minh brought some turtle soup and tea back to the room and looked at Dong and the child, starting with their eyelashes. Like feelers. The way the sun shifted onto the bed, the sheets. Onto her body. Bodies. Two of them in his life now. Arms. Fingers. Hands. The way their fingertips touched. Their chests. They rose up and down in sleep: the loveliness of breath. The sunlight glinted on her hair, which slithered black against white on the pillow.

  The baby’s lips were parted slightly, allowing just enough room for a sigh. His legs were bent at the knee, forming a circle with his legs. His light seemed to radiate outward from within, lighting the room and casting a warm glow different from the sun’s, more vivid, redder somehow, on the furniture, Dong’s face, the floor.

  From their window he could see the walls of the Imperial City. Every schoolboy knew it had taken more than twenty thousand workmen to build those walls, and enough land for eight villages lay within them. Inside, the Emperor Duy Tan, a child in king’s clothes, ruled—Georges-Minh had seen postcards—“L’empereur Duy Tan, en costume de cour”—from his 1907 coronation: the poor little puppet, the folded hands, the tiny shoes, the serious brow. The lost eyes looking not into the camera but at a point beyond the photographer’s shoulder, at a presence in the corner of the room as if at a wild animal, a sorcerer who held back a tiger on a chain saying, “You know what will happen if I let go!” Poor Duy Tan. Pawn of the French, whose father had gone insane because of the spies that followed him even in his own castle. But who knew if the story was true? The only fact not open for debate was the sad little eyes in the postcard.