by SJ Naudé
Perhaps it is simple. Perhaps the unlikely friendship is fuelled simply by the fact that Hisashi is Japanese. An old-fashioned kind of exoticising. And, because he so carefully preserves Hisashi’s strangeness in his own mind, he doesn’t really know what Hisashi in turn might be drawing from the friendship.
The Vietnamese extension to the trip is inspired by Philippe, with his second-hand nostalgia for the former French colonial territoire. One notices it immediately in Philippe, the inherited memory. The sedimented layers of historical reminiscence. He is often struck by the way his European friends remember places they have never known.
In Philippe’s flat there are photos of his great-grandfather in Saigon during the Franco-Siamese war of 1893. Another of his grandfather in the first Indochina war. A grandmother in Hanoi, in a garden full of flowers that look familiar to Philippe, but that he cannot name. Inherited artefacts on a sideboard, a drawer full of little objects of silver and silk: handmade trinkets that conjure up a vanished world.
For his European friends, the dead are alive and the vanished places still exist. Loss is in their blood, the boundaries of time permeable. How different it is for him, a naïf from the remote Third World. For the recently dispersed with their encumbering passports. To them everything is new; everything has to be discovered and experienced and lost from scratch.
He pleads, holds out half-teaspoons of soup towards her pursed lips. Nothing.
He does not stop cooking. He reduces the portions so as not to overwhelm her. Smaller and smaller the mounds of food become. At one point he kneels before her bed as before an altar, offering crumbs as if to a sparrow-goddess.
He thought the battle was about getting her to eat, but no. It is, he now realises, about who is caring for whom. She wants to look after him from her bed. Sometimes she is too weak to speak, but she is obsessed with what he is eating, wants to know what he is taking from the freezer and preparing for himself. He is, after all, her child. And he persists in bringing her small offerings.
He stops eating too. He makes sure that she knows it. Refusal is easy.
When he walks out into the garden, the trees are bare. A carpet of pin-oak leaves covers the lawn. Days have passed since he last set foot outside the house.
Hisashi calls. He has made it clear to his Japanese friend, as politely as possible, that he must maintain a reasonable distance, that now is hardly the best moment for a visit. He has sketched only the broad outlines of the situation. Even so, Hisashi calls him once a day. He doesn’t say much. Just calls and then waits for him to initiate the conversation.
‘As I said, Hisashi, I’m sorry I can’t show you around. It just isn’t possible at the moment.’
‘I’m managing. I have a car. I have a hotel. Don’t worry.’
Cheerful silence.
Hisashi’s imperturbable good cheer irritates him, rubbing up against his own despondency. What the Japanese man is doing in this dull provincial place he cannot fathom. There’s nothing to see here. Nothing to learn. Nothing to lift the heart. One does not travel here to civilise oneself.
By the time their trip to Asia comes around, Hisashi has already moved back to Tokyo, where he now works at the Alliance Française. He himself is still in London. They fly out to Vietnam: one from the west, the other from the east. They meet in Hanoi. They book into a modern hotel. The air is grey and murky. The streets are rivers of scooters. When you cross, the scooters open around you like currents around an island. Hisashi is mistaken for a Vietnamese, even though he is in fact too large to be either Japanese or Vietnamese. He is from the southernmost corner of Japan, from the countryside, not far from Nagasaki. Peasant stock. His forebears were scorched brown on the watery rice paddies. Over centuries their feet have become waterlogged, swelled and lost their shape. Hisashi is heavy, bigger than he. Dark. His feet fleshy.
They want to do different things. He wants to visit the art museum, take pictures of the Buddhist-Communist kitsch of Ho Chi Minh’s grave and the French colonial buildings, visit the street with dog restaurants. Hisashi wants to sleep during the day and then wander around endlessly at night observing people, visiting karaoke bars and drinking Vietnamese coffee in cafés filled with teenagers. Before long, misunderstandings arise. Hisashi’s English is surprisingly limited for someone who has lived in London for a few years. Sometimes they try to converse in French, but Hisashi’s French is even worse than his own.
During the day he goes about on his own, Hisashi staying behind at the hotel. He goes into a dusty shop selling Communist propaganda posters from the old days. He buys one inciting the young proletariat to make pig farming the future of the socialist Vietnamese state. The poster shows a young man and a young woman, both of implausible proportions, the perspective from below, rays of sunlight fanning out behind them. Each is clutching a heroic piglet under the arm. Each with a fist in the air.
That evening, when they are out walking, two Vietnamese girls on a scooter drive right up to them on the pavement and offer themselves in shrill tones, shouting out prices in English for a menu of obscene acts. He holds himself aloof to get rid of them, but Hisashi banters with them. Hisashi confuses them because he looks vaguely Vietnamese, but doesn’t speak Vietnamese. The situation becomes increasingly uncomfortable. He walks ahead on his own. The girls heckle him from behind.
Later, back in the hotel, he takes a shower. When he comes out of the bathroom, Hisashi is sitting on the bed wrapping a few trinkets that he has bought on a street somewhere. When he comes closer, he sees that the strips of paper being used for the wrapping are torn from the propaganda poster he bought earlier.
‘What the hell, Hisashi?’
He mentions what he paid for the poster. Hisashi looks astonished, hurt.
‘Thought it was just a piece of newspaper. Forgive me.’
Hisashi remains sheepish for the rest of the evening. The Japanese man makes himself small, watching him furtively. He withholds forgiveness.
He is relieved when they leave Hanoi, but he resents not being on his own. He doubts whether they will complete this trip together.
A respite, a fragile ceasefire. He makes his mother’s bed with her best linen. A handwoven blanket, white as snow. Things she has not used since her wedding day. Up to now she has been sleeping on the sheets on which his father died a few years before.
He washes her hair. Every thirty seconds she has to take a break. He holds her hand mirror in front of her while she brushes her hair and applies make-up, for the first time in a week. She rests between every movement. He rubs foundation lightly over her upper cheek with his forefinger. His stupid fingers are becoming cleverer.
Then they intensify, the skirmishes. He tries to veil his attempts at feeding her as an extension of the freshening of the bed. He takes out the best porcelain, silver-coated cutlery. Heirlooms unused not only by his parents, but also their parents. He arranges a delicately embroidered linen cloth on a tray. He does his best with the cooking.
She awaits her tormentor at every mealtime. One can sense the tension in the air when the aromas float from the kitchen to the bedroom.
‘I can’t digest the food,’ she says softly. ‘It’s physically impossible, surely you know that.’
Once or twice, when he feeds her, she does eat a mouthful or two. It gives him an opening, creates a precedent. The battle becomes increasingly determined, the object of it progressively smaller. Now sometimes just a grain of rice, a bread crumb. A sugar crystal.
An unequal battle, he realises. But he does not relent. He towers above the bed, the light behind him. She is lying in his shadow. Her own shadow has already departed.
I will match you, he decides; what you eat, I will eat. Gram for gram. Morsel for morsel.
Sometimes she asks him to put on some music. Always the same. Medieval German church music. He considers trying to get her to ingest something while it is playing. Perhaps her resistance is lowered then. He sees how her face relaxes while she is listening, knows he would be
able to catch her unawares with a spoonful, even two. He decides against it. He cannot assail her last redoubt.
He walks out into the garden, looks up.
These days have a barely audible undertone, like the music she listens to, an underlying note that is sustained and trance-inducing. A divine presence is thus made audible, say those who are knowledgeable about such music. He thinks it is the sound of breath forced through the vocal chords while the body is disintegrating. The sound of inconsolability.
They are in a flat-bottomed boat, he and Hisashi, on a wide, brown river. A small, wrinkled chestnut-coloured woman with a Vietnamese straw hat is rowing. Every now and then she jabbers as if they can understand her. Otherwise just silence and water against oars. They are a half-day trip away from Hanoi, in the mountains. The river meanders among massive rock peaks, overgrown with foliage in the mist. Palm trees, water buffalo. The destination is the Perfume Pagoda – the forty-ninth temple. En route they will pass forty-eight other temples. On the banks amidst the bulrushes. On stilts above the water. Between treetops. Against slopes. Simple temples of antique wood, larger ones in the Chinese style. Old and new. One by one they slide past. He is counting.
It is a Buddhist holiday. The river is packed with boats overloaded with pilgrims. On a normal day, the route up the mountain to the cave where the Perfume Pagoda is located takes, say, three-quarters of an hour. Not today. Where they moor, thousands of pilgrims are congregating under strings of small multicoloured flags.
They move with the crowd. Here too everyone seems to think that Hisashi is Vietnamese. He himself is also attracting attention. Some pilgrims have never seen a Westerner. They point at him and laugh, holding their hands in front of their mouths, touching his shaven hair. They think he is a monk, he imagines, or perhaps a thin, pale Buddha, sliding in the mud. He repels the pilgrims’ attention with a stony face. Hisashi is patient and acquiescent, giggling with the people.
The path is becoming steeper, and narrower. He has to cling to the roots of trees. Among the pilgrims there are ancient, shrunken figures. They can hardly stand upright, are being dragged towards the peak by the current of people. Hisashi picks up a child who looks as if she is going to be crushed. She immediately smiles at him, strokes his face.
The path is becoming increasingly slippery. The pressure is forcing the breath from his lungs. Everything is coming to a standstill. The bodies pressed against him smell of something he doesn’t know. A stampeding disaster is imminent, he thinks. And yet an unfamiliar kind of patience and tolerance reigns. The wind is playing through the prayer flags over the path.
‘Enough,’ he says to Hisashi. ‘Meet you at the bottom later.’ He slips and stumbles through the crowd, against the current, to the foot of the mountain.
The world is shrinking. His routes are contracting: from his mother’s bedroom to the kitchen to the garden to his own bedroom. Now and again to a shop. Only the order of the destinations varies.
He is sleeping in the bedroom right above hers. It is only her rising cloudlets of warm breath that hold him up, he thinks in the moment before sleep overtakes him. He holds his own breath. In the morning, when he enters her room, the winter sun is falling over her white sheets. She does not want him to draw the curtains at night; she wants to see the sun for as long as it shines.
When he is not with her, he thinks of her as tumbling – with the sluggish, unnatural movements of an astronaut drifting away from a ship. But that is not how it is. She is just lying there, entirely still, hands under her chin, angled at the wrists like a mouse’s feet. There is a bell to ring when she needs him, but she has never used it. During the night, through his sleep, he listens for the tinkling, should it ever come.
She is saying something. He has to listen with his ear against her lips.
‘Terrible pain,’ she says. ‘Deep. From underneath the foundations, from the soil.’
On a different occasion: ‘A barbel,’ she whispers, ‘in the sludge.’ Nothing further.
He exchanges her morphine plaster for one with a higher dosage, 50 micrograms.
Later that morning, for the first time in more than a week, she asks for food. She would like some cottage pie, she says. A reconciliatory moment, something she can still do for him. Or perhaps it’s a cruel trick, a new tactic. If it is that, it’s working. His chest fills with bright light at the mere thought of her asking for something, even though he knows in his heart of hearts she will not eat it. He goes out to buy tomatoes and potatoes. He drives to the shop at speed, then rushes back. Out of the packed freezer he takes lean mince. He leaves it to thaw in the sun on the veranda.
He sits down inside. He looks around him, tries to imagine how her absence will change every object, every piece of furniture and every ornament. He tries to imagine how a world without her would look.
He gets up and goes outside, feels the mince. It’s half-thawed. Watery blood is dripping onto the floor tiles. When he comes back inside and looks up, she is sitting on the sofa where he has just been, in his stead. Like her own future ghost. He is startled. He blinks.
‘Hello,’ she says softly, all innocence.
One corner of her mouth twitches into a little smile. She has noticed his consternation and patently understands what he is thinking. It’s the last time, he thinks, that she will remember how to smile.
Late afternoon the phone rings. The landline this time. Hisashi. He should never have given out the number.
‘I’m here now.’
‘Where?’
‘In a guest house.’
‘Where?’
The new lodgings, it turns out, are just around the corner.
Why? he wants to ask, but he contains himself. He curses himself for ever giving out the address. He does not invite him to the house, but agrees to meet him somewhere nearby for coffee.
‘Unfortunately, I have only ten minutes,’ he tells Hisashi.
They meet at a coffee shop in a shopping centre where the muzak and human noises drift up to the high glass ceilings, creating a constant undertone.
‘Do you remember Philippe?’ Hisashi asks. ‘He is dead.’
‘What? When? I didn’t hear.’
‘Month ago. Someone at the Alliance mentioned. Somewhere in Asia, drowned in a hotel swimming pool.’
He wants to hear more, but that is all Hisashi knows. What a banal end, he thinks. Too much champagne in the blood, perhaps – the accumulated residue of years of sipping the nectar of European civilisation. There is silence while Hisashi chews his cake.
‘I can help you here,’ Hisashi says in between crumbs. ‘Allow me.’
He is instantly furious. How dare he? What is it that’s driving this clumsy Japanese man’s behaviour, that’s keeping him here? Is there nothing, or no one, waiting for him in Tokyo?
‘No, Hisashi, you can’t.’
‘Come on, let me help.’
Does the man have the thick hide of a walrus?
From the Perfume Pagoda they travel to the coast, to Halong Bay. Dragon Bay. A large expanse of water, with two thousand islands. The islands resemble the rock peaks inland around the Perfume Pagoda. Steep and pointed, rising like mountains from the water, tropically overgrown. In between, wooden junks are navigating like warships: sails aloft, dragon heads spewing flames at the bows. He and Hisashi negotiate a price and sail out on a junk. They get a cabin. They will spend the night on the water.
The air is murky and turbid. Some little islands have inlets with floating villages. Rows of floats with wooden houses and moored boats. A woman is sitting on her knees on the edge of a float, gutting fish. Scales drift away from her in silver patterns. She bobs up and down in the junk’s wake, not looking up.
The anchor is dropped. Kayaks are lowered into the water. He and Hisashi row around one of the islands. On one side is a low entrance, so that, at ebb tide, one can only just row through. You have to pull your head into your shoulders, the rocky roof against your crown. When you can tilt your face to the sun
again, you gasp: a perfectly round lake, inside the islet.
‘This island is a doughnut!’ Hisashi says, and laughs.
Steep, tropically overgrown slopes around the lake. Absolute silence. Something moving in the hanging branches. A tail appearing and disappearing amidst the foliage. He has read about the generations of shy monkeys that spend their lives here. They know every tree, every branch, even before they are born, a map of the slopes etched into their genes. He cannot get a proper view of any of them. Just flickerings of movement from the corner of the eye.
He hears a splash behind him. Then silence. When he looks around, Hisashi’s kayak is lying bottom up. The boat is in the middle of the lake. Ripples move towards the edges and the water settles again. Only he is left. And the invisible monkeys.
For a moment he enjoys the peace. Then he takes a deep breath, rolls over and dives down into the cold water. He gropes around, grabs onto a soft arm. He drags the weight to the surface. At least the fatty are lighter in water. Hisashi gulps for air. He bursts out laughing, spluttering and coughing. He himself finds nothing to laugh about.
Rowing back, they are chilled to the bone. In their cabin, he and Hisashi take turns in the shower. ‘You first,’ Hisashi says. His eyes are shiny.
His throat constricted earlier at the thought of the two of them together in this little cabin, but a calmness has come over him now. He is being emptied; his thoughts fill with water. He showers, wraps himself in a blanket. Hisashi takes too long and his shower is too hot. Steam fills the small room. The Japanese emerges, naked and shiny like a seal. He looks at the large smooth surfaces of the dark body. It is the first time he has thought of Hisashi as sensual. Hisashi stands there smiling; steam keeps rising from him. Hisashi stays standing like that until he pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders and walks out onto the deck.
