The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  T admires the Bùi Xuân Phái paintings he remembers—the three street scenes hanging on the cracked part of the south wall. Phái’s pictures of the streets of Hanoi look so very different from the streets today. They are empty and grey, without food stalls or motorcycles or markets or shops displaying shiny items or windows draped with red lanterns and colourful fabric.

  “Was it really like this?” T remembers asking his father when he saw these paintings for the first time.

  “This is the Hanoi I knew,” he had said.

  The Hanoi Ts father knew looked dead.

  They say Bùi Xuân Phái was so poor that he had to pull the gold caps off his teeth in order to pay the rent. Now his work is being sold to foreigners for thousands and thousands of dollars. T wonders if Mr. Võ has any idea how much the works on his walls would be sold for in one of those fancy new galleries. But Mr. Võ would never sell the pieces; he would not get rich off the backs of friends who died in poverty.

  Mr. Võ shuffles forth from the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’m not serving any more today, son.”

  T has to remind him of who he is—Ðạo’s grandson, Bình’s son.

  “Ah. Yes, of course,” says Mr. Võ. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since you were a boy. How is your father? I hear he is doing very well as a carpenter. And what are you up to these days?”

  T pulls a card from his back pocket and hands it to Mr. Võ.

  “Very impressive,” says Mr. Võ as he reads it.

  Mr. Võ leads T on a clockwise turn around the room, recalling the names of the artists, many of their works unsigned. The names are as well known to him as , the letters of the alphabet, but none of these is Maggie’s father, Lý Văn Hai.

  “Do you still have that big chest in the back?” T asks.

  “I’ve never had the space to display all the art,” says Mr. Võ.

  “Do you think you could show it to me?”

  “Come,” says Mr. Võ, leading him to the living quarters at the back—just a mattress on the floor and the wooden chest, his ancestral altar perched upon it.

  Mr. Võ moves the photo, the fruit and the incense holder aside so that he can open the chest. T kneels down beside the old man, who is lifting out sheets of newspaper stamped with woodblock prints, oil paintings on cracked canvases, delicate paintings on dyed silk, charcoal drawings on brown paper, ink drawings and pencil sketches done on rough paper and torn cardboard and strips of bark.

  There must be a hundred pieces here, T thinks, as he scans them for names and dates. Portraits, street scenes, sketches of birds and animals, paintings of very nude ladies and still lifes of empty bowls. About half the works are unsigned, but Mr. Võ still remembers most of the artists’ names. T wishes Hng’s memory were half this good.

  Toward the bottom of the pile lies a series of four intricate drawings of tigers. The last of the four is a particularly gory sketch of two tigers mauling each other in a cave. T picks it up to study the detail. The weak light through the doorway suggests there is something written on the other side. He turns the piece of paper over and his heart begins to pound. There’s an inscription on the back that reads For Tan Võ from Lý Văn Hai.

  “Hah!” T exclaims, flapping the drawing in his hand. “I knew it! This is exactly what I was looking for. I know this woman who works at the Metropole, Mr. Võ, she’s his daughter.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember him,” Mr. Võ says, rubbing his eye with the ball of his palm. “So much dust,” he mutters.

  “But, Mr. Võ,” says T, shaking the piece of paper, “Lý Văn Hai dedicated this picture to you.”

  Mr. Võ shrugs and reaches for the sketch. He looks at it blankly. “I’ve been open for sixty-seven years, T. I’ve seen a lot of people come and go through my door.”

  He gestures at the pile of work on the floor. “Time for me to close up shop.”

  As soon as Maggie turns off the shower, she hears a knock at her apartment door. Mrs. Viên must have blown a fuse again. She steps out of the soapy puddle around her feet and wraps a towel around her hair. She pulls on her robe, kicking her abandoned shoes out of the foyer and into the bedroom.

  But it’s not her neighbour. It’s T. “Is everything okay?” she asks. “Is it Hng?”

  “It’s about your father,” says T, his black eyes darting across her face.

  “My father?” Maggie stares at him in confusion.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course I do. Come.” She gestures, leading him down the hall. Maggie sits down at the kitchen table and wraps her arms around her waist, bracing herself for whatever T has to say.

  T leans forward in his chair, places his hands between his knees and says, “I found some of your father’s drawings at Café Võ.”

  Maggie feels as if she has been punched in the stomach. “But I went there a few months ago,” she stammers. “I had a careful look at all the art—not every piece was signed, but I did ask him whether he had any of Lý Văn Hai’s work. He said he must have been one of Hng’s customers. That’s how I found Hng in the first place.”

  “The sketches were in the chest Mr. Võ keeps in his backroom,” says T. “Your father even inscribed one of them to Mr. Võ, but he claims to have no recollection of him.”

  “None at all?” she says. How is it that in the face of concrete evidence her father still remains invisible?

  “The drawings are of tigers,” says T, “big, very muscular. In the last one, two of them are attacking each other—kind of tangled up together like a puzzle.”

  Maggie stands up and rushes out of the room to retrieve her father’s drawings. She returns to the kitchen and unfolds them on the table in front of T, smoothing her palms across them.

  “He always did animals,” she says. “Did they look anything like these?”

  T studies the sketches for a moment. “But these ones look like they were done by a child.”

  “He did them after they destroyed his hands,” says Maggie.

  T sees only lumpen shapes, thick, clumsy lines. She sees vitality and animation, humour and heroic effort. They could not touch him inside, Maggie reminds herself—the last words she had heard her mother speak. They had broken his hands, but not his spirit. That did not come until later.

  “What happened to him in the camp?” Maggie had asked her mother as she lay in the hospital bed after her first stroke.

  “They made him dig pit latrines, Maggie, can you imagine? The indignity of it. Hundreds of them. His only consolation was the time he spent alone underground. He liked the silence and he would carve pictures of animals into the mud walls down there, pictures no one would ever see—pictures that would soon be covered in people’s waste.

  “After a year there was a new guard assigned to watch over the men digging the latrines. A scary one, very rigid, he carried an iron rod he would beat against his hand. One day he hopped down into a pit with your father and held a torch up to the walls.

  “‘You did these?’ the guard asked. What could your father say?

  “‘But they’re brilliant,’ said the guard, ‘Was this your job before?’

  “Your father shrugged.

  “And then you know what he did, Maggie? This new guard who everyone was afraid of? He began to smuggle bits of paper to your father. Dozens of little pieces. And pencils. Your father hid the paper underneath his overalls and kept the pencils under a floorboard in the little wooden hut he shared with the other diggers.

  “One day he was returning to the hut when he was suddenly ambushed. Two senior guards knocked him to the ground and stripped off his clothes. They found a pencil and two drawings and demanded to know where he got the pencil and paper. But he wasn’t going to betray the guard. The two senior guards dragged your father, still naked, over to the barracks where the guard who oversaw work on the pit latrines lived. They dumped your father at this man’s feet. They put one brick on the ground and one in the guard’s hands. And then they ordered the guard
to break your father’s fingers one by one.

  “‘But he’s my best digger,’” the guard said.

  “‘And just as good an artist as you said he was.’”

  So this guard had set her father up and reported him? “But why would he do that?” Maggie had asked her mother.

  “I don’t know. They called me in to clean up the mess afterward. I was just a nurse, only twenty; I knew nothing about setting bones. His hands had been completely shattered. As if they were made of glass. The best I could do was wrap them in bandages. He didn’t complain; he even thanked me. I loved him more than I knew it was possible to love.”

  T looks up at Maggie. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” she says, “it’s okay.”

  A Proper Friend

  As Hng loads up his cart this morning, he finds himself glancing back over his shoulder. Lan’s shack is in darkness. He returns to his own shack, opens the paper box and cuts what remains of Maggie’s lemon meringue pie in half. It is a small piece, days old now, but still a lovely yellow topped with a cheerful burst of cloud. He wraps the slice of pie in banana leaf, piercing it closed with a twig whittled into a toothpick. He loops a piece of string under the twig and ties a knot.

  He makes his way over to Lan’s shack, where he hangs the packet from a beam that extends over her front door, well out of reach of rats. He remembers how he used to do this during the war, but back then it was not fancy pies from the Metropole, it was pondweed and frogs’ legs. Mung beans and larvae and brown bark for tea.

  Hng returns to his waiting cart, plants his feet firmly, shoulder- width apart, and grasps the handlebars. He inhales and braces himself, then exhales with a grunt as he thrusts his load up the slight incline. What an effort; he really is getting old. If he doesn’t keep moving, the spirits of silence will soon be upon him.

  As he rights his cart on the dirt track he can smell the moment just before the sun rises in the air. He is late getting started, but he did not oversleep. How long had he stood upon Lan’s threshold? Perhaps a good deal longer than it had felt.

  When Hng returns home from breakfast duty a few hours later, he finds the banana leaf washed and laid flat to dry upon the threshold of his shack. He glances to his left. She is sitting on a stool sorting through a basket of rice. Picking out small stones and dried insects. She wears a kerchief in her hair like a woman from the country, and she wipes her brow with the back of her hand. She is concentrating on her task. She does not look up.

  When her grandmother died some years after the war, Hng had followed the small, sad procession to the temple to pay his respects. Lan turned around in her great, black mourning cape and looked directly at him. He turned his head and slinked away. It was the last time their eyes had met.

  He wishes he could share what is in his heart in this moment. I remember some of Ðạo’s poetry, he would tell her. I remember some of Ðạo’s poetry because of a girl who reminds me of you.

  Maggie follows T up the street, motorbikes moving like purring cats beside them, navigating the distance by means of invisible whiskers. It is the dinner hour and people have thrown the wooden doors of their houses open to the streets; the guts are fluorescent-lit, on full display, revealing cracked linoleum tiles and blaring televisions. Motorbikes are parked in front rooms and women are crouched on the pavement boiling rice over charcoal fires, frying beef and onions, pouring bubbled dishwater into the street.

  At Café Võ two men are slapping down backgammon pieces with a loud clack on a wooden board and flicking their cigarette ashes over their shoulders, while Mr. Võ swishes a broom over the oily cracked tiles and a fan overhead creaks with each laboured revolution. The place is otherwise empty.

  “T,” Mr. Võ says, as he looks up from the floor. “I don’t see you for years, and then I see you two times in a week? Listen, I’m closing up now.”

  “This lady,” T says, gesturing at Maggie, “I think you’ve met. This is Maggie Lý, Lý Văn Hai’s daughter.”

  “Who?”

  “The artist who did those drawings of tigers you have in the back.”

  “Look, T, I told you last time—you can’t expect me to remember every single person who has ever drunk a cup of coffee in my establishment.”

  “I’d like to show them to Miss Maggie.”

  “Not today, T.”

  “Just very quickly.”

  “It’s not convenient right now.”

  “But—”

  “My wife, T, please, she’s not well,” says Mr. Võ, his hands shaking now. “She’s had an operation. She’s resting in the back.”

  “It’s okay, T,” says Maggie, putting her hand on his wrist. “We’ll come back another time. Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Võ. I hope your wife feels better soon.”

  Maggie tugs T by the shirtsleeve, leading him back out to the sidewalk. “These things take time, T,” she says. “Believe me. After the past year, I know.”

  “But we were so close,” says T, leaning his shoulder against the building.

  “We’re still close,” Maggie says.

  “I don’t know,” says T. “Something didn’t seem right.”

  “It’s probably the fact that I’m a foreigner.”

  T had actually been wondering the same thing.

  “Listen, do you want to get something to eat?” she asks.

  T brightens. “Have you ever had ch cá?”

  Maggie shakes her head.

  T points down an alleyway to their left, taking them deeper into the Old Quarter. When they reach Ch Cá Street, they climb up a narrow staircase to a cramped room on the second floor of an old building. They shuffle past rows of people crammed side by side on wooden benches and sit opposite each other at the end of a long crowded table. As soon as they sit down, the waitress leans in over T’s shoulder, lights a burner and slams a pan of oil down upon it. T orders beer for both of them and the woman promptly drops two bottles onto the table over T’s head before thwacking down plastic plates of cubes of fish and various herbs.

  The oil begins to bubble and T throws the cubes of fish into the pan. He tosses in the dill and stirs it with his chopsticks until it wilts, then lifts the fish onto a bed of vermicelli and dresses it with peanuts and coriander.

  “Taste,” he says, presenting it to her.

  The fish is soft and buttery with oil, earthy with turmeric and collapses perfectly in the mouth.

  “Good?”

  “Delicious,” says Maggie, wiping a drop of oil from her bottom lip. “You know what, T? You’re my first proper Vietnamese friend,” she says in English, as if it’s the only language suitable for such words.

  “I’m not so proper,” he replies shyly.

  The Walls

  Hng owns no land, but by claiming an inch each year, he has come to consider a small rectangular patch in front of his shack as his own. He grows long beans and peppers and onions under chicken wire to prevent feasting by the foraging creatures of night.

  This year he has been blessed with an extravagant addition to his garden, a thing he would not have dared display just a few years ago. It is a flower, some type of orchid with petals like pale pink tongues. He’d come across it while pushing his cart to work one morning. He’d been suspended in an early morning dream of himself and Bình aboard a sampan, Hng pedalling the oars with the thick soles of his feet while Bình dragged aboard net after net teeming with fish. He could still see the floor of the sampan shimmering like liquid mercury when he heaved his cart over the dirt lip of a building site, taking a shortcut through the old Soviet spark plug factory slated for demolition.

  He followed the track through the dirt, stopping short of a mound that the bulldozer had clearly missed. But the shape of the mound was deliberate, he realized, a perfect circle framing this unlikely pink flower. It caused him to exclaim aloud.

  He knelt and freed the flower from imminent death. He replanted her later that day, crowning her queen of a small country of vege
tables.

  The symbolism is not lost on him. Lan was once such a queen.

  Hng is surprised she never married. Surprised she never went in search of somewhere or something better. Her beauty has not faded in all these decades, and even though he has avoided gazing upon it, he has, on occasion, felt it shine upon his back like a warming sun.

  Hng walks down to the pond this afternoon, consciously avoiding glancing over his shoulder. He asks Thuy Doc if he might borrow his sampan for an hour. He feels he has grown stronger in the days since Maggie’s visit; remembering a few lines of poetry, he feels renewed. He’s in the mood to cook something special this evening, and he’s thinking of the delicate warmth of an eel and mushroom soup. He leaves his slippers on the shore and pushes the wooden boat into the water, pulling his muddy feet aboard last. The bottom of the boat is a velvety green, the oars worn smooth by years of sweat and repetitive motion. He rows himself to the centre of the pond, equidistant from the shantytown and the tire factory. The water is as opaque as wood, the sky above, leaden. We are not so adventurous as the other animals, Hng thinks, inhabiting just this narrow band between earth and water, earth and sky.

  He drifts toward the western edge of the pond, dragging a net through the reeds. He looks toward home: his shack and hers, only a metre between them. He’d suggested joining their shacks once, bridging that metre with some combination of wood and bamboo and corrugated tin. It was just after Lan had taken his finger into her mouth. A wall between them had collapsed. He’d felt the urge to tear the rest of them down.

  “If we took out this wall, we would have another room entirely,” he said, leading her into his spare shack.

  She looked around admiringly, acquainting herself with its contents. Where he slept, kept his few clothes, his cooking utensils and his stash of precious magazines.

  She stood so close to him that he could smell the wild garlic on her breath. It made his mouth water, as if in anticipation of a great meal.

  “I’m sure my grandmother would like it very much,” she said. “But, Hng, if we did live together, where would we all sleep?”