by Camilla Gibb
He cleared his throat and said nervously, “Well, that would depend.”
“On what would it depend?”
“On whether I am like an uncle to you or more like a husband.”
“A husband,” she responded, but he could not interpret her tone.
Did this shock her or appeal to her, or was it just a simple statement of fact? Had he destroyed everything with one word or set it free?
T has waited a week at Maggie’s insistence, but he can’t stand to wait any longer. He makes his way to Café Võ alone after work one night, a camera stuffed in his back pocket. It is just before 7 p.m. and he stands in the doorway, a sick lump rising from his stomach to his throat. The tables and chairs are stacked in the centre of the room. All the paintings have been taken down; the walls are montages of tobacco-coloured outlines. Sloppy white stripes of fresh paint run from the ceiling to the floor of the south wall, where Mr. Võ is supervising a kid with a paint roller attached to a broom handle. T hopes to God this is nothing more than a renovation.
“Mr. Võ,” says T, “I see you are making some changes.”
“I must prepare for what is to come,” he says sullenly.
“What is to come, Mr. Võ?”
“It’s time for me to sell the shop and take my wife back to our village, where she can spend her last days in peace.”
“I’m sorry to hear your wife is no better,” says T, though he is not so sorry that he refrains from asking about the art. “You’re taking it all with you?”
“I’m selling it,” Mr. Võ says matter-of-factly.
“Everything? Even the stuff in the back?”
“Everything. Life is a circle—just as we are born with nothing so we shall die.”
The room feels terribly hot to T all of a sudden, the air close and chemical. “But who are you selling it to?”
“One of those dealers,” says Mr. Võ with a dismissive wave. “They’ve been after me for years. I will soon have to pay for a funeral. I already owe the money for my wife’s operation. Everything costs too much money these days. Ði mi does not make everybody rich, you know. Some of us it just makes poorer.”
T leaves without another word—his hands clenched, his nails cutting into his palms. He punches the frame of the door as he passes through it, then pounds his way down random streets, his heart and mind competing for most agitated. He chews on some negative integers and finally, nearly an hour later, calms down. He takes shelter from the rain in a crumbling doorway on Tạ Hin Street and spies a tiny bar across the road. He darts between the lanes of traffic and crouches through the door of the bar. The room glows red from the light of paper lanterns, the operative language appears to be Englamese and the music is the kind of rock that old white men like. Places like this make T feel like a tourist in his own town.
He orders a beer from a very pretty waitress who tells him there is no bia hi in this place, only bottles from Germany and places like that. T sips his expensive beer and wonders to whom Mr. Võ might have sold his collection. He’s determined to find out—he doesn’t care how long it takes or whom he annoys along the way. Mr. Võ might need the money, but doesn’t he realize he has just given their history away? What if it all ends up in foreign hands, lost to Vietnam forever?
T pulls his pen and notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and flips through lists of new English words until he reaches a blank page. He draws a line down the middle of the page, making two columns. On the left-hand side he begins to write the names of all the artists he can remember, on the right-hand side, descriptions of the pieces of artwork he can recall hanging on the walls of Café Võ.
He makes his way counter-clockwise around the room in his mind, starting with the three Bùi Xuân Pháis. He moves on to what he remembers seeing in Mr. Võ’s chest, the more dramatic works coming most readily to mind—not just Lý Văn Hai’s tigers, but Nguyn Dip’s Requiem for Uncle H, where a face made of bricks is demolished by a sledgehammer. He remembers a painting of a Russian cosmonaut landing in a rice paddy, several portraits of men with stony faces and bleeding eyes, and a good number of naked ladies.
He taps his temple with his pen, commending himself for his memorization skills. A communist education has its benefits.
T’s mother opens the door for Maggie. Anh is slight and feminine but strong, with prominent veins in her forearms. A single streak of grey begins at her temple and runs the length of her hair, but apart from that suggestion of maturity, she looks barely older than T.
Maggie follows Anh across a fragrant green courtyard into a modern kitchen on the far side. The appliances gleam under the bright fluorescent light and a woven mat covers part of the linoleum floor, evidence of a game of dominoes underway upon it. The Honda Dream II rests on its kickstand in the corner of the room, a faithful member of the family.
T is standing by the table examining his knuckles. He’d sounded very upset on the phone. “I went back to Café Võ,” he says. “Mr. Võ’s wife is dying and he has decided to sell the shop so they can go back to their village.”
“And the art? Is he taking it with him?”
“He sold it all to a dealer.”
Maggie closes her eyes for a second. Her eyelids flutter, those thin membranes struggling to conceal her disappointment. She places her palms on the table to steady herself. “Did he tell you the name of the dealer?”
“He was very vague about the whole thing,” says T. “But, Maggie, I had an idea. I think my father might be able to draw some likeness of one of your father’s pictures if I could describe it to him.” T places his hands on his father’s shoulders, his expression one of mild desperation.
Bình smiles weakly, with humility. “I generally stick to objects,” he says. “Things without movement or expression. But I would be very happy to try.”
Maggie swallows the lump in her throat and takes a seat on a hard wooden chair across the table from Bình. He apologizes for the fact that he has only graph paper. He holds his pencil, ready to interpret his son’s words, but T has some difficulty getting started.
“They live in the mountains, don’t they?” his father prompts. “Not at the very top, but in the woodland areas.”
“They were in a dark cave,” says T. “Maybe it was a cave in a mountain but you couldn’t see the mountain. It was more close up.”
“What shape was the cave?” Bình asks.
“The shape of an eye,” says T. “The tigers are just to the left of the pupil.”
Bình makes a few bold strokes with his pencil.
“How big were they?” Bình asks.
“I don’t know,” says T, shrugging. “Tiger size. They were strong: tearing into each other, their muscles rippling, blood gushing from the neck of the one on the right.”
The concentration on Bình’s face feels familiar to Maggie. The way his eyes dart across the page, his pencil turned horizontally as he assesses proportion. Her father used to do exactly this as he knelt on the floor of their room in Saigon and distracted her from the realities of a war, her arms draped around his neck as he brought a water buffalo to life.
“Now what do you think he wants to eat for dinner?” she remembers her father asking as he leaned back on his heels.
“Dog,” she had said over his shoulder.
“But buffalo don’t like meat, Maggie. You really are an urban girl, aren’t you.”
“What does that mean?”
“From the city. I should teach you about the country. Show you where the things we eat come from. When the war is over we’ll go into the countryside and stay at a farm for a few days. Would you like that?”
That promise alone had made Maggie pray for an end to the war.
“Huh,” Bình finally says, putting down his pencil and holding the graph paper at arms’ length.
Maggie steps round to his side of the table.
“I don’t really know how one captures the emotions of things,” Bình says.
“What do you think it me
ans?” Maggie asks.
“If I knew, I would probably be able to do a much better job for you.”
T examines the page and lists all the things he had neglected to communicate to his father.
Bình tears the top sheet of graph paper off his pad, ready to begin again.
This time, T is more descriptive. He uses his hands to illustrate the degree of the tigers’ entanglement, his face to indicate the width of the one tiger’s open mouth. He describes stalagmites and shadows. Bình’s second attempt is a good deal more detailed as a result.
“I wonder if they ever escape the cave,” Maggie says as they stare at the drawing lying flat on the table.
“I’m going to recover those pictures for you,” says T.
Maggie looks at him and wonders if this is what it might feel like to have a brother. She reaches out to him; he flinches. She reaches out again, grabbing and squeezing his good hand.
Hng’s eel and mushroom soup has just the right consistency and heat. He waits until Lan wanders off to the latrine in the dark before ladling some into a wooden-lidded bowl. He leaves the bowl on the stool that sits on her threshold, making sure it is illuminated by the light of her kerosene lamp.
He sits down in the dark on his own threshold and awaits her return. He hears the scratch of stiff fabric as she bends to pick up the bowl, her exhalation as she sits down, the clack of the wooden lid being shifted and set aside, the dull tap of the spoon against the bowl, her swallow, her contented sigh, the quiet words—is it true? Does he really hear them?—Thank you, Hng.
An Emotional Vocabulary
T is standing at Maggie’s office door wishing that the cuffs of his jeans were not so dirty and that he had thought to splash on some aftershave. “Can I help you?” some guy in uniform had asked as he walked through the lobby. “I have an appointment with Miss Maggie,” T had replied defensively. “She’s expecting me.”
This was not exactly true, but he felt justified in saying it given the urgency of the search for her father’s missing pictures.
“T,” says Maggie, surprised to see him. “Do you have clients at the hotel today?”
“I was just coming to ask whether you have had any luck identifying the dealer.”
“Not yet, T. It’s only been a day. I contacted a professor at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts who specializes in Bùi Xuân Phái’s work. I thought he might be able to help narrow the search down—there are hundreds of dealers throughout Southeast Asia who could be interested in that collection.”
“But, Maggie, this is something of an emergency. I think we need to act now. All the pistons firing. That collection is full of national treasures.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his notebook. He points to the eleven names listed there, including Maggie’s father and Bùi Xuân Phái, and the brief descriptions he has written of more than two dozen pieces of art. “These are the ones I could remember off the top of my head,” he says.
“T,” Maggie says, her eyes twinkling as she draws the notebook toward her. “This is brilliant. Can I make a copy? I’d like to give it to Professor Devereux at the university. I think it could help.”
T hesitates, suddenly feeling territorial. Isn’t the point to keep this work out of foreign hands? “This professor,” he says, “he is not Vietnamese?”
“Vit Kiu,” says Maggie.
“Like you,” says T, feeling deflated.
“Not exactly,” she says. “He sounds very French.”
T stares idly at a painting propped up on the arms of a chair. A man looks out a window, a faint reflection of his face in the glass, a grey sea beyond.
“Do you like that?” Maggie asks.
“I don’t know,” says T, shrugging
“Well, how does it make you feel?”
The confusion must show on his face. “What’s your instinctive reaction?” she asks. “What does your gut say?”
T’s gut doesn’t really speak except when it’s hungry or interested in a girl. His instinct makes suggestions occasionally, but he largely ignores them. “Kind of lonely?” he ventures.
“That’s interesting,” she says with a glimmer of a smile that T doesn’t know how to interpret.
“Am I right?” he asks tentatively.
“It’s not a question of right or wrong, T. It’s subjective.”
Subjectivity is a dangerous business: the party certainly doesn’t encourage anyone to have an independent opinion. But has he not just put his hand into subjectivity’s fire? Does he see loneliness where she sees hope?
“What is your subjective opinion?” he asks.
“It’s like he has lost something or perhaps someone at sea, or maybe he wishes he could be on the other side where he imagines a better life for himself. Whatever the case, something is more compelling out there in that empty space than in the world that surrounds him. You feel his alienation, and yes, it is lonely,” she says.
Hah! thinks T, so I am both subjective and right.
“I know that feeling,” she says. “We probably all do. That’s the power of art. Do you?”
Ôi zi ôi, he thinks, what a question. He clears his throat before answering. “Sometimes by Hoàn Kim Lake you can have thoughts about, you know, life, feeling small, why we are here on earth. It doesn’t matter if all that traffic is honking at your back.”
“Is that loneliness, or existentialism?” she asks.
He opts for loneliness, not knowing the other word. “It’s lonely because these are thoughts you cannot share with anyone.”
“But you have just shared them with me.”
Hng has nodded off while sitting on the grass mat outside his shack, listening to Lan appreciate his soup for a third night in a row, her delicate swallow, her contented sigh. He has slipped into a dream of floating on water. He is lying on his back, the sun high in the sky, dragonflies roosting on his stomach.
“Foreign lady for Mr. Hng!” Van shouts, tearing Hng from his pleasant reverie.
“Goodness gracious, Van!”
“I’m sorry to disturb you again,” says a figure in the dark.
He knows her voice but her face is in shadow. “Come inside, dear, so I can see you,” he says. “If anyone has disturbed me it is this one here. The dim-witted boy thinks I’m deaf.”
Van ignores this, fixated on the box in Maggie’s hands.
“Ah, a lemon meringue pie,” Hng says, nodding at the box himself.
“Not today,” she says, kneeling down beside him and peeling back the lid.
The old man picks up a brown lump between his thumb and forefinger. “It looks very much like a fungus.” He turns the lump around and sniffs it. “Or an animal dropping. Off you go, Van,” Hng says, putting the lump into the boy’s hands and pulling another one from the box.
“It’s called a truffle,” Maggie says. “Try it.”
Hng pulls his lips back and clasps the thing between his dentures, which sink into its molten centre.
“Tastes like neither a fungus nor a turd,” he says, pulling the truffle away from his mouth to examine its interior. “Quite unusual.”
“Have you ever had chocolate?”
“Ah,” he says. “That’s what it is. Not since the French days.”
Maggie reaches into her purse and pulls out a sheet of paper. She unfolds it and lays it across the top of the cake box. “I wanted to ask a favour,” she says.
Hng sucks the chocolate stuck to the roof of his mouth and picks up the flimsy piece of paper. He pats his chest, then says, “Fetch my glasses for me, would you? They’re just inside the door on the little table to your right.”
“Bình drew this for me,” Maggie says, handing Hng his glasses. “Based on a description of a piece of my father’s work.”
Hng raises the picture to his good eye, holding his glasses as if examining a diamond through a magnifying glass. “Huh. He’s good,” says Hng.
“I know. And he says he’s not an artist. Does the drawing mean anything to you?”
“It’s a couple of Indochinese tigers attacking each other in a cave,” Hng says. “Is it in the tiger’s nature to turn on his brother? I don’t know. Perhaps they are too hungry to care, perhaps there has been some betrayal. I would venture that it might be a metaphor. Perhaps we, the Vietnamese, are the tigers, and this is the war we fought amongst ourselves once we were rid of the colonial enemy.”
Hng drops the paper onto his chest. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes.
“Your father obviously did very sophisticated work,” he says. “I would have liked to know such a man. As I’m sure you would have.”
Hng wishes he could offer Maggie something more. He has the sense that it is not an interpretation of the art that she is really after, but rather an interpretation of the artist, the man.
He remains on his stoop after she wanders off in the dark to her waiting taxi. He stares out at the blinking lights on the other side of the pond. “If only I could remember him,” he says aloud.
“The illustrator,” says a disembodied voice in the dark.
He’s not sure if he’s heard this correctly. For decades he has trained himself not to hear her voice, to block out its register. “The illustrator,” he says, reclaiming the word from the ether, taking possession of it just in case.
Hng falls asleep with the word in his mouth, waking to wonder if Lý Văn Hai might have been the one who populated the pages of Fine Works of Spring with bold caricatures and allegorical drawings, pictures Lan used to admire, touching them with the tips of her fingers, inadvertently leaning her back into Hng’s chest as she did so, him notso-inadvertently inhaling her hair.
But how can he possibly prove the illustrator was Lý Văn Hai in the absence of the journal?
As he pushes his cart home later that morning, he thinks about a poem published in that spring volume. “When you find yourself upon the threshold of the door to your new home,” Ðạo had written during the brief but euphoric blush that followed the ’54 revolution. He remembers an illustration of a house, its door open, a welcoming hearth in the room. Hng repeats the words to himself, generating speed, hoping to take a verbal run at that door, skip over the threshold, find the rest of the poem waiting inside.
