MEMORIES from the EAST

by Abdulla Kazim

  “You heard something, eh? From Ah Cy, I guess.”

  I nodded.

  “That motherfucker mother. Selling her daughter’s happiness for the sake of her own. Who would give money to a guy to play with her daughter! I needed money, you see. I know her crazy daughter is very hurt and desperate now, but I am not the one responsible. I felt the true feelings of Qiuyue, and I was sad about it. I wouldn’t hurt anybody, but I was in need of money. The mother, unsatisfied with whatever lies she brought upon her daughter, tried even to throw herself on me one night before recalling that I am…”

  “Gay?” I added, almost in a broken voice filled with shyness.

  “Gay,” he replied. He lowered his head for a couple of seconds before raising it up again. “But I am not embarrassed about what I am. I am proud of myself. I am sure God is proud of what I am as well. He is the creator.” He paused again while his eyes rested on me. I could see thin layers of water in them. “I have tried to change and be what I am not. I wished to be a man with the usual feelings and desires, but I just failed. God hurt me in a very hideous way.”

  His lower left eyelid was almost full of water. Realizing that, he put one finger underneath it, pressed it in, and wiped it dry.

  “A few years ago I thought my desires towards men were just not real and that once I was with a girl in bed, my wild desires would awaken. Based on this optimism, I approached a girl, though nothing inside me was pushing me towards her. A few conversations led us to exchange our numbers. Eventually it all resulted in deciding to exchange our real sexual desires. We agreed on it together and arranged our venue. My inner self told me that I was making a mistake, but I refused to listen. I kept telling myself that I would please that girl, arouse her and give her the best satisfaction, and please myself. I have been watching porn since I was twelve, and I memorized the styles and positions. But once we were alone, the girl did all sorts of seduction tricks she had mastered, but she failed to arouse me the slightest bit. My optimistic venture ended there with her. But I didn’t give up there, and I tried a few more times, filling myself with the false belief of being a man. But, you see, nothing worked. When Qiuyue came into my life, I had already given up on trying anymore; I acted purely for money. God left me to the wild.” He sniffed, and traces of water in his nose were clear; he was emotional.

  “God left me too to the wild,” I said and returned to the workout area.

  17

  Trinh was very excited to go back to her country. She said that it had been almost four years since she had left. But I could read nervousness in her eyes as she talked to me about her longing to go back to Vietnam. One day before our travel, she asked me to accompany her to the market to buy some clothes.

  It was five in the afternoon when we met at a local post office as agreed. Her style hadn’t changed yet, but the white paint on her face was a bit lighter. She stopped first at a shop selling accessories. She bought a few hair ties, hair clips, and head bands. They were just simple black and dark brown. Next she stopped me at shop selling dresses. We went in together. She asked the salesman for some long casual straight dresses. The guy started picking clothes and showing them to her. My eyes roamed around the shop, and one dress caught my attention. It was short-sleeved and floral-printed. I caught it in my fingers and could sense blends of cotton in it. I let my imagination picture how beautifully it fitted Trinh with her slender body, unpainted face, and semi-curled hair.

  “Gerald,” Trinh called.

  I turned my head and saw her coming towards me, holding a dress in her hand. She was about to show it to me when she saw me holding that floral dress.

  “Wow, where did you find this,” she said, while handing the dress she was holding to the salesman.

  She stood next to me and removed the dress from its hanger and held it with her hands from each side of the shoulders. Then she attached the dress to her body and the small hump on her chest bumped out against it. It fitted her as perfectly as I had imagined. She walked to the nearest mirror and smiled to herself.

  “Does it look good?” she turned to me and asked.

  I nodded. “Aren’t you going to try it on?” I said.

  She thought for a while, looking at the dress in her hand. I could read the answer from her face. She wouldn’t try it on for the reason that it might not look good with her clown-painted face. She smiled at me one more time, but it was a shaky smile.

  “I will try it later. I am sure it will fit me. I am content with it.”

  She bought four of the same dress, but in different colours. She dragged me then to a ladies’ underwear shop. I stood outside while she went in. I was a little shy to go in for no clear reason. Trinh looked at me and beckoned me to come in. I warded off my shyness and obeyed her order.

  I was inside and just behind her, and yet she kept looking at me from time to time, I believe to make sure I hadn’t run away. Going to the bra section first, she stopped in front of a long desk with multiple squares on the top. Each square section contained coloured collections of a type of bra. There was the trainer bra, the minimiser, the soft cup, the demi cup, the peephole, the nursing, the padded, and the push up. What a big collection! Some of the types I didn’t even know about. Looking at her breast size, I would suggest a simple trainer bra without pad, but after going through many of the types, even the nursing one, she decided at last to go for a simple padded one. It was a wise decision, as it would give her small breasts a fuller shape without additional lift. She added to the four bra sets four pink panties—two thongs and two hipsters.

  She was now finished with her shopping, and she asked me to drop her home so that she could sleep and wake up for tomorrow’s travel. We walked out among the crowd in the market area. With a sudden flip of my head to the left, my eyes caught a shadow of Fang, dressed in dark clothes, walking among the crowd not so far from me. I could recognize her from her side view, plainly beautiful. I stopped where I stood and kept staring at her till she disappeared. My heart beat with some sort of brightness that I wasn’t used to, but that brightness faded fast with the belief that it was just a false image of a dead passion.

  “Anything wrong?” asked Trinh.

  I turned to her and shook my head in silence. She smiled, and we walked together to her apartment. All the way there, my mind didn’t stop telling and swearing that that shadow was the real shadow of Fang. I tried telling myself that I didn’t care if that person was really Fang. She was part of a past that I had tried to escape, but it bothered me that it proved me wrong. I had to force myself to veil the memory of her in my mind; I was to focus on Trinh and my journey with her.

  I entered the apartment after her. A few girls were talking and sharing a bottle of wine. Papers and books were scattered around them. The living room was occupied by those nasty creatures, and they gave us with silent suspicious looks that roused fear in Trinh and disregard in me for their characters. I returned a casual gaze, and the talk among them just fell dead. Trinh held me by my fingers and pulled me to her room.

  It was very tidy, her room. The personality she portrayed to the outside world bore no relation to her room. Different sorts of rectangular portraits were hanging on the wall, and they all belonged, I suspected, to the tradition of her country. A small Buddha statue sat on a tiny rack in one corner at the height of my shoulders. Its dark-brown complexion concealed it well in the dark, but its face was illuminated all of a sudden with greyish-green. I could see that it served more than one purpose—as a light and as a religious symbol.

  “Don’t you bother about those girls,” she said, pulling out her bag that was already packed for the journey.

  “I am not, but you are,” I said.

  “I don’t want to pick any fight with them.”

  She unzipped the bag and slid in the new items she had bought without removing them from their plastic bags.

  “We will m
eet tomorrow, I guess,” she said, zipping the bag.

  “Why don’t you come and stay in my room for the night?” I suggested. “It will be faster leaving together to the airport.”

  It was a very bad excuse, I guess. But I believed that I didn’t have to explain it; she would have accepted my suggestion anyway. I needed the warmth of her body for the night, and I got it.

  18

  The travel time in the plane was for Trinh just a chance to sleep. She had a brown neck rest placed around her neck in the shape of a funny pig. On the left side, it showed “LOVE PIGGY” stitched in pink. The funny thing about it wasn’t the round shape of its ears, but its curly tail that resembled a snail.

  Trinh didn’t wear any makeup that day, and all the small complicated plaits on her head were removed and her hair fell, semi-curled onto her shoulders. I admit having some unknown feelings for her. She was a rare beauty concealed from others but not from me. No one, knowing her earlier appearance, would ever believe that she was the same Trinh they used to get sick of seeing. She was the pride of my journey to Vietnam.

  The night before our travel, she handed me a piece of newspaper just before we went to bed. It contained news about a house set on fire by a stranger. The report was headlined “DEATH HOUSE ON FIRE”. It briefly explained the background of the house with a brief of each of my parents and the tragic event that led to the house being abandoned. I could see Trinh having her suspicions about me being part of that torn-up family and being the one accused of setting the house on fire. Her doubts turned into belief as I ripped that piece of paper into very small pieces and piled them under the bed. She didn’t ask any more questions, and I didn’t provide any free answers.

  My one year and seven months stay in Vietnam was a joyful time, during which I worked on a farm and did some paintings of local views and traditions of the country. I also learned there the basics of working with clay, and I started making some shapes, but nothing was perfect, and I was given no chance to perfect them because the old lady I worked with, the owner of a clay-making hut, died, leaving behind that small business to be fought over among her three sons and two daughters; the old lady had always complained about these people and described them as lazy and greedy.

  Trinh owned a beautiful little hut among many that resembled it either in shape or design. I used to get confused which hut was Trinh’s, and it was only the neighbours’ understanding and respect for me that allowed me to avoid conflict, as many times I entered a hut to discover that it wasn’t hers. One time I entered a hut and came across a couple who were at the level of intimacy that leads to intercourse.

  The times I stayed in the rural area, I slept with Trinh. We shared the same wooden bed with no intimacy. As I said before, I wouldn’t approach any girl with my sexual desires in any way unless I was invited to. She liked our relationship to be casual, and I didn’t violate her wish. Her neighbours would ask her about me, and she would say that I was her boyfriend.

  The openness of the green landscape opened up the creativity of my paintings. I soon found a shop in the city that agreed to display my paintings, and I was getting paid fair enough for them. Going back and forth to the city wasn’t a fast journey, and so, when I was in city, I used to rent a room for stay for a day or more. Being away from Trinh also let loose my attraction towards other town girls, and there were many pretty ones. As always, I was getting looked at with eyes in which I could read attraction.

  I never was in peace with the eyes of the daughter of the old man I used to sell my paintings to. Whenever I visited the store, and upon hearing my voice through the thin wood layer that separated the store from the rest of the three rooms at the back of it, she would step in beside her father, and all her fantasies would emerge. On the first few occasions I observed those scanning eyes of hers, I just ignored them, but when they continued to recur, I didn’t resist them. It started with me accepting at last the invitation I received from the old man on every visit for breakfast prepared by his daughter. I went with the daughter to the room that served as a kitchen with an attached bathroom. She served breakfast on the table, and then she put her left hand under the cloth on her right shoulder and started scratching a spot there, and slowly the cloth fell lower and lower.

  My few weeks of sexual fasting broke there. I jumped to my feet and slid my hand under her long grey-black stripped dress and lifted her up, while my other hand wrapped around her to guide her body from falling but towards me. My lips went searching wildly along the open space of her chest, trying to dive deeper with the assistance of my chin that went clearing the path. Then she spoke, with her hands on my head, but I couldn’t get what she was saying. I lifted my eyes to see her pointing at the other room and I understood that she wanted to finish the business we had started in there.

  In that position, I took some steps to the room and dropped her body, with a little flip, in the one empty corner my eyes caught. She stood facing back there while I removed all the unwanted layers of clothes. When I went in her, she put one hand on her knee with a screech that not only hurt my ears but would also attract others’ attention. I covered her mouth with one hand and kept it covered throughout the process. Turning my eyes to the left corner, a big shoulder-high portrait attracted my attention. It was of an old woman dressed all in grey; she wore a light grey dress, and the straps of the dark grey frock and cloth piece were wrapped around her neck. The old lady had her eyes wide open, staring towards me, as if in shock at what she was seeing. It brought a small laugh in my belly.

  I could see that though the daughter of the old salesman was very young, almost seventeen, she wasn’t a virgin. I don’t know what other techniques she used to attract other guys, if she ever did, but I knew her techniques towards me. I also found out that many of the paintings on sale in her father’s store were actually her own paintings. The funny thing was that I never got to know the girl’s name; I didn’t bother asking, and she didn’t bother providing it free. Her father would just call her “daughter”. I don’t know whether to believe that the old man was really her father, as the age difference between them was very great.

  On another occasion when I was in the city again, I took the chance to visit a local video store. When I asked for the English movie There Will Be Blood, the girl, being very busy tallying something on the counter desk, called her assistant. The assistant, Anh, started her welcome with a strange smile that followed a while of pause and gaze. I asked her for the movie, and she asked me to follow her. She wore a tight black T-shirt bearing at the back the name of the shop in yellow text. Her collars were apart with all the three front buttons open, and this created a nice V-shape on her milky chest with the point of the V falling into the darkness of the narrow space between her breasts. Her black pants seemed to me to be intended for sportswear, as its material didn’t seem to be for an official use; it was fairly thin. She stopped at a rack and kneeled down. About twenty per cent of her concealed butt was visible, revealing the yellow T-back panties she had on, and the colour combination of black and yellow gave everything some boldness. Her curled brown-red shoulder length hair smelled of peach. I didn’t know what she used for it, but it smelled fantastic. She stood up straight and handed me the DVD.

  “You can rent anything here,” she said and winked. The fake eyelashes did not suit her face.

  Then she turned back and rested her body on the balls of her feet, sitting adjacent to the rack arranging some tapes. The big attraction in this scene was again her bottom; now almost half the butt was stretching out of the pants. With this delicious scene, I took the necessary pace towards her and slid my finger across the yellow line half the way in and drilled it where it first fitted.

  Instead of getting the expected reactions, I got an unexpected one—a light giggle. But that was the appetite-opening serve, and everything with her followed next. I enjoyed her on the bed. She was sweet and professional, but she wasn’t free. As she said
before, I rented her every time I needed her. Who would mind paying for that beauty!

  Trinh had always been a very good girl and a good example of a straight girl. This was what made me share a room with her for the first year and three months of my stay in Vietnam without having intercourse with her. She was a religious person, and sometimes when I went out with her, she would take me to some temples and even to churches. She said that she believed in one God and that whatever religion one follows, it will lead to the same God, the God of love and forgiveness.

  I used to enter those religious places with her and see people doing their rituals towards whatever they believed might make them closer to God. I admit my heart was touched with some sacred feelings, and a stronger river of sorrow would flow in me. Those feelings would bring back questions about God and the purpose of believing in something, like being always with God. If I had ever been heartless, I turned so because of God. If I had been a lustful person for sex, I had been so because of Him.

  What would you do when you have lost the grip on your life and when you see and feel only death? I am a man with my own path to follow. I am Godless.

  One dark night, Trinh and I dragged an almost broken blue wooden bench with a back rest into the bushes miles away from our cottage. I recall it was a cloudy night. Far in the east, there was mute lightning emerging from time to time with a weak warning about any rain that might be expected. In the west, a half moon looked down towards us through a hole in the dark clouds that seemed to be specially made for it. The weather was mild, with gentle winds floating in between unmeasured intervals. A few grasshoppers were jumping in the grass, and we could only sense their presence when they leaped. Some rested on my feet for a while and tickled the veins there.

  Trinh started talking about God, but I stopped her there asking her to change the subject. She talked about her family. Her father was a very devoted man in what he believed, but though having two girls, Trinh and her younger sister, her parents never got married because of some conflict between the two families that dated to almost fifty years ago. Her father was a fairly rich man, as she said. He owned farms and houses. His quest to make peace between the two families was always rejected, and his wish for marriage remained hanging as just a hope. That hope came to a dead end when the woman was killed in a road accident. The father’s mind now turned to a determination to obtain the corpse of the woman of his life. The family of the woman made an impossible condition for him to satisfy his wish—to pay his entire wealth. The man made it all possible, and he got the corpse in the end, but now he had nothing to live on. Yet the new poverty didn’t kill the man, but that sorrow of love did. Trinh worked different sorts of jobs for the sake of supporting her younger sister. When the younger sister opened her eyes more to the world around her, she chose a new and easy path of life—to be a sex worker. She left Trinh, but she never forgot her older sister; she kept sending her money every month, telling her that she wished to repay all the good things Trinh had done for her. That was how Trinh managed to obtain her college degree.