I stared at those parts of his face, like I said, and maybe this was a way for me to hide from the snow, maybe the strangeness that he saw in my face had to do with the snow. But when his eyebrows jumped and I did not say anything to explain what was going on inside me, I could see him wondering what to do. I could feel him thinking: Should I ask her what is wrong or should I just ask her for my carry-out? I am not an especially shy person, but I hoped he would choose to ask for the carry-out. I came to myself with a little jolt and I stood up and faced him—he was sitting in one of the stuffed chairs at the next table. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to turn us both from my dreaming. “Do you have an order?”
He hesitated, his eyes holding fast on my face. These were very dark eyes, as dark as the eyes of any Vietnamese, but turned up to me like this, his face seemed so large that I had trouble taking it in. Then he said, “Yes. For Cohen.” His voice was deep, like a movie actor who is playing a grandfather, the kind of voice that if he asked what it was that I had been dreaming, I would tell him at once.
But he did not ask anything more. I went off to the kitchen and the order was not ready. I wanted to complain to them. There was no one else in the restaurant, and everyone in the kitchen seemed like they were just hanging around. But I don’t make any trouble for anybody. So I just went back out to Mr. Cohen. He rose when he saw me, even though he surely also saw that I had no carry-out with me.
“It’s not ready yet,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said, and he smiled at me, his gray beard opening and showing teeth that were very white.
“I wanted to scold them,” I said. “You should not have to wait for a long time on Christmas Eve.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “This is not my holiday.”
I tilted my head, not understanding. He tilted his own head just like mine, like he wanted to keep looking straight into my eyes. Then he said, “I am Jewish.”
I straightened my head again, and I felt a little pleasure at knowing that his straightening his own head was caused by me. I still didn’t understand, exactly, and he clearly read that in my face. He said, “A Jew doesn’t celebrate Christmas.”
“I thought all Americans celebrated Christmas,” I said.
“Not all. Not exactly.” He did a little shrug with his shoulders, and his eyebrows rose like the shrug, as he tilted his head to the side once more, for just a second. It all seemed to say, What is there to do, it’s the way the world is and I know it and it all makes me just a little bit weary. He said, “We all stay home, but we don’t all celebrate.”
He said no more, but he looked at me and I was surprised to find that I had no words either on my tongue or in my head. It felt a little strange to see this very American man who was not celebrating the holiday. In Vietnam we never miss a holiday and it did not make a difference if we were Buddhist or Cao Ðài or Catholic. I thought of this Mr. Cohen sitting in his room tonight alone while all the other Americans celebrated Christmas Eve. But I had nothing to say and he didn’t either and he kept looking at me and I glanced down at my hands twisting at my order book and I didn’t even remember taking the book out. So I said, “I’ll check on your order again,” and I turned and went off to the kitchen and I waited there till the order was done, though I stood over next to the door away from the chatter of the cook and the head waiter and the mother of the owner.
Carrying the white paper bag out to the front, I could not help but look inside to see how much food there was. There was enough for two people. So I did not look into Mr. Cohen’s eyes as I gave him the food and rang up the order and took his money. I was counting his change into his palm—his hand, too, was very large—and he said, “You’re not Chinese, are you?”
I said, “No. I am Vietnamese,” but I did not raise my face to him, and he went away.
Two days later, it was even earlier in the day when Mr. Cohen came in. About four-thirty. The grandfather had just chimed the half hour like a man who is really crazy about one subject and talks of it at any chance he gets. I was sitting in my chair at the front once again and my first thought when I saw Mr. Cohen coming through the door was that he would think I am a lazy girl. I started to jump up, but he saw me and he motioned with his hand for me to stay where I was, a Single heavy pat in the air, like he’d just laid this large hand of his on the shoulder of an invisible child before him. He said, “I’m early again.”
“I am not a lazy girl,” I said.
“I know you’re not,” he said and he sat down in the chair across from me.
“How do you know I’m not?” This question just jumped out of me. I can be a cheeky girl sometimes. My mother says that this was one reason I am not married, that this is why she always talks about the boy I was once going to marry in Vietnam, because he was a shy boy, a weak boy, who would take whatever his wife said and not complain. I myself think this is why he is driving a taxi in H Chí Minh City. But as soon as this cheeky thing came out of my mouth to Mr. Cohen, I found that I was afraid. I did not want Mr. Cohen to hate me.
But he was smiling. I could even see his white teeth in this smile. He said, “You’re right. I have no proof.”
“I am always sitting here when you come in,” I said, even as I asked myself, Why are you rubbing on this subject?
I saw still more teeth in his smile, then he said, “And the last time you were even sleeping.”
I think at this I must have looked upset, because his smile went away fast. He did not have to help me seem a fool before him. “It’s all right,” he said. “This is a slow time of day. I have trouble staying awake myself. Even in court.”
I looked at him more closely, leaving his face. He seemed very prosperous. He was wearing a suit as gray as his beard and it had thin blue stripes, almost invisible, running through it. “You are a judge?”
“A lawyer,” he said.
“You will defend me when the owner fires me for sleeping.” This made Mr. Cohen laugh, but when he stopped, his face was very solemn. He seemed to lean nearer to me, though I was sure he did not move. “You had a bad dream the last time,” he said.
How did I know he would finally come to ask about my dream? I had known it from the first time I’d heard his voice. “Yes,” I said. “I think I was dreaming about the first Christmas Eve I spent in America. I fell asleep before a window in a restaurant in St. Louis, Missouri. When I woke, there was snow on the ground. It was the first snow I’d ever seen. I went to sleep and there was still only a gray afternoon, a thin little rain, like a mist. I had no idea things could change like that. I woke and everything was covered and I was terrified.”
I suddenly sounded to myself like a crazy person. Mr. Cohen would think I was lazy and crazy both. I stopped speaking and I looked out the window. A jogger went by in the street, a man in shorts and a T-shirt, and his body glistened with sweat. I felt beads of sweat on my own forehead like little insects crouching there and I kept my eyes outside, wishing now that Mr. Cohen would go away.
“Why did it terrify you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, though this wasn’t really true. I’d thought about it now and then, and though I’d never spoken them, I could imagine reasons.
Mr. Cohen said, “Snow frightened me, too, when I was a child. I’d seen it all my life, but it still frightened me.”
I turned to him and now he was looking out the window.
“Why did it frighten you?” I asked, expecting no answer.
But he turned from the window and looked at me and smiled just a little bit, like he was saying that since he had asked this question of me, I could ask him, too. He answered, “It’s rather a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course I did.
“It was far away from here,” he said. “My first home and my second one. Poland and then England. My father was a professor in Warsaw. It was early in 1939. I was eight years old and my father knew something was going wrong. All the talk about t
he corridor to the sea was just the beginning. He had ears. He knew. So he sent me and my mother to England. He had good friends there. I left that February and there was snow everywhere and I had my own instincts, even at eight. I cried in the courtyard of our apartment building. I threw myself into the snow there and I would not move. I cried like he was sending us away from him forever. He and my mother said it was only for some months, but I didn’t believe it. And I was right. They had to lift me bodily and carry me to the taxi. But the snow was in my clothes and as we pulled away and I scrambled up to look out the back window at my father, the snow was melting against my skin and I began to shake. It was as much from my fear as from the cold. The snow was telling me he would die. And he did. He waved at me in the street and he grew smaller and we turned a corner and that was the last I saw of him.”
Maybe it was foolish of me, but I thought not so much of Mr. Cohen losing his father. I had lost a father, too, and I knew that it was something that a child lives through. In Vietnam we believe that our ancestors are always dose to us, and I could tell that about Mr. Cohen, that his father was still dose to him. But what I thought about was Mr. Cohen going to another place, another country, and living with his mother. I live with my mother, just like that. Even still.
He said, “So the snow was something I was afraid of. Every time it snowed in England I knew that my father was dead. It took a few years for us to learn this from others, but I knew it whenever it snowed.”
“You lived with your mother?” I said.
“Yes. In England until after the war and then we came to America. The others from Poland and Hungary and Russia that we traveled with all came in through New York City and stayed there. My mother loved trains and she’d read a book once about New Orleans, and so we stayed on the train and we came to the South. I was glad to be in a place where it almost never snowed.”
I was thinking how he was a foreigner, too. Not an American, really. But all the talk about the snow made this little chill behind my thoughts. Maybe I was ready to talk about that. Mr. Cohen had spoken many words to me about his childhood and I didn’t want him to think I was a girl who takes things without giving something back. He was looking out the window again, and his lips pinched together so that his mouth disappeared in his beard. He seemed sad to me. So I said, “You know why the snow scared me in St. Louis?”
He turned at once with a little humph sound and a crease on his forehead between his eyes and then a very strong voice saying, “Tell me,” and it felt like he was scolding himself inside for not paying attention to me. I am not a vain girl, always thinking that men pay such serious attention to me that they get mad at themselves for ignoring me even for a few moments. This is what it really felt like and it surprised me. If I was a vain girl, it wouldn’t have surprised me. He said it again: “Tell me why it scared you.”
I said, “I think it’s because the snow came so quietly and everything was underneath it, like this white surface was the real earth and everything had died—all the trees and the grass and the streets and the houses—everything had died and was buried. It was all lost. I knew there was snow above me, on the roof, and I was dead, too.”
“Your own country was very different,” Mr. Cohen said.
It pleased me that he thought just the way I once did. You could tell that he wished there was an easy way to make me feel better, make the dream go away. But I said to him, “This is what I also thought. If I could just go to a warm climate, more like home. So I came down to New Orleans, with my mother, just like you, and then we came over to Lake Charles. And it is something like Vietnam here. The rice fields and the heat and the way the storms come in. But it makes no difference. There’s no snow to scare me here, but I still sit alone in this chair in the middle of the afternoon and I sleep and I listen to the grandfather over there ticking.”
I stopped talking and I felt like I was making no sense at all, so I said, “I should check on your order.”
Mr. Cohen’s hand came out over the table. “May I ask your name?”
“I’m Miss Giàu,” I said.
“Miss Giau?” he asked, and when he did that, he made a different word, since Vietnamese words change with the way your voice sings them.
I laughed. “My name is Giàu, with the voice falling. It means ‘wealthy’ in Vietnamese. When you say the word like a question, you say something very different. You say I am Miss Pout.”
Mr. Cohen laughed and there was something in the laugh that made me shiver just a little, like a nice little thing, like maybe stepping into the shower when you are covered with dust and feeling the water expose you. But in the back of my mind was his carry-out and there was a bad little feeling there, something I wasn’t thinking about, but it made me go off now with heavy feet to the kitchen. I got the bag and it was feeling different as I carried it back to the front of the restaurant. I went behind the counter and I put it down and I wished I’d done this a few moments before, but even with his eyes on me, I looked into the bag. There was one main dish and one portion of soup.
Then Mr. Cohen said, “Is this a giau I see on your face?” And he pronounced the word exactly right, with the curling tone that made it “pout.”
I looked up at him and I wanted to smile at how good he said the word, but even wanting to do that made the pout worse. I said, “I was just thinking that your wife must be sick. She is not eating tonight.”
He could have laughed at this. But he did not. He laid his hand for a moment on his beard, he smoothed it down. He said, “The second dinner on Christmas Eve was for my son passing through town. My wife died some years ago and I am not remarried.”
I am not a hard-hearted girl because I knew that a child gets over the loss of a father and because I also knew that a man gets over the loss of a wife. I am a good girl, but I did not feel sad for Mr. Cohen. I felt very happy. Because he laid his hand on mine and he asked if he could call me. I said yes, and as it turns out, New Year’s Eve seems to be a Jewish holiday. The Vietnamese New Year comes at a different time, but people in Vietnam know to celebrate whatever holiday comes along. So tonight Mr. Cohen and I will go to some restaurant that is not Chinese, and all I have to do now is sit here and listen very carefully to Grandfather as he talks to me about time.
RELIC
You may be surprised to learn that a man from Vietnam owns one of John Lennon’s shoes. Not only one of John Lennon’s shoes. One shoe that he was wearing when he was shot to death in front of the Dakota apartment building. That man is me, and I have money, of course, to buy this thing. I was a very wealthy man in my former country, before the spineless poor threw down their guns and let the communists take over. Something comes into your head as I speak: This is a hard man, a man of no caring; how can he speak of the “spineless poor"? I do not mean to say that these people are poor because they are cowards. I am saying that being poor can take away a man’s courage. For those who are poor, being beaten down, robbed of rights, repressed under the worst possible form of tyranny is not enough worse than just being poor. Why should they risk the pain and the maiming and the death for so little benefit? If I was a poor man, I, too, would be spineless.
But I had wealth in Vietnam and that gave me courage enough even to sail away on the South China Sea, sail away from all those things I owned and come to a foreign country and start again with nothing. That is what I did. I came at last to New Orleans, Louisiana, and because I was once from North Vietnam and was Catholic, I ended up among my own people far east in Orleans Parish, in a community called Versailles, named after an apartment complex they put us in as refugees. I lived in such a place for a time. The ceilings were hardly eight feet high and there was no veranda, nowhere even to hang a wind chime. The emptiness of the rooms threatened to cast me down, take my courage. In Saigon, I owned many wonderful things: furniture of teak, inlaid with scenes made of tiles of ivory and pearl, showing how the Tru’ng sisters threw out the Chinese from our country in the year 40 A.D.; a part of an oracle bone from the
earliest times of my country, the bone of some animal killed by ritual and carved with the future in Chinese characters; a dagger with a stag’s antler handle in bronze. You might think that things like this should have protected me from what happened. There is much power in objects. My church teaches that clearly. A fragment of bone from a saint’s body, a bit of skin, a lock of hair—all of these things have great power to do miracles, to cure, to heal.
But you see, though the Tru’ng sisters threw the Chinese out, just one year later the Chinese returned and the Tru’ng sisters had to retreat, and finally, in the year 43, they threw themselves into a river and drowned. And the oracle bone, though I did not know exactly what it said, probably dealt with events long past or maybe even foresaw this very world where I have ended up. And the dagger looked ceremonial and I’m sure was never drawn in anger. It would have been better if I had owned the tiniest fragment of some saint’s body, but the church does not sell such things.
And here I sit, at the desk in the study in my house. I am growing rich once more and in the center of my desk sits this shoe. It is more like a little boot, coming up to the ankle and having no laces but a loop of leather at the back where John Lennon’s forefinger went through to pull the shoe onto his foot, even that morning which was his last morning on this earth. Something comes into your head when I tell you this. It is my talent in making wealth to know what others are thinking. You wonder how I should come to have this shoe, how I know it is really what I say it is. I cannot give away the names of those who I dealt with, but I can tell you this much. I am a special collector of things. A man in New York who sells to me asked if I was interested in something unusual. When he told me about this shoe, I had the same response—how can I know for sure? Well, I met the man who provided the shoe, and I have photographs and even a newspaper article that identifies him as a very close associate of John Lennon. He says that certain items were very painful for the family, so they were disposed of and he was in possession of them and he knew that some people would appreciate them very much. He, too, is a Catholic. The other shoe was already gone, which is unfortunate, but this shoe was still available, and, I paid much money for it.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Page 13
