A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

by Robert Olen Butler

  And Mr. Lê had taken one more step in his trusting embrace of this new culture. He had bought not only a Chevrolet but a Chevrolet pickup truck, which made him not only American but also a man of Louisiana, where there are many pickup trucks. He did not, however, also purchase a gun rack for the back window, another sign of this place. Perhaps it would have been well if he had, for it was through the back window that the bullet was fired. Someone had hidden in the bed of his truck and had killed him from behind in his Chevrolet and the reason for this act was made very clear in a phone call to the newspaper office by a nameless representative of the Vietnamese Party for the Annihilation of Communism and for the National Restoration.

  And Thng, my son-in-law, said to his youngest son, L’i, “There is no murder weapon.” What I saw was a faint lift of his eyebrows as he said this, like he was inviting his son to listen beneath his words. Then he said it again, more slowly, like it was code. “There is no weapon.” My grandson nodded his head once, a crisp little snap. Then my daughter Lâm said in a very loud voice, with her eyes on me, “That was a terrible thing, the death of Mr. Lê.” She nudged her husband and son, and both men turned their faces sharply to me and they looked at me squarely and said, also in very loud voices, “Yes, it was terrible.”

  I am not deaf, and I closed my eyes further, having seen enough and wanting them to think that their loud talk had not only failed to awake me but had put me more completely to sleep. I did not like to deceive them, however, even though I have already spoken critically of these members of my family. I am a Hòa Ho Buddhist and I believe in harmony among all living things, especially the members of a Vietnamese family.

  After H had reassured me, on that first visit, about the temperature needed to heat Maestro Escoffier’s glaze, he said, “Ðo, my old friend, do you still follow the path you chose in Paris?”

  He meant by this my religion. It was in Paris that I embraced the Buddha and disappointed H. We went to France in early 1918, with the war still on, and we lived in the poorest street of the poorest part of the Seventeenth Arrondissement. Number nine, Impasse Com-point, a blind alley with a few crumbling houses, all but ours rented out for storage. The cobblestones were littered with fallen roof tiles and Quc and I each had a tiny single room with only an iron bedstead and a crate to sit on. I could see my friend Quc in the light of the tallow candle and he was dressed in a dark suit and a bowler hat and he looked very foolish. I did not say so, but he knew it himself and he kept seating and reseating the hat and shaking his head very slowly, with a loudly silent anger. This was near the end of our time together, for I was visiting daily with a Buddhist monk and he was drawing me back to the religion of my father. I had run from my father, gone to sea, and that was where I had met Nguyn Aí Quc and we had gone to London and to Paris and now my father was calling me back, through a Vietnamese monk I met in the Tuileries.

  Quc, on the other hand, was being called not from his past but from his future. He had rented the dark suit and bowler and he would spend the following weeks in Versailles, walking up and down the mirrored corridors of the Palace trying to gain an audience with Woodrow Wilson. Quc had eight requests for the Western world concerning Indochina. Simple things. Equal rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. The essential things that he knew Wilson would understand, based as they were on Wilson’s own Fourteen Points. And Quc did not even intend to ask for independence. He wanted Vietnamese representatives in the French Parliament. That was all he would ask. But his bowler made him angry. He wrenched out of the puddle of candlelight, both his hands clutching the bowler, and I heard him muttering in the darkness and I felt that this was a bad sign already, even before he had set foot in Versailles. And as it turned out, he never saw Wilson, or Lloyd George either, or even Clemenceau. But somehow his frustration with his hat was what made me sad, even now, and I reached out from my bedside and said, “Uncle H, it’s all right.”

  He was still beside me. This was not an awakening, as you might expect, this was not a dream ending with the bowler in Paris and me awaking to find that He; was never there. He was still beside my bed, though he was just beyond my outstretched hand and he did not move to me. He smiled on one side of his mouth, a smile full of irony, as if he, too, was thinking about the night he’d tried on his rented clothes. He said, “Do you remember how I worked in Paris?”

  I thought about this and I did remember, with the words of his advertisement in the newspaper “La Vie Ouvrière”: “If you would like a lifelong memento of your family, have your photos retouched at Nguyn Aí Quc’s.” This was his work in Paris; he retouched photos with a very delicate hand, the same fine hand that Monsieur Escoffier had admired in London. I said, “Yes, I remember.”

  H nodded gravely. “I painted the blush into the cheeks of Frenchmen.”

  I said, “A lovely portrait in a lovely frame for forty francs,” another phrase from his advertisement.

  “Forty-five, H said.

  I thought now of his question that I had not answered. I motioned to the far corner of the room where the prayer table stood. “I still follow the path.”

  He looked and said, “At least you became a Hòa Hào.”

  He could tell this from the simplicity of the table. There was only a red cloth upon it and four Chinese characters: Bào So’n K Hu’o’tng. This is the saying of the Hòa Hào. We follow the teachings of a monk who broke away from the fancy rituals of the other Buddhists. We do not need elaborate pagodas or rituals. The Hòa Hào believes that the maintenance of our spirits is very simple, and the mystery of joy is simple, too. The four characters mean “A good scent from a strange mountain.”

  I had always admired the sense of humor of my friend Quc, so I said, “You never did stop painting the blush into the faces of Westerners.”

  H looked back to me but he did not smile. I was surprised at this but more surprised at my little joke seeming to remind him of his hands. He raised them and studied them and said, “After the heating, what was the surface for the glaze?”

  “My old friend,” I said, “you worry me now.”

  But H did not seem to hear. He turned away and crossed the room and I knew he was real because he did not vanish from my sight but opened the door and went out and closed the door behind him with a loud click.

  I rang for my daughter. She had given me a porcelain bell, and after allowing H enough time to go down the stairs and out the front door, if that was where he was headed, I rang the bell, and my daughter, who is a very light sleeper, soon appeared.

  “What is it, Father?” she asked with great patience in her voice. She is a good girl. She understands about Vietnamese families and she is a smart girl.

  “Please feel the doorknob,” I said.

  She did so without the slightest hesitation and this was a lovely gesture on her part, a thing that made me wish to rise up and embrace her, though I was very tired and did not move.

  “Yes?” she asked after touching the knob.

  “Is it sticky?”

  She touched it again. “Ever so slightly,” she said. “Would you like me to clean it?”

  “In the morning,” I said.

  She smiled and crossed the room and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled of lavender and fresh bedclothes and there are so many who have gone on before me into the world of spirits and I yearn for them all, yearn to find them all together in a village square, my wife there smelling of lavender and our own sweat, like on a night in Saigon soon after the terrible fighting in 1968 when we finally opened the windows onto the night and there were sounds of bombs falling on the horizon and there was no breeze at all, just the heavy stillness of the time between the dry season and the wet, and Saigon smelled of tar and motorcycle exhaust and cordite but when I opened the window and turned to my wife, the room was full of a wonderful scent, a sweet smell that made her sit up, for she sensed it, too. This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers but instead reminded us that flowers were always ready to fall into dus
t, while this smell was as if a gemstone had begun to give off a scent, as if a mountain of emerald had found its own scent. I crossed the room to my wife and we were already old, we had already buried children and grandchildren that we prayed waited for us in that village square at the foot of the strange mountain, but when I came near the bed, she lifted her silk gown and threw it aside and I pressed close to her and our own sweat smelled sweet on that night. I want to be with her in that square and with the rest of those we’d buried, the tiny limbs and the sullen eyes and the gray faces of the puzzled children and the surprised adults and the weary old people who have gone before us, who know the secrets now. And the sweet smell of the glaze on H’s hands reminds me of others that I would want in the square, the people from the ship, too, the Vietnamese boy from a village near my own who died of a fever in the Indian Ocean and the natives in Dakar who were forced by colonial officials to swim out to our ship in shark-infested waters to secure the moorings and two were killed before our eyes without a French regret. H was very moved by this, and I want those men in our square and I want the Frenchman, too, who called H “monsieur” for the first time. A man on the dock in Marseilles. H spoke of him twice more during our years together and I want that Frenchman there. And, of course, H. Was he in the village square even now, waiting? Heating his glaze fondant? My daughter was smoothing my covers around me and the smell of lavender on her was still strong.

  “He was in this room,” I said to her to explain the sticky doorknob.

  “Who was?”

  But I was very sleepy and I could say no more, though perhaps she would not have understood anyway, in spite of being the smart girl that she is.

  The next night I left my light on to watch for H’s arrival, but I dozed off and he had to wake me. He was sitting in a chair that he’d brought from across the room. He said to me, “Ðo. Wake up, my old friend.”

  I must have awakened when he pulled the chair near to me, for I heard each of these words. “I am awake,” I said. “I was thinking of the poor men who had to swim out to our ship.”

  “They are already among those I have served,” H said. “Before I forgot.” And he raised his hands and they were still covered with sugar.

  I said, “Wasn’t it a marble slab?” I had a memory, strangely clear after these many years, as strange as my memory of H’s Paris business card.

  “A marble slab,” H repeated, puzzled.

  “That you poured the heated sugar on.”

  “Yes.” H’s sweet-smelling hands came forward but they did not quite touch me. I thought to reach out from beneath the covers and take them in my own hands, but Ho leaped up and paced about the room. “The marble slab, moderately oiled. Of course. I am to let the sugar half cool and then use the spatula to move it about in all directions, every bit of it, so that it doesn’t harden and form lumps.”

  I asked, “Have you seen my wife?”

  H had wandered to the far side of the room, but he turned and crossed back to me at this. “I’m sorry, my friend. I never knew her.”

  I must have shown some disappointment in my face, for H sat down and brought his own face near mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There are many other people that I must find here.”

  “Are you very disappointed in me?” I asked. “For not having traveled the road with you?”

  “It’s very complicated,” H said softly. “You felt that you’d taken action. I am no longer in a position to question another soul’s choice.”

  “Are you at peace, where you are?” I asked this knowing of his worry over the recipe for the glaze, but I hoped that this was only a minor difficulty in the afterlife, like the natural anticipation of the good cook expecting guests when everything always turns out fine in the end.

  But H said, “I am not at peace.”

  “Is Monsieur Escoffier over there?”

  “I have not seen him. This has nothing to do with him, directly.”

  “What is it about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You won the country. You know that, don’t you?”

  H shrugged. “There are no countries here.”

  I should have remembered H’s shrug when I began to see things in the faces of my son-in-law and grandson this morning. But something quickened in me, a suspicion. I kept my eyes shut and laid my head to the side, as if I was fast asleep, encouraging them to talk more.

  My daughter said, “This is not the place to speak.”

  But the men did not regard her. “How?” L’i asked his father, referring to the missing murder weapon.

  “It’s best not to know too much,” THng said.

  Then there was a silence. For all the quickness I’d felt at the first suspicion, I was very slow now. In fact, I did think of H from that second night. Not his shrug. He had fallen silent for a long time and I had closed my eyes, for the light seemed very bright. I listened to his silence just as I listened to the silence of these two conspirators before me.

  And then H said, “They were fools, but I can’t bring myself to grow angry anymore.”

  I opened my eyes in the bedroom and the light was off. H had turned it off, knowing that it was bothering me. “Who were fools?” I asked.

  “We had fought together to throw out the Japanese. I had very good friends among them. I smoked their lovely Salem cigarettes. They had been repressed by colonialists themselves. Did they not know their own history?”

  “Do you mean the Americans?”

  “There are a million souls here with me, the young men of our country, and they are all dressed in black suits and bowler hats. In the mirrors they are made ten million, a hundred million.”

  “I chose my path, my dear friend Quc, so that there might be harmony.”

  And even with that yearning for harmony I could not overlook what my mind made of what my ears had heard this morning. Thng was telling L’i that the murder weapon had been disposed of. Thng and L’i both knew the killers, were in sympathy with them, perhaps were part of the killing. The father and son had been airborne rangers and I had several times heard them talk bitterly of the exile of our people. We were fools for trusting the Americans all along, they said. We should have taken matters forward and disposed of the infinitely corrupt Thiu and done what needed to be done. Whenever they spoke like this in front of me, there was soon a quick exhange of sideways glances at me and then a turn and an apology. “We’re sorry, Grandfather. Old times often bring old anger. We are happy our family is living a new life.”

  I would wave my hand at this, glad to have the peace of the family restored. Glad to turn my face and smell the dogwood tree or even smell the coffee plant across the highway. These things had come to be the new smells of our family. But then a weakness often came upon me. The others would drift away, the men, and perhaps one of my daughters would come to me and stroke my head and not say a word and none of them ever would ask why I was weeping. I would smell the rich blood smells of the afterbirth and I would hold our first son, still slippery in my arms, and there was the smell of dust from the square and the smell of the South China Sea just over the rise of the hill and there was the smell of the blood and of the inner flesh from my wife as my son’s own private sea flowed from this woman that I loved, flowed and carried him into the life that would disappear from him so soon. In the afterlife would he stand before me on unsteady child’s legs? Would I have to bend low to greet him or would he be a man now?

  My grandson said, after the silence had nearly carried me into real sleep, troubled sleep, my grandson L’i said to his father, “I would be a coward not to know.”

  Thng laughed and said, “You have proved yourself no coward.” And I wished then to sleep, I wished to fall asleep and let go of life somewhere in my dreams and seek my village square. I have lived too long, I thought. My daughter was saying, “Are you both mad?” And then she changed her voice, making the words very precise. “Let Grandfather sleep.”

  So when H came tonight for the third time, I wanted
to ask his advice. His hands were still covered with sugar and his mind was, as it had been for the past two nights, very much distracted. “There’s something still wrong with the glaze,” he said to me in the dark, and I pulled back the covers and swung my legs around to get up. He did not try to stop me, but he did draw back quietly into the shadows.

  “I want to pace the room with you,” I said. “As we did in Paris, those tiny rooms of ours. We would talk about Marx and about Buddha and I must pace with you now.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Perhaps it will help me remember.”

  I slipped on my sandals and I stood up and H’s shadow moved past me, through the spill of streetlight and into the dark near the door. I followed him, smelling the sugar on his hands, first before me and then moving past me as I went on into the darkness he’d just left. I stopped as I turned and I could see H outlined before the window and I said, “I believe my son-in-law and grandson are involved in the killing of a man. A political killing.”

  H stayed where he was, a dark shape against the light, and he said nothing and I could not smell his hands from across the room and I smelled only the sourness of L’i as he laid his head on my shoulder. He was a baby and my daughter Lam retreated to our balcony window after handing him to me and the boy turned his head and I turned mine to him and I could smell his mother’s milk, sour on his breath, he had a sour smell and there was incense burning in the room, jasmine, the smoke of souls, and the boy sighed on my shoulder, and I turned my face away from the smell of him. Thng was across the room and his eyes were quick to find his wife and he was waiting for her to take the child from me.

  “You have never done the political thing,” H said.

  “Is this true?”

  “Of course.”

  I asked, “Are there politics where you are now, my friend?” I did not see him moving toward me, but the smell of the sugar on his hands grew stronger, very strong, and I felt H Chí Minh very close to me, though I could not see him. He was very close and the smell was strong and sweet and it was filling my lungs as if from the inside, as if H was passing through my very body, and I heard the door open behind me and then close softly shut.