A Thousand Tiny Truths

by Kyo Maclear

  Now that he had finished the piece about Joseph, he stopped writing and began walking. In the mornings, Oliver would rise early and leave the suite. Where did he go? What did he see? I tried to imagine his itinerary. I pictured him walking down Tu Do to the river and yelling at the water; yelling at the deaths that never made it into the news.

  I began accompanying Oliver on his walks. We went back to Givral’s and Samedi’s. We visited the rooftop of the Caravelle where I slipped in next to him at the bar. I often thought of Joseph but sometimes I forgot, for minutes, hours at a time. I would be lying in bed or having a bath or eating a croissant and I would remember and the sadness would immediately return. This ebb and flow taught me something painful and unexpected: that when people die, they don’t just die once, but rather, many, many times.

  It took me years to understand that Joseph’s death had hit Oliver personally. He felt punished and roused by it. He took it as a warning. Don’t court death, don’t take stupid risks. Don’t leave things too late.

  There were no more short pieces. There were no more reports of any kind. There was a fresh blank page loaded into his typewriter but Oliver did not work. He did not even pretend to work. When he wasn’t out walking, he spent time sitting in the living room while I drew. Having lost his focal point, the bull’s eye of danger, he was cut free to notice his surroundings. His attention ranged off into corners.

  One day he spotted the books Pippa had sent resting on the shelf and walked over. He pulled down The Phantom Tollbooth and sat down beside me and opened it to the beginning.

  “We used to read to you when you were a baby.”

  “You and my mum.”

  He nodded.

  I watched his eyes tracking the lines of the first paragraph and said, “Would you read to me now?”

  So Oliver began reading to me: “There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself . . . Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden . . .”

  The next morning Oliver hired a taxi and we travelled all the way to the bridge where Joseph had died. We lay down in the grass, feeling our bodies cool and warm, cool and warm, as cloud shadows passed across the field.

  That night he pulled down another book. “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes . . .”

  Oliver began telling me stories every night before we went to sleep.

  Then the night came when Oliver said, “Marcel? Can we talk tonight instead of reading?” He was sitting at the table turning a teacup around and around in his palm.

  “Oh?” I said, curious, lowering my sketchbook. “What did you want to talk about?”

  At first I thought Oliver had finally lost his mind.

  “What? My mother?” I said when he finished. “Are you joking?”

  As I said her name he reddened and shrank back in his seat. I felt everything grow still and silent, as if the entire city had stopped moving. I felt my chin begin to tremble.

  When he started speaking again, I listened to him fill the air around me and above my head with words.

  “Pippa?” I whispered, repeated.

  “Marcel. You knew who your mother is. Why do you pretend you didn’t.”

  I shook my head, swinging it back and forth vigorously. I was a fighter trying to block punches, only the punches were the crazy things Oliver was saying.

  When I stopped, I felt as if I were floating. I saw objects laid around the room. A plaited basket on a chair. A blue tea towel on the table. But everything felt separate and unreal. Anh came in from the bedroom with Dinh and took my hand. They must have been listening. I looked down and could see our hands connected but I felt nothing. Dinh picked up a cloth napkin and walked over to offer it to me. He understood what could make a person not want to speak. I looked at the napkin, puzzled, until I realized I was crying.

  I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face but avoided looking into the medicine cabinet mirror because I did not want to see the new person this disclosure made me. I didn’t want to be revealed the way characters are revealed in the movies. I walked back to the table, picked up my pencil and ran it up and down the seam of my sketchbook until the lead was flat. Then I poked the flat pencil through the page. I kept puncturing the page, harder and harder. I was fairly certain that a part of me had worked its way loose and was about to break off and fly away. I was fairly certain this part of me was my heart.

  “Marcel, I’m so sorry,” Oliver said. “Please try to understand.”

  The longer I remained silent, the more he pleaded and the more anxious he became. From very far away, I heard him say, “We’ll send her a cable. I’ll take you back to England. Please, Marcel, I’ll do anything you want. Just say something.”

  I saw his eyes fill with water.

  “Please say something,” he repeated.

  But I would not give him the satisfaction.

  I walked around lost in thought as I disassembled and reassembled my life. I went through the motions for Anh because she had enough worries thinking about her family in the north, and I didn’t want to be the source of further grief. I was shamed by the concerned look on her face. I ate everything she put before me, ate mechanically beyond the point of fullness, unable to stop behaving as I had been brought up. When Oliver sat with us, I copied Dinh and kept my eyes lowered, pretended I was unseeing, unhearing. I had decided that until I had something to say to Oliver that I wanted to say, I would be silent. I had learned from Dinh that deep silence could be an exit, another place to go.

  Meanwhile, in my thoughts, I swung between gratefulness and misery: Who was I to complain? I had no blood wounds. There was food on the table. I was not homeless.

  But my family was a lie. My life was a lie. I hated them both. How could they have hidden so much from me?

  I stood up from tea one afternoon and walked out of the suite, thinking, I’m leaving. When I realized there was nowhere to go, I stood in the corridor, shaking.

  At night I dreamt I was being led through Paris on a cyclo pulled by Audrey Hepburn. I dreamt of Sophia Loren pinning bedsheets to a clothesline and Ava Gardner folding a stack of shirts and Maria Callas flying with me through the sky. I dreamt that Pippa was floating on her back in a swimming pool, swishing her arms through the water like Esther Williams.

  I awoke very early one morning with a damp pillow and turned my night-table drawer upside down on my bed. I searched through all the letters I had received from Pippa until I finally found the photo she had sent of herself on Brighton beach with Stasha. It felt strange to look at her face now. I thought about her London flat and her strange existence and all those times she was coming and going at odd hours, beds unmade all day long, and tried to picture the life I would have had if I had been with her all this time. A good life? A crazy life? I flipped back and forth between the beach photograph and the one I had of me as a baby on my mother’s lap. Anh was calling me to breakfast by the time I stopped.

  Then I thought of my real father. Long ago, I had been told that my father was dead and I had accepted this fact without a second thought. But what if that was a lie too? What else were they capable of hiding?

  I sent Pippa’s photo to Kiyomi. I sent her the broken pieces of my heart. I wrote on the back of the photo, Pippa is the one, my mother—not even waiting for the ink to dry before slipping the photo inside an envelope. I had no idea how she would react but I needed to tell her the news to make it real to myself.

  Then I helped pack up the suite. There wasn’t much to keep. We had acquired so little. Anh washed the tiles and the dishes and even dusted the broom. Dinh and I carried all our old paper down to the hotel burn-barrel, just outside the kitchen. There was a breeze but the janitor was able to start a flame deep within the paper-filled cylinder. We watched as the fire took hold, and small sparks leapt through the metal screen, and we kept watching, hypnotized, unti
l the dark curling mass was reduced to a small pile of clean, white ash. When that was done, we walked back to the suite in a bit of a trance. The air felt different, hushed, without the rustle of newsprint, without our habits of writing and setting everything down.

  The next day, Anh and Dinh moved into Arnaud’s apartment on rue Pasteur while Oliver and I remained at the Continental for a few days. Arnaud had arranged to buy the record player as a gift for Anh so there was no music any more. There was only the sound of traffic and the call of the street dentist offering to pull a few teeth.

  On our last night in Saigon, Arnaud, Anh and Dinh joined us for a final meal at a restaurant by the river. We were the only diners that evening and sat at a large, round table in the centre of the room. There were tablecloths and good wineglasses. The waiters wore white coats and refilled our teapots and removed the white comb of bone from our fish. It was a multi-course feast. Delicate soups. Ornate side dishes. It all seems unreal now. A short distance away, there were artillery barrages and bombing attacks and peasants being forcibly herded from their ancestral homes into gulag-like hamlets.

  Halfway through the meal, Arnaud held up a glass in a toast: “To Oliver and Marcel. A safe return.”

  Everyone clinked glasses, except Oliver and me. I pretended it was because my glass was empty, but when the waiter brought more Coca-Cola and ice, I still kept my hands to myself.

  Anh smiled, but later, as we were preparing to leave the restaurant, she took me aside.

  “Macee, you have to forgive Oliver for what he’s done. Next time, you knock his glass too,” she said. “Remember. Your family is your lie.”

  It took me a second to realize that she was saying life. Your family is your life.

  Later that night, a window flew open and street noise streamed into the suite. Soldiers laughing down on Tu Do, a little too loudly, the roar of motorcycles and bursts of car horns, women click-clacking in heels, the broken wails of a cat in heat.

  As Oliver stood up to close it, I stopped him. I knew I owed him a debt for raising me but something told me he wasn’t completely heroic.

  “Why did my mother leave us, Oliver?”

  There was no response.

  “What did you do?

  “What are you implying?”

  I persisted. “I don’t think she could have stayed. You never showed her any fun.”

  “Think what you want, Marcel,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he headed off to his room.

  “See! You always do that. You always shut yourself away.”

  Oliver reached his door and stopped. For a moment, I thought he was going to respond, but he just sighed. “It’s past eleven and I’m going to bed. Remember we have to get up early.”

  The French doors were still open and the curtains floated like air, twisting and taking the shape of the breeze. Was this feeling of detachment I had what my mother felt before she left? Was this the weight of loneliness?

  I went and got my sketchbook and stood on the balcony. I decided to make one last drawing of Saigon. My pen quaked over rooftops, the sharp juttings of the Opera House, the soft uneven swoop of a broken restaurant awning, a lone tree. When I was done I thumbed through the rest of my book. Now I turned to my movie star clippings and ripped out the pages and let them go. All my fantasies and all the stupid hopes I had pinned to my mother were useless. My mother could not be anyone any more. She could only be Pippa, flawed and unpredictable. I watched the pages float down to the street—with big, slow swoops, like tired birds.

  Just before we left for the airport the next morning, I made a drawing for the hotel maid. She was replacing towels and emptying wastebaskets and moving her trolley down the corridor, wiping away people’s lives with her spritzer and supply of fresh notepads and mini-soaps. I had forgotten her name but I knew it wasn’t Sue, even though the name tag on her new hotel frock said it was. I drew her a picture of a giant dao tree. For some reason, I wanted her to remember us. I went up and shook her hand and told her she was free to keep anything we had left behind.

  In reality, I wanted to draw a picture for Pippa. I was eager for some meaningful exchange, anything, some swap of intimacy. Oliver’s phone calls and cables to her had gone unanswered. It seemed cruel that after waiting so long to meet my mother, she still wasn’t within reach. I needed to see her. I had words to say.

  Even though I had contradicted Oliver when he said it, the truth was that a part of me had known all along. Children always know somehow. They know instinctively but if the knowledge is too painful, they push it away. They snap their eyelids shut, hoping to make difficult situations disappear. They escape to fantasy. And not just children.

  Still, from the moment I met Pippa, I saw and felt someone familiar, someone who understood me. I don’t know if it was an umbilical thread, some imprint left in infancy, but I knew.

  I knew. I would tell her that.

  IN A SIMILAR WAY, Iris has known about me. That day she snooped around my studio, the day of the war books, she found a photo.

  “I was just looking for scissors. The ones in the kitchen were all goopy,” she says now.

  We are sitting on my small deck sharing breakfast before we go shopping for the weekend. Iris has barely touched her eggs. There is a mystery novel by her elbow. I have been staring down at the street, watching two young boys shed their coats while their mother follows behind, warm sun on her pale underslept face.

  “That person you considered marrying,” Iris now says. “Who was she?”

  I feel myself stiffen. Her voice is pointed and I can see from the corner of my eye that she is leaning forward in her chair. I hear her foot tap under the table.

  Then, with the gruffness of a Mafia don, she says: “How about you write down her name and I give you back the photo?”

  She takes my hesitation as compliance and rises from the table, returning with a pen and a rigid square card.

  I look at the card and take a deep breath in: It’s time for the truth now. Then I write down the name.

  She opens the novel and hands me the photo, which had been tucked between its pages.

  I try to smile as I look at it: 1972. A beautiful bride and a groom who, even I can see, is still pulling himself together, impersonating a whole person.

  I put the photo down and begin pouring granola into a bowl. I want my interrogator to return to her breakfast, but she obviously won’t do that. Nothing will deter her, not vodka or gin or contraband cigarettes, not eggs.

  So I explain, “The photograph was taken at Kensington and Chelsea Register Office. That’s where we got married. We lived together for four years before I lost courage and left. It’s not something I’m very proud of. And there’s no way to justify it except to say I think I didn’t know how to stop waiting and wanting and to start holding onto what I already had.”

  She looks at me with a frown.

  “I didn’t know how to be content.”

  Or maybe I wasn’t ready to reverse my unhappiness yet. Kiyomi could always be counted on to do exactly the right-wrong thing. For example, when my head was a closed box she was the one who poked it open with pinholes of light.

  I look back at the photograph while Iris, channelling Marlon Brando, asks if I still love her mother. I don’t answer for a moment. I think of the way Kiyomi and I used to stay up late dancing by ourselves in the living room, and how I taught her to drive, and she taught me to swim, and how late at night our limbs would rest together, entwined, even when we were drawn back in our own solitary thoughts, and finally I nod. Yes.

  And Iris says, “Well? Then?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  She stares at me. “Do you ever wonder why my mother sent me here?”

  I don’t know how to respond.

  “You’re not the only friend she could have asked.”

  I nod again, while the information sinks in. My heart is nervous, fluttering. Kiyomi seeking me out? And then I say, “Any suggestions for winning back an old love?”<
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  “Not really,” Iris says with a shrug. “But I think in your case it might be like drawing. Maybe it’s better not to think too much. Don’t worry so much about getting your house to look like a real one.”

  Sometimes it’s better to have a lopsided but true life. I think that’s what she’s saying. I nod and thank her, even though I have no idea whether she’s rooting for me or just making an observation.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Thousand Tiny Truths

  WHEN WE CAME BACK FROM SAIGON, the ground was wetter than I remembered it ever being, but not tropical. There were no swaying palm trees or parks filled with exotic flora. The cars drove in straight lines and sidewalks were not used as extra traffic lanes during rush hour.

  The train fare had gone up.

  The skirts were shorter.

  There was a new bounciness to the way women walked, a swing to their hips. I tried not to stare.

  We moved back into another furnished flat on New King’s Road with money Oliver borrowed from the Bownes. Number 51, just another house in a row of identical houses—matching doors, matching stoops—on and on.

  The old phone number we had for Pippa, my mother, was out of service.

  We went to the flat she used to share with Stasha but it was vacant and there were workers inside refinishing the floor. Oliver asked for permission to look around but all we discovered was an empty room, with naked hanging lights and bare walls with thumbtack holes. I breathed in the dust. I walked around the room and found a gold ribbon wound around a doorknob with the words You Win Gold printed on it. I don’t know what we had imagined, maybe that we would walk in and see Pippa waiting for us on her worn settee.

  “I don’t think she’s coming back,” I said, slipping the gold ribbon loose and putting it in my pocket.

  “No. Maybe not.”

  We took walks through Eel Brook Common, where I half expected to find her, maybe sitting on a swing or photographing a tree, but she was not there. Still, we returned each morning, slowing walking the perimeter, like patients on the grounds of a sanatorium.