She Weeps Each Time You're Born (30 page)

Years ago the drive back from Laos had been uneventful. Within minutes of crossing the border the others had regained their wondrousness—Qui pale as marble, Linh once again in perennial childhood, even the birthmark on Tu's face seemed to shine like a star. Only Rabbit herself was changed. She had been the one to insist they turn around and drive back, the prospect of living in both exile and silence too much to bear. At the border, Tu's face looked ghostly, as if drained of blood at the knowledge of what awaited them. Even after they'd crossed back into Vietnam, the silence that had enveloped Rabbit on the Plain of Jars pressed like a weight on her chest. When they pulled up at the great wooden doors leading into the house on Hang Giay, the
police were already waiting. Within days the government had found a new psychic, a young girl who had been bitten by a rabid dog and awakened from her coma with strange abilities. Rabbit remembered the shame of being led away from the grand house on Hang Giay. In the papers and on the TV the government claimed her powers had been a sham. The Old Quarter ground to a halt as Rabbit was put in a car and driven off, the music from a funeral wafting down the street. Then the endless list of charges brought against her. Article 87: “Undermining national solidarity, sowing divisions between religious and non-religious people.” Article 88: “Conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Article 258: “Abusing democratic freedoms to encroach on the interests of the state.” It went on and on. She sat in the tiny cell on Duong Roi and imagined a monk in his orange robes, by his side a plastic bucket heaped with shit. The trial took less than a day. She had to ask the driver what was happening in the moment before two policemen got in the car. The driver said you are to be put under house arrest. How long, she'd asked, but one of the policemen got in the front seat and the driver didn't answer. It took Tu eight months to find out where she'd been taken. Did the government even know the beauty of it? The Mountain of the Fragrant Traces was one of the sacred sites, the Lady like a star on the mountainside. Rabbit barely remembered how she had managed during those eight months on her own. Each morning she would walk down to the river and cast the bones of the fish she'd eaten the night before into the waters. In the evening she would walk back to the same spot and put her hand in. Within minutes, a fish would swim into her palm and allow itself to be lifted into the air, each day the same iridescent fish putting its life in her hands. Rabbit remembered nothing else about those days except the silence and the glittering fish who was her only friend.

Already that was another lifetime ago. Tonight as she walked
in the shadow of the mountain she clutched the fish in her arms and thought of the long years of solitude she had endured. In some ways it felt as if no time had passed, and in other ways she was just beginning to realize exactly what had been lost.

At last the four of them staggered out of the trees. The river shimmered expectantly. Rabbit could see a series of wooden boxes tucked away in the treeline. She imagined the colony of bees asleep inside with their treasure, the queen like a beacon among the workers. It hadn't rained in months, yet the boxes gleamed white as snow. Linh walked over and put her hand on one. A deep thrumming buzzed inside as if a storm were brewing in the box. The male parakeet fluffed his chest. Qui reached over and lifted one of the lids. Light poured out into the darkness. Linh stood on tiptoe to get a better look, her baby face suffused with brilliance. Rabbit peered over her shoulder. It was as she'd always imagined. Inside, golden universes being born and falling dead.

Qui put her hand in and pulled out a comb. It blazed in the night air. With Linh's help she wrapped it up in a palm leaf, then lowered the lid and tucked the comb in her shirt alongside the pale blue rice bowl. It was all they needed. They could go anywhere. A bat swooped overhead. Maybe tonight they would go anywhere.

How many times had they been on the road? In the darkness the land looked like another world. The Swallow Bird River was like none of the other rivers Rabbit had ever known, the waters slow and dark, a mist rising off the surface. The landscape incandesced like a scene on an ancient scroll. Everywhere small green mountains rising straight up out of the earth.

She didn't hear it until it pulled up beside them. In the moonlight Rabbit could see two figures squatting on a simple raft. The taller figure gestured with his fingers. Pay him, said the male parakeet. The sound startled Rabbit. She hadn't heard the bird speak since Laos. Cautiously she leaned over and slipped the live fish into the old man's arms. He hefted it in his palm as if judging its value, then handed the fish to a little girl squatting beside him. The old man was completely bald, his long gray beard pouring all the way down to his feet.

The girl brought the fish to her face the way one would a puppy. She kissed it and stroked its belly before reaching over the edge of the raft and letting it go. As it swam away Rabbit could see a trail of light left behind in the water like a comet blazing through the sky. The little girl laughed and clapped her hands together, her uneven braids bouncing on her shoulders. When she smiled, Rabbit could see the child was missing one of her front teeth, the head of the new tooth just starting to break the skin.

Rabbit couldn't believe the raft would hold all of them, but it did. As they boarded, a white cormorant dove into the water as if to make room. All the way downriver the bird swam beside them under the light of the full moon. Rabbit sat watching the cormorant, the bird an icy white. Suddenly the bird swung its head toward her. She felt its red stare pricking her skin. They need you, a voice said. Rabbit closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the bird was still floating by the side of the raft, its eyes locked straight ahead into the night.

At the front of the raft Linh was holding the little girl's hand. What's it like, she whispered. She and the little girl with the uneven braids were sitting crossed-legged, a parakeet on each of their shoulders. The little girl shrugged. How would you describe this, the girl said, waving her hand at the landscape. Were you scared, asked Linh. The little girl looked off toward
the mountain. There wasn't time, she said. Qui tapped Linh on the back and shook her head. But I want to know, Linh whined. Qui shook her head again.

They came around a bend in the river. The old man paddled them to shore, his gray beard almost touching the water. The little girl pointed toward a copse of trees, her new tooth flashing in the moonlight. A fish jumped, a streak of iridescence rippling outward. Tu stepped off the raft and helped pull it closer to land.

Rabbit was the last one off. She turned and bowed her head to the old man and the little girl, beside them the white bird floating in the water like a cloud. In the next life I will serve you, she said. The old man laughed. In the moonlight his head seemed to shine as if radiating its own brilliance. Sister, he said. It's all one life.

When she stepped onshore, Rabbit felt corporeal in a way she hadn't experienced in years. The old familiar freckles on her nose and cheeks began to shimmer. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, a spark trying to catch in the dark. It felt strange to be walking on land, as if all those years at the foot of the mountain she'd somehow only been floating.

Linh stumbled on her first. The woman was lying facedown in the tall grass along the riverbank. It was obvious she had crawled there. She had no pants on, a large swatch of earth black and sticky under her pelvis. Her body was twisted in an unnatural shape, her hips displaced from their sockets, the agony of her final moments apparent. Rabbit scanned the grass for clues as to what had happened. The blood trail ran up the bank and into the woods, though the thing that had killed her was nowhere in sight. Qui pulled Linh to her and buried Linh's face in
her chest. What happened, asked Linh. Already Tu was moving off to find a suitable spot. Quickly Qui followed, taking Linh with her.

Rabbit picked up the woman's wrist. The arm was stiff and cold. In the light of the moon the skin looked ghostly. The stain on the earth still seemed to be spreading. Rabbit could smell the dark blood. Wandering Mother, she said. Speak. Carefully she wove the woman's fingers into her own. Rabbit sat by the body for the two hours it took Tu to dig the grave. From time to time a breeze rustled the grass, but the world remained silent.

It took another twenty minutes to put the body in the earth. Rabbit walked silently beside Tu as he carried the corpse to the spot he'd found upriver. Qui and Linh trailed behind. Together they stood watching until it was done. Tu patted the earth with his shovel. The parakeets stirred the muggy air with their wings.

At the sound of the shovel tamping the dirt, Rabbit felt dizzy. Her limbs filled with the sensation of lying on a stony breast in the dark. She held her hand out to steady herself. Qui reached over and slipped something in her mouth. It was a piece of the honey comb, the comb melting on her tongue, honey the first thing she had ever tasted long ago in a box in the earth.

The moon came out from behind a cloud. Rabbit turned to look at the Mountain of the Fragrant Traces, searching it for even the faintest pinprick of light. The blood began to pound in her ears, the rising wind tinged with voices. In the moonlight, shadows seemed to ebb and wane, each one suddenly unattached to its object.

He was standing on the other side of the river searching the ground at his feet as if he'd been always been standing there, his body still lithe as a sapling, the water like a country between them. Even after all this time Rabbit could see the scratch forking down his face, the mark as if a god had touched his cheek with a finger. He didn't look at her but kept on scouring the
earth. Finally he picked up a small stone, palming it in his hand, and when he seemed satisfied it would do, he stepped up to the river's edge and skipped it across the water, the gesture simply the act of a young boy at play. Rabbit watched the stone skim the dark surface, kissing it three times before sinking. She could feel the rooms flooding in her heart. The taste of honey lingered in her mouth. After the ripples faded, the river once again glassy, she looked back across the water. The air shimmered as if distorted by heat, but there was no trace of him.

Then Rabbit's ears began to itch. How many years had it been? In the night she could hear something stirring from a long ways off. She let herself be drawn toward it, the sound pulling her along. The dead woman had crawled all that way, a quarter mile down to the river in search of help, and the treasure she'd left behind was inland, secured in a spot where the trees didn't grow. Rabbit began to run, Tu and the others following, the song floating through the woods. Our Lady of the Fragrant Traces, watch over us in the darkness.

It was lying in the moonlight in the middle of a clearing. Rabbit picked it up and took it in her arms. Every inch of its skin was free of the gore she had witnessed down by the river. She had never seen anything like it, the woman's agony now fully apparent, though how she had gotten it out of her body was a mystery. It was shaped like a T. It had two arms and two legs but at the top of its torso its body branched like a banyan tree into two distinct necks with two distinct heads, two sets of eyes shining in its faces, a single small sea horse lumped between its thighs.

Already Qui has lifted her shirt and taken the bifurcated creature in her arms, but both heads refuse. Then Rabbit feels the spark catch in her chest. Here, she says, and Qui hands her the being. Rabbit lifts her shirt and cradles a head to each breast. The clearing fills with the voices of the dead, tens of hundreds
of thousands of millions. Through the gathering roar she can hear voices crying
listen
as the two tiny mouths pull the light from her body. Something shoots down the vault of the sky. I hear you, she whispers. Under the full moon in her thousand thousand arms Rabbit holds the new life closer to her chest.

The insights into life and death on
this page
are quotations from the Buddha.

The poem etched in Little Mother's conical straw hat on
this page
is taken from
Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry
, translated by John Balaban.

Much of the language in the interludes “Baby, sleep well” on
this page
and “Beloved, stay with me” on
this page
is taken from Vietnamese children's songs that can be found at
http://​www.​mamalisa.​com
.

On
this page
the line “After life there must be life” is taken from Lucie Brock-Broido's poem “After the Grand Perhaps” from the book
A Hunger
.

Specific incidents in the chapter “
And the Water Was Made as Glass
” come from Hung Nguyen's escape narrative titled “Coffee Shop
from Two Spoons” in
Voices of Vietnamese Boat People
. An's experiences in a reeducation camp draw heavily from Huu Tri Le's
Prisoner of the Word
and Van Toai Doan and David Chanoff's
The Vietnamese Gulag
.