She Weeps Each Time You're Born (9 page)

In each of Terres Noires' fourteen villages there is a commissary, a small store where everything is costly and of the worst quality. Your mother is trying to stretch the money she has been
paid, though the salary is only a figure in the manager's book, a number inked on a piece of paper. Last month the commissariat informed her that they were only paying you half the wages. But she's fourteen, your mother wailed. Thuan deserves a full salary. The other women in line told her to be quiet. Let them treat her as a child, one woman whispered. The women all lowered their eyes. It is the only line they respect, someone said. Your mother stopped protesting and accepted the eighteen pounds of rice without further complaint, then made her mark in the commissariat's book.

And that very afternoon as your mother is learning another of the thousand things mothers fear for their daughters, you see him for the first time—a grown man in his late thirties. Underneath the cashew tree with its white flowers the size of fists.

He sees you staring. There is something in his eyes that you have never seen before. A knowing gentleness, the palms of his hands white as clouds. It is 1940 and when he looks at you, you can feel yourself being recognized for the first time.

In each village there is a medical clinic where a Frenchman sits smoking a cigarette as the patient struggles to describe his
malade
in a foreign tongue. When the patient finishes, the Frenchman will rise and flick his cigarette out the window. Do not eat or drink for the next twenty-four hours, he will invariably counsel. Give your system a chance to purge itself. And the patient is ushered out.

When the people don't work, it means the plantation doesn't have to pay them. The company would rather you stay home and starve than go out into the woods and earn a wage.

So the workers turn to him when they fall sick, the man with palms white as liquid rubber. The people's sicknesses are predictable, the dark siftings leaking from their bodies from the poor food, the dirty water. Depending on whether or not there is blood or pus the man with the unworldly smile will brew a tea
made from the bark of the philodendron. Drink this, he says. Within hours the rumblings in the worker's belly fall silent.

That first time you see him it's Sunday. He is sitting off behind the barracks in the shade of a cashew tree, legs in the lotus position, eyes shut, the white flowers of the tree big as fists. You have been working Terres Noires for months. The muscles in your thin arms are striated. The empty buckets you are carrying bang rhythmically against your knees as you walk by. You don't know the word for the thing you are feeling in the pit of your stomach, though you know it has nothing to do with dirty water. The moment like walking a long dirt road directly into the sun, the sound of the buckets like the clattering of your heart. There is something in the stillness of his body, though somehow you know there is a fire burning deep within like one you have never known. How is it possible? The man opens his eyes.

Not your mother. Not Hong Hanh, who is actually fourteen and lives in Village Eight with her whole clan from Ha Nam. Hong Hanh, whom you'll meet in the grand kitchen of the
propriétaire
, the copper pots and saucepans hanging from iron hooks. Nobody.
Personne
. Not a single soul will ever understand the unworldly rapport between you and this man. You barely understand it yourself.

It happens like this: there is a riot in Village Two. Village Two is one of the original villages. Some of the workers have been cutting the trees there for more than a decade. As Village Two is more than fifteen miles away, news of the riot doesn't reach your village for almost a full day. The night after it happens the first of the rioters begin to trickle into your sector well past midnight. When they knock on the barracks door, only he will rise and step outside, the man with the palms white as cream standing in the moonlight and patiently drawing a map in the dirt. The man tells them which river the dogs won't ford, which mountain tribes are friendly, which to avoid at all costs.

And so a new girl is needed in the kitchen. The girl from Village Two who used to work there doing whatever was needed has disappeared along with her family. The truth is maybe one of the overseers saw an opening and took it, lured her out into the field of new saplings by Village Fifteen, and did what he'd been waiting to do, ultimately burying her body there beneath the young trees where they will grow and mature and bleed for years. Who can know for sure?

Two days after the riot you are filling your bucket out among the rubber trees when one of the LeBonne brothers appears and says come with me. His skin is pitted as if with a needle. You turned ten years old in the fall, though you are starting to look fourteen. For the rest of the day your mother, who was only a half mile away when you were driven off, will be tearing her hair out.

In the grand house you see things you have never seen before. Indoor plumbing. Gas stoves. Lace so fine it hurts just to look at it. Staircases carved in teak. Ivory and china and the fabric they use to blow their noses in finer than anything you have ever touched.

This is where you will grow up, not out there under the rubber trees and the watchful eye of the other LeBonne with the battered rattan cane he is never without, your hands callused like leather, fingers peeling and raw where the white sap sticks to them and won't come off. No. This is the world the world has been hiding from you. Massenet. Lavender. Madeleines. Taupinière. A world of leisure, though the hours of sweet inactivity are not for you. You will work as hard as ever in this other world.

Time passes. The war arrives. Nobody is allowed to leave. Because Vietnam shares a border with China, the battle-thirsty Japanese invade, desperate to keep Vietnamese supplies from the Chinese. Occupied France allies herself with Japan, and now Indochine has a new ruler. On the plantation three-year contracts
are extended indefinitely because where would you go, child? The Japanese have faces like yours but different somehow, eyes smaller, hard as knives, eyes as if entirely made of pupils, like insects with their compound lenses. Mostly it doesn't matter. The French are still very much in charge because business is business, and the Vichy are accommodating, though the young mademoiselle sits at the piano crying that her life has been ruined, that she will never stroll the Seventh Arrondissement with a lover on her arm.
Mon pauvre petit chou
, you say, fanning her with a banana leaf. My poor little cabbage.

You no longer sleep in the barracks but in the servant quarters with Hong Hanh and the rest of the staff. The few times you see her, your mother says she is happy for you. Your French is flawless in that way children pick up foreign languages without even trying. Once when you haven't seen her for months, you barely recognize her, the lines in her dark brown face as if gouged with an awl. The first time you call your mother
Maman
, she looks stricken, as if you've just hit her.

Though you never forget the moment by the cashew tree, as the years pass you only see the man with the beautiful palms every now and then, mostly when the French
garagiste
sneaks him into the building just off the main house where they keep the Saoutchik shipped in all the way from Marseilles so he can work on the great black car so polished it always looks wet, the thing bigger than any room you have ever shared or ever will. The way the man with the beautiful hands can intuit what is wrong, twisting the right cap, replacing the right part, with the result that the engine purrs back to life and the
garagiste
can hold his head up around the grounds. You always knew the man was magical, his hands like blank pages. This is the proof.

Today the
garagiste
yells through the back door to bring them some coffee. Though you are in the middle of boiling the napkins, there is no one else around, so you do as you're told. You
make it just the way the
propriétaire
himself likes, the aroma so bitter you wince at the smell. You leave it in the press and carry the tray outside, your house dress just below the knee, your body fully blossomed, eyes clear as glass. In the night when Hong Hanh is asleep, the breath sniveling out through her nose, you are learning how to touch yourself. Sometimes you think of him, the man with the perfect hands, the light in his eyes seemingly faceted like a cat's, and when you do, it happens faster.

For a moment you stand in the light of the garage. He is under the great black hood. You can see yourself reflected in the liquid metal—a girl holding her heart out in front of her. Then he comes out from under it and everything is as you've remembered. Even under the grease his hands shine like moonlight. The
garagiste
is nowhere in sight. Thuan, the man says. It is the only time he will ever speak your name. The rooms in your heart flooding.

In the days after the European war is over, when the danger in Vietnam is at its most extreme as Indochine steadies herself to fight the French imperialists, Hong Hanh will say this is why the man with the lily-white palms befriended you. Because you have access. You can get him keys and maps and help him drug the dogs and tell him things about the cycles of the great house. You stand in the pantry with your hands folded across your chest.
Ta guele!
you shout at your best friend. And years later, after all the passion has drained from your body, you will keep the physical memory of your first afternoon of love, July 1945, the
propriétaire
's niece to marry that very week, the tent like a great sail staked out under the flowering cashew trees, the man beaten, his back laced with welts, and how he brought out the dragon fruit nevertheless, the thing he had been hiding just for you, and the way he brought it out from the dark cave of his body where he had kept it hidden between his legs as the overseers beat him with their canes, the LeBonne brothers with
their homicidal rages blind to who he was, not knowing that stealing the fruit was the least of it, that he was Vietminh, that he was organizing the workers, that nights he would read to them from
Than Chung
and
Humanité
, the French Communist paper, tales of workers finding their voices, the collective power of their awakening, of
sûréte
agents and managers and armies of overseers being overthrown at last, and the memory of that first time when the man peeled the fruit for you and watched you eat of it, and the way he took you in his arms, and all the while you were careful not to touch his back as he moved into you and you felt the little death creeping up on and on until you died and he moved in you until you died again and you said I'm yours I'm yours I'm yours I'm yours you never stop saying it even when someone tells the overseers about the two of you there on the eve of the August Revolution, Ho Chi Minh with his declaration prepared, the war in Europe over, the Japanese emperor declared just a man, August 1945 and Ho Chi Minh né Nguyễn Sinh Cung with his letter of friendship to Harry S. Truman which will go unanswered ready to tell all the world that after a thousand years Vietnam is Vietnam's at last but before it happens the LeBonne brothers come and drag you out of your bed and put you in a room where a series of Frenchmen ask you where is he and it goes on and on until one of them puts his cigarette out on your chest not because he thinks it will bring an answer but because he can the burning going all the way down to your heart a window a hole that lets the light in gives you second sight a way of seeing in the dark which is why now at the end of everything you see yourself lying on a highway in the middle of fleeing millions a girl a child kissing your scar light of my blood everything spilling into her so that you can finally rest but it isn't the end,
n'est-ce pas
?
After life there must be life.

And years later when an old medicine man with green scars in
the pits of his hands moves to the same province where you live by the Song Ma, the River of Dreams, you will be vindicated. It wasn't all about access, about dogs and maps and keys. It wasn't.

This is what Rabbit sees in the instant she kisses the skin where a Frenchman burned her grandmother next to her heart. Terres Noires and everything that followed—the three or four men who came after the man with the milk-white hands, one of them the father of Tu, the subsequent fire of childbirth, the feeling of Tu's small hot mouth on Bà's breast, war and more war and war without end and the living on because you had to, the years beside the Song Ma and the years on Lak Lake and all the while the world growing dim though in the heart it was the opposite. The scar on her chest like a medallion.

She's dead, said Huyen. In among the clamoring light of the full moon, Rabbit could hear others dying farther up on the road, the closest one only a few hundred feet away.

Lady, lift us up in the darkness.

September 1945. Within two months the uprising in Indochine is over. All over Vietnam the plantations are once again under French rule. The end of the war in Europe means that France has been liberated and Indochine is still a colony. The French gendarmes and the
sûréte
agents and even a division of Allied soldiers have put an end to the revolt, rounding up as many Vietnamese Communists as they can. But what the French don't know could fill a universe.

Today the wound on your chest from the August Revolution no longer smells and is starting to heal, though it will never fully heal. Now you work the rubber trees again as you did long ago
when you were a child pretending to be a woman. Each day you take up the sharp pruning hook and gouge the bark. Each tree forever scarred.

One tree over, Hong Hanh puts down her pruning hook and points. A truck is coming through the woods, but you don't stop what you're doing. It's just another truck full of prisoners headed to Con Son Island off the southern coast. Now that the revolution has failed, Terres Noires is shipping them out, anyone suspected of illegal activity, of being a Communist and organizing against the French. It isn't until your friend, who has also lost her job in the kitchen, snatches the hat off your head that you put down your bucket and look.