Stray Love (24 page)

“I have a friend named Pippa back in London who says that art should be an act, not a thing.”

He looked up and thought for a moment. “The problem is that one person’s act quickly becomes another person’s thing. But I agree that the act should come before the thing. Otherwise, you’re just a manufacturer.” He continued paging through the book for a bit, then stopped and asked, “Do you ever paint?”

“No. Painting always feels like too much of a bother to me.”

“Do you draw animals?”

“Sometimes.”

“Self-portraits?”

“Now and then.”

He reached across for my pencil. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

He still hadn’t said what he thought of my drawings but it didn’t really matter. He was treating me as a peer and that bit of respect meant more to me than any compliment he could have dredged up.

I watched him flip to a blank page and draw an armadillo, a good, fast drawing. When he was finished, he looked at me and explained that he was an armadillo because he had a hard shell that protected him. If something scared or threatened him, he just rolled up into a tight ball. When things quieted down, he uncurled and walked away unharmed.

He did a few more sketches—a scorpion, a tortoise—then looked at his watch and said it was time for him to go. “We’ll see each other soon,” he said, before he walked away.

The café was now really crowded. Even the cushioned red stools by the soda fountain were occupied. As he strolled out, he stopped at a few tables to say hello to people he knew, clasping hands in greeting.

I waited for the café door to chime closed. Then I stood up and started making my way around the room. I wanted to know more about Arnaud. I sat down at one table, then another, and another.

“Oh, Arnaud!” his friends said with beaming smiles. Arnaud this. Arnaud that. I learned quite a bit. Arnaud had been in the Congo. Arnaud’s photo equipment had been destroyed. Arnaud took wedding and family portraits on the side. Arnaud was the son of a French father and a Vietnamese mother who had
moved from Da Lat to France when he was five years old. He went to art school in Rennes and painted beautifully. At age twenty-two, he was sent to Vietnam as a French combat photographer and after his discharge stayed on as a civilian photographer. Now he worked for AP.

He was an artist. A genius. A loner. A saint. A magician. A romantic.

The next time I saw Arnaud he was standing across the street from the hotel. His head was tilted upwards. I realized that he was watching someone on the balcony. When I looked up I saw Anh—her loosely tied hair falling forward over one shoulder as she tossed a tablecloth free of invisible crumbs, lifting it up and down.

Eventually, as if sensing someone watching her, Anh looked down. When she spotted me, she gave a happy wave. Then her gaze travelled to Arnaud. She swept her hand across her forehead, gathering a few strands of hair. She locked eyes with him for a moment, then slowly stepped back into the room. The balcony door closed.

Arnaud turned to me with a smile. “Do you have time to sit with me today?”

“Of course.”

Arnaud took one last look at the balcony, then placed his hand lightly on my shoulder. “We’ll get drinks on the terrace. And you can tell me more about your beautiful
amah.
“

Frosty glasses on the table, a sliver of shade, I could feel Arnaud’s curiosity burning but I had my own questions for him once we were seated.

“What do you mean by ‘action zones’?” he repeated, puzzled.

I felt myself blushing. I opened my satchel and brought out
a map of Vietnam I had taken from the lobby. I smoothed it out on the table. “Arnaud, please, just show me. Where are the hot spots?”

“Hot spots?” he said with a big laugh. “You mean the war!” He took the pen from his pocket and began to circle areas. “There is a hot spot here. Here. Hot spot. Hot spot. Here. Here. Hot, hot, hot. Here …”

While Arnaud continued scribbling I thought of Oliver and how he avoided speaking of the war directly when I was around. Now, I could see from the map that we were right in the middle of it. In a strange way, Arnaud’s honesty was a relief. And the way he delivered the truth—casually, as if he assumed it was something I could face—made me feel grown up.

“Here you are,” he said, passing me the map, which was now full of blue, overlapping circles. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Now tell me about your
amah.
“

I rattled off a few things (great cook, nice singing voice, easy-going). He looked so hopeful, so wistful, I didn’t mention that she seemed to have a lot of devotees.

“Anything else?”

I was thinking:
She has a son. He’ll be joining Anh soon.
But I couldn’t bring myself to mention that either.

The following Saturday morning, Anh’s son Dinh arrived while Oliver and I were having breakfast. Absorbed in our separate reading, we barely noticed the door open.

Anh walked in first to announce their arrival. “Marcel, Oliver,” she said. “This is my son. This is Dinh.”

I looked up and saw a boy about my height but thinner. He had those wide-set eyes I’d noticed in the photograph, a full mouth and short cowlicked hair, which Anh smoothed as if
tidying him for his introduction. He returned my stare, curious, but made no sound or movement at all.

Oliver watched him for a moment and then, remembering his manners, said, “Hello, Dinh. We’re happy to meet you. Please, come join us.”

Anh nudged her son towards the table. He sat down tentatively, studying the bread she placed on a plate before him. Then he slowly began turning his head to look around the room—at Oliver’s desk, the balcony, our home.

I had been told that Dinh was only a year younger than me and also an only child. I had also been told that he was mute—by choice, not birth. In other words, it was not that he
could not
speak, it was that he
would not.
In public, he communicated in sighs and nods and tilts of his head. In private, he spoke fluently to his mother in a rapid, whispered Vietnamese too quick for my ears. Now, watching Anh crouch down and place her hands on Dinh’s knees, I felt a twist of jealousy.

A part of me just wanted him to turn around and leave. But wherever he had come from, it must have been very far away. He looked exhausted. He fumbled through his breakfast, and when Anh suggested he take a rest, he followed her like a zombie to my bedroom. She pulled down the covers of the unoccupied twin bed and he slipped inside without protest and promptly fell asleep.

He continued to sleep off and on for the next two days. And I discovered to my great annoyance that he was not a mute sleeper. He mumbled and moaned. Occasionally his voice would rise and words would form. The first night my eyes flew open to Dinh ranting in his sleep; by the second night I was convinced that he had arrived to ruin my life.

Dinh, on the other hand, slept like a prince. When he finally
emerged from the bedroom that first morning, he looked replenished. He walked around the spacious suite, lifting up books and bottles, trailing his finger over chairs and cushions, surveying everything with curiosity. He finally joined me by the window and we sat watching the traffic below, cars and pedestrians darting like a school of fish around an old man and his slow-moving cart.

Anh called us both over to the table and put one hand around Dinh’s arm and another hand around mine and said with a smile, “Macee. You know this is my number one son. I know you will take care of each other.”

I nodded.

“So, Dinh, number one son,” I said with a smile. “What do you say we go exploring. Shall we start with the courtyard?”

Dinh was silent.

I looked over at Anh:
What shall I do now?
Anh pulled her shirt, so I pulled gently on Dinh’s sleeve and said, “Let’s go. Can’t wait all day.”

And finally Dinh nodded as though he understood and followed.

It wasn’t easy. It was hard to discern at first if he was smart or stupid, interested or indifferent. Even as I got to know Dinh, there were moments when his muteness was too much to bear. There were days when it felt like a punishing silent treatment.

“Dinh. Don’t think you’re going to get away with not speaking.”

When I was cross, Dinh looked baffled. Anh urged me not to take it personally. But I felt that Dinh’s muteness had never been properly explained.

“But
why
doesn’t he say anything?” I asked Anh one morning as she was washing her hair in the sink.

“He wants to save his voice so he can be famous opera singer one day.”

“Anh! Come on.”

She laughed, rinsing the last suds from her hair.

“Come on, Anh,” I pleaded. “Tell me the real reason!”

“The real reason,” she said, not smiling any more, “is his father.” She wrung the water from her hair and told me that Dinh’s father was a soldier in the north. One day he allowed himself to be “lifted off by the wind of war.” For several days he hovered in the air and then he saw that he would have to make a decision, to choose sides. When that happened, he left Hue, abandoning his family, and joined the northern guerillas. These soldiers had burrowed into the ground to survive and now lived in tunnels night and day. Anh had fled to the south, where she hoped to be able to protect her son. She said that Dinh was so upset by his father’s actions that he had decided to remain silent until they were reunited.

When she had finished her story, she wrapped her hair in a towel and walked over to the record player in the other room and turned it on, placing the needle on a groove in the middle. There was a crackle, then the sound of a woman’s voice singing in a language I didn’t recognize. Anh adjusted the volume, louder, louder, until the room was filled with a sad, moaning melody. “I think it’s Portuguese,” she said with a shaky smile. While the music continued playing, she used the record cover to flatten dried rice skins for cooking.

Once I learned about Dinh’s father, my attitude towards Dinh changed. It stirred something nurturing in me. I knew what it was like to have to adjust to life with a missing parent. I barely had one.

One afternoon as we reclined on the cold floor of our room,
escaping the broiling heat outside, I remember whispering questions to him.

“Do you suppose it’s hard to live in a tunnel?”

“Is there a way of visiting him?

“How long can a person live without sunlight?”

When I tired of asking questions, I just began speaking my own thoughts.

“Oliver is going away to the war for the third time.”

“He’s never quite right when he returns.”

“Sometimes I think he
wants
to get hurt.”

“I hope my mother can find us here.”

“Maybe I should learn more Vietnamese.”

Dinh said nothing.

In the days that followed, with Oliver gone again, Dinh trailed me everywhere I went. He followed me to Givral’s and to get fruit shakes at the local stall. When we were out together, I sometimes found myself narrating our experiences (“This drink needs more ice.” “Boy, is it hot.”) just to occupy the thick silence.

Then one day I stopped narrating and the silence thinned and became easy. There were different kinds of silence, I discovered. Silence that hid things and silence that held a space. With Dinh, I began to notice other sounds: his breathing and the soft private noises he made—the hums and grunts—like a conversation that had no beginning, middle or end.

I discovered that Dinh loved animals. He adopted the lizards that floated up the corridor walls. He watched them stay still, their gentle heaving abdomens the only indication that they were alive. There was no such thing as moderate movement among lizards. No gradation of motion. They rested as if glued
to the spot, then bolted off. Who knew what sudden, mysterious force propelled them forward?

Dinh combed his surroundings and mimicked the sound of birds in the trees and crickets in the courtyard, and beetles knocking against glass.

One lunchtime, I brought out a copy of
National Geographic
I had bought at Samedi’s with a special feature on American Midwest farm animals.

I pointed at a rooster. “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

Anh and Dinh laughed.

“Chikiriki,” said Dinh in response.

I pointed at a dog and said, “Woof, woof.”

“Wau wau,” said Dinh.

Next came a pig: “Oink, oink.”

“Ut-it, ut-it,” said Dinh.

Then a sheep: “Baa, baaa.”

“Be-hehehehe.”

We went through the animals until all that was left was a photo of a solitary penguin on a drift of ice.

I felt really happy that day. It didn’t matter if Anh loved Dinh more, I felt I was living a normal home life.

That night I wrote back to Pippa. I sat at one end of the table while Anh and Dinh sat at the other end playing cards. I told her all about my new family, how wonderful everything was. I wanted to make her jealous. Painfully jealous. I wanted her to know what she had given up.

O
LIVER CAME BACK FROM HIS THIRD PATROL
in rough shape. I had been in Saigon for three months by then. He had a nagging cough and jungle foot rot. He walked to his bed the day he arrived, flopped face down and fell asleep. When he awoke in the night, he sat down at his desk but the writing didn’t come easily. The sun rose and set and he was still stuck on his lead sentence. A cloud of smoke gathered around his head. He typed, then crossed out what he had written, then retyped.

The wastepaper bin was filled with false starts, crumpled papers which I uncrumpled and read.

“Fuck,” he said, pulling out his old typewriter ribbon, a thin ragged reel of red and black unscrolling onto the desk.

He went out, came back drunk. He typed until he was sober. Then he went out again the next day, came back drunk.

But then, four days after he came home, whatever had been blocking him finally lifted and the writing started to go well. Now, he typed without stop. He made his documents in triplicate and kept one copy locked up in an otherwise empty suitcase, snapping the latch shut with pride. For the next week, I watched as he feverishly cabled, Telexed and handed roundups to travellers who were leaving the country.

He wrote about the South Vietnamese army’s blunders and the guerrillas’ victories. He pounded out more than four thousand words a day. I was just relieved to see him more cheerful, smiling occasionally.

Joseph joined us for dinner one evening. Anh had prepared his favourite dish of grilled pork and scallions. As we ate together, Oliver and Joseph began exchanging stories about their various adventures over the years. Every now and then, Anh would nod or wrinkle her nose, and say,
Sounds dangerous …
or
You are a lucky man.
After a while, I realized that they were showing off for her, pushing each other further and further until they were laughing about their near-death experiences. (“So I told him I’d buy him a ticket to Las Vegas if he put the gun down” … “A few more steps to the right and I would have been human confetti!”)

Halfway through the meal, Anh noted the horror on my face and put her hand on my arm. “You okay, Macee?”

I shook my head.

Joseph saw my reaction and reassured me with a warm smile. “Marcel, don’t worry. It’s the ones who can’t laugh that you worry about.”

“Or the ones who can’t stop,” added Oliver.

“Yes, those are the truly lost ones.”

I slept late the next morning and was still stretched out in bed when Dinh came in and called me to the table by poking me in the side with a butter knife.

“Stop jabbing me,” I said, swatting him away with my hand.

When he wouldn’t leave me alone, I finally rose, annoyed, and followed him out to the main room.

“Macee, I’m sorry to wake you up,” said Anh. “Sit down, drink some tea.” She was mopping a small spill with a cloth. There was a strained look on her face.

Oliver came and joined us.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“A small incident,” said Oliver.

“What happened?”

Oliver explained that South Vietnamese troops had fired into a crowd of protestors downtown, killing nine people. In retaliation, a grenade was thrown at the Paris Palace nightclub close to the hotel.

“Did anyone die at the nightclub?”

“I don’t know.”

“You
must
know.”

“Please, Marcel. The point is we need to be a bit more careful for a while,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

He looked over at Anh, then back at me. “We want you and Dinh to be chaperoned until the streets are safer.”

I could see there was no point in even arguing so I just nodded. Then I slid off my chair to go look out the window, but everything outside looked the same as usual.

The next morning I overheard a few reporters in the lobby discussing the attack on the nightclub. It had made international
headlines. Thirteen people had been killed, including two American soldiers and three British nurses working for the International Red Cross.

It seemed obvious to me: the streets would not get safer. But for the next two weeks, it was a prisoner’s life we led. The only thing that broke up the caged feeling were visits from Arnaud. We rushed to the door the minute we heard his voice. On weekends he took us to the theatre near the bridge at Da Kao where we sat in the red leather chairs in the balcony and watched movies. The movies were an assortment of French avant-garde cinema and American westerns. We also watched a Vietnamese slapstick comedy, which made us laugh so hard we cried. Strange that the comedy would have come from the place that was seeing so much tragedy.

I
AM OFFICIALLY STUCK
. It’s the fucking
Guardian
comic. I’m trying (and failing) to break down the bigger picture, reducing war into its component parts, the “cells” from which comics are created. I have just spent an hour drawing a hooded prisoner, too caught up in the joyless labour of tiny details, sketching and resketching, to notice what I was actually creating. Now my prisoner looks baroque, bejewelled.

Iris watches me rip up page after page, curious but hesitant, observing me the way you might observe someone unhinged from reality. She has been treating me strangely ever since she came across those books. She follows me around but doesn’t speak much.

At the moment she is seated in my ergonomic Aeron chair, working at my desk, while I sit at the lightbox. She stretches her arms over her head, yawns extravagantly and then resumes
working. A slight wind rattles the window. Around where she sits, desk drawers have been left open, 2B pencils and brushes dumped out on the desk’s surface. From my stash of drawing implements, she has chosen the most antiquated nib pen. Her knuckles are grained with ink. She is even using a blotting towel. These prehistoric artifacts seem to have unlocked Iris’s creative flow. Her page is full of beautiful black squiggles, thin imprecise lines snaking from the top edge of the paper to the bottom. They look like dribbles of rain. Every now and then she brings me “faces,” small squares with faint pencil marks. She likes to draw made-up things. They are the quietest pictures I’ve ever seen. Looking at them is like floating under water, feeling immediate silence.

I walk over to the pencil sharpener clamped to my desk and say, “Remember when you offered me drawing lessons? I think I want them now.”

The next thing I know we are sitting on the floor of the studio in front of a giant sheet of paper. We have agreed that our journey will begin in the top left. Beyond that, there are no rules. We take turns improvising, picking up where the other left off. The pen in my hand, the pen in her hand. Back and forth we go. My leaden line giving way to her almost weightless twirl. It’s hard for me. I don’t know the last time I set out on the page without a plan or direction. I suddenly realize that drawing has been a way of form-finding for me. It pains me mentally when things don’t cohere. Maybe it’s time for some incoherence, a different kind of knowing.

“What do you see?” she asks, stopping to point at the marks we’ve made so far.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Good,” she says with a nod.

We continue working. Then something happens. My pen begins to lift, hers begins to fall. Flat ink blobs appear on her side. My lines loosen. Drawing has been a way of keeping myself safely and purposefully detached, but now our pens make eye contact, and it turns my heart inside out.

O
LIVER HAD STARTED
to take even greater risks, joining soldiers in Viet Cong–infiltrated areas at the very southern tip of Vietnam. At night, when my worries seemed to swell the most, I found myself making endless private promises. I prayed with brand new spiritual zeal. I made deals with God. I would be very good and not run off any more. I would sit on the hotel steps and watch the General and absorb valuable lessons about discipline. I would give away all my pocket money and I would not, under any circumstances, wear any white, write the number “4,” eat an orange without first offering one to Buddha. I was determined to produce nothing but excellent karma for Oliver.

Very early in the morning, soon after Oliver had returned from yet another trip to the front, I heard him opening the window in the main room. I got up and went to him.

“Look,” he said. The moon was still in the sky, but a green army tank was rolling down the middle of Tu Do, spewing gusts of diesel into the air.

Oliver closed the window and went to make two cups of sugary, extra milky instant coffee while I sat down at the table.

“Above the fold?” he said when he returned with our drinks.

At some point,
above the fold
had become our code word for the greatest stories.

I grinned and replied, “Pippa’s famous penis display.”

He laughed, handed me my mug. “What were they supposed to be, again?”

“Stalagmites. She was trying to make a prehistoric cave with modelling clay.”

“Yes. That’s right,” said Oliver.

“They cracked as they dried. Some of them broke right off.”

Oliver winced.

We continued sipping our milky coffee.

“Do you remember that day she came home with a baby goat?” Oliver said.

“I remember. She brought it home in a taxi.”

“And what was the goat for?”

“I forget.”

We both laughed.

There was a fly buzzing around. It landed on the rim of my cup, then on Oliver’s forehead, then on the table.

We returned to our separate rooms and I fell asleep quickly, but by 8 a.m. I was awakened by the sound of chainsaws. Throughout the city, trees that had long ago been planted by the French forestry service were being chopped down to widen the roads for military traffic.

The toppling of the trees was a turning point. Even after the French left, Saigon had felt like a European city. Now, boxy American cars were overtaking the old French cars on the streets. The stores began stocking American chocolate, mayonnaise and cornflakes. On Tu Do, there were posters for an American rock band and, a block farther south, big American farm boys in sunglasses were lining up to eat at Big Boy Hamburgers.

I saw more reporters bolting off on more mornings. Swift-footed when they left, they walked slower when they returned—stinking of sweat, covered with bug bites and dust, criss-crossed with cuts and scratches. A few were really messed up. Joseph called them “hair-trigger boys” and warned me to avoid them. It wasn’t unusual to see a casual conversation end in a tantrum or a brawl.

Oliver left for night patrol early one Saturday morning and returned three days later with his loafers bound up with tape. He had walked all night through rice paddies up to his waist in water, then had to stay in water for about two hours before sweeping through a rebel village with a small platoon. I overheard him telling Anh about Americans with tommy guns pushing a scared company of South Vietnamese soldiers to continue.

“It’s going to get worse,” he said with strange openness. “Everything before now was small.”

When he was done talking he lay down on the sofa with his black feet and stared at the ceiling fan until he fell asleep.

The next morning Anh, Dinh and I went to Ben Thanh market, in the Chinese neighbourhood of Cholon, to do our shopping. The city was hazed in a morning fog. As we walked through the streets, I watched the grainy shapes of two women ahead of us and thought of my mother. All these years later, she was still a blurry image, only slightly more than a vaporous nothingness. I still imagined that a letter would arrive from her one day, pleading for my forgiveness, asking for a reunion.

Whatever thoughts I was having as we walked through the main entrance to Ben Thanh were instantly jostled aside by the crowds, all the vivid colours and layered noise, the pots
clanging and customers arguing. It was prime selling time. We moved along with a surge of shoppers. There were narrow aisles brimming with baskets of dried fish, bottles of Bordeaux, live birds. After picking out a few mangos and fresh spring rolls for ourselves, we made our way to the clothing area to buy new shoes for Oliver.

This section of the market was less crowded. I stood under a pink-striped canopy while Anh and Dinh sauntered around looking through racks of shoes. A woman nearby was arranging a spiralling tower of silk slippers, carefully balancing each pair, reaching higher and higher.

Suddenly, from a few stalls over, I heard angry shouting. I turned and saw a skinny teenage boy guarded by two policemen. The boy looked terrified. From what I could gather, a third policeman had just discovered a box of ammunition beneath a pile of cotton shirts and straw mats. ”
Duma,
“ spat the policeman, lifting his hand to strike the boy. The boy flinched and momentarily lost his balance. It was almost imperceptible—no effort to bolt away, just a small stumble backwards. But the policeman to his right reacted immediately, pulling a pistol out of his holster. It happened so quickly. I heard the word
no
leave my mouth. Then I heard the shot, and the boy dropped to his knees and fell to the ground, his hands still tied behind his back. I saw blood pooling.

Someone started yelling behind me. The boy was convulsing. I felt light-headed and steadied myself against a shoe rack. The boy’s face was unnaturally white. One of the policemen swore and made a tourniquet out of a torn shirt. I crouched down and closed my eyes and I tried to use Mrs. Bowne’s technique of picturing pleasant things.
Think of the flowers in Eel Brook Common and the lake in Kelsey Park. Picture Kiyomi
… It was no use.

I heard Anh yell in Vietnamese for someone to call an ambulance.

Then I opened my eyes and saw her backing away, scared. I stood to join her. Dinh was the last to follow. He didn’t want to leave.

The sun was out and the fog had lifted but we walked home in a daze. We watched a cyclo driver, huffing and puffing as he passed us. I held Dinh’s hand, which was cold and small, and I felt suddenly protective. Why had he wanted to stay? I could tell that we were all still inside the market, watching that boy with his cheek on the floor, shuddering in pain.