The Darkest Little Room (24 page)

I carried her in my arms to the water.

‘Let me carry her too,' said Zhuan. He put his hand under her waist and in doing so grasped my hand and I looked into his eyes.

We set her body down in the stony shallows. Her hair played about her beautiful face as in a wind. Once more she was exquisitely beautiful. The water would rise through the day with the rain fallen in the mountains. Then we both knelt beside her and I wet my face.

Zhuan looked back along the road.

‘We cannot stay.'

‘No.'

We walked back to the car.

I stared at the blood soaked into the passenger seat, thick and wet.

‘You will have to get your shoulder seen to,' said Zhuan, staring out the window at the blank sky.

‘Yes,' I said, closing my hand around the butterfly hair clip that was greasy with blood.

‘I know a good doctor in Saigon.' I put the hairclip to my lips and tears burst from my eyes before I could help it. ‘Oh, God.'

36

I saw Zhuan a half-dozen more times in Saigon. Christmas was coming and festoons of lights hung above Le Loi and Dong Khoi Roads and the city was beautiful. Zhuan would sit in Bui Vien cafes for hours. He made no attempt to hide from what was coming to him. We stared at each other once as I walked past on my way to a travel agent to book a ticket to Singapore where I had got a job at a paper. I think he thought I was going to sit down and talk with him. He lowered his eyes when he saw I was not.

We met a week later at the Victory Hotel swimming pool, where we often met by design in happier times. He was sitting in a deckchair with a beer.

I was about to walk straight back out of the hotel but he sat up and grabbed the sleeve of my shirt.

‘Let go of me.'

‘Please sit down. I may not have long to live.'

‘Are you sick?' It was a cruel joke and I should not have made it. The guilt I felt then made me pull out the chair opposite him.

‘If only you knew how much you have to thank me for – what is coming for me could be coming for you if I had not protected you. I could have given your name at any time.'

We sat in a long silence. I looked down at one of those grandiose faux restaurants without customers that government men build to launder their wealth.

Zhuan held up an MP3 player. I had wondered what the earphones were for. I thought they might be attached to a mobile phone, but I could not imagine there were many people left for him to call – perhaps a policeman somewhere in China or Thailand who owed him a favour. Someone who could get him an ID or passport. But he was not going to run. He smiled.

‘These are wonderful things. Do you have one?'

‘No.'

‘I've been sitting here listening to Górecki's
Miserere.
The sound is just as though you have a choir before you.' I nodded and looked away at a pretty girl in a one-piece swimming costume.

‘How long do you think girls have been sold in this country?' Zhuan asked.

‘Forever, no doubt.'

‘Yes. Thousands of years.' I had the feeling he was talking to himself – as though he were engaged in some personal battle that had been waging since long before I sat down. Since the day he first saw Thuy and perhaps longer. ‘We are none of us at home here,' Zhuan said. ‘That is what causes all our trouble. We are in exile, just like the girl who died. The difference was she could never forget it. That is what has caused my trouble.'

I shrugged.

‘You're very self-righteous, Joe? I wonder what you would do if a high ranking officer offered money for a girl who had taken up a permanent seat in a bar you owned?'

‘Throw him out.'

‘Oh, yes. But you are imagining an enemy. Much more difficult when the man is supposed to be your friend and all his friends are the present rulers of the land.' He sighed again.

That resigned sigh was beginning to annoy me. I was regretting sitting down with Zhuan now. He was destroying the peace I felt in despair. I had only wanted to swim and let exhaustion blank my mind.

‘Do you think those wounds of hers were miraculous, Joe?'

‘You never saw them?'

He shook his head.

‘Not in person. Were you lying?'

‘No. She bore wounds that I could touch.'

‘I forgot to look that last night in the car … but then she was in coats.'

‘Well,' said Zhuan, ‘she will not recover from that bullet wound in her back. That I saw. That I touched and it did not vanish. Yet there may be a miracle after all. We both loved her, and do you not feel that somehow through that love we may be redeemed, and somehow she survives?

‘The warlords and professors shout and blast their way through the centuries and they come and go. But those who love stand like beacons in the ocean of time. Why? Why do you think the materialists spend so much time and money in the attempt to drown out a man who wrote but one sign in the sand that was blown away by the wind? I'll tell you why – because people loved him, and where there is love there is continuation, there is life. He knew his words were immortal because people loved them. People love that man still – love him unto death. Everything we do is blown away by the wind, even the ancient law that Christ unwrote then. But not love. Love alone is immortal.'

‘The slave boss becomes a saint.'

‘Boss? Do you know who I think the bosses are? The thugs. Tan and Trong. The men standing at the doors with guns and knives. The ones without love or morals or even real money. The men of coldness and stupidity and violence. In an evil business who should be highest ranked but the most evil men. I think we all finally answer to them. And they answer to no one. No law of man can harm them because their ignorance, their dullness, is nearly as immortal as love. And all the Devil asks of the rest of us is to sit quietly by and accept them, so he destroys our souls by inches at a time. How poorly medieval Europe imagined the Devil. If they were cleverer they would have dressed him modestly, had him staring blankly at the wall in an afternoon cafe.'

‘Something like you right now, perhaps.'

I could not bear any more of Zhuan's sermon.

‘I have to go,' I said, slapping the ticket and my passport on the table where Zhuan could see them.

‘I am sorry things have taken this turn with us. I had hoped we would always be friends.'

I stood up and walked away.

Dusk had arrived by the time I was on the street, and when I walked to pick up my bike I had an inexplicable feeling that I was being followed. I turned and saw the shape of a Caucasian man step into an alley and out of sight.

Later that night I rode to the bridge that crossed to District Four. A black Citroën pulled up beside me. I did not turn from the water to see who got out. I felt his presence behind me.

He lit a cigarette and came and leant on the balustrade. I did not give him a chance to speak. I got on my bike and rode back to the edge of District One. At the foot of the bridge I stopped the bike and looked over my shoulder. I thought he was making it easy for whatever thug pursued him to exact the revenge of the gang he had betrayed. I was a little surprised that he was still alive – I think he was waiting for death in the form of a bullet in the back of the head, so that he might fall into the river. He must have been trying not to imagine the less graceful forms in which death might come to him. We had been back a fortnight already. I wondered if he had begun to hope death would pass him over. Like me, he probably wondered that it was taking so long. There could be no such thing as mercy in the hearts of the men who pursued him – but, like any businessmen, perhaps they too had problems of logistics, and the thing was postponed or momentarily forgotten amidst other more pressing concerns.

I was jealous that we both shared this place, this bridge and the running water. Zhuan stood staring down at the fast-flowing waters of the Ben Nghe Channel and perhaps like me noted the irony that this transient place of dark water that gave no reflections, that destroys every image, that forgets everyone, remembered her best.

I waited and watched until he got in his car and drove away.

37

I sat at a bar in Bui Vien watching the traffic flow around a corner in the direction of the park and Binh Thanh Market. A little girl in school uniform came in and tried to sell me a rose. Then a boy with a cropped head marched up to my table and sat down. I smiled at the boy who was from a happier time and asked him if he wanted a Coke.

Peter Pan shook his head.

‘I have a new girl for you.'

I looked away to the street.

‘Oh yes.'

‘But only one problem. She is girl on the bridge.'

‘No. She is dead.'

‘Not dead. She on the bridge.Very late at night.'

‘I mean the girl who–' I did not feel like explaining it. I doubted I could. Explain that the archetype was gone, that looking for the counterfeit amidst shadows no longer even possessed the virtue of hope.

‘But this girl look just same-same like the photograph.'

‘Yes, of course she does.'

‘Truly!'

‘You have spoken to her?'

‘No. I got nother boy.'

Now my boy had a boy. I wondered what part of the meagre allowance I gave Peter Pan was passed on to his employee in order to find girls. What a wonderful little economy I had launched, built of broken dreams and desire. I imagined a dollar coin broken into a million pieces, for all the street boys of Saigon, to go looking for a girl of memory who finally could not be found as the searchers had forgotten what it was they had first set out to discover.

‘I tell my boy say her you meet her on the bridge, yes? At nine clock.'

I handed Peter Pan a 50 000đ note that he presumed meant I had answered in the affirmative though I had no intention of meeting his girl.

I walked alone that night. I had not meant to go to the bridge. But the roads of the city always led to the river, and finally, if you walk them long enough, to every crossing. I stood at the railings of the bridge and watched the water, neither waiting nor hoping for anything. A man in a raincoat stood leaning against the rails further down and his face flashed in the bridge lights and I wondered if I knew him, but perhaps the lost and lonely are given to recognise their kin. I saw a pair of bridge-walking girls moving toward me and I looked away. I did not want to meet a girl who was just enough like Thuy to remind me of what I had lost. I walked back along the bridge away from them. Rain slanted across the dark. The rain fell quietly on the black Ben Nghe Channel and gloaming city and a girl who came along the bridge with face lowered to protect her make-up looked up at me out of her hood.

‘No,' I whispered. ‘It cannot be.' But I stood looking into her hazel eyes. ‘I saw you dead in the river. I laid you under the water. You were shot. I laid you in the river!'

She fell to her knees.

‘Thuy,' she cried, and put her hands together in prayer and then I realised what I should have known long ago.

‘God, you are not the same. You were sisters. Twin sisters.'

She did not hear me. She knelt praying to the dark water.

And I remembered the classic poem she had sung that first night we sat together on the river:

Even the flowers are jealous of she and her sister; bodies like slim plum branches, rain-pure souls; each her own self, each perfect …

I sat down with her with my back on concrete and looked up at the stars.

‘Em tên gì
… What is your name?'

‘Phuong,' she said.

Phuong. The phoenix that rises from the ashes. What a name, I thought.

I took the green butterfly clip from my pocket. When she saw it she wept again.

‘It is hers? Or yours?'

‘Hers, I suppose. I gave it to her.'

I shook my head and laughed at myself and tried not to let the bitter tears welling in my eyes fall.

I put the clip in Phuong's hand. What a clever ruse. She thought I would remember a green hair clip better than a soul.

‘I loved her,' I said. ‘I could not save her.'

We sat in silence and Phuong's hair became heavy with rain and hung across her face in blades. She pulled up the hood of her coat and stood up as though to leave and I grabbed her arm.

‘Why do you walk the bridge like this? How do you do it with safety?'

But I knew the answers.

‘I do not know where the manager of Club 49 has gone. The owner too. All of them have gone away.'

‘The manager is dead. And the owner will not be troubling you anymore.'

‘He never troubled me. He was good.'

‘Perhaps.

‘I met him some nights.'

‘I know. Did Thuy ever meet him?'

‘No. But I told her about him. He stopped her beatings. She hoped, I think, that he would help free us. But I put my hope in you. Like you he thought we were one, and I did not tell him different. You know, there is a certain kind of man that can only love what is wounded, broken. A man filled with guilt.'

I lowered my eyes.

‘How can you recognise such a man?'

‘It has been my work to know men. It is how I have survived.'

‘Yes.'

I lowered my eyes.

‘Anyway,' said Phuong. ‘I have police protection now.'

‘From who?'

She furrowed her brow.

‘From a man.'

‘How did you get it?'

She glared at me.

‘So you are owned once more?'

She scowled and I lowered my eyes. ‘No one owns my heart. No human being.' She made the sign of the Cross.

I wondered then at the strange communion there has ever been between prostitutes and the God of Israel. The first words He spoke to Man after the Fall were to Abraham's mistress when she was banished to the wilderness. The one and only time he wrote, in the sand at Canaan, was to unwrite a law to save the life of a prostitute. Truly His kingdom could not be of this world – the kingdom where prostitutes would be the first to enter. They were the last to Man's table on earth.