The Darkest Little Room (7 page)

I gave no answer and she did not lift her eyes.

‘Is there such a place?' I asked.

She breathed deeply.

‘Căn phòng nhỏ ít tỏi nhất la nhân tim
… The darkest little room in the world is the human heart,' she said at last. ‘Even yours, perhaps, has black secrets that you would never let into the light.'

‘But the darkest little–'

‘What did she look like, the girl you spoke about before?'

‘Just like you. But she wore her hair differently. She wore it up.'

‘Như cái này
… Like this? … Joseph?'

I thought of the photograph in my coat pocket. That she had never seen.

‘I never told you to tie it on the side.'

She shrugged.

‘Many girls do it like that now.'

‘And your eyes …'

‘Yes.'

‘Your eyes are hers.'

‘Tinted contact lenses are not expensive. Many girls wear them.'

‘Let me see.'

She leant toward me and laughed, but then pulled her face away.

A plump girl with wide cheekbones came into the room and ‘asked' me to buy two more drinks, and she asked for a tip. Apparently she fed off the affection men felt for Thuy and off Thuy's sympathy.

Thuy switched to English.

‘Please, Joseph, you give my friend one hundred thousand. She get very small money.'

I took out my wallet and gave the girl the note and she left us. I was running out of cash. Thuy saw it. In a few drinks' time I would not have enough to buy her.

‘You can take me out now,' she said.

I took the drink I had paid for at the bar and then paid what in Saigon is the average monthly wage and Thuy changed her dress and put a few of her personals from the box in the room into a bag and we walked onto the street where the heat was gone and it was showering rain. A black Citroën sat across the road and dimmed its lights and for a moment I thought the driver must be watching us, but then the car pulled away.

‘So this really is Saigon,' Thuy said when we drove onto the esplanade. ‘And this is Saigon River.'

She leant on the window of the taxi and looked down at the dark water, then at a floodlit driving range netted in beside a five star hotel.

I had the driver pull left down back roads and we came to the river's edge – to a boardwalk at the back of the hotel and a place where we could eat fish hotpot. The rain had eased to a spit.

‘Perhaps that is all the rain we will get tonight.'

Thuy shook her head.

‘See the bubbles in the water where the rain falls? The bubbles mean more rain will come. Heavy rain.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Không nhớ
… I do not remember. Someone when I was a child in Thanh Hoa.'

‘Saigon is a beautiful river.' I lit a cigarette. ‘At this hour,' I justified. ‘In the dark it is beautiful, when you cannot truly see it.'

The girl nodded.

‘The man who told me about you said your eyes were like a Vietnamese river. The Ma River, near where you said you were born.'

I looked out across the immense and quietly churning Saigon.

‘Thuy … that name means ‘water', no?'

She nodded.

‘Thuy, you are her.'

She looked away at the river.

‘Why does it matter?'

‘Redemption.' I spoke the English word, though she would not know it.

‘She was your girlfriend?'

‘I believe … I hoped she would be my wife.'

‘If you possessed such a girl, why did you not keep her? Why would you let her end up like me?'

I turned my eyes to the river again. I repeated something I had heard Zhuan say.

‘Perhaps we can only truly know a sin for a sin once it's committed. Once it has borne fruit. Tell me you are the girl I have searched for.'

‘Em tự hỏi
… I wonder.'

‘It must be you. Your eyes are not contacts. I saw well enough in that room back there.'

‘Nói thật
… True, they are not dark. Do you know the name
bui doi?
It means ‘the dust of life'. The name is given to children of mixed blood. The people in my village thought my eyes were a curse. Either I was the daughter of a whore or had Annamite blood.'

‘Nhưng rất đep
… But they are beautiful.'

‘They believe that too is a curse. Like
Kieu.'

The great Vietnamese heroine: she sacrificed herself to prostitution for her people. Some nights I translated a verse or two of
The Tale of Kieu
into a notebook back in my room, originally to practise my Vietnamese, though no one used the old classical register
Kieu
was written in any more, and few Vietnamese could recite the verses offhand, yet this girl sang one now.

Ông Vong có hai con gái đẹp

như nữ thần của mặt trăng,

Thúy Kiều là chị,

Thùy Vân trẻ

A barge glided past and a wind rose in the north and I thought how beautiful it was to be beside this girl who sang ancient song that obliterated the noise of the cars on the bridge.

We went to some awful hotel she knew. She said all the girls at the club used it.

‘Don't turn on the light.'

‘Alright,'

‘I opened the fridge.'

‘Drink?'

‘No.'

I took a Tiger beer. She took off her coat and her hand went to her shoulder to unstrap her dress.

‘Wait.'

‘Cái gì?'

‘Sleep. I don't want to touch you.'

‘What?'

‘Sleep'

She lay down on her side and the bones of her back were like those of a small bird. In the amber light that came in from the street her skin glowed like some strange jewel.

I lay down too. I had promised her a night of rest, but I did not sleep easily with her beside me.

‘Tell me your story. How you came to be here.'

‘That is something you cannot pay for.'

‘I do not intend to pay for it.'

She stared at me.

‘Không biet
… I hardly remember it.'

‘Please try.'

‘I told you I was from Thanh Hoa.'

‘And from there you were taken–'

She stared at me blankly.

‘To China, no?'

‘Yes. China.'

‘You alone?'

‘No. There were other girls.' Thuy clicked her tongue. ‘Some were very young. Maybe twelve years old. We were taken to a house.'

‘Who took you? How?'

‘I was kidnapped. I have been kidnapped twice. Once by old women. Once by police.'

‘That is hideous,' I said.

‘Yes. Police are hideous. I was glad when they sold me on.'

‘Some police are good men.'

‘I do not know them.'

‘Could you name any of these men – the ones the women sold you to, or the police? Or the women themselves?'

She laughed and stared out the window.

‘It is too long ago. I can hardly remember.'

‘A year and six months.'

‘Ðung roi, gần hai năm
… Yes, near two years.' she said and turned to face me. ‘But a year can seem like forever. Many of the girls at Club 49 come from the north. From the Chinese border country. The girls are moved and sold by a gang that operates in the mountains of Sa Pa. That is all I know.'

I reached for the notebook I kept with me always.

‘Troi oi!
… For God's sake! Can't you just do what the others do to me?'

She does look like a whore, I thought. She talks like a whore. I looked at her petulant tinsel eyes. That cunning mouth. It hurt to realise she was a whore and not a saint. The dream had been beautiful. Yet what if it was I who had made her this way?

The Thanh Hoa photograph fell out of the sleeves of my notebook. I looked at it and slipped it back in.

‘There is one more thing I want to ask you?'

‘Cái gì?'

‘The girl I am looking for had a hairclip.' I looked at the wall beneath the window, at the bag she had brought with her. ‘A jade butterfly clip that her grandmother gave her and she was never without it.'

She stared at me and said nothing.

‘Do you have it?'

Her eyes fell.

‘Even if I did … Many girls …'

I got out of bed but she leapt and grabbed the bag.

‘Open it.'

‘There are private things I do not want you to see!'

‘I have seen everything a girl might put in a bag like that a thousand times already. You don't need to be embarrassed. Please open it.'

She did. Earrings, a mascara pencil, a box of condoms, glitter … a green butterfly hairclip.

She stood and stared at me in the street light that came in the window. She lowered her face. She lay down on my shoulder.

I sighed and closed my eyes.

‘Do you want to ask anything of me?'

She shook her head.

‘No. I know already.'

We lay still and silent for an hour. I do not know if I slept.

‘You'd better get dressed,' she said.

‘What? Let me sleep.'

‘But I want you to buy me something to eat before I go.'

‘Go where?'

‘I have to work.'

‘Why?'

‘How can you ask that?'

‘Lie down. You're staying with me.
Mai mai
… forever. Understand?'

She nodded and smiled and stayed sitting up and watching me blink with drowsiness. I tried to stay as long as I might in that pleasant march that lies on the borders of waking and sleeping, letting the evil of the night fade, and all the while watching her like watching the movements of a figure in a dream. She had learned to move around sleeping men as silently as a cat. I wondered how many wallets she had stolen this way. Without concern I watched to see if she would steal mine. I would not have cared if she had tried. I would only have smiled and kept drowsing. But she took nothing from me. She went to the bathroom. The fridge. I did not realise I had fallen asleep until a vaguely threatening and instantly forgotten dream was broken by her movements. I rubbed my eyes. She stood at the end of the bed putting on her clothes. I took my wristwatch from the bedside table. It was three in the morning.

‘What are you doing?'

‘I have to go back,' she said.

‘At this hour?'

‘I must go.'

‘But I bought you for the night?'

‘You bought me for an hour. But I need something, Joseph. Something to help me sleep.'

‘Name it!'

‘I am sick.'

‘Sick how?'

Ashamedly I thought then of a cut on my hand where I had nicked myself with my army knife making repairs to my ceiling fan – I had momentarily forgotten that Thuy did not bear Hönicke's sacrificial wounds. Perhaps in the dream I had woken from she had. That was it: I had dreamt she was wounded and lay bleeding beside me.

But anyway that was not the sickness she meant.

‘Thuỏc phiện.'

‘What?'

‘Opium.'

I did not recognise the word at first. I thought she was asking for a cigarette. I had her write down what she wanted in my notebook. I held the notebook to a scrap of street light.

‘It is three in the morning. You do not need it,' I said stupidly, for that need is as sleepless as the devil.

‘Anh phải lấy nó cho em
… Elder brother must get it for little sister.'

‘Must?'

‘Hoặc em phải đi
… Or sister must leave.'

‘You cannot be serious.'

‘Please.'

‘How do you take it?'

She took the foil from a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table and took my lighter and held them up. So it was not opium she wanted but heroin. I had forgotten that in Vietnam the same word does for both drugs.

‘Damn it, Thuy!' I was about to speak a profanity, but she stared at me out of the dark and a light came on in a hotel across the road and lit her face that was the face of an innocent child.

‘How much do you need?'

‘A gram.'

‘A whole gram!'

‘Less then. Three points.'

‘Three points?'

‘Yes. That will do for a tonight and tomorrow if it must.'

I was angry that she had tried to fool me. But maybe she did need a gram after all. Though she did not look like a junkie, maybe a third of a gram was a terrible concession.

‘Where will I get it?'

‘Không biet
… I do not know,' she said with tears in her eyes. ‘But there is always somewhere at night.'

I sat up and put my head in my hands. She put her hands on my head.

‘
Thật sự anh không biết đi đâu hả?…
Brother truly does not know where to go?'

‘No. And at this hour I do not even know who to ask.
Rất nguy hiem, em
… Does young sister understand how dangerous a thing she asks brother to do?'

‘Anh muỏn em ở đây không?
… Does brother want sister here with him?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then I will return to you on another night. I must find somewhere safe that we can buy it if I am to stay.'

‘Alright,' I said. ‘I will get you a taxi.'

‘Thank you.'

We went downstairs and paid a man sleeping on his motorbike to take her across the river.

‘Please forgive me,' Thuy said.

‘Of course.'

She smiled and kissed me. She spoke English.

‘You very re-regard me,' she said.

‘Yes,' I smiled. ‘I regard you.'

I watched the motorbike turn the corner out of this street I did not know and walked back upstairs.

12

I called her phone the next day at lunch. She said she would meet me. I rode down to the river and met her getting out of a taxi. I thought she would have had more trouble getting away.

‘Em ở đây thế nào?…
How are you here, sister? I thought I would have had to come and get you.'