The Tapestries (25 page)
He wound his way through the partial opening. The light he saw came from the main living room. Against the bright parchment, Big Con perceived several shadows moving. He paused, tilted his head, and shut his eyes for a moment. The gob of tobacco in his mouth released a constant, bitter juice that teased his tongue.
He swallowed and drew a breath. The itch to fight burned in his mind, and he sauntered forward. Tonight, he would demand an assignment from that sinister magistrate. Maybe for a few silver pieces, he could harass some of Toan's current enemies.
To Big Con, picking a fight to get hard liquor was an old addiction, much like drinking and chewing tobacco. His hazy mind vaguely recalled a hot afternoon, a violent tussle with a mean dog, and then the promise of fifty silver coins, which had changed his position in this town from that of local pest to notorious killer-for-hire. That first verbal agreement was made here on the front porch of this mansion, when he had promised Toan he would eliminate a police officer.
He touched the depression on his upper lip, wincing at the unexpected surge of memory. It amazed him sometimes how his intoxicated brain could still retain such details after all these years. And yet he could not remember whether or not he had collected that money. The sudden recognition that he might have been swindled whirled up a wave of anger, like three evil spirits rushing through his body.
Ah, that slick old fossil!
He paused on the hard pavement to throw his head back, unhinge his jaws, and tilt the bottle into his mouth. In his irritation, Con accidentally swallowed the tobacco leaves. “Not tonight!” he mumbled. “You are not going to cross me anymore. I have kept my end of the bargain. That Officer Dao was dead, was he not?”
No one argued with him, except for a slight moan that seemed to rise from inside his head. He closed his eyes and listened. The sound came again, relentless and agonizing. Fear tiptoed up his back, choking him. It was impossible.
Could the dead have come searching for revenge tonight?
He turned to flee the Toan property, slurring incoherent phrases as he ran. On his way out, before he could see the dark scarecrow hanging on a pole opposite the magistrate's house, he tripped and fell into its dangling body.
“I did not kill you, Officer Dao,” he whined. “It was an accident.”
The bottle slipped from his hand and rolled along the earthy embankment until it disappeared inside the field, leaving a trail of liquid. Big Con buried his face in his hands. The puffy scars were rough against his callused fingers. His thoughts returned to that fateful day when he had gone looking for Dao, excited by the shiny silver pieces in the magistrate's hands. His mutilated face was still oozing blood when he reached his old enemy's home at the south end of town, behind the last rice field.
The officer he had encountered that late afternoon was no longer the fit, sinister policeman who had sentenced him to the endless torture of the prison plantation. The man he found was as taut and rotund as a watermelon.
Big Con had come up to the front door, looked inside with his red, drunken eyes, and bellowed out a curse upon Dao's three generations. His hand shook the neck of a broken bottle in the air. Its sharp edges were stained with his own blood.
He remembered watching the way the angry man stormed from his dining corner. In his hand he flaunted a well-polished ebony club.
Officer Dao knocked him down. Con emitted the deep bellow of a wounded cow, until the obese man kicked him in the face with the metal tips of his leather shoes. Con remembered spitting out his front tooth while grabbing one of the officer's legs.
Suddenly, a portion of the ruddy sky was blocked away from his vision, replaced by a mound of shuddering flesh. He pushed the mass off of himself and struggled to crawl away, but curiosity prompted him to look back. The policeman thrashed in the dirt next to his children's broken toys, clutching his chest. Blood drained from his face, turning it the color of young grass in early spring. The time-teller got to his feet and stood over the officer. It was his first and foremost unexpected triumph.
Since then he had become a new demon to the citizens of the Cam Le Village. Even though Dao had clearly died from a heart attack, Con's malignant aura became something people feared. As for him, the incident was buried deep inside his foggy mind, dulled by countless bottles of rice wine. However, from time to time, a villager would find him drunk and disheveled, sobbing and begging the gods for their forgiveness, just as he did now.
He touched the scarecrow's bare feet, banging his face against its toes. “Forgive me” was all he could say over and over again. As if in response, the dummy above him writhed feebly. In the calm of the night, he heard it moaning, and he realized with horror that the noise was not coming from inside his head. The bundle of rags resolved itself into a female shape. He could not tell if her hazy outline was a result of his tears, or if she was a vision. Gradually, he recognized her face. It was the beggar woman, dangling over him as if she had just descended from Heaven.
“—ep,” she uttered in a voice like the keening of a desperate eagle looking for its young. Big Con noticed her black mouth, and his senses were overwhelmed with the tangy smell of blood. The beggar jerked against a wooden pole, tossing her head, and Con noticed the thick ropes that bound her. He fell backward, stunned. All at once, her body sagged forward, resuming the scarecrow position as if what the time-teller had just witnessed was nothing more than a hallucination.
He drew closer, touching her hair. The beggar responded with a slow upward twist of her head. He slid closer still; his fingers brushed past her hair and caressed her face. Like a cat rubbing against a piece of furniture, she pushed her head against his hand and tilted her face so that the moonlight could illuminate her open mouth. The darkness that was caked inside grew redder before him until it turned into a pool of blood. Some of it had coagulated and was affecting her breathing. He could hear the air rattle in her throat.
Without a word, he untied the ropes and received her in his arms. And when, after a long time, the whole world was melting away, and there was this sluggish, sullen woman against him, an excitement he had long forgotten slithered in, slowly at first. Then it burst through him, rousing every nerve in his body with a new rush of intoxication. With a hoarse cry, he pressed his burning face into her hair.
T
hey walked across the fields, heading toward his hut. Her arm was wrapped over his shoulders while he clung to her waist, lifting her with every step. The alcohol seemed to have evaporated from his brain, and he no longer felt its influence on his limbs. He hesitated in confusion: what right had he to rescue a prisoner from the house of Toan? The question taunted him like a scornful parental voice, which he chose to ignore.
As they passed street after street, he held on to her body, feeling the soft and womanly curves, and his rough hand lingered. The bamboo forest circled them into its thickets. Big Con listened to the footsteps of the woman upon dried leaves, and he felt as though he had walked this road with her a thousand times before.
He took her to a small creek in the woods a short distance from his cabin. There, on a remote bank, they came to a thick bamboo floor he had built during the days when he was sober and needed to keep busy. Con laid the woman on her back. Her hair fell through the gaps of the platform, soaring along with the brook's current below. She looked at him with eyes filled with a silent despair that nearly brought him to tears. He understood that hopeless look, and there was nothing he could say to her.
Slowly, he unfastened her soiled blouse, unable to keep his fingers steady. After he peeled her tattered garments away, his hands glided across her skin, searching for the source of her bleeding. But her body showed no visible injury. Around them, the air was warm after the rain. The moon peeked through the broad branches and spied on the two of them. The beggar's anguished face was bathed in a light that turned her skin the color of ashes, yet she made no effort to push his hands away.
She lay before him, her head turned toward the water; his presence was beyond the range of her blinking vision. In this strange, awkward silence, she held her legs together, arms crossed shyly over her breasts. The time-teller took a deep breath, conscious only of the rise and fall of her chest. He was incapable of looking away. She, too, was trembling, as if anticipating a blow. She coughed, spitting some blood on the slick surface of the stand.
“Tell me, where are you hurt?” he asked her.
She turned to face him, but said nothing. Her mouth was open, like a hollow in a tree. A slight rattle seeped from it.
“You must show me your wound, so that I can help you. I see blood in your mouth, but I do not know where it comes from. Is it internal?”
She shook her head. Nothing in her eyes gave him a clue about her condition. Then she raised her hand and reached for his face. Big Con leaned closer. He felt her fingers touch the outer borders of his lips before they slipped inside. He was mystified by her fumbling gesture, until she caught hold of his tongue and yanked at it.
He peeled her hand away from his face. “Is it about your tongue?”
She nodded and opened her mouth wider.
“You cannot speak? Your tongue, and the blood—”
As if someone had just scalded him with a bucket of boiling water, he understood. “That old magistrate did this to you, did he not?” he shouted, and the sound of his own voice startled him.
Again, she nodded.
He took her hand and pressed it between his. She lay back with her eyes closed, peaceful. For a long time, they remained in each other's presence, listening to the night song of the brook, and the fresh vapor of springwater clung to their bodies.
“You stay,” he said to her after a while. “You are safe now. Do not worry about that man any longer. I will be back with some herbs, and I will wash you. These scars have taught me many lessons about how to handle flesh wounds,” he said, touching the crisscrossed marks on his face.
W
hen he returned to the creek, he found her clothes lying crumpled in a corner of the bamboo stand. A few paces away in the silver stream, her bronze body steeped in the moonlight. She had taken a bath while waiting for him. Hearing his footsteps, she looked up and covered her body with her arms. As he stood by the bank holding a handful of sweet melilot buds, he saw her rise out of the stream, shimmering.
He turned into a statue, unable to believe the beauty in what he was seeing. Even her face seemed to have shed its usual plainness and glow with the sparkling, mystical world. He wondered if she liked him, and the thought sent a wave of panic through him. He watched her get dressed with the wonderment of a once-blind person seeing the sunset for the first time.
When she was done, he said to her, “I have found some herbs for you.”
Warily, she took the yellow blossoms. There was little trace of blood left on her, only trails of fresh water trickling down her clean hair.
“You must chew them until they mix with your saliva—” He paused in the middle of his sentence, realizing the improbability of his suggestion. “Let me help you,” he mumbled, stuffing his mouth with the herbs and avoiding her eyes.
Once the bitter medicine was crushed thoroughly, and his saliva became strong with its essence, he raised his eyes and looked wonderingly at her. The woman leaned forward with her mouth partly open. She found his hands and seized them. Big Con shut his narrow eyes, drew in a deep breath, and pressed his lips against hers. He felt her cool body, quivering as she pulled him closer to her breasts. The strength of the peasant woman was like strong wine, rekindling the fire in him. He tried to breathe; the forest swayed and his vision blurred. Just like two drops of water, they fused and became one.
As for Ven, she had found a sense of richness deep in her soul that was never there before. When she walked with ease into his cabin, she knew that she was finally home.
SEVEN YEARS LATER
The Apartments of Peace
THE CITADEL, SEPTEMBER 8, 1932
L
ady Chin was dying. In a tiny cell reserved exclusively for the terminally ill, the wife of the late Minister Chin Tang lay quietly among her pillows. As soon as her eyes opened to the blackness of the mosquito net above her bed, she wondered if this would be the night she would see her husband and son. If she remained perfectly still, she could savor the hope that they might come to her before morning. She did not bother to listen for their footsteps, for her mind was still sharp enough to understand that ghosts made no sound when they moved. Instead, she felt them reaching out as if they were fumbling for a tear in the fabric of her world, so that they could slip through.
For the past seven years since their deaths, she had spent most nights awake, drenched with a guilt that she alone could understand. But recently, in this confinement, she had begun to hear them. She knew she was near the end. So she clasped her hands above her heart, where her son, Bui, had laid his head and where she expected to receive him again. She knew that once the apparitions of her loved ones took shape in the darkness in front of her, it would be time to depart this place.