If You Lived Here (30 page)

“I think we manage,” I tell him.

At the end of the block, the town comes to an abrupt end and the hills rise above us, blocking huge portions of the sky. My grammar school had a book of photographs of Vietnam, and the one of Hoa Binh was spooky. The town nestled among craggy, mist-laced hills, a place of wandering spirits, beautiful and bleak. I dreamed of visiting, then. I dreamed of traipsing through the hills, a rucksack on my back, unafraid of ghosts. Now that I’m here, though, it just looks grim and poor.

We go inside a noodle shop, empty at this hour. Most of the tables sit low to the ground, surrounded by stools, and Dr. Penzi picks the only Western-style one, which sits near the curtained door to the kitchen. Even on these larger stools, his tall frame looks awkward. Long has left us for some shop down the street. I take a seat across from the doctor.

Within a few seconds, a stocky middle-aged woman in a pink summer pantsuit emerges from behind a curtain at the back of the room. When she sees Dr. Penzi, she breaks into a grin and claps her hand.

“
Chào bác s˜ı!
”—Hello, Doctor!—she bellows. She has the voice of a produce seller at the market.

“Hello, my old friend,” says the doctor. He stands again and shakes her hand, causing her all kinds of embarrassment and pleasure. “I’m very happy to see you.” Both of them turn and look toward me expectantly.

Of course, I’m supposed to translate. But, with the two of them staring at me, I find myself unexplicably stumped. It’s as if one of my hands had suddenly stopped working. I will it to move, but it won’t.

Eventually, the restaurant proprietor and the doctor move away from each other awkwardly. He sits down. She motions toward a row of bottles on the bar and mimes the sign for drinking. Dr. Penzi points to a 7-Up. She looks at me and I nod. She takes two 7-Ups off the shelf and carries

them with her into the kitchen. Dr. Penzi leans back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. He doesn’t say anything. He watches me.

The toe of my clog rubs against a dark patch on the bare concrete floor. “Maybe I’m little nervous,” I admit.

“I would like a bowl of beef
ph
d
and a pâté sandwich, please,” he says.

I nod. I feel like an idiot.

The proprietor reappears, having opened our two bottles of 7-Up and filled two glasses with ice. “Tell the doctor that I made the ice from boiled water, just the way he likes.” She whispers now, as if it’s a secret between the two of us that I understand Vietnamese.

I tell the doctor about the ice, then turn to the proprietor. “We’d like two bowls of beef noodle soup. And the doctor also wants a pâté sandwich,” I say, in Vietnamese. The sentence comes out accurately, each word distinct, but I feel as if my mouth were stuffed with cotton.

The proprietor goes back into the kitchen and neither of us says a word. Instead, we stare out the open door toward the quiet street. The town seems slow and lazy after the raucous energy of Hanoi. Dr. Penzi sighs and stretches his legs across the floor. His body is nothing but angles. I like that he doesn’t feel obligated to talk.

When our food arrives, the restaurant owner brings an old wine bottle as well, refilled with homemade rice wine. Dr. Penzi takes the bottle by the neck and gazes at it fondly. “This dear woman makes the best
r
U:<.
u
in Vietnam,” he says. The proprietor, delighted by the satisfaction on his face, hurriedly grabs two glasses from behind the bar.

When the doctor sees the glasses, he raises a hand and waves them away. “Please explain about our task for the afternoon,” he tells me. “We’ll drink the
r
U:<.
u
later.” Then he turns back to his soup.

The woman has paused uncertainly, waiting for me to tell her why the

doctor has refused to drink. “He has to see patients this afternoon,” I explain. “He’ll save it for later.”

Realizing that he hasn’t rejected her offer entirely, she laughs, then sets the glasses down on the bar again, pulls up a chair by the table, and

sits down next to me, leaning over her knees. “So, do you live in San Francisco or Paris?” she asks.

I glance at Dr. Penzi, but of course he can’t understand. “How do you know I’m
Vi
Ù
t Ki
e
u
?” I want to know.

The proprietor throws back her head, letting out a howl that is slightly

derisive. She reaches forward and grabs a handful of my Levi’s. “Girls here don’t wear blue jeans,” she begins. “And they don’t cut their nails so short. And they tuck their shirts in. And they don’t like flat shoes. We Vietnamese girls like to wear heels these days,” she says, proudly holding up a pudgy foot stuffed into a tattered pump. I consider telling her that I’ve seen women in Hanoi wearing jeans, and even sneakers, but we’re in the provinces now, and fashion might be different. Anyway, my blue rub-ber gardening clogs, a recent purchase from Land’s End, seem to be the clincher.

“Those are ugly,” she tells me. “How long since you left Vietnam?” she asks, as if the answer might help her assess the time it took me to lose my fashion savvy.

“Twenty-three years.”

She laughs and then gets that sneaky look of pride on her face. “A lot more motorbikes now, don’t you think?”

Dr. Penzi watches us, but when he sees me glance at him, his eyes drop back to his soup. His hands move over it nimbly, tossing the noodles through the broth, and I remember my father hunched over a bowl of
ph
d
, saying, “Girls, we eat our
ph
d
with finesse, like a maestro conducting a symphony.”

It takes an hour to travel from Hoa Binh to the village, heading deeper into the mountains. Long has brought back to the car the strong smell of tobacco and an urge to chat. “What’s it like in America?” he asks in Vietnamese. He’s maybe twenty-five, with slicked-back hair and a crisply pressed button-down shirt that probably cost more than the doctor’s. “How much money do you make every month? I bet you own a car. Is it true?”

“Yes,” I tell him. I’m getting nervous about the afternoon. I don’t want to make some horrible mistake that kills somebody.

The road winds higher and higher. We turn off the air-conditioning and let the fresh, cool air float in through the windows. To our right, the rocky hillsides are dense with leaves, ferns, and bright bursts of wildflow-ers. To our left, the ground drops off sharply. Sometimes, I can see villages and fields far below. At other times, we drive through the clouds themselves and I can’t see more than a few feet beyond the windshield of the car. Long shifts into low gear. “I bet you have a TV in every room of your house. Is it true?” he asks. With every syllable, his head jerks back over his shoulder toward me, but he somehow manages to keep his eyes on the road.

“No,” I tell him.

“But you know people like that, don’t you? Vietnamese people with that much money.”

I think of Gladys and Marcy’s two-bedroom apartment at Oakwood Manor. It’s a cheap, slapped-together complex populated by students and itinerant construction workers. But, yes, Gladys and Marcy do have a TV in every room. “I guess I do,” I say.

Long snorts with satisfaction. “Tell the doctor that. He says that in Italy no one has two TVs. He wouldn’t believe me about the States.” He throws his chin backward, talking louder to the backseat. “Hey, Dr. Dario!” he says. His English is loud but merely passable.

The doctor has been dozing again. He doesn’t open his eyes. “Yes, Long?”

“In America, they have TV in every room.”

The doctor opens one eye and looks at me. “True?” “No.”

“Sometimes true!” Long declares. I shrug.

“Long, why do you care so much?” The doctor sighs.

Long flips one hand off the steering wheel, but he keeps the other in place. “This subject is interesting one,” he asserts, but his voice trails off, defeated by the fact that no one else agrees.

The road descends a bit and we enter a valley marked by small hamlets and cultivated fields. We turn off the main highway, drive for a few kilometers down an unpaved road, then pull to a stop in front of a house, one in a cluster of thatched-roof buildings, all rising on stilts eight or ten feet off the ground. Below the house, chickens and the occasional pig nose about on the bare, dusty earth. Children, some wearing tattered shorts, others wearing nothing, soon surround the car. Near the steps to the house, twenty or thirty people stand watching us. We’re a long way from the poverty of Oakwood Manor. We’re a long way, even, from the poverty of Hanoi.

We get out of the car. The children squeal with excitement and I can’t understand a word they say. I walk over to the doctor, who is bending over the open trunk. “I don’t know their language,” I tell him.

He glances up for a moment, then immediately turns back to the trunk, which is filled with medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. “Don’t worry. Some of them speak Vietnamese.”

Within a few moments, two men appear from down the road, jog to the car, and shake hands with each of us. Then they lead us through the crowd and up the stairs into the house. At the threshold, we slide off our shoes and step inside. The building consists of one enormous semidark room. At the far end lies a freestanding hearth stove. At the other end, a pile of rolled-up mattresses sits against a wall of glassless windows, simple wooden screens pulled down to keep out the light. The floor is made of long, narrow slats of wood, smooth to the touch. Sunlight shines up through the spaces between the slats, which give a little as you step on them.

Long heads directly to the hearth and sits down on the bench beside it, pulling his cigarettes out of his breast pocket. I follow the doctor and the two Muong men toward the front of the room and we sit down on a wide mat that covers a broad section of the floor. A woman, wearing one of the traditional long skirts that I remember from my childhood encounters with the
ng
U:o
i dân t
é
c,
appears out of the darkness and walks toward us. Without looking at any of us, she sets a tea tray on a mat on the floor, then carefully opens the windows, letting the light flood over us.

I can hear shouting and the murmur of people down below. Two or three teenage boys step through the door, each with one of the boxes from the trunk on his shoulders. They set the boxes down and the doctor begins sorting through them.

“Do you know, in all the time that I’ve been treating patients in the villages,” he tells me, “I’ve never had any supplies stolen. Not a single box of bandages.”

One of the two young men leans forward and says to me, “My name is Bac. I’m the village council leader.” He speaks Vietnamese with an accent I’ve never heard before, but I’m grateful to find that I have no trouble understanding him.

“I’m Mai. I’ve never translated before.”

He smiles kindly. “It doesn’t matter. We always double-check every instruction two or three times.” He turns and introduces the young man by his side. Close up, this one looks to be about sixteen. “This is Sinh. He’s had some medical training, so the doctor tells him what to do for the patients in the coming weeks.” Sinh grins shyly, staring at the floor.

The sounds of voices now waft in through the wall that runs beside the stairs. Although I can’t see anybody, I can distinguish, between the slats, flashes of color, a play of shadow and light that suggests the presence of a growing crowd. “Let’s begin,” says the doctor. I nod at Bac and he stands up, walks to the doorway, and leans out. I can hear him mak-ing an announcement in his strange language. Then I hear the sounds of more rustling and movement on the stairs. An old woman appears in the doorway and hobbles toward us.

Bac motions for her to sit down. With some effort, she lowers herself onto a stool. She has a badly disfigured foot, twisted almost 180 degrees, with the toes bunched together and pointing like a ballerina’s toward the floor.

“I remember this lady,” says the doctor. He waves.

The old woman breaks into a toothless grin, nodding and chuckling. “What’s her problem?”

I look at the doctor. “Her foot?”

Dario lifts his hand and lets it drop again, rejecting that idea. “No, no.

She was born with that foot. She’s very agile with it. She walks a couple of kilometers just to get here. Find out what her problem is today.”

As it turns out, the old woman is suffering from a gastric disorder. She hasn’t been able to eat anything but plain rice for weeks. After a few minutes of questioning, the doctor gives her a bottle of pills and tells her to boil her water before drinking it. She grabs his hand and jerks at it like the handle on a water pump before limping out.

Next comes a man who scorched his leg while burning off the stubble in his rice field. Then, a child with a broken arm, a pregnant woman showing signs of preterm labor, a man suffering from unexplainable headaches, a teenager with alcohol poisoning. The doctor gives each of them several minutes of focused consideration, listening to their symptoms, making his diagnosis, then prescribing a course of therapy. It’s a complicated process. Between us, we have three native languages. Every question has to go from English to Vietnamese to Muong, then the answers come back the same way. To be certain, we repeat every question twice.

“What do you do if you see someone very sick?” I ask during a pause while a new patient shuffles forward.

The doctor shifts his legs from one side to the other. He’s clearly not used to sitting so long on the floor, and I catch the slightest wince as he unbends his knee. “That can be a problem,” he says. “As you’ve probably noticed, this Socialist Republic of Vietnam is not so socialist anymore. My services today are free, but the hospital isn’t. We try to do the best we can right here.”

Over the course of the next few hours, a steady stream of ill and wounded make their way up the stairs and through the door. On the way in, I saw only ten or twelve houses in the entire village, but dozens of people wait their turn. According to Bac, some walked for hours from distant hamlets, just to have a moment with us. Dario methodically examines each of them. The line, which sounds from the clatter of voices as if it trails down the stairs and circles beneath the house, slowly dwindles. The light from outside grows so dim that Bac has to light a kerosene lamp so that the doctor can read the boxes of medication and look at the patients’ bodies. Across the room, the owner of the house fans the flame of the fire