If You Lived Here (38 page)

I can feel Anh’s eyes on me. I stare at my hands, sticky and smudged with lychee juice and dust. It is one thing to imagine, all these years, how I made my sister suffer. It is another thing, entirely, to hear about it.

“Lan stayed at the institute another few years,” Anh continues, “until the economy began to improve. Then she quit her job and opened her café. She kind of blossomed then. She adored Lien, and her café was a great success. Dat and I would never have opened this one if we hadn’t seen how well she did with hers. Life has gotten better, really. And then, last year, Chung showed up. Fourteen years later! He’d gotten a divorce and he wanted to meet his daughter. One thing led to another— again!—and they got married. He can’t leave Sydney because he owns a big seafood processing plant somewhere on the coast there. Of course, he wants Lan and Lien to move there. But Lan refuses to leave your father.”

I finally have someone to ask. “How is my father?”

“He’s dying, I suppose.” Anh was always frank. “How old is he now?” “He’ll be sixty-six this year.”

“He can’t breathe. To be honest, he could die tomorrow or he could die next year. I think he’d rather die tomorrow.”

For more than half my life—yes, it’s been that long now—I have wanted to go back in time, to live it again, and better. But that’s a lot to

desire. Let me consider the possibility of something simpler. Giving my lungs to my father.

“You should go and see him,” Anh says. I stare at her.

“He’s alone during the day. There’s a padlock on the metal gate of the house, but people come and go, to visit him. It looks locked, but it’s not, really.”

At some point, I realize, we have slipped into Vietnamese. Dario, however, seems intent on following the conversation anyway, through tone, expression, the gaps between our words. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “We’re rude.”

“No.” He shakes his head. He looks kind of embarrassed, as if he’s heard too much already.

Dario and I walk back to the hotel over the same route, but not quite together, like two people who became intimate too quickly and now try to put distance between themselves. I struggle to focus on the day around us: the feeling of the sun on my skin, the glare in my eyes, the crankiness of the traffic. But I can’t ignore the fact that I am not a better person. For so many years in America, I have been a failure to myself, and I came back to Hanoi knowing I’d face the disappointment of others. But this new shame comes unexpectedly. Two weeks ago I didn’t even know this man existed.

Amid the noise of the street, I almost don’t hear him. “Can I tell you something, Xuan Mai?” he asks.

I smile, but I’m worried. “I guess.” No criticism could be worse than how I feel already.

“Do you remember when I described my wife’s death?” “Of course.”

“In the airplane, right after the crash, I worried about the plane explod-ing. I mean, I am not an idiot. I knew such a thing could happen. I tell my wife I am going out to look for supplies, but, also, I want to get out of the plane. Very quickly. When I tell my story to other people, I omit that piece of information.”

Kind, but unconvincing. “It’s not same.” “You’re competing.”

“No. Why you want me to hear this?” “What do you call your crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“I call it negligence. And abandonment. For negligence and abandonment, you get twenty-three years.”

“And you?”

“For being a coward, I get nine years.” “You try to make it easy.”

He sighs, then stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. The woman behind us, hauling a load of bananas, curses and walks around us, glar-ing. The doctor takes my arm and holds it, looking down at me and speaking Italian—two or three sentences, maybe, not a single word that I can understand. The phrases roll into each other, up and down, languid but emphatic, like opera. Then he releases my arm and we begin to walk again. I don’t ask for a translation and he doesn’t offer one.

I grew up on Nguyen Sieu Street, just down from Ngo Gach, the Brickmaker’s Street. It used to be a quiet neighborhood, the focus of which was the Thanh Ha Pagoda. Now, every building houses a shop selling paint. It’s a rainbow of house paint, my old street. And brushes, tur-pentine, tarps. I can’t think how such a thing has come to pass. My mother taught history at the Tran Phu Middle School a few blocks away. When she died, I remember, the students filed through our house in waves, class after class after class, all braids and jitters, eyes on the floor, unsure of themselves, embarrassed. My father insisted that he and Lan and I shake every single student’s hand. At the time, I resented it. I didn’t want to shake hands, accept condolences, or look into the eyes of children who would, ten minutes later, rush home to confirm that their mothers still existed. I wanted to escape, too. I wanted another family. A whole one.

I head down Nguyen Sieu, bags of groceries hanging from the handlebars of my borrowed bike, and it takes me a minute to figure out where I am. The street-level doorways have changed. These days, they all contain the same displays of paint and paint products, none of it familiar. I have

to position myself by looking across the street, and locating myself in relation to the pagoda that I walked past every day for the first nineteen years of my life. Then I see the familiar entry, the narrow passageway leading between two street-front buildings. I step inside, and follow it twenty feet, where it jogs to the left, then straightens again and plunges deeper. The air smells of mildew, kerosene, and something new, too: incense. Yes. I pass the doorway of the tiny room where Old Mrs. Nhung used to live and the steps leading up to the Le house, the floor by the bottom step still cluttered, as always, with bicycles and shoes. And then, at the end of the passage, the old gate and the padlock in it. I jiggle the lock and it opens. I slide back the gate and I’m home.

The house was old, even when my parents first moved into it. A fam-ily of Chinese merchants had lived in it for fifty years or more, finally abandoning it in 1954 when they fled to the south during the cease-fire. When my parents arrived in Hanoi soon afterward, they were homeless and unsure of where to go. The government granted them a lease on the house as an acknowledgment of the service they’d provided in the war. Unlike some of the ornate villas in the city, it wasn’t big or grand in any way, but it had one memorable feature. In one corner of the courtyard, facing the passageway leading from the front gate, a banyan tree grew out of a small square of dirt, up the side of the wall, and opened its great green arms over the courtyard, making the space quiet, cool, and shady, even on the hottest days of summer. The tree had existed longer than the house, sending its long vines toward the ground, where they grew thick and hard as trunks. I was raised believing that banyan trees, including ours, are homes to the spirits of the dead. We weren’t particularly happy to have one growing so close by, but we wouldn’t dream of cutting it down, which would risk angering the spirits and inciting them to haunt us. Our family and that tree always lived together in peace. Even during the most stringent years of Communism, we could manage to find a stick of incense to leave there as an offering. My mother would have liked to do more, worrying that failing to make the requisite offerings showed dis-respect. My father always said that you couldn’t make an offering if you

had nothing to offer. And, besides, the spirits weren’t blind. They could see the barrenness of our lives. They wouldn’t expect much.

The first thing I notice when I step into the courtyard is the hundreds of bright red incense sticks, spent now, stuck into the crannies of the tree. The second thing I notice is my father, seated in a wicker chair in the shade beneath it. A folded newspaper lies across his lap, his glasses rest in his hand and his eyes are closed, his head tipped back. I lean the bike against the wall, set my groceries on the ground, then step inside the courtyard, moving closer. With each breath, his chest rumbles to life, then dies again. My father’s skin is pale, bluish, veiny, and spotty. His hair, nearly white now, forms a silky mass of short, thin curls around the base of his head. After twenty-three years, he looks different, of course, but not radically so. He was old when I left, although not much past forty. He aged enormously after my mother died. People talk about growing old, but he didn’t “grow” old. He—the optimist who had believed beyond reason that she would recover—“turned” old, in about five minutes. That can only happen once in a person’s life. Afterward, there’s nothing to do but get older, which he has done. Part of me feels sad to see this once strong and agile man look so frail and exhausted. The other part just grieves for the years I missed with him.

An empty second chair sits next to my father’s, positioned close, as if inviting conversation. On a table between the two lie a worn deck of cards, a copy of
The Tale of Kieu,
three medicine bottles, a mug, a fan, and a pile of crumpled tissues. Quietly, I pick up the stray tissues, straighten the table, then take the mug, which is half full of lukewarm coffee and ringed with dried milk, and carry it to the spigot in the far corner of the courtyard. When I squat and turn on the valve, the water bursts out, spraying my clogs. It’s a deluge compared to the trickle I remember, the moments when my mother would scream at the spigot, as if it bore responsibility for the fact that it produced so little water. Why didn’t Khoi give me this information when he talked to me about his visit to Hanoi? Why didn’t he tell me about improvements in the plumbing?

Next to the spigot, I find a basin containing a pile of clothes, soaking in water, a thin soapy ring making rainbows on the top. I take off my watch, push it into my pocket, then thrust my hands into the cool water and begin to scrub, one item at a time, firmly enough to get at the dirt, gently enough to keep from tearing the fabric. These are old man’s clothes: nothing but white undershirts and faded pajamas, thin from so much scrubbing. I glance over my shoulder, but my father hasn’t stirred.

It takes me longer than it should to finish the laundry. After so many years of washing clothes in machines, my hands and arms feel awkward and weak. Finally, I hang each item to dry on the line, then unpack my groceries and begin to prepare lunch. I’ve brought water morning glory, which is a darker green and tougher than what I can get in the States. I’ve got eggs, a piece of pork, tofu, a small bag of tiny pickled eggplants, which I know he loves, and rice. Sometimes, in Wilmington, I cook the food my mother told me she’d eaten during her childhood—fine pork sausages, ginger prawns, even French specialties like crème caramel and pâté. I never had a chance to taste such delicacies during my life in Vietnam, but in America I learned to make them. Today, though, I’ll cook simple food. I remember how much my father loved the dishes he grew up with. I think they reminded him of his youth, his days in the war, when he could survive on so little. Now I squat over the old stove, preparing a meal for a peasant: a simple omelet with chunks of pork; boiled water morning glory; fried tofu stewed in tomatoes; a plate of pickled eggplant; a bowl of vegetable broth; and rice. I have not smelled anything so delicious in years. When I’m finished, I clear the table by my father’s chair, pull out the round aluminum tray, set the bowls and chopsticks on it, and carry lunch to where he sits. Perhaps it’s the sound of the tray brushing across the table that, finally, wakes my father. Perhaps it’s the smell of the food in front of him. He rubs his eyes and opens them, gazing for a moment at the sky. Then he picks up his glasses, sets them on his nose, and sees me, standing there in front of him.

“
B
'
,
” I say. Father.

I think he tries to speak, but the words catch in his throat. “Cough” seems too insignificant a word for what happens to his body then. Wave after wave of spasms begin in his gut, move up through his chest, shoulder, back, and neck, erupting from his mouth in loud and cacophonous bursts, like air bellowing from a broken machine. How can such a weak and fragile body produce such noise? I rush across the courtyard to pour a glass of water from a pitcher by the stove. But when I offer it to him, he waves it away, still coughing, still staring at me when he gets the chance. Five minutes later, as the spasms subside, he points to the bowl of broth. I perch on the other chair and spoon some of the liquid into his bowl. He takes it between his shaking hands and slowly brings it to his mouth to drink. I would like to hold it for him, but I don’t. He sips slowly, but without stopping, finishing every drop.

“Can I give you some rice?” I ask.

He nods. “I came after you,” he says in a voice that’s stronger than I expected.

I spoon the rice into a bowl, put a couple of pieces of omelet and tofu on top of it, push the plate of pickled eggplant in his direction.

“The omelet might be a little burned,” I tell him. In fact, it’s golden brown, crispy outside and soft and moist inside, the way my mother made it. But I have to say something, and I can’t bring myself to acknowledge the fact that I’ve been away for a very long time.

He takes a bite of the omelet and chews. “I came after you,” he says again.

I spoon some rice into my own bowl, take a small piece of tofu and eat it. Leaning across the table, I lift an especially large and succulent cube of tofu and place it in my father’s bowl. “The omelet’s not good,” I say. “And the tofu is too chewy. And the rice—it’s a little dry. I’m sorry.”

“I knew you would go on the boat,” he tells me. “I went after you.

Uncle Binh had a motorbike, remember?”

I nod, but I don’t look at him. I push the plate of eggplant farther across the table. I lift a grain of rice from my bowl and put it in my mouth.

“Your boyfriend’s brother told us where to go. We found the village easily, only a few miles south of Hai Phong. We made good time on the motorbike. I don’t think I arrived more than an hour after you did on the bus. But those fishermen move fast. As soon as they saw you had the money, they let you on the boat, and pulled away.” I’m surprised that he

goes on for so long, talking and breathing simultaneously. His bowl is full and forgotten. I put a piece of tofu on top of all the tofu there already.