The House on Dream Street (24 page)

Tung and I waved good-bye. “I’ll keep a list of phone messages for you,” Tung yelled after him, but Mr. Huey and the translator were already getting into the car.

Tung poured me another cup of tea, and we watched an old Chinese martial arts film, dubbed into Vietnamese, on the television. The traffic on the street began to pick up, and the morning after the typhoon began to resemble a normal day. After a while, the sound of footsteps made me turn and look toward the door. Phai stepped inside. “Still alive?” he asked.

      The next night, a full moon hung in the sky, and hundreds of dressed-up young supplicants packed the Quan Su Pagoda like revelers at a disco. Phai squatted on the ground, using a Bic to light a large bunch of incense. He handed half the burning joss sticks to me, and we began our circuit of the pagoda, leaving prayers and incense at each of the dozens of altars that filled the shrine.

We’d been praying at the pagoda together nearly every full and new moon night since my visit to the Perfume Pagoda several months earlier. I still couldn’t explain what had come over me on the mountain that day, but the feeling hadn’t disappeared. Every two weeks now, I joined the crowds of Hanoians paying tribute to the waxing and waning of the moon. All I had to do was stand in front of an altar with incense in my hand and the feeling—What was it? Fervor? Spirituality? God?—washed back over me. Now, the experience of going to the pagoda felt central to my life. Mine might have been the only white face amid a thousand praying Asians. Teenage boys and wrinkled old women might have stared at me. I hardly noticed anymore.

Of course, I was watering down the religion itself, but I reasoned that most of these people were watering it down as well. It had been forty years—a few generations—since Vietnamese had had complete freedom to practice their beliefs. It was impossible to quantify the loss or define what it meant if a family no longer knew how to pay homage to its dead, or if no one in a village was alive anymore to teach the movements of a sacred dance. Tra had complained that people didn’t even recognize the difference between pagodas and temples anymore. At a pagoda, one prays to the Buddha, she’d told me, and at a temple, to local and national spirits. The difference was essential for many reasons, she explained, not least of which had to do with what you prayed for in each place. “You go to the pagoda if you’re worried about love or health or happiness,” she’d explained. “And if you’ve got money problems, you need to appeal to the ancestors.” She’d seen people in the pagodas asking the Buddha to give them good fortune.

“Is that rude?” I’d wanted to know.

“No, it’s not rude. But what’s the point?” she’d asked. “The Buddha knows nothing about money. Go to the Buddha to ask for favors in love.”

Tonight, it looked as though most of Hanoi needed favors in love. With all the young people walking through the corridors holding hands, the Quan Su Pagoda might have been the most romantic destination in the city. At the very center of the main sanctuary, Phai and I stood waiting our turn to pray. The smoke of the incense was so thick that it burned like onions, and my eyes began to water. Phai looked at me. We were the same height, and in this dense crowd our faces were so close together that I could almost feel his breath.

We made our way through dozens of people and squeezed through a side door that led outside. An altar was hidden in a
niche in the wall, and we waited our turn among the people massed there, eyes closed, whispering their prayers. When space cleared, Phai and I stepped forward and stood next to each other, facing a serene Quan Am, a female Buddha. I glanced at Phai. His eyes were shut already, and his hands were raised in supplication. I watched as his lips moved through their silent prayers. After a few seconds, his body swayed slightly and his shoulder touched mine. I forced my eyes closed then, lifted the sticks of incense grasped between my fingers, and had a hard time focusing on the Buddha.

The night was hot. Hanoi had enjoyed one day of air so fresh that it felt like nature’s sweet reward for making us suffer through a typhoon. The respite hadn’t lasted, though. Today, the second morning after the storm, had dawned so hot and humid that the sky above us felt like the top on a steaming rice cooker. Even now, at well past eight in the evening, with a moon like a scoop of ice cream in the sky, the heat refused to break, and the air was so moist that even people sitting motionless had to wipe the sweat off their faces with handkerchiefs.

“Let’s go get a lemonade,” Phai said. I nodded. Ice-cold drinks made life bearable. Even the recent outbreak of water-borne cholera in central Vietnam hadn’t stopped people from filling their glasses with cubes of ice. I drank at least three lemonades a day.

Back in the street the air seemed almost refreshing. “Let’s walk up to the lake,” I suggested.

Hanoi’s municipal authorities had yet to make a dent in the job of clearing the massive trees off the city’s streets. Nonetheless, the amount of debris had already begun to shrink. What Americans might have seen as enormous obstacles, the Vietnamese looked upon as free firewood. For two days now, men and women had been straddling trunks and branches with hand saws.

Falling trees had pulled down so many power lines that the city had shut off electricity. Our way through the streets was lit by the moon, flashlights, and candles. Without electric fans or air conditioners the entire population had moved outdoors in search of a breeze, hauling tables, chairs, and even folding metal beds along with them.

Phai walked through it all without emotion, as if the sight of people eating their dinner in the middle of the sidewalk was the most natural thing in the world. Our path was so circuitous that we walked in single file. Phai led the way, weaving carefully around children tossing balls, old men playing chess, and even older men already curled up in bed and snoring. Every so often, he’d pause and look back at me, his face full of concern, checking to see if I’d made it through some particularly narrow space between the side of a building and the trunk of a fallen tree. In addition to the scavengers hacking away at the branches, children were using the trunks as giant jungle gyms. Because the road itself was often blocked, people with motorbikes and bicycles were up on the sidewalk, too, trying to maneuver their vehicles past.

After half a mile or so, we reached Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi is a city of lakes, brought about over the centuries by the Red River’s myriad floods, expansions, and diversions. The lakes invested the crowded neighborhoods with light and air and a sense of space that made quite livable what would otherwise be a fairly claustrophobic urban environment. I’d never seen a lake in Hanoi that wasn’t necklaced by benches and circled by people out enjoying the view. People fished in them, swam in them, and waded out into them to harvest wild
rau muống,
a waterborne vegetable that could add a few extra vitamins to a bowl of rice.

Hoan Kiem Lake wasn’t Hanoi’s biggest, or its deepest. It wasn’t even the cleanest. But it represented the spiritual heart of
the city. It was possible to stroll its circumference in less than thirty minutes, but the role that it played in Hanoians’ sense of their city—both historically and in the present day—was enormous. The lake drew people toward it as a body draws breath. I had seen the crowds at the lake on Liberation Day, thousands of revelers on their bicycles and motorbikes, moving slowly, packed tight, endlessly circling the lake. During the wedding season, I’d seen professional photographers snap shots of brides and grooms on the green lawns beside the water. Traditionally, at midnight on the first night of the Tet New Year celebration, the most significant moment in Vietnam’s year, the smoke cloud of a million exploding firecrackers covered the lake like a blanket on a newborn. Hanoians didn’t even call Hoan Kiem Lake by its proper name, but used a shorthand term of endearment,
bờ hồ,
“the shore of the lake.” No one had to ask, which shore? which lake?
Bờ hồ
 wasn’t merely the heart of the city, but its lungs, and mind, and soul as well.

Bờ hồ
 was quiet tonight, its wide sidewalks nearly empty. A few young couples walked hand in hand, or sat on benches looking out over the water. I hadn’t thought of Hoan Kiem Lake as a particularly romantic spot, but now I felt embarrassed for having proposed it as a destination.

Phai fit in well here, even if I, the American, didn’t. His outward appearance had changed dramatically over the past few months. Abandoning the T-shirts and work pants, he now wore neatly pressed shirts and belted, baggy trousers. It was a look that was very much in vogue among Hanoi’s smart set. Personally, I didn’t like the flashy new outfits, but I did understand the significance of Phai’s new look. He had decided to aim for something more ambitious than fixing motorbikes for the rest of his life. He was, wishfully or not, willing himself out of manual labor and into the middle class.

Now that we had plenty of space in which to walk, it was hard to tell that Phai and I were even together. There was still so much distance between us that another person, or two, might have fit between. He walked silently, his eyes on the ground, and I was beginning to worry that I’d done something to offend him. Then I heard him say, very quietly, “Duyen.”

I said, “Yes?”

“Do you remember when I told you about my friend in Moscow?” he asked.

“The one you’re going to marry?” I asked.

He shrugged, kicking a small branch out of our path. “I said maybe.”

The Moscow pen pal had made me jealous, but I had also felt relieved. I still didn’t know what I wanted from Phai, but I was sure I wouldn’t marry him, and I didn’t want to hurt him, either. I didn’t mind the pen pal, so long as she stayed in Moscow.

We passed a fallen tree, its root system exposed to the air, its branches deep in water. “Is she coming home?” I asked. As soon as I asked that question, the jealousy returned. How would I feel if Phai suddenly showed up at Tung and Huong’s with a girlfriend from Moscow?

Phai shook his head. For a long time, he didn’t speak. The hot air in my lungs suddenly felt heavy and useless. When I exhaled, the breath came out like a gasp, and its force surprised me. The sound made Phai look over. “You’re driving me crazy,” I told him in English.

“What?” He looked confused.

“Totally bananas,” I said, articulating every syllable with the precision I used when speaking to my students.

“Is that English?” he asked.

I nodded, but I couldn’t look at him.

“I don’t speak English.” His tone was polite.

“I know that already,” I said in Vietnamese.

Phai said, “I wanted to tell you. I got a letter from her a few days ago. She’s getting married.”

I stopped and looked at him. “What do you mean?” I asked.

Phai paused, shrugged, then started walking again. “She’s getting married to a guy she met in Moscow. That’s all I know.”

For two years, Phai had considered the pen pal his destiny. And now, in a single letter, she’d effectively ceased to exist. Now what?

“Are you upset?” I asked.

Phai ran his fingers through his hair, and his laugh sounded less distraught than confused. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that we’ve been writing these letters for such a long time, but I hardly even knew her.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. I think we were both trying to come to terms with his sudden freedom. What if I did something I’d later regret? Still, I felt like an obstacle had been removed, and I was surprised by how light and happy I felt.

“Let’s go get a lemonade,” I said.

We headed beyond the end of the lake, then turned down Hang Gai Street. The sidewalks were empty and we walked closer together. Something had changed between us in the past few minutes, but neither of us said a word.

The power was still out on Hang Bong Street, and the only light poured down from the glowing moon. It was nearly ten o’clock. Parents sat whispering to each other, holding their sleeping children in their arms. An old woman squatted at the edge of the road, brushing her teeth with one hand and holding a cup of water, for rinsing, in the other. Phai’s rubber sandals softly slapped the pavement.

The café was eight or ten tables scattered along a wide swath of empty sidewalk. We pulled two low wicker chairs together
and ordered drinks. Phai picked up my hand, not acknowledging the gesture. He suddenly became chatty, as if nothing more concerned him than the prospects for the cleanup after the typhoon. I couldn’t focus at all. The more I tried, the more I found myself mesmerized by the way his thick black hair nestled like the tail of a cat around his ear. Phai’s eyes swept the road, scanned the trees, settled back on the road again, looking in every direction but at me.

“Phai,” I said, interrupting some observation about how long it might take a single crew of road workers to clear each fallen tree.

His face turned to mine, and I leaned close and kissed him on the lips. He pulled away, looking at me in shock. Then he dropped my hand and covered his face.

“I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” I gasped, watching him rub his hands across his temples. I felt mortified, as if I’d made a terrible mistake.