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LE THI HUE
______________________________
The stirring red
"I'll give you only half an hour," my son said
as he drew up beside the pavement to let me get off, "I must take you
back to aunt Thao's house, and then, go to the college." ¾"Yep,
I will need only half an hour," I said. "Bye, Mum!" my
youngest son said hurriedly while handing me the sweater. I watched his head
the hair close-cropped, his white car whizzing away, before heading to the
lowest step to sit down on it.
Spring has drawn to the beginning of
its end. In the distance, there stood the cherry trees which were just coming
into young-pecked leaf. Recently, as the sun came late the weather was
neither hot, nor dry. I sat looking at the immense stretches of sky and
earth. I had been sitting¾
years ago, in late one evening of May the gentle breeze blowing, on that very
topmost step¾
with a man, side by side.
I could not imagine that I has
stretched my life close on the age of seventy to attend the graduation
ceremony at which my son received his highest degree, in a city where I had
one day rolled up my trousers bottoms to walk across. I never thought I'd
come back here.
I heard my breath, so near, so short.
There was something imperceptible in the wind. My heart was quivering, it
seemed, as were the smell, the soil, the rock round this place. The acridness
rose in my nose, then the burning sensation in the two curve petals. How
could an old, simple place be capable of stirring and evoking, in me,
suddenly and strongly, all of my emotions? I knew tears were welling up in
the corners of my eyes. Dabbing them with the soft white tissues I thought,
"At this very moment I had a sudden wish. Wishing at the very moment
near death my heart would vibrate with emotions so the tears from the corners
of my eyes would flow perpetually till that stream of emotion drained out."
I had only few more years to live, yet still I could shed tears this evening
while recalling the state of mind in those days of old. I had thought it was
my last romance, but the pond of tears for which I was longing, perhaps,
would be the last of the last.
I had still then been young. Just
started the first few years of the forty, the age at which a woman was
wrenched with physical discomfort and really fired with lust. The man had
been young. Very young. Young hair was in the early thirty. What made me
think of him for years and years was not that he was more hulking than the
other men I'd ever known. He never realised this. Never ever he could know,
but in all these years having passed, as many a time I felt in me stirring
some such arousal I had to try to recover¾ with great effort of
recollection¾
his face, his smile, and his voice. Trying to recover the last walk with him
I took. The month of May. The songs. The stories. The wind and stars. The
body full of life and all the life of youth. A woman having several dozen
years of life to think of as I has been I had no particular memory, nor the
memories chose me to stay with. Yet I was now rippled with bunches of waves
of memory, which was neither great, nor important.
A wander around the city on a Friday.
The sky was dull; there was no wind, nor fog. He wore a short sleeve summer
shirt. I covered myself with a heap of clothes. As we walked out of an
Italian pasta store he said, "You should take off at least one of your
shirts for a good airing." He helped me pull the sleeves off and said,
"You look astonishingly young while wearing white, sister Mi."
The beauty supply store nearby was
feverish in the reds of ranges of lipsticks and powders that stood
saturation-displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. "I must call in and get
some napkins," I said. I chose a small block of rose-watered tissue
paper at the counter and brought it to the checkout. Seeing him stoop
surveying the basket in which were displayed nail varnishes I asked, "Choosing
nail polish for Michele, aren't you?" He smiled, picking up one,
"What colour is this?". "China red." I said smiling. But
then, came out of my mouth words clinking, "May be not. That colour
looks cute. Pretty cute."
"Stirring red," he said,
"Name it so, if you wish. The Vietnamese language is rich in adjective,
sister Mi." (1)
"I feel old," I said, in a
sudden, as we came out of the store. We walked side by side. The shuffling of
his Reedbook shoes echoed the street.
"Nope!" he said,
"You're still young." He took hold of my hand, smiled an amusing
smile, and went on, "I remember you telling me once, that when you feel
your age you would begin to paint your nails. You haven't painted them
yet."
"Oh, you should not remember
such a trifling!"
"When you're getting old,"
he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, "I will send you some
nail polish."
"Your wife is crazed with
jealousy, and yet you keep joking!"
Turn after turn in the streets.
Conversation exploded like firecrackers going off in the New Year Eve. Now
his hand resting on my shoulder, now his arm wrapping around my waist. There
were times when my whole body was raised from the ground and swung round and
round. In the evening, we sat on the topmost step looking down at the park
which, merely stretched from the end of this brown to the corner of that eye.
"Are you happy?" I asked.
His face grew deeply distressed.
"I don't know," he
answered, in English.
"She loves you crazy," I
said, American's. (2)
"I apologise for what had
happened last night. She was a bit too much."
"Best way to avoid
misunderstandings would be to talk. Husband and wife must communicate. Why
don't you make it clear to her?"
"I had tried in vain, and wanted
no more talk."
I had read in a trashy book, there
might well be a sure sign of that the family happiness is at stake when a man
can no more communicate with his wife. I knew he was shirking his wife,
dodging his work to go out with me on the sly all day long.
***
"I had never experienced my
marriage ceremony," I said, "I had been shacked-up with Man for a
period of five years. When leaving him I said: "Other than living with
you I don't think I can live with any other man for long." I still
remember I was then working for a dressmaker near my house. One night he
dropped by and said, in a tone of no tension, -"Will you go with
me to-morrow?"-"Where
to?" -"Escape
the border!" I had been clumsy like a lame duck. Walking my bicycle I
breezed to the appointed place where I saw a group of men, women, and
children standing about. I was seized up at once. Giving the bike to his
niece so she would drive it home, I sent my words: "I am trying to
escape, but do not know whether or not I could get through." Not capable
of escaping the border was then usually to be expected, remember? I could not
imagine that time he took my hand to lead me onto the boat. A boat full of
storms, waves, blood, and the tears of my own life. As we're getting ashore, a crowd had been standing about to
identify the newcomers. I opened my eyes but saw none of them. I did not even
see my own being. During the whole week in the camp the Malaysian women
brought me food, water, and clothes. I appreciated the fact that they didn't
speak the same language. I had just wanted to have vanished under the ground.
Wanted to die. Wanted to get away from the human being. I thought of no one.
More still, having no desire to see him. How could I dig up the tomb of
memory to burry deeper the picture in which Man and the young lads on board
were tied together lest they saw the pirates were doing the crushing of
me?"
"Why do you choose this moment
to bring it up again?" he said after a long moment of my falling into
silence.
"I don't know. I don't
know!"
The evening breeze began to send the
fog over, slightly cold. He put his arm over my shoulders.
"I still remember the nights when
I went to the beach, with you, and Bach."
"Ah! It was your child-like
Bach, was it?"
I cocked my head. The smell of man
filled my hair.
"Do you remember this
thing," he said.
"I do remember you brought me
water, took my letters to the post, asked me out to the beach at night."
He would not let me finish:
"Remember the day before I left
the camp?" he said, "Bach made a pot of sweet-soup, waited for the
night came, and brought it down to the beach."
"What then remained, after the
night we eating the rice soup?" I interrupted, "I remembered that
after the eating, the breeze rose slightly cold, I made a pillow out of your
folded T-shirt and I fell to sleep until being waken up. Why at that moment I
failed to ask why Bach had gone. What was really remained I could now have it
said without hesitation."
I took hold of his hand, the solid
playing-tennis hand, drawing it onto my breast.
"They will, in my heart, live on
for evermore. I want to thank the song I heard, that night, rippled so near
in my hair¾You
are a tiny star, and I wish my heart the blue sky."
He spoke about how his life had been
after he had left the island for America. Studying at college. Studying at
university. How many American peaches he slept with. How many Vietnamese
leaves. Why he married his young wife at last. "I can divorce her
anytime," he said, "but then there's thinking of my two kids."
At another moments: "Kids, well, even though it is no matter. If cheesed
off, I will surely part."
I felt his marriage was sliding down
the slope.
It was the last day I stayed in
Capitol city. I complained of being tired of walking as he asked me to walk
along May Street. "I will massage your legs when we get back to the
hotel," he said.
I had no intent at all of pushing him
down the abyss. I sensed the merest rendezvous would make us the hungers of
flesh pounce on each other. I had ever done that to several other men. And
perhaps, he too, to certain women. In the midst of our conversation, it
seemed, we once mentioned a Hollywood movie which, shown years ago, dealt
with two adulterers who were haunted with the strong desires to possess one
another that led to brutal killings.
"How terrible to see they torture the child and maltreat the
woman!" he said.
It was in the car while he took me
back to the hotel that I said, "You get home so late it will provoke
your wife into jealousy." He laughed, "For the worse, just like I
had ever heard my Mum yelling at me when I came home late after sneaking out
to go with girls."
He was, anyway, so lovely a male. I
looked at his talkative mouth. My eyes dimmed. My head thinking. This man,
after making love, will talk beguilingly, perhaps. But I was a dead body,
which shattered into a thousand tiny pieces of glass. I had crawled to bed
with many men, trying to assemble what could be assembled no more: it was the
tenderness, the warmness every girl having been dreaming all her girlhood
when thinking about the first time she would sleep with a man.
There was at last no hotel, motel at
all. As we were about to part, standing in front of the Shade I said,
"It is twelve o'clock at midnight, and you must go home." I kissed
the stalk of his neck where the veins stood straight and warm, felt our
bodies ballooned out and possibly exploded in any minute.
Here lying on the bed in the hotel I
thought how funny it had been. It was only our meandering around the streets,
which wore off the day. This morning, when coming to meet him I had thought
that I might meet him in a bed.
I slept the night through, got up
very late the following morning, and went to the airport.
***
His wife and his two years old
daughter stood lingering over the Mickey Mouse pictures displayed at an
airport's kiosk. He came back, sitting at the table where I sat sipping my
coffee, waiting to board.
"Do you think you'll return to
Vietnam and live there?"
"Um, yes." I said.
As his wife and the child neared, he took from his pocket a
music tape. I grasped the tape, and put it into my purse. Their footsteps
echoed regularly. He leant back in his chair, and said in a natural tone:
"We might see each other in
Vietnam, who knows?"
"Gosh, Vietnam's romantic
sentimentality," I said quickly. "It takes all sorts." (3)
Vietnam's. Silly. Romantic, romany
(4). Dolled-up cai-luong (5). Poetic and dreamy. Of low quality. Different
from everyone.
He was quite right. ¾"The
Vietnamese language is rich in adjective."
However it might be. The last memory
of our relationship was more rubber-banded and ballooned. The music tape,
which I stuffed into my purse at the airport, recorded an old song of Anh
Viet Thu performed by a male singer and the lyrics he had blown into my hair
the silent night on that beach in that old island.
I had listened to that song over and
over again, and outlasted in my heart the phrase he sang into my ear at the
airport when his wife was not standing beside him: "Where are you going
to? Remember the flickering stars..?"
***
I had no love story. I did not come to love Man yet. Never had I
trusted man. Including him.
I had come back to and decided on Buon
Me Thuot for living there all those dozen following years. Then coming under
raising children, of which I shared the tasks with another man. Then again,
remarrying the third. My husband died when I was near the age of sixty. I
knew 'he' had been divorced from his wife, and remarried a certain woman. I
determined not to establish any relationship after my coming back to and
living in Vietnam.
The old woman now had many dozens of
years that crumpled the lines in her palms. I hung my head, looking anxiously
at my rough, tortoise-shell-skinned hands. "When you're getting old I
will send you some nail polish."
It seemed I'd never polished my nails
in all my life now¾
Never.
Translated* by N. Saomai
Translator's note:
(1) It is 'My' in the
original, adapted for pronunciation.
(2) intended as a joke. 3) Saying: 'It
takes all sorts to make the world'.
(4) In the original version, the author plays
alliteration by using of the same sound at the beginning of the words
'lang-man' and 'lang-dang', but not intending the meaning of the second word
'lang-dang'. In the translation, 'romantic, romany' uses alliteration with
the sound 'ro'; the translator intends no meaning of the word 'romany'.
(Example of alliteration: in Vietnamese, ba ba ban bun bo; in English, the
rat ran round the rock.)
(5) Cai-luong: reformed drama. In the original
version it is used as an adjective, meaning 'of dolled-up, fanciful or trashy
quality'. In the translation it remains a noun, for the Vietnameseism
purpose. Vietnameseism is a word or expression which is Vietnamese, used in
other languages¾ writing or speaking. In
"The Ao Dai is the Vietnamese traditional dress", Ao Dai is a
Vietnameseism. Compare Americanism (translator's note (2), page 40).
(*)Translated from the original version published in
SongVan magazine [USA: SongVan (ISSN
1089-8123), issue 12&13, 1998, pp 16-21]
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