A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Page 2

  Changing my question as I did, even as I spoke it, I thought I would never get the answer to what I really wanted to know. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt a flush spread from under my chin and up my face. It was only a minor attack of shame until I saw what was happening before me. I suppose it was the suddenness of this question, its unexpectedness, that caught him off guard. It’s an old interrogation trick. But Thap’s hands rose gently from his lap and I knew they were remembering her. It all happened in a few seconds and the hands simply lifted up briefly, but I knew without any doubt that his palms, his fingertips, were stunned by the memory of touching her. Then the hands returned to his lap and he said in a low voice, “Of course I miss her.”

  I asked him no more questions, and after he was gone, my own hands, lying on the desktop, grew restless, rose and then hid in my lap and burned with their own soft memories. I still had a wife and she had not been my wife for long before I’d had to leave her. I knew that Thp was no ghost but a man and he loved his wife and desired her as I loved and desired mine and that was within the bounds of his purity. He was a man, but I wished from then on only to stay far away from him. The infantry guys had their own interpreter and I wouldn’t have to deal with Thp and I was very glad for that.

  Less than a week later, however, I saw him again. It was on a Sunday. Early that morning there’d been some contact out in the Long Khánh Mountains just to the east of us. First there was the popping of small arms for a few minutes and then a long roar, the mini-guns on the Cobras as they swooped in, and then there was silence.

  In the afternoon the enlisted men played cricket and I sat beneath a tree with my eyes on them but not really following this strange game, just feeling the press of the tree’s shade and listening to the thunk of the ball on the bat and the smatterings of applause, and I let the breeze bring me a vision of my wife wearing her aó dài, the long silk panels fluttering, as if lifted by this very breeze, as if she was nearby, waiting for me. And a few times as I sat there, I thought of Thp. Maybe it was my wife who brought him to me, the link of our yearning hands. But it wasn’t until the evening that I actually saw him.

  It was in the officers’ club. Sometimes they had a film to show and this was one of the nights. Captain Townsend got me there early to help him move the wicker chairs around to face the big bed sheet they’d put up at one end for a screen. Townsend wouldn’t tell me what the film was. When I asked him, he just winked and said, “You’ll like it, mate,” and I figured it was another of the Norman Wisdom films. This little man, Wisdom, was forever being knocked down and tormented by a world of people bigger than him. Townsend knew I didn’t like these films, and so I decided that was what the wink was all about.

  Thp came in with a couple of the infantry officers and I was sorry to see that their interpreter wasn’t with them. I couldn’t understand why they had him here. I guess they were trying to make him feel welcome, a part of their world. I still think that. They just didn’t understand what sort of man he was. They clapped him on the back and pointed to the screen and the projector, and they tried their own few words of Vietnamese with him and some of that baby talk, the pidgin English that sounded so ridiculous to me, even with English being my second language. I didn’t think Thp would like Norman Wisdom either. Thp and I were both little men.

  But when he came in, the thing I was most concerned about was that since I was the only other Vietnamese in the club, Thp would seek me out for help. But he didn’t. He glanced at me once and that was it. The two infantry officers took him up to the front row and sat him between them, and when Thp was settled, my attention shifted enough that I finally realized that something was going on here out of the ordinary. The Aussies were unusually boisterous, poking at one another and laughing, and one of them yelled to Townsend, “You intelligence boys have to smuggle this stuff in?”

  Townsend laughed and said, “It was too bloody hot even for us, mate.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about and I was evidently staring at Captain Townsend with my confusion clear on my face. He looked at me and then put his arm around my shoulders. “You’ll see,” he said. “It’s for all us boys who are missing our little ladies.” He nodded me toward the chairs and I went and sat a couple of rows behind Thp and a little to his left. I could see only the back of his head, the spray of his hair, his deep brown neck, the collar of his plaid shirt. He raised his face to the screen and the lights went out and the films began.

  There were nine of them, each lasting about twenty minutes. The first began without any credits. A man was walking along a country path. He was a large, blond-haired man, Swedish I later learned, though at the time it Simply struck me that this wasn’t the sort of man who would be in a Norman Wisdom movie. He was dressed in tight blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was unbuttoned, exposing his bare chest. I had never seen an Englishman dressed like that. Or an Australian either. And Wisdom’s movies were all in black and white. This one was in grainy color and the camera was quaking just a little bit and then I realized that all I was hearing were the sounds of the projector clicking away and the men beginning to laugh. There was no soundtrack on this film. Someone shouted something that I didn’t catch, then someone else. I thought at first that there’d been a mistake. This was the wrong film and the men were telling Townsend to stop the show, put on little Norman. But then the camera turned to a young woman standing by a fence with cows in the background and she was wearing shorts that were cut high up into her crotch and she shook her long hair and the Australians whooped. The camera returned to the man and he was clearly agitated and the club filled with cries that I could understand now: Go for her, mate; put it to her, mate; get on with it.

  I glanced at Thp and his face was lifted to the screen, but of course he did not know what was about to happen. I looked up, too, and the man and woman were talking with each other and then they kissed. Not for long. The woman pulled back and knelt down before the man and she unsnapped and unzipped his blue jeans and she pulled them down and he still had his underpants on. I discovered, a little to my surprise, that I could not breathe very well and I felt weak in my arms. I had never seen a film like this, though I’d heard things about them. But there was a moment, when the man remained clad in his underpants, that I thought there was still some boundary here, that this was not a true example of the films I’d heard about.

  But the woman squeezed at him there, playfully, smiling, like this was wonderful fun for her, and then she stripped off his underpants. His body was ready for her and that was very clear there, right on the screen, and she seemed truly happy about this and she brought her face near to this part of him and I drew in a sudden breath as she did a thing that I had never even asked my wife to do, though seeing it now made me weak with desire for her.

  And then I looked at Thp. It was simply a reflex. I still had not put together what was happening in this club and what Thp was and what had happened to him in his life and what he believed. I looked to him and his face was still lifted; he was watching, and I glanced up and the woman’s eyes lifted, too; she looked at the man even as she did this for him, and I returned to Thp and now his face was coming down, very slowly. His head bowed low and it remained bowed and I watched him for as long as I could.

  I must admit, to my shame, that it was not very long. I was distracted. I said before, speaking of Thp’s “personal purity,” that an indifference to this notion is a weakness of mine. I have never remarried, and I must admit that it pleases me to look at the pictures in some of the magazines easily available in America. The women are so naked I feel I know them very well and the looks on their faces are usually so pleasant that they seem somehow willing for me to know them this way—me personally. It’s a childish fantasy, I realize, hardly the right intentions, and I suppose someday this little desire will lead to unhappiness. But I am susceptible to that. And on that dark night, in that Australian tent in the province of Phu’ó’c Tuy, I was filled with desire, and I watched a
ll nine films, desiring my wife—mostly her, I think—but at times, too, briefly desiring one of these long-haired women who took such pleasure in the passing farmer, the sailor on the town, the delivery man, even the elderly and rather small doctor.

  Three more times I looked at Thp. The first time, his head was still bowed. The second time, he was, to my surprise, looking at the screen. He was watching as the camera settled on the face of a dark-haired woman who was being made love to in the only way I had ever known to do it, and for a time all we could see was her face, turned a little to the side, jarred again and again, her eyes closed. But on her face was a smile, quiet, full of love, but a little sad, like she knew her man would soon have to leave her. I know I was reading this into her from my own life. She was a Swedish prostitute making a pornographic movie, and the smile was nothing of this sort. It was fake. And I know that it’s the same with all the smiles in the magazines. The smiles of these naked women are the smiles of money, of fame, of a hope to break into movies or buy some cocaine or whatever. But on that night in the Australian tent, Thp and I looked at this woman’s face and I know what I felt and something told me that Thp was feeling that, too. He watched for a long time, his face lifted, his hands, I know, yearning.

  He was still watching as I turned my own face back to the screen. There were two more films after that, and I viewed them carefully. But my mind was now on Thp. I knew that a few rows in front of me he was suffering. This man had been my sworn enemy till a week ago. The others in this room had been my friends. But Thp was my countryman in some deeper way. And it had nothing to do with his being Vietnamese, either. I knew what was happening inside him. He was desiring his wife, just as I was desiring mine. Except on that night I thought I would one day be with my wife again, and his was newly dead.

  But if that was all of it, I don’t think he would have made this impression on me that does not leave. These films he saw sucked at his desire, brought the feel of his wife to him, made his hands rise before him. He was a man, after all. I watched the films till there were no more and I felt bad for Thp, his wanting a woman, wanting his wife, his being drawn by that very yearning to a vision of her body as ashes now and bits of bone. The third time I looked at him, his head was bowed again and it probably remained bowed. It was bowed still when the lights went on and Captain Townsend was called to the front of the room and was hailed for his show with wild applause and cheers.

  And as we all shuffled out of the tent I saw Thp’s face briefly, between his two Australian mates, the two infantry officers who had made him feel like he was really part of the gang. Thp’s face told me how it would all end. His eyes were wildly restless, like he’d been on a sapper mission and a flare had just gone off and he suddenly found himself here in the midst of his enemy.

  That night he went to a tent and killed one of the two infantry officers, the one, no doubt, who had insisted on his coming to the club. Then Thp killed himself, a bullet in his brain. It was lucky for Townsend that Thp didn’t understand the cheers at the end or the captain might have been chosen instead of the infantry officer. Thp’s desire for his wife had made him very unhappy. But it alone did not drive him to his final act. That was a result of a history lesson. Thp was a true believer, and that night he felt that he had suddenly understood the democracies he was trying to believe in. He felt that the communists whom he had rightly broken with, who had killed his wife and shown him their own fatal flaw, nevertheless had been right about all the rest of us. The fact that the impurity of the West had touched Thp directly, had made him feel something strongly for his dead wife, had only made things worse. He’d had no choice.

  And as for myself, I live my life in the United States of America. I work in a bank. I have my own apartment with my own furniture and I have saved more money than I expect ever to need, if I can keep my job. And there’s no worry about that. It’s a big bank and they like me there. I can talk to the Vietnamese customers, and they think I’m a good worker beyond that. I read the newspapers. I subscribe to several magazines, and in one of them beautiful women smile at me each month. I no longer think of my wife. I go to the movies. I own a VCR and at last I saw the movie “Mary Poppins.” The street I live on is one of four named after Mary Poppins in our neighborhood. This is true. You can look it up on any street map.

  The Vietnamese on the Westbank do not like the Vietnamese in Versailles. The ones on the Westbank point out that for the ones in Versailles, freedom only means the freedom to make money. They are cold people, driving people, Northerners. The Southerners say that for them, freedom means the freedom to think, to enjoy life. The Vietnamese in Versailles do not like the Southerners. We are lazy people, to them. Unfocused. Greedy but not capable of working hard together for what we want. They say that they are the ones who understand America and how to succeed here. There are many on the Westbank and in Versailles who are full of hatred.

  I say that desire can lead to unhappiness, and so can a strong belief. I can sit for long hours from the late afternoon and into the darkness of night and I do not feel compelled to watch anything or hear anything or do anything. I can think about Thp and I can fold my hands together and at those times there is no hatred at all within me.

  MR. GREEN

  I am a Catholic, the daughter of a Catholic mother and father, and I do not believe in the worship of my ancestors, especially in the form of a parrot. My father’s parents died when he was very young and he became a Catholic in an orphanage run by nuns in Hanoi. My mother’s mother was a Catholic but her father was not and, like many Vietnamese, he was a believer in what Confucius taught about ancestors. I remember him taking me by the hand while my parents and my grandmother were sitting under a banana tree in the yard and he said, “Let’s go talk with Mr. Green.” He led me into the house and he touched his lips with his forefinger to tell me that this was a secret. Mr. Green was my grandfather’s parrot and I loved talking to him, but we passed Mr. Green’s roost in the front room. Mr. Green said, “Hello, kind sir,” but we didn’t even answer him.

  My grandfather took me to the back of his house, to a room that my mother had said was private, that she had yanked me away from when I once had tried to look. It had a bead curtain at the door and we passed through it and the beads rustled like tall grass. The room was dim, lit by candles, and it smelled of incense, and my grandfather stood me before a little shrine with flowers and a smoking incense bowl and two brass candlesticks and between them a photo of a man in a Chinese mandarin hat. “That’s my father,” he said, nodding toward the photo. “He lives here.” Then he let go of my hand and touched my shoulder. “Say a prayer for my father.” The face in the photo was tilted a little to the side and was smiling faintly, like he’d asked me a question and he was waiting for an answer that he expected to like. I knelt before the shrine as I did at Mass and I said the only prayer I knew by heart, The Lord’s Prayer.

  But as I prayed, I was conscious of my grandfather. I even peeked at him as he stepped to the door and parted the beads and looked toward the front of the house. Then he returned and stood beside me and I finished my prayer as I listened to the beads rustling into silence behind us. When I said “Amen” aloud, my grandfather knelt beside me and leaned near and whispered, “Your father is doing a terrible thing. If he must be a Catholic, that’s one thing. But he has left the spirits of his ancestors to wander for eternity in loneliness.” It was hard for me to believe that my father was doing something as terrible as this, but it was harder for me to believe that my grandfather, who was even older than my father, could be wrong.

  My grandfather explained about the spirit world, how the souls of our ancestors continue to need love and attention and devotion. Given these things, they will share in our lives and they will bless us and even warn us about disasters in our dreams. But if we neglect the souls of our ancestors, they will become lost and lonely and will wander around in the kingdom of the dead no better off than a warrior killed by his enemy and left unburied in a rice paddy to
be eaten by black birds of prey.

  When my grandfather told me about the birds plucking out the eyes of the dead and about the possibility of our own ancestors, our own family, suffering just like that if we ignore them, I said, “Don’t worry, Grandfather, I will always say prayers for you and make offerings for you, even if I’m a Catholic.”

  I thought this would please my grandfather, but he just shook his head sharply, like he was mad at me, and he said, “Not possible.”

  “I can,” I said.

  Then he looked at me and I guess he realized that he’d spoken harshly. He tilted his head slightly and smiled a little smile—just like his father in the picture—but what he said wasn’t something to smile about. “You are a girl,” he said. “So it’s not possible for you to do it alone. Only a son can oversee the worship of his ancestors.”

  I felt a strange thing inside me, a recoiling, like I’d stepped barefoot on a slug, but how can you recoil from your own body? And so I began to cry. My grandfather patted me and kissed me and said it was all right, but it wasn’t all right for me. I wanted to protect my grandfather’s soul, but it wasn’t in my power. I was a girl. We waited together before the shrine and when I’d stopped crying, we went back to the front room and my grandfather bowed to his parrot and said, “Hello, kind sir,” and Mr. Green said, “Hello, kind sir,” and even though I loved the parrot, I would not speak to him that day because he was a boy and I wasn’t.

  This was in our town, which was on the bank of the Red River just south of Hanoi. We left that town not long after. I was seven years old and I remember hearing my grandfather arguing with my parents. I was sleeping on a mat at the back of our house and I woke up and I heard voices and my grandfather said, “Not possible.” The words chilled me, but then I listened more closely and I knew they were discussing the trip we were about to go on. Everyone was very frightened and excited. There were many families in our little town who were planning to leave. They had even taken the bell out of the church tower to carry with them. We were all Catholics. But Grandfather did not have the concerns of the Catholics. He was concerned about the spirits of his ancestors. This was the place where they were born and died and were buried. He was afraid that they would not make the trip. “What then?” he cried. And later he spoke of the people of the South and how they would hate us, being from the North. “What then?” he said.