The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 15

Hng is surprised she never married. Surprised she never went in search of somewhere or something better. Her beauty has not faded in all these decades, and even though he has avoided gazing upon it, he has, on occasion, felt it s.h.i.+ne upon his back like a warming sun.

Hng walks down to the pond this afternoon, consciously avoiding glancing over his shoulder. He asks Thuy Doc if he might borrow his sampan for an hour. He feels he has grown stronger in the days since Maggie's visit; remembering a few lines of poetry, he feels renewed. He's in the mood to cook something special this evening, and he's thinking of the delicate warmth of an eel and mushroom soup. He leaves his slippers on the sh.o.r.e and pushes the wooden boat into the water, pulling his muddy feet aboard last. The bottom of the boat is a velvety green, the oars worn smooth by years of sweat and repet.i.tive motion. He rows himself to the centre of the pond, equidistant from the shantytown and the tire factory. The water is as opaque as wood, the sky above, leaden. We are not so adventurous as the other animals, Hng thinks, inhabiting just this narrow band between earth and water, earth and sky.

He drifts toward the western edge of the pond, dragging a net through the reeds. He looks toward home: his shack and hers, only a metre between them. He'd suggested joining their shacks once, bridging that metre with some combination of wood and bamboo and corrugated tin. It was just after Lan had taken his finger into her mouth. A wall between them had collapsed. He'd felt the urge to tear the rest of them down.

"If we took out this wall, we would have another room entirely," he said, leading her into his spare shack.

She looked around admiringly, acquainting herself with its contents. Where he slept, kept his few clothes, his cooking utensils and his stash of precious magazines.

She stood so close to him that he could smell the wild garlic on her breath. It made his mouth water, as if in antic.i.p.ation of a great meal.

"I'm sure my grandmother would like it very much," she said. "But, Hng, if we did live together, where would we all sleep?"

He cleared his throat and said nervously, "Well, that would depend."

"On what would it depend?"

"On whether I am like an uncle to you or more like a husband."

"A husband," she responded, but he could not interpret her tone.

Did this shock her or appeal to her, or was it just a simple statement of fact? Had he destroyed everything with one word or set it free?

T has waited a week at Maggie's insistence, but he can't stand to wait any longer. He makes his way to Cafe V alone after work one night, a camera stuffed in his back pocket. It is just before 7 p.m. and he stands in the doorway, a sick lump rising from his stomach to his throat. The tables and chairs are stacked in the centre of the room. All the paintings have been taken down; the walls are montages of tobacco-coloured outlines. Sloppy white stripes of fresh paint run from the ceiling to the floor of the south wall, where Mr. V is supervising a kid with a paint roller attached to a broom handle. T hopes to G.o.d this is nothing more than a renovation.

"Mr. V," says T, "I see you are making some changes."

"I must prepare for what is to come," he says sullenly.

"What is to come, Mr. V?"

"It's time for me to sell the shop and take my wife back to our village, where she can spend her last days in peace."

"I'm sorry to hear your wife is no better," says T, though he is not so sorry that he refrains from asking about the art. "You're taking it all with you?"

"I'm selling it," Mr. V says matter-of-factly.

"Everything? Even the stuff in the back?"

"Everything. Life is a circle-just as we are born with nothing so we shall die."

The room feels terribly hot to T all of a sudden, the air close and chemical. "But who are you selling it to?"

"One of those dealers," says Mr. V with a dismissive wave. "They've been after me for years. I will soon have to pay for a funeral. I already owe the money for my wife's operation. Everything costs too much money these days. i mi does not make everybody rich, you know. Some of us it just makes poorer."

T leaves without another word-his hands clenched, his nails cutting into his palms. He punches the frame of the door as he pa.s.ses through it, then pounds his way down random streets, his heart and mind competing for most agitated. He chews on some negative integers and finally, nearly an hour later, calms down. He takes shelter from the rain in a crumbling doorway on T Hin Street and spies a tiny bar across the road. He darts between the lanes of traffic and crouches through the door of the bar. The room glows red from the light of paper lanterns, the operative language appears to be Englamese and the music is the kind of rock that old white men like. Places like this make T feel like a tourist in his own town.

He orders a beer from a very pretty waitress who tells him there is no bia hi in this place, only bottles from Germany and places like that. T sips his expensive beer and wonders to whom Mr. V might have sold his collection. He's determined to find out-he doesn't care how long it takes or whom he annoys along the way. Mr. V might need the money, but doesn't he realize he has just given their history away? What if it all ends up in foreign hands, lost to Vietnam forever?

T pulls his pen and notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and flips through lists of new English words until he reaches a blank page. He draws a line down the middle of the page, making two columns. On the left-hand side he begins to write the names of all the artists he can remember, on the right-hand side, descriptions of the pieces of artwork he can recall hanging on the walls of Cafe V.

He makes his way counter-clockwise around the room in his mind, starting with the three Bui Xuan Phais. He moves on to what he remembers seeing in Mr. V's chest, the more dramatic works coming most readily to mind-not just Ly Vn Hai's tigers, but Nguyn Dip's Requiem for Uncle H, where a face made of bricks is demolished by a sledgehammer. He remembers a painting of a Russian cosmonaut landing in a rice paddy, several portraits of men with stony faces and bleeding eyes, and a good number of naked ladies.

He taps his temple with his pen, commending himself for his memorization skills. A communist education has its benefits.

T's mother opens the door for Maggie. Anh is slight and feminine but strong, with prominent veins in her forearms. A single streak of grey begins at her temple and runs the length of her hair, but apart from that suggestion of maturity, she looks barely older than T.

Maggie follows Anh across a fragrant green courtyard into a modern kitchen on the far side. The appliances gleam under the bright fluorescent light and a woven mat covers part of the linoleum floor, evidence of a game of dominoes underway upon it. The Honda Dream II rests on its kickstand in the corner of the room, a faithful member of the family.

T is standing by the table examining his knuckles. He'd sounded very upset on the phone. "I went back to Cafe V," he says. "Mr. V's wife is dying and he has decided to sell the shop so they can go back to their village."

"And the art? Is he taking it with him?"

"He sold it all to a dealer."

Maggie closes her eyes for a second. Her eyelids flutter, those thin membranes struggling to conceal her disappointment. She places her palms on the table to steady herself. "Did he tell you the name of the dealer?"

"He was very vague about the whole thing," says T. "But, Maggie, I had an idea. I think my father might be able to draw some likeness of one of your father's pictures if I could describe it to him." T places his hands on his father's shoulders, his expression one of mild desperation.

Bnh smiles weakly, with humility. "I generally stick to objects," he says. "Things without movement or expression. But I would be very happy to try."

Maggie swallows the lump in her throat and takes a seat on a hard wooden chair across the table from Bnh. He apologizes for the fact that he has only graph paper. He holds his pencil, ready to interpret his son's words, but T has some difficulty getting started.

"They live in the mountains, don't they?" his father prompts. "Not at the very top, but in the woodland areas."

"They were in a dark cave," says T. "Maybe it was a cave in a mountain but you couldn't see the mountain. It was more close up."

"What shape was the cave?" Bnh asks.

"The shape of an eye," says T. "The tigers are just to the left of the pupil."

Bnh makes a few bold strokes with his pencil.

"How big were they?" Bnh asks.

"I don't know," says T, shrugging. "Tiger size. They were strong: tearing into each other, their muscles rippling, blood gus.h.i.+ng from the neck of the one on the right."

The concentration on Bnh's face feels familiar to Maggie. The way his eyes dart across the page, his pencil turned horizontally as he a.s.sesses proportion. Her father used to do exactly this as he knelt on the floor of their room in Saigon and distracted her from the realities of a war, her arms draped around his neck as he brought a water buffalo to life.

"Now what do you think he wants to eat for dinner?" she remembers her father asking as he leaned back on his heels.

"Dog," she had said over his shoulder.

"But buffalo don't like meat, Maggie. You really are an urban girl, aren't you."

"What does that mean?"

"From the city. I should teach you about the country. Show you where the things we eat come from. When the war is over we'll go into the countryside and stay at a farm for a few days. Would you like that?"

That promise alone had made Maggie pray for an end to the war.

"Huh," Bnh finally says, putting down his pencil and holding the graph paper at arms' length.

Maggie steps round to his side of the table.

"I don't really know how one captures the emotions of things," Bnh says.

"What do you think it means?" Maggie asks.

"If I knew, I would probably be able to do a much better job for you."

T examines the page and lists all the things he had neglected to communicate to his father.

Bnh tears the top sheet of graph paper off his pad, ready to begin again.

This time, T is more descriptive. He uses his hands to ill.u.s.trate the degree of the tigers' entanglement, his face to indicate the width of the one tiger's open mouth. He describes stalagmites and shadows. Bnh's second attempt is a good deal more detailed as a result.

"I wonder if they ever escape the cave," Maggie says as they stare at the drawing lying flat on the table.

"I'm going to recover those pictures for you," says T.

Maggie looks at him and wonders if this is what it might feel like to have a brother. She reaches out to him; he flinches. She reaches out again, grabbing and squeezing his good hand.

Hng's eel and mushroom soup has just the right consistency and heat. He waits until Lan wanders off to the latrine in the dark before ladling some into a wooden-lidded bowl. He leaves the bowl on the stool that sits on her threshold, making sure it is illuminated by the light of her kerosene lamp.

He sits down in the dark on his own threshold and awaits her return. He hears the scratch of stiff fabric as she bends to pick up the bowl, her exhalation as she sits down, the clack of the wooden lid being s.h.i.+fted and set aside, the dull tap of the spoon against the bowl, her swallow, her contented sigh, the quiet words-is it true? Does he really hear them?-Thank you, Hng.

An Emotional Vocabulary.

T is standing at Maggie's office door wis.h.i.+ng that the cuffs of his jeans were not so dirty and that he had thought to splash on some aftershave. "Can I help you?" some guy in uniform had asked as he walked through the lobby. "I have an appointment with Miss Maggie," T had replied defensively. "She's expecting me."

This was not exactly true, but he felt justified in saying it given the urgency of the search for her father's missing pictures.

"T," says Maggie, surprised to see him. "Do you have clients at the hotel today?"

"I was just coming to ask whether you have had any luck identifying the dealer."

"Not yet, T. It's only been a day. I contacted a professor at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts who specializes in Bui Xuan Phai's work. I thought he might be able to help narrow the search down-there are hundreds of dealers throughout Southeast Asia who could be interested in that collection."

"But, Maggie, this is something of an emergency. I think we need to act now. All the pistons firing. That collection is full of national treasures." He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his notebook. He points to the eleven names listed there, including Maggie's father and Bui Xuan Phai, and the brief descriptions he has written of more than two dozen pieces of art. "These are the ones I could remember off the top of my head," he says.

"T," Maggie says, her eyes twinkling as she draws the notebook toward her. "This is brilliant. Can I make a copy? I'd like to give it to Professor Devereux at the university. I think it could help."

T hesitates, suddenly feeling territorial. Isn't the point to keep this work out of foreign hands? "This professor," he says, "he is not Vietnamese?"

"Vit Kiu," says Maggie.

"Like you," says T, feeling deflated.

"Not exactly," she says. "He sounds very French."

T stares idly at a painting propped up on the arms of a chair. A man looks out a window, a faint reflection of his face in the gla.s.s, a grey sea beyond.

"Do you like that?" Maggie asks.

"I don't know," says T, shrugging "Well, how does it make you feel?"

The confusion must show on his face. "What's your instinctive reaction?" she asks. "What does your gut say?"

T's gut doesn't really speak except when it's hungry or interested in a girl. His instinct makes suggestions occasionally, but he largely ignores them. "Kind of lonely?" he ventures.

"That's interesting," she says with a glimmer of a smile that T doesn't know how to interpret.

"Am I right?" he asks tentatively.

"It's not a question of right or wrong, T. It's subjective."

Subjectivity is a dangerous business: the party certainly doesn't encourage anyone to have an independent opinion. But has he not just put his hand into subjectivity's fire? Does he see loneliness where she sees hope?

"What is your subjective opinion?" he asks.

"It's like he has lost something or perhaps someone at sea, or maybe he wishes he could be on the other side where he imagines a better life for himself. Whatever the case, something is more compelling out there in that empty s.p.a.ce than in the world that surrounds him. You feel his alienation, and yes, it is lonely," she says.

Hah! thinks T, so I am both subjective and right.

"I know that feeling," she says. "We probably all do. That's the power of art. Do you?"

oi zi oi, he thinks, what a question. He clears his throat before answering. "Sometimes by Hoan Kim Lake you can have thoughts about, you know, life, feeling small, why we are here on earth. It doesn't matter if all that traffic is honking at your back."

"Is that loneliness, or existentialism?" she asks.

He opts for loneliness, not knowing the other word. "It's lonely because these are thoughts you cannot share with anyone."

"But you have just shared them with me."

Hng has nodded off while sitting on the gra.s.s mat outside his shack, listening to Lan appreciate his soup for a third night in a row, her delicate swallow, her contented sigh. He has slipped into a dream of floating on water. He is lying on his back, the sun high in the sky, dragonflies roosting on his stomach.

"Foreign lady for Mr. Hng!" Van shouts, tearing Hng from his pleasant reverie.

"Goodness gracious, Van!"

"I'm sorry to disturb you again," says a figure in the dark.