The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 4

So the man escaped the North only to be killed later in the South.

"Was he much older than your mother?" Hng asks.

"Eighteen years."

There had been twenty-one years between him and Lan. Was it a matter of just three less? Could they have had a daughter like the lovely young woman sitting in this room with him right now? Might something between them have lived?

T has just dropped off his new German clients at the Metropole two hours earlier than scheduled. He doesn't know whether it was the couple or the driver he was forced to work with since Phng called in sick to work this morning, but the day has lacked any particular joy. The couple seemed unimpressed with his list of famous German composers. "Ich glaub, mich laust der Affe," they said, which T thought must be the German equivalent of really, except with more words.

T finds himself at the bar where he and Phng have a beer at happy hour on days like this when tourists have had their fill and just want to leave the dirt of Hanoi behind in their hotel pool. Sometimes, if Phng has some thinking to do, you can find him here alone. But happy hour isn't particularly happy for T without Phng. In fact, everyone in the place looks rather bored and unhappy, and T feels like a very big loser until he is relieved by the ring of his cellphone.

He answers it loudly. But who is this speaking? It is some lady called Miss Maggie Ly who speaks Vietnamese with a strange accent. She says she's calling from the Sofitel Metropole. Have the Germans complained about him to the hotel management?

"It's about your Mr. Hng," she says.

Oh no, thinks T, is the old man in some kind of trouble? Has he shamed himself on hotel grounds?

"I'm afraid he was in a bit of an accident."

T throws some ng on the table, then jogs down the street. He has been dreading a day like this. The traffic has no mercy for an old man pus.h.i.+ng a cart. A moment of hesitation or misstep can prove fatal for a spry sixteen-year-old.

T bursts through the front doors of the Metropole, beer riding up his throat. He quickly scans the lobby. Everything is giant: the pillars, the potted palms, the guests. The man behind the front desk directs him to take a seat. T feels tiny sitting in the gilt-edged chair, his feet barely touching the floor. He whistles nervously and swings his legs until he notices the concierge scowling at him.

The man from the front desk approaches and asks if he might like to have a cup of coffee in the courtyard while he waits; Miss Maggie will be just a few minutes longer. T is about to decline, but something about the situation tells him not to. This is a highly unorthodox invitation. He is a tour guide, not a guest. They don't even like to have tour guides sitting in their expensive chairs; they certainly don't invite them to have coffee. He worries the stage is being set for the delivery of some very bad news.

The bellhop escorts him through a bistro and onto the teak deck of a poolside bar. T plants himself in a giant wicker chair that looks like a prop out of a movie. He would much prefer a beer at this hour, but a waiter serves him coffee-coffee in a cup and saucer rather than a gla.s.s as he is accustomed to. T looks slyly to his right and left before stuffing the piece of chocolate resting on the side of the saucer into his jacket pocket. He eyes the sugar cubes next, both white and brown.

He suddenly floats to his feet at the sight of the light-skinned beauty in the trim black suit who is entering the bar-it's her, the mysterious woman who appeared at breakfast yesterday! Before he can think of what he might say if he were to approach her, she is standing before him.

"T?" she says.

T nods, stunned by the coincidence. "Miss Maggie Ly?" he asks tentatively.

"Thank you for coming," she says, hand outstretched, her manner crisp, professional, American, her accent strange. "I'm sorry you've been kept waiting."

"Is the old man all right?" asks T.

"He's okay. I sent the doctor to see him and nothing's broken. He's a bit shaken by the whole experience though, and his cart's quite bashed up. I don't think he can manage to get it home. I asked if I could call anyone for him and he gave me your card. He was carrying it in his pocket."

T is relieved the old man hasn't been seriously injured, but he's also a bit ashamed by the situation. The staff probably think Hng is some kind of homeless person.

"Do you, uh, know Mr. Hng very well?" T asks.

"Me? No. We met for the first time yesterday morning."

This only increases T curiosity, but before he has had a chance to pursue this any further she is standing up and smoothing her trousers over her thighs in a way T finds a bit too s.e.xy. "If you don't mind waiting in the lobby," she says, "I'll just bring him down."

T watches Miss Maggie Ly leave. T does not have a lot of experience with Vit Kiu, at least not of the up-close-and-personal variety. Until very recently the Vit Kiu were not much welcome. This one has a nice slim body and a musical sway to her hips, though she's tall for a Vietnamese woman. It must be all that milk in the American diet. This would also explain her perfect teeth. Milk and hamburgers. He wonders what she looks like naked. Whether she strips off all her clothes before crawling into bed with her husband. But no, she is a Miss, not a Mrs. Her boyfriend then. An even dirtier thought.

T reaches for the sugar cubes and pops a few into his pocket. A waiter catches his guilty eye.

Old Man Hng has never looked so smart: he is wearing black trousers with some gold piping down the side like he belongs in a military band. Rather than sticking to his head as it normally does, his grey hair is a bit frothy. He smells good, too, if a bit feminine, like flowers. He looks far better for having had this accident, in fact.

T leaves Miss Maggie with a New Dawn business card and a confident wave, saying, "If you ever need the services of a tour guide in future." Friends in high places, he thinks. Hng waves a confident goodbye of his own, saying, "I hope to see you again at breakfast."

But why does he hope to see her again at breakfast? What the heck is going on?

"Hng," says T as they walk down the hotel steps, "what happened?"

"Taxi cut me off," he says, limping and gripping T by the forearm. He wades straight into the traffic, pointing over at his cart lying on its side on a traffic island, its front panel completely torn off.

"But why were you here?" T shouts. "This isn't on your way home."

"Maybe I get bored of the same route," says Hng, lurching up onto the island. "Now help me pull this upright."

"Hng, I think we should get my father to fix your cart before we try and move it."

"Come on, T," he says, stubborn and determined. The old man tugs one of the handles while T crouches down and leans his back against the side of the cart, grunting as he tenses his thighs and strains upright.

Hng pushes the cart forward on the traffic island and it careens to the right. The wheels are askew.

"Seriously. My dad can fix this," says T.

But the old man refuses to accompany T home, insisting he needs to get back to the shantytown. He always insists on this point. Even that time when T found him in agony after he had anaesthetized himself with rice wine and pulled out the broken stumps of three teeth after being punched by a police officer, Hng had refused to come back to their house. He hadn't eaten for at least two days. Ts father sent for a dentist instead, one who, at considerable expense, relieved Hng of the rest of his upper teeth and gave him a set of rejected dentures designed for a much smaller mouth-dentures that seem to have gone missing in the mysterious course of today's events.

Several times over the years T and his father have insisted the old man come and live with them-it is the Vietnamese way-but Hng always wins in the battle of insistence, offering no other reason than "a man knows where he belongs."

T feels no man belongs in such a dirty, shabby place, least of all Old Man Hng. He has always wished the old man's goodness could be rewarded with a better standard of living, a decent place to live, but he knows it is useless to keep trying to convince him to abandon the shantytown. He lives a quiet life of routine, remaining loyal to the people and places he knows, serving breakfast each morning, then returning home to his shack on the sh.o.r.es of a dirty pond.

The Beauty of Humanity.

Hng agreed to take Ts money for the taxi fare, simply to put an end to the boy's questions. He is mortified by every aspect of this situation, and with T involved now, Bnh and Anh will also worry. Worst of all, he can offer none of them a coherent explanation of what happened.

The taxi crawls through streets crowded with people making their way home. They are carrying babies and groceries and news of the day, looking forward to a meal with their families, Hng supposes, the type of life he might have lived if circ.u.mstances had been different. The view through the window unsettles him, detaching him from the streets he knows.

Today's incident has, furthermore, prevented him from fetching the supplies he needs for tomorrow's breakfast. To come from a poor place and make a better life means marrying yourself to the work that will improve things. ph is Hng's rightful wife and mistress, just as it had been for his Uncle Chin.

"You should caress the beef as you slice it," he remembers his uncle instructing him as he got older. "If you treat it tenderly, it guides you toward the grain. Tend your broth as if she is a sleeping beauty; keep watch over her, only waking her in the final hour with a splash of fish sauce."

Although he has been loyal to Uncle Chin's recipe, Hng has had to adapt to the vagaries of circ.u.mstances over the years. There was a time when he'd made ph from almost nothing. He hadn't known it was possible, but inappropriate love for a girl had driven him to it, had drawn him back into the bosom of ph, his willing mistress and reliable wife.

He had been sitting outside his shack with Lan one evening long ago, a full moon straining through the clouds, when he first admitted to himself that he was in trouble. Lan's grandmother joined them less frequently by then, saying the poems and the stories just lulled her to sleep and what good was she to anyone with idle hands? She nevertheless encouraged her granddaughter to spend evenings with Hng, saying the girl needed an education and where else was there any chance of that.

Hng thought this quite an enlightened att.i.tude on her grandmother's part, perhaps choosing to not consider the possibility that she might be looking to relieve herself of a burden by pus.h.i.+ng her granddaughter into the arms of a man, even one as old, blemished and poor as Hng.

Hng focused on the matter of education, an issue he took very seriously, having learned as much as he had from o. Hng had held onto all the poems o had copied down for him, even though the poet later came to throw away most of his early efforts, dismissing as adolescent and naive his laments for a stolen country with recurring images of weeping mothers and flowers blooming without scent.

As Vietnam struggled toward independence, o's poems reached into an uncertain future, contrasting images of Vietnamese peasants in Parisian zoos with those of human pyramids shaped like paG.o.das; allied Vietnamese workers with hands raised toward yellow skies. Some of these poems were eventually published in Fine Works of Spring, the first publication o and his colleagues produced.

Upon reading that journal by the bitter melon light of the oil lamp in the backroom of his shop, Hng had felt the words do a perilous dance on the page. The ill.u.s.trations vibrated with hidden meaning. His skin tingled and his ears burned as he read a poem about the hard times that had befallen the North since 1954. It was a risky topic to raise, one that might lead the Party to charge a person as an agent acting on behalf of the imperialists in the South.

When Hng tried to return the journal to o the following morning, o insisted it was his to keep. "Because you are one of us," he said. "One of our movement to keep the beauty of humanity alive."

Hng, filled with a mixture of pride and fear, held the inky pages to his chest. He bowed his head. He was humbled by the honour, but with honour comes responsibility. Being part of their movement meant the risk was his to share.

Five years later, in the interest of Lan's education, Hng found himself sharing the journal with the girl, retrieving his well-worn copy of Fine Works of Spring from the stack of papers he kept wrapped in plastic inside his shack, safe from rats and rain. He handed her the mimeographed volume, wanting her to feel the paper, smell the ink on its pages, hoping she might experience it with all her senses just as he had when he'd held it for the first time.

"But, Uncle, I cannot read," she said, holding the pages in her delicate hands.

Hng was surprised to hear it. He had left school at eleven, but he was a peasant boy from the country, this was to be expected. This girl was a Hanoian, born and bred, with the sophistication of the city about her despite the indignities of her current surroundings.

"Have you had no schooling?"

"My father was killed in the liberation struggle when I was very small," she said. "After that we had very little money, only enough for one of us to go to school. We sent my older brother."

And so Hng began to read to her-the essays, the stories and the poetry-doing his best with the latter to infuse the lines with some approximation of o's intonation and cadence.

Hng read the contents of Fine Works of Spring to her, then those of Fine Works of Autumn. She took it all in and appeared to want more, and so he proceeded to read the Nhan Van magazines to her, as well as the poems o had copied down for him with his own hand.

Through poetry, Hng conveyed to Lan a world of allegory and metaphor, and just as he had once not understood such concepts, the multiple layers of meaning at work, she did not at first understand.

"How can he claim his love for her is so great if he is only willing to feed her one cherry a month?" she asked. "It is very selfish of him to leave her hungry, is it not?"

"But he does not want to overwhelm her," said Hng, speaking his own truth through o's lines.

Where o described the country as the smallest in a nest of red- lacquered Russian dolls, she recalled a promise her grandfather had once made to buy her a toy from Paris.

She understood things only in literal terms, but it did not matter. He loved her for her innocence, for her sensory appreciation, for the fact that when she heard a lemon described she could taste a lemon. And he loved her proximity. While he read o's poetry to her, she would study the ill.u.s.trations in the journals, leaning in close to him, smelling of the coriander flowers she used, when she could find them, to wash her hair.

"But you are not reading," she said one day, as she looked up from an ill.u.s.trated page.

"I have it memorized," he said of the poem, a favourite.

"Teach me," she said, placing her hand on the page lying between them.

He stared at those graceful fingers, their beautifully tapered tips and natural polish, and thought, Oh, but, my dear girl, I cannot. Surely my heart would break.

Hng had studied o's poetry with his untrained eye and found his heart moved. His heart had then begun to educate his eye. He had recited certain poems so often that they had become part of him, as familiar as the tongue in his mouth. To teach the girl one of these poems would be to give himself to her. To see himself in her mouth.

He quickly changed the subject, pointing at the moon. "Did you hear the Russians put a man in the sky this week?"

"But why would they do such a thing?"

"Perhaps so they could prove once and for all that G.o.d does not exist."

News of the wider world could not distract her for long, though; it was far less compelling than the world they were creating between themselves.

One evening, as she reclined on her elbow, hair loose about her shoulders and bare feet interlaced, she said, "Maybe one day you will have a shop again and all the artists will come back. And I will work for you. I will chop the herbs and wash the dishes."

The scenario was so impossibly perfect that Hng knew this exchange could not continue. It was torture. It would cause him to dream the impossible, will the dead to life, act on impulses better left buried. He would lose his way and perhaps destroy her in the process. And look how thin the girl had become in recent months: what had he been thinking feeding her only poetry? He needed to find his way back to making ph.

But how did one make ph from nothing? Even the rice ration, when it was available, did not fill more than the palm of his hand-and that included the maggots. And so he was forced to experiment. One day he pulled weeds from the pond and laid them out to dry in the sun until they were as crispy as rice paper. Then he ground the dried weeds in a makes.h.i.+ft mortar until he had a fine powder, to which he added enough water to make a paste. He poured the paste onto a grid of dried, woven gra.s.s and left it to bake in the weak sun. When it had set, he cut the sheet into fine strips for his first batch of pondweed vermicelli. He improved upon the vermicelli the next time, making sure to use only the white hearts of the weeds. The slightly muddy taste was easily masked with a dash of . He had to make do with fish and wild leeks for the broth.

The girl and her grandmother were the first to taste Hng's communist-era ph. From the looks on their faces, Hng knew he'd been successful. The broth tasted nothing like it should have, but it was pleasant enough, and the vermicelli was quite convincing.

"You could sell this," said the grandmother, and in fact, this was already in Hng's thoughts.

He spent the next month building a stone grinder he could operate by pus.h.i.+ng a pedal. Then he made himself a cart out of wood sc.r.a.ps and twine, and set out into the streets, launching himself as a roaming ph seller.

Up until that point, Hng's sense of Hanoi had been fairly circ.u.mscribed, his routes dictated solely by the needs of the restaurant, but times had changed, and with them both the city and his way through it. His route meandered as he went in search of new clientele. How quiet the city was in those days, how devoid of people. Streets that had once bustled with commerce had become graveyards. Just a few entrepreneurial souls like himself had something to sell.

Without distraction he began to see the layers of the city. Craft villages had first arisen on this site a thousand years before, when the capital had been moved to Hanoi. The wall of the citadel, which these villages had served, still marked the western edge of the Old Quarter. The inhabitants had built walls around their villages as they evolved into guilds, and though those walls had since come down, Hng could map their respective territories by discerning which temple, which paG.o.da, which communal house or nh belonged to which of the thirty-six guilds.

He had walked around the perimeter of the Old Quarter and come to rest his cart at the East Gate, the only original gate still standing. Hng reasoned that a gate was an invitation to traffic, even in the absence of a wall, even in the absence of traffic, and so this is where he waited with his cart.

Several people pa.s.sed by him on foot that first morning, none of them even glancing his way, but eventually two men on bicycles, curiosity or perhaps hunger getting the best of them, turned around and asked what he was selling.

"But there's no rice," the older of the two said, "no noodles. How on earth can you be selling ph?"

"Come," Hng said with a nod and an inviting smile. "Taste."

He pulled the lid off one of his pots. Even he found the aroma tempting. He lowered a handful of his pondweed vermicelli into the broth with his bamboo ladle. He had one bowl and one bowl only- they would have to share. They held the bowl between them, accepted the proffered chopsticks and grasped at the noodles. They drank from the bowl in the absence of spoons.

"Ahh," the younger one sighed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "That is excellent."

"That is the best thing I've tasted in years," said the other, burping loudly.

"I'll be here again tomorrow morning," said Hng. "Bring your bowls and your friends."

"But how much are you charging?" asked the younger.

"How much can you pay?"

"Not much now, but next week I am old enough for the army."

"Me, I could pay in leather," said the older one. "I used to be a leather worker, that is, before all the cows disappeared. But I still have my sc.r.a.ps. Hey, a belt-do you need a belt?"

And so Hng found himself the proud owner of a new belt, and soon thereafter, of quail feathers and palm fronds and lumps of northern coal.

He would share these things with the girl. Present them as small gifts. "You deserve so much more," he would say, handing her a speckled duck's egg or a smooth piece of cow horn.

She had tried to reciprocate where she could. One morning he found her sitting on the threshold of the shack she shared with her grandmother sewing a man's s.h.i.+rt out of a piece of tarpaulin. In the absence of news, of underground papers, of anything other than propaganda shouted through megaphones and plastered on walls, one had to rely on signs like these. There must be threat of another war, Hng thought, if there are enough military vehicles for her to risk tearing a piece of tarpaulin off the back of a jeep. Who is it now? he wondered. The French or the Chinese? The Saigonese or j.a.panese or Khmer?