Gods Go Begging (34 page)

“Why did you stop?” Her large eyes were open now, her heavy breathing had slowed. “Vô Dahn, please don’t stop. Vô Dahn, what is it? I was getting so close.”

The man above her stared downward at the lovely face of the woman beneath him—at her rising and falling breasts, at the glistening patches on her skin where their sweat had mixed. He raised his head to look around the room. He recognized nothing at all—not the paintings, not the furniture, not even the remains of a meal for two. He rose from the bed and walked to the window, spreading wide the curtains despite his nakedness.

He looked downward at the harbor and the bay and the construction cranes and gray high-rise buildings that glutted the skyline to his left. He wondered if he was in San Francisco or Seattle. There were signs down below written in Cantonese. He shook his head. How did he know it was Cantonese? He could be on Stockton Street, looking toward Oakland. His eyes returned to the distant bay. The very sight of water left him cold.

After a moment of silence he moved back to the bed but did not rejoin the woman lying there. He sat down in a blue chair that had been draped with hastily tossed clothing. He lifted a man’s shirt to eye level, then let it drop. The shirt slumped to the floor, disappointed, deflated, unrecognized.

“Vô Dahn,
mon cher,
you’re beginning to remember things, aren’t you? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve prayed for this moment, even though I knew it might mean that you could forget us, what we’ve meant to each other.”

She lay on the bed as she spoke, her eyes still gazing upward and her legs still open and receptive. There was a trembling on the surface of her skin. At last, she was living the moment that she had both dreaded and longed for. Now that the time had finally come, she felt relieved.

“Now I’ve become a liar,” she sighed. “Now I’ve become a liar.
Maintenant, je suis une menteuse.”

“It seems that remembering means forgetting,” whispered Vô Dahn. He hadn’t heard her last words. “Somehow, remembering means forgetting.” He raised his head to look at the beautiful woman on the bed. “You called me Vô Dahn. How did I get the name Vô Dahn?”

“You got that name by forgetting your own true name. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been without a name.
Vô Dahn
means nameless. You have been called Vô Dahn for at least three years. It was I who named you.”

“What year is this? Where am I? What have I been doing? Do we live here together? Are we lovers, you and I?”

The woman sat upright on the bed. The man noticed for the first time the flawless, almost alabaster skin that covered the last layer of her soul’s temple. Only a blurring tattoo on her forearm marred the perfection of her skin. He canted his head to read the words written there, then his eyes returned to her face and hair. She had long black hair that fell almost to her waist. Her face was unwrinkled and un-marred by worry, but there was such grief in her eyes.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and jumped down to a soft woven mat. Her legs seemed as smooth as marble. It was clear that their lovemaking session was over. Perhaps they would never make love again. A sigh of disappointment escaped the man’s lips as she threw a loose robe around her body, covering her thighs and her breasts. The sigh was familiar to her, so she smiled. Not everything had been lost.

“I have been lying about you to myself for years, Vô Dahn. But since you have always insisted that you are no one, I never thought of it as a lie. As long as you were my lover, I knew that someday I could tell my husband that I made love to no one.”

“You have a husband?” asked the man.

“I am married.” She exhaled deeply. He could taste her breath. Its flavor calmed him. “He might be dead—he’s probably dead, but I still have hopes. As his wife it is my duty. Every day I hope.” She walked toward the sitting man and let her hair touch his shoulder and his bowed and confused head.

“My name is Cassandra. At least that’s my English name. I’ve had a dozen names in the last few years. But it is Cassandra who knows that her husband is dead. It is Cassandra who knows that today is the end of our love affair—that the time has come for me to begin my search for someone.
Mon cher,
you and I met five years ago. For three years you and I have taken care of each other. You have been more to me than a husband. You may not know it and you may never know it, but for a year or two, perhaps more, you were a very happy man.”

The man who had raised his head to listen to her now dropped it back down, as a thousand thoughts fought for access to a single throat and tongue.

“My name was once William Calvert,” he said, in exchange for her revelation.

“This is our apartment, Vô Dahn—I mean, William Calvert. We met in a refugee camp in Thon Buri, Thailand. If you think hard, you will find that you speak some Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and Thai.”

The two were speaking just above a whisper. They were rank strangers now, risen up from a warm bed of intimacy. He rose from the chair and placed his hands upon her waist as if to lift her. The woman was confused: should she embrace him or not?

My name is a lie, he thought to himself as looked down at the woman before him. Now he remembered that the useless land the Mennonites had purchased from his father had turned them into rich apple growers. It made them gentleman farmers, and to assuage their guilt, they had given the poor Mexican boy a luxurious name in repayment. They had always known the real value of the property and had paid his father next to nothing for it. When some of their children returned to the United Sates for a proper advanced education, he had been allowed to go with them.
Quelle folie!
Vô Dahn suited him well.

“The city outside that window is Hong Kong. We live in a small apartment on a small hill just north of Boundary Street. Kowloon is in that direction and Kai Tak airport is in the other direction.” After a moment of hesitation she ventured her bravest question.

“Do you know who you really are, Vô Dahn?”

“The name my father gave me was Guillermo Calavera, but that name is a lie, too, like everything else in my life.”

He inhaled as his muscles swelled. His hands tightened on her tiny midriff. She flexed her lovely legs. Still confused and a bit awkward with her own nakedness beneath the robe, she turned first to the right and then to the left,
une pirouette dehors.
Her long hair leapt from one shoulder to the other. Then, following the force of his hands, she jumped straight up. He carried her back to the bed and laid her down once more.

“My name is not really Cassandra. I’ve had a Thai name, a Chinese name … so many names. But I want to say that our life together is not a lie.”

“Me llamo … my true name is Guillermo Moises Carvajal. I was a chaplain for the U.S. Army in Vietnam. My life alone has been nothing but lies!”

“I was a whore for the Thai guards.”

A tone of indescribable grief settled into Cassandra’s voice as she forced the sentences from her mouth.

“It was an ugly camp—they were all ugly camps. I had no other choice. If I hadn’t surrendered my body to them they would have taken the little girls. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. It was you who gave me the strength to endure it. It was you.

“Since then I have cleaned bilges and outhouses in Bangkok and Macao and waited on tables in Victoria. Now I am a maid in one of those British hotels over there. They make me wear very short dresses. You are a taxi driver for the English and the Germans. You know every street on the Heights and on the Island. Your taxicab is down in the street below. It’s that little green Toyota with the front fender missing. There is your coat and hat.”

She pointed to a closet on the other side of the bed. He turned to see, but only as a gesture. Like the woman, his entire being was flailing desperately at the words that filled the room. It was as though the words had always been there, hovering in that small apartment, waiting patiently for the two mouths that would, at last, come speak them. Each word was tinged with frenzy and relief, glad that their human conduits had finally arrived.

“It was a hill—it wasn’t just terrain,” said the still naked man through clenched teeth. “Cassandra, there were young men out there—not just ground units, grunts. There were trees, stands of elephant grass and deep ravines—living things, not goddamn lines of fire and killing zones. They were not just soldiers, they were my flock. What became of them, Cassandra? Where are they now?”

“The North Vietnamese have marched into Saigon.” The woman sighed, then knelt down before the man in the blue chair. She took his hand and gave it the kiss that haunts.

“The land is filled with reeducation, revenge, and the ghosts of millions of my people. Your flock has gone back home to a country that is fighting itself. Many soldiers are living in Lisbon and Paris. A few of them have become senators or congressmen, but many more are drug addicts or living under bridges. I’ve seen them on the television news. They are lost in their own homeland.”

“Do they still need me?” asked the padre. There was pain in his voice. “Do you think my flock needs me now?”

“Back in Thailand, Vô Dahn—Guillermo, you would whisper into my ear late at night. I remember, your lips right next to my ear, words of hope carried upon your breath. You never let me lose hope. You tended to the women who gave their bodies, and to the children. When the young girls found the first stains of blood in their underclothing, when they knew the Thai soldiers would be coming for them, you told them what was love and what was not love. You taught us all how to suppose, and we passed so many nights supposing world upon world, better worlds than this one. Don’t you remember that? Vô Dahn, my dear, you were the strongest one of all. I am sure they need you, Vô Dahn. I am sure of it.”

The chaplain closed his eyes and fell backward into the chair. His dance with Cassandra had not ended. It would never end. But Vô Dahn, William, Guillermo had no idea what steps, what movements came next in this bumbling, self-conscious pas de deux.

“One night, on the boat that finally brought us to Hong Kong, you told me little things about the Mennonites in Chihuahua. I hope I pronounced it right. After years together, you finally shared with me some of the story of your parents. You once even told me about the insects and about a little boy with polio. It was then that I put that beautiful painting on your back. It is the only tattoo I have ever made. An old Laotian woman helped me to do it. Why did you make me put it there, Vô Dahn? At first I understood so little of it. The boy was upstairs, the boy was like God. You have been sick so often that I thought you were dreaming. Over time, I came to understand. It was you who taught me English.”

Cassandra reached upward with her right hand, touching the familiar chest and belly of her ex-lover. The skin beneath her touch burned with a different, unfamiliar fever. This heat was a stranger.

“Once when I was a child, there were a series of particularly heavy storms raging in northeastern Mexico.” There was a hint of detachment in the padre’s voice. He could not speak of these things without drifting.

“Chihuahua had never seen such torrents of water and wind. One of my grandfather’s hidden treasures saw the light of day during one of those storms. I stumbled upon it on my way to the outhouse. I saw the tip of a canvas bag sticking out from the soil and the high grass. I dug it up and found another buried beneath it.

“I brought them both into our tilted home. When I opened the first one, I slowly began to understand why my father and grandfather had fostered, even encouraged all of those strange rumors about our family. He was protecting us … all those years he had been protecting us.

“I hid the bags in the basement and visited them each time the Mennonites allowed me to return home. Later I would visit the bags when the semester was over at seminary. My brothers at the seminary couldn’t understand why I didn’t vacation in the Grand Tetons or visit New York City. Something always brought me back to Mexico.

“At night I would cautiously remove the contents from the bags, then unwrap layer upon layer of protective cloth. Even as a boy I could tell that the old paper in the center of the larger bag was somehow sacred, precious. Within the second bag was the lyrical heart of my history. Even then I knew my family was different, Cassandra. In the years since then the truth has been at my door, begging to be let in. So often I have turned it away. I have never had the courage to speak the truth aloud. Secrecy has been my birthright.”

He pounded his skull—pummeled his
calavera
with his fists, banging his knuckles against the hidden meaning of words.

“Vô Dahn, while you have spent these years removing names, I have spent them covering one name with another. Are we going our separate ways, my love? I know that I must go to America! I believe that there is someone there who might answer my most heartfelt question. I must find her.”

She wrapped her thin fingers around the man’s wrist.

“I have loved no one.
Regardez-moi. Ecoutez-moi, mon amour.
Look at me, Vô Dahn. My God, I have loved no one so much,” she whispered. She leaned toward him and kissed his hand.
“Viñh viêñ,
” she said softly. The Vietnamese words for forever.

“Kerereti,
Cassandra.
Te quiero.
Something deep inside me loves you more than I can say. But I have to go back to a hill and find my lost flock, or what’s left of it. I abandoned them all, Cassandra. I walked away when they needed me the most. Will they ever forgive me? They are all back in America—the ones who survived. I know they are all back in the world.”

The chaplain closed his eyes, his face distorted with pain.

“Kerereti,”
he muttered.

He rose from the chair and led her back to the bed.

“It is a word in Ladino—one half of the language of spiders. The other half is a smattering of Yiddish. You said that I can also speak French, Vietnamese, and Thai? Perhaps I needed all of these tongues just to speak a single honest thing. It was a copy of the Torah that I found, Cassandra, and a beautiful book of the Psalms. Both had been printed by hand on parchment and protected by the skin of lambs. I once said that I was nobody.
Tôi khônglà gi ca.
It isn’t true. I once played the fiddle in secret. I am a Mexican brown recluse. No, I am a violin spider. No, no, I am a Jew.”