Ru (5 page)

T
oday, my mother regrets not bringing me up to be a princess, because she’s not my queen in the way that Uncle Two was a king to his children. He maintained the royal status until his death, even though he never signed a note for the teacher, read a report card or washed his children’s dirty hands. Sometimes my cousin and I were lucky enough to travel on my uncle’s Vespa, my cousin standing in front, me sitting behind. Sao Mai and I waited for him many times under the tamarind tree in front of our primary school, until the janitor padlocked the doors behind us. Even the men who sold pickled mangoes, guavas with spicy salt and chilled jicama had already left the sidewalk in front of the school when Mai and I, dazzled by the setting sun, would see him coming in the distance, hair windblown, wearing a fiery smile, incomparable.

He would take us in his arms and all at once not only were we transformed into princesses, but we were in his eyes also the prettiest, the most highly prized. That moment of euphoria only lasted the length of the journey: very soon he would have a woman in his arms, rarely the same one, who became in turn his princess of the moment. We would wait for him in the sitting room until the new princess stopped being a princess. Each of those women had the satisfaction of thinking she was the chosen one, even if she was well aware that she was only one among many.

M
y parents were very critical of Uncle Two’s casual attitude. That was why, without Uncle Two ever asking me, I never talked about the long waits outside school or the evenings in the sitting rooms of unknown women. If I’d exposed him, he wouldn’t have been allowed to pick us up. I would have lost the chance of being a princess, of seeing my kiss transformed into a flower on his cheek. Thirty years later, my mother would like me to place upon her cheeks those same kisses turned into flowers. Maybe I did become a princess in her eyes. But I’m just her daughter, only her daughter.

F
rom Quebec, my mother sent money to Uncle Two’s sons so they could get away by boat as we had done. After the first wave of boat people in the late 1970s, it no longer made sense to send girls to sea because encounters with pirates had become inevitable, a ritual of the journey, an inescapable injury. So only the two older boys set out on the fugitives’ bus. They were arrested during the journey. Their father, my uncle, my king, had denounced them … Was it from fear they’d be lost at sea or from fear of reprisals against him, their father? When I think back on it, I remind myself that he couldn’t tell them he’d never been their father, only their king. He must have feared being pointed to publicly as an anti-Communist. He was certainly afraid of appearing in public, where he’d have been at home a short time before. If I’d had a voice then, I’d have told him not to denounce them. I’d have told him that I never informed on him for being late or made mention of his escapades.

J
eanne, our good fairy with a T-shirt and pink tights and a flower in her hair, liberated my voice without using words. She spoke to us—her nine Vietnamese students at the Sainte-Famille elementary school—with music, with her fingers, her shoulders. She showed us how to occupy the space around us by freeing our arms, by raising our chins, by breathing deeply. She fluttered around us like a fairy, her eyes stroking us one by one. Her neck stretched out to form a continuous line with her shoulder, her arm, all the way to her fingertips. Her legs made great circular movements as if to sweep the walls, to stir the air. It was thanks to Jeanne that I learned how to free my voice from the folds of my body so it could reach my lips.

I
used my voice to read to Uncle Two just before he died, in the very heart of Saigon, some of the erotic passages from Houellebecq’s
Particules élémentaires
. I no longer wanted to be his princess, I’d become his angel, reminding him how he had dipped my fingers into the whipped cream on café viennois while singing
Besame, besame mucho …

His body, even once it was cold, even once it was rigid, was surrounded not only by his children, by his wives—the old one and the new—by his brothers and sisters, but also by people who didn’t know him. They came in the thousands to mourn his death. Some were losing their lover, some their sports reporter, others their former member of parliament, their writer, their painter, their hand at poker.

Among all these people was a gentleman who was obviously destitute. He wore a shirt with a yellowed collar and wrinkled black pants held up by an old belt. He stood in the distance, in the shade of a royal poinciana laden with flame-red blossoms, next to a mud-stained Chinese bicycle. He had waited for hours to follow the funeral procession to the graveyard, which was in the outskirts of the city, enclosed within a Buddhist temple. There again he stood off to one side, silent and unmoving. One of my aunts went over and asked him why he’d pedalled all that distance. Did he know my uncle? He replied that he didn’t know him but that it was thanks to my uncle’s words that he was alive, that he got up every
morning. He had lost his idol. I hadn’t. I’d lost neither my idol nor my king, only a friend who told me his stories about women, about politics, painting, books; and mostly about frivolity, because he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man.

S
o perhaps my mother doesn’t need to be my queen; simply being my mother is already a lot, even if the rare kisses I place on her cheeks aren’t so majestic.

M
y mother envied my uncle’s irresponsibility, or rather his capacity for it. In spite of herself, she was also jealous of her little brother and sisters’ status as king and queens. Like their older brother, her sisters are idolized by their children for a variety of reasons, one because she’s the most beautiful, another the most talented, yet another the smartest … In my cousins’ eyes, their mother is always the best. For all of us, including my aunts and cousins, my mother was only frightening. When she was a young woman, she’d represented the highest authority figure. Zealously she imposed her role of older sister on her little sisters, because she wanted to break away from her big brother, who gobbled up every presence around him.

So my mother had taken on the duties of man of the house, Minister of Education, Mother Superior, chief executive of the clan. She made decisions, handed out punishments, put right delinquents, silenced protesters … My grandfather, as chairman of the board, didn’t look after everyday tasks. My grandmother had her hands full raising her young children and recovering from repeated miscarriages. According to my mother, Uncle Two was the embodiment of selfishness and egocentricity. And so she became established as manager of the supreme authority. I remember one day when my grandmother didn’t even dare ask her to unlock the bathroom door and release her little brother and
sisters who were being punished for going out with Uncle Two without my mother’s permission. As she was only a young girl, she administered her authority—naively—with an iron hand. Her revenge against her older brother’s nonchalance and the way the children revered him was poorly planned, because the youngsters went on playing in the bathroom, and did it without her. All the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance.

O
ver the past ten years, however, my mother has discovered the joys of dancing. She let her friends persuade her that the tango, the cha-cha and the paso doble could replace physical exercise, that there was nothing sensual or seductive or intoxicating about them. Yet ever since she’s been going to her weekly dancing class, she says now and then that she wishes she’d segued from her days on the election campaign to the parties where her brother, my father and dozens of other young candidates amused themselves around a table. Also, today she seeks my father’s hand at a movie and his kiss on her cheek when posing for photos.

My mother started to live, to let herself be carried away, to reinvent herself at the age of fifty-five.

A
s for my father, he didn’t have to reinvent himself. He is someone who lives in the moment, with no affection for the past. He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements. That’s why he always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness, whether holding a mop on the steps of a hotel or sitting in a limousine en route to a strategic meeting with his minister.

From my father I inherited the permanent feeling of satisfaction. Where did he find it, though? Was it because he was the tenth child? Or because of the long wait for his kidnapped father’s release? Before the French left Vietnam, before the Americans arrived, the Vietnamese countryside was terrorized by different factions of thugs introduced there by the French authorities to divide the country. It was common practice to sell wealthy families a nail to pay the ransom of someone who’d been kidnapped. If the nail wasn’t bought, it was hammered into an earlobe—or elsewhere—on the kidnap victim. My grandfather’s nail was bought by his family. When he came home, he sent his children to urban centres to live with cousins, thereby ensuring their safety and their access to education. Very early, my father learned how to live far away from his parents, to leave places, to love the present tense, to let go of any attachment to the past.

T
hat is why he’s never been curious to know his real date of birth. The official date recorded on his birth certificate at the city hall corresponds to a day with no bombardment, no exploding mines, no hostages taken. Parents may have thought that their children’s existence began on the first day that life went back to normal, not at the moment of their first breath.

Similarly, he has never felt the need to see Vietnam again after his departure. Today, people from his birthplace visit him on behalf of property developers, suggesting he demand the deed to his father’s house. They say that ten families live there now. The last time we saw it, it was being used as a barracks by Communist soldiers recycled as firemen. Those soldiers started their families in the big house. Do they know that they live in a building put up by a French engineer, a graduate of the prestigious National School of Bridges and Roads? Do they know that the house is a thank-you from my great-uncle to my grandfather, his older brother, who sent him to France for his education? Do they know that ten children were brought up there but now live in ten different cities because they were ejected from their family circle? No, they know nothing. They can’t know: they were born after the French withdrawal and before that part of the history of Vietnam could be taught to them. They’d probably never seen an American face up close, without
camouflage, until the first tourists came to their town some years ago. They only know that if my father takes back the house and sells it to a developer, they will receive a small fortune, a reward for confining my paternal grandparents to the tiniest room in their own house during the final months of their lives.

Some nights the firefighter-soldiers, drunk and lost, would fire through the curtains to silence my grandfather. But he’d stopped speaking after his stroke, which had happened before I was even born. I never heard his voice.

M
y paternal grandfather I never saw in any position but horizontal, stretched out on an enormous ebony daybed that stood on carved feet. He was always dressed in immaculately white pyjamas without a crease. My father’s Sister Five, who had turned her back on marriage to look after her parents, kept watch obsessively over my grandfather’s cleanliness. She would not tolerate the slightest spot or any sign of inattention. At mealtimes, a servant would sit behind him to keep his back straight, while my aunt fed him rice, a mouthful at a time. His favourite meal was rice with roast pork. The slices of pork were cut so finely they seemed to be minced. But they weren’t to be chopped, only cut into small pieces two millimetres square. She mixed them with steaming rice served in a blue and white bowl with a silver ring around its rim to prevent chipping. If the bowls were held up to the sun, one could see translucent areas in the embossed parts. Their quality was confirmed by the glimmers that exposed the shades of blue in the patterns. The bowls nestled gently in my aunt’s hands at every meal, every day, for many years. She would hold one, delicate and warm, in her fingers and add a few drops of soy sauce and a small piece of Bretel butter that was imported from France in a red tin with gold lettering. I was also entitled to this rice now and then when we visited.

Today, my father prepares this dish for my sons when he’s given some Bretel butter by friends coming home from France. My brothers make affectionate fun of my father because he uses the most outrageous superlatives to describe the tinned butter. I agree with him, though. I love the scent of that butter because it reminds me of my paternal grandfather, the one who died with the soldier-firemen.

I also like to use those blue bowls with the silver rims to serve ice cream to my sons. They are the only objects that I wanted from my aunt, the one who was driven out of her house after the death of my paternal grandparents. She became a Buddhist, living in a hut behind a plantation of palm trees, stripped of all material goods but a wooden bed without a mattress, a sandalwood fan and her father’s four blue bowls. She hesitated briefly before complying with my request: the bowls symbolized her last attachment to any earthly concerns. She died shortly after my visit to her hut, surrounded by monks from a nearby temple.

I
went back to Vietnam to work for three years, but I never visited my father’s birthplace some two hundred and fifty kilometres from Saigon. When I was a child, I would vomit the whole way whenever I made that twelve-hour journey, even though my mother put pillows on the floor of the car to keep me still. The roads were riddled with deep fissures. Communist rebels planted mines by night and pro-American soldiers cleared them away by day. Still, sometimes a mine exploded. Then we had to wait hours for the soldiers to fill in the holes and gather up the human remains. One day a woman was torn to pieces, surrounded by yellow squash blossoms, scattered, fragmented. She must have been on her way to the market to sell her vegetables. Maybe they also found the body of her baby by the roadside. Or not. Maybe her husband had died in the jungle. Maybe she was the woman who had lost her lover outside the house of my maternal grandfather, the prefect.