The Beauty of Humanity Movement (114 page)

“Not today,” she says, kneeling down beside him and peeling back the lid.

The old man picks up a brown lump between his thumb and forefinger. “It looks very much like a fungus.” He turns the lump around and sniffs it. “Or an animal dropping. Off you go, Van,” H
ng says, putting the lump into the boy’s hands and pulling another one from the box.

“It’s called a truffle,” Maggie says. “Try it.”

H
ng pulls his lips back and clasps the thing between his dentures, which sink into its molten centre.

“Tastes like neither a fungus nor a turd,” he says, pulling the truffle away from his mouth to examine its interior. “Quite unusual.”

“Have you ever had chocolate?”

“Ah,” he says. “That’s what it is. Not since the French days.”

Maggie reaches into her purse and pulls out a sheet of paper. She unfolds it and lays it across the top of the cake box. “I wanted to ask a favour,” she says.

H
ng sucks the chocolate stuck to the roof of his mouth and picks up the flimsy piece of paper. He pats his chest, then says, “Fetch my glasses for me, would you? They’re just inside the door on the little table to your right.”

“Bình drew this for me,” Maggie says, handing H
ng his glasses. “Based on a description of a piece of my father’s work.”

H
ng raises the picture to his good eye, holding his glasses as if examining a diamond through a magnifying glass. “Huh. He’s good,” says H
ng.

“I know. And he says he’s not an artist. Does the drawing mean anything to you?”

“It’s a couple of Indochinese tigers attacking each other in a cave,” H
ng says. “Is it in the tiger’s nature to turn on his brother? I don’t know. Perhaps they are too hungry to care, perhaps there has been some betrayal. I would venture that it might be a metaphor. Perhaps we, the Vietnamese, are the tigers, and this is the war we fought amongst ourselves once we were rid of the colonial enemy.”

H
ng drops the paper onto his chest. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes.

“Your father obviously did very sophisticated work,” he says. “I would have liked to know such a man. As I’m sure you would have.”

H
ng wishes he could offer Maggie something more. He has the sense that it is not an interpretation of the art that she is really after, but rather an interpretation of the artist, the man.

He remains on his stoop after she wanders off in the dark to her waiting taxi. He stares out at the blinking lights on the other side of the pond. “If only I could remember him,” he says aloud.

“The illustrator,” says a disembodied voice in the dark.

He’s not sure if he’s heard this correctly. For decades he has trained himself not to hear her voice, to block out its register. “The illustrator,” he says, reclaiming the word from the ether, taking possession of it just in case.

H
ng falls asleep with the word in his mouth, waking to wonder if Lý Văn Hai might have been the one who populated the pages of
Fine Works of Spring
with bold caricatures and allegorical drawings, pictures Lan used to admire, touching them with the tips of her fingers, inadvertently leaning her back into H
ng’s chest as she did so, him notso-inadvertently inhaling her hair.