The Beauty of Humanity Movement (143 page)

She lays the vial down on his chest.

“But surely this is not for me.”

“I have been collecting it for you,” Lan says. “In any case, it is not so expensive these days. You can now find it everywhere.”

“But still—”

“And you are the cook.”

“Was the cook. Will be. If I ever get out of here,” he says, tapping his plaster cast.

“It won’t be long, H
ng.”

“Tell me, how is everybody in the shantytown? I worry about them when I’m not there to cook.”

“Times are better now, H
ng. No one is going hungry.”

“So they don’t need me anymore.”

“It doesn’t mean they aren’t all wondering when they will next taste your food. I hear them reminiscing about their favourites. Your spring rolls, your roast duck, that pig’s ear salad.”

“What about Phúc Li?” H
ng asks of the legless man who lives on the other side of him. “His mother told me she was teaching him to sew labels into shirts so he could work in a factory.”

“I don’t know, H
ng. She doesn’t talk to me. None of them do.”

“But why?”

“Because of
you
, H
ng,” she says as if he is dim-witted. “Because they are loyal to you.”

It is true, she has no visitors, no apparent friends; she has lived without conversation or companionship for years. But what is a life if you cannot say to another: Grey sky today, isn’t it? Did that thunder keep you up last night? How’s your cousin, your bunion, your mushroom- hunting, your game of chess? How she must suffer in isolation, must question her entire existence.

A great rush of feeling overcomes him. “You weren’t literate,” he says, “you didn’t know the worth of those papers.” He bites the tremor that now afflicts his bottom lip.

“But I should have understood, H
ng. I could see what the words meant to you. I was very young. It was foolish of me. I honestly thought I could protect you.”

“Protect me? How?”

“I feared they would come and find those papers.”

“They did come,” says H
ng, his mouth hanging open. “They set fire to my shack.”

“I panicked, H
ng. I didn’t want to lose you.” Lan hangs her head, her chin falling into her chest.

They arrived too late and found nothing. They did not charge him
with any crime. They did not drag him away or kill him. Take away his eyes, tongue or hands. They left him to his life on the shore of a muddy pond, to live in silence beside a beautiful girl named Lan. A girl who had tried to save him, but in so doing had lost him.

I
t’s a brooding early morning with a sagging sky, creating a mood that T
would find despairing even if they were not faced with the prospect of eating an inferior bowl for breakfast every day for the indeterminate future. The ph
at the end of Mã Mây Street seems particularly inferior now that T
has had his own experience of cooking. He thinks the problem is less the cook’s failure to trim enough fat from the meat than it is his laziness in not skimming off the grease that rises to the surface of the broth before he reboils it.

“If that were his only problem, it would not be so bad,” says his father, turning his spoon over unenthusiastically. “H
ng would never be so lazy.”