The Beauty of Humanity Movement (154 page)

Lan pats the papery, parched skin of H
ng’s hand. “Bad dream,” she says gently, touching his cheek. She strokes his mole with her leathery fingertips. “Do you ever think that without this mole your life would have turned out differently? You might not be here, for instance.”

“But then I wouldn’t be here with you,” says H
ng. “Maybe that is why I was born with it.”

Maggie leans against the frame of the doorway of the ward, holding a brown paper–wrapped package to her chest. She doesn’t want to interrupt: H
ng is staring intently at the old woman sitting at his side. She is wearing faded black communist-era clothes and the same black slippers H
ng always wears, or used to. Her thin grey hair is pulled back in a bun, and they could be brother and sister if it weren’t for the way she is looking at him.

It’s a look of old love, of something knowing and decades deep. Something she wishes her parents could have shared.

The woman kisses H
ng’s forehead, then slumps back in her chair. “Oh, H
ng,” she says, immediately heaving herself forward to wipe away a tear clinging to the old man’s lower lashes. “You old fool. I’ve known you for almost forty-five years; I don’t think it’s a sin if we’re not married. Do you even know if it has enough room at the back? Not that we need much, but we’ll probably only have room for one altar.”

They are planning a future together, as much of a future as they have left.

Maggie asks the young man who is soon to be H
ng’s apprentice to give the old man the package when his visitor leaves.

“But she never leaves, Miss Maggie. He is never on his own.” She will hold on to her father’s framed picture for the time being, then. She has the others at her apartment, delivered in person two days ago by the dealer in Hong Kong, unwrapped by Simon shortly thereafter. There will be another occasion, a more appropriate one to give the old man this picture—at the grand opening of his new shop. The past will be revealed and given a place to hang in the present.

Ph
Nhân Vãn

T
he pots are new, and so is the stove over which H
ng is perspiring as he greets people on Mã Mây Street through the open window. Despite his limp, he can stand here for hours in these new shoes; they make him feel as if he could walk on the moon. In truth, his keen apprentice does much of the walking for him. Dong does the market run every morning, takes deliveries, carries the steaming bowls to tables, keeps the shop clean, swept and tidy.

H
ng admires his establishment every morning. He basks in the heavenly white of the newly plastered walls. Look at that fine fridge standing there. He likes its gleaming newness and won’t ever remove the manufacturer’s sticker. And hasn’t Bình done an exquisite job of restoring the old wooden shutters and the latticework around the door? He’s even created cupboards in the backroom for him and Lan according to H
ng’s description of the closet he once admired in a room at
the Hotel Metropole. Bình has also built a chest big enough to hold two altars: Ðạo and Lan’s grandmother are now getting acquainted. There have been no complaints from either of them so far.

H
ng is particularly proud of the sign. P
H
N
H
ân VĂ
N
it says on the outside of the building, words painted by a local artist in exchange for one hundred bowls of ph
. That artist sits now with colleagues and professors from the Hanoi University of Fine Arts at a table permanently reserved for them. A framed picture of two Indochinese tigers entangled in battle hangs on the wall above their heads—an inspired work by Lý Văn Hai, an alumnus of the school, Maggie’s father—a sober reminder of the brutality waged between brothers in earlier times.