The Beauty of Humanity Movement (17 page)

Perhaps the poor girl who turned up unexpectedly this morning
knows something of this too. If Lý Văn Hai was among the men who used to frequent H
ng’s shop, he is unlikely to have met a happy end.

Right, he says to himself, slapping his thighs. Time to tell Anh about the girl and the ghost who is her father. H
ng presses his palms into his knees and pushes himself upright with a groan. He really is getting old. He has begun to wonder what Buddha has in store for him in the afterlife, whether it be reincarnation as a bull or a bug.

H
ng offers the bird seller a thousand đ
ng to watch his cart. The bird seller bargains for double. H
ng passes over a greasy wad of small bills, then makes his way unburdened toward a pink pyramid of stacked pigs in the far corner of the market.

Anh waves a large blade in greeting. She puts the knife down and wipes her bloodied hands on her white smock before delicately taking the business card H
ng holds out to her by the edges. She does not read English either. They need someone of T
s generation to translate. Anh calls over the fishmonger’s son, but he shakes his head: he was in a boat as a boy, not a classroom.

The district propaganda broadcast is reaching its peak as the business card is passed from bloodied hand to fish-scaled hand to muddied hand throughout the stalls of the market. A voice backfires like an exhaust pipe through the loudspeaker, spluttering the names and addresses of those who have neglected to pay their garbage collection fee or renew their motorbike licence or turned eighteen and failed to report for military duty.

Having heard his own name so many times, H
ng is immune to this public shaming. He’s more attuned to the smaller sounds, the burps of nature. Frogs croaking their final days in pans of slimy water; birds twittering in their lacy cages. Despite all the years he has lived in Hanoi, H
ng can still hear a canary sing above the propaganda
broadcast, over the thrum and burr of engines and the orchestra of competing horns. He can still discern a note of nature’s grace.

The card is a stampede of fingerprints by the time it is returned to H
ng, but someone has written a translation of the words on its reverse.

luxury at the heart of Hanoi since 1901