The Beauty of Humanity Movement (22 page)

Although the girl’s grandmother would often fall asleep while they sat on the grass mat together, her dreams whistling through her nostrils, Lan would remain bright, nodding, asking questions in a voice as soft as silken tofu, causing H
ng to forget the squalor that surrounded them and transporting the two of them to some alternative plane.

“Tell me about the Hundred Flowers, Uncle.”

“Teach me why you prefer poems that do not rhyme.”

She would lie on her side, her heart-shaped face resting in her upturned palm, her perfect feet moving back and forth against each other according to some internal rhythm.

Tell me. Teach me
. Poetry and politics. In the absence of both, she had made him feel he still had something to give. These had been exquisite moments: a brief respite from life on earth, a journey to some faraway Buddhist heaven. But it is not a place he has visited ever since. He has neither the means nor the desire. He turned his back to her long ago, and his heart became a stone. They do not even acknowledge each other, have not done so now for over forty years.

She has lived alone in the hut next door since her grandmother died, refusing to move. Whether this is motivated by a deliberate wish to torture him or rooted in some more benign and practical reasoning, he really cannot say. The effect upon him is the same, regardless.

There is a particular bird that sings in the same register as her speaking voice, but he has managed to so thoroughly block out the song of this bird that it may as well belong to a species extinct. He even finds the cataract that began to cloud his vision a couple of years ago
something of a blessing. It limits his peripheral vision so that he can’t see her shack when he retrieves the apron he leaves to dry outside over the handle of his cart. Why then does he find himself glancing briefly to his left this afternoon as he reaches for his apron? Why has he been thinking of her at all? It is because of the girl who came for breakfast. A beautiful girl, imploring. Maggie Lý, the daughter of an artist, Lý Văn Hai.
Tell me
, she might just as well have said,
teach me
.

Lan is hunched over a wicker basket now, picking dirt and stones out of a bushel of rice, or perhaps shelling peanuts for sale, or maybe she has been lucky enough to find a cluster of tree ear mushrooms from which she is brushing dirt.

H
ng shakes his head to be rid of her and looks to his right instead, toward his neighbour Phúc Li, a man who, as a boy, lost his legs to a land mine and perhaps a bit of his mind as well, sitting as he does with his hand cupping his genitals, his old mother trimming his hair.

The legless Phúc Li waves to H
ng, grinning like a child watching fireworks. His mother snaps the rusty shears shut over his head. “Do you want me to do you next, H
ng?”

“I’ll give it another week,” H
ng says, running his hand over his few remaining strands of hair.

H
ng crouches to enter the door of his shack, lays his dry apron down on his straw mattress and roots for the needle and thread he keeps inside an old rubber boot. He stares at Ðạo’s framed image on the altar as he digs around in the toe. The picture is all he really has left of Ðạo, having forgotten all his poems over the years. It was drawn for him by a woman who had come begging decades ago. “Look, we’re all poor here,” he had said to her as she stood on the threshold of his shack. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing to give you.”

Much to his horror, she unbuttoned her shirt then and tossed it
to the ground, revealing a bony, scabbed chest. “Stop that,” he reprimanded, picking up her shirt and tossing it back at her. “Cover yourself. What do you think you are doing?”

“You can lie with me and do what you want,” she said. “Pay me anything.”

“Woman,” he said with disgust, “what did you do before life came to this?”

The woman said she had been a tea lady at the art school.

“And did you learn anything of art while you were there? Did you learn to draw, for instance?”

She nodded once and cast her eyes to the ground. But H
ng had no paper. The only thing he could think to do was tear out one of the endpapers from
Fine Works of Spring
, the journal Ðạo and his colleagues had published a few years earlier. And so H
ng had squatted beside the woman as she laboured her way toward some likeness of Ðạo, using a piece of charcoal from H
ng’s kitchen fire.

He attempted to describe Ðạo to the woman as best he could, but found a simple physical description of the man could not adequately capture his spirit. Once she had a basic outline of his face, H
ng interjected, “His eyes were set a bit farther apart, almost as if he had a wider view than an ordinary man, that of a visionary.”