The Beauty of Humanity Movement (98 page)

“Yes?”

“There is a cake,” the boy whispers.

Maggie offers the old man the box and opens the lid for him.

“From your room service?” he asks.

“From the restaurant,” she assures him. “The chef is excellent.”

The old man peers inside the box and inhales. “I smell lemon, but what is this on top?”

“That’s meringue,” says Maggie. “They beat the egg whites with sugar until they’re stiff and then bake the whole thing at a low heat.”

“Huh,” says the old man. “I’ve never seen such a thing.”

“I will get you a knife, Mr. H
ng,” says the expectant boy, bounding off, shouting, “Ma! Ma! Get a knife!”

Maggie follows the old man into his shack. His few belongings are stacked neatly on wooden crates, but the space is narrow and cramped, with nowhere to sit down really except upon his mattress.

Van pokes his head through the door of H
ng’s shack a minute later. He holds a crude knife with a roughly serrated edge that looks like it could skin the hide off an animal. H
ng takes it from the boy and slices the pie in half. “There’s plenty enough there to share, Van,” says H
ng, as the boy receives half the pie with grateful hands and a gleeful yelp and disappears into the night.

“I brought you some wine as well,” says Maggie, handing Old Man H
ng the bottle she has held clamped under her arm.

“That’s very generous of you,” he says, turning the bottle around in his hands. “Is this the kind they make from grapes?”

“It is.” She nods. “French.”

“Ðạo will enjoy this,” he says, rising to place the bottle in front of a candlelit altar. “Bình’s father. T
s grandfather. He was a man of European tastes despite himself.”

H
ng places the bottle and a slice of the pie alongside an orange, a banana and some grains of rice positioned in front of a framed picture. Maggie doesn’t know what to make of the very white pair of basketball shoes also parked there.

H
ng stares at the picture, the face of a man, for some time. His lips move as if he is reciting a prayer, and Maggie feels as if she is interrupting a private moment. She’s not even sure the old man remembers she’s there.

“Mr. H
ng?” she prompts gently.

H
ng looks at Maggie for a few seconds as if trying to place her. “They slit Ðạo’s throat,” he says. “The very day that they came to arrest him.”

Maggie doesn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry,” she eventually utters. “You know,” he says, turning away from the altar, back toward her, “that story of your father’s escape from a camp raises the question of whether it’s possible any of the men I knew might have managed to escape.”

Maggie takes this as her cue. She pulls her father’s drawing from her jacket pocket. “I wanted to show you this,” she says nervously, laying it down on H
ng’s mattress. She’s worried he’ll think it clumsy. That he’ll dismiss it as insignificant or unintelligible.

“My father drew several like it for me when I was a child,” she says. H
ng leans over the drawing then picks it up, holding it to the weak light. He reaches for a pair of glasses. They are thick-rimmed and don’t have the elegance of the previous pair. They don’t seem to be the right strength for him either. He holds them like a magnifying glass rather than putting them on.