The Son (14 page)

When I got back Eric was still there, and Hao made a strange request.

‘Would you mind if I did a
cúng
?' she asked. ‘For Hien. It's her birthday today, and I always do one for her.'

She explained. Pronounced ‘coom', with a short ‘oo', the way they say ‘come' in Yorkshire (
coom 'ere loov
), a
cúng
is a votive feast for the dead, carried out at birthdays and anniversaries or other special occasions. I watched as she set the dining table up as a small altar. She had made odd purchases over the past two days, for which she wouldn't accept any money, and now their purpose became clear. On a table-cloth she set out a number of dishes and plates, all in threes: three plates of fruit, grapes, mangoes, and small sugar bananas, three dishes of food – caramel pork, a lacquered duck, and three salted duck's eggs, plus a dish of the sweet tapioca dessert called
chѐ
. ‘That was her favourite dessert,' she said. In front of them she put three bowls of uncooked rice with three sets of chopsticks, and three small cups of green tea, with an empty glass in front of them.

She went into her bedroom, and reappeared in Vietnamese dress, the first time I'd seen her in it. It was a dark blue
áo dài
, the long, close-fitting tunic with long sleeves and a tight bodice which is worn, slit from the waist down, over long silken trousers – black in this instance, and black high-heeled sandals. The
áo dài
was embroidered with a design of twigs and blossoms. She looked exotic and delicate and very elegant, but she wasn't concerned with effect. Behind the display on the table she placed a small framed photo of a Vietnamese girl. The photo was cracked and not very clear but there was no doubt who it was.

‘It's my only photo of her,' she said. ‘I got it from my mother. We lost all we had on the boat. You don't mind, Paul? You're being very understanding.'

‘It's the least I can do.'

‘You can join in if you like.'

She had also bought a packet of joss-sticks, the long incense sticks which Vietnamese use at these ceremonies. She lit several, gave me three to hold, and three to Eric, and we stood side by side in front of this improvised altar, Eric in the middle, holding the incense sticks between our palms in the traditional attitude of prayer. We bowed three times, then put the incense sticks upright in the glass, where they continued to smoulder, shedding ash on the table-cloth. Eric and I stood back but Hao went down on her knees and did the three
lạy
, the three deep bows of prayer and humility, her hands on the carpet before her and touching the floor with her forehead. When she stood up her face was streaming with tears.

I put my arm around her shoulders. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I don't normally get so emotional. But there's something about this year – I don't know – something special, as if she's trying to tell me something …'

She dried her tears, Eric looking on awkwardly. He too seemed moved by it all, though no doubt felt it unmanly to show it. She went into her bedroom to change.

‘Do you remember much of your mother?' I asked him.

‘A little. It's all very vague. I'm not sure how much I remember and how much I make up.' He seemed lost in thought. ‘Can I give you a ring during the week? I want to ask you something.'

‘Why not now?'

‘I – I need to think about it.'

Hao came back, in a loose jumper over a skirt. We helped her clear the table. She packed some of the food for Eric.

‘Take that back with you,' she said.

Vietnamese are very practical with votive offerings to the dead: they don't throw them away, but after a decent interval to allow the dead to partake of them in spirit, they eat them. As they always choose the best quality for their
cúng
, this is a treat for the living as well.

After Eric left she sat next to me on the sofa. She looked very beautiful, even with no make-up, her hair held back with a ribbon and her face still pale and puffy. I touched her forehead. Her skin was warm, and she looked tired. I thought guiltily that I'd imposed a great strain on her. She had not spared herself, working in the office and looking after me, and the weeks spent with the cousins couldn't have been easy either. I felt a surge of warmth. She sat with her legs tucked up beneath her, showing a bit of thigh, her knees like pale ivory.

I kissed her. Her lips were cool and unresponsive at first, then softened as she leaned into me. I caressed her face, her neck, let my hand wander to her knee. For a moment I thought she was going to respond – she moved her leg, as if to make it easier – then suddenly she pushed my hand away and went out of the room.

‘I can't – I'm sorry–'

I looked after her with a sinking feeling. Not again, I thought dismally. Why did I always have to rush my fences? This time I wasn't going to let it end like that. I waited a moment, then got up and went after her. Her bedroom door was ajar. I knocked softly and looked in. She sat on the bed with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up to her chin and her head in her arms.

‘Can I come in?' I asked gently. ‘I won't do anything. I just want to talk.'

She nodded. I sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to touch her.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I didn't mean to frighten you, or hurt your feelings.'

She shook her head.

‘It's alright. It's not your fault.'

‘You probably think I'm a bit of a beast,' I went on awkwardly. ‘Some kind of sex maniac who can't keep his hands to himself. Please don't think that. Of course I want to make love to you. You're one of the most attractive women I've ever known. But it's not just that, you know. There are so many other things I like about you. Your honesty, your kindness, your strength, your smile – I love you, Hao. The last thing I want to do is to force myself on you.'

She shook her head, still not looking at me. ‘You're one of the nicest persons I know.'

I sat in silence, not daring to believe what I'd heard.

‘I mean it. You've been so good to me, and I've been unfair – I like being here with you–' She moved forward and rested her forehead on my shoulder.

‘If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone?

Ever? Not Eric, or anyone else?' she said.

‘Of course.'

‘And will you promise not to hate me, or think badly of me?'

‘How could I ever do that? What is it, Hao? Is it something to do with Hien? Something that happened on that boat?'

An idea had come into my mind, an idea which sent a chill through me. She nodded and spoke, so low that I had to strain to hear her.

‘Yes. I told you that she died at sea, in a storm. But she didn't die. Not then. There was no storm. She was kidnapped.'

‘By pirates? Is that what happened? Your boat was attacked?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh God! I am sorry!'

Haltingly, she told me the story. It was a story I'd heard so many times before, in the camps in Malaysia and Thailand, that nothing in it surprised me. Thai fishermen, turning their hand to piracy when easy prey came their way, or more vicious, organised gangs ranging far and wide through the Gulf of Thailand, searching for refugee boats in distress, connected to each other by radio. RPM, we called it in our reports, compiling the routine statistics. Rape, Pillage and Murder. How many women raped, girls abducted, had anyone been killed …

This one was as nasty as they came.

‘It was our second day at sea. We'd had engine trouble, we'd drifted north, too far off course, up into the Gulf of Thailand. There were three boats. Thai. They came in the afternoon. First one, and then two others. They were well organised, they had radios, and loud hailers, and they had guns. We knew what they were, we all knew about pirates, but there was nothing we could do. One of the men on our boat had a gun, and wanted to shoot, to scare them off, but the others stopped him, they were afraid that the pirates would shoot us all – they came aboard. The men had made us hide, down in the hold, we wore old clothes, and we put grease and dirt on our faces to make ourselves look ugly and old – but they – they dragged us out, and – and–'

‘You don't have to tell me.'

‘I want to say it. I've never told anyone – only Khiem knew, and the doctors – I want you to know. So that you can understand why I'm – like this.'

I held her hand. There was nothing I could say.

‘They took us on one of the boats – about eight of us. All the young women. And they kept us there. All that night. There were many – I don't know how many – men from the other boats as well – they took turns at us–'

She stopped, and I waited, silently. She started again, more calmly.

‘I don't know how many times I was raped. Ten, fifteen times maybe. I could hear Hien scream, and fighting back – and the others – I was pregnant, and I started to bleed. I think that's why – they sent me back, the next morning, with one or two others, but they kept Hien – and the others – and then they left – I could hear Hien scream …'

‘Some of the men tried to stop them. But they beat them up, very badly. One man was killed. And then that afternoon, the afternoon of the third day, we were rescued, and taken to Singapore. I was still bleeding.'

‘Did you ever find out what happened to her?'

‘No. When we were rescued we tried to tell them, on the ship – and in Singapore, we made reports, and talked to the UN, Khiem went to the American embassy, the French, the British, the Thais.

And later, through the UNHCR*, they tried with the Thai authorities, but nobody ever found out what happened. We couldn't even give them the boat numbers, they'd all been blacked over.'

I remembered a girl I'd interviewed, in Songkhla, in southern Thailand, where I'd gone to visit a refugee camp. A Vietnamese girl, eighteen or nineteen, who'd been abducted with her two sisters off a boat. A very similar story. Thai fishermen, or pirates. They'd kept her three days on board, alternately raping her and her sisters and throwing them scraps of food, and then, when she started to weaken and looked as if she might die, had thrown her overboard. She'd survived by taking off her long trousers and using them to make a rough kind of float, tying the ends and filling them with air, and staying afloat. Later another Thai boat had picked her up, and brought her to shore. Sometimes in the midst of all this savagery you got a small, inexplicable act of mercy. Perhaps, being Buddhist, they thought they could achieve some redemption that way.

What I remembered most about her – this was three weeks later, when I interviewed her in the presence of an older woman – was how angry she looked. She had survived physically the worst of her ordeal, apart from a bad case of sunburn, which gave her a comically angry look – and I thought, thank God she's tough. She'll survive. She's one of those who'll make it. One of the lucky ones. Like Hao, of her sisters she had no news, and wondered if they were still alive. What I remembered most about myself, on that occasion, was how ashamed I felt, simply at being a man.

Yet only now did I begin to understand something of what they'd gone through. Sometimes suffering is almost harder to look on than to endure. Once it's over, the victims – those who aren't dead – somehow learn to cope, better perhaps than some others, relatives or onlookers. But now I could see the ravage that that experience could inflict. Deep inside, where it didn't show, and you didn't talk about it. Except one day, much later, when some clumsy stranger made you relive it all.

‘I think she's dead. I've been praying that she's dead. But I don't know.'

‘I expect she is. If it's any consolation. So long after, if she were still alive you'd have known by now.'

‘The UN tried, we even tried to go to Thailand ourselves, but the Thais wouldn't give us visas.'

‘You'd know, she would have got a message out, one way or another, if she were still alive. I'm sure she's dead too.'

The alternative was almost too horrible to contemplate.

‘That's why I can't have any children, Paul. I was four months pregnant. I had a miscarriage, and almost died. I was bleeding. There was no doctor on the ship but we had one with us, and he operated on me, in the sick bay. The ship took us straight to Singapore, but I had an infection, I had to go to hospital. They did a hysterectomy, they took my insides out. Khiem – Khiem was so upset, I thought he would go mad, but there was nothing he could do. They even killed a man, when he tried to save his daughter. They had the guns.'

‘What happened to Eric? Did he see all this too?'

‘No. They kept the children in the hold, while they – while they did those things. And some other people on the boat looked after him. On the boat and later in the camp, until I got better. We said his mother had fallen into the water, and drowned. Please put your arms around me, Paul, and hold me.'

I held her for a long time, as she wept softly. Tears had come to my eyes too, I wanted to howl, with rage and grief. After a while she lay down exhausted and went to sleep. I put a blanket over her, made sure she was comfortable, and went to my room.