Tree of Smoke (25 page)

“Minh has his own opportunities and will make his own arrangements.”

“You mean sooner or later he’ll be killed.”

“Wife, please, it’s time to consider these matters carefully.”

Often when they spoke of things that upset her, she stood up and moved around without realizing it. Picked up the pillows and tossed them between her hands and clapped the dust from them, or used a knee-high whisk to stir the lint on the wooden floor. Hao’s mother had used such a broom. His grandmother too. There’d been one in every household he could remember having entered.

“I met Mr. Colonel’s nephew. His name is Skip. Let’s have him to dinner.”

“It’s not good to have Americans in the house.”

“If we don’t choose sides, neither side will trust us. We’ll be the people in the middle. That kind of person is eventually put into a camp somewhere, no matter which side wins.”

“So you’ve joined the Americans. If the Americans win, we can stay.”

“No. The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.”

“Hao! Then why help them?”

“They can’t win, but they can prove themselves a friend to their friends. And I believe they’re honorable and will do so.”

“But you have friends in the Vietminh.”

“They’re called the Vietcong now.”

“Trung. Trung Than is your friend.”

Hao said, “I don’t want to talk about the Vietcong. The Communists believe only in the future. In its name they’ll destroy everything, they’ll fill the future with nothing. I want to talk about the Americans.”

“Talk. I can’t stop you.”

“If I help these Americans, we don’t have to be refugees, they’ll help us get away. Maybe to someplace like Singapore. I believe it can be done. Singapore is a very international place. We won’t be made to feel like outcasts.”

“Have you talked to them about Singapore?”

“I’ll talk when the time is right. There are other places too. Manila, maybe Jakarta, maybe Kuala Lumpur. As long as we don’t have to be refugees in a camp.”

“I’ll pray the Americans destroy the Vietminh.”

“I don’t hold any hope, Kim. There’s an old saying: The anvil outlasts the hammer.”

“Which one are we? We’re neither one. We get smashed between.”

“And another: Every cock fights best on his own dunghill.”

“Hah! Here’s one more old saying: A rooster is a chicken, but men are like a bunch of hens.”

“I never heard this saying.”

She laughed with delight, heading toward the kitchen.

“I know,” Hao called, “you’re happiest when you make a fool of your husband.” But it warmed him to hear her laugh, she did it so seldom since Thu had gone. She’d treasured Thu as a gift. The two brothers had come from her dead sister. They were all she had. Now she had only Minh.

I
n the kitchen Nguyen Kim lit the Primus stove under the teakettle. Paused before the shelf and uncapped, one by one, her small bottles of fragrances and inhaled from each. The therapy of breath occupied her much. These days rosemary in particular intrigued her. She wanted to blend it with the extract of patchouli, not as a curative but just for the perfume, and she couldn’t find a way; concocted, they seemed to produce a third fragrance, not entirely pleasant.

Her asthma remedy had been delivered to her in a dream. She hadn’t told him that. And she used a syrup from a Chinese herbalist in the Cho Lon District. He wouldn’t say what it was but she’d heard they used the meat and skin of the gecko. Hao disapproved of these things.

Kim viewed her husband as a gambler and a dreamer. He’d surprised them all by selling two of their dry-goods stores and leasing the third to a man who’d quickly lost the business. Now her relatives camped among its naked shelves. Rather than putting his money into something else, Hao used it to meet their daily needs and had instead invested all his time, his very soul, in these Americans. Did he think that wasn’t clear? Did he think she had to be told?

She appreciated the two girls living with them, Lang and Nhu, they helped out, cousins from her ville who couldn’t be called servants. She had no way of telling them that under certain circumstances she wished they’d behave like servants. But it was no good unless they understood this, unless their good-for-nothing mother, her aunt, had already told them this—

She steered her mind away from ungenerous thoughts.

She believed that when the blood exhaled a disease it took with it certain spiritual impurities, and the convalescent experienced a fleeting state of purity.

In such a state, she believed, clear thought was possible. Even inspiration, perhaps.

Hao didn’t discuss finances with her other than to say if they didn’t make major purchases, they could go on as they had before. That was good enough. Gambler, dreamer, yes; but he was a dependable man, and she respected him. His father, bringing native goods down the Saigon River to trade with the French, had built a good business. Hao—cursed with a childless marriage, the scion of a dwindling line—Hao had overseen its slow destruction. She wouldn’t ask him to stay here. If he wanted to run, they’d run. And why cry about tomorrow? Maybe long before they had to tear up their roots they’d be dead.

She carried the pot and two cups out to him where he sat with his hands on either arm of the chair, his eyes closed, meditating in the breeze from his electric fan.

She settled herself and poured for them both. “I need an oath from you,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“I want you to promise me that whatever happens, you will take care of Minh.”

“I promise.”

“Too quick!”

“No. Understand me, wife: when I said Minh had his own opportunities, I meant he’s already making his way. He no longer flies jets, you know. He flies U.S. transport helicopters—only for transport, and only for the colonel. He’s already safe. And Mr. Colonel and I will keep him safe. Hear me again, wife: I promise.”

“And one more.”

“How many more?”

“Only this: If we leave, will we ever come back?”

“If it’s possible.”

“Promise me.”

“I make this vow to you. If it’s possible, we’ll come back home.”

“Even if I come back as ashes,” she said.

T
o hear Kim speak openly of her concerns surprised him. She’d never said anything like this, was careful always to hide her best hopes from the scrutiny of the powers, from the vague assembly of her innumerable gods.

The conversation thrilled him. She was more than considering the move, she was bargaining over it, compromising, as with something inevitable. They went upstairs, and despite the heat, which always stayed a bit longer in the top of the house, he embraced her and held her until she slept. War and war and war like a series of typhoons against their lives, and now, on the other side of it all, a distant peak of safety, a place to travel toward. And Kim’s breath came quietly, just as she’d claimed, no more of the wheezing, at least not tonight.

He moved to his own bed, putting his clothes and his sandals on the floor just outside the net—his plastic sandals, which said on the instep, in English, “Made in Japan.” The high walls between cultures were dissolving. Collapsing as mud. He and Kim might go anywhere. Malaysia. Singapore. Hong Kong. Even Japan was possible. He laughed to think he could walk out into the road now and remark to someone, “Japan is possible.”

Kim woke him in the night. He looked at the clock’s radium hands. Quarter to four. “What is it?”

She said, “Dogs were barking down the lane.”

“Sleep. I’ll listen for a while.”

Until she slept again he lay quietly, watching the tiny ember of insecticidal incense burning on the dresser across the room.

From out in the lane he heard Trung—of course it was Trung, who else could it be?—imitating a gecko’s warble.

Trung had never before arrived this late. But a cautious man would vary his approach.

Hao reached down and drew up the netting and swung his feet out. He took his trousers, shirt, and Japanese sandals to the head of the stairs and dressed there and stood in the darkness hearing nothing, tasting his own breath. Headed downstairs as softly as he could. The cousins slept right below his feet, in the shop of which the staircase made the slanting ceiling. There was no way to go quietly, every tread had something to say. At the bottom he waited until he was sure he hadn’t wakened the two girls.

He made his way into the kitchen, to the window behind the gas stove, and turned the clasp. As soon as he opened it he heard a small cough just outside.

“Trung?”

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“I can’t offer you anything hot. Would you like a glass of water?”

“Thanks for your kindness, but I’m not thirsty.”

“I’ll come outside.”

He went out the kitchen door into the tiny courtyard, where Trung stood by the wall in the dark.

“My cigarettes are upstairs,” Hao said.

“I don’t think we should smoke. We might be seen.”

The two men squatted side by side against the wall beneath the kitchen window.

Hao said, “You take a chance coming into the city.”

“It’s a risk to be anywhere now. Just a couple of years ago, I could travel in a wide area. Now we’re fugitives anywhere in the South.”

“And coming to the house, it’s a risk for both of us.”

“More of a risk for me, I’d say.”

“I’m protecting you, Trung Than. I give you my word.”

“I believe you. But it’s best to assume the worst.”

“Trung, I understand completely that you have to feel protected every step we take.”

“Don’t push ahead too fast. I don’t yet agree we’re taking steps.”

“Each meeting we’ve had has taken us a little farther, don’t you agree?”

“Farther toward an understanding, maybe. But we haven’t actually taken any steps.”

“Are you ready to change that?”

“No.”

A ploy, in Hao’s opinion, and not an actual refusal.

“Before we go any farther,” Trung said, “I have to make sure I’m understood.”

“Please tell me. I’m listening.”

“It took three days to go north on a Russian ship. That was in ’54. They said we’d come back to a reunified country in two years.”

“Go on,” Hao said.

“Six years later it took me eleven weeks to get back by Ho’s trail, and on the way I nearly died a hundred times.”

Hao said, “I’m listening.”

“In ’64 I realized I’d been waiting ten years to come home. And yet by then I’d already been back in the South for four years.”

“In all these numbers I hear the massing of resentments. You’re dissatisfied,” Hao said.

“I’ve been living a contradiction. It isn’t going to go away.”

“I see.”

“I’ve been a coward. I have to resolve this for myself.”

“I’m here to help you any way I can.”

“I know that,” Trung said. “But what do you want from this?”

“I want to be helpful to an old friend.”

“We need to talk honestly. You say you want me to feel safe, and then you lie. Tell the truth: What do you want from this situation?”

“The survival of my family.”

“Good.”

“And what do you want?” Hao asked.

“The survival of the truth.”

What now? Philosophy? Hao said: “How can the truth be threatened? It’s the truth.”

“I want the truth to survive inside
me
.”

Hao thought, I’m a businessman; let’s talk profit and loss. But said only, “I’m trying to understand.”

“I don’t think words can take me any farther in explaining what I’m doing. I just want you to understand that nothing forces me. I’m not in any trouble. I don’t need money. I just need to steer closer to the truth.”

Hao disbelieved him. He was betraying his comrades, what could be the motive for that? Not philosophy.

Squatting at Hao’s side, Trung leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. It seemed he might make his farewell. “All right,” he said instead, “let’s have a smoke together.”

Hao crept back upstairs and found his cigarettes and his American Zippo lighter. At the head of the landing he got two going and brought them downstairs, wondering if the Monk would still be waiting. There he was. Very good. Tonight they’d take important steps.

Hao said, “He wants to meet you.”

“He wants too much.”

“He’s willing to protect you.”

“As long as he can’t identify me, I won’t need his protection.”

“He wants to protect you from his own people. From his side, not from yours.”

“I’ll be the one to worry about both sides.”

They smoked, each with his hands cupped around the glow, Hao thinking, I can’t even light a cigarette for my friend, he can’t survive a light on his face. It’s years since I’ve seen his eyes.

“Trung, in order to get where you’re going you need a protector, and this protector has to trust you.”

“It’s not time yet.” His friend scraped the ember from his cigarette and put the butt in his shirt pocket.

Hao said, “Three years ago, shortly before you first contacted me again, my nephew burned himself alive behind the New Star Temple.”

“I know about it.”

“Is that what you’re doing too? Destroying yourself?”

What a slow, thoughtful man the Monk had become. He’d always had a dogged sincerity, but this was deeper. His silences were searches. They were inspiring. “There’s been a lie told. I’ve told it. I’m going to let the truth reclaim me. If I can’t survive that process, so be it.”

“We have to express a more intelligible motive.”

“No. The truth. They’ll assume I’m lying anyway.”

“It takes time to gain trust. They’ll need something. Can you give me something?”

“This time I’ll tell you something they probably already know. Next time a little more.”

“Ah. We’re going to cross, but we’re not going to jump.”

“The ones returning from the North say a big push is coming. Not soon. Probably around the next Tet.”