Listen, Slowly (15 page)

Bà raises a hand as if she can’t bear to listen anymore.
“How long was he with you?”

“One dry season.”

“You last saw him when?”

“I never could learn his system of keeping a calendar by plucking the hairs on his toes and calves. It was close to the end of the dry season because we yearned for rain so much we tasted it in our own sweat.”

“Saw him last when?”

“My apologies for a habit of hoarding words. After all, they are free. That last night we had been breathing real air for just a few hours. It was our routine to drag ourselves to the pond and cook our rice. Water and air still seem to me the two most beautiful gifts on our earth. The previous night we had spent completely underground because helicopters circled all night. So we desperately needed to breathe. I still cannot fully describe the air in the tunnels. Of course, it was skin-peeling hot, but that, the mind will acclimate to. To say it stank with human waste and rotting flesh is just voicing the obvious. But I cannot describe what it was like to inhale stale, trapped, smokey, fragile oxygen. We simply did not have enough. Our chests hurt after each inhale and our minds clawed for more air, but there was none. It was a hunger that gnawed at every pore in our beings. That last night aboveground the air was particularly lovely, a breeze, such luxury is a breeze, and the sweet linger of roasted corn from some nearby hut. We talked that just smelling it, never mind getting to eat it, was a gift from some spirit who remembered we were still alive. Then too soon we heard the helicopters again. I limped back to the tunnel and thought he was behind me. Neither of us could walk well from lack of food and air and from too long under the reign of invisible tunnel creatures that feasted on and inside us. He had a cough that wanted to devour his lungs and intestines. The cough persisted as long as I knew him. Only when I reached the tunnel’s secret entrance did I realize I had been limping alone. I went back for him but could not get him to stand, much less move. He said ‘Enough,’ that he was a human being not a mole, and that while he had learned to live without sunlight, he could not relinquish air. I pulled at him. By then, American planes were following their helicopters, and the first bombs could be heard.”

Bà gasps. That gives everyone else permission to do so too. Except me. I’m confused. The Americans and Ông fought for the same side, the South, right? But if the Americans found Ông with the guard they would think he’s a Communist too, I think. The Communists were from the North but they were also in the South. Where is PBS when I need a review?

“I pulled again and he slapped my hand. Red and blue flares reflected in the pond. The bombs were quite near, opening up like parachutes inside my eardrums. He pulled back his rot-thin pants to reveal feet and calves swollen with pus and darkened with insect bites. ‘Enough,’ he said again, and coughed so deeply I was surprised he still had lungs. The helicopters were now over our heads. I scrambled to the tunnel. I glanced back at him sitting by the water. The flares rained down to reveal the face of a man in a deep inhale.”

“You left him out there?”
Bà asks, and stands up. Oh-oh!!

“I pulled but he . . .”

While the guard fumbles for words, Bà leans over and slaps him across the face. SLAPS HIM!!! Bà never raises her voice, even when I deserve it, and now she has slapped the one person who knows about Ông? The guard’s mouth falls open. Everyone sucks in breath.

“You did not perform your duty,”
Bà says in an iron voice that is not hers.

“I had not the strength to force him,”
the guard pleads. He’s not angry, just panicky like the rest of us.

“You should have dragged him back down, forced him if you must.”
Bà’s iron voice has shifted into a choke. She walks away. I should follow but I’m supposed to be on the plank. What if she slaps me too? First, she wants to make sure the guard did not hurt Ông, then she wants the guard to use force if needed. Nothing makes sense in a war.

“We never found his body, by the pond or anywhere,”
the guard calls after her.
“He wrote you a message.”

OMG, that’s huge! But Bà keeps walking toward Ông’s ancestral home and no one dares to stop her. Did she hear the guard? This makes coming to Vietnam almost worthwhile. Why won’t Bà listen to the best part?

“Let me have the letter,”
the detective demands. He stands up, face rigid. In this kind of emergency, even he omits the poetic nonsense. Thank you!

“It’s not a letter that I can carry,”
the guard says.
“She has to come see it.”

“The letter, now! I have no more patience.”

“If you bring her south, I will take her to see it.”

Just like Bà, the guard stands up and walks out of the village. Why did he hide the message in the South? Is the message a letter?

The detective releases swirls after swirls of words and gestures, but the guard keeps walking and shaking his head. The detective looks ready to chase and tackle him. But in a contest between two equally leathery men, the younger one will always be able to flick off the older. Even the detective knows this and slumps down on his stool.

If the detective is defeated, this know-everything, been-all-over man, then what can the rest of us do? Everyone starts shouting and running and I hurry back to the torturous plank. With this many people on edge, I’m not about to add to the tension.

B
y late afternoon:

Bà has shut herself in the blue goddess room.

The guard, whose name I’ve finally learned is Thượng and I’m to address him as Bác, meaning he’s younger than Ông but older than Dad, has disappeared. I can twist my tongue and intestines into several pretzels and still not be able to say Bác Thượng, so I shall continue to refer to him as “the guard.”

The detective is frantic, dropping things, running here and there, emailing Dad, shouting into his cell. Yep, the oldest man ever has a cell. Finally, he leaves too.

Cô Hạnh tries to get everyone to sip tea and eat soup, two acts meant to bring about peace and harmony, and failing at both, she goes to give herself a facial.

Út and Froggy retreat to the pond.

Anh Minh has been sent on errands.

That means no one is watching me.

I’m about to report these monumental events to Mom when I realize I left my cell in Ông’s Brother’s house. A good thing, otherwise the cell would be at the bottom of the pond. But if I’m to have energy to text later, I’ve got to eat. Seriously, I can feel my cheeks sinking in, even the one recently swollen and still bruised.

I fumble my way to the
phở
stand in the open market. It smells like safety: salty beef broth, sturdy white noodles, sprigs of basil, wedges of lime. I realize I must look pathetic, bruised and pale, standing there swallowing spit. But I can’t force my feet to step away. It’s the end of the market day and the sun has weakened. Thank goodness few people are around. The
phở
stand owner waves me over.

“What does your stomach tell you
?
Can you eat?”
Of course she knows about my troubles. No one has secrets in Vietnam.

I nod so eagerly my head wobbles like a dashboard doll.

“Eat just noodles and broth, all right? Let’s listen to what your stomach does with that.”

They are just rice noodles and beef broth, but they are the best rice noodles and beef broth ever. My stomach shreds every bit and demands more. But I have no money. My face tells her. The seller pats me on the shoulders and say,
“It’s only the bottom of the pot. Go on home.”

“Cảm ơn,”
thank you.
“Con qua ngày mai,”
I come here tomorrow. I mean to say I will pay her tomorrow, but those are the words I know and they will have to do. But four words in a row! I’m getting less Tarzan-ish.

Two girls I recognize from the sewing party walk up, smiling. From their ability to not pick and wiggle, I can tell they know about my talk with Anh Minh and have rid themselves of their thongs.

Without saying anything, they escort me all the way to the cement front yard at Ông Brother’s house. There, I step on something: the detective’s notebook. Can I be this lucky? The powdery cover has very little leather left, but the pages somehow hold together. The girls think nothing of this find and leave. I hear their flip-flops disappear into the dusk and know I have minutes before an army bearing minuscule swords will start hunting. So what if I could sorta maybe pass for a real Vietnamese in my pajama-ish set, I won’t fool the buzzers.

Inside, under a dangling bulb, I flip through inky, tiny handwriting dating from 1975 to now. The detective must be turning his stomach inside out looking for his beloved notebook. I’m so mad at myself for not learning to read Vietnamese. When I get back, I’m going to go to school in Little Saigon. Yes, my parents always nagged me. Yes, I always fought them because each class lasts all Saturday. Track meets that day, and HE is on the boy’s team, and . . . you know. Track, though, doesn’t last all year.

I crawl inside the mosquito net, arrange the pillows just so. Bà’s awake, chanting. When I was little, I used to fall asleep every night to that murmur and the comfort of Tiger Balm and BenGay. I hadn’t known how much I missed her until this summer.

“If only I could retrieve the force in my palm
.”

I hold Bà’s hand.
“Không sao,”
no worries, I say, using Bà’s constant phrase. Maybe it’ll soothe her too.

“In listening, my intestines wrung themselves until I thought they would tear. Imagine Ông coughing and starving, without even a pair of sandals. The guard did not say but I heard between his words that Ông was too weak to have survived even if he had dragged himself back under. I understand Ông’s yearning for real air in possibly the last hours of his life, but I was thinking of us. I should not have punished the person who told me what my entire being refused to hear.”

“Không thấy người.”
Not see person is what I say to mean they didn’t find his body. Bà understands and sits up.

“How do you know?”

I repeat what the guard said, dramatizing with hand gestures and facial expressions. Bà looks so hopeful and sad and determined.

“Maybe a villager pulled Ông inside his hut, maybe they cared for him or took him to a hospital, maybe he was granted a full stomach, maybe they bandaged his feet. Maybe someone cared for him in our absence.”

Bà sounds strangely hopeful.

“Ông sống?”
Ông alive?

Bà whispers her frequent word, “
Maybe
.”

“Làm gì?”
What to do?

“I need to apologize to the guard, maybe . . .”

When I was little, Bà would whisper all kinds of maybes to herself when she thought I was asleep. I remember now. I used to sneak in and sleep with her way past kindergarten, up to third grade even. Deep in the night, I’d hear murmurs of maybe Ông escaped, maybe Ông lost his memory but was healthy and happy, maybe Ông was stuck in a place where no one knew the war had ended, maybe Ông was thinking of us right now.

I listened, even when I couldn’t hear every word because some remained in her throat. No matter how I listened, though, I never knew how she would ever come to a point where she’d no longer need the maybes.

Bà squeezes my hand.
“Tell the guard to bring me the letter. I will listen this time. I shall ready my mind to accept that what he knows equates to all we shall ever know and that the time has come to go home.”

“Không thư,”
meaning there might not be a letter but some other message.

But Bà isn’t listening.

Why, why, why do I have such a big mouth? Why couldn’t I just keep secret what the guard said, then leave it to the detective to solve everything? We could be going home. Whatever Ông wrote in the South, the detective can bring it to Laguna. He’d like Little Saigon, where signs are in Vietnamese, and the food is so good he’d plump up in no time.

So we’re back to waiting for the detective to return with the guard. NO! I’m not sitting around and waiting for our stressed-out, wordy detective to do his one little job. What if he doesn’t appear for weeks and weeks? I will get Út to help. We will think of something.

B
à did not sleep all night and neither did I. The more hours Bà had to think about Ông in the tunnel, by the pond, aching for a sweet potato, dragging himself on rotten feet, the more she lay immobile and sighed.

I sat up and tried to comfort her with foot rubs and cold tea then realized she only wanted me to massage Tiger Balm into her temples. That got us through the night. Now at breakfast time, Bà still shows no sign of wanting tea or
cháo
. Of course, I’m starving but playing nice. Út must have brought the basket and left, having been told to not bother Bà or fire up the charcoal stove. The entire village is keeping its distance, giving Bà time to regain her composure.

Such is my life: when I need maybe-relatives to help cheer up Bà, they vanish; when I ached to be alone after the most embarrassing bathroom trip ever, they sardined me.

Bà lies so still that once in a while I have to put my ear next to her mouth to listen for her breaths. That does it, I’m calling Mom.

Ugh, she’s not picking up. My message: “emergency. now. help.” Surely, that will get her attention.

Within fifteen minutes my phone rings. I jump out of the net, out of hearing range.

Mom gets words out first. “I’ve got a tough cross-examination, what’s the matter? Are you okay? Is Bà? I have to go back in five,” Mom whispers, which means she’s in the hall peeking into the courtroom. I can see her: gray suit, slick hair, perfectly poised, even if she’s exhausted at the end of a trying court day.

“Ông left Bà a letter, and the guard said only Dad can go get it, so Dad must come back right now, like right now.”

So I have a habit of exaggerating. But in my logical universe the person who’s actually here to endure the stress with Bà gets to relay the facts however she wants.