The Time in Between (15 page)

“This is the case, isn’t it?” Vu said. “We set sail in a particular direction, certain of the route, and then find ourselves loose.” He paused and tilted his head. “Or adrift. That is more correct. Yes.”

Charles said that it was, and he complimented Vu on his English.

Vu dismissed this. “As I said, I have foreign friends, and with these friends I must speak English. How many people from Uruguay know Vietnamese? You see.” He drank and then leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and said that it was to his benefit to meet people who came from another place, because that could only add to his artistic vision. “Imagine sitting in a room by yourself with nothing to look at, no one to talk to. I need other people. I need images. I need the solid world. I am asked sometimes why I don’t move to another country where there is more freedom, and my answer is that I cannot be an artist elsewhere. How would I remain faithful? From which place would I tell my story? Finally, of course, the artist is alone, like Dang Tho, the writer we talked of the other day. I feel great envy and great pity for him. He has succeeded in angering the authorities, but he is also separate. This is what happens, isn’t it? A man has a vision which is not political, but others make it so, and so the vision is made smaller because some person of little consequence decides that the man with the vision is too big, too proud.”

Vu stopped. “I am talking too much,” he said. He drank quickly and then said, “Dang Tho’s answer to all the attention around the novel was to turn away. He did not write another book. And of course, though the war did not kill him, the time after the war probably will. He is a man bathed in a sad blue light.”

He stood and left the room once again, coming back a few minutes later with a plate of satay pork garnished with mint and wrapped in rice paper. Vu began talking about his time after the war, about returning to Hanoi and the difficulty of life. He said that his niece—he lived with his sister and her daughter—had been born a long time after the war, good for her, and with fortune she would never have to suffer. He had run out of cigarettes and he called for the girl. She left and returned some time later, handed him a pack of Rave, and moved sideways out of the room, her bare feet brushing the tile. Vu poured more whiskey for them both, lit a Rave, and closed his eyes. He said, “I love everything. Art. Books. Women. There is an Indian writer, Tagore, a poet. I love him. I love languages. French. André Gide. Sinhalese, German, Arabic.” He paused.

“You speak Arabic?” Charles asked.

“Maybe. A good poet is Nguyen Du. ‘In another three hundred years, / Will anyone weep, remembering my Fate?’ Or Tan Da, he wrote about getting drunk. Do you like poetry?” He was looking at Charles. Then, before Charles could answer, Vu was off on several more lines, from
Hamlet
this time, and then back to a Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Khuyen, and he recited in a soft voice, and though Charles did not understand the words or their deeper meaning, he felt that he had arrived at some unlikely place.

Vu got slowly drunk. His conversation began to meander. He quoted both Kahlil Gibran and Ernest Hemingway. He said, “I read
The Prophet
years ago when I was in school. How do you say his name, Kawleel Zibrun? Like that. And Hemingway, you know that one about the fish where the old man comes back with nothing? That’s it. You fly over things, you must, and you arrive on the other side with nothing. You ask me, do I believe? I love the tiniest flower, that rock, that tree, the indigo moon. I am not a Communist. I can believe. But that’s a big question. Everyone’s question.”

They drank and when the whiskey was gone Vu wandered into another room and came back with a bottle of brandy and poured a little into their glasses. He raised his glass, studied it, and then he ducked his long face and drank quickly.

At two in the morning Charles shook Vu’s hand by the green gate. The moon was full and the streets were bright. Vu offered Charles his bicycle, even began to set off to find it, but Charles stopped him, saying he would walk up to one of the busier streets until he found a taxi.

He did not know when he lost his way but he supposed it might have been just after he turned off Thanh Thuy Street. He had come down a small lane that he did not recognize and he had arrived at a beach. He did not know this particular beach. It was different from the one at My Khe; debris floated on the water. He walked and he was aware of his own breathing and the roiling of his stomach. He passed shuttered shops and he wandered through small streets and crossed large thoroughfares. Always, he looked for the bright neon sign of the Binh Duong Hotel, but he never saw it.

He walked by an old man sitting in a metal chair by a child’s swing. Charles tried to talk to the man, but he was sleeping. On a dead-end street, near a cluster of buildings that turned out to be a carpet factory, he was set on by a man brandishing a long knife. The man talked to him quickly and moved the knife in short thrusts through the air. Charles backed up until he was at the gate. He took out his cigarettes and offered the man the pack. The man put the knife in the waistband of his shorts, took the pack, and lit a cigarette, all the time watching Charles. The man made a motion with his free hand, a curling of his fingers. The knife was still tucked away. Charles was drunk. If he had not been drunk he would have swung at the man, who was small and thin. His shorts were dirty and his T-shirt was torn. Charles stepped forward and in a single motion the man pulled out the knife once more and swung at Charles’s waist. The knife slit his shirt. Charles looked down. Put his hand to his waist and felt something wet. “Fuck,” he said and he looked at the man, who clicked his teeth and circled Charles and passed the knife by his face. In the darkness the man was a black ghost, and it came to Charles, in the haze of his drunkenness, that he was going to die. The man crouched and muttered some words that were foreign and fluttered about in the air. There was the knife in one hand and the cigarette in the other and as the man shuffled clockwise he drew on the cigarette and then exhaled at Charles. Charles thought of the money in his wallet. He reached for it and the man cried out and lunged forward. Charles swiveled and watched the knife slide past his rib cage. The man stumbled and fell. Charles knew then that he should kick the man in the chest and in the head, but instead he stood there, offering his wallet. The man rose and was going to reach for the wallet when from the courtyard of the carpet factory there came a whistling sound, a shout, and the rattling of a gate, and the man fled.

It was the night guard of the factory who beckoned. “You, come,” he said, and he led Charles through a small metal gate and into the showroom. He made Charles sit on a rolled-up silk rug. He returned with a glass of water and handed it to Charles. “Okay?” he asked.

Charles looked at his stomach. The knife had barely scratched his abdomen, leaving the slightest trace of blood. He nodded and thanked the guard. A single light shone down on the spot where he sat. The night guard was an old man with bowed legs. He carried a magazine and a cup of tea. Keys hung from his belt. He spoke quickly and then left and returned some time later and directed Charles out to the taxi he had found. Charles offered the guard money, but he moved his hands back and forth and said, “Happy, okay?” and he closed the taxi door. Riding home through the quiet streets, Charles saw the moon and the clouds around the moon. His chest hurt. He could not remember if his attacker had hit him in the chest. He didn’t think so, but he could not remember.

In his room, he showered and then lay on his bed in shorts and waited for a sleep that would not come. He recalled the attack as something that had happened quickly and with little warning. He had been more curious than alarmed, as if he were a spectator at the scene of his own execution, and he wondered at what point indifference had set in. He saw Vu’s long face, the dark high cheek-bones, heard the soughing of his voice.

And then he sat up, as if from a dream, though he had not been asleep. Thoughts had been dipping like swallows in and out of his head. He had discovered a kind of narrative but the story had turned out badly. He put it down to a brief sleep that had produced a nightmare in which his attacker, just before sticking him with the knife, had whispered in his ear, “What we have on our hands is always enough.”

He was shaking. His mouth was dry. He got up and drank some water. The manner of his own death was an important one. To be killed by a wastrel and a drunk in the dirty streets of Danang was not what he had imagined. The man had been missing two front teeth, and contrary to the dream, he did not speak English, neither was he any sort of a philosopher.

Charles sat in a chair and watched the sun rise. It came quickly, red turning to orange and then yellow and finally white. He recalled mornings like this on the mountain when the children were younger, mornings when he sat and waited for their voices or the padding of their feet, and always it was Ada who came to him first, settling into his lap, the smell of sleep on her breath, her bare arms around his neck. “Daddy,” she said, and nothing more. She didn’t need more. Sitting there, her head pressed against his neck, was enough.

ON THE WEEKEND HE TOOK THE TRAIN UP TO HUE. FROM HIS window seat he saw the occasional aqueduct and the cliffs falling away into the fog below and then the ocean breaking through that fog.

In Hue it was cold and windy and raining. He found a small room for ten dollars a night and then walked the streets close to the Perfume River. As arranged, he met Jack and Elaine for dinner. They ate noodles and tiny whole fish fried in garlic. Jack drank Festi, Elaine and Charles ordered beer. The restaurant was cold; rain drove against the shuttered windows. Elaine said that the car ride up had been beautiful. She described the hairpin turns and the color of the ocean far below. Charles watched her as she talked. At her neck was a silver necklace and as she talked she fingered the necklace and sometimes it seemed that her hand wanted to reach across the table, but it didn’t. Jack seemed distracted. He looked out the open doorway or he watched other customers and, once, he struck up a conversation with the owner of the restaurant, a tall man wearing a beret. Later, Charles complimented Jack on how well he spoke Vietnamese.

“How do you know?” Jack asked and grinned.

“Don’t listen to him,” Elaine said. “Jack always says that a good ear helps you hear the tones. Jack thinks he is a singer.”

“And you?” Charles asked Elaine.

“She doesn’t want to speak the language,” Jack said. “Anything that smells of this country, she throws away or deliberately ignores.”

Elaine moved her food around on the plate with a fork. “I enjoyed this fish,” she said. “I like being here, right now.” Her head lifted. “Jack likes to show off, to use his halting Vietnamese, which is really quite elementary. And he thinks that talking to a restaurant owner who wears a beret, that this somehow raises our estimation of Jack Gouds. May I?” She reached for Charles’s cigarettes. Took out one and lit it. Her hand was shaking.

Jack watched her. He said, “When did you pick that up?”

Elaine exhaled. “Oh, long long ago. Before we met. Millions of years ago, in fact.”

Jack said to Charles, “She’s impossible.”

Charles took a cigarette for himself and shrugged. Beyond the open door he saw the rain and a cyclo driver curled up under his canopy.

Elaine said, “Charles and I are going to see the Citadel tomorrow. Aren’t we.”

Charles said that that would be fine.

Jack nodded and said, “Good, good,” and then explained that both tourists and locals were pillaging the grounds of the Citadel, prying up ceramic tiles that had been laid a thousand years earlier. It was a shame, he said.

Elaine said, “We are not the kind of people who plunder. Are we, Charles?”

Charles, trying to save Elaine, said that he knew nothing about the history of the Citadel. He said that history was not his strength, but still he liked walking through castles and museums.

“Well,” Elaine said happily, “that’s exactly what we’ll do.” And she told Charles they should meet there at noon. It was easy to find, in the middle of town.

On parting, Jack seemed to want to repair the evening. He held an umbrella above Elaine’s head and said that he had been bad company. He was sorry. Charles waved the apology away. In the driving rain, he was aware of Elaine studying him, and then her mouth moved and she said, “See you tomorrow.”

He rode back to the hotel by cyclo. His feet and hands were cold, his head felt light, and he saw the images that passed as if they were happening elsewhere and at another time: a man leaning over a pool table; a child crying beside a chicken; a woman sleeping inside her jewelry shop; a boy being beaten with a stick by two other boys while several people looked on and laughed; a basket of bread; a man and a fridge on a bicycle.

That night he sat at a small desk and opened Dang Tho’s novel to the blank pages at the back where he had written the few lines in Hanoi and the date, October 4. Now, he wrote Elaine Gouds’s name. And then he wrote, “In Hue. It is raining. The room is damp and chilly. Ate fish the size of pencils. She is sharper than him by far. Than I am, as well.”

AT THE CITADEL THE NEXT DAY, CHARLES WALKED PAST SMALL iron cannons and foundering sculptures, on down the walkway between two shallow pools, and came upon Elaine sitting in an alcove full of sunshine. He said her name and she looked at him and said that the sun’s heat was making her sleepy. They sat and looked out at the grounds. Several French tourists took photographs of their group by the entrance to the Midday Gate. Elaine said that she had thought of Charles all night. “I couldn’t sleep. The room was cold. I imagined a day of looting.” She laughed. Closed her eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. The marble spiral of her ear. Her eyes opened, caught him looking. He shifted, aware of the sun on his knees.

“Sixteen years I’ve been married to Jack,” she said. “We met in college. He wrote for the paper, I was on the debating team. We moved around a lot at first and finally bought a house in a suburb outside of Kansas City. And then about a year ago Jack started to get restless and to talk about going overseas, doing something different with our lives. We went back and forth, with him really pushing and me resisting. I loved my life. I had started up a small catering business with a friend and I didn’t want to walk away. And then Jack suggested Vietnam and I said, Okay.” She paused and whispered
okay
again. She removed the cap from a bottle of water and drank. Then she said, “I was thinking about you being here so many years ago. How old were you?”