Wednesday passed, and then Thursday, and then Friday and Saturday, and still Anguli Ma hadn’t paid what he’d owed her. At first she had knocked on the garage door politely, but then day by day as he did not answer, her door-knocks got louder and the landlady grew more and more indignant.
When she heard sounds in the kitchen, Đào ran in and found Anguli Ma scooping some rice and chicken into a large bowl.
“Stuffing your mouth until you’re sated are you? Where’s the money you owe me for the food you’re eating and your lodgings?”
Anguli Ma slowly looked up at her, dug his grimy hand into his pocket and pulled out three twenty-dollar notes. He waved them in front of her. His black eyes were trained on her. His lips, sensual and reddish brown, parted and his voice became sing-song and thick like gravy, “Here, now you can spend it on makeup and expensive shampoo.”
“You must be deranged, I wouldn’t spend it on anything silly!”
“Women living away from their đại gia đình, in a foreign country, become lost, even the older women.” He sneered at her. “Without obligation or direction, they become like wild beasts…”
The phone rang…Đào glared at Anguli and ran to the hallway to pick it up.
“Allo?” She heard silence, then a dead tone. “Allo?” The caller had hung up. Đào could see Anguli’s dark form in the kitchen. He turned around, smiled at her and then left.
“Those who are dog-born!” Đào swore aloud. She hung up and went back into the kitchen, but she was too late. Scattered on the table were oily grains of rice. His three twenty-dollar notes lay on the table next to the unfinished bowl of food. She took the wrinkled notes and scraped the wasted food into the bin, cursing his sinfulness.
Lying in bed afterwards, Đào told herself that perhaps her new tenant’s stubborn behaviour was due to his pride: those who had a higher position in the old society must now feel their decline more keenly. Men lost more status than women, whose status could only be elevated upwards from the strict old ways of Confucianism, when a woman belonged first to her father, then to her husband, and then to her son. Đào hoped getting money from Anguli Ma next month would be easier, and exhaled a long, serious breath. She flattened the crumpled money and placed it with her neat bundle in the bottom of an old vase.
Anguli Ma
Alone in the kitchen, Anguli ate his rice without ceremony or companionship. His sneer collapsed and was replaced by the dead countenance of a man severed from history. It is a form of liberation, he thought, from your own conscience, from all your expectations of life. Anguli turned around to grin at Đào, who was down the hallway answering the telephone. All the feelings he had once thought of as beneath him, he now swallowed rapaciously.
Đào
Tiệm Bà Sáu was busy. Đào told the girl at the cash register she had money for the boss lady. The girl yelled to the back of the shop and Bà Sáu appeared shortly. Đào took out her cash and told Bà Sáu to count it in front of her, which Bà Sáu had already begun to do.
“You didn’t have all the money at the hụi meeting,” Bà Sáu said, without looking up from her unerring hands.
“I told your son that the shortfall was a one-off…”
The boss lady cut her off. “Don’t do it again. A hụi administrator needs to be trustworthy, or else people will pull out their money and decent people will get burnt.” Then she finished counting. “It’s all here, the water spinach is very fresh today – take a bundle home with you.”
Đào walked in the dusk with her bag of precision-cut, clean rags from the factory and the groceries from tiệm Bà Sáu, which was one of three Vietnamese shops in the predominantly Greek, Italian and Yugoslav suburb of Footscray. The cluster of shops on Barkly Street opened up to wide vacant lots, where it was darker and colder. Her breath misted in the cold air.
In Việt Nam she would not have been so humiliated. She would have borrowed the shortfall from her nine siblings and her parents. If one did not have enough, she would ask the next one, and the next one, and the next until she had what she needed. No one would have dared speak to her like that. Over here, the closest thing she had were the people in her hụi group to turn to. Most were those she met on the refugee island, or the migrant hostel when they were first settled. Or they were close friends or relatives of those people.
Tiny lights from large ships twinkled on the invisible horizon. Behind her, across the Maribyrnong River, orange warning lights flashed at the docks, revealing then obscuring the rearranging formations of the shipping containers.
When Đào returned home, she could see her young tenant’s thin outline in the dusty window of the studio. She tapped on the glass.
“You eaten yet? Come and have a bite to eat with me.”
“Not yet Cô, cháu ra liền,” Sinh put on her coat and came out.
Đào noticed that Sinh had already cooked some rice in the electric cooker. She smiled and spooned some into bowls, and reheated the chicken curry in the big aluminium pot.
“You did overtime today?” Sinh asked.
“Yes,” Đào said, her fingernails were still stained with magenta-coloured lint from the sweatshop. She ladled chicken and potato into the girl’s bowl; they ate, as heartily and quickly as they liked. The warm glow of the kitchen made Đào feel talkative.
“When will this girl get married?” she playfully teased Sinh.
“When this girl meets a decent man,” Sinh answered somewhat seriously.
Her young tenant’s long hair was tied back with an elastic band.
“Then you can get your own house,” Đào teased some more.
“How can I marry without my parents here? Maybe if I win TattsLotto, first prize, one million dollars, then I’d buy a house for myself, and you can stay with me if you want to aunty.”
They laughed at the thought of them being in a one-million dollar house.
“The house will be so big, I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind,” Sinh blurted and then grew very quiet. After a while, she asked, “Cô, do you think we’ll be reunited?”
“It’s a very big question,” Đào said, buying some time. “Your parents don’t know where you are either…I’m sure that they miss you.”
“Thank you. I’m so overcome all of a sudden,” Sinh said apologetically, and smiled.
Đào tried to lighten things up, “I would love to live in your million-dollar house, and we would swap places, because I would be your tenant.”
Sinh replied, in between large mouthfuls of cooked potato, “I’ll be so rich, you can stay with me for free.”
Đào was touched by this simple girl who lived out the back of her house.
“Ahh, when will we be happy?” Đào muttered to herself.
“Maybe we are happy now, and we just can’t see it,” Sinh said, then to stop herself from further sadness, she added, “Aunty, I’m giving you the money.” Sinh slipped the next month’s board and lodgings to her landlady.
“You’re giving me the money ahead of time, without being asked.”
“So I won’t forget,” Sinh said simply as she emptied her bowl.
Đào wanted to feed the girl more chicken and rice.
The Brown Man
It is unusually still and clear in the park. He has not seen the monk for several days, so he wanders down the hill towards the river. Something grey and white dashes by, and then disappears behind some rocks again. The brown man shuffles more quickly towards the site.
He calls out, “Ey!”
The dog stops, and looks up at him momentarily, its muzzle frosted with sandy-coloured earth and just a smear of something dried up, which it licks with its long, lolling pink tongue. Then, greedily, it continues digging up what’s beneath.
The man sees a piece of fabric, half buried in the clay soil where the stray is digging. The brown man approaches, his shoulder clips something and he hears the softest “snap” of a large spider web springing away from him. The spider’s round belly dangles in the middle of its crumpled web. The sun is out, heating the grasses, boulders and paths within the park and the bitumen roads that surround it. The swollen midday air stirs something dreadful in the man’s blood. He glances up the cliff to the rear of the factory high above them, and sees that no one is about; no one is there to cast an eye over this scene.
He walks softly. Glossy black ants scurry over something slender and whitish, almost translucent by now. He wades into the scrub as high as his waist. The stray looks up at him, its tail wagging. The man takes in the naked, silver trees; their rough bark lying stripped and scattered on the ground.
The dog backs away from the mound, and starts to growl. The man makes friendly noises at the stray, and herds it up the hill through the overgrown thistles toward the hurricane fence. His hand searches, then clutches a large rock on the ground. Some of the thistles are now as high as his head; their thorns catch on his clothes and spear his forearms. The dog’s long coat is covered in burrs; it is struggling to move in the thick scrub and weeds. The stray bares its teeth, its red, jagged gums. The man stands erect with the heavy rock lifted over his head.
He notices the dog’s breathing, how it is shallow and fast, how it becomes stilted as the dog presses itself against the thistles and the hurricane fence, unable to get through. He notices his own breathing, which is strangely high-pitched. The dog begins to shake uncontrollably, its hair stands up along the ridge of its back. The brown man looks into the eyes of the dog; the dog sees the man and knows itself to be animal, stuck in its animal form. It regrets its imminent pain and death. It is able to regret because it has known joy, the joy of running freely in the wind.
The man’s hands drop the rock down on the animal’s head. The dog lets out a loud, high yelp, but the blow does not kill it or even knock it out. The brown man lets the rock fall to the ground, all strength leaving him.
‘I am useless now,’ he realises as the stray runs a crooked line down the hill, escaping across the river at the fish trap.
Đào picked up the Nhân Quyền and turned to the horoscope page. Perhaps it will tell her which lucky numbers to pick this week.
Those born in the year of the Dog are naturally optimistic, sociable and loyal to a fault. It is vital this year to recognise which loss is grave, and which is merely painful.
Đào started to wonder: what could this prediction relate to? The newspaper was filled with horror stories from her home country, what with all the escapes and Thai pirates, now the morbidity was spreading to the horoscopes!
The phone rang. She picked it up. It was Thảo, her friend from the migrant hostel days.
“Người đẹp, em want cái gì?” Đào cheered up. “Yes. The Meeting will be on this week.” She listened to the earpiece. “You won’t be there?… You’ll be back on the Monday…What’s your bid this time?…I’ve written if down…If you’re successful, could I hold it for you?…Okay, em đừng có lo, tôi hiểu rồi, I’ll hold the money for you.” Đào hung up the phone, her mind gainfully occupied with calculating the interest to be paid on Thảo’s bid.
In the warmth of her bed, Đào remembered those early days when she first arrived. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and was constantly busy rearranging her life to this new country. She thought that one had to take some chances, or else get crushed by change.
The side gate squeaked.
She got up and looked out the kitchen window. Peering into the darkness, she could see Anguli Ma and two men entering her backyard. They went into the garage. A dim light was turned on. After a while, the warped door opened again momentarily, throwing out a small cloud of cigarette smoke, before closing again.
Đào wondered, “What must Bác and Sinh think about this new tenant, and of me…” but admonished herself immediately. Anguli Ma was just having fun like other men his age. And yet her intestines burned with tension.
The moon was silent-calm. Suddenly Đào longed for the advice from her parents and elders, from the whole society which she had once been part of, was taken care of by, whether wisely or not. She had never been alone like this before. Like an arm without a torso, or a leg without a thigh, or a pair of ears without eyes.
Đào patted down her uneasiness, and tried to go back to sleep. As the night dragged on, the men’s revelry was intermittently heard as snatches of drunken singing, and the clinking of bowls and glasses. These sounds intermingled with the ocean of traffic flowing along the highway.
At one point, Đào startled herself from her sleep. She woke thinking she’d heard a man’s drunken scream or perhaps it was the wailing of a human child. Now she was no longer sure whether she had heard it or not. She listened hard to the night and its endless flow of cars along the highway. She looked around her room. Nothing had changed. So she lay back down.
Very early in the morning before her tenants had woken, Đào came down the concrete path. She was careful not to disturb the blue drops of dew on the long grass, which would make her slippers and socks wet. Then Đào stiffened; there was a trail of blood, of something dragged along the side of the house. The trail continued past the studio to the bathroom-outside.
Although she tried to push it away, a jewel of terror gleamed inside Đào.
Young Triều
While the car was moving, its door opened with Young Triều leaning out. He vomited a gush of white fluid onto the road. The door closed again and the car resettled into a straight path and sped off. That was after the whisky, after driving home, after the puddle of blood in the boot of the car, after the impact with the front when they ran over the dog, after meeting Anguli Ma again that day at hụi. In the drunken blur Young Triều saw, back at the house, Anguli Ma carrying the dog in his arms.
It was breathing unevenly with its perforated lung. But there was something else that was strange with the collapsed dog. It had Anguli Ma’s face attached to its furry neck.
Young Triều yelled in a drunken lilt, “Wow, I liked you better before,” pointing his index finger at the dog’s face. “Fucken fur all over and then naked on the head.” He was delirious with his own swearing, and laughed, “You look hideous with Anguli Ma’s face…”
“Shut up you arsehole,” Anguli Ma told him.
Young Triều looked at the melting plasticky dog. “Wow! I bet De Niro can’t do that – ‘You talkin’ to me?’”
The dog didn’t answer, but instead began to grow pointy ears; its face was rubbery-pink, like recently burnt flesh. And when Young Triều looked up, he saw that Anguli Ma now looked like the dog. Young Triều turned between the dog with the man’s head and the man with the dog’s head, and his own seemed to swirl around violently.
“Stop changing!” he screamed in the woman’s backyard and blacked out.
“Stupid poofter,” Anguli Ma spat at the unconscious boy.
When he came to, there was the smell of cooking, beautiful cooking.
They were in a room with bare walls covered in mildew, and a wooden door on the side. Then, Young Triều was able to recognise the garage door entrance. He sat up and was given a bowl, and ate. The rice was cooked to perfection, each grain was plump yet separate. The first two dishes were delicious, very tender médaillons of meat and handmade grilled sausages; but when the third dish came along, it had a small tail in it. He began to feel queasy, but tried not to let on. Anguli Ma pressed another beer onto him.
The workmate intervened; he complained that Anguli always pressed drinks onto everyone. “He’s just trying to lose himself, and take everyone else with him. Eat some more rice, it’ll make you feel better.”
Young Triều blinked and obeyed. The rice did soak up the nausea in his stomach.
“What do you do?” the workmate asked him.
“I just finished my studies. When I find work, I will save money to buy a house.” The young man was starting to feel his body again.
“No point doing all that study. You’re homeless, man. Just like us,” said Anguli Ma.
Anguli Ma
They felt they had done nothing wrong. They had been driving at night: him, the workmate and Young Triều. The men drove across the silent, empty land, intermittently marked out by a solitary street sign, an isolated tree, an abandoned warehouse. They got onto the highway, and then more tidy, mean, suburban enclosures.
And there was a dog on the road. Anguli slammed the car into it. The thud of the collision, and then the front and rear wheels rolled over its black body.
“Đụ má!” he said.
“Shit, what was that?” the workmate said.
“It was solid,” Young Triều said. “Was it a…child?”
Anguli turned off the engine. “Don’t be a pê đê. It was a dog! Black as night. Ran onto the road.” He got out of the car to look. He went to the back and unlocked the boot.
“What are you doing?” Young Triều said, following him out.
“Look at him. He’s not going to make it,” Anguli said.
“What are you doing?” the workmate protested from inside the car, “What? We’re going to take him?”
Then, there were people around, spilling out of the concrete slab homes. They had heard the sound of the body being struck and then the three men’s voices. They were in a housing estate area, full of old people in pastel-rendered prefabricated homes.
“Poor dog, poor dog, I will take him to the vet,” Anguli Ma announced in English.
The small crowd started to talk more quickly and loudly, but a little old Italian lady, eyes no longer bright said, “What an animal lover he is…”
They chucked the dog with the blood and black fur into the boot; they drove away and drank more whisky. They listened to its rasping breathing in the back, sometimes loud, then sometimes so weak that it seemed the animal was finally expiring. But then the breathing would come back again.
Their car drove through the western suburbs, with neat gardens and milky, overfed children. A land so sparse and peaceful that the newcomers believed that it was empty space, unmarked and un-storied, a barely populated land uninhabited by wandering demons and limbless men from wars that dragged on for millennia.
Still the animal in the boot had not died.
The sedan parked out the front of Đào’s house. They went along the side path, and Anguli was scruffing the dog around the neck, carrying it. It was whining, struggling to get out of his embrace.
“Which tap? Over here tap?” the workmate asked. There was the bathroom-outside that he shared with the girl and the old woman.
“Close that door,” Anguli told the workmate.
They taped its legs, its muzzle with gaffer tape. The dog’s forehead was smeared with its own saliva. Its barrel and chest floor were collapsed. Its coat was lustrous underneath the drying blood. Both he and the workmate knew that the dog would, for a shiny moment, acquire the vocal chords of a human and the eyes of an angel, and that this was not to be trusted. Anguli Ma held the dog’s body between his legs and stretched its neck under the tap. His right hand reached out to Young Triều to pass him the blade. The workmate turned on the tap, struggling with the stiff handles. Anguli cut its throat under the running water. Blood flowed, swirling into the black drain hole. The body of the dog released its shape, and quietly folded in half in his hands.
They cooked three dishes on a butane stove in the garage. Dinner was served up. The men relished the special occasion, and the workmate quoted ancient poetry:
Sống trên đời/ăn miếng dồi chó
Chết xuống âm phủ, biết có hay không?
“What is dồi?” Young Triều asked.
“Sausages,” the workmate explained. “In this lifetime, one tastes a piece of…”
Young Triều continued, “And, after you die…and descend to… âm phủ?”
“To Hades, to hell…” the workmate’s voice was warm in the darkness of the garage, “who knows whether these morsels will be offered or not?”
“I am unsure if this here is Hades or not, but if so, the second line has been answered!” Anguli drunkenly proclaimed.
They laughed and continued eating. The talk turned to more mundane things, what they’d seen on tivi.
“What dog?”
“In the desert…”
“Yes, the dingo that’s eaten the baby.”
“Everyone’s saying the mother did it, and her weak husband helped her.”
“They dressed their baby in black – the colour of death for them.”
The men were quiet for a moment.
Young Triều was the first to speak again. “In this country, the dog eats the man,” he said mournfully.
They all looked at each other and laughed so hard that their bellies hardened in ache and their eyes squeezed out little tears. Their laughter roared in the upside-down world.
They continued drinking until Young Triều passed out again. Cigarette smoke clogged the garage room. Now it was only Anguli and the workmate left. They had exhausted their bravado and were two blind men; they continued drinking despite their blindness. The strange night had reminded them of the old world. They shouted to each other to keep track of their progress.
“The last time I had this much fun was…” The room was spinning so. “Hahaha.”
“Yes,” someone punctuated.
They kept losing track of each other…in the blurry, roiling room.
“A large group of us, post-game drinking.”
“What year?” Anguli shouted.
“Seventy-five.”
Something still stabbed at their organs at the mention of that year.
“Friends?” a lifeline was thrown.
“Yes, twenty.” They could see one another again. “Our team won – it wasn’t really about the winning, we were drinking like devils because it was ‘Seventy-five’.”
His voice was so very soft now, and the room seemed suddenly calm and quiet. Even though in the lead-up to the Fall of Saigon, everyone knew what was about to happen.
“The end của một cuộc đời,” the workmate concluded.
In that stillness, they avoided each other’s eyes, for losing a homeland was like losing someone who knew you intimately, and whom you knew intimately. In this abyss, Anguli Ma and the workmate realised that their old life, and youth were both gone forever.
And so their drinking brought them a blindness that was preferable to the bright vastness of their daily lives in this new âm phủ, this other layer of Hades. Somewhere in the depth of their sorrow, the two men became isolated from each other. With their spirits empty, they cried, quietly in their seats.