21

Bones

YOU’LL ENDOW A FAMILY TEMPLE in Can Tho, you share with Nina; a memorial for the Commander and his ancestors, and a gathering place for the Chief Clerk’s Vietnamese descendents, and Oldest’s and Loc’s American children.

“It’ll divert energy from our projects,” Nina warns. “They’ve just started, and need tending. I don’t think we’ll have the bandwidth to take on something else.” She adds, “You aren’t even sure you believe in an afterlife. Who’ll pray in it? You’re not expecting any more descendants from the male line, are you? And Loc’s children are all in America and not likely to come back.”

You dismiss her protests. “If there are no sons around, then the female line will have to do it. As it is, Third Sister’s the one taking care of the sacrifices for my father’s and mother’s ancestors, not Loc. If I put aside the money, Kim will surely see to it we have an endowment that goes beyond forever. It’s daughters you rely on ultimately.”

You pull Nina to you and rest your head against her shoulder.

“It’s something that needs doing. If I don’t, Tri certainly isn’t going to. Even if my blood-father’s line ended before I was born, it doesn’t mean I should forget him. But, he might well be forgotten eventually, buried away in Bac Lieu. If I exhume his bones and bring them to Can Tho to a joint family place, then there’ll be just one destination for everyone to visit, a single gathering place in Vietnam that Tri, and Oldest’s and Loc’s children can identify with.”

“What about that training centre I was going to set up with Ly’s wife for post-traumatic stress counselors? And that land mine disposal program you wanted to take on?” Nina asks.

“I promise you, we’ll manage. I’ll tell Ly I have less time for him,” you assure her. “And when the temple’s ready and my father and blood-father are moved in, we’ll go look for my blood-mother’s grave and bring her back too,” you tempt.

You see Nina smile. “A quest,” she says, her black eyes glittering.

.....

“The pieces are a rape, a baby, a murder and a stolen bangle,” this much Nina has gathered from your mother, blind and senile, almost ready to meet her maker. “The rape comes before the baby, naturally. And from appearances...” Her eyes check to make sure you won’t be offended at what she’ll say next... “The rapist is Chú Hai even if he makes it sound like a love affair in the version he told you.” She points at you. “You’re the baby of course. But what’s next?”

You drum your fingers against the glass of the attic window and look out across the courtyard to the other house where your mother’s dying. You let Nina play with her hypotheses, and go back to the package of information Chú Hai’s students have compiled for you on the new appointees to the politburo, central bank and ministries.

“Does the stolen bangle come first, or the murder?” Nina asks. She decides, “Murder last. Murderer? Your blood-father. That’s the most likely scenario. Possibly in a jealous fit after he discovered the affair.” She pauses. “But why doesn’t he kill you then? Why does he carry the bangle as a talisman on his back and pass it on to you after that?” She turns to you. “You never felt he treated you like anything other than his true son, did you?” she asks.

“No, never,” you answer.

“That’s a complication then,” she says, rubbing the bridge of her nose.

She attacks the puzzle from a different direction. “Not Chú Hai. No motive. Rape or love story, your blood-mother seems to have kept it a secret. Your blood-father never suspected him, so he didn‘t need to protect himself.” She lies back against the bedcovers, happy with that piece in place. “The bangle keeps flitting through your mother’s story—first there were two, now there’s one in the grave, the other lost then found and hanging around your neck. But it might be a red herring. Maybe it doesn’t even matter.” She circles back to the rape. “Chú Hai could be the suspect, but only if your mother’s wrong about the rape. Only if Chú Hai’s version, a love story, is correct. Then, perhaps, Chú Hai might have killed your blood-mother out of desperation, because she refused to come away with him after you were born. That might explain his departure from the camp and his leaving behind the bangle she gave to him, because he was too guilty to hold on to it. But, to lose his cool like that... It doesn’t sound like the Chú Hai we know, does it?” She sits up. “What do you think?”

She’s interrupted your thoughts about how the trade minister might be persuaded to issue a license to develop an industrial park near Saigon, on land Ly’s managed to pick up cheap.

“It’s not a Ph.D. dissertation, cưng. You can’t solve everything in the world with hypotheses and counterfactuals. My mother would need to tell you and she can’t. That’s a fact. It’ll always be a mystery,” you tell her. You don’t add that perhaps she might like to corner Chú Hai. That’s forbidden territory, not a place you’re prepared to let Nina go with her hows and whys and whens.

Nina goes down to your mother. You see her from the attic window, kneeling beside the hammock, staring at your mother, willing her to provide the answers.

But your mother can resolve nothing for Nina now. In no pain, life simply ebbing away from her, your mother’s contemplating the next stage, not the past. She’s leaving everything behind—the rape, the baby, the murder, the stolen bangle. If she knows anything about the murder, she hadn’t been in a position to stop it. As for the baby, she’s done more than enough by you.

Not that any of it matters at this point in her life, you think. The lessons she’d taught you and Loc and your sisters—the need for a good thought to offset a bad, for an atonement to wipe out a sin—wouldn’t they pale to nothing against the voices calling her, the white light... Perhaps a broad tall shape beckoning?

.....

You send your mother off just as the new family temple is completed—Loc and you, Huong and Nina, your sisters and brothers-in-law, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Flesh and blood signs of a life well spent and blessed, all of you are there, except Oldest and her family, who do not have US travel documents yet, and Tri, who’s locked away as a postulant.

Dry as a leaf, your mother leaves easily on the pyre of kindling scented with sandalwood and incense sticks. Loc and you shed tears but you don’t shudder at this burning. Her passing and cremation are part of the cycle of life, a cycle which sees Loc and Huong going home to America to welcome another grandchild, while Nina and you remain behind to settle your mother in her resting place, and begin the search for your long abandoned blood-mother.

.....

You do not find your blood-mother till 2006. Even though you remember your blood-father’s directions almost word for word, even with your money and resources.

You’d been anxious through the hunt, but you feel nothing when they lift her up from the black delta clay, what remnants there are after nearly sixty years—bits of hands and feet, crushed pieces of rib, arms and forearms, upper and lower leg bones as tiny as a child’s, a delicate jaw bone, her cranium broken in half, the pelvis collapsed.

It would sadden her, what you’re thinking: That she wasn’t the one who cradled you when you were colicky, who rubbed mosquito balm on your legs before you slept, and let you nuzzle her breasts during nightmares, who saved the best pieces of pork fat for you, although she ate no meat herself. That you have no memory of her, just the stories from your blood-father, an allusion from Chú Hai and your own almond-shaped eyes in the mirror. It would sadden her, but it can’t be helped.

The laborers hoist up the pieces from her grave, one basket at a time. You carry the baskets to a makeshift plank table with an attentive Tri, who’s come to Vietnam specially for the occasion. Then, scooping from a barrel filled with rice-wine brewed for the purpose, your son and you wash away the years of mud encasing her.

The retinue of monks you’ve brought along lay out the washed bones again as best they can, while chanting prayers to release whatever might still be trapped in the remains. You watch dry-eyed as your son chants along with them, his face still carrying its blissful religion-deluded expression.

As the monks and Tri pray, you seek the dead woman’s forgiveness for taking so long to come for her. “But now I’m taking you home to the new temple I’ve built, where Blood-father and Father and Mother are waiting to receive you,” you whisper to her bones. You pick them up with chopsticks—you, Nina and Tri—then layer them into the celadon jar Nina has commissioned specially from a potter in San Francisco. Just before the monks cap the jar, you take out a flat package wrapped in red silk from your shirt pocket. It contains the bone bangle you’ve worn on your body since your blood-father gave it to you. The bangle is yellowed now from long contact against human skin; your blood-father’s, then yours. The etched pattern of pine needles on its surface has almost completely worn away. Still there’s a gleam to it. You rub it gently between your thumb and index finger one last time, before placing it in the jar and fastening it with red string to the cracked earth-stained one you found by her left wrist, the one that identified her to you.

“She has both of them now. Now she can rest,” you say to Nina.

Nina doesn’t reply immediately. She looks up at the trees, at the sky between the leaves. Across the river she sees a kite fly by, floating to freedom in the stark blue delta sky.

She points to it. “See, isn’t that a good omen?”

.....

You install your blood-mother’s jar next to the Commander’s. “It doesn’t matter who I am or how I came about,” you pray to both of them. “I am a son of your spirit. I lay you to rest.”

.....

Nonetheless, your blood-mother does not rest. Whether the physicists believe in it or not, there remains a quirk in the time-space continuum allowing connections to be made between the here and now, and the there and beyond, a channel through which a spirit can cry out if she wishes.

Whether it’s from the shock of the new aluminum frame window clattering shut, or Third Sister’s fingers becoming shaky with age, the jar containing your blood-mother’s remains slips out of Third Sister’s hands when she’s cleaning the altar. The celadon pot bounces away from her like a ball before falling onto the rust brown granite floor with a sharp crack and breaking cleanly into two. The red cloth holding the bangles falls out and unfolds itself, revealing the two circlets of bone loosely tied to each other.

“An accident,” Third Sister explains away the white porcelain replacement jar when next you visit with Nina. “I didn’t want to bother you two with it. The monks came and said all the proper prayers for reinstatement. Everything’s fine now.”

You do not know that when you go out to the fields with your brothers-in-law for a look at their new fish ponds, Third Sister corners Nina. “How is it this was in Auntie’s jar?” she asks, opening her palm to show Nina the less worn circlet.

“It’s Thong’s. His blood-father gave it to him years ago and told him to put it in the jar with the other one when he found her,” Nina answers.

“Well, it shouldn’t be there. That’s why the jar broke. Auntie was telling us she didn’t want it with her.”

“Why?” Nina asks, hopeful that the last piece of the puzzle will fall into place at last.

.....

This is what Third Sister tells your wife, a story Nina recounts reluctantly only after the perpetrator himself has confessed.

.....

It started with a treat before Mid-Autumn, a cinema show on the hospital grounds. It was a screening of The Three Musketeers, the old fashioned kind where people sat on mats in the open to watch the moving images projected on a piece of white cloth hung between two trees.

In those days, that had been a special occasion. Everyone in town went to see the film, including a day laborer your father had assigned to guard the government store-rooms... Inevitably, there was a break-in. As punishment, the Chief Clerk thrashed the man, accidently laming him.

At Mid-Autumn, the guardians of the oppressed, a Viet Cong guerrilla squad, came to teach your father a lesson. But your father had gone with your mother to a wake in a nearby hamlet. Oldest Sister and Third Sister had been left to look after the younger children, supervised by your blood-mother, who’d come to town for the festival.

Third Sister was twelve, Oldest was fourteen, your blood-mother still quite a young woman. It is easy to imagine what might have passed when the vigilantes found the Chief Clerk missing and only children and three young women at home. But it hadn’t.

Your blood-mother had stepped forward and asked them to take just her, lying that she was the Chief Clerk’s oldest daughter. She’d said her sisters were too young. An eye for an eye, one daughter for one man lamed, she’d argued. She convinced them. They hustled her into a room and sent in just one young man.

Third Sister and Oldest Sister couldn’t see anything. But, standing outside the front room they’d heard everything through the wooden walls. Your blood-mother had fought the rapist most of the way, until she didn’t have any strength left, your Third Sister said. When she came out, her eyes were red but she was dressed and still walking straight, still whole. It was only the bangle missing from her right wrist that suggested something had happened.

Nine months later, your mother was called into the salt marshes and came back home with you

.....

“I haven’t seen this for more than half a century,” Third Sister tells Nina. “I’ve no idea how Uncle got it back. But I believe Auntie would never have wanted that thing resting next to her bones.”

She presses the circlet into Nina’s palm. “Oldest saw the face of the young man sent in to Auntie. She always thought Youngest looked remarkably like him. She also said the general in Saigon whom Youngest calls Chú Hai has the same face.” She notices that Nina isn’t surprised by this revelation. “I think you should give this back to him,” she says.

“But what will I say to Thong?” Nina asks.

Third Sister bends forward to clasp Nina’s free hand in both of hers. “Nothing. Don’t say anything, ever. His mother sacrificed herself to protect us. To honor her, my mother said we were never to tell him what happened, never to let him know he’d come about through an act of violence.” She looks at Nina sadly. “Sometimes, it’s best to hide the truth.”

And Nina agrees. Who can benefit from this sorry tale, when Chú Hai and you are as close as thieves, each holding a central place in the other’s heart? She will not be the first one to break this awful truth to you, she decides.

But there’s the problem of where to hide the bangle. The two of you have been living in each other’s pockets since coming back to Vietnam. She digs in your wallet for small change for the beggars. You raid her handbag for wet wipes and sunscreen. Often, both of you travel with only one suitcase and a single toiletry bag between you. It’s a closeness Nina couldn’t have imagined in your long years apart, an unanticipated joy. But now it’s an obstacle to something she needs to do to protect you.

She finally stuffs the bangle into a box of tampons, a box she knows you’ll never investigate. She’s right. You only suspect later that the circlet has passed through her hands on its way back to Chú Hai and then your son, because of her uncontrolled curiosity. For inevitably, when puzzling over how to hide the bangle from you, Nina also begins to wonder how you originally took it out of Vietnam undetected.

You’ve told her about the checks on those allowed to escape the country then. How your documents were scrutinized and re-scrutinized before you could board the rusty freighter. How you were all frisked and relieved of any gold and valuables you were attempting to carry out. How your orifices, especially those of the young women, were probed. And how, when you got on the high seas, the pirates who accosted you tore apart the boat, searching under and between every single board and probing every cubby when they found nothing on your bodies. But if Nina wants more of that story...

“I let my hair grow to my shoulders. Then Chú Hai braided the bangle against my head with it. He put the bangle between the two whorls of hair here, on the flat of my skull. And he attached my Father’s and my Mother’s gold wedding bands here at the two hollows above my nape.” You indicate the positions on your head for Nina to see. “After that, I stopped washing my hair. At one point, there were lice in it. If you’d seen me then, you’d never have invited me back to your apartment.”

“But how were you allowed to walk around with a head full of un-Socialist Rastafarian locks?”

How she always needs details!

“It was Chú Hai’s idea. I was already pretending a nervous breakdown so I could disappear from work to help with provisioning and stocking the boat. When I presented him with the problem of the circlet and my parents’ wedding rings, he came up with the hair as the final touch. He said no one would try to get too near a crazy man with a stinking head of hair, let alone stop him from leaving.”

“So, Chú Hai saw your mother’s bangle after she died?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” you say. “He recognized it. But he would have thought it was the one she usually wore on her wrist. I don’t think he’d know about the one that was lost and then found.”

“Do you remember if he was nervous, or emotional, or anything out of the ordinary when you showed it to him or when he took it from you to attach to your head?”

You don’t understand why Nina’s asking such questions, especially when everything’s settled and the bangle is safe where it should be, but you humor her. “This was just a few weeks after Chú Hai put our ID cards side by side, just as I was preparing to escape the country. If he was nervous, or emotional, or anything out of the ordinary, it would all have gone over my head. Anyway, you know him now. If he swallowed an elephant and didn’t want you to know he had indigestion, well, you wouldn’t, would you?”

“So true,” Nina says. “But he’s the key, the chameleon piece that pulls the whole puzzle together. Everything goes back to him.” She’s insisting on this as if it’s a fact you need to understand. As if you haven’t grasped his full measure already.

.....

Nina decides to unlock the mystery the next week, when you’ve left her in Saigon and flown off to the Central Coast to assess an oil refinery project for Ly.

“I’m running out to visit Chú Hai,” she tells you when you call to touch base. “I’m going to corner him.”

You are too pre-occupied with the spreadsheets from the feasibility study to ask her why.

In any case, Chú Hai isn’t there to be cornered. He’s gone to the hospital for an operation, his sister informs Nina at the gate. She doesn’t know what kind. Her brother never tells her anything, she complains. He’s been coming and going as usual. Then suddenly, the other day, he calls from the office to tell her he needs a medical procedure. It’s nothing serious, she’s been told. And he hasn’t asked her to visit. But if Nina wants to, it’s the hospital for cadres. She gives Nina his ward and bed number.

Chú Hai’s room at the end of a grey carpeted corridor air-freshened by ionizers is bright and modern.

“Wow! They’ve recreated a Singapore hospital in Saigon just for you cadres,” Nina shouts into the room when she arrives.

Strangely, there is no answering retort or laugh.

Nina has to push aside the curtains around Chú Hai’s hospital bed to see his response.

‘But the doctors are still no damn good,’ Chú Hai lifts a magnetic doodle pad for her to read.

He’s propped up on pillows, his neck and lower jaw wrapped in bandages. Nina sees him try to greet her with his usual mischievous grin, but something has happened to his jaw muscles and his lips merely wobble.

“What’s happened? Why didn’t you tell us?”

He scribbles—‘Cough... Sore throat... Scratches.’

Nina finds out from the newly recruited Vietnamese-American doctor that it’s not just scratches. There are irregular growths in and around the throat. They’ve found malignant cells. There’s a tumor wrapped around the voice box. They’ve taken out the bits from the inside of the throat and mended it. But the voice box is gone. Chú Hai won’t speak again.

Chú Hai is at his most vulnerable, face to face with his mortality, his defenses down. If Nina wants to get information about the bangle, now is the moment. But she can’t. It’s a time for forbearing, not confrontation. Instead, she scolds Chú Hai gently for not telling the two of you, then goes to call you with the bad news.

Like her court ancestors, Nina has the art of timing in her bones. She doesn’t know it then, but there will be a better time to confront Chú Hai with the circlet, to leverage it for more than just a story.

.....

They find another hotspot. Not in the throat they’ve been scanning and torturing with radioactive waves for the last year but in the prostate. Probably unrelated, the doctor tells you, just something that happens in old men. Nonetheless, it ought to be investigated.

‘Not enough exercise down there,’ Chú Hai types on his new mini-computer. He adds a smiley icon, then continues, ‘It’s telling me the down-there exists. I need to pay attention to it and give it some fun before it’s too late. I’ll be fine if you find me a sweet sixteen.’

You don’t say anything. Instead you take his left hand in yours, and point to the age spots on its back, and the wrinkles around his knuckles and wrist.

After a while he punches out, ‘So you don’t think you can find a sweet sixteen who’ll touch skin like mine? So I’ve no choice? It’s off with it or I’m gone?’ He bites his lower lip and turns to examine the pattern on the curtains the nurse has drawn to block out the sun.

You pat his knee, the bones sharp against your palm, even under layers of blankets, and adopt the roguish tone he used to put on. “It’s not the balls, you know. The wet noodle will still work. Anyway, before we worry about the sweet sixteens, let’s do a biopsy first. Then we can decide.”

After the last near miss, Nina and you had sent Chú Hai to Singapore for follow-up radiotherapy. ‘No need. Everyone has to die anyway. Why prolong the agony?’ he’d written on the doodle-pad then, trying to brush you off. But against his inclinations, he’d gone, and has been flying out for quarterly checkups since.

‘No need for a biopsy. The more they check, the more they’ll find. Just fly me home. Quick and sharp is how I said I wanted to die last year. Quick and sharp is what I’m thinking I want this time,’ he bangs on his keyboard now.

It’s not what I want,” you shout.

‘It’s not your life... It’s not your death... It’s no concern of yours,’ the reply flies off Chú Hai’s fingers.

“Oh yes it is!” You grab the computer and fling it across the room to the opposite wall. Its plastic parts break and clatter to the floor as you stalk out.

But Chú Hai sticks to his guns. He won’t sign the consent forms for the biopsy. He turns his face to the curtained window when Nina and you visit.

“You still have so many good years. Don’t let them go just like that,” you beg.

“Prostate cancers are slow growing, very controllable if they’re treated early,” Nina tries to appeal to his logical side.

“I told you already, you’re not losing your balls,” you raise your voice in exasperation.

“Prostate cancers tend to spread to the bones if they’re not caught. Extremely painful once they get there,” Nina threatens.

“And by then it will undoubtedly be too late, far too late” you shout.

He will not bend.

You imagine him laughing at the two of you, silly children trying to shake him with empty words. Yes, you haven’t forgotten he spent the twenty-five years of the American war leading a double, even a triple life. Yes, you know that although he always lived in fear of discovery he never once veered from his purpose.

“But this is foolish bravado,” you plead with him.

He keeps his face turned to the curtains. You see him mouthing the Analects to block you and Nina out, “The superior man lies under arms and meets death without regret, how firm is his energy. When good principles prevail he does not alter his stand, how firm is his energy. When bad principles prevail, he maintains his course to death without changing, how firm is his energy.”

.....

“If we can’t do anything for the general, we’ll need to release the hospital bed to someone else,” the doctor informs you.

“We’re paying, damn it!” you say, losing your manners.

“Still, we’re a hospital. We have a waiting list. And most of the people on it seem more interested in getting better than the general.”

“Give us one more day,” Nina placates the doctor. She breathes in your ear. “Let me go and talk to him alone.”

“You think you can convince him?” You’re skeptical.

“I don’t know, but it’s worth trying. I backed away from confrontation before, when he was at his weakest and afraid to die. Now when he’s at his most foolish, I’m hoping I can bring him back to his senses by showing him how much he still owes the living,” she replies.

.....

You learn this from Nina after Chú Hai dies:

He shuts his eyes when he sees her come in and heaves himself over so he’s facing the curtains again, his back to her.

“Hey Chú, I thought you’d like to know the hospital’s kicking us out. They say we should be giving your bed to someone else who’s more interested in living,” she whispers.

She waits to see if there’s a response from him, but there isn’t. He isn’t a spy trained to withstand all manner of torture for nothing. Finally, she strokes his right hand gently. “You’ve won. And seeing as you’re determined to go, I thought you should have this to take along,” she says. Then she opens his hand flat and presses the bone circlet into it.

His hand trembles as it closes around the circlet. After some time, he brings his thumb and index finger together and tentatively caresses the old bone.

Nina says in her softest voice, “Thong put it into his blood-mother’s jar with the other one, like his blood-father asked him to. But the jar broke. She wasn’t ready to take it back. I think, she wanted you to have it, to remind you of your obligations... The Confucians say we have children so they’ll take care of us when we’re old and to make sacrifices to us when we’re dead. The Buddhists say we have children because we owe them their lives. What do you think, Chú?”

Nina turns around to draw open the curtains and let the daylight in. She climbs onto Chú Hai’s bed and closes both her hands around his, wrapping her fingers and his around the circlet. “There are so many things you still owe my husband. So many explanations why things turned out the way they did. And even if you don’t want to give him those explanations, still he needs an acknowledgement of what he is to you and what you are to him.” She raises his hand, still holding the circlet, up to her lips, and kisses it. “Just an acknowledgement before you die. You owe him that, don’t you think? Ba?”

She’s obeyed your Third Sister. She’s given back the circlet to him. She hasn’t asked him for any secrets. She isn’t any clearer how the jigsaw fits. But she thinks she’s said enough. He’ll never tell, and therefore he’ll have to live.

She slides off the bed and leaves the room.

He remains where he is, facing the window, his back to her, his eyes shut. But now light is pouring in.

.....

The bangle’s muteness beating against his palm must have moved him.

You imagine him now, taking up a pen from the table beside the hospital bed, trying to fashion the story. It isn’t the truth he finally left for you in a formal white envelope, written on onion skin paper in his and your mother tongue, Vietnamese. These are scraps, what you find on pieces of hospital stationery when his sister gives you the keys to his safe after his funeral. They’re his starts and stops, written in English, the language he liked to hide behind.

‘How should the story start?’

‘Should it begin in the first person? I was a young man and foolish, also foolishly in love. Or the second and third? You may have forgiven him for keeping silent about the past, but can you forgive him for keeping this last one from you... No, the second and third don’t work. It keeps coming back to the first person, myself. It appears it must be written that way then. But not as a confession. Never.’

‘So, I start again. If I told you it happened one way, I would become a rapist. Or I could cast your blood mother as the adulteress and her husband as the unwitting cuckold... Hardly edifying. As for what happened after, would you rather she died in child birth, separated too soon from a longed for child? Or would you prefer the version where her husband killed her in a jealous fit? Or a third, where I suffocated her with my palm to stop her from smothering you, the unwanted offspring of an unfortunate encounter? Would you rather believe I sought you out to nurture you? Or that our first few encounters were accidents of fate, the heavens deciding I should have a hand in your life regardless of how much I wanted to put it all behind me?’

‘After reconsideration, I realize this isn’t a story to be told from a single point of view. There are too many threads, too many characters. Why work with only one voice? I’m a journalist, a rapporteur. Perhaps, I should assume the omniscient, be like God, all knowing... But I’m not God. I’m mortal, dying. And still there are the secrets untold. I can only hope it will somehow all be redeemed—my sins as monumental as Thai Son Mountain, the consequences flowing like water through to endless generations. In the end, all I know is to spin a story from the facts, taking into account my audience. And yes, perhaps beyond that, there is one last thing...’