YOUR FATHER CANNOT ACCOMPANY YOU in the body to redeem the time you’ve lost with Jules Anderson. Chú Hai dies a few weeks after Tri’s ashes are installed in the family temple. As he so much wanted, his going is short. Blessedly it isn’t sharp and it isn’t painful. He slips away one night in his overstuffed armchair, a day old copy of the International Herald Tribune in his lap. It is his beloved roosters, unfed at dawn, that alert his sister with their crowing.
He isn’t buried in Delta clay in the unfortunately positioned graveyard of his forefathers. You aren’t given a chance to explain to his sister why you should be allowed to lay him to rest in the family temple you’ve built for your ancestors either. As befits his contribution to the country, his masters memorialize him in the National Cemetery for Revolutionary Heroes.
His sister finds the instructions for orchestrating your meeting with Jules in a plain brown envelope on his desk next to a square package. Each step is listed as precisely as those he’d given you for courting Ai Nguyet more than forty years before. ‘Write to Jules a month after my funeral. Tell him I’ve died, with a simple description of the funeral. Remind him of my promise to his mother. Then ask him if you can personally hand over some mementoes I’ve left for him. Let him determine the time and place. If he doesn’t reply after three months, send him a gentle reminder.’
Nina isn’t surprised when you tell her about Jules and about Chú Hai’s instructions. She simply pats your hand and says, “Let’s find him then.” And she volunteers to go with you, if you need her, once he’s found.
Your wife’s love, you realize, will always flow. Something else more than your karma should allow.
.....
Jules has moved from Washington D.C. It takes Jerry a year to discover he’s in the US Embassy in London, his exact responsibilities there difficult to ascertain.
You imagine he must be more than a little concerned when he receives the letter from that stranger whose birthday party turned into a shootout. Still, he agrees politely enough—‘In London, at your convenience. Otherwise I shall be in D.C. in the summer.’
In the middle of winter, a month after receiving his reply, a week after completing the sale of the brownstone, Nina and you fly from New York to meet him.
“The café in the National Portrait Gallery off Nelson’s Needle just after lunch,” he suggests, when you call to make the appointment. A neutral place at a neutral hour, he’s learned his tradecraft well, you think. Chú Hai would approve.
He’s seated in the corner of the room near an emergency exit, his back defended, with a wide view of the comings and goings, and a quick way out if needed. The only man in a grey suit among English matrons in twin sets and tourists in layers of sweaters, he’s at a café table jiggling a teabag in a cup of hot water, and looking at a museum catalogue.
He stands up when he sees the two of you, dropping the teabag abruptly and splashing hot water over the table.
You reintroduce yourself and Nina.
Everyone shakes hands.
“Cold out isn’t it?” he asks, becoming suddenly British.
“Nice and warm in here though,” Nina replies, just as British.
“What was it like in New York?” he counters.
As he and Nina make small talk, you examine your son, Julia Anderson’s son. You can’t help noting he’s big boned like his mother, that he is the color of dust, like the little girl you saw kicked about in the Delta the last time his mother and you were together, that he has eyes shaped like yours but amber like a lion’s, no one’s eyes but his own. When Nina places the package from Chú Hai on the table, the hand that reaches out for it has scholar’s fingers, just like yours. Like yours, the fingers are delicate but strong enough to kill. It is a hand that can potentially crush a heart, yours.
You see Jules touch the package tentatively. For all your discomfiture as you pass it to him—Nina blinking furiously, your eyes sliding this way and that—it might be a letter bomb. It isn’t inconceivable, considering the circumstances of your last meeting.
His hand hesitates. Perhaps he’s wondering what this last gift from his mother’s friend is; that man who his mother said was someone very important in his life, someone to keep in touch with, someone who would look after him when she was gone.
Jules does not look to you like someone who needs looking after. This tag-along son of that solitary peripatetic woman would have learned to take care of himself soon enough. You’ve been told how well he’s done in the international schools he was shuffled in and out of, the honors he received in college, his reputation in the State Department.
“And anyway, now the old guy’s dead too,” he says suddenly, his fingers drawing back to the edge of the table. “Is it a memory I should even hold on to?” he asks.
You don’t reply for a while. Finally you lie. “He said he’d always felt a certain sympathy between the two of you, an undercurrent of understanding.”
Jules’ hand comes back to the package. “May I?” he asks you.
You look at Nina and then nod.
Jules unties the package to reveal an airmail envelope outlined with blue and red stripes, and a grey silk pouch. He lifts the flap of the envelope. It contains two ID cards and a newspaper cutting of his own face pasted on cardboard. You reach over, and silently fan out the ID cards and the cardboard piece on the table. Then you push the silk pouch towards him.
Barely able to take his eyes off the three almost similar faces looking back at him from the table, Jules unties the pouch. The ivory circlet and a sheet of paper folded in the shape of a kite fall into his hands.
He unfolds the tiny kite and reads—‘One day I shall be gone. And my life, what of it will remain? The consequences of what I did, both bad and good; a son of a son who carries the image of what I was on his body; a circle of bone too mute to explain itself; a story, if you are looking for one, about beginnings.’
Your son raises his amber eyes to you—a stranger with a face like his own. He looks at Nina—a woman who is not his mother. He picks up the circlet, his hand trembling, and closes his thumb and index finger over the worn bone.