Anguli Ma (10 page)

Tears dripped down Đào's face, seeped into her warm skin and her clothes. She wiped her cheeks with her fingers. And tried to call again. Another thirty-six and then silence.

She turned to the horoscope page. It said:
If you should search today, then you will find the precious possessions that had been long ago buried or lost
.

A gem of hope sparkled in Đào's heart, and she dragged herself to the spare room to rummage through all her upended refuse again. The empty cardboard boxes vibrated with the noise from the trucks going past.

A few of the boxes were wet at the bottom. A thin film of water covered the floor. Đào would have to tie new rags more tightly around the leaky taps, and empty and dry the boxes before the contents began to stink. She rummaged through the clean fabric offcuts from the factory: shoulder panels, collars, arms, legs, reinforcing, front panels, torsos, scooped pockets, looking for the right length and absorbency.

To her surprise, Đào found an orange-pink embroidered top. A whole one. It looked old-fashioned, but didn't smell musty; it had the aroma of tropical fruit. She tried to figure out where it had come from, as she held it in her desiccated hands. She traced the patterns of billowing embroidered clouds, and red curls and orange petals, with her pointing finger following the stitching. The needlework was intricate, with tonal changes in the flower petals, the different shades of green on the stems and leaves, and thread of varying colours showed dappled light on the embroidered human figures.

The phone rang. Could it be Thảo? Đào put the embroidered top aside. She tiptoed slowly down the hallway. Could it be the Cowboy? Or her friends from the migrant hostel days? Đào sat by the phone. Each ring tore into her brain, and the silence between rings seemed to get
longer and deeper than the one before it. Could it be Sinh, ringing to let her know where she is?

Đào snatched the handset. “Allo?”

An Australian male voice said, “Good afternoon Ma'am, how are you today?”

“What you want from me?”

He was taken aback, and after the briefest moment replied, “Ahh, it's not what I want – it is about what you want,” and told her that she was very lucky to be given a special discount.

“You have been selected to receive an extremely modern vacuum cleaner worth a hundred dollars, for only two dollars per week, that is,
two dollars per week
. I know you're a very intelligent woman, and you're thinking this is twice as much as the best models in the stores. But this vacuum cleaner is so modern, it is not available through retail outlets. Let me give you the facts: it uses technology to clean triple the amount of dirt, as well as filth that you can't even see.”

“Fifth?” Đào asked.

“Filth, yes, unwanted and unhygienic dirt. Your house will be spotlessly clean and will be the envy of all your friends,” the man on the phone explained.

“How many weeks paying two dollars?” Đào asked.

“You would pay two dollars a week for two and a half years.” His voice rose slightly as he corrected her broken English, “You, Mrs
Na-gu-Yen, are very fortunate to be selected for this opportunity. This is excellent value to you. We do not make this offer to everybody.”

Đào pressed her lips together and worked out the maths: 2.5 years was 130 weeks, times 2 equals $260, which was $160 more than what he said the cleaner was worth if she bought it outright. With her calculation, Đào did not feel the least bit invisible, or inadequate, as she told the man on the phone, “Me no-Englit!” and hung up.

Đào rushed back to the spare room and the embroidered top. In her haste to get to the phone earlier, she had dropped the orange top on the floor, and now the sleeve was wet, deepening the colour of the fabric and embroidery.

It reminded her of a holiday at the end of school, before she was about to be married. She had felt so womanly as she stood with her girlhood friends on the beach. They were wading out from the shore, to look at the mussels growing under the pier, laughing, and taking in the coastal air at Vũng Tàu.

She knew for certain now that she did not bring it with her on the boat journey over. The embroidered top had come from Vietnam. That style and workmanship did not exist here. Đào wondered how she had kept it for so long, it would have been after Vũng Tàu, then over twenty years of marriage, then her escape from her homeland as it descended into social and economic chaos.

She discovered other impossible things in her over-cluttered house:

children's socks, her red wedding
áo dài
, her dead husband's glasses. Things she did not bring with her to Australia. It was as though they had floated up to the surface from forgotten crevices deep below. Somehow, time had returned to the beginning, as though the past and the present had been shipwrecked against one another.

Seeing these objects made Đào realise more keenly how she had been reduced. All the things in her house, collected and cluttered together with all of her concentration and effort, had no story or meaning to her. The furniture, the modern appliances, the boxes of clean good scrap fabric, the plastic containers – all evoked nothing inside her.

She looked for Sinh amongst the impossible objects. For any clue about Sinh's whereabouts here in Australia.

Nothing.

Horrified, Đào decided to incinerate her objects. Despite the pain this separation caused, she hoped that if she returned the impossible things to the past then Sinh could be found.

Trung

“Where is grandma?”

“She's out in the backyard,” Tuyết answered.

“It is very cold for grandma to be outside,” Trung said.

“She's keeping warm by the fire.”

“The fire? What fire?” Trung repeated.

“Grandma is burning her clothes in the steel drum. She poured some smelly water onto the clothes, and I wanted to come out and watch but she yelled at me, and made me to go back inside, but I watched the clothes floating up to the sky as smoke, and then the phone rang, and I ran to pick it up, and it was you, and now we are talking,” his daughter relayed.

Trung glanced along the cord of the public phone.

“Hurry and get grandma to come to the phone,” he told his daughter.

He could hear the creaking of the door, and a slice of traffic rumbling, as he waited for his mother to come in from the backyard.

“
Sao
?” his mother answered, as though phone calls were charged by the word.

“What are you doing? I am not going to let my daughter visit if there are fleas or lice there,” he said quickly.

“No, it has nothing to do with Tuyết,” then his mother's voice became distant, “I'm only destroying what should not be here.”

Trung did not know what this meant, but pictured her house full of the junk she'd accumulated since they arrived. He had borne her disappointment in him for so long, that he did not even know who she was when she turned her attention elsewhere.

Bác

In the evenings that followed, the old woman observed that Đào had begun the habit of forgetting the terrible loss that had struck her. After preparing the rice and broth, she asked Bác to please tell Sinh that dinner was ready, and to come in from the studio to eat with them.

Bác simply shook her head and moved away feebly. “This one does not know where the girl is.”

Bác had come to the end of her days feeling she had been harassed by what she had witnessed in life. She had seen this depth of grief many times before, and knew that Đào would wallow in the circle of pain for years before she would become aware of her animal situation.

Bác found a moment alone with Trung when he visited his mother. The sky was already dark and the temperature had dropped as soon as the sun's rays had retreated. She told him the head and tail of the story of the missing
hụi
, and the disappeared girl who lived out the back, and Đào's recent descent into madness. Trung was mortified, and could not work out why his mother had not told him any of this before.

“Hurry, their anger cannot have been sated.”

With that, Bác felt she was free of her debt to Đào.

Very soon after that, Bác packed her few belongings into a tri-colour plastic bag. “I am old, my time is running out. I cannot live like this,” she told her landlady. The studio had been partitioned to accommodate
both her and Sinh. Now it was lifeless, empty on one side, and frozen in time on the other, to the exact day when Sinh disappeared. Bác left the door of the studio open, hoping this would call the girl back.

Đào pleaded, “Please stay one more week, and maybe she will be back then. Then the house will be back to normal, things washed and cleaned, food on the stove…”

The Brown Man

The man watches the different states of mind come and go, the pain scatters in patches across his back, and floats slowly like clouds in the sky across the horizon of his being. Sitting in deep meditation, he observes his skin drying up on contact with the outside air, and little by little, becoming taut as the moisture evaporates from him. At other times, he feels the warmth in his body radiating constantly, as a candle burns wax to emit its flame. The man's focus improves and he can follow the changing forms of his breath, which becomes his constant friend. He asks himself, “Which species of breath am I being inhabited by now?” Still, the brown man cannot retain equanimity before the pain in his limbs, which seems to move from place to place as though each limb is being amputated and rearranged.

The monk advises him that if the pain is too great, and one
has already lost the balance of one's mind, then it is best to stop the meditation. However, if one's mind is still balanced, the meditator can
lean
into the pain, as though walking against a strong wind; lean into it with your calmness and attention. The monk explains that these are experiences familiar to all who have meditated deeply.

“The human race needs to practise to know itself as an animal, this is not the same as to
be
an animal,” the monk says quietly to his disciple, and his own heart.

On his next attempts, the man experiences increasingly longer moments without the prattle of plans or hopes or conversations recreated inside his head. His body becomes present to itself. His body is aware of itself as breathing, pulsing, pulled down and sagging in gravity, heating the air around it, slowly burning in time. This thing we call time. The storms of anger and violence accumulate and break across his being, until they empty him out completely. Then he is ready to experience loss. Another cloud of pain gathers in a different part of the body, and his attention is already there, ready to observe it. And increasingly, it is not
his
pain experienced in his body: it is simply pain, or its twin, hope, and it arises and then departs.

Sinh

She was walking in the park and found, by the river, a fish trap created by the land's first inhabitants. Not knowing what it was, she thought it was a bridge. Sinh took off her coat, put her little shopping bag down and rested. There seemed to be other plastic bags there too, abandoned, but she did not pay any attention to them, being taken so much by the idea of the bridge of boulders, and how much it gleamed, while all around it was dusty and muted in colour. She decided to go and sit on the stones in the middle of the bridge, and pretended that she was in fact overlooking a great waterfall, like the one in
Đà Lạt
. Then, for her own amusement she discovered that if she lay down on her back, and hung her head over the rocks, she could view the great waterfall upside down, its powerful gushing sounds drowned out all the other sounds. She proceeded like this until her long hair slipped out of its elastic tie, and fell into the murky water. Her wet hair dripped on her dark coat.

Dark and thick clouds gathered at the top of the hill, and she started to get cold, and would certainly get colder still if she didn't begin to return home straight away. So she rushed off, up the hill, until halfway up she realised she had forgotten her little shopping bag at the bridge of rocks. She hurriedly ran down the hill. When she reached the boulders, she looked at the very spot. It was then that she took in all the other abandoned plastic shopping bags, as though they had been placed there
all along to confound her. She glanced at each one, but none were hers. She looked all around in case it had been blown over. She looked behind and in front of it, and still it was not there. Behind her was the river, unmarred by any fallen bag.

She caught a glimpse of something moving just above her, positioned between herself and the top of the hill. With great dread Sinh looked up. His face was unspeakably dark and grim and his hair danced with the howling wind. His menace grew as he nonchalantly looked down at his large hands and comforted her, “I am not going to hurt you.”

Even as the scream left her throat, Sinh knew that it would never reach the top of the hill in the wind. Even as she recognised that last utterance from her throat, she could not believe that this
absoluteness
had arrived so unexpectedly, and she regretted the trouble and confusion that those left behind would face when they searched for her, only to find nothing except for her little plastic bag sitting peacefully at the large boulders she had visited that day.

Trung

Trung ran to Đào's front door while Tuyết waited in the car. The wind roared through the trees, like sets of large waves. He came back with a suitcase of Đào's clothing, and then Đào herself. They drove away in
the middle of the night in the whooping-cough car. Trung watched the lights from the used-car yards near Đào's house disappear in the distance. He gripped the steering wheel as rain and strong wind pushed his car sideways.

In the passenger seat, Đào's breathing was uneven. She was asleep and had started to dream.

As the car moved along, Đào yelled in a high-pitched voice, “Anguli took your money. I haven't found it, I've been finding all kinds of things…”