Anguli Ma (3 page)

Bác withdrew from the brightness of the past, to sit up slowly on her thin bed-mattress. Đào moved across the partitioned studio and pulled the nylon curtains open. Bác was suddenly bathed in the harsh daylight, and she quickly shielded her eyes.

She knew that her landlady was here to collect the board and lodgings for the month. Instead of enacting the transaction, Bác charged into her complaints of aches and pains, and how she was far from even her distant relatives in this strange
nước lạ quê người
.

“It is too late for me, in my old age, to make use of this new land.
Nếu tôi mà tuổi em
, what I could do with this new beginning, but I don't have your energy. Why did he take me along to abandon me on this land? And now he is in some watery grave never to be seen again.”

Đào stared mutely at the cardboard boxes and a still-life print, of glistening European fruit, that made up the partition in the room.

“My only son, so
có hiếu
. He didn't want me to spend my dying days amongst
mấy Ổng – bọn cướp đất tao
! They confiscated our land, our house, our entire life savings, and called him ‘
thằng ngụy
', a ‘puppet' of the Americans. For which nationalist ideology did they do this? For
their own children to be fattened by our ancestral property,
để cho con cháu nó ăn
! This is what it means to be a conquered people…And then to come over here, to the cold, and work like
một con
servant. You work your fingers to the bone too, Đào, and what for? To lurch into your old age in this foreign land? Feel these hands of mine, feel what they've become.” Bác reached out and clasped her landlady's hands.

Đào gently pulled away from the old woman's icy, thin fingers and returned her hands to the plastic bag on her lap. “
Cô
, do not think about the past too much; thinking about it just makes us sad. And what's the point?” Đào said. Then, to cheer Bác up, Đào changed the topic. “You should wear socks to protect your feet. What do you expect if you wear open sandals in this cold weather?”

Bác became aware of her poor feet, how the wrinkly skin gathered just above her cracked heels.

“I am not used to socks, for more than six decades my feet have been bare…” Bác protested.

Đào slowly produced a new pair of socks from the plastic bag. “But Bác, I even had to argue with the stall holder over them. He told me that woollen socks were warmer. What lies! He was just working on a commission. Then I said to him, ‘Mr Stallholder, I could buy three pairs of nylon socks for the same price, and wear them all at the same time!' And this made him laugh a lot, so he gave me a discount.”

Đào handed her the dark blue nylon socks. “You wear them, Bác.”

“Okay,” she said, “I will wear them later.”

She rose slowly, and put them in a drawer in front of the partition, without taking them out of the wrapping.

Bác would eventually send the socks back to the countryside in
Việt Nam
as a gift from the West. They would arrive six months later, after having been thoroughly inspected by the new Communist government for “subversive political content”. Then, back in the village, what remained of Bác's extended family would be allowed to collect them from the State-run postal service. There, the socks would be highly prized, but completely useless due to the tropical heat, and would also be kept in a drawer.

Đào

Đào left the studio after she received Bác's money, and went along the narrow path past the bathroom-outside. She crossed the yard to the garage. There was a stench in the air. Đào wondered if the smell was coming from the vacant lot beyond her back fence. Perhaps a rat, or a stray cat, had trapped itself in some disused piece of equipment or column of tyres.

Perhaps the thick smell came from Đào's neighbours, an Australian couple whom she never saw except when the ruddy-faced husband
worked in his garden, swearing at his lawnmower. He also swore at the houses down the street, who all mowed their lawns in an accidental sequence, two-stroke engines starting up, one after another, throughout the entire weekend. “Fuck fuck fuck,” Đào would hear her neighbour mutter, just loud enough to be heard from the other side of the fence. The only other times she saw him outside was when he drank beer, alone, in his immaculate garden. Then Đào could hear his AM radio and the names of horses jostling one another for the race announcer's breath.

Đào sniffed the air along her neighbour's fence; the rotting smell did not come from there. No, it was nearer. Perhaps from her garage.

Anguli Ma had gone to work, so perhaps she should have a look around. A truck roared past, its fumes deadened the smell in her nostrils for a few breaths. As she came closer, Đào was overcome by the fetid stench of rotting meat. She knocked on the warped door and waited. A soft breeze came over her and provided a moment of relief. It was silent inside the garage, so Đào took out her key and started to open the door.

Đào heard Anguli Ma's footsteps. He was coming down the side of the house. What was he doing home so early? She heard him open the gate, so she hid the key inside her fist and proceeded to knock on his garage door again. She stood and waited earnestly.

“What are you looking for?” His voice was right by her ear.

“Oh,” Đào turned around in feigned surprise, “I thought you were sleeping inside.”

“I'm at work this time of the day.”

“I am collecting the money for board and lodgings.”

Anguli Ma unlocked the warped wooden door and was closing it after him, but Đào pushed her way in.

“What's the smell in here?” She stepped inside the garage. Clothes and shoes had been strewn indiscriminately on the floor, cigarettes lay dead in an overflowing tray of ash and crushed butts, empty beer cans had collapsed on the ground. The walls had previously been stained from water damage, but now there flourished plumes of mould. The air inside was stagnant, which magnified the rancid stench of meat. Anguli Ma reached down to pick a wrinkled jacket from the floor. He checked its pockets for his tobacco and lighter, and then slipped it on.

Đào scanned the room for the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the bed. While holding her breath, she ran over and picked up a bowl of decomposing
Bún Bò Huế
that sat on the concrete floor. When she stood up, Đào caught a dark, disdainful look on Anguli Ma's face, which was immediately concealed by a genial mask.

“Thank you,” Anguli Ma said after the shortest pause. His voice was eerily small, as though it came to her from very far away. “You've found it. How forgetful of me. My sense of smell seems to be not what it was since working at that abattoir.” The frayed collar of his T-shirt was awry, as was his mouth.

Đào felt a wave of nausea about to crash over her, and ran outside to get a lungful of fresh air.

In between deep intakes of breath, Đào asked, “Have you got the money for me?”

“Unfortunately, I won't have it until next…Wednesday.” His face was half hidden in the darkness of the garage; his voice seemed thin and detached.

“What? Next week?” Đào said, “I need the money for the
hụi
this Saturday!” She was about to dart into the garage once more, but he had closed the door.

Đào cursed under her breath, “
Thằng thô bỉ!
”

She stood there looking at the wood panelling, unsure what to do.

Then, her rashness was restrained by a new thought. In the pale sunlight, Đào was not even sure if she had seen that fleeting, terrifying look on her new tenant's face.

She carried the rancid soup past the bathroom-outside, down the concrete path dotted with stunted pot plants. At the very end of her backyard, Đào emptied the bowl of rotting
Bún Bò Huế
into three plastic bags, tied each one up securely and placed it in the rubbish bin, lined with old advertising material. She hosed down the bowl, spraying the foul juice onto her mint weeds, and marvelled at the way her new tenant was unaffected by the stench.

The Brown Man

“Sit down,” the monk says softly.

The brown man looks at the bench, which is covered with thick drops of rain.

Then, in the gentlest of voices, the monk says to him, “You are ignorant. Your anger…is the result of your ignorance. Sit, and cross your legs.”

The brown man is still agitated by the composure of the monk. He keeps his leering eyes on the monk as he slowly sits. He can injure this monk, he can subjugate and debase him. Yet the monk is not taken in by his seething anger. This monk is a cool and smooth pebble.

They are both seated now, side-by-side. The brown man's hands start to move, touching different pockets, not knowing where to be.

“Lower your eyes, close them if you can. Now observe your breath. Watch how it comes in, then goes out again.”

How stupidly simple, the brown man wants to blurt, but realises that the monk might have seen him in the park earlier. This makes him suddenly nervous.

“Everything is changing, changing, changing,” the monk continues. “As soon as you sit down your mind has already begun to wander. Bring the mind back to the breath.”

The rain eases, and the park is now empty of birds, wild rabbits,
foxes and dogs who have all scurried away from the storm. Cool air seems to envelope the men.

The brown man decides to find out what the monk has seen, if he has seen anything. So he reaches out and takes the monk's words, grasps them by the neck, chokes and drags them, limp and unconscious, back into his very being. The brown man sits apprehensively with his eyes closed. His mind shifts from his own anguish to the monk's flat and round face. It fidgets and fights with a thousand ideas, how he would teach this stupid monk a lesson; the cold, discarded meal he ate; the beautiful garland of dripping red buds. Then his mind wanders in the opposite direction as tension pushes against his forehead.

He opens his eyes a little to peek at the monk, whose eyes are indeed closed. Bolder now, the man looks openly at the monk's profile, tracing the perfectly balanced features, the monk's easeful frame. He is searching for the markings of history on the monk's countenance to locate his place within the order of things. Yet the brown man cannot perceive such lines.

Then, he has an experience that is completely unknown to him. Without willing or choosing it, his mind drops between the churning waves of anguish into something underneath, as though submerged momentarily into another world. Resting beneath his wandering, agitated mind is the clear and still truth. He has his first taste of not grasping at the future or the past.

Then, just as suddenly, it is gone and the brown man is back on the choppy surface, scarcely understanding what has happened. As quickly as the truly present moment has come, it has vanished, and inside his mind again swirl a thousand thoughts of violence and hate.

The monk tells him, “The human race needs to practise to know itself as an animal.”

Together they sit, feeling the subtle movement of air through their nostrils. The blades of grass glisten with droplets of rain, and the earth warms with returning sunlight.

Đào

Đào figured that even a piece of junk was better than nothing. Something can always be pulled off one thing and tied onto or stuck onto another thing – you improvised what was needed as you went along. Đào loved found things, pilfered things too, takeaway containers, plastic forks and spoons, little paper parcels of salt and pepper from the fast-food chains.

The sound of the highway traffic rose and fell outside her house. When Đào thought all her tenants had gone out, she went to the spare room, which was right next to her own bedroom. The lock was stuck. She tried again, and kept turning the door handle, but nothing budged.
Her temples became hotter as she tried again, turning the key at a slower rotation. And then it unclicked.

The spare room was crammed with overstuffed cardboard boxes and bags. In this room, she had several hiding places for her valuables: at the bottom of a box of tissues; inside a ceramic vase bought at the Trash & Treasures; in amongst the clean rags from the factory. Đào carefully rotated her hiding places, and was confident of her ability to recall the ever-changing sequence with the changing days and weeks. The boxes were filled with scraps of fabric which had been precision-cut, fifty layers at a time into shoulder panels, collars, torsos, scooped pockets ready for over-locking into tracksuits. She received these scraps of material for free and used them to clean any spills in the kitchen or to tie around the stems of leaky taps. Đào pulled several wads of twenty-dollar notes from amongst the fabric, turquoise and indigo, and anxiously arranged the offcuts around them.

Then, she heard a creak from the back door. She ran into the kitchen expecting to see one of her tenants, but to her alarm it was empty. Đào interrogated the scene. She asked herself if a tenant might have seen her hide the money. She hurried to the living room and peered through the window into her front yard, through the plastic lace curtain, the venetian blinds and metal grilles, but could see nothing out of place.

Đào left the window and returned to the spare room, where she rearranged her valuables in new hiding places all over again.