Anguli Ma (9 page)

Đào passed the studio, and slowly patrolled the backyard. No sign of movement. She looked across to the garage window; it was dark inside and out. The concrete felt rougher than usual beneath her feet, the side fence was a profusion of malevolent splinters as she walked by, and from beyond the back fence an eeriness seemed to reach out to her with its velvety substance.

“Anguli?” Đào called out. No answer. She gripped the meat cleaver tightly, and dragged her heavy feet towards the bathroom-outside.

“
Ai đó
?” but heard no reply.

She pushed the door open slightly, and caught a glimpse of a dark shoe behind the door. Đào stared as the shoe shifted slightly. Then she heard a movement of air from the bathroom – a fart.

Without thinking, Đào used all her strength to pull back on the door handle, closing the door tightly. To trap the monster inside the
bathroom. Đào's forehead was warm with sweat. She felt her hands moisten and the meat cleaver began to get heavy. Inside, the toilet flushed. Water flowed, for what seemed a long time. A river of waiting.

With a violent force, the intruder yanked the door open, dragging Đào's arms and body into the bathroom. He punched her head with a square fist. A burning pain rang in Đào's cheek and nose; she dropped the meat cleaver. His smell emanated from the toilet.

“I knocked on your door earlier,” the intruder told her.

He was broad across the chest and head and had thick black hair. His ears were swollen and shrivelled up like dried fungus. So this is
thằng
Cowboy that she had been warned about.

“…I was out all day,” Đào backed away from him, both her arms covering her face and head. He shoved her off balance and she fell onto the concrete.

“Where's the money?”

“I don't know where it is. It was taken – ”

He lifted his foot and got her just below the rib cage. He kicked her in the liver. Her eyes turned glassy with pain. Đào tried to scream, but she couldn't even breathe.

“Think harder, or this will really hurt.”

“I'm not…I'm not hiding…I swear.” Her bracelet scraped on the concrete as she tried to crawl. Her voice sounded like a collection of other people's voices all talking at once, fluctuating up and down.

She tried to stand but her legs were shaky.

The back door flung open. “
Cô
,” Sinh's voice called, and light from the kitchen was thrown over a corner of the backyard. “
Cô
Đào!” Sinh ran out with a torch, shining it straight into the intruder's face.

He had an unusually large forehead, and his eyes were focused somewhere in front of it, like a dog following the scent of meat. He stood and stared at the girl's long black hair swaying in the cold darkness.

Sinh let out a scream, “I'll remember you –
thằng vồ
! I'll describe you exactly. You're as tall as that door.”

“They sent me; no one will find me. Everyone will help conceal us,” he spat and then bolted over the back fence, disappearing into the shadows of the disused factory.

The meat cleaver lay, edge dented, on the tiles of the toilet floor. Đào clutched her side, as Sinh helped her back to the kitchen.

“Was it Anguli Ma?” the old woman asked.

“No, it was a bad-luck number with a big forehead,” Đào said. She looked at Sinh, and felt a pang of regret.

“How do you say it in Vietnamese?”

Đào said it the usual way.

“Are you Vietnamese?”

“Yes.”

“Not Chinese?”

“Yes,” Đào agreed.

“Chinese?”

“No. Vietnamese.”

“How do I say your name?”

Ahh, now she had to think for a moment, being unused to having to describe something she did not usually have to think about.

“Đào.”

“Dow?”

“No, Đào. There is a falling…sound.”

“Da-ow”

It's as close as she'll ever get, Đào thought, and smiled politely.

“I got it?”

“Yes,” Đào said, “Yes,” and nodded.

“We can take down your description – but from what you've told us, he could be any number of persons.”

The Brown Man

When he wakes, he realises he has been sweating out impurities during his sleep, from his meditation earlier that day.

He is clean from washing himself in the river, upstream from the murky scum. He is fed, from discarded food and some weeds and berries foraged in the park; he is quenched from the drinking fountain. Where the river splits in two to form a small island is where he sits. Seventeen moons come and go; the plants change in their colour and thickness. Few walkers come to this side of the park, and so no one crosses the river to reach him. He makes a thin raft to cross from one bank to the other.

Inside the cave, the man is sheltered from the extremes of the weather, and his meditation becomes longer and deeper. He sits through the hot seasons and the cold and wet seasons. Even when the howling winds blow through the cave, the man is able to sit with increasing equanimity. He experiences the difference between physical pain and mental pain; he comes to realise that without the latter, almost all physical pain is tolerable. He sits with extreme pain, riding its peaks and troughs, and afterwards at the next sitting finds that his focus is profoundly deepened for having persevered with the pain. His mind wanders to the icy fingers that touch his shoulder in the middle of the night. He can no longer tell whether this is a dream, a hallucination, or that he has been awakened by her; her body, so beautiful, except the bloody stumps where the fingers had been. The man feels the weight of it, the sacrificial garland, the flesh and nails of it. Icy fingers touching him in the night.

The man tells the monk of the vividness of his visions and memories and dreams. The monk advises him that these are the impurities of the mind, which arise from deep meditation.

“Do not place attachment to them at this moment. Try to return to the present. So much has happened to each of us.”

Beyond that, the monk remains silent, because the truly sacred things one does not talk about until the listener is ready. They watch the tea-coloured water glide past under the slender trees, as the brown man rests his sore legs and back.

Bác

The old woman locked the door to the studio; the girl had a key so she could get in later. Or if she had forgotten her key, she could knock and Bác would get out of bed to unlock the door for her.

Bác pulled the woollen blanket over herself and rubbed her legs together to get warm. The studio seemed bigger without Sinh on the other side. The old woman's eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and she scanned the partition, made up of cardboard boxes filled with fabric and household items the charities had donated to Đào when she first arrived. A large cardboard still life of fresh fruit covered another part of the partition, and then a curtain.

Bác slept, and dreamt that her son was calling her from the bottom of the ocean's body. And no matter how much she tried to bucket the salty water away to reach him, more would rush into the very spot. Her clothes were soaked, and clung heavily to her old thin body.

When she awoke, she saw that she was in the studio. The light was still on. The old woman didn't know what time it was. She switched off the light, and then realised as she stood in the dark that the reason the light was still on was because Sinh had not come home.

With all the troubles their landlady had had, and Đào's heart drying up like a piece of beef jerky, Sinh had made herself scarce from the house recently. Still, it was unusual for the girl to be out this late, especially on a cold night. Bác eventually fell asleep.

Her ears brought her attention back to the studio. She heard a female voice speaking methodically and comfortingly. “She is just outside,” the old woman's hope rose; “It is Sinh, standing outside, trying to be quiet so she won't wake the landlady up,” the old woman thought.

“I'm coming, I'll open the door in one second.” Bác began to rise dully from her bed. She managed to sit up, and had one foot out of bed, when she realised that the female voice had continued talking, over her response.

“Sinh?”

The old woman's mind became attuned to the cadence of the female voice. It was in English, and there were no pauses in her speech. Not
a conversation, not a live person standing outside their door, the old woman began to dread.

Where was Sinh at this time of the night? Who could she be with right now? The Cowboy or someone else? Her alarm pricked her. Bác realised that it was the voice of a radio announcer, floating across from the neighbour's house. The old man was drinking beer alone with his radio on, in the peaceful night.

Đào

She offered more fruit to the Buddha and Ancestors. Buddha's eyes were serenely downcast, while her dead parents looked out from the photograph as though stunned by the flash from the camera. Đào pressed the thin stems of incense between her palms, and raised them three times to her forehead.

“
Phật ơi, Nam mô a di đà Phật
, Buddha please keep me sane.
Nam mô a di đà Phật
, Buddha keep me sane.
Nam mô a di đà Phật
, please keep me sane.”

The smoke was sliced with each gesture by the incense sticks, and dissipated into thin haze. She had tried to calm the old woman down, and perhaps she did do a good job, but now Đào found her hands trembling as she planted the incense sticks in the urn. She stood there,
lost. This was the terror of emptiness, of finding herself utterly severed from her ancestral land. Đào looked over to the crucifix, very high up above the door. Jesus' head drooped heavily to one side, and Đào could not see whether His eyes were closed. Đào did not know whether He was the Son of God or not, as the tall church-people had told her, but maybe He had some influence in this peaceful, rich land, and could pass on her prayers for a future of peace and prosperity.

Đào planned to keep her own ears and eyes open. She tried to tell her son about it when he came over that weekend with Tuyết. There was an unusual silence between them, as Đào tried to tell Trung her fears, that the girl was missing; that Thảo and others from the
hụi
group had enlisted the Society-Black after she had lost their money.

“Where is the girl today?” her son unthinkingly asked, somehow tuning into his mother's fears.

“I don't know where she is…” Đào was about to continue, but then stopped. She tried to pull the words up from her stomach, to throw them from her mouth into the wide world. The pain still lingered. She felt a sickness in her liver that she could not get rid of. If grief was a colour, it was certainly a dirty orange. Her son stood on the edge of the unknown, wanting to ask further.

“I need to borrow money from you,” Đào said abruptly.

“How much?” he asked in a careful tone of voice.

“
Bây giờ mày có
how much money?” she demanded.

He shifted uneasily and looked around the cluttered room. “I've got enough,” Trung declared, ready to defy her if she was going to berate him for earning so little, for being lazy, for being selfish and wanting to enjoy his life outside the shadow of catastrophe.

“But you don't have anything spare, do you? Nothing big saved up for a rainy day.”

“I've got enough to look after my family…” Trung's voice wavered.

“Just as I thought,” Đào said, shrinking in her disappointment.

Finally, Trung gave up. “I've got to go, I'll pick Tuyết up at six.”

Đào picked up the phone and dialled Thảo's number. The phone rang and rang and rang out. She listened incredulously and then put the receiver down. She tried to breathe but her chest was heavy. She picked up the phone again and dialled, listening to the regular tone in the earpiece. She counted the rings, then the line cut out at thirty-six. No one home, or Thảo was not answering.