Goodbye, Vietnam (8 page)

Kim and I and Loi tried to guess what the grandmother would have for herself. “A whole leg,” Kim guessed. “The neck,” Loi said. I could see he was thinking of all the juicy shreds nestled between the neck bones. I guessed it would be the liver, crisp on the outside and pale pink and smooth on the inside.

But when we asked my grandmother, she shook her head and looked haughty. “It is my duck and I choose to give it all to the others. It will be added to the rice and everyone will have a taste.” A murmur of awe went around the boat. Everyone was impressed. Our grandmother held her head high. The admiration of the other passengers tasted sweeter than the tender breast meat of the duck would have. After all the passengers had their rice and the lucky ones had found pieces of duck among the grains, the grandmother allowed Le Hung to coax her into accepting the drumstick of the duck to suck. “Only if you are sure all the meat is off of it,” she said.

When Le Hung handed it to her I thought I saw a good-size chunk of meat on the bone, but my grandmother popped the drumstick into her mouth so quickly I could not be sure.

10

In the days that followed Tet we often thought about the taste of duck, for our food and water were running out and land was nowhere in sight. There was only one meal a day, and that was a small one. I tried not to think of my empty stomach. When night came I was too hungry to sleep. Without food and with only a few sips of water, Dao did not have enough milk to give her baby, and the baby cried and hiccuped most of the night.

The first thing everyone looked for on waking in the morning was a thin dark line on the horizon that would mean land. But the horizon was as empty as our rice bowls. One morning Loi went about the boat collecting bits and pieces of string. Kim and I watched him knot a fish net. His fingers moved quickly, forming loops. When he finished a set of loops, he ran string through each one of them. When he pulled all the strings tight—there was a square of mesh.

At last the net was ready to be lowered into the
water. I kept thinking of the big catfish we sometimes caught in the stream that ran through our village, but Loi said there were no catfish in the sea. Each time he drew up the net I was sure there would be something in it, but each time it was empty. “There is nothing for bait, and besides, the movement of the boat frightens the fish,” Loi said. But we could not stop the boat. With our food and water nearly gone we had to find land in a hurry.

I was getting tired from standing in the glare of the hot sun and dizzy from not eating. The small ration of water everyone had been given that morning had left me thirstier than ever. I was looking at the cool green sea, wondering why there had to be so much water with salt in it, when I saw something floating on the surface of the sea. “Loi,” I called. “Look. What is that?”

“A turtle!” He quickly drew up the net and threw it out just in front of the swimming turtle. The splash of the net frightened the turtle, and it veered away from the net, coming closer to the boat. I could see its brownish-green shell shaped like a great upside-down bowl. It had a thick head and hooded eyes. Its
flippers worked slowly, pushing it along. Without taking the net out of the water, Loi slid it under the turtle and gave a quick jerk. The turtle rose out of the water with the net under it like a sling. Its head and feet disappeared into its shell. The flippers worked back and forth trying to swim out of the net into the air.

Loi swung the bamboo pole that held the net toward the boat, but just as the turtle was almost within reach, the tip of the pole, bent by the weight of the turtle, cracked, and the net and turtle fell into the water. In a second Loi was over the side of the boat and holding on to the turtle. I screamed for help. Someone threw a rope, but instead of tying it around himself, Loi wrestled it around the struggling turtle. “Pull!” he shouted.

Hands reached for the turtle, and the rope was cast out again to Loi, who used it to pull himself up to the boat’s edge where the men could boost him onto the deck.

The turtle was at least three feet across and ugly. As hungry as I was, I didn’t think I could eat anything that looked like that. “They’re delicious,” Kim
told me. “We used to make soup from them.”

I decided cities might not be such special places if that was what people ate. I couldn’t watch the men pry the turtle’s shell apart to get at the meat. I kept thinking of how much I had felt like a turtle without its shell when I was leaving our house. That made me sorry for the turtle, but when the time came to eat it, I was so hungry I took a small piece. It tasted like chicken, and I ate it greedily.

“I told you so,” Kim said.

But the little bit of food only sharpened everyone’s appetite. The insides of the turtle had been carefully saved for bait. Loi and some of the men made fishing lines and threw them overboard. They thought they were sure to catch something until they saw a sharp black fin skim the surface of the water. “Shark,” Loi said. “He’s after the bait and the hooks are too small to hold him.” A moment later the bait was gone.

As the afternoon grew hotter,
Bac si
Hong warned Kim and me not to move around so much. “Stay on your mats,” she said. “Movement makes you warm and that makes you perspire. It’s important that you should not lose any water from your body when there
is so little water to replace it.” But sitting with nothing to do made you think about how thirsty you were.

There was talk over how the small amount of water we had left ought to be divided. Some thought it ought to go to the old people, who seemed to feel the heat the most. Others said it should go to the children. “To the boys,” our grandmother said. “They will carry on the family name.”

Kim was shocked at this and started to answer my grandmother back, but her mother hushed her. “It is not a time for quarreling,” she said.

For once our grandmother and Kim’s mother were working together. Quang had fallen sick. He could not speak and part of his body was paralyzed. His right leg would not support him, and his right arm lay useless at his side. There had been a question of who would attend him. Dao and her husband wanted Kim’s mother, but everyone knew that if the old man could speak he would have asked for the grandmother.

The grandmother was too proud to push herself forward, but she watched with a skeptical eye as Kim’s mother examined Quang. When the examination was
over, Kim’s mother bowed gracefully to our grandmother and indicated that she would be glad to have the grandmother do her own examination. Pretending to be indifferent, the grandmother bent over the old man. He lay with his eyes closed, his chest heaving. I found myself holding my breath, waiting for Quang’s next breath to come. When my grandmother was finished she and Kim’s mother looked at each other. My grandmother shook her head sadly. Kim’s mother nodded agreement.

“There is nothing to be done,” the grandmother told Tho and Dao, “beyond prayer and incantations to insure the easy passage of his soul.”

They turned to Kim’s mother. She agreed. “Beyond prayers, there is nothing that can be done.”

Tho and Dao looked frightened. “If he should die at sea there would be no proper coffin and no burial ground,” Tho said. He pleaded with the grandmother and the
bac si
. The grandmother rubbed Quang’s useless arm and leg with some salve and repeated a number of incantations, explaining that if any of Quang’s three souls and nine vital spirits had departed from his body—as certainly they had—he could not live.
Her incantations would beg the souls and spirits to return, but she was sure it was too late.

Kim’s mother gave Quang some pills, which he was able to swallow only with great difficulty, but neither the pills nor the incantations helped. Quang slipped into a deeper sleep. He lay still as a statue. His breathing became so light you could not see his chest move unless you looked closely. In the evening he died. A great silence came over the boat, broken only by the sobbing and wailing of Tho and Dao.

At first I was afraid to look at Quang. I had never been that near to a dead person. But he lay so close to us it was impossible not to see him. I was relieved to find that he appeared quite peaceful. Dao and my grandmother had carefully dressed him and wrapped his head in a turban. His thin face with the high cheekbones and the scraggly beard and the long thin body looked like the statues that lay upon the tombs of ancient emperors. I had seen pictures of such tombs in my history book.

One by one the passengers came to offer their sympathy. Le Hung spared us a few grains of rice to put into Quang’s mouth so that he would not be hungry
on the journey to his next life. But there was not enough rice or tea for the ritual offerings. Finally the captain came and with many apologies explained that it was time for the burial. With great dignity the body was wrapped in a tarpaulin and, with Dao and Tho leading the way, was carried the few feet to the boat’s edge and gently lowered into the sea. Tho recited five prayers that entreated the soul of his father to leave his grave in the sea and return to the altar of their ancestors.

I thought this was the saddest part of all, for until Dao and Tho found a home, there would be no altar for Quang to return to, only the sea.

After the burial, no one said much. I could see that many of the passengers were thinking of other burials. Everyone on the boat had lost relatives in the many years of the war and the new government. Kim would be thinking of her father. Loi? Who knew what sad thoughts must be going through Loi’s head? I could not even look at him. Then something more terrible occurred to me. Suppose we never found land? Our food and water were nearly gone. Would we all be slipped, one by one, into the shark-filled sea like old Quang?

Others must have been thinking the same thing, for an argument was going on in the cabin over the direction the boat was taking. Loi wanted the captain to change the course of the boat. Loi insisted he was right because of the position of the stars and where the moon rose at night and the sun set and the way the winds blew. Most of the men believed Loi, for the journey was taking nearly three weeks, but Captain Muoi resented Loi’s interference. If the boy was right he, Captain Muoi, must be wrong. At last he agreed to try Loi’s course “for one night only.”

I watched the moon rise. As it climbed, it left a trail of silver footprints on the water. Loi explained to Kim and me that each night the moon rose in a slightly different place and that you could predict where those places were. That seemed strange to me. In all the space of the sky, how did the moon know where it should be? What kept it from being like our boat, just drifting on the sea of sky?

As I lay down to sleep, I noticed that there was a bit more space than usual. I didn’t have to curl my legs up quite as much. Grateful for the new comfort, I stretched out. Then I realized that the reason there was more room was because Quang had died. It was
his empty space. Feeling guilty, I pulled up my legs. Suppose his spirit was still with us, floating aimlessly about until Tho and Dao found a home where they could prepare a proper altar for Quang and the rest of their ancestors?

All night I lay in my cramped position, leaving Quang’s small space open.

PART FOUR
The Silver City

11

“Mai! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes. My arms and legs were so cramped I could hardly move. My empty stomach ached. Even in the cool morning my throat was dry. I saw people crowding toward the railing.

Kim was shaking me. “Mai! You can see buildings!”

I sat up. Anh, who was curled up next to me, awakened and looked around as if the buildings might be right in the boat. Our mother hurried after Thant, who was hanging over the railing. Anh and I followed Kim. The passengers were cheering. A few were silent, just looking and looking as though they could not get enough of what they saw. Kim pointed to the horizon, where I saw the silver city just as it was on Diep Van Tien’s postcard. I had never quite believed there could be such a place, but there it was. Hundreds
of buildings rose out of the sea and stretched unbelievably high into the air. “How do people get to the top?” I asked Kim.