The Beauty of Humanity Movement (104 page)

T
slaps some đ
ng on the table and stomps out of the bar.

His feet know where he’s headed before his brain does. T
marches straight over to the eastern edge of the Old Quarter. If anyone knew Maggie’s father, it would be Mr. Võ. All the old artists took their coffee at his café—Võ is to coffee what H
ng is to ph
—but unlike H
ng, Võ has managed to hold on to his shop, keeping his doors open throughout the decades, even during the years when his weekly rations allowed him fewer beans than he would use today to make a single cup, even during the years when the government stores carried no coffee and he had to reuse and reuse old grinds.

T
has not visited the café since he was a child, but he finds it exactly as he remembers it. Mr. Võ has few customers at this hour, just a couple of men using a tabletop as the board for a game of
c
t
ng
, Chinese chess, cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, squinting through the smoke as they calculate their next moves.

T
admires the Bùi Xuân Phái paintings he remembers—the three street scenes hanging on the cracked part of the south wall. Phái’s pictures of the streets of Hanoi look so very different from the streets today. They are empty and grey, without food stalls or motorcycles or markets or shops displaying shiny items or windows draped with red lanterns and colourful fabric.

“Was it really like this?” T
remembers asking his father when he saw these paintings for the first time.

“This is the Hanoi I knew,” he had said.

The Hanoi T
s father knew looked dead.

They say Bùi Xuân Phái was so poor that he had to pull the gold caps off his teeth in order to pay the rent. Now his work is being sold to foreigners for thousands and thousands of dollars. T
wonders if Mr. Võ has any idea how much the works on his walls would be sold for in one of those fancy new galleries. But Mr. Võ would never sell the pieces; he would not get rich off the backs of friends who died in poverty.