The Beauty of Humanity Movement (107 page)

“He did them after they destroyed his hands,” says Maggie.

T
sees only lumpen shapes, thick, clumsy lines. She sees vitality and animation, humour and heroic effort.
They could not touch him inside
, Maggie reminds herself—the last words she had heard her mother speak. They had broken his hands, but not his spirit. That did not come until later.

“What happened to him in the camp?” Maggie had asked her mother as she lay in the hospital bed after her first stroke.

“They made him dig pit latrines, Maggie, can you imagine? The indignity of it. Hundreds of them. His only consolation was the time he spent alone underground. He liked the silence and he would carve pictures of animals into the mud walls down there, pictures no one would ever see—pictures that would soon be covered in people’s waste.

“After a year there was a new guard assigned to watch over the men digging the latrines. A scary one, very rigid, he carried an iron rod he would beat against his hand. One day he hopped down into a pit with your father and held a torch up to the walls.

“‘You did these?’ the guard asked. What could your father say?

“‘But they’re brilliant,’ said the guard, ‘Was this your job before?’

“Your father shrugged.

“And then you know what he did, Maggie? This new guard who everyone was afraid of? He began to smuggle bits of paper to your father. Dozens of little pieces. And pencils. Your father hid the paper underneath his overalls and kept the pencils under a floorboard in the little wooden hut he shared with the other diggers.

“One day he was returning to the hut when he was suddenly ambushed. Two senior guards knocked him to the ground and stripped off his clothes. They found a pencil and two drawings and demanded to know where he got the pencil and paper. But he wasn’t going to betray the guard. The two senior guards dragged your father, still naked, over to the barracks where the guard who oversaw work on the pit latrines lived. They dumped your father at this man’s feet. They put one brick on the ground and one in the guard’s hands. And then they ordered the guard to break your father’s fingers one by one.

“‘But he’s my best digger,’” the guard said.

“‘And just as good an artist as you said he was.’”

So this guard had set her father up and reported him? “But why would he do that?” Maggie had asked her mother.

“I don’t know. They called me in to clean up the mess afterward. I was just a nurse, only twenty; I knew nothing about setting bones. His hands had been completely shattered. As if they were made of glass. The best I could do was wrap them in bandages. He didn’t complain; he even thanked me. I loved him more than I knew it was possible to love.”

T
looks up at Maggie. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” she says, “it’s okay.”

A
s H
ng loads up his cart this morning, he finds himself glancing back over his shoulder. Lan’s shack is in darkness. He returns to his own shack, opens the paper box and cuts what remains of Maggie’s lemon meringue pie in half. It is a small piece, days old now, but still a lovely yellow topped with a cheerful burst of cloud. He wraps the slice of pie in banana leaf, piercing it closed with a twig whittled into a toothpick. He loops a piece of string under the twig and ties a knot.

He makes his way over to Lan’s shack, where he hangs the packet from a beam that extends over her front door, well out of reach of rats. He remembers how he used to do this during the war, but back then it was not fancy pies from the Metropole, it was pondweed and frogs’ legs. Mung beans and larvae and brown bark for tea.

H
ng returns to his waiting cart, plants his feet firmly, shoulder- width apart, and grasps the handlebars. He inhales and braces himself,
then exhales with a grunt as he thrusts his load up the slight incline. What an effort; he really is getting old. If he doesn’t keep moving, the spirits of silence will soon be upon him.

As he rights his cart on the dirt track he can smell the moment just before the sun rises in the air. He is late getting started, but he did not oversleep. How long had he stood upon Lan’s threshold? Perhaps a good deal longer than it had felt.

When H
ng returns home from breakfast duty a few hours later, he finds the banana leaf washed and laid flat to dry upon the threshold of his shack. He glances to his left. She is sitting on a stool sorting through a basket of rice. Picking out small stones and dried insects. She wears a kerchief in her hair like a woman from the country, and she wipes her brow with the back of her hand. She is concentrating on her task. She does not look up.

When her grandmother died some years after the war, H
ng had followed the small, sad procession to the temple to pay his respects. Lan turned around in her great, black mourning cape and looked directly at him. He turned his head and slinked away. It was the last time their eyes had met.

He wishes he could share what is in his heart in this moment.
I remember some of Ðạo’s poetry
, he would tell her.
I remember some of Ðạo’s poetry because of a girl who reminds me of you
.

Maggie follows T
up the street, motorbikes moving like purring cats beside them, navigating the distance by means of invisible whiskers. It is the dinner hour and people have thrown the wooden doors of their
houses open to the streets; the guts are fluorescent-lit, on full display, revealing cracked linoleum tiles and blaring televisions. Motorbikes are parked in front rooms and women are crouched on the pavement boiling rice over charcoal fires, frying beef and onions, pouring bubbled dishwater into the street.

At Café Võ two men are slapping down backgammon pieces with a loud clack on a wooden board and flicking their cigarette ashes over their shoulders, while Mr. Võ swishes a broom over the oily cracked tiles and a fan overhead creaks with each laboured revolution. The place is otherwise empty.

“T
,” Mr. Võ says, as he looks up from the floor. “I don’t see you for years, and then I see you two times in a week? Listen, I’m closing up now.”

“This lady,” T
says, gesturing at Maggie, “I think you’ve met. This is Maggie Lý, Lý Văn Hai’s daughter.”