The Beauty of Humanity Movement (109 page)

The oil begins to bubble and T
throws the cubes of fish into the pan. He tosses in the dill and stirs it with his chopsticks until it wilts, then lifts the fish onto a bed of vermicelli and dresses it with peanuts and coriander.

“Taste,” he says, presenting it to her.

The fish is soft and buttery with oil, earthy with turmeric and collapses perfectly in the mouth.

“Good?”

“Delicious,” says Maggie, wiping a drop of oil from her bottom lip. “You know what, T
? You’re my first proper Vietnamese friend,” she says in English, as if it’s the only language suitable for such words.

“I’m not so proper,” he replies shyly.

H
ng owns no land, but by claiming an inch each year, he has come to consider a small rectangular patch in front of his shack as his own. He grows long beans and peppers and onions under chicken wire to prevent feasting by the foraging creatures of night.

This year he has been blessed with an extravagant addition to his garden, a thing he would not have dared display just a few years ago. It is a flower, some type of orchid with petals like pale pink tongues. He’d come across it while pushing his cart to work one morning. He’d been suspended in an early morning dream of himself and Bình aboard a sampan, H
ng pedalling the oars with the thick soles of his feet while Bình dragged aboard net after net teeming with fish. He could still see the floor of the sampan shimmering like liquid mercury when he heaved his cart over the dirt lip of a building site, taking a shortcut through the old Soviet spark plug factory slated for demolition.

He followed the track through the dirt, stopping short of a mound that the bulldozer had clearly missed. But the shape of the mound was deliberate, he realized, a perfect circle framing this unlikely pink flower. It caused him to exclaim aloud.

He knelt and freed the flower from imminent death. He replanted her later that day, crowning her queen of a small country of vegetables.

The symbolism is not lost on him. Lan was once such a queen.

H
ng is surprised she never married. Surprised she never went in search of somewhere or something better. Her beauty has not faded in all these decades, and even though he has avoided gazing upon it, he has, on occasion, felt it shine upon his back like a warming sun.

H
ng walks down to the pond this afternoon, consciously avoiding glancing over his shoulder. He asks Thuy Doc if he might borrow his sampan for an hour. He feels he has grown stronger in the days since Maggie’s visit; remembering a few lines of poetry, he feels renewed. He’s in the mood to cook something special this evening, and he’s thinking of the delicate warmth of an eel and mushroom soup. He leaves his slippers on the shore and pushes the wooden boat into the water, pulling his muddy feet aboard last. The bottom of the boat is a velvety green, the oars worn smooth by years of sweat and repetitive motion. He rows himself to the centre of the pond, equidistant from the shantytown and the tire factory. The water is as opaque as wood, the sky above, leaden. We are not so adventurous as the other animals, H
ng thinks, inhabiting just this narrow band between earth and water, earth and sky.

He drifts toward the western edge of the pond, dragging a net through the reeds. He looks toward home: his shack and hers, only a metre between them. He’d suggested joining their shacks once, bridging that metre with some combination of wood and bamboo and corrugated tin. It was just after Lan had taken his finger into her
mouth. A wall between them had collapsed. He’d felt the urge to tear the rest of them down.

“If we took out this wall, we would have another room entirely,” he said, leading her into his spare shack.

She looked around admiringly, acquainting herself with its contents. Where he slept, kept his few clothes, his cooking utensils and his stash of precious magazines.

She stood so close to him that he could smell the wild garlic on her breath. It made his mouth water, as if in anticipation of a great meal.

“I’m sure my grandmother would like it very much,” she said. “But, H
ng, if we did live together, where would we all sleep?”

He cleared his throat and said nervously, “Well, that would depend.”

“On what would it depend?”

“On whether I am like an uncle to you or more like a husband.”

“A husband,” she responded, but he could not interpret her tone.

Did this shock her or appeal to her, or was it just a simple statement of fact? Had he destroyed everything with one word or set it free?

T
has waited a week at Maggie’s insistence, but he can’t stand to wait any longer. He makes his way to Café Võ alone after work one night, a camera stuffed in his back pocket. It is just before 7 p.m. and he stands in the doorway, a sick lump rising from his stomach to his throat. The tables and chairs are stacked in the centre of the room. All the paintings have been taken down; the walls are montages of tobacco-coloured outlines. Sloppy white stripes of fresh paint run from the ceiling to the floor of the south wall, where Mr. Võ is supervising a kid with a paint roller attached to a broom handle. T
hopes to God this is nothing more than a renovation.