The Beauty of Humanity Movement (39 page)

H
ng read the contents of
Fine Works of Spring
to her, then those of
Fine Works of Autumn
. She took it all in and appeared to want more, and so he proceeded to read the
Nhân Van
magazines to her, as well as the poems Ðạo had copied down for him with his own hand.

Through poetry, H
ng conveyed to Lan a world of allegory and metaphor, and just as he had once not understood such concepts, the multiple layers of meaning at work, she did not at first understand.

“How can he claim his love for her is so great if he is only willing to feed her one cherry a month?” she asked. “It is very selfish of him to leave her hungry, is it not?”

“But he does not want to overwhelm her,” said H
ng, speaking his own truth through Ðạo’s lines.

Where Ðạo described the country as the smallest in a nest of red- lacquered Russian dolls, she recalled a promise her grandfather had once made to buy her a toy from Paris.

She understood things only in literal terms, but it did not matter. He loved her for her innocence, for her sensory appreciation, for the fact that when she heard a lemon described she could taste a lemon.
And he loved her proximity. While he read Ðạo’s poetry to her, she would study the illustrations in the journals, leaning in close to him, smelling of the coriander flowers she used, when she could find them, to wash her hair.

“But you are not reading,” she said one day, as she looked up from an illustrated page.

“I have it memorized,” he said of the poem, a favourite.

“Teach me,” she said, placing her hand on the page lying between them.

He stared at those graceful fingers, their beautifully tapered tips and natural polish, and thought, Oh, but, my dear girl, I cannot. Surely my heart would break.

H
ng had studied Ðạo’s poetry with his untrained eye and found his heart moved. His heart had then begun to educate his eye. He had recited certain poems so often that they had become part of him, as familiar as the tongue in his mouth. To teach the girl one of these poems would be to give himself to her. To see himself in her mouth.

He quickly changed the subject, pointing at the moon. “Did you hear the Russians put a man in the sky this week?”

“But why would they do such a thing?”

“Perhaps so they could prove once and for all that God does not exist.”

News of the wider world could not distract her for long, though; it was far less compelling than the world they were creating between themselves.

One evening, as she reclined on her elbow, hair loose about her shoulders and bare feet interlaced, she said, “Maybe one day you will have a shop again and all the artists will come back. And I will work for you. I will chop the herbs and wash the dishes.”

The scenario was so impossibly perfect that H
ng knew this exchange could not continue. It was torture. It would cause him to dream the impossible, will the dead to life, act on impulses better left buried. He would lose his way and perhaps destroy her in the process. And look how thin the girl had become in recent months: what had he been thinking feeding her only poetry? He needed to find his way back to making ph
.

But how did one make ph
from nothing? Even the rice ration, when it was available, did not fill more than the palm of his hand—and that included the maggots. And so he was forced to experiment. One day he pulled weeds from the pond and laid them out to dry in the sun until they were as crispy as rice paper. Then he ground the dried weeds in a makeshift mortar until he had a fine powder, to which he added enough water to make a paste. He poured the paste onto a grid of dried, woven grass and left it to bake in the weak sun. When it had set, he cut the sheet into fine strips for his first batch of pondweed vermicelli. He improved upon the vermicelli the next time, making sure to use only the white hearts of the weeds. The slightly muddy taste was easily masked with a dash of
. He had to make do with fish and wild leeks for the broth.

The girl and her grandmother were the first to taste H
ng’s communist-era ph
. From the looks on their faces, H
ng knew he’d been successful. The broth tasted nothing like it should have, but it was pleasant enough, and the vermicelli was quite convincing.