The Beauty of Humanity Movement (86 page)

“What is it?” Lan asked, putting her fingertips to the paper.

H
ng inhaled deeply before reading the line of dedication. “‘To H who is wise in matters of soup and well beyond.’”

“H,” said Lan. “Is it you?”

H
ng read aloud the poem that followed.

Ðạo wrote of longing for those who had disappeared, all the innocent farmers and compromised children. He wrote in the elliptical way of a poet, without naming who was responsible. He had gone well beyond theory and found the stinging heart. Ðạo had atoned through poetry, spanning the differences between their worlds, capturing the tragedy of the countryside so viscerally that H
ng could taste blood on his tongue.

H
ng stopped reading and wiped his lips.

“What’s the matter?” Lan asked.

“My mouth,” he said, turning toward her. “Is it bleeding?”

She put her delicate finger to his chin and said, “Open.” She peered into his mouth. “There is no blood. But, H
ng,” she added, “I can taste it too.”

H
ng still holds that poem somewhere deep inside him. He can share stories about the Beauty of Humanity Movement with T
, with Bình, even with a relative stranger like Miss Maggie, but he has not been able to share poetry with another soul. Not since the day he returned home from peddling his pondweed noodles to discover all his papers— the journals and the poems, every single one of them—gone.

He had torn the place apart. He had wept for years, not observably, but on the inside. The poems that he had memorized slowly bled out of him from lack of use. Is this why his chest hurts now?

He swallows a good medicinal dose of Bình’s rice wine as the sun beyond his shack sinks into the ground. He toasts Ðạo’s picture upon the altar, framed and illuminated by a ridiculous pair of shoes.

T
returns to the Metropole at half past five and paces the lobby while he waits for Miss Maggie. He’s rehearsing a speech in his mind, one
that will allow them both to save face. If she pushes, as Americans tend to push, and forces him to say something less than polite, it will be she who is at fault for not knowing the Vietnamese culture.

Miss Maggie approaches with a smile and her jacket folded over her arm. “I thought we could get out of here,” she says. “Go somewhere for a drink.”

“Um. Yes?” says T
, disarmed by her informality.

“And please try to call me Maggie,” she says over her shoulder as they snake their way up the sidewalk. “The Miss just makes me feel like a schoolteacher.”

Maggie
,
Maggie
, T
repeats in his head as he follows her to a place he doesn’t know even though he thought he knew almost every bar in the city. It’s a funny little Russian vodka bar called Na zdorovye— “cheers”—the only Russian word T
knows because they replaced Russian with English as the second language in schools in 1988.

Which is just fine with him. T
finds everything Russian, apart from perestroika and glasnost, a bit sad. The crappy Minsk motorbikes and the cloudy potato vodka that makes you sick and all the stories of young Vietnamese who got scholarships from the Russian government to study in Moscow but ended up freezing to death alone in unheated apartment blocks in winter.