A Thousand Tiny Truths Page 19

  There were no smirks or sly grins. Men did not look at Anh in the same way they eyed the women who took mini-steps in tall shoes along Tu Do, the ones who sang in bars and wore false fingernails and red flowers in their hair. Anh’s beauty wasn’t flashy. She hardly wore any makeup and her simple clothes only hinted at her body’s outline. But there was something in the way she held herself, her head high, back straight, that brought brave boys to shout I love you! in Vietnamese before dashing off. She could make a room full of men explode into silence. Everyone was a bit in love with her.

  At the market one day, a French man followed us and tried to convince her to marry him. He was a chef, he said. He offered to cook her a beautiful dinner. He said he made an exquisite consommé. “Be my wife! I will make you very ’appy!”

  I began holding her hand when we were out in public, so that others could see she was not free for the taking. I didn’t want anyone stealing her away from me.

  At dinner one night, when the three of us were eating together, chopsticks clacking against our bowls, I caught Oliver studying her.

  “More eating, you two,” she said, when she noticed the quiet.

  I looked at Oliver, then back at Anh. I watched her lift a prawn from the serving bowl, place it on her rice before taking a bite. At no point did the chopsticks make contact with her lips or tongue or teeth.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked, resting her chopsticks across her bowl. Lately she had noticed that Oliver wasn’t eating his meals so much as rearranging them.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just not very hungry.”

  She observed him for a moment, then picked up her chopsticks and started eating again. “I’ll make you some English food,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Thank you, Anh, but that won’t be necessary. Everything you make is wonderful.”

  “I’ll make it English,” she said, ignoring him. “But not too English.”

  He laughed and leaned back in his chair, studying her again.

  Later, when Anh left and we were alone, I asked Oliver if he thought Anh was beautiful.

  “Every woman is beautiful,” he said, smiling.

  “As beautiful as my mother?”

  As soon as I said this, his smile tightened.

  The next morning Anh took me to Samedi’s bookshop near the hotel and found recipes in a brittle copy of Betty Crocker and a magazine called Ladies’ Home Journal. Over the next few days, she learned to make mashed potato, breaded fish, and meat loaf in a glass dish. But she insisted on preparing vegetables the Vietnamese way—sliced and julienned so finely, they glowed like transparent matchsticks when lifted to the light.

  “Macee, come with me and see,” Anh said.

  She had discovered a sidewalk artist a block north of the hotel, an older man nicknamed “Raphael” who sported a scraggly white beard and did large chalk pastel portraits on a portable easel. There was a sign in Vietnamese on the ground. I asked Anh what it said.

  “It says he used to be a schoolteacher but he quit his job because there was not enough money to feed his children.”

  As people passed up and down the street, he called out to them in a singsongy voice, flattering and praising the beauty of men’s wives and children.

  When a woman sat down, I slipped into a gap in the crowd and approached the easel. He worked shockingly fast, no fiddling or underdrawing. He did all the showy things, emphasizing the woman’s best features, making her big eyes bigger, cheekbones longer. He added orangey pink skin highlights and fluttery lashes and gave her the kind of swept-up hair that made her look like women in the magazines.

  I walked back over to Anh and tapped her on the shoulder. “I want to start my own portrait business,” I said.

  “Okay, Macee. As long as you keep studying,” she said.

  I didn’t know where to get an easel, but Anh had an idea. That afternoon she took me to the river where an old French restaurant was being turned into a new American nightclub. You could tell it was American because the entire front had been painted with pictures of eagles and motorcycles. Anh walked under the scaffold and stepped through the empty window opening. Inside, a few boys, only slightly older than me, were hammering silver siding onto a bar. When they noticed her, one of the boys stopped and walked over.

  I don’t know what Anh said to him but a few minutes later, he headed to the back and returned with an A-frame pavement sign. It still had a smudged chalk list of recent food and wine arrivals by Air France (Le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé . . . ) in upright French script. Anh paid him and we lugged the wooden sign back to the hotel.

  The next day I was up early. I borrowed two chairs from the terrace and set myself up with my easel under a tree on the sidewalk. When my furniture was organized, I sharpened my pencils, clipped a piece of paper to the board and sat waiting. The paper fluttered in the breeze. The sun rose in the sky. Towards noon, I leaned back in my chair, watching the planes overhead and half listening to voices from the terrace, the dull clink of espresso cups on saucers, the pop and hiss of a bottle cap. I turned around and saw David subduing a reporter from New Zealand who was complaining about a recent altercation with a police officer. I could smell the grilled pork sandwiches they were eating and the mango and soursop in their drinks. The General stopped beside me, peered down at the blank paper with his brown leathery face, before continuing down the sidewalk. Eventually my stomach started rumbling, and I leaned my easel against the tree trunk and went inside.

  After lunch, there were plenty of people passing on the street but none of them stopped. At three o’clock, Anh came outside and coaxed two people to sit for me: an elderly fruit-seller whose trousers were so worn they hung in strips by his ankles, and the eldest daughter of the hotel manager, who kept her eyes on the pavement the entire time.

  I had my first official customer the next morning: a Canadian reporter named Daniel. He kept his eyes very open and sat very stiffly, hands folded in his lap, as though posing for a school photograph. No matter how many times I asked him to make himself comfortable, he just couldn’t relax.

  I had already decided that I would avoid tricks. I’d keep it simple. No emphasis on the nicer parts. No off-centre placement. My portraits would be the real thing. I couldn’t wait to write to Kiyomi and tell her I’d gone professional.

  “Not bad, not bad,” Daniel said when I was finished. He paid me 20 piastres and bought me a Fanta.

  When David found out what I was up to, he stood on the sidewalk shouting like an obnoxious carnival barker. “Check it out. Marcelangelo! Otherwise known as Oliver’s kid.”

  Soon, every new reporter who showed up at the hotel was stopping by for a drawing.

  I’d been drawing on the street for a week when I met Arnaud. The sun was shining directly overhead. I was about to take a break, when he sat down in front of me, short and dark-haired with a huge smile on his face.

  “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “David calls you a ‘freakish prodigy.’”

  “David’s crazy,” I said, and gave him a shy smile.

  He was wearing a white button-down shirt. A black cord dangled from his breast pocket.

  “I thought you were Vietnamese when I saw you,” he said. “But now I can see you’re probably . . .”

  “English,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Are you Vietnamese?” I asked, unsure, taking in his narrow eyes, high cheekbones, long nose.

  “Yep,” he replied. Sensing my curiosity, he added that his father was Vietnamese and his mother was French.

  We chatted for a moment, further introducing ourselves. His English was fluent but there was something different about the way he pronounced the words. A mixed accent. Maybe French and something else. He asked where I had learned to draw, and when I said I was self-taught, he nodded his head but didn’t make a fuss.

  “Are you an artist?” I asked.

  “No.” He pulled up the black cord hanging from his pocket to reveal a small light met
er. “A photographer.”

  “Do you take pictures of people?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any tips on making a good portrait?” I asked.

  “The first rule is to disappear. Find a corner and catch people without them knowing. Try a sideways look.”

  I glanced over at the terrace. It was crowded with reporters, waitresses in flowing silk pants. When the terrace was deserted, when the regulars weren’t at their tables at the usual time, you knew something was up. I saw Oliver and Joseph leaning together at a corner table, holding up a creased road map. I looked back at Arnaud. He grinned, exposing a row of evenly spaced teeth.

  “Actually, my advice,” he said as he stood to leave, “is to forget about people. You’re better off drawing trees.”

  When I returned to the hotel room an hour later, Oliver was busy packing a large canvas bag. Laid out on the table were a canteen, a jack knife, mosquito repellent and a flashlight.

  “I’m travelling to the countryside with Joseph for a few days,” he said, making it sound as if he were heading off for rolling meadows, fields of wildflowers.

  “The countryside?” I shot him a look. “I thought you were going to stay near Saigon. You promised you’d leave the dangerous reporting to others. Anyway, it’s jungle, not countryside.”

  “Don’t worry, Marcel. Anyway, it’s not combat. And if there’s any danger, Joseph will protect me. We’re flying on the MACV Skytrain together.”

  “Oliver.”

  “How was the portrait business today?” he asked, switching the subject.

  “Fine.”

  “I saw you chatting with Arnaud.”

  “Yeah.” I waited for him to say something more about Arnaud, but he returned to his packing.

  I watched as he sorted his identification papers and money and matches into condoms and tied the tops closed. The jungle was wet and alive. There were streams and ditches all over Vietnam.

  “Precautions,” he said with a wink.

  When Anh arrived with dinner, the table was still edged with a row of condoms filled with Oliver’s pocket valuables.

  IT’S NOT AS IF I’M UNAWARE. It’s not as though I don’t know how a meal can carry on as usual, thick with the unspoken.

  For the past ten minutes, Iris and I have been sitting across from each other at the table having lunch. Iris has combed her hair so that it is long and loose and parted severely in the middle like Morticia Addams. She has put on some makeup that she found in the medicine cabinet. Property of another roommate? For the past two minutes, she has been pushing her salad around on her plate, seemingly bored and inconvenienced by the pumpkin seeds and pea shoots I tossed in for variety. The entire time I have been making random serving utterances—more baguette? juice?—to fill the silence. I wonder if an eleven-year-old can have an eating disorder. When did she become so quiet?

  I don’t know if she is still wondering about the books, but I feel the need to say something. So, as simply as I can, I tell her the truth. I tell her that at a certain point in my life, I needed those books, I needed to see the things that were hard to look at, to gather evidence of what the war had done. There was a gap between what Oliver had seen and felt and what I could imagine, and if I was ever going to touch Oliver again, I needed to close that gap.

  She pours some juice for herself while observing me steadily. “Did it work?”

  “Not really.”

  The worst of the images made me feel sick, a few brought a twinge of excitement, some brought horror, others brought shame. Arms torn from their sockets, babies tossed into ditches, wounds shown with laparoscopic closeness. The shame was complicated. It was the genital shame of viewing the pornographic, then it was the shame of bringing harm to the dead, of being alive, of not feeling sad enough. What I realized, in the end, was that sometimes the gap, that unthinkable barrier, the one that war creates between men and the people they love, cannot be closed.

  “So you filled your eyes with all that”—she gestures vaguely towards the studio—“for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing.”

  She nods but her expression is unresolved. What is it? Disbelief? Pity? Amusement?

  “My mother said that you get down in the dumps sometimes.”

  “Oh? What else did she say?”

  “You get quiet.”

  “And?”

  “That you used to love each other.”

  “She said that?”

  “No. I guessed.”

  There’s no point in disagreeing. She’s too smart for that.

  “Was it long ago?” she asks, finally.

  “No. Not really. I know you’re maybe too young to understand this but it was yesterday. Twenty-six years ago and yesterday. When it’s unfinished business, it’s the same thing.”

  When I was twenty-four, Kiyomi and I bought a tiny flat together in Hackney. After a few years of temporary arrangements and communal houses, of living sometimes together and sometimes apart, Kiyomi wanted to create a stable home life for us—a home with fresh semigloss, matching red cups, cheerful Marimekko towels. She was turning that picture of her and me, the one we had nurtured as children, into something real.

  At first I happily went along with it, but then something happened. One day I woke up and the mere act of buying a toaster seemed like the endeavour of a madcap visionary. The simplest things suddenly became outrageous. Shopping for fruit and veg in Ridley Road. The rubbish collectors dragging our trash to the curb. The shadows of a tree dancing across our wall. The future implied by our spare room, however minuscule. The idea of a child seemed ridiculous, impossible.

  I didn’t want to see all that delicate imagining, our dreamt future, crushed by reality. It worried me that Kiyomi might have to spring off, that there was some wildness in her that would need to be expressed, some quiet secret that would grow loud. As for myself, I was still trying to escape the grown-ups. I couldn’t see myself making much of a father, not after my disrupted childhood. So I made a pre-emptive decision.

  I asked her to let me go.

  How could I have known that the unwinding process would be infinite, that in the end all the ties would remain—circumstance, history, Kiyomi—tugging at me, no matter which future direction I took?

  With self-preservation in mind, I walked away. I limped on, believing that fidelity was hopeless and love was a scar.

  Let me go. It is the opposite of what I want to say now. Today I want to say, Kiyomi, I made a mistake. I want to tell her I can’t stand the lack of her in my life. But all that seems too hungry, too needy. To speak so bluntly might upset the tentative intimacy I have felt budding between us this past week. So I need to find other words, ones that won’t go crashing into the world. Sometimes you have to have the lightest touch to lift a heavy heart, to speak at all.

  Let me go. She did this as if she had been expecting it all along. Twenty-six years ago, we parted abruptly, coldly, and she responded with nearly a decade of silence. I copied Oliver and gave myself over to my work, thinking it would give me emotional sustenance. What eventually replaced the silence was tepid friendship (hers) and aching regret (mine).

  I remember it now. Kiyomi sitting on the bed in a T-shirt and underwear. When I said Let me go, I hoped she would stop me.

  I finally call her back and say, “Before I put Iris on the line, I was wondering if you’d come to London for my birthday.” I say, “Please, Kiyomi, just for a weekend. Come sit with me for a bit. Let me draw you again.”

  There’s a pause, while we both acknowledge the erotic undertone, and then she says, “I’ll think about it,” and after another moment, “Iris seems to have taken a shine to you.”

  When I get off the phone I feel a mixture of high and low, which may just be what alive feels like. I turn to Iris and announce that I need new books, so we head off to Waterstone’s in Notting Hill Gate. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes for me. Lemony Snicket for Iris. Then we go to see the Paul Klee show at the Hayward Gallery. Playful, rhy
ming lines. Happy paintings.

  OLIVER AND JOSEPH LEFT FOR THE FIELD the next morning and seemed to take the terrace with them. The tables sat empty and as much as I wished to see him, Arnaud did not reappear. For days the hotel rattled and sighed with emptiness. I planted myself at a corner table and watched the waiters talking among themselves, practicing their new English words, while wiping the tables, again and again—an endless, useless activity, with all the dust flying through the air.

  On the street, the General spent less time marching and more time standing under shady shop awnings. The striped hems flapped in the wind above his head. Down the street, two men hoisted a big sign onto a former French grocery. The word Bunny appeared in bubbly pink letters. A second sign leaning against the wall said Club.

  I carried a sketch pad but no longer bothered with the easel. I took Arnaud’s advice and tried to draw people secretly, with sly glances, sketching as quickly as I could. Sometimes I drew outside all day and when my skin began to darken as a result, Anh bought me a canvas hat to wear. My drawings began to crowd the walls of my room. Anh said it was like visiting an art gallery. At night when I lay in bed, I could feel the fingers of my right hand curling around an invisible pencil.

  Oliver returned, then left on patrol. Returned and left.

  Downstairs in the lobby, I began to hear new words. Strategic hamlets, Napalm, Daisy cutters, Agent Orange, Eagle flights, hints of the horrors to come.

  I had finally started receiving very short fact-filled letters from Pippa. Random details about your mother (part one): She taught herself French. She spent a lot of time feeding birds in Orme Square. She brought home a used bicycle when you were still a baby. The neighbours say she sang a lot.

  They said nothing earth-shaking but I read them in private and hid them in my night-table drawer when I was done.