A Thousand Tiny Truths Page 20

  One morning Oliver went downstairs and picked up the mail before I did. When I awoke, he was standing by the balcony window, holding an envelope up to the window.

  “From Pippa?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For you?”

  “No. For you.”

  “Oliver, can you not do that, please? Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

  Left alone again, instead of studying I began paying more attention to the shoeshine boys on the street. I watched them heckle pedestrians at intersections and disappear behind pulses of exhaust when the traffic was thick. They moved like cats. They would sidle up to the terrace, rattling their wooden boxes, and tell anyone who was sitting there how bad their shoes looked. Sometimes they would dive right in and clean and buff until they were kicked away.

  “Hey, Mr. Dirty Shoe, you want a shine? Very cheap. Ten cent.”

  If they were turned down, they put away their rags and black polish and combed the area for other sources of income: the wallets peeking out from gaping pockets, the cameras left on tables, anything that could be pilfered and sold.

  I began to give the boys secret names. There was Mr. Ten Cent (the leader), Mr. Dirty Lung (always exhaling cigarettes) and the youngest of them, Mr. Red Cap. I guessed that they were all about my age. No one had ever told me that malnutrition could make a child look younger than he really was; and that sometimes it was better that way because a boy who looked ten was safe from the war.

  I was sitting at my usual table on the terrace on a sunny Sunday morning when out of the corner of my eye I saw an object flapping and realized it was the magazine I had been reading: LIFE, with a smiling and sweaty photograph of Cassius Clay on the cover.

  “Hey. Give that back,” I said.

  Ignoring me, the boy I called Mr. Ten Cent flipped through the magazine, stopping at a shot of Clay in a boxing ring, upper body rising in a wave of victory. He tapped the picture excitedly with his finger.

  “I am the muscle like this guy. I am a protector of small boys.”

  Up close I saw that Mr. Ten Cent had a miniature barrel chest, and downy hair growing above his upper lip. He was small but wore an undershirt with suspenders and sucked on a toothpick in a way that made him look tough. He tossed the magazine back onto the table.

  “Urrr always reading. Always sitting at the same old table. You should come wip us.”

  The next morning when I was sitting on the terrace, Mr. Ten Cent returned.

  “Hey, big guy, what are you gonna do today?” He planted his foot on his battered shoeshine box and spat on the ground.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Why don’t you do something?”

  “I am doing something. I’m drawing.”

  “Oh. Rrrr you a famous artist? Big nam artist?”

  “No.”

  “Ai! Ow artist suppose to make money wip no nam?” He spat again. “Forget drawing.”

  A large blond man walked by.

  “Hey, Mister Boston-Mass,” Mr. Ten Cent shouted after him. “Long time no see.”

  “You stole my glasses!” the man yelled over his shoulder.

  Mr. Ten Cent turned back to me and shrugged.

  He pointed at my sketch pad.

  “Okay, big guy. Tomorrow you do something. No, not with your eyes. With your feet. Now I go or Mister Alan is taking my pay because I am fucking late. But tomorrow I come here same time and take you around. You be ready, okay?”

  The next morning I dressed quickly and told Anh I was going to the bookstore to spend a few quiet hours. She waved me off with a wet rag. There was a time between nine and eleven-thirty in the morning when she liked to do most of her cleaning and meal preparation for the day. During this time, she counted on me to occupy myself without supervision. As I left her that morning, I tried to feel that I was merely extending my range and not disobeying her.

  The shoeshine boys led me roaming through the city, improvising games along the way. We walked gangplanks and pretended to be pirates; kicked a coconut shell and pretended to be football champions. At Cong Vien Van Hoa Park, we sat around the fountain and whistled at schoolgirls bobbing for peeled pineapples with their arms behind their backs. Two of the girls held a pole from which the pineapples swung back and forth. The shoeshine boys hooted and cheered every time someone dived in for a bite. We headed over to the Brinks Hotel, an American officers’ residence near the Continental, and pestered the men going in and out past the guards. The officers wore sweat-soaked utility shirts decorated with gold U.S. Army insignias. On their heads were green berets or faded baseball caps, which they removed to mop the sweat beading their foreheads. I found a Zippo lighter on the ground and put it in my pocket. An officer named Morgan (Morgan sewn right there on his shirt) pulled out a pack of gum and began tossing foil-wrapped sticks at us.

  I noticed Mr. Ten Cent hanging back from the others and walked over to join him.

  “What does that man think? We are a pack of dogs?” he said, and spat.

  When the guards waved their guns in the air indicating that the fun was over, the shoeshine boys gave one another a look and scattered. Mr. Ten Cent picked up speed as he turned the corner.

  “Wait!” I shouted, but they kept going, racing ahead of me with their bare feet and shoes with flapping soles. I looked back and saw the hotel getting smaller.

  The trips I took with the shoeshine boys became a daily ritual. I slipped away after breakfast and returned in time for lunch, almost blind from the sun, feeling my way through the lobby, past shadowy furniture. I wiped my shoes with my handkerchief but even when I forgot and they were grey with dust, Anh said nothing.

  I grew accustomed to the strange way the shoeshine boys greeted me by frisking and scrounging through my pockets for loose change. Up close, their legs were dotted with sores and scars, white circles surrounding areas of shiny pink where scabs had fallen off.

  “We share together, big guy,” they said. “Hurry on. Don’t be scare.”

  There were usually four or five boys. At some point they would switch into Vietnamese. As I gained their trust, they took me farther from the hotel, leading me through unpaved lanes, over scraps of corrugated tin, mountains of empty cans, rotting fruit peels. One morning they took me to their village at the centre of Saigon, a shantytown built over a former graveyard. It was filled with refugees bombed out of the countryside who had escaped to the city.

  A tinkle of glass, stones through windows. Arcs of urine on American cars. My muscles relearned ways to move, prowl. It made me feel brave, even when I was shaking with fear. I discovered where the opium dens were and the massage parlours where men entered ready to part with their money and emerged glistening with cheap oil. I saw where the poorest people lived, the ones that looked as if they were always shivering even when it was sweltering. I tried to imitate the boys’ nonchalant attitude—until, one day, I even watched them laugh at a mother hitting her child with a wooden spoon without feeling shocked.

  I started returning to the hotel later and later, leaving hunks of mud on the doormat as I clomped into the lobby. When I was late for lunch, Anh accepted my excuses. All it took was a grin or an innocent look and she would laugh and forgive me. I knew there were children that didn’t mind lying to adults but it always made me feel terrible to deceive Anh.

  One morning the boys led me to the end of a lane and told me to wait. They said the small house surrounded by weeds belonged to a man named Mister Alan. I did as they said and sat down on the ground, catching my breath, a cloud of dust in my mouth. A young woman was sweeping around the house with a straw broom. She stopped and looked at me, then resumed her sweeping. A few minutes later the boys came out holding sandwiches. I tried not to stare as they wolfed down their food, pushing the bread into their mouths, wiping their hands on their scuffed shorts and torn shirts. But it made me feel uncomfortable. I knew that nothing in my life added up to that hunger.

  When they had finished eating, Mr. Ten Cent frowned. He
had a cold, hard look on his face that I had never seen before. It was the look of someone who had just been beaten and now wanted revenge. He stood up and walked towards one of the boys. He grabbed the boy’s arm and twisted it around his back. Then he let go and turned to the small boy with the red cap and started punching him, pummelling him until his face was half swollen and he was kneeling for mercy. The three other boys didn’t interfere, seeming to know better.

  Then Mr. Ten Cent approached me where I stood mute with horror and pointed at the boy on the ground with a smirk.

  “You going to tell your English daddy what you see?”

  I shook my head, full of fear. The hatred on Mr. Ten Cent’s face was so deep it made me want to crawl away.

  “He’s not my real daddy,” I muttered, suddenly ashamed of so many things at once I couldn’t even begin to sort through them all.

  As we headed back to the centre of town, Mr. Ten Cent didn’t really acknowledge me, which was just as well because I wouldn’t have been able to look him in the eye if he had. When we reached the market, he grunted that he had somewhere to be and turned away.

  “See ya, big guy,” he said. The other boys followed him.

  When they were no longer in view, I noticed that my money and watch were gone. I checked my pocket and found the Zippo. I practised flicking it open, but the breeze kept blowing the flame out as I started back towards the hotel.

  I was turning onto rue Pasteur when I was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. I felt a painful crack on my side, then sparks of silver popping behind my eyes. I tried to sit up but I was yanked back by my hair. I pulled my knees tight to my chest, covered my head with my arms. There was a sharp jolt to my right shoulder, then a searing pain in my kidney, and on it went, kicks coming from all sides.

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed the legs of two boys jumping up and down, the rattle of a wooden kit, a shouting voice, more legs running back and forth with excitement. It was clear that the boy doing most of the kicking, Mr. Ten Cent, thought it would be a good idea to kill me. But something, someone, was stopping him. I strained upwards for a look and saw the boy with the red cap and smashed face standing a few yards back shouting, “Dung lai!” (Stop!) over and over.

  Anyone passing us might have concluded that I was being beaten because I had something the other boys wanted. To some degree it was true: Mr. Ten Cent wanted my Zippo lighter. Satisfied that his work was done, he flicked it open and closed and slipped it in his pocket and strode away in his rubber sandals. But I knew that the truth was more complicated. What he really wanted was for me to feel the pain that usually belonged just to him. And I took it because I felt I deserved it.

  The wrist I had been using to prop myself up buckled and I went down again. The ground had a sick fruity smell. I was so close to the road I could see mango peels in the gutter. I closed my eyes and tasted blood trickling, metallic, down my throat. I don’t know how long I lay there. I awoke under a cool canopy, the leaning shade of a person. I heard someone humming. With a cringe of pain, I opened my eyes and made out an old man in uniform. He kneeled down and stroked my hair.

  When he stood up and began yelling for help, I realized it was the General. He had a surprising voice, sweet and high.

  “Boy, you are big, big mess,” he said, crouching down again.

  “I tried—”

  “It’s okay. Shhh. No talk.”

  A woman ran over to us. She was wearing a flowing white gown and holding a pile of towels. She wrapped me in one of the towels and held me. She looked familiar. Audrey Hepburn, I thought. I knew she would come one day. I knew she would grow bored of Roman holidays.

  The woman helped me to my feet, then steered me as we walked, one arm around my shoulder, the other hand holding my elbow. I looked down, mesmerized by the spatters of blood hitting the pavement. I had the sensation that my legs were straggling behind and kept stopping to look. When we reached the hotel, the porter took over for the woman, leading me up to my room, knocking loudly on the door. When the door opened, Anh screamed and covered her mouth.

  Four days and four nights is how long it took me to recover and when I did I wanted as much distance from the slums of Saigon as possible. I ordered soft drinks from Room Service, flicked the light switches on and off, sank into a hot bath, stretched out on my starched bedsheets. I discovered that there is no greater comfort than the comfort that follows danger. There is no clean cleaner than a body rinsed of blood. I was infant clean. Purified. I slept and slept, like a baby.

  When Anh demanded I tell her what happened, I refused. When she kept insisting, I begged her to wait until Oliver returned, promising her I would explain everything then. Although she agreed, she became watchful, following me around the suite, observing everything I did.

  A bird kept bashing into my bedroom window one morning, and Anh tried everything to chase it away—a broom, a jug of water—but it just came back. At one point it smacked into the glass so hard I was sure the glass would shatter and fall to the ground. I was certain the bird was dead, but it came back a few minutes later. When Anh’s efforts to banish the bird failed, she tried to turn it into a positive sign. “When a bird flies into your window,” she said, “it could be someone who wants to see you.” But I knew that there were dead birds all around Saigon. Stressed-out birds that flew into windows or walls whenever a fighter plane passed overhead.

  All the same, that morning I lay in bed and listened to the rap, rap of the bird hitting the glass again and again. “Who are you?” I said. “Who is it that wants in?”

  While I was resting, Anh brought in mail from Pippa. I had written her two weeks before asking if anyone she had met in connection with my mother had ever mentioned a doctor named Samuel Scranton. For years, ever since I had snooped through Oliver’s correspondence, I had kept the name filed away in my mind. Now, to my disappointment, I read: I’m sorry, Marcel. I haven’t come across any Dr. Scranton in my search. In fact, I may have reached the end of my sleuthing. i.e. no more info . . . But here are two snaps of me and Stasha taken during a recent visit to Brighton. You’ll see I’m feeling very well these days.

  I looked in the envelope and found two photos. The first showed them lounging in bathing suits on the beach. And the second showed them blowing kisses to the camera in front of the Royal Pavilion.

  A day later there was also a postcard from Brighton, mailed separately, with the confusing one-line message: Don’t wait for Messiahs.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Oliver asked, sitting down on the bed the night he returned. He touched my face, traced the discoloured bump on my cheek. Wherever he had been, I could see it had been hard. He looked as if he were wearing stage makeup, or posing as one of those men in medieval Italian paintings, like the ones Miss Humphreys had shown me in her books, with ash grey faces and untended beards.

  I pulled the covers up instinctively. I wanted to protect him from the evidence, and myself from his reaction. But Oliver pulled them down, slowly examining my scrapes and bruises.

  “What happened?” he repeated, more gently.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “No, Marcel,” he said again, “something happened. And I need to know what it was.”

  “Nothing happened!”

  “Did someone attack you?”

  I looked at him closely and answered. “I was hit by a cyclo.”

  He eyed me suspiciously.

  “I think I need a nap,” I said, looking away.

  He let out a deep sigh. “Okay. You can rest now. We’ll talk later.”

  A few minutes later I overheard him telling Anh that it wasn’t like me to be untruthful. There was a note of reproach in his voice.

  “I know a lie when I hear one,” he said.

  Anh replied, “It’s my fault. I should be watching more.”

  “But who could have done that to him?”

  “Those boys who run in the street. They’re crazy. I see them all the time outside the hotel.”
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  “But, Jesus, what’s wrong with him?” Oliver burst out. “Does he not know how to protect himself?”

  I felt nauseated. Did he really think my injuries were my fault? I heard Anh’s footsteps and then the sound of the balcony door opening and closing behind her and I knew that she was mad at him, even if there was nothing she could say or do about it.

  As I lay there, eventually drifting towards sleep, I pictured the General bending over me, shaking his head at my pathetic beaten face, as if I were the one who had been in a war.

  When I finally ventured outside again, I vowed to Anh and Oliver that I would stay close to the hotel. There was no need for them to press the point. I still felt a tenderness in my lower ribs and when I imagined meeting the shoeshine boys again, the scenes that came to mind were not pretty.

  I was surprised, then, to discover that the shoeshine boys had basically forgotten the beating. When Mr. Ten Cent caught sight of me sitting on the terrace, he shouted out, “Hey, big guy!” with such enthusiasm, I spilled my juice down my shirt. I looked up and saw him standing on the opposite side of the street, smiling. A snap of his suspenders. A salute.

  Mr. Ten Cent’s unexpected friendliness gave me the courage to cross the street the next day and head for Givral’s pastry shop to do some sketching. When I walked in, I saw a group of Vietnamese men crowded around a table in the middle of the room—fixers, drivers, standby photographers—all swapping information. I weaved my way to a red booth by the window and watched as one of the men slapped his hand repeatedly against his palm. The waitress came by and I ordered a lemon soda. When she left, I waved at Pham, the journalist who had recommended Anh. Pham always sat in the same corner booth. He was never alone. People called him General Givral because he always seemed to know what was happening.

  I leaned my head back against the booth, half listening to the jukebox selections. A young Vietnamese woman I recognized from the bookshop was seated nearby, tilting her face to the sun. The sun made me feel sleepy. I shut my eyes and daydreamed that I was lying beside Kiyomi but just as I went to kiss her, I was interrupted by the sound of someone snapping.