Now she watched the pot for half an eternity, it seemed, while the young boy grew so weary with waiting he started to cry and cry and could hardly stop himself. He called her grandson Anthony Cheung, “Father, Father.”
Grandmother Wright was half Chinese and by now more than a hundred years old. She had the power to see through walls. It was a quite usual thing for her to bore with the smoldering chill of her vision through the center of the earth and the layered decades and to see clearly the face of Arnold Wright. Arnold Wright was her father. He had been a British importer of some kind. In honor of his memory she’d kept her maiden name all of her life.
On the day of his death, father and daughter had been living with her mother, Hua-ling Kaung Wright; and the little girl, now a sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned, had been beautiful and hadn’t been called Grandmother, but Marie. The three of them had lived in Saigon, an Asian city that later took the name of a great Communist leader and then became a cipher in the cataclysm.
Whenever she imagined, against her will, that triumph of death over the world, the hordes of skeletons dragging the sacks of their skins behind them through the flaming streets, the buildings made out of skulls, the empty uniforms coming inexorably through the fields, the bodies of children stuck full of blast-blown knives and forks — the bottom of everything, the end of the world, a grey blank with nobody to remember it, the vision described, passed on, preserved by no one—it was in that city that she saw it, in the city of her father’s death.
And it was on the day when her father took his life — shot himself with a shiny automatic pistol no bigger than his hand — that she marked the end of the world as having begun. As a matter of fact, however, only that small war, between the Americans and the Vietnamese Communists, was turning toward its end on the day of her father’s death. Their downstairs neighbor, Mme. Troix, a frail, sleepless Frenchwoman who lived alone, came to their door wearing only a sheer black slip and fanning herself violently against the heat with a little round fan, to drip with sweat and say out of a strained face that more awful rumors, too unthinkable not to be true, were swarming around the American Embassy. This, she insisted, was the finish. They must all get out of the city, take themselves back to Europe, to China, to Britain — to any place that wasn’t falling apart.
Marie and her mother, Hua-ling, stood half out in the hallway listening to her complaints. Mme. Troix wore her hair in a bun pulled back tightly from her forehead, and it was there at the borders of her scalp that the perspiration seemed to start, collecting in tiny beads that grew pendulous and then plunged down — it was damp and hot everywhere; you had to move slowly on any errand. Having made herself into a collection of nervous disorders by worrying, Mme. Troix now hoped Hua-ling would assure her that things were fine. But Marie’s mother was far too polite to contradict her. Mme. Troix exclaimed something briefly in French, in the manner of someone dealing with an uncomprehending street vendor, and raced in tears down the stairs. No detail of this was unavailable to Grandmother Marie now, nine-tenths of a century later, even down to the three dull patches of sweat in the hollow of Mme. Troix’s back, along the spine of her nylon slip.
And next, within a few more minutes, Mme. Troix was back again, ushering up the stairs two policemen in khaki. They moved too quickly for normal people — they were part of this hallucinatory city, driven beyond all limits by the Americans, who ate up the time from under everything. The policeman in the lead held a shiny Baretta pistol on the flat palm of his hand, and he shoved it repeatedly toward her mother as if trying to get her to take it.
Hua-ling raised her hands above her head. So did Marie. Mme. Troix stopped fanning herself and stood still.
The policeman spoke in Vietnamese; the mother shook her head, because she couldn’t speak it; he insisted; she grew even more frightened.
And then he said in English, “This you hesbunt gun?” When she nodded, unable to find reason to deny it, he said, “Why he kill himself? Shot himself?”
“Who did?” Hua-ling Wright said. “Who shot?”
The second policeman abruptly turned on Mme. Troix with an intention of inspiring fear, and the fear on his own face was more intimidating than any trumped-up malevolence he might have managed to show her. She dropped her fan as if it were a weapon.
The first officer put the Baretta in his belt and said to Hua-ling Wright, “You come right away. Now. We get it taking care of, baby.”
“He’s working,” Hua-ling said. “He’s at work.”
When Hua-ling came back from identifying her husband’s body she seemed to have acquired the tight-faced, berserk efficiency of the two starched officials. The same darkness of trouble stained her eyes.
A cremation and funeral were arranged; today, however, in her life in the room off the damp kitchen and the rocking chair in the parlor, Grandmother remembered no cremation or funeral and wasn’t sure she’d attended any kind of ceremony for her father at all. What she remembered, instead, was a vision of him standing in their cramped living room next to the air-conditioning unit with a tumbler of Scotch whiskey and ice in his hand, letting the refrigeration spray over his face, ducking his head and reaching back to lift his collar and let the cool air spill under it onto the pale English flesh of his neck, while simultaneously, not three meters across the room, Hua-ling talked to herself angrily with a swollen and terrified face, ticking off the factors that kept them from joining her brother’s family in Seattle. Clearly Marie’s father was already dead in this picture. It was his ghost standing there in the room.
“Perhaps you’re saying that a squall took him off the boat,” her grandson Anthony said. There was a cup of tea before her, as motionless as a stump or a rock. If they were on a boat, the sea was calm today.
The boy was crying as if his own cup of tea were the origin of all the world’s torment. “It was the tiller,” the boy said.
Captain Minh nodded — he’d grown so old.
How long had they been on this boat? Hang on! Everything else is nothing. Remember that, remember that.
But she wasn’t on the boat yet. She was still in Saigon. She was trying to get to America.
Because Hua-ling’s brother was an American citizen, mother and daughter not unreasonably hoped to be granted visas by that country. Hua-ling managed to reach him in Seattle by telephone, an accomplishment demanding rare energies and a tremendous will; but the sense of dishonor surrounding the world, the troubled nature of anything to do with America, the people and things that wouldn’t behave, the official machinery that was out of synch, the frayed hearts, the broken faces, the ugly rules, all of these things kept them in Saigon when they should have been able to leave for Seattle right away.
The dry season ended and the rains began, driving the grease up out of the streets and tearing up the surface of any road that wasn’t concrete, and eventually eroding great potholes over which the taxis and personal sedans slammed obliviously. The drivers of mo-peds and Hondas careened among the chasms bearing a relentless faith in their immunity, while the bicyclists shrank themselves against the margin of whatever street and forged straight ahead. The traffic ate up the precious time and the pointless distance, the rain grated and sighed over everything, and in spite of her grief, to Marie Saigon was music.