“What happened?” Raksmey asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jean-Baptiste.
When the monks saw their boat, they began to jump up and down, calling out for help.
“We should help them,” said Raksmey. He looked down and saw ash floating on the surface of the river. A half-burnt page.
Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “We can do nothing.”
“Why?”
But his father gave no answer.
After an eternity, the river opened and parted into the salamander islands of the delta. They passed clusters of floating markets teeming with long-tail boats, bunches of fish hanging from their sterns. They passed a large container ship that had become beached on a sandbar, its crew lazily playing cards on the deck. One of the men formed an imaginary gun with his hand, aimed, and shot at Raksmey as they went by.
Finally, as the sun began to sink behind them, they could see it: the place where all things went, the great expanse of the South China Sea.
Raksmey turned to his grandmother. “You cannot see the end,” he signed.
“We must have faith,” she signed. “If there was no end, then all of the water would flow out and the ocean would be empty.”
The wind picked up. It began to rain. They sought shelter in the boat’s little cabin, listening to the raindrops hammer at the thin metal roof. Raksmey curled up in Eugenia’s lap and quickly fell asleep to the lull of the motor and the roll of the waves against the hull. A leak from the roof began dripping onto Eugenia’s head, but she did not move, fearing she would disturb the child. The water collected and ran down her neck. She put her hand on the bulb of his cheek and smoothed his hair.
“Little one,” she signed against his skin. “How do you say goodbye?”
Hampered by a steady headwind and a whipping rain that increased in intensity as they worked their way up the coast, they arrived in Saigon late that night, cold and hungry, caught in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was too late to head to the collège as planned, so they hurriedly loaded their luggage into the back of a tuk-tuk, clambered into another, and directed this little caravan directly to the hotel.
Much was as Eugenia remembered it from her youth, though the facade now read CONTINENTAL PALACE in an art deco sans serif and the street signs were all in Vietnamese, an attempt by the state to shed the language of its colonizers. They stood, waterlogged, in the bright white-marble lobby, blinking at the legacy of Pierre Cazeau’s audacity. A group of American officers emerged from the elevator, holding their hats in their hands. One of them delivered a punch line and the rest burst into laughter.
“This is where your grandmother grew up,” said Jean-Baptiste. “She was high society.”
“High society?” Raksmey repeated. “What’s this?”
Eugenia wobbled, steadied herself, and then tumbled over their luggage and onto the floor.
“Grandma!” Raksmey yelled.
The American officers came rushing over to help.
“I’m fine,” she signed, shooing them away. “It’s been a long trip.”
They did not understand her signs, so they lifted her up and placed her in a plush chair next to a palm plant. She was annoyed at all the attention, but her face had drained of its color and she’d begun to shiver uncontrollably.
“Someone should call a doctor,” one of the officers said loudly.
“I’ll do it!” yelled another.
“Does she speak English?” asked another.
“She does not speak. She’s deaf,” Jean-Baptiste said in English.
“Deaf, eh? My old lady’s deaf,” said the officer. “Selectively deaf.”
“Let’s get you upstairs, Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “You shouldn’t have come to Saigon.”
“I’m fine,” she said aloud, but her voice quavered, and she did not protest when a bellhop brought over a wheelchair.
When they got her into the room, it was discovered that she was already running a high fever. The doctor arrived, bearing pills and a hot water bottle. Swaddled inside the blankets, a shell of herself, Eugenia was too weak to complain.
Raksmey sat by her bed, staring at his grandmother, lying prone beneath a headboard of two ornamental dragons locked in combat.
Eugenia moved her hands from beneath the covers. “Don’t look so worried,” she signed. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“Your father owned this hotel?” he signed.
“Yes,” she signed. “This was back when the French were in charge. My father was a. .” She paused, her hands searching for the word. She waved her fingers and floated her hands upward. “He was a proud man. He was used to getting his way.”
“He died?”
“In 1911. Four years after your father was born. He never met Jean-Baptiste. I don’t think he wanted to meet Jean-Baptiste.”
“Why not?”
“Sometimes we’re related to people purely out of chance. We don’t love them; they’re simply there, like the forest.”
“He was mean to you?”
“Not so mean. He didn’t understand who I was, that’s all. We can’t expect people to understand all the time, can we?” She closed her eyes. “Tell me, Raksmey, what do you hear now?”
The answer to their game felt vitally important. As if he could make everything better simply by giving the correct response. He closed his eyes and imagined a world where there was nothing but sound. Nothing but the compression of air molecules, bouncing this way and that. No light, no objects, no jungle, no animals, no love, no fire, no death. Only sound.
He listened and heard piano music drifting down the corridor. A woman’s laughter, rising, joined by a man’s, before both fell silent again. The faint ting of the elevators opening and closing next to their room. The rattle of silverware on a cart in the hallway. Rain tiptoeing against a windowpane.
How to say this to her? He scratched his nose and took a breath, then he put his mouth up to her ear and hummed. He hummed, and from his lips he gave her everything he heard. She smiled, her eyes closed, taking in the little boy’s vibrations.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, she was gone. The bed was neatly made, and there was no sign of her anywhere in the room or the hotel. The staff in the lobby had not seen her come or go.
Jean-Baptiste was furious.
“What was she thinking? Wandering off like that in the middle of the night? Unwell? Deaf and blind? Doesn’t she have any sense at all?”
After giving a description to the hotel manager and a representative from the police, he told Raksmey to gather his things.
“We will not let the lunacy of an old woman derail the whole purpose of coming here.”
“But what if she’s in trouble?”
“Don’t worry about her. You’ve got enough to worry about. We came here to get you to school, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
“But—”
“Raksmey, she’ll be fine. Has she ever not been fine? She’s going to outlive us all. We’re going. No arguments.”
Saigon was in a state of low-grade unease. The president’s assassination in a U.S.-backed coup had created a vacuum in the country’s leadership. On nearly every corner, young policemen in oversize helmets stood at attention, thumbing at their surplus Kalashnikovs. On the way to the collège, they passed three jeeps carrying American troops, their faces set in hard expressions, their skin pasty in the gleam of the morning sun.
Raksmey watched from the back of the tuk-tuk as they crisscrossed the broad, palm-lined boulevards, weaving through waves of traffic, gliding through the roundabouts like electrons circling a nucleus. He tried to chart their route, but he could not read the street signs. It was the first time he had encountered a language he did not understand.