The Eaves of Heaven Read online

  “I just came from the morning session. I don’t think I’ll have time to change when I get back this afternoon. Sergeant doesn’t like us summer-cadets running around town in uniform. People might credit the real cadets with our bad behaviors.” I grinned and reached for her waist.

  She hugged me, giggling.

  “Where’s your valise?”

  “I left it with the stationmaster.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  I shrugged. She was far more trusting than I.

  It seemed tragic that this was only our seventh date. There was so much I didn’t know about her, though what I had fathomed fascinated me immensely. She was a romantic girl who knew poems by heart and could reconstruct whole movie scenes with manic gestures and a breathless voice. A mystic, she read palms, interpreted dreams, and traveled fearlessly when the stars were favorable. We had one thing in common. She had grown up without a father, I without a mother. We were matched by our needs. I came from a rigid world of order, form, class division, nobility, and peasantry. My parents did not marry for love. It was an act of obedience and filial obligation, one that they honored their whole lives. And here before me was this wild child of sand and sea, a fatherless girl who did not know how to mask herself. She lived on her instincts, willfully and zealously; beneath sun or rain, it mattered not.

  I had asked her for this early rendezvous. The station, I knew, would be deserted. I took a camera out of its case and she twirled into a playful pose. Life was still a game to her. This, I would learn, was one state of happiness.

  “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?” I framed her against the tracks.

  “Carven by Elizabeth Arden.” She knew to look away from the lens.

  “French?” In my viewfinder, her long hair was as dark as steel.

  “From Paris.” She turned her face, suddenly mysterious.

  “It’s lovely.”

  At the time, most college girls hadn’t considered accentuating their beauty, but Anh knew enough to choose one of the most expensive and subtle fragrances on the market. It seemed amazing to me that she came from Phan Thiet, the same backwater fishing town where I had spent last summer teaching.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I might buy a bottle for myself since I’ll miss the scent.”

  She gave an un-ladylike snort and pinched me.

  I never told her it was this perfume that had first caught my attention.

  It was a Sunday, three weeks prior. I had a day’s leave from the army camp. My barracks buddies tramped around town on their usual weekend routine, looking for girls to escort to their afternoon coffee by the lake and, hopefully, an evening dance at the clubs as well. I begged off to go hiking with plans of taking a series of photographs of Dalat’s waterfalls. I was fiddling with my camera on the side of the trail when I caught the scent of her as she walked past with a little girl. They held hands and hummed a folksy tune. What happened next was an impulsive move, quite out of character for me. I trotted back down the trail, oddly compelled by a need to see her face. Pardon me, Miss. Could you tell me the way to Cam Ly Waterfall? I used my friendliest tone. But then she smiled her smile, the smile that bloomed like wonder itself. It was as simple and elegant as that. It rendered me speechless. Before she uttered a word, I was already consumed with a singular desire, a wanton need, to win this girl for myself.

  THERE was time for an early lunch, so we caught a ride with an army truck back toward town. It left us on the shore of the Lake of the Fragrance of Spring. We walked as we had for all our outings. We leaned close, held hands, pecked each other on the cheek, allowing ourselves, as tourists, small public displays of affection. Bend after bend, the road was hazy and quiet, save for housewives walking to market with woven satchels tucked under their arms. Bicyclists pedaled sleepily down the center of the unmarked road, undisturbed by the occasional three-wheeled Lambretta taxis grunting past, crammed with up to eight passengers. Once in a long while, a local bus, a truck with benches, came through on its rounds. When a real car came down the road, people turned to look.

  Dalat was still a quaint resort town, tucked high in the cool mountains at the end of the rail line, surrounded by conifer forests, trout streams, waterfalls, and lakes. Earlier, it had been a retreat for the French, who regularly fled the stifling heat of the lowlands. These days it was a vacation destination for rich Vietnamese and top-level government officials. European-style villas dotted the hills, and tiny bungalows hid in the woods, joined by meandering gravel paths. Three asphalt streets flanked with little shops and two-story buildings coiled around two hills, forming the town’s business district. It was small and rustic enough to permit visitors a proprietary sense of belonging.

  We paused and took a picture beneath the big pine tree by the ice cream parlor where we had spent the entire afternoon of our first date. I took another photo of her standing at the trailhead where we had embarked three times to a creekside clearing where we picnicked on roasted chicken, baguettes, fruits, and lotus-scented tea. Then another snapshot at the cozy alcove of rocks that sheltered us from a storm. I clicked through the entire roll, feeling helpless that I couldn’t possibly capture her in all the places that needed to be preserved—the tree-lined walks that seduced us away into the hills, the park benches, the mimosa trees, the moonlit lanes on which I had walked her home, the long good-night kisses by the hedge. She was leaving, and I was afraid.

  I wondered if she would forget the intimate, nameless places where we had talked through the lazy hours. I wondered if, like me, she felt as if we had lived a whole, though tiny, life here.

  We paused at a few boutiques and peered through the glass store-fronts, but she wouldn’t let me buy her anything. She knew I was poor. We strolled through our usual window-shopping circuit, down the one avenue then up the other, weaving back and forth around vendors crowding the brick sidewalk. The streets curved and sloped in such a way that the town appeared laid out like an old-fashioned vertical painting, buildings and trees in the distance rising to the sky or falling off toward the valley. Climbing the hill to the town center, you saw the narrow, cranky buildings edged against mountain and sky. Turning around, you saw rooftops layered against the lake and the dale below. I was fond of Dalat for its crooked intersections, its uneven buildings, its sweeps and jags that made the light changes captivating.

  Anh wanted a baguette and bananas for her trip, so we stopped at the main market. It clung halfway up the hill, a quilt-work of multicolored tarps strung up at different angles, overlapping and flapping in the wind. Beneath, aglow in the filtered light, was a congested world of colors, aromas, odors, and noise, all ruled by women. Sellers sat snugly behind their counters, arranging and rearranging their wares. Shoppers stomped about on thick clogs, holding their hems away from the mush of trampled banana leaves and mud. They haggled, gossiped, laughed, yelled, napped, cackled, and sang over baskets of fruits, bins of produce, sides of raw meat, coils of sausage ropes, silvery fish laid out like steel blades, great bags of spices, barrels of rice in a dozen varieties, toy-like plastic wares, and every conceivable household item, short of furniture.

  I waited for her on the market fringe amid peanut roasters, pork-bun steamers, fruit-women with baskets of tiny peaches and blood-dark plums, flower-maids with packs of incense sticks and altar bundles of carnations and daffodils. Wrapped in sweaters and scarves, schoolgirls with rosy cheeks gathered around a vendor who sold fried dough fritters, hot from a bubbling oil vat. People bantered, rattling off quick words with a lilt that reminded me of the central highlanders.

  When we topped the hill, it began to drizzle. Anh steered me to a kiosk tucked in an alley barely three paces wide, next to Thien Nhien Bookstore. It was one of those foldable tin-and-wood assemblies that at the end of the day could be carted home. The cook, a woman in her mid-forties, sat like a barrel of flesh behind the counter, flanked on three sides by six woks, each set on a coal stove no bigge
r than a flowerpot. Despite the chill, she sweated through her white peasant blouse, her face flushed and jovial. Equally good-humored, the thin husband, a chain-smoking man with huge hands, made coffee and served the customers while their teenage daughter prepped the food and washed dishes at the back end of the alley. It was a bustling operation of six tables sheltered under a green army tarp.

  “This is my favorite place. They make the best banh xeo in Dalat,” she announced and waited for my reply as was proper.

  “Then I insist we eat here before you leave.” I grinned.

  Anh gossiped with the woman, touched her forearm, laughed, talked about catching the afternoon train, and somewhere in between special-ordered our banh xeo with all her favorite fillings. She had a way with common folks that was beyond me. Even though my family had become miserably poor, our lot no better than any cyclo driver’s, a big part of me was still rooted within my family ancestral estate, in its orders and values. I always felt more at ease going to the market or to new eateries with Anh. Everywhere we went, folks welcomed her like kin. She had a natural confidence entirely different from any girl I had met. The way she moved, how her long-fingered hands danced when she talked. I never got tired of looking at her. I especially liked the way she smiled whenever she caught my eyes.

  We shared a tiny wooden bench, our backs to the mildewed wall. The man brought us a pot of tea and two tin espresso presses set atop small glasses with a finger’s worth of condensed milk.

  Anh said, “I know you don’t usually drink coffee, but it’s a real treat in this weather. Try it, for me.”

  Caffeine made my heart race. “It’ll probably give me a heart attack, but, for you, why not?”

  She smiled, the whole of her canted toward me, a bundle of warmth in the dancing wind, in her hair a scent of lily.

  She said, “You won’t forget my address in Saigon, will you?”

  “Didn’t I tell you I’ve got a photographic memory?”

  Anh looked dubious. “Then tell me again, how you’d get to my uncle’s house.”

  We had made no promises to each other. It would have been improper to speak of our feelings. Before any of that, I must tell her about my family, our history, and my father, who spent most of his days sprawled on the floor with his opium pipes, smoking away the final vestiges of our ancestral rice fortune. I must tell her of the squalor of our lives, of my crushing study loads at two schools, of my struggle to help support my family on a meager tutoring salary. There was another whole troublesome world out there that I did not want to let invade this moment. I wanted our hours encapsulated until the sweetness of these days had become an unimpeachable part of the past.

  I repeated her precise directions from the Main Post Office at the center of Saigon to her uncle’s house in a middle-class neighborhood on the opposite side of the city from mine. Then I said that on my first day back in Saigon, I would get a haircut and a shave. I would put on my best shirt, buy the prettiest bouquet of flowers, then take a cyclo to her house because, after all, the man she’d met in Dalat was a handsome cadet and I didn’t want to look like a disheveled, sweaty bum who had walked across the city.

  Anh giggled, squeezed my hand, and showed her pleasure by preparing my coffee. She lifted the lid of the espresso press, turned it upside down on the table, placed the press on top, and stirred the condensed milk at the bottom of the glass until all of it had turned into a caramel swirl. She presented the glass with both hands, then waited for me to taste it before preparing hers. These were traditional gestures of affection, and for the first time in my life, I allowed myself to revel in them.

  I was twenty-four and had never been with a woman. I knew nothing about love, and everything I knew about sex I had seen while managing our inn in Hanoi. For a young lad who hadn’t so much as held a girl’s hand or even seen adults kissing, the sight of peasant girls rendered homeless by war and desperate by hunger prostituting themselves to the French soldiers was shocking. They were no different from the girls I had grown up with in the countryside. The experience tainted not only my idea of sex, but also my general view of women. Since then I resisted the advances of girls. I feared I was ruined.

  I had thought I would never marry.

  It was a miracle to meet Anh and feel my insides flip-flopping about. I was desperate to hang onto her, if only to make these emotions last a little longer. I liked the way I felt when I was near her.

  I gave her the thin package I kept under my coat. It was a silk scarf I had seen her admire. She gave a sharp cry of delight that made everyone turn around. She bound her long black hair in it—which somehow made me immensely pleased.

  Holding hands underneath the table, we huddled like conspirators over our chicory coffee. The man brought us a platter of fresh vegetables, herbs, and pickled radishes, and two plates with big, fat crepes made from a batter of rice flour, turmeric, and coconut milk. They were crunchy on the outside, moist and slightly chewy in the middle, coddling a steamy center of bean sprouts, mung beans, and a mix of sautéed pork, shrimp, and scallion. We broke the crepes, dipped pieces in a delicate lime-chili fish sauce, and ate them with sprigs of cilantro, fresh lettuce, basil, and la chua, sour leaves that tasted like green apples. The scallion oil in the crepe glistened on the fresh herbs like a light salad dressing. Anh fed me perfect morsels wrapped in crisp lettuce. And, as she had promised, the milk-coffee was a fabulous accompaniment. Small, unforgettable decadence. I enjoyed being here with her so much, I couldn’t stop smiling. I had never felt this way. I stole a kiss and tasted tangy sugared lime on her lips.

  We ate, oblivious to the crowd, the bustling shops, the humming traffic, the jostling pedestrians, the chanting hawkers. Rain-water ran green in the gutter. A lavender hue fell over the town, softening the cries of babies, the bells of donkey carts, errant laughter. Even the pale moss-washed buildings lost their edges. The world went all crumbly, and I was keen only on the red curves of her lips, the way she gasped after a bite of chili, the unbelievably delicious warmth of her thigh against mine.

  THE NORTH

  AUGUST 1940

  6. THE MID- AUTUMN FESTIVAL

  Under the looming shadow of war, Uncle Thuan performed one of the wisest acts in his life. It would mark the pinnacle of our clan’s ascendancy, and also the dawn of our quick dissolution. He opened his personal treasury, instructed the servants to ready his ancestral estate, summoned the fireworks-maker from Hanoi, and bestowed upon the village an extravagant Mid-Autumn Festival—an event that would be well remembered among those who lived to see the next millennium.

  I was seven years old that year and remembered the great swell of excitement and activities that overtook the estate. At the time, I had two younger brothers and four cousins, all Uncle Thuan’s children from three wives, living at our ancestral estate. My father had decided not to come home for the festival, so I had a wonderful time. It was thrilling for my cousins and me to watch all the carpenters and craftsmen prepare for the celebration. We tailed them everywhere and got underfoot at every opportunity.

  The preparation began immediately after the Rituals of Forgiveness in mid-July, a full month in advance. Walls received fresh coats of paint. Roofs were mended, squeaky doors oiled. Three bedrooms were added to the guests’ wing to accommodate relatives coming from distant provinces. New sleeping mats were laid in all quarters. Moon-gazing divans were built, flower gardens expanded, strolling paths cleared, courtyards repaired. Workers installed additional stoves in the main kitchen. In the garden next to the carp pond and the existing cow-roasting pit, bricklayers constructed earth kilns with unbaked clay bricks for roasting piglets and chickens. A thousand moon cakes were ordered from renowned Chinese bakeries in Hanoi. Gifts of livestock, silk, porcelain wares, and jewelry were purchased and sent out with the invitations to the honored guests.

  Our stockman fattened the piglets to ensure that there would be thick layers of fat on every cut of meat roasted. The resident artist, who was also our tutor, painted many p
oems in classic Nom characters on long cuts of red banner cloth. The guards spent days polishing the arrays of altar brassworks, serving trays, ornamental relics, giant candleholders of six-foot-tall brass storks, and the whole decorative brass armory. And every night after supper, all the staff and the adult residents of the estate, including the magistrate and his wife, sat down with piles of bamboo sticks, colored papers, paint, glue, and twine. Over tea, sweets, and tall tales told beneath a waxing moon, they practiced the traditional art of lantern making. On Mid-Autumn Night, every child would have a beautiful lantern for the moonlight parade.

  On Mid-Autumn Day, important guests started arriving for the festival in the afternoon. My cousin Tan and I came out to the Ancestral Gate to watch them. It was a fine sight. We had never seen so many new faces. The wealthiest came in horse-drawn carriages. High-ranked officials from the old warlord lines rode horses and wore mandarin robes and slacks. Each had a retinue of two to four guards and banner bearers. Local visitors, often of more moderate wealth, traveled in wood palanquins with silk canopies carried by liveried men. Distinguished scholars and elders of modest means came in man-pulled rickshaws. None of stature passed through the Ancestral Gate on foot.

  Villagers arrived in droves, coming through the rear gate. They found their way to the courtyard, sat on mats laid on the paved bricks, and helped themselves to tea and sweets from the kitchen. In the grand hall, people congregated to play Chinese chess and cards—the men with men, the women with women. Men stood around, chatting and swaggering with the confidence of farmers after a good harvest and a new promising crop already in the fields. Mid-autumn was the season of indolence; all the hard work of planting was long finished and there was nothing to do except watch the seedlings grow.

  People sorted themselves into parties befitting their stations. Folks of equal wealth sat on the same straw mat. Even then, families of similar status stayed near each other. It was a world where titles, however minor, mattered. A man’s social station determined everything, from whom he may wed to which school his children may attend. It determined where a person sat, when he spoke, the manner in which he addressed others, and even how large a share of a public feast he took home. It was a harsh world where people relied on the rigid order of the centuries.