Anguli Ma (2 page)

Đào wanted to be free of the sin of throwing food out, so she wrapped the extra cuts in individual plastic bags, to give to the women at her
hụi
game. Đào wiped her face and her hands on a clean piece of fabric and sat down. She opened the
Nhân Quyền
newspaper, flicked past the news stories and turned straight to the horoscopes.

The pot boiled. Đào reduced the gas and skimmed off the layer of foamy muck that had floated to the top. The pot of soup would be their warm centre for the week. She would boil fresh rice noodles, and her tenants would have the thick soup ready to ladle into a bowl when they came home from their toils each day. Once inside, they would remove their coats as though unyoking an animal muteness, a constrained vocabulary of grunts and gestures. It was then that her house performed a kind of magic on her and her tenants, and they would be able to speak as humans once again, and fill themselves with food that their bellies were conversant with.

Her son was going to ask her questions, that was for sure. Đào stared at the Buddha on the altar which silently dominated the living room, along with the television set and an old upright piano. Above the door hung a crucifix given to her by the local church, although Đào's family did not convert when they were refugees, and were even less likely to do so now that they were safe and settled. The tall church-people had helped her to rent this house, with its large rooms and high ceilings. So Đào hung the crucifix above the door. Being quite short, she rarely saw the pained face of Jesus when she walked out of the room and could only catch a glimpse of His toes.

While she waited, a quiet resentment arose in her. All these years Đào had made sacrifices for Trung. And look how he had turned out. Why did he lack motivation? What had she made these great sacrifices for? Trung had adapted much more quickly than she did, which is expected. But he had assimilated the laziness of the locals. If she had the tongue that he had she would be applying for better-paying jobs and wearing better clothes and driving a better car than that whooping-cough car of his, so that the neighbours could see they came from a good family. Instead, her son chose to wear ordinary pants and plain shirts. All the ‘label' shirts she bought for him from the factory, at a heavily discounted price, he simply put in his walk-in robe. He opened
only one of the long-sleeved cotton shirts, which hung like a formal stranger amongst his other short-sleeved shirts and windcheaters.

Through the metal grilles and venetian blinds and the nylon lace over the windows, Đào watched him shaking his legs as he got out of the car. He went around stiffly to open the door for his daughter, Tuyết. The moment they were inside her house, Đào took charge.

“Here, you watch the
tivi
okay?”

Tuyết's short haircut emphasised a sullenness in her jaw. She looked up at Trung, who nodded encouragingly. She turned back to her grandma blankly, acquiescing. Đào turned on the television, disappeared and then returned with a range of sateen cushions, which she put on the lounge next to the back pillow.

“Stop sitting so close to the
tivi
! Move back!” Đào yelled.

Tuyết moved back obediently, and was then arranged, along with the back pillow and cushions. The granddaughter appeared sleepy and tried to pull away from Đào.

Đào began to reheat the soup for her son. The slimy green curry soup swirled in the large pot. She garnished the bowl with bean sprouts and Vietnamese mint from her garden. Then she presented the soup to the table, stood with her feet rooted to the ground and waited for him to taste it.

“Is it all right?” Her hands tensed up.

Trung tasted it silently, said it was delicious and moved the top of
his head away from the vicinity of her hands. Đào continued standing there. She wanted for more to be said, more praise for her hard work and cooking skills. Nothing came back at her. Đào pursed her lips, disappointed, for her son was not in the habit of heaping praise on housework he disliked doing himself. Unable to express this displeasure, she began interrogating him.

“When are you going to make a decision about your life? Other people's sons have restarted their careers.”

Trung became confused for a moment, but then replied, “It's good to have a look at what is around…things are different over here…”

Đào was back at the large pot, spooning the curry soup into a smaller, child-sized bowl.

“You're young,” she said from the stove, “you don't understand how short our lives are. Turn your head this way and that, and then three years have already passed. We've been in this country for that long now, can you believe that?”

During that time, Trung had been quietly evading the shadow of something he could not quite name.

He lowered his voice. “Then, I don't want to spend every minute of my short life…” he didn't say the rest, “working like a dog.”

His daughter was absorbed in a noisy cartoon on the television, oblivious to their conversation. Then a newsbreak about a baby in the Northern Territory, either killed by its parents or taken by a dingo.

Trung changed the topic. “
Má
, was that man who left the house when we arrived one of your
hụi
friends?”

“No. He's living here, for a month or two – in the garage.”

Trung leaned forward. “Why did you rent out your house to a stranger? The girl and the old woman are okay, but why a man as well?”

“I can use the extra money,” Đào said.

“Do you know anything about him?”

“Of course I know about him!”

“What do you know about him?” he persisted.

“He is a polite, well-spoken man.” Đào's voice calmed down again, “His
quê gốc
is in the North and his father was a school teacher.”

“But, what does he do over here?” Trung stirred his slimy green soup, and resumed eating.

Đào raised her voice. “He's a Vietnamese. Everyone over here is struggling the same way. We have all lost so much already. There's no point having no
tình người.
”

Trung looked indignant and replied, “We all need money over here, but there are limits…”

“You see someone in need, so you help them. Come over here and everybody's blood turns tepid.” Đào waited for his counter-attack.

Trung got up and left his soup unfinished. “Let's hope your granddaughter is safe with strangers around.”

The Monk

After meditating in the morning, the monk decides to leave his shelter to walk down to the river and the nearby park. His makeshift abode is behind an overgrown paddock, beyond the old blue-stone quarry next to the handful of factories on the escarpment. The distance is further than he first guessed, and upon arrival he finds the wind has picked up and grey clouds are looming on the horizon. The monk has another difficulty: he needs to do a shit. It is the middle of an overcast day and no one is around. He tries the brick public toilet, but finds it locked. So the monk makes sure he is discreet, and has a dump behind a shrub in a secluded part of the park. He is feeling lighter and happier for it; all the cells inside his body are singing, and at times he thinks enlightenment is worth it for the regular bowel movements. The joy of non-attachment to the contents of one's intestines as well as one's thoughts, emotions, convictions and conceptions. That was the thought, but the moment is already gone.

The sky starts spitting small, cold droplets. The monk notices a large lopsided man leaning on the side of the barbeque shelter. He isn't there to jog or walk a dog or eat his lunch, and seems without purpose, other than to watch the monk. The clouds darken dramatically and rain begins to pour down. The monk dashes beneath a wattle and sits under its luxuriant silver-green foliage. Before him is a declination where he
can look over the view of dense shrubs and trees as he waits for the heavy rain to pass. He takes out a book from his cloth pouch.

The lopsided man's skin is deeply tanned and leathery. He walks around the back of the shelter, then climbs down the slope amongst the trees and shrubs and is now standing only twenty metres in front of the resting monk. The man stands there with his hands in his pockets.

The monk reads from a book about Emptiness in Nature and Man. He applies his reading to contemplate how this very park has been shaped by the different elements of water, sun, wind and air. The largest trees growing under those power lines on the other side of the river had come from tiny seeds, which had then been nourished by water…

The monk stops reading and looks up from his book. He sees the brown man, now less than ten metres away, standing beside a slender, dripping eucalypt with something metallic flashing in his hand.

The monk lowers his eyelids, returns to his breath. The large trees in this park have within them light from the sun and the nutrients from the soil. These non-tree elements have transformed into tree-elements: trunk, bark, foliage, roots like strands of hair digging into the sandy earth. This is the nature of Emptiness, contemplates the monk, and he lifts his eyes a third time. The brown man is right before him, drenched, his gnarled fingers curled around a pair of meat shears.

Heat rises on the monk's cheeks and tension increases in his body. He observes the changing; the slightly harder breathing, the unusual
strength entering his arms and legs, an increased sharpness of vision. The monk detects in the other man a faint rotting smell, festering in the intestines perhaps, causing a dull pain of which the brown man is no longer aware. The monk's nostrils flare softly as he inhales the whole earth with each tender, deliberate breath. Continuing to sit still, the monk remembers, “I came here to read”, so he reads aloud from his book, raising his gentle voice to meet the stranger: “If you meet the Buddha on the road,” his voice betrays a flicker of tension, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

The Brown Man

With each step, his feet sink into the gravel. His hands clench the heavy sharpness in his pockets as he walks along the dirty river coursing its way through these industrial suburbs. High above him is an escarpment with shabby grass and thistles. He continues along the path as it diverges from the river and opens on to a plateau surrounded with shrubs and grasses. In the centre is a bench beneath a weeping, misshapen tree.

On the embankment, he can see the path resuming and veering back down towards the river. Suddenly, a bald, shiny head appears from behind a shrub. It is a monk, untangling himself from an overgrown corner of the deserted park.

The man is so shocked he almost falls backwards; the monk has dirty hands and a dirty brown robe. The monk sees him and nods, then sits underneath the weeping tree. He lowers his eyes, as if he is asleep while sitting upright.

The brown man stands there for a long time. He watches how the monk arranges each finger like the petals of the lotus flower. The brown man looks down at his own fingers, which are thick and dirty. His own body is scarred and deformed, broken and mended wrong. The clouds draw from the horizon and begin to foam and gather overhead.

He approaches the monk, feet brushing against the serrated tussocks. A strong wind forces the branches of the tree downward in one big gust and the cold rain comes. Still the monk does not look up. The man is astonished – perhaps the monk is blind and does not realise how menacing he is. So he musters greater fearsomeness; his eyes widen to show the pink membranes of his eye sockets; the furrow of his brow deepens and forces its way downwards almost between his eyes; his teeth present their dull lustre to his seated victim; he lets out a wild cry that pierces the emptiness of the park. This he does several times, and after each howl, stops to watch for the monk's reaction of fear and terror. Instead, the monk remains motionless, his eyes lowered. The brown man takes the meat shears from his pocket; with his other hand he reaches out to touch the monk. He feels the warmth of the monk's skin, then notices how icy his own fingers are, how the rain has made his hands so cold.

The monk opens his eyes wide. The brown man shows his weapon, and demonstrates his intent; he intimates the cutting of his own fingers and limbs. The monk watches the man impassively. During the sawing action of the shears, the brown man's face changes, pulling downwards like plastic, and he starts to cry out, no longer with coercion, but with fear of the monk's composure.

The monk interrupts the man, “If you meet the Buddha on the road…”

The brown man stops cutting into his own hand and redirects the shears at the seated monk. Each of the monk's words seeps through his skin, muscles and internal organs, bleeding some perceptual outline that separates him from the world, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Bác

The old woman lay in bed. She was relishing the warmth seeping into her bones like the humid embrace of the tropics. Her frail body felt protected under the covers. She knew that her landlady was going to come into the studio at any moment, so she should probably get up and put a coat on. But Bác kept her eyes shut against the new day and continued to roast underneath her blankets, reminiscing about the plump and brightly
coloured fruit at the market stalls, and her friends tossing cakes wrapped in banana leaf to her. The more she remembered the generosity of her childhood friends, the more she unclenched her hands from the blanket and opened them to the heavens. She was staring at the ceiling, peering into her memories when Đào's figure appeared in the studio.