The Journey Prize Stories 25 (8 page)

It is during a usual rendition of
“Ballade à la lune,”
when the children start laughing in the middle of the song, that Paul can smell sulphur. The children pinch their noses, then point fingers at each other, and then the fingers settle on a little red-headed girl with a sombre expression. The smell gathers strength. As the girl’s pallor matches her hair and tears roll down her face, the children laugh harder and clear a radius around her.

Josephine comes to the girl, checks under her navy dress, and picks her up by the armpits.

“It’s diarrhea,” says Josephine.

“Oh dear,” says Paul.

“I’ll take her to the washroom. Can you bring a pair of pants?”

“How would I have an extra pair of pants?”

“The nuns must have supplies,” says Josephine. “You must have a physical education department? An extra pair of shorts or sweatpants in a locker room? It doesn’t have to be the perfect size.”

“Of course,” says Paul. “I’ll be right back.”

Paul does not realize that he has sweated through his dress shirt until class is done. The red-headed girl’s mother shudders when she finds her daughter in baggy sweatpants.

“She had an accident,” says Paul.

“You changed her?” says the mother accusingly. She hisses in relief when Paul points at Josephine.

Josephine stays after all the other children are gone, waiting for Christian who is so absorbed with a strange looking toy that she finally has to pull it away.

“Until tomorrow,” she says.

“You know, I really teach fourth grade,” says Paul. “Fourth grade and up.”

“I understand.”

“I’m just substituting for the term,” says Paul. “Until a spot opens up in fourth grade. Or higher. Hopefully.”

“We will see you tomorrow.”

“Certainly.”

Thuong’s daydreams are as vivid as nighttime visions. Now, he is on a warship, looking for General Tran. The year is 1287. The Mongol naval fleet has settled at the mouth of the Bach Dang river, close to Hanoi.

Under General Tran’s direction, the Vietnamese navy waits until high tide, and then its fleet engages the enemy’s boats. When the tide ebbs, the Vietnamese boats retreat toward the ocean. The Mongol boats give chase, not realizing that the Vietnamese have laid metal spikes along the riverbed. The Mongols’ heavier, sturdier boats become embedded in the spikes in low tide. Meanwhile, another cohort of the Vietnamese fleet have been laying in wait in the tributaries behind the Mongol boats. The Mongols are surrounded and skewered.

Thuong is on the deck of a ship, but General Tran is nowhere in view. In fact, Thuong is among Mongols, tall, burly, bearded men wearing looks of horror. They see through him, run right through him. The ship is sinking. In the distance he can hear the victory chants of his countrymen, while the Mongols around him are helplessly bailing out water with giant clam shells.

Once a year, on her birthday, Thuong cuts Josephine’s hair outside in the old style. Not only is it his tradition to do it outdoors, but there is no room in the basement to properly cut hair. Outside there is an old apple tree, its protruding roots radiate through the backyard. There is a nail on the tree where Thuong hangs up a picture frame mirror. There are a fold-out wooden reclining chair and a lamp stand where he lays out his implements. Thuong does his barbering bare-chested, so that he does not soil a good shirt with her hair. He keeps a folded white towel over one shoulder.

It is unfortunate that Josephine’s birthday is at the end of September, when, in Vancouver, the sunlight is spotty at best. At least today it’s not raining. In the afternoon Josephine has set out
banh uot
in the kitchen when Thuong calls her outside. She knows what is coming. “I don’t need a haircut,” she says through the window, as she always does, and as always, Thuong leads her outside, arm held in arm, after Josephine puts on her blue-laced slippers to walk on the moist grass.

He ignores his mother, who croaks out the window, “Leave her alone.”

Josephine wears her hair long and straight, cascading over her shoulders. Every year he takes off five inches. “You know this is my true calling,” says Thuong, who is the son of a barber. “You thought you were going to marry a professor.”

“I thought I was going to marry a Colonel.” They regard each other through the mirror, the one time the whole year they make eye contact while talking. “I can settle for a professor,” she says.

Every year, Thuong thinks, Josephine becomes more beautiful. Every year it becomes harder to hold her gaze.

“Wait,” says Thuong. He calls Christian out from the basement. “Grab the sprayer.” Christian mists Josephine’s hair while Thuong pulls out the scissors from their plastic cover.

Next door is a barking Doberman. Around dinnertime it sticks its nose through the wooden fence posts and snarls at the apple tree. Now it is digging into one of the posts to loosen the soil around it. The dog’s Cantonese owners have complained to Thuong’s landlord, although it’s been months since Christian threw fallen apples at the dog. Thuong’s mother speculates that it’s Josephine’s cooking which sets the dog off. The dog gets this way no matter the dish, whether it’s beef noodle soup, imperial rolls, or even her cold shrimp and papaya salad.

The barking usually doesn’t bother Thuong, but now he nicks his little finger with the scissors.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve lost your focus,” says Josephine. “Maybe it’s the new incense.” She means the joss sticks that he burns for his father’s altar in their bedroom, the ones he got from Chinatown. “It keeps me awake too. It smells impure.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the incense.”

“They are opening up a temple on Kingsway,” she says. “You should get some proper joss sticks there.”

“A temple in Vancouver? Buddhist? Vietnamese?”

“I think so. You should also take that statue of yours. Leave it with the monks. You’ve been distracted by it. I can tell.”

“No, I haven’t.”

Josephine never complained when Thuong asked her to stow the statue in her trunk, never mentioned all the dresses she gave up, the farewell presents from her students that she
had to leave behind. She had thought the statue was struck in pure gold, and was shocked when Thuong rubbed off the gold paint so it wouldn’t be confiscated by the border guards. She thought Thuong did it for love of country, so there would be one less treasure the Communists could get their hands on. She didn’t think Thuong actually worshiped the folk deity. After all, Thuong got baptized just before they got married. They go to church every Sunday.

“Why else can’t you get your degree?”

Thuong taps her cheek with the scissors. “Please don’t,” he says. “Not today.”

Josephine brushes the scissors off her face. “Does the General belong in a temple or in our bedroom?” she says. They stare at each other through the mirror.

It takes all of Thuong’s power to peel his eyes away from her. When he is done cutting he takes the towel and wipes her hair off of his chest. The dog will not stop barking.

“Fish sauce,” yells Thuong’s mother through the window. “That’s what makes the dog crazy.” Fish sauce is the common ingredient in every dish Josephine makes.

There is one framed quotation Josephine had not noticed until today’s class, because it hangs in the corner where the children are sent to be punished:
“La vérité, comme la lumière, aveugle.”

The truth, as the light, makes blind. By Camus.

She loses focus the whole class. This is the guilt that Josephine cannot admit to: she has read
The Stranger
more times than any other book, except perhaps for the Bible. There is little that moves her, but she cannot keep her eyes from moistening
when the protagonist Meursault drinks coffee idly in front of his mother’s coffin. Nothing, nothing in the great Vietnamese romantic fables touches her as much as when, at Meursault’s trial, he can blame only the sun for his shooting the motionless Arab those four times. Nothing even in the Book of Exodus moves her as when Meursault is asked if he loved his mother, and he answers yes, the same as anyone.

She cannot explain it. She is as much an existentialist as the crucifix she wears is made out of water.

Maybe she feels all the things Meursault is unable to. Each scene of the novel evokes in her the true Christian feelings that Meursault ought to have if he were Christian as well. Plus there is the added pity she feels for Camus, for only a writer who feels such sorrow for the world can create a figure of such tragic emptiness. And yet she cannot condemn Meursault. She comes back to the novel at least once a year, not truly convinced there is no place in paradise for such a man.

After class she tells Paul that
The Stranger
is her favourite novel. She has never admitted this to anyone. Paul wipes his face wearily, as if every one of his students has told him this.

“It’s mine too,” he says.

“But you must love God?”

“I do.”

“Then isn’t it difficult to reconcile?” she says.

“It is very difficult,” he says, with furrowed eyebrows. “But we have to try, don’t we? Even if we have to start over every day.”

Josephine really does have a magic touch with the children. Those that fall off of their plastic chairs, or scrape their knees
during recess, go to Josephine for ministrations. Paul is free to concentrate on his lesson.

Josephine’s presence is based on a fib, and the fib is different depending on whom you ask. The nuns are told that Christian will break into tears and wet himself if Josephine leaves him for even a moment. The parents are told that she is a teacher in training. The children are told, for a laugh, that she is Gulliver’s wife.