Mãn (17 page)

I am still angry with myself for having dozed off several times during that night, as if a life together were already established before us, entire and possible. I think Luc spent a sleepless night, because every time I half-opened my eyes, my gaze was met by his, waiting for it with the tenderness of certainty. At dawn, we went outside to smell the dew and the aroma of carrot muffins, my favourites except for the
tarte Bourdaloue
with pears and pistachios that we'd sampled together on the steps of St. Eustache church in Paris.

He left again the following afternoon, asking me to sew one of my hairs into the weave of his jacket and another into the bottom of the right-hand pocket of his jeans. On the station platform, he wrote on my palm that he promised to love the cold and the whiteness of sheets that mattered so much to me. And then, with no warning, he got down from the train to announce that he would take a taxi to give us half an hour more, and also to plan my return to France in response to an invitation from two restaurant owners in the countryside.

ruồi son

birthmarks

THAT VISIT AND THEN
two more gave me time to kiss and baptize each of Luc's beauty marks with the name of a place where we would exist without wounding any family or friends, our first raisons d'être. I counted each of those ruby spots as attentively and proudly as most Vietnamese, who conferred on them the role of good luck charms and saw them as precious because they were so rare on dark skin. I showed him the yellow colour of my palm and he talked to me about the
grain
, or texture, of my
imberbe
, or smooth-cheeked, skin, two words Luc had added to my vocabulary by placing them next to
dependence
and
gluttony
, old terms that had been given a whole new meaning.

va-li

suitcase

THE LAST TIME WE SAW
each other in Paris, when we were hastily closing my suitcase, Luc asked: “If I showed up at your door next week, what would you say?” Instinctively, without even taking the time to stop what I was doing, I replied with one word, “Disaster,” kissing him. It was a real question and I hadn't understood it.

đinh

nail

I DIDN'T KNOW THAT
a lot of tears had flowed at his house, that unspeakable words had been flung and wounds inflicted. When I finally grasped the scope of his question and the impact of my reply, it was already too late. The final nail had been driven into the lid of my coffin when his wife, without reproaching me, announced her intention on the phone: “I'm staying. Do you understand? I am staying.”

I received that declaration when I was preparing red snappers to be steamed with ten condiments (
cá chưng
) for a wedding anniversary party. On the work table, vermicelli, cat's ear mushrooms, shiitakes, soya beans in brine, minced pork, finely grated strands of carrot and ginger, sliced peppers: everything was ready but the lilies. I knotted them one by one so the petals wouldn't come undone while they were being cooked. That repetitive act allowed me to hear in my head Luc's voice whispering sentimental songs without anyone being aware. I was absolutely not expecting that call from his wife, which petrified me. I remember seeing my hands continue to remove the pistils from the flowers, to garnish the fish and place them in the enormous
bain-marie
with the big holes, but I've forgotten the rest, what came next.

xé lòng

heartbreak

MAMAN HAD BEEN EDUCATED
by Catholic nuns all through her childhood. She knew a lot of stories from the Bible that she would tell me to back up a message or a lesson. That night, I took charge of cleaning and closing the kitchen. She stayed with me and slipped in the story of the Judgment of Solomon before disappearing up the stairs.

I washed the kitchen floor on my knees, holding a scrub brush and weeping profusely. I sharpened the knives on the whetstone. I went out back with a flashlight and removed the wilted flowers and dead leaves from the garden. And most important, I held my breath—to cut myself in half, to amputate Luc from me, to die partially. Otherwise, he would die entirely, torn in two, in seven, in shreds, making his children into collateral injured.

thu

autumn

MY SAFE HAVEN LAY IN
cooking elaborate, time-consuming dishes. Julie supported me in these extravagant projects by lightening my schedule and cutting down on my usual tasks without my knowledge. For Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, I spent nights at a time boning chickens without tearing the skin, then stuffing and sewing them up. I also gave the local Buddhist temple a large plant covered with mandarin oranges hung one by one on the branches. Each fruit had a wish wrapped around its stem, intended for the one who would pick it on the stroke of midnight. For the Moon Festival in August, I made
bánh trung thu
, mid-autumn moon cakes that the Vietnamese savour while they watch the children walking down the street with their red lanterns lit by candles. The fillings vary according to taste and the time we spend on them.

I had all of eternity because time is infinite when we don't expect anything. And so I had decided on a stuffing with many kinds of roasted nuts and watermelon seeds that I husked by cracking the tough bark of each one very firmly. To avoid touching the delicate flesh inside required a lot of control to stop at the right moment. Otherwise, the flesh would break like a dream on waking. It was painstaking work that allowed me to withdraw into my own universe, the one that no longer existed.

Fortunately, there are no verb tenses in the Vietnamese language. Everything is said in the
infinitive, in the present tense. It was easy, then, to forget to add “tomorrow,” “yesterday” or “never” to my sentences to make Luc's voice ring out.

I had the impression that we had lived a lifetime together. I could visualize precisely the position of his right forefinger pointing up when he was annoyed, his body relaxed in the shadow of the shutters, the way he wrapped his long royal blue scarf around his neck when he was running after his children.

thẻ bài

dog tags

LUC'S ABSENCE HAD LED
to the disappearance not only of himself and of “us,” but of a large part of myself as well. I had lost the woman who laughed like a teenager when she tasted the ten flavours of sorbet at the oldest ice-cream maker in Paris, as well as the one who dared to look at herself lingeringly in a mirror to decipher the reflection of the word written in felt pen on her back. Today, when I stand on a stepstool at the bathroom mirror, I can sometimes find the blurry remains of the letters
ruoma
if I read from the top of my spine to the bottom and
amour
in the opposite direction.

I don't recall exactly how much time passed before Maman intervened. In the absolute dark of her bedroom, where she had asked me to spend the night, she put a small metal plate the size of a tea biscuit into my hand. It was one of the two dog tags belonging to PhÆ°Æ¡ng, the young boy who'd become a soldier and who had given her a poem when she was a teenager. The tags embossed with the same essential information about him had to be worn around his neck at all times, unless he fell on the battlefield and a comrade in arms pulled one off to take back to the base. Before he left, he'd gone to see her in uniform and given her the plate to offer her “the life he hadn't lived” and his dream of her that would be eternally a dream if he didn't come back to retrieve it.

For many years, every time Maman saw a military helmet abandoned by the side of a rice paddy or in
some reeds, turned right or wrong side out, empty or filled with rainwater, she thought she would collapse from inside. If her feet hadn't been obliged to continue advancing in her comrades' footprints, she'd have knelt beside those helmets and never got up again. Fortunately, the silence of the single file kept her upright, for a false move could trigger a mine, endangering the lives of all those soldiers ready to stop the cannons from sliding down a muddy slope by lying in front of the wheels: sacrificing themselves for the cause of a nation.