hand and touched his arm. “I’ve been dreading this day.”
NINE. Tiens
Fairies
Linh had taken a picture of Helen with him while he was gone, had stared and dreamed over it often during the whole long month, an impossibly long time to keep away, but he had forced himself. When he first caught a glimpse of her on the dirt road, he was struck by how she had filled out, how her skin had bronzed. She looked younger, a flushness in her figure he had not seen before. But as he came closer her face went downward and hardened as she recognized him, and he froze.
“Darrow said it was time to go.”
“I know.” She fell into step beside him, back to the village.
He was a fool, he berated himself. Wasting so much dreaming.
The afternoon Linh had delivered Helen into Darrow’s arms, he was a tired man. After he took his leave of them, stowing his camera gear in the USAID compound, he dressed in the plain clothes of a farmer and hiked down a dirt road. Outside the village, he climbed down the bank of the river to an isolated grassy spot, took off his clothes, and went for a swim.
The grass along the bank was plush and long; it fell in swaths one direction and then another, like a hand-mown lawn. The spot reminded him of the place Mai used to lure him to during their school days to sing to him.
The water cooled his body, the solitude a deep plea sure. A relief simply not to have to speak. In his earlier life, he had lived so much in his imagination, writing in notebooks, that it was now a constant strain to keep his mind directed out into the world, trying to understand others more than himself, to rewrite his thoughts into a foreign tongue.
After his swim, he climbed back up on the grassy bank, put his clothes on, and fell asleep under the trees.
The sound of children’s laughter woke him in the late afternoon. Two young girls trawled the shallows for crayfish and shrimp for dinner. More interested in splashing each other than in catching anything.
Linh sat up, startling the younger one so that she fell back and landed on her rump in the water.
“You scared us!” the older girl scolded.
“I’m sorry,” Linh said. “Come closer here, and I’ll give you a present.” The girls giggled and moved closer, and Linh handed them each a stick of Juicy Fruit gum.
The oldest girl had a smooth oval face like a polished river stone. Linh stroked her blue-black silken hair as she tore the first piece in half and handed it to her sister. She put the second piece in the waistband of her pants for safekeeping.
“Do you tell stories?” the younger girl asked.
“I used to.”
“Please, please,” the older girl said.
“There is one I’ve been thinking of,” he answered.
“A poor woodcutter’s wife passes away. He is very lonely, and in the market he sees a picture of a beautiful tien, a fairy, whose image he falls in love with. He takes the picture home and hangs it on his wall, and he talks to it at night, setting a bowl of rice and chopsticks in front of it at meal times.
“One day he comes home and his hut has been cleaned. There are delicious dishes prepared for him to eat. This happens every day with no sign of who is taking care of him. So the woodcutter decides to solve the mystery. He pretends to be going to work one morning and instead doubles back and peeks through a crack in the wall to find the fairy from the picture come to life. He rushes in and forces her to stay and marry him. As insurance, he locks the empty picture frame into a trunk. They live happily together and have three sons.
“The sons grow to adulthood and the woodcutter grows old, but the tien, being immortal, is as young as the day she stepped out of the picture. The villagers begin to gossip and finally the sons confront the father. When he tells them the truth, they refuse to believe him. Angry, the father unlocks the trunk and shows them the empty frame as proof, but still they scoff. When he leaves for work, the sons confront their mother, who denies it until they mention the frame. She begs them to show it to her, and when they do, she admits the truth and bids them farewell and returns inside the picture forever.”
“Does the tien come back?” the younger girl asked.
“Yes. Actually, there is a tien in your village right now.”
“Yes? Where?”
“Look for her. She has long golden hair.”
“Who are you?” the older girl asked.
“I’m the ghost of this tree, don’t you recognize me?”
“No.”
“Every time you come by here, I know if you’ve been a good girl and caught fish for your mama.”
“We’ve been bad today. We played and caught no fish.”
Linh laughed. He reached in his pocket and took out a few coins. “Tell Mama you found these lost on the road. So you don’t get in trouble to night at least.”
The younger girl leaned over and touched him on the knee. “You’re a ghost?”
Linh nodded slowly, in his best guess at a ghostly demeanor.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’ll always be here. You just might not be able to see me.”
At sunset, Linh lay back on the long, cool grass of the bank and inhaled the heavy scent of grapefruit blossoms in the evening air. He closed his eyes, remembering the smell of Mai’s hair after she washed it, adding a few drops of citrus oil to the rinse so that at night the fragrance permeated their bed when she lay down, making the room a dark grove in which to find her.
He rationed himself only one thought of her each day; otherwise he would not be able to go on. He hoarded his memories like other men did cigarettes or chocolates.
Today was the third anniversary of her death, the period of official mourning over, but he felt he had lost her a hundred years ago and only yesterday. He panicked at times, unable to remember a detail of her face as clearly as before. Worried about the thousand small memories of body that had already vanished from his recollection. Time like a chemical pushing a print too far, a fog overcoming the detail. It pained him that he relied on a few poor photographs of her more and more; everything that made him love her absent from the pictures. The images felt disloyal, as if he were dreaming over a stranger.
The next morning he rose at dawn, again washed in the river, then set off toward Can Tho, hoping to bum rides there for his trip north.
Once he arrived, Linh went to a dirty outdoor cafe and sat at Mr. Bao’s table. He had last seen Bao a little more than a month ago, yet he had put on the weight of a year.
“What took you so long?” Mr. Bao said.
“It took time to leave.”
“There hasn’t been anything as good as the Captain Tong piece since last we talked.”
Linh lit a cigarette.
“Why aren’t they with you?”
“Darrow is wounded. And they don’t go where I direct; it’s the other way around.”
“You are their friend. Lead with sugar.”
Linh hated Mr. Bao’s stupid Confucian sayings, his peasant cunning. These were the kinds of drones the party was filling itself with.
Mr. Bao changed tack. “How is your wife’s family?”
“I don’t know. I imagine not so good, since they got in touch with me.”
