A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (44 page)

I rang for my daughter. She had given me a porcelain bell, and after allowing H
enough time to go down the stairs and out the front door, if that was where he was headed, I rang the bell, and my daughter, who is a very light sleeper, soon appeared.

“What is it, Father?” she asked with great patience in her voice. She is a good girl. She understands about Vietnamese families and she is a smart girl.

“Please feel the doorknob,” I said.

She did so without the slightest hesitation and this was a lovely gesture on her part, a thing that made me wish to rise up and embrace her, though I was very tired and did not move.

“Yes?” she asked after touching the knob.

“Is it sticky?”

She touched it again. “Ever so slightly,” she said. “Would you like me to clean it?”

“In the morning,” I said.

She smiled and crossed the room and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled of lavender and fresh bedclothes and there are so many who have gone on before me into the world of spirits and I yearn for them all, yearn to find them all together in a village square, my wife there smelling of lavender and our own sweat, like on a night in Saigon soon after the terrible fighting in 1968 when we finally opened the windows onto the night and there were sounds of bombs falling on the horizon and there was no breeze at all, just the heavy stillness of the time between the dry season and the wet, and Saigon smelled of tar and motorcycle exhaust and cordite but when I opened the window and turned to my wife, the room was full of a wonderful scent, a sweet smell that made her sit up, for she sensed it, too. This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers but instead reminded us that flowers were always ready to fall into dust, while this smell was as if a gemstone had begun to give off a scent, as if a mountain of emerald had found its own scent. I crossed the room to my wife and we were already old, we had already buried children and grandchildren that we prayed waited for us in that village square at the foot of the strange mountain, but when I came near the bed, she lifted her silk gown and threw it aside and I pressed close to her and our own sweat smelled sweet on that night. I want to be with her in that square and with the rest of those we’d buried, the tiny limbs and the sullen eyes and the gray faces of the puzzled children and the surprised adults and the weary old people who have gone before us, who know the secrets now. And the sweet smell of the glaze on H
’s hands reminds me of others that I would want in the square, the people from the ship, too, the Vietnamese boy from a village near my own who died of a fever in the Indian Ocean and the natives in Dakar who were forced by colonial officials to swim out to our ship in shark-infested waters to secure the moorings and two were killed before our eyes without a French regret. H
was very moved by this, and I want those men in our square and I want the Frenchman, too, who called H
“monsieur” for the first time. A man on the dock in Marseilles. H
spoke of him twice more during our years together and I want that Frenchman there. And, of course, H
. Was he in the village square even now, waiting? Heating his glaze fondant? My daughter was smoothing my covers around me and the smell of lavender on her was still strong.

“He was in this room,” I said to her to explain the sticky doorknob.

“Who was?”

But I was very sleepy and I could say no more, though perhaps she would not have understood anyway, in spite of being the smart girl that she is.

The next night I left my light on to watch for H
’s arrival, but I dozed off and he had to wake me. He was sitting in a chair that he’d brought from across the room. He said to me, “Ð
o. Wake up, my old friend.”

I must have awakened when he pulled the chair near to me, for I heard each of these words. “I am awake,” I said. “I was thinking of the poor men who had to swim out to our ship.”

“They are already among those I have served,” H
said. “Before I forgot.” And he raised his hands and they were still covered with sugar.

I said, “Wasn’t it a marble slab?” I had a memory, strangely clear after these many years, as strange as my memory of H
’s Paris business card.

“A marble slab,” H
repeated, puzzled.