She Weeps Each Time You're Born (21 page)

When she kissed his scar, the silvery light dawned in her head, her ears itching as if an insect had wormed its way down the aural canal. Then it was all there, the disembodied voices of the dead—Afghanistan, a small boy in a long shirt running away, then the sudden explosion in the Russian's neck as the grenade went off, the concussive bang, the air like a hammer, his best friend Mikhail running toward him with the blacksmith's iron that had been heating in the fire right when the grenade exploded, the smell of his own burning flesh filling his nose and lungs.

The moon sat squarely in the window. Already the rain was down to a light patter, outside the sounds of things dripping from a great height. The Russian put her fingers in his mouth. She could see where he had smeared her blood on his chest. Nothing about it had hurt. Lastochka, my little swallow, he said, drifting off to sleep. She had to fight to keep all the voices rising off his skin out of her head. There were so many dead by his hand in that foreign place. I hear you, she whispered. His name was Levka Zaytsev, the lion and the hare. He was nineteen years old. He had seen literally everything.

Two hours before dawn Rabbit opened the door to the room she shared with Qui in the row of flimsy rooms next to the bus
depot. The moon was still in the sky. Qui was sitting in the corner milking herself into a jar, her silver hair flowing down her back like a mirror. With one hand she was squeezing the swollen orb of her right breast, with the other plucking bits from the red chrysanthemum and quietly slipping the tufts in her mouth.

T
HE THIRD TIME LEVKA TOOK HER TO THE HOUSE, SHE TOLD
him everything. They were lying in bed. Outside, the water was rising in the streets. The daily rains had been harder than usual. Together they had waded through it to the house. At one point Levka had carried her on his back. Now in the sparsely furnished room on the second floor he was telling her about the fields of Dien Bien Phu, the little orange flags dotting the valley. He walked his fingers down her belly. The ring winked on his finger. You have to be careful where you step, Levka said. She smiled as he got closer. He made a noise with his mouth. The way he shook his fingers, as if he'd burned them, she knew it was supposed to be an explosion. One wrong move, he said. He pulled his hand away and rolled over.

Moonlight tangled in the sheets. Rabbit knew he was lying in his own world far away, that he was thinking of Mikhail running to help with the red-hot iron glowing in his fist, the smell of Levka's flesh burning as Mikhail cauterized the wound. Mikhail who was always running to help. Running through the shadow of the Urals where they had grown up together as boys. Running out into the sector of Dien Bien Phu the French had called Huguette, near the old airfield, to help with the excavator, the machine's left track jammed up with rocks, the little orange flags flapping in the wind as far as the eye could see, then an old wound opening up in the earth, the air transformed into a hammer, the hammer striking Mikhail.

Rabbit could feel a tension in the mattress. She knew Levka was still awake. She didn't expect him to understand. He was the perfect audience. She reached over and kissed his scar, saw the little boy in the long shirt running away, the grenade sailing through the air. There was a man on fire, she said. I could hear him screaming. We were below deck, but I could hear him. For me, to hear something is to see it. The flames raging off him like the sun.

It has always been like this, Rabbit said. Even the three days I lay in my mother's arms in the ground, her fingers slick with honey. Maybe it started because I had no sight. I could only hear the sound of my own heart filling the dirt, the sound like water dripping from a great height.

Those first years I listened. The world was full of them. Everywhere we went. In the paddies. In the ditch beside the road. In the temples. In the rivers. A nation of people who have been dying from war for over a thousand years. Everywhere their faces buried in the road.

Levka was still lying with his back to her, in the window the moon cocked like an ear. She closed her eyes. I don't understand it myself, she said. I hear them stretching their voices out to me. They call to me and they tell me things and I say, I hear you. The simple act of someone hearing them, an acknowledgment, and then they can go wherever it is they go.

That dark week I almost became one. All those families swept overboard. The Cambodian who left the earth for good. The doctor lying with his broken god in his arms. The pirates' boat exploding. Then the hold was filled with the brightest light I have ever seen and I felt a thousand arms lifting me up. All around me the waters becoming as glass.

When I woke, there was a lump on my forehead and it was night. The moon was out. It looked full, the rabbit with its long bright ears as if stamped on a coin, but I knew it couldn't be full. We had just celebrated the Harvest Moon the night we escaped. Then I saw Son and Qui drifting on a piece of wood. Son was staring at me. There wasn't a single wave in the ocean. The moonlight shone on the water like a white robe stretching to the horizon. It does look full, said Son, but yes, it can't be.

We drifted for three days, each night the moon as if whole, the three of us adrift, Qui almost naked where the explosion had ripped her clothes off, her milky-white skin without a single
bruise. When the sun rose that first morning, Qui climbed onto my piece of wood, shielding me with her body that never burns, the sun hammering down on us all day without pause, Qui's body always the same ghostly hue. I imagined from a distance her body flashing like a mirror in the sunlight.

On the second day Qui lifted her head and pointed. A boat, Son shouted. I looked up. It was so close I could see the people on board. The boat was riding low in the water. I couldn't see the boat itself for all the people spilling out on every surface, a ship made entirely of people. I know they saw us. I could see the desperation in their faces. They didn't stop.

How did we keep going? When I was thirsty, I would take Qui's breast in my mouth. It tasted like mountain air passed to a man floating hundreds of feet below water. Sometimes I would pass the milk from my mouth into hers.

The second night I heard something chittering in the waves. Then I saw them—a family dancing in the watery light of the always-full moon. Dolphins, their skins like silver. All night they stayed with us, keeping watch.

The morning of the third day the dolphins disappeared. One minute they were singing their high-pitched songs, then I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the waters were empty. I could see seabirds circling in the distance. I watched them get closer. Among them there was one dark bird, the others white as salt. Then the dark bird left the group and flew toward us. None of us said anything even after the bird landed by my shoulder. I put my hand on the elegant S of her neck, her feathers fully formed. Binh, I said. The bird that had been traded for a red wedding dress. Rabbit looked out the window. She died just last year, Rabbit said.

Toward afternoon we heard the boat. None of us had to look. It took more than forty minutes before they reached us. The waters were so calm we could see it a hundred waveless miles
away. The sailors pulled me up first. When they pulled Qui on board, I gasped. I hadn't noticed while we were drifting on the ocean. Standing on deck, her skin was still as pale as the underbelly of a fish, but over the course of three days lost at sea, her long black hair had turned white from root to tip.

Someone brought us a blanket. I can't say they were unkind. On top of the boat the red flag waved with the yellow star, a single lidless eye.

Where's Son, I said. I became frantic. One of the sailors put his arms around me to keep me from jumping back into the sea. Where is he, I shouted. A sailor came and handed us a burlap sack and a pale blue rice bowl. This is all that was out there, he said. The sack rattled as Qui took it. I could hear voices chattering softly. I knew it was full of the bones of generations.

Levka rolled over and ran his fingers through her hair. A few pieces got stuck in his ring. Gently he freed them with his other hand. With his finger he traced a pattern in her freckles, connecting them one by one. She could see tears glistening in the corners of his eyes. Почему ты всегда молчишь? She lifted her head as he inched himself into her. She was fifteen years old in the ancient system of reckoning. The way they moved together she thought of the ocean. Why are you always so quiet, he cried. You never say a word. She felt the wave cresting in her body, and even then she stayed silent, every muscle in her body screaming. The gibbous moon hung in the window, the long bright ears of the rabbit just starting to show.

T
OWARD THE END OF THE SUMMER RAINS VAN DISAPPEARED.
Each day Qui searched for him across the street in the concrete pit, but he was never there, a figure with muddy feet coming toward her bearing a red chrysanthemum. A light seemed to dim in Qui's face, the flowery perfume on her breath receding. The few nights Rabbit slept in their one room by the bus depot she could hear Qui shivering, her bones rattling in their sockets. Rabbit thought of the year the two of them had spent in the reeducation camp after the government sailors pulled them out of the sea. How one night Rabbit watched a new arrival, an old Chinese woman deprived of her nightly tar, the woman shaking uncontrollably, spit running down her chin.

The final night when Qui's sickness was at its worst, Rabbit got up off her mat. Qui, she said, placing her hand on Qui's forehead. Let it pass. Qui put her hand on Rabbit's neck. After a while, Rabbit let herself be pulled down to Qui's chest. It was the first time since the long days floating off the tip of Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand almost seven years before. Air where there shouldn't be air. Light spilling out of the darkness of the body. Rabbit had forgotten how sweet it tasted.

In the morning Qui was bright as a star, the pain of withdrawal long behind her, her skin and hair the same unearthly white. In the days that followed, Rabbit began to find small gifts left in front of their door or under the cinnamon tree on Duong Khiem. At first Rabbit thought they were from Van. Then early one morning as she returned from the Russian quarter, she saw one of their neighbors leaving a bowl of rice. The woman bowed her head and clapped her hands together in front of her face the way people did in the temples. It was obvious she was praying, but for what, Rabbit wondered. Then the woman scurried off.

Two weeks after Qui pulled Rabbit to her breast, Van appeared on Duong Khiem just as they were packing up their supplies for the night. His mangled hand was heavily bandaged. Just by looking, Rabbit could tell he had only one finger left.

Van kept himself in the shadow of the cinnamon tree. Qui put down the basket of leftover lemons she'd been packing. I have to leave Hoa Thien tonight, he whispered. Qui took his hand in her hands and held it to her chest. The blood seeped through his bandages. She let go and disappeared behind the iron fence. A few minutes later she came back with a jar filled with milk. Tell him to bathe his wound with it, said Son from his perch in the tree. Bathe your wound with it, Rabbit said. Qui handed Van the jar. He touched his forehead with his one remaining finger and disappeared down the street.

Years later they would see him again in Hanoi's Old Quarter on the shore of Hoan Kiem Lake, Rabbit's fame having spread all over the north. At first she didn't recognize him, his shy smile, his finger fully restored, the finger warm to the touch but heavily scarred at the knuckle. He had come to ask Rabbit of his wife and son. After all these years, had they made it to safety? Were they alive? Van would tell her of his fears, the smugglers always searching for him, constantly ratcheting up the price of his family's escape. In her grand house on the Street of Shoes, Rabbit will wrap both her hands around the two fingers Van has left and look him in the eye. Your son lives, she will say. Your wife and your enemies are dead.

T
HEY WERE SITTING UNDER THE CINNAMON TREE. RABBIT, QUI,
Son. It was two hours past noon. A bird was singing in the branches, the sound like a man whistling. The three of them were drowsing peacefully by the fragrant trunk, each with their own thoughts, the smell of the cinnamon perfuming their blood. How do you think it will end, Son said suddenly. The question floated up into the air.

Rabbit thought of the planets spinning wordlessly in space. She knew nothing was permanent, Levka's body arcing over her as he cried in his helplessness, the skin trembling by the corners of his eyes. She repeated Son's question. End? She looked and saw the wetness growing on the front of Qui's shirt, the stain expanding like a map. Maybe Qui knew. Maybe they all knew. End? That instant, forty miles away in the scrubby brush of Anne-Marie, it was ending.

I
T HADN'T RAINED FOR DAYS. NOW IT LOOKED LIKE IT
wouldn't. The season was still some months from the deepest cold of a temperate winter. At the foot of the cinnamon tree Rabbit sat studying the cloudless sky. The red-breasted parrot from earlier in the day had flown away. Overhead the stars were beginning to appear. She always missed the rains when they stopped. There was something comforting about the sound of water hammering the roofs, the sound as if you were being given a second chance, the world washed clean.