She Weeps Each Time You're Born (29 page)
Read She Weeps Each Time You're Born Online
Authors: Quan Barry
Rabbit closed her eyes. She stood holding the bone and waiting for its story to come. She could feel the sun moving through the sky. Whole universes being born and falling dead. I can't hear anything, she said. Maybe it's too old, said Tu. Rabbit squeezed the bone even tighter in her palm. She sniffed it, then put it to her lips and slipped it in her mouth. It was sour and gritty and silent.
Then the sound of someone crying. Rabbit opened her eyes. She could see Qui and Linh walking back down the ridge, Qui's face pink with sun as the two of them picked their way down the hill through the forest of jars. Rabbit spit the bone out into her palm. What's wrong, she said. Qui walked with her arm around a crying Linh. I'm bleeding, said Linh. In the growing light her face look aged. Qui nodded, the front of her shirt dry. Rabbit closed her eyes again.
Already the others are heading back to the car, the sounds of Linh's sobs traveling on the wind. Rabbit stands on and on in the shadow of a stone jar gripping the bone fragment. Sweat trickles down her forehead. The sound of insects chirring in the dry grass. Nothing comes to her but the smell of bird shit rising from her arm.
She is the One Who Hears the Cries of the World. In Her male form She is sometimes referred to as the One Who Holds the Lotus or He Who Perceives the Lamentations of the Living, in Her female form She is depicted with eleven heads, a thousand arms, the orphaned parrot who became Her disciple often on Her shoulder. Her home is a small grotto on the side of Fragrant Mountain. She can produce Her own light, can incarnate as anything or anyone. She is the Goddess of Mercy who postpones Her own nirvana for the sake of us. She will not leave the earth until every being has been freed from the dark cycle of life
.
I
N HER PREVIOUS LIFE, SHE WOULD HAVE HEARD THE ROAR OF
their engines miles away in among the clamor of the world, her ears prickling at the distant sound. Instead she heard the roar of engines just as Linh did, the noise of their motorcycles like small boats on rough seas.
Something was biting her on the shin. Rabbit opened her eyes. She could feel the late-evening breeze fluttering through the gaps in the sun-bleached planks of the one-room hut in the shadow of the Mountain of the Fragrant Traces. Already Linh was standing guard in the doorway, the female parakeet perched on her shoulder. Even in the gathering darkness Rabbit could see the bird glaring at her as if to say you have nothing to lose by trying. You're wrong, Rabbit thought, but she remained silent in her hammock, not wanting the bird to begin lecturing her after all these years.
It was another ten minutes before the strangers arrived. The sun was down, the moon on the edge of the trees. She wondered where they were coming from so late in the day. Through the woods she could hear a dog barking, the meditative waters of the Swallow Bird River surging a short distance away. The Mountain of the Fragrant Traces was said to be the home of Quan Am, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Lady's home a grotto
no bigger than a coffin. According to legend the tiny grotto was lined with a thirty-foot snake, the Lady curled up tight in its coils.
Qui and Tu were late coming home from the river. Perhaps the two of them had stopped somewhere in among the trees. Evenings Tu checked the nets for fish while Qui tended the hives barehanded. They never coupled in the one room the four of them shared, Rabbit and Linh sleeping in hammocks and the two of them down on a mat on the floor, though Rabbit knew things were different when they were alone. The way Tu and Qui would float back into the house at the end of the day, faces luminous.
And now someone was making their way to the door. Rabbit wondered who would be desperate enough to brave the government edict. She heard the gate creak open on its rusty hinges. At the noise, the female parakeet winced. Anytime the gate swung open, Rabbit thought of bone grinding on bone. Outside the full moon was rising like a trophy over the tops of the trees.
When the man and woman stepped into the yard, Linh was already standing in the doorway with her arms akimbo, the female parakeet perched on her shoulder, the little girl's delicate features in sharp contrast to her iron bearing.
Xin chao, xin chao
, said the bird. Linh stuck her finger in its black beak and quickly motioned the visitors inside. After they were in, she peered up and down the road to see if anyone was watching. When she finally closed the door, she blew out the candle burning on the table, throwing the scene even further into darkness.
The room was small and cluttered. Two sleeping mats lay in the dirt, a pair of hammocks hanging by the window, pots and baskets stacked on either side of the door. An old fishing net was heaped in a corner, the netting full of holes chewed by rats. The only light was from the fire burning in the open pit. In the
tight space the woman visitor stood behind the man as if trying to make herself smaller. The man smelled of cigarettes, his teeth stained from addiction. The skin around his eyes was lighter than the rest of his face. Little Sister, he said to Linh. He kept his eyes on the floor. His hands were shaking. The villagers who live along the Swallow Bird River say in this house there is one who speaks with the dead.
Linh began to stroke the parakeet on her shoulder. She looked the man right in the face. Child, she said. You are mistaken. Linh waved her hand around the empty room. I am the only one here. Then the door opened and Tu and Qui walked in. There was a smattering of stray twigs stuck in Qui's silvery hair. What's going on here, said Tu. He was holding a fish, the thing wriggling and iridescent in his arms. Who are you? When he and Qui walked in, the room grew a little brighter.
The man began to talk. He explained who he was and what he did. He introduced the woman standing just at his shoulder, the woman with a face like none of them had ever seen, a face at once like their own but at the same time darker and foreign, her long eyelashes curling back on themselves. Please, said the man. I just want to show her everything there is to see in Vietnam. He made a gesture of supplication with his hands. This is the country where she was born, he said. Tu sighed. The fish continued to wriggle in his arms. We are her people, the man added as if that would help.
Then the floor opened up at their feet. The woman gasped and jumped back. The man with the pale skin ringing his eyes fell to his knees. Rabbit came rising out of the earth, the male parakeet on her shoulder. The female parakeet flew across the room and perched next to its mate. I hear you, said Rabbit. More than two decades after the end of the war, the woman's kind were starting to come back. For the past few years, thousands
of adults who had been given up as children during the war were returning to the country where they'd been born.
Something fat and gray went scurrying across the floor leaving a trail in the dirt, the tracks an indecipherable script. The dark woman looked to her guide. Is she talking to me, said the woman. Please, is this about me?
Sometimes a body is lifted from a chair and walks to where it sees a silent crowd. When you come rising up out of the earth from the secret place your father has once again hollowed in the floor, a strange man and woman are standing in the room, the woman dark in a way you have never seen before. The journey she has taken to arrive at your door is long and arduous and weirdly joyful. This unlikely combination of circumstances opens your ears again for the first time in what will be for you a new age. Everything is interconnected. How the young rice is carried by hand from field to flooded field. Transplantation. The green stalk putting down roots. What you want to say to her: “Wherever you go in the world, even if you find yourself in a strange land among strangers who love you, know that someone will always be listening who loved you first,” but there is no need to say this as the woman already knows, a presence at her shoulder keeping watch as she has always suspected. When you take her hand in yours, a symphony of voices rises from her skin, ancestors multi-various like the branches of a tree. The world stirs in mysterious ways. For your own reasons you stopped listening to us in the years when you lost hope, but now our voices are calling you back with our stories like song. The woman is not looking for anything or anyone. She is not asking you to listen on her behalf. She knows she does not walk alone and never has. And now in the light of this room where she stands in the presence of one who might bring her face-to-face with her origins, she lets the awareness wash over her. Consequently please do as you have always done and say, “I hear you,” and leave it at that
.
T
HEY WERE ALMOST TO THE RIVER. IT WAS A SHORT WALK
through the dense woods that surrounded the mountain. The hour of biting insects was long over. Moonlight poured through the canopy and dappled the ground. They walked single file, bats darting through the muggy night air, the parakeets resting on Qui and Linh's shoulders. Rabbit could hear the slow waters of the Swallow Bird River ambling through the darkness, the water gurgling like a baby. She could see the mountain looming over the trees. For a moment it seemed as though a tiny light were burning on the mountainside. She imagined a figure sitting in the light as if at a window, the figure like a star, invisible in the daylight but nevertheless always there.
After the two strangers left, Rabbit told Tu what she'd seen. He took a deep breath. The stain on the edge of his hairline gleamed as if freshly bloodied. Okay, he said. He handed her the fish he'd been holding and went out the door to see if he could find a boat.
Despite the lateness of the hour Qui began to flit around the room. Rabbit watched as she hefted a pot in her hand, then put it back. In time Qui tested everything they owned only to leave it all where it was.
Finally Qui took the burlap sack hanging from the altar out into the yard. From the doorway Rabbit noticed a strange shadow gliding independently along in the moonlight. She rubbed her eyes. When Qui found the small spade they used to plant vegetables, she got to work, her silvery hair sparkling. There were no voices chattering, just the clatter of bones as she lowered the sack in and buried it. The shadow stayed put where it was in the yard even as Qui hustled back inside, the shadow quivering as if weeping. It had been years since Rabbit had seen him standing at the border in the shadow of the guardhouse. She knew if she could see him now, the eternal scratch branching down his face would not be healed.
An hour passed. Linh sat by the fire grooming the parakeets with her fingers. Qui took the pale blue rice bowl off the altar and wrapped it up tight in her shirt. When there was nothing left to do, she sat down and milked herself into the dirt, not even bothering to go outside.
Rabbit lay in her hammock still holding the fish. It seemed to shine in her arms. She was still startled by the suddenness of the two unexpected visitors. It had been years since she'd spoken with the parakeets or seen Son. Whole lifetimes had passed since the rustling of voices stirred inside her. But tonight how the voices wafted easily off the strange woman, the room crowded with their music, the foreign woman's face at once Vietnamese and at the same time something else. Rabbit had seen Amerasians before, but generally they were pale with big eyes, their noses often large and western. The woman was different, her skin a deep chocolate, eyes dark, her nose small and flat.
On the way out the door the woman had gripped Rabbit's hands. She nodded as her guide, his voice shaking, the skin pale around his eyes as if marked by coins, expressed the woman's gratitude. Then the woman let go and the man took Rabbit's hands in his own. Suddenly her ears itched in the old way. An unexpected sadness filled her heart. She closed her eyes. A light dawned in the room inside her head. Somewhere a pair of naked legs lay cooling in a pool of blood under the unblinking moon. The man let go and the vision receded.
Cam on
, the foreign woman said,
thank you
, and then she and the man turned and disappeared into the darkness.
And so Rabbit was making her way to the river, the others trailing along. Tu had returned to the house shaking his head. Their neighbors wouldn't even answer the door, scared of being seen talking to anyone who had anything to do with the one under house arrest. It was as Rabbit had expected. They would make their way on foot. On the way out of the yard, Tu grabbed
the small shovel just in case, thinking of a night long ago and the things one unexpectedly finds in the earth.
Rabbit was still carrying the fish Tu had brought home for dinner. It seemed wrong to leave it behind. They hadn't had time to do anything else with it. The fish was still alive, its skin streaked with iridescence, its mouth gaping open rhythmically as its gills folded open and closed.
Ever since they had walked back down out of the Plain of Jars, the four of them had lived in exile in their own country. Through the years they had each slipped away into their own worldsâRabbit staring at shadows, her freckles fading as she holed up indoors, Qui and Tu entwined down by the river, Linh with the parakeets. Watching the foreign woman and her guide walk away in the moonlight, the simplicity of it had become apparent. That one could open the door and keep going, the man and woman lost to the night. Through the trees Rabbit could hear the rumblings of frogs. An insect buzzed near her ear. The government had forgotten her. She felt the knowledge wash over her. She had stayed in the one-room house all these years without being guarded because she had come to think of herself as a prisoner.