She Weeps Each Time You're Born (7 page)

Qui woke up after midnight. Her braids lay in coils on the ground. Beside her the child was still awake, Rabbit's eyes focused on something remote. Qui looked off to where she was staring. After a moment she too could see it, a light dancing in the distance. It quivered like fire but was the wrong color, the flame a steely blue.

Gently Qui put a hand on Rabbit's face and closed her eyes. After a while they stayed shut. The old women were asleep.
Qui was mindful not to wake them. She slipped the cleaver out from beneath Bà's head, careful not to pull her hair, then moved toward the flame. It was farther off than she'd thought, the little blue light always winking just up ahead.

When she arrived, Qui could smell something cooking. Her stomach rumbled. It smelled like catfish and lemongrass. They looked up. None of them were surprised that she should be coming out of the forest—a young girl carrying a cleaver, her hair snaking down her back, her exquisite face as if carved from moonlight. The man in the group said something she didn't understand. He tried again in broken Vietnamese. You VC? She shook her head. He pointed to a spot next to where the fish was cooking over a small blue flame. She sat.

There were more than ten of them, a family of Bana. The women wore the traditional skirts, each one long and black with a panel of colorful red embroidery around the middle. The man was shirtless, his loose pants made of the same dark material. They talked in their own language. She couldn't be sure which ones were his wives, which his sisters.

The fire was starting to wind down. A woman sat shaping a lump of clay into a small gray ball. When it was good enough, she tossed it into the flames and for a moment the fire sparked a pale blue as the ball ignited and began to burn. Qui could feel her mouth watering.

The man said they had crossed a bridge made from the bodies of the dead, corpses strung together to make a way. Two days ago Buon Me Thuot falls, he said in broken Vietnamese. Route 7 is a river of despair. Do you know what this means, he asked. Qui nodded, but he said it anyway. It means we are dead.

The front of Qui's shirt suddenly went wet in the blue light. She could feel the hot milk dribbling down her stomach. One of the women noticed. Without a word she got up from her seat and disappeared into the darkness. The woman came back carrying
a sleeping child. His face seemed older than Rabbit's, almost wizened, but his body was smaller, less than what it should have been.

Qui lifted her shirt. Instinctually the sleeping child took her breast in his mouth. His lips were dry and chafed her nipple. Qui tried to stifle a sigh. The rapture of a foreign mouth on her body, a hunger she could satisfy.

In the light of day if the little Bana boy could have described his dreams to his mother and aunts, he would have told them fabulous tales of leaf-nosed bats and the long white tongue of the full rabbit moon. He would have told them about a dead woman glowing six feet below ground with a pearl gripped tight in her hands, all through the air the scent of honey. He took as much as he wanted, and still there was more. Soon the milk spilled from the corners of his mouth. In the days and weeks to come, his face shone with a new glory. His form filled out, skin radiant and supple, soft as down. After his midnight suckling at the stranger's teat, he was never sick a single day for the rest of his natural life.

In the morning the world was dewy and bright. Qui lay on the mat next to Rabbit in the middle of the trail where they had gone to sleep. The cart still stood where they'd left it loaded with their possessions, condensation glistening on the jars. The cleaver was back under Bà's head.

Qui sat up and stretched. The old women were already awake. They had slept on top of a hill. Through the dead trees she could see down to where the Serepok had run dry. If she turned east she could just make out a wide horizon where the world seemed to come to an end. She picked Rabbit up and walked to the edge of the hill and lifted her shirt, the baby's face flushed from a restless night. Qui closed her eyes, then the familiar feeling of light issuing out of the body. Water rushing downhill to find itself.

Overhead scavengers were already circling for the scent of
rot. Huyen watched the birds sail in rings on the wind. All that was left to do was pack up. They had another long day before them. One by one the old woman picked up their bamboo mats. Under Qui and Rabbit's there was something in the ground. Huyen brushed back the dirt with her foot. She didn't blanch when she saw what it was.

It was a face, the eyes still open. For a moment she considered digging further to see if she could find a gun. What is it, said Bà, her heart gone cold, but already Huyen was covering it back up.

They traveled all day over the highlands toward Nha Trang on the coast. Bà lay in the cart with her useless body, the baby nestled in her lap. Huyen hobbled forward on foot. The smell of salt sharpened in the air, the land leveling down. On this side of the mountain the populace lived on the ocean, the people fishermen and their business the business of fishing. Qui thought of the Bana family she had met in the woods. We are dead, the man had said, the man with his stories of crossing the Song Den on the backs of corpses. Like stepping on logs only softer, he'd added. Qui kept walking, the blisters on her hands starting to bleed. One of the women had described how you could feel the soft dents growing on the backs of the dead, like bruises on fruit. Spots where the bodies had been stepped on repeatedly.

Years ago in Cong Heo, Qui had heard stories about the NVA using peasants to ford streams. How the Americans would send fighter jets to bomb an area, houses and roads and animals all destroyed for the sake of a single bridge. Little did they know that by nightfall the rivers were again being crossed. By the light of the moon the peasants would stand shoulder to shoulder in the muddy waters, then bend over, their backs like wooden planks. Entire villages were lined up, even the elderly, each becoming a single stone in the human road. Then the NVA would roll a
series of bicycles over the living bridge, bicycles loaded with rice and ammunition and medicine.

For the third day in a row Huyen was chewing the same betel leaves, the leaves long stripped of their punch. She looked up into the blue sky. A white bird floated in the air. It was a seabird. She could tell by the wide yellow feet and the fact that the bird stayed close to earth. In the distance a haze hung over the far horizon, the line indistinct between the sky and the South China Sea. Everywhere flocks of the little white birds with the wide yellow feet swirled in the air.

From the back of the cart Bà grunted and lifted her right hand. By the side of the trail there was a dragon-fruit tree growing in a ditch, each prickly arm green and spidery. They were succulents, a kind of cactus, the fruit itself magenta though the flesh was white and speckled with small black seeds. Huyen walked over and picked one. She peeled back the thick pink petals and bit into it, chewing a little before spitting the mush back out into her hand and offering it to Bà.

Bà turned her head away so Huyen offered her the fruit directly. Painfully Bà lifted her head and took a bite. At the familiar sweetness, the seeds crunching between her teeth, she remembered the first time she'd ever eaten dragon fruit, the tree with its green arms armed with spikes.

It had happened at Terres Noires. The black earth. Bà's breasts newly blossomed. She is standing behind the old wooden shed where the tin buckets are stored, each one rinsed out at the end of the day, the old women and children peeling the white residue from the sides and collecting the sticky peelings in a heap, which in turn will be measured and added to the day's take. Thirty feet off someone is being beaten in the water station again, the sound of the victim's voice familiar, something almost pleasurable in the man's cries, though she cannot place it. The way his breath
catches in his throat, the man gasping. An inexplicable burning grows in her loins as she listens to his agony.

Then she sees them. A pile of bright pink oblongs gleam on a table underneath a white tent. Everywhere there are acres of plates and silverware. She isn't supposed to be standing here behind the shed where the tin buckets are stored when not in use. Her mother is out working the twelfth sector, bringing in her thirty pounds a day, which is easy in the twelfth sector because the trees are the ideal age. The white sap pouring out of them like tears.

And where is she now? A long communal building, a barracks. Things cluttered in the corners. Personal effects. Pots for cooking. Mats. It has been a long time since she has set foot in this world. Even with everyone out working in the sectors, the lingering smell of hundreds of unwashed bodies. He is sitting on a stool with his shirt off, a series of fresh welts running the length of his back. Is she still a child or was she ever a child? The man is older than her by whole lifetimes. Yet there is something about him that draws her to him. Perhaps it is the beauty of his hands, the skin of his palms like milk. Where is she and how did she come to this place? A room where she finds herself all alone with a shirtless man and his shredded body. But the man is winking at her. On the floor the sunlight pools in a yellow swatch. He is smiling as he reaches down inside his pants and pulls it out. She moves toward him.
Pour vous
, he says. Even when they had been beating him, he had managed to keep it tucked between his legs. The stolen fruit bright as a jewel.

Qui and Huyen stood and watched Bà toss in the cart. Together we unpeeled it, says Bà. The hunger of our hands, the black seeds crunching between my teeth. He takes his perfect milky palm and wipes the juice from my chin. Then he kisses me, our mouths full of dragon fruit.

Huyen could feel the headache stalling at the back of her brain. She had spit out the old leaves miles ago. Qui looked at her grandmother. I don't know what she's saying, Huyen said. It's gibberish. They stood watching as the juice rolled down Bà's chin. Finally she lay still. She's dying, Huyen added. Qui didn't even nod. Overhead a few of the small white seabirds floated in the blue, each one like a V in the sky. All right, Huyen said. Let's go.

From the last hill leading into Nha Trang they could see a mass of boats in the port. People were in the water holding what looked like bundles over their heads, a small fleet already making their way out to sea. Later, Huyen would hear a rumor about an American battleship ten miles off the coast, and that if you could reach it, it would take you with them.

Late afternoon they came to a neighborhood. The highway was still another few miles east. They walked through deserted streets. Some of the houses had been dismantled, names and markings taken down, signs blacked out. Trash littered the ground. An old dog lay in an alleyway. As they wheeled by, it lifted its head and sniffed but didn't get up. Something in the eyes—an animal weariness, as if it had seen this all before.

We should make the highway by sundown, said Huyen. She nodded toward the cart. People will help us. Somewhere she had picked up a large stick and was using it to make her way. Qui wondered where her grandmother had come into this newfound hope, this belief in people. Qui knew what would happen. She had seen it in the eyes of one of the Bana women when the man had offered Qui some of the fish. Overnight a thousand-year culture of hospitality had been reduced to every man for himself. The milky hollow in Qui's chest was on fire. Who would
help them? If things were different, she wasn't even sure if she would help.

They walked on. A car shot past headed toward the highway, a sea of heads visible in the window, furniture and suitcases tied to the roof. As it sped by, Qui saw someone training a gun on them out the passenger-side window. It was a child, a young boy sitting in a woman's lap, the boy's face hard, his arm steady. The car continued on its way. Before the car reached wherever its destination was, Qui knew the boy would shoot somebody.

A man was standing in a doorway. It looked like it had been a shop of some kind. Through the window Qui could see the empty shelves. The man wasn't wearing a shirt as he stood coolly smoking a cigarette. A handmade flag was tacked just above a window, the flag red with a single yellow star in the middle. It was probably something his wife had stitched up from rags. Qui wasn't sure which one was prettier. The north's solid red with the one yellow star or the southern flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three red stripes running horizontally in a field of yellow.

There were other people making their way to the highway. Many of them were traveling with carts and bicycles loaded with possessions. Occasionally a motorbike would speed past, or just as often someone would be pushing one, either out of gas or trying to conserve it. Everyone looked dirty and hungry but energized just the same. Qui tried to imagine what had happened in these streets in the first minutes when news of Buon Me Thuot hit, that the central highlands were falling. Qui knew that for many it was the beginning of a road without an end.

It took a while for her to notice that not everyone was fleeing. Qui saw a woman carrying a burlap sack of rice on her back. Two teenaged girls walked beside her, one with a proprietary hand on the sack. Both of the girls carried large sticks. They were walking the wrong way back up the street. The woman
looked tired. Maybe she wasn't ready to abandon her ancestors. Maybe in her mind she told herself she had nothing to fear, that she had never uttered a single word against the north, but her eyes said something else.

At the end of the street, Qui stopped and put down the cart. They had arrived at the boulevard that would take them to the highway. On one side of the street there were open-faced shops and small buildings, on the other side endless white sands and the aquamarine waters of paradise. Huyen looked at Qui. What, she said. Qui shook her head and picked up the cart again. Her hands were bleeding, the skin blistered and peeling. It would take too long to explain. Clouds of the small white birds sailed on the winds. She had never seen the ocean before.