Naturally, it came as a surprise to everyone when Old Vu quietly announced that he was going to remarry. The woman was a religion teacher at a school in Cam Ranh, never married and now past her prime, who had answered the newspaper advertisement that Old Vu had placed a few months back.
There were no apparent benefits to the union—neither was particularly wealthy, and Vu’s hair had been white for years while the schoolteacher was rumored to be exceptionally plain.
“At least his back is so stooped that he’ll never have to see her face,” the townspeople whispered among each other. “But what do you think she’ll do when she meets the girls?”
Vi and Nhi were the last ones to find out about their father’s new bride. In fact, they did not know that there was to be a wedding until the very day of the ceremony. An unspoken agreement existed between the twins and their father, and they had managed to cross paths only a handful of times in over two years. Old Vu left for work before Nhi and Vi woke up in the morning, and they were gone long before he came home in the evening. The twins were now sixteen and menacingly beautiful. They didn’t go to school; they had no interest in housework or cooking. They maintained the same half-feral existence that they had as children, spending their time traipsing around the jungle or the beaches, except now they stayed far, far away from the temple on the hill. When they needed to sleep, they slept. When they needed to eat, there was leftover rice in the pot or a jar of money in the corner of the kitchen that Old Vu left for them. Sometimes they would make an appearance in town, walking with their heads held high and their arms linked, relishing the stares of the bystanders. The twins had a weakness for mangosteens and would buy several dozen at a time, meeting the curious gaze of the fruit seller with two pairs of narrow blue eyes that lacked anything resembling
human warmth. Then they would swing themselves easily into a high tree and eat their fruits, throwing the dark purple peels at anyone who happened to come too close.
Mrs. Dang, who had long given up trying to socialize the girls, was the one who informed Nhi and Vi of the impending nuptials. On the morning of the wedding, she came by the yellow house dressed in her best ao dai to find the twins curled up asleep beneath the kitchen table. The soles of their feet were caked with black mud and their hair was tangled together.
“Ai-cha! Get up, the pair of you! Your new stepmother will be here very soon!” Mrs. Dang prodded Nhi, the nearest one, with the pointed toe of her special-occasion embroidered slippers. The girls crawled out from underneath the table and stood, stretching their necks and shaking out their long, slender limbs like egrets in a rice paddy. The news did not appear to elicit a reaction from Nhi or Vi, but as Mrs. Dang supervised their cleaning and dressing—she didn’t trust them to get the job done by themselves—she noticed that their eyes kept meeting over the washbasin, as if communicating something that she was not privy to.
Despite the fact that Mrs. Dang and the twins were the only audience members in attendance, the schoolteacher from Cam Ranh had the church filled with flowers and wore a white, Western-style dress, complete with a train and lace veil. “These foolish modern women,” Mrs. Dang clucked to herself from a pew. The bride had also chosen to forgo the traditional tea ceremony and bowing before the ancestral altar, which Mrs. Dang thought most unwise. She doubted that they had
even consulted their astrological charts before becoming engaged.
Nhi and Vi slipped out of the church silently before the final vows. They hadn’t even seen the bride’s face.
I
T TURNED OUT
that Xuan, the new wife, was just as plain as the rumors had predicted, with heavy, sunken cheeks, a thick waist, and hair coarse as straw that she always pulled back into a severe bun. But her eyes sparkled with intelligence and she carried herself differently from the other women. With them, you could see it in the curve of their spines—the weight of generations of famine, of husbands and brothers and sons leaving home for war and never coming back. Xuan may have had the plodding features of a peasant, but she possessed a lightness that they did not. Old Vu could not love her—he was far too out of practice for that—but he could fear her a little. Not the same fear that he had felt for his old wife, with her fits of wailing and drunkenness and violence, but a kind of formless anxiety, the feeling one gets setting out for home after the sun has already begun to set, of trying to outrace the darkness. He supposed it meant that he cared for her. They took walks together, they ate the meals that Xuan cooked together, they slept together in the bed where the twins had been born, on the mattress that still had a burn hole from when Huong had once tried to set fire to it with a cigarette. Old Vu was certain that they were doing everything a good married couple should. Still, he could not shake the sense of apprehension that he felt
whenever he interacted with his new wife. When he was at home he tended to lapse into silence and just watch her moving about, him trying to give a name to the strange dread he felt. But no one watched her more warily than the twins.
They lurked in the bushes, they stared at her from the shadows. Now that she lived in the house, they didn’t sleep under the kitchen table anymore; because it was the dry season they moved to the roof, peering at her through gaps in the thatching that Old Vu had neglected to mend, spying silently until they fell asleep beneath the stars.
In her own way, Xuan studied the girls just as closely as they studied her. She noticed that the burnt rice crust at the bottom of the pot vanished whenever she wasn’t paying attention, and she noticed the muddy footprints that appeared before dawn some mornings. Xuan was intrigued by the girls, as a naturalist would be by some rare specimen of bird, but she could not figure out how to get closer to them. She left a box of sweets from Saigon—one of her few wedding presents—out on the kitchen table, but they were never touched. The handful of times she caught them and tried to strike up conversation, they would only stare at her with empty blue eyes before fleeing. Xuan knew three and a half different languages, but she could not understand the girls. Nhi and Vi could barely read, and were unhindered by any sense of morality or responsibility. They knew other things instead: how to shinny up a palm tree with a knife clenched between the teeth, where to go to swim without worry of leeches, what to say to make even the briniest of fishermen blush. But they did not know what to
make of Xuan, either. They could not comprehend what she was doing there, living in their house, leaving her books on the table where the ancestral altar had once been, lying in wait in the kitchen to ask them questions about what they did and where they went. But they did not like or dislike her yet, so they just watched her. The eyes were everywhere in the yellow house: Old Vu watched Xuan who watched the girls who watched her, and from a distance, leaning against the fence of her chicken coop, Mrs. Dang watched them all.
I
T HAD BEEN
three months since the wedding. Xuan still wasn’t used to her new role as Old Vu’s wife and Nhi and Vi’s mother, and still didn’t feel that she was fulfilling it. She didn’t regret it quite yet, but she was beginning to question her decision to leave her hometown to marry a man nearly fifteen years her senior. She had done it because she was lonely, but here, in the yellow house, she felt more isolated than ever.
Perhaps this was why Xuan felt strangely reassured when she began hearing voices from the bamboo grove. It meant that she was not alone. Having grown unchecked for years, the grove had become sprawling and almost impenetrable, devouring the land. When Xuan began to hear the sounds, she knew instinctively that they were coming from that darkness at the far end of the lawn. At first it was faint and wordless, whispering to her as she and Old Vu lay in bed at night with their backs to each other. She started leaving the bedroom window open, telling her husband it was because the breeze
helped her sleep, when really all she wanted was to listen to the murmurs. Then one afternoon, when she was hanging out the laundry in the yard, it finally became clear; the wind rustled the bamboo and she heard her name,
Xuan, Xuan
, the soft chanting of a hundred voices, over and over. They were calling for her.
Another woman might have run back inside the house in fear, but not Xuan. She had no fear. She had read Plato and Aquinas and Descartes. She walked straight into the bamboo. “Who’s there?” she called out, picking her way through the thick forest of stems.
“Xuan,” the voices replied simply. “Xuan.”
They became quiet when she was deep in the thicket and everything was in cool green shadow. Xuan waited but they did not speak again. She turned to make her way back out again, but suddenly she tripped over something—an old glass bottle, almost invisible in the shade—and she had to clutch wildly at the stems around her to stay upright. They shook, but she regained her footing. Several small birds, spooked by the commotion, shot out of the bamboo and flapped away noisily. Xuan tilted her head back and watched them become specks against the sky. And then she saw it fluttering down toward her between the branches. Like the birds, it, too, had been shaken loose from its bamboo perch. She caught it in her fingers: a piece of silk, tattered and filthy, now worn down to a square the size of a piece of parchment, but still as red as a fresh knife wound, and fine as a tongue of flame.
Xuan had been given less than her fair share of loveliness
in this lifetime, and so she held on tightly to this delicate cloth that had fallen into her possession. She carried it out of the bamboo and held it up to the light.
Nhi and Vi lay on their bellies on the edge of the roof, watching. When they saw the red shadow the silk cast across her face, their mouths formed identical hard lines, and they reached for each other’s hand.
S
ISTER
E
MMANUEL
’
S VOICE
trailed off. Without warning, she pulled her hands out of the mixing bowl and pushed it away from her violently. I handed her a dishcloth but as her fingers closed around it she began to shake, and the cloth fell to the kitchen floor. I dropped down to retrieve it for her. But I did not get up immediately; it was only there—kneeling at her feet, squeezing the cloth in my clammy hands that would not keep still, my face averted—that I was brave enough to ask her: “Which one are you?”
Sister Emmanuel was still shaking. “Not yet,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
X
UAN HEARD THE VOICES
even when she was away from the house. They still called out her name from time to time, but now they mostly sang her a song, always the same one. It was a simple song, made up of four notes and a handful of repeated words, but Xuan practiced it relentlessly even when the voices were quiet.
“Chim, chim, I will find you. Chim, I will find you,”
she sang alone in the kitchen. She could see the bamboo through the window but at the moment it was silent. Her left eye was itchy, so she rubbed it with one of the ends of the red cloth that she wore tied loosely around her throat.
“Chim, I will find you, and you will be mine. Chim, chim, I will find you—”
She stopped and rubbed her eye with the cloth again.
When the silk wasn’t around her neck she wore it in her hair or had it folded up and tucked secretly in between her breasts. When she lay in bed at night, she would fall asleep twisting it between her fingers while Old Vu snored beside her and had nightmares about his dead wife. She had to be touching it at all times.
The twins had begun keeping their distance from their stepmother, but they still needed to eat. They would alternate between which one had to sneak into the yellow house to scavenge for leftovers and raid the money jar. One muggy summer afternoon, while they were perched in their usual tree and their stomachs began to growl, it was Nhi’s turn.
It was so oppressively hot that any sane person should have been napping; Nhi was certain she would not be seen. But just to be safe, when she left Vi in the tree and set off for home she went by the forest instead of by the road. This route concealed her from whatever eyes might have been watching, but it also forced her to walk through the bamboo grove.
Nhi entered the green thicket. Though she was so thin she could weave through the bamboo stalks without disturbing them, above her the long, tapered leaves began to move. It
didn’t occur to Nhi that it couldn’t have been the wind, for there was none that day—the air was heavy and damp and still. The noise of the thousands of leaves brushing against one another was maddeningly loud, and because of it, Nhi did not hear the sound of Xuan singing inside the house. It was the usual tune, but this time the words were slightly different:
“Chim, chim, I will feed you. Chim, I will feed you, and you will be mine.”
Nhi didn’t notice it until she had already climbed into the house through the window of her mother’s bedroom. A photograph of Old Vu and Xuan’s wedding was hanging on the wall, conveniently covering an old bloodstain. The twins were not in it. When Nhi heard the singing she cocked her head to listen, but the noise of the bamboo leaves was still muffling everything, subtle but relentless, like the sound of waves, and she could not make out the words. Curious but suspicious, she dropped to all fours and moved silently toward the kitchen.
The words were still unclear but now Nhi could hear pots and pans being moved around. As she crept into the room she saw that Xuan was preparing something by the gas stove and crooning her strange melody—the words lost in the clanging of cookware—with her back to the doorway. The jar of money was in the corner, and Nhi would have to act fast if she didn’t want her stepmother to catch her. She was considering her next move when Xuan suddenly stopped singing. Outside, the leaves of the bamboo went limp and quiet once more. Without turning around, Xuan spoke sternly. “Nhi, stop behaving like an animal and stand up.”
Nhi was so startled that she obeyed her stepmother instantly.
“That’s better,” said Xuan, still keeping her back to the girl. She lit the stove and the flame leapt to life. After a few seconds the kitchen was filled with the scent of oil warming. Nhi knew she should just bolt out the door or the window, for she was frightened, but she was also angry—seething at herself for submitting to an order, and even more furious with her stepmother for giving it. She chose not to run because she wanted to punish the woman.