The Kaisho (20 page)

It was as if he were there, lying beside her, and she trembled with some unknown emotion. She knew now that he had given her the strength to continue with Tony along the path of their new future. Because there was more, and she turned her mind away from the knowledge for as long as she could. But in the end, it came flooding back, but for this moment at least, the new, emerging Margarite possessed the strength to shoulder the full weight of her brother’s legacy.

Because of Robert. With a soft moan she surrendered to the thought that she wanted to see him again.

Truth to tell, Do Duc never knew his father. He surmised, from what he picked up around the house, that his father had been Japanese, but he never got this confirmed from his mother or anyone else. She would never speak of his birth or the germination of it at all, as if by this willful ignorance she could pretend it had never occurred. He imagined that the man who was his father was Japanese because all the other alternatives were worse.

The “house” was the compound in Saigon where Do Duc’s mother worked. It was owned by a one-armed Frenchman. It was contained by pale green stucco walls, this rambling, horseshoe-shaped villa of sloping tiled roofs and lush inner courtyards. Around the villa were kaleidoscopic gardens full of bougainvillea vines and rustling tamarind trees that Do Duc sweated endless hours to keep pruned to the Frenchman’s exacting specifications; encysted within it was a cut-stone patio floating an asymmetrical pool the shape of which reminded Do Duc of a water buffalo’s head.

There was something about the pool that Do Duc loved. In the short hours he had for sleep, he would creep off his pallet, slip naked into the clear water, and push himself to the bottom. There he would cling, sealed in this soundless world, his head cocked back, staring upward at nothing, thinking about nothing, and whatever had filled him, preventing sleep, drained away into the nothingness.

Here in the Frenchman’s compound, the thrumming diesel clangor of Saigon and, especially, the war itself could be kept at the distance of memory. Only the reflections of jets, momentary as dreams, rippling in the cool cerulean water of the pool articulated the harsh reality outside the stucco walls.

Do Duc’s earliest memories of the Frenchman were wholly spurious: a gentle man, religious in his own way, because he sang the Nunc Dimittis, Simeon’s prayer, every evening and taught it to Do Duc much as a father would teach a nursery rhyme to his child:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant to depart in peace, according to thy word…

To induce Do Duc to sing along with him—the words were unfamiliar and difficult for him to pronounce—the Frenchman fed him sweets, a recipe of his own concoction that was dark and rich, tasting of honey, cinnamon, and cloves.

But that was long ago, when Do Duc was five, the age at which the Frenchman deemed him old enough to be put to work.

When he was very young, Do Duc was certain that the Frenchman was printing up money in his basement, so much of it was there constantly changing hands. Later, he came to understand that the Frenchman was in the business of weapons and dope, if not directly sanctioned by Uncle Sugar—the local cynical nickname for the U.S. government—then at least tolerated by this enigmatic, godlike entity that overstrode life in wartime Saigon like a Titan from the clouds.

Often, half-drunk on Médoc, he would order Do Duc to inventory his war matériel. Once, a supplier, disgruntled at the Frenchman’s resolve to keep his costs low, had left a live grenade wired to the inside of one of the crates of K-5Os he sold him. In those days, the Frenchman, dogmatic on matters of security, had done all the inventorying himself. That was how he had lost his arm. Now he ordered natives to do that work. Do Duc discovered that he was the third young Vietnamese to hold this job.

Later still, when he, acting as houseboy-slave at one of the Frenchman’s astonishingly extravagant parties, was told by a pair of giddy Swedes how his mother had been used at these parties years ago before time had etched her face and bent her frame, he experienced the auras for the first time.

Stoned on a combination of champagne and the peculiar opium-laced marijuana the Frenchman favored, they related to Do Duc with the kind of raucous vivacity that could not be faked certain events that had taken place twelve years before. His mother, who was serving them their particular brand of poison, stood stoically through the recital, her eyes focused on nothing, as opaque as the clouds in the night sky that blotted out the horned moon.

Do Duc could not make up his mind whether they were waxing callously nostalgic or being deliberately sadistic. How could they not know who he was, that this was his mother they were giggling over? But then, Caucasians had this disturbing propensity for seeing Asians as just another part of the exotic landscape, along with the nipa palms, rice paddies, and mangrove swamps.

As to the auras, this strange incandescence he saw emanating from people seemed to signify like stigmata upon the flesh the depth of the change he himself was undergoing. It was as if he were able to peel back the layers of rational behavior civilization had impressed upon people, divining in their auras their purely primitive essence.

The auras became for him a kind of trigger. And eventually, he came to believe that the release of his profound rage was akin to a state of grace. In that moment following the onset of the auras, the purity of purpose that moved him to action was of the utmost relief, after the knots of conflicting emotions he carried upon his back like the bones of the dead.

This was how Do Duc viewed the Frenchman: he was someone who had given his mother life after the man she had loved had been killed by the military for daring to speak his mind for the good of his people. Whatever schooled intelligence she had possessed, whatever stature she had once possessed, had perished with the man she had loved. But this fall from grace was fatal. Unlike most of her brethren, she had an inkling of what might have been. Now she could only stare dull-eyed like a cat at nothing while she leaned her heavy head against the side of the refrigerator.

Life, even for her now, meant a few piasters, a pallet on which to sleep (his mother’s was in the kitchen so she could be ready to whip up a meal at any time of the day or night), and even, from time to time, the benevolence of the Frenchman’s protection, for he was an exceedingly powerful man, even in the corrupt and treacherous waters of Saigon.

At the same time, the Frenchman treated her with the kind of contempt normally reserved for a disease-ridden cur. He did not see how he demeaned her, stripped her of all dignity, was pleased, in fact, by his benevolence, his one significant act in keeping this Vietnamese woman from becoming a whore grubbing in some filthy back alley until she died of consumption or addiction. Instead, she became a whore in his house, and renowned she was for services to all nations whose representatives came and went beneath the Frenchman’s roof.

Life? Do Duc often thought. What life? She was expected to be on call for the gluttony—in all things—of the Frenchman’s many guests. He was particularly proud of his reputation for hospitality—his bit, he said, laughing, for offsetting the constant bad press given his fellow countrymen back home.

And yet without the Frenchman as guardian angel his mother would have had nothing, would have been used up by the street, died old before her time. And what of Do Duc? There would have been none. He owed his very existence—humiliating and shameful beyond words—to this man. Owed him, in fact, for everything that had any meaning for him. And yet…

The Frenchman’s aura, as it happened, was different from that of the others. It was a sharp blue, almost metallic, and much later, upon reflection of many such incidents, Do Duc was to understand that this color signified the man’s close proximity to death.

“Gang rape,”
Do Duc said as he took the bread knife to the Frenchman’s sun-dried flesh. The party, like a sun that had waxed too bright, had burned itself out. All the guests were gone or insensate in drugged slumber. “They told me. Everyone grouped around, counting how many men could penetrate her before she passed out.”

The knife flashing like a cormorant in the sun as it rose and fell in a terrible rhythm. “This is what you have done to my mother.” Blood on the Frenchman’s hands, first, startling as a spilled bottle of his best wine. “This is my birth, a humiliating party anecdote.” Then, in a great spurt, Do Duc’s own hands were hot and sticky.

“Do you understand my mother’s shame? She cannot even bring herself to speak of my birth.” His thin cotton shirt was wet and heavy with blood. “No, you cannot. What can you know of shame?”

The Frenchman’s eyes were wide and staring, muddy with an incomprehension as to what was happening, his life leaking out through the proliferating wounds as Do Duc stabbed him again and again.

“Each time she looks at me she remembers all over again what she is, what you have made her become.”

The Frenchman’s mouth gaped wide.

“She knows how mean and bitter life is because this was your gift to her.”

He put his bloody hand out; it opened and closed on nothing, spastic as a machine gun on rock ’n’ roll.

“To her you are the Word, more than God or Buddha because these are indifferent entities. But you are here—flesh and blood. The man who made the world.”

The Frenchman had slipped to his knees and now swayed this way and that in a rhythm dictated by Do Duc’s attack. Finding his voice was difficult through the blood bubbling in his throat. “I did nothing that you... I saved her.” Incredulous, still, at the end, not even dissembling but, frighteningly, still righteous. And this innocence served only to enrage Do Duc all the more, although, later, when the auras died, it would haunt him, confusing him in a labyrinth of complex adult emotions for which he was wholly unprepared, because the Frenchman was entirely sincere.

“You saved her for
this
—misery and degradation. She would never touch you, never even think ill of you in her heart because that is her way. But not me. I am different… different… different.”

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant to depart—”

Do Duc slit his throat, unable or unwilling to allow this last obscenity—the word
peace
in the Nunc Dimittis—to be uttered here in the peaceful isolation of a luxe fantasy that contemptuously denied the poverty and suffering at large in every quarter.

The Frenchman’s last words were curdled in blood and bile, slurred by the inexpressible runes of death, but distinct enough to be forged into Do Duc’s soul. “There are... no evil thoughts,” the Frenchman vomited. “Only… evil deeds.”

This last exhortation must have taken everything he had left because his eyes rolled up and he collapsed, one leg jerking fitfully in galvanic response. Then his sphincter gave way, leaving a final epitaph Do Duc found particularly fitting.

Do Duc fled Saigon, fearing for his life. He knew how powerful the Frenchman was, and he understood that he was obliged to bury himself in order to remain among the living.

What he wanted most then was to fight, to climb into the cockpit of one of those jets he had for years seen only in reflection or at a far distance.

He hated the Communists as much as he hated the French and the Americans—more, even, because the Communists were his own people and they should know better than to turn on their own. What madness gripped them to try to commit genocide, to expunge their unique history, was as yet beyond him to comprehend. All he knew for certain was that they were like a pack of rabid beasts who were best exterminated with all due dispatch.

However, joining the ARVN—the South Vietnamese army—at just this point might prove dangerous, as those looking for him might understandably search through the dossiers of recent recruits. Instead, he went into the mountains and changed his life forever.

At that time, the mountains were no place for a twelve-year-old boy. There, the rag-tag hill-tribe montagnards were forming; there, the Viet Cong were massing; there, blood was being spilled every minute of the day and night. But to Do Duc it still felt less dangerous than the life he had led in the Frenchman’s walled compound in Saigon.

But there were others in the mountains, urged on by the Communists and the war, who had crept southward from their home in the highlands of North Vietnam. These were the Nungs, a wild, almost aboriginal people of Chinese descent who possessed their own primitive outlook on the world, their own ancient ways of preserving what was theirs.

Even the fierce VC were afraid of the Nungs, keeping their distance, shunning the areas where Nung tribesmen were sighted. In the mountains, Do Duc heard wild rumors and exaggerations about the Nungs—that they were disposed toward magic, that they wrapped themselves in the cured skins of their enemies while crouched before fires, eating their roasted flesh.

Far from frightening him, these tales merely aroused Do Duc’s curiosity. He was intrigued by any people who could terrify the Communists. In the Frenchman’s compound he had learned the only lesson worth remembering in Asia: that it wasn’t money one sought in life; it was power. The Nungs had power while Do Duc had none. So he set out to find them. The way he figured it, all he had to lose was his life, which at this moment was just about worthless. What he had to gain, he felt, was limitless.

It was the best decision he ever made—and the worst. The old Do Duc, whoever he may have been, was dissolved among the Nungs, and a new Do Duc was born.
Resurrection
would have been too simple a term, but after the assimilation process, he would often go off by himself, climbing higher into the cliffs to look out into the deepening sapphire twilight and, quite without knowing it, sing to himself the Nunc Dimittis.

Even after the old Nung, Ao, had examined him, told him that he had once been addicted to opium, Do Duc set aside a time each twilight to sing the prayer. Even after he worked out what must have been in the sweet the Frenchman had fed him besides the honey, cinnamon, and cloves, even as he wondered at the cynical method the Frenchman had used to import loyalty to his compound.