Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

And years later when an old medicine man with green scars in the pits of his hands moves to the same province where you live by the Song Ma, the River of Dreams, you will be vindicated. It wasn’t all about access, about dogs and maps and keys. It wasn’t.

This is what Rabbit sees in the instant she kisses the skin where a Frenchman burned her grandmother next to her heart. Terres Noires and everything that followed — the three or four men who came after the man with the milk-white hands, one of them the father of Tu, the subsequent fire of childbirth, the feeling of Tu’s small hot mouth on Bà’s breast, war and more war and war without end and the living on because you had to, the years beside the Song Ma and the years on Lak Lake and all the while the world growing dim though in the heart it was the opposite. The scar on her chest like a medallion.

She’s dead, said Huyen. In among the clamoring light of the full moon, Rabbit could hear others dying farther up on the road, the closest one only a few hundred feet away.

Lady, lift us up in the darkness.

September 1945. Within two months the uprising in Indochine is over. All over Vietnam the plantations are once again under French rule. The end of the war in Europe means that France has been liberated and Indochine is still a colony. The French gendarmes and the sûréte agents and even a division of Allied soldiers have put an end to the revolt, rounding up as many Vietnamese Communists as they can. But what the French don’t know could fill a universe.

Today the wound on your chest from the August Revolution no longer smells and is starting to heal, though it will never fully heal. Now you work the rubber trees again as you did long ago when you were a child pretending to be a woman. Each day you take up the sharp pruning hook and gouge the bark. Each tree forever scarred.

One tree over, Hong Hanh puts down her pruning hook and points. A truck is coming through the woods, but you don’t stop what you’re doing. It’s just another truck full of prisoners headed to Con Son Island off the southern coast. Now that the revolution has failed, Terres Noires is shipping them out, anyone suspected of illegal activity, of being a Communist and organizing against the French. It isn’t until your friend, who has also lost her job in the kitchen, snatches the hat off your head that you put down your bucket and look.

In the truck bed the prisoners stand shoulder to shoulder, their arms held out in front of them where, in lieu of rope, someone has speared a length of copper wire through the center of their hands, the men strung together like fish on a line, each man wired to the other. Already their hands are growing green and useless.

Calmly Rabbit kissed her grandmother’s forehead. Co ta không chêt . She’s not dead, said Rabbit, her first sensical words. She was four years old in the ancient system of reckoning. In the darkness the freckles on her face seemed to shine. Huyen put a hand over Bà’s mouth, but there was nothing coming out.

And when you see him, the man you have always loved, as you invariably will, your love riding in the back of a truck with wire running through his palms under the hot September sun, don’t cry out. Don’t acknowledge his presence. His swollen hands sewn to his neighbors’, his back riddled with fresh welts.

He doesn’t see you, his mind a thousand miles away, the anger already growing in him, a rage that will carry him through the term of his imprisonment. Standing there in the hot sun he doesn’t see anything. He can’t. But the Lady is watching. We are always in Her sight. And so for some reason the man lifts his heavy head and looks out at Terres Noires one last time. He turns his face toward you out there somewhere among the trees, a knife in your hand, your eyes bright and cloudless, and bows.

The Christians among us have a story about the light of the world and a voyage by water. “Now under the Semites’ Barley Moon of the Strong Rain it came to pass that he went into a ship with his disciples, and he said unto them, ‘Let us go over unto the other side.’ But as they sailed he fell asleep, and there came down a storm of wind, and they were filled with water and were in jeopardy. And they came to him and awoke him, crying, ‘Master! Master! We perish.’ ” This is what the Christians among us believe, and as some of us have lived it word for word, the waters serrated and thronging, our stories are not dissimilar. East and West. Night and day. The light of the world indiscriminately keeping watch over all of us .

RABBIT AND SON WERE SITTING ON THE FRONT PORCH with their feet in the river when the boat floated by. It was the sixth one that month. The engine was up out of the water, a mass of weeds threaded through the rusty blades. Two men stood on either side of the pilothouse using bamboo poles to push the boat downstream. The only noise was the sound of the bamboo stabbing the water, the boat gliding down the Mekong through the floating village of Ba Nuoc on its way toward the sea in the darkness before moonrise.

Squatting on the porch, Son waved, but the men didn’t wave back. Nobody else came out of their rickety houses to stare as the boat drifted by. Son knew better. It might look like nobody was watching, but somebody always was.

Ba Nuoc was a small community of fewer than fifteen houses, each one no more than three rooms built on empty fifty-gallon drums along with a type of river weed that the men harvested and the women matted together until it floated. Sheets of metal covered the roofs, at night the rooms lit by firelight. Some of Ba Nuoc’s residents were extended families like the Dinhs, Son’s clan. Others were southern professionals like Dr. Kao who had been pushed out of the cities with nowhere else to go but the Mekong delta. It was thought the doctor had a wife and children somewhere. There were rumors he had once been the personal physician to Madame Nhu. Now his house was just a floating raft with a shack lashed to it.

The water coursed under the porch where Son and Rabbit sat waiting. There were floating villages all over the delta as well as floating markets and floating factories, in places the Mekong so wide one couldn’t see the other side. In some spots the villages were built on stilts to avoid the annual flooding when the river overran its banks. Everywhere things were made to float, the whole world tying itself to something and not letting go.

The boat was almost to the bend in the river. Soon it would disappear behind the thick curtain of mangroves. There was still no sign of Son’s mother, Phuong, or Huyen and Qui and the other women returning from the floating market. The moon was well above the trees. Finally the boat rounded the bend.

Let’s go, said Rabbit, her voice as if inside Son’s head. He jumped up before he could help himself. He was nine years old in the modern system of reckoning, two years older than her, but in every other way Rabbit was the leader, her hair cut short as a boy’s, a black bowl encompassing her head. From a distance she and Son looked like brothers, their bodies lithe as saplings, Rabbit’s ribs also visible when she went without a shirt. Once, out on the porch of their floating house, Son’s own mother had called to Rabbit thinking the little girl was Son. Then Rabbit had turned around and Phuong had seen the map of freckles adorning the child’s face. Phuong shuddered at her mistake. The freckles were unsettling, the spots so rare among the population that nobody knew what to make of them.

At the other end of the porch Rabbit began untying the sampan. Son opened the cage and took Binh out first, placing her black webbed feet on his shoulder. Binh was the first bird Rabbit and Huyen had ever trained. While other birds came and went, Huyen had allowed Rabbit to keep Binh. There was a trainer over in Sac Bao who clipped the wings of his birds, taking the strongest feathers from each appendage. That way they couldn’t fly away and never come back. It also meant they couldn’t dive as deep. Consequently the fish they caught were midsize and unremarkable, but the man said that was the price you paid if you never wanted to worry about losing your bird.