Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

These words make me as happy as if he has suddenly kissed me. But still, I can hear his voice working hard in order to speak. I watch a spot in the sky, out ahead of us, near a grove of cashew trees. It seems to be a great bird hovering, hanging motionless against the sky. We near, and the bird moves to one side and then jerks back to the other, and I know it is a kite. There is a child, invisible to us, beyond the trees.

“Tien,” Ben says, low. “I’m sorry if I’m quiet. I’ve driven half my life, nearly, and it has always been in silence.”

“I understand,” I say.

We pass the cashew trees by. The sky is empty now. I take this explanation as an act of love.

He says, “There’s a quiet place in me, since I stopped by the road. I want to keep that. I want it when we reach the sea.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is a good thing, this silent time.” I struggle with my hands, to keep them where they are, in my lap. They obey this time. I try to find that quiet place in me now, too.

And so, together, Ben and I become the landscape rushing past us. Red soil and the smoke of brick kilns and piles of brick along the road, and roof tiles. And in Phan Thiet, TV antennas on bamboo poles and in the air the smell of nuoc mam, our wonderful fish sauce that they make in the town, and then, beyond, the salt flats with their little levees of tan mud and great squares of seawater and the piles of white salt taller than a man, and then paddies again and the smell in the air of rice hay burning and swarms of ducks grazing the wet fields after the harvest, and then coconut trees and then the Truong Son mountains to the west. And the mountains slide over and squeeze us next to the sea. And the sea is there for Ben’s eyes, our first sight of it together, the South China Sea, sudden and vast coming out from behind the dunes and bright from the sun, and it is the dark green of the finest jade.

And now I steal a look at Ben, and his face is turned my way, though his eyes are far out to sea already. He glances at me and out again and then to the road. “We’ll lose it again for a few hours, won’t we,” he says, and I know he means the sea.

“Yes,” I say.

And we go on. And we stop only briefly at a roadside stand to eat, and we sit on tiny plastic chairs in the shade of an umbrella and I keep my eyes away from Ben, because his knees are almost up to his ears as he sits on this thing meant for a Vietnamese, and I like the size of him and I like him looking funny and not even realizing it, but these are the kinds of things I must put aside for now. Still, I am beginning to thrill again, like on the afternoon when I was preparing to make love to him, though we did not make love on that day, the preparation was a very sweet thing, and now I am having the same feeling. We are going fast. We will be at the sea near Nha Trang before the sun is gone.

So we go back on the road and soon we are passing tobacco drying in racks, the large green leaves, like the ears of elephants, and somewhere I think they must be burning the scrap because there is a strong tobacco smell suddenly around us and Ben is moving beside me. I look and he has lifted a little in his seat to dig in his pocket, and he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. This is a surprise for me. I have never seen him smoke. He does not take his eyes off the road. He does not take out a cigarette. He holds the pack for a moment, as if thinking about it, and then he tosses it into the backseat.

And what can it be that whispers in my body at this moment? I am a practical woman, a good citizen of a serious Marxist state, and this part of me says it is the food I ate by the side of the road, upsetting my body, just that, and perhaps also the smell of tobacco, which makes me feel a little bit unbalanced, since I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. Even perhaps it is some idle idea, a public health issue, since the man I love — the man who I am believing, in some shuttered-up room in my mind, will be living with me forever — has just rejected the smoking of a cigarette. I know that the smoke from a cigarette can harm others, especially delicate others. All of these things may be what turn my face to the landscape and whisper such an important message to me, so important that as soon as the thought comes, I ignore the message itself and instead I start thinking around and around about how it might have been prompted by nothing but indigestion or some other trivial thing. And even knowing how it is that I am avoiding the thought itself, I go on trying to discredit it. It could be a trick of the mind: I have just seen a Cham woman walking ahead of us and we raced past her and I turned to see her and she was carrying a baby in a pouch on her chest. The Cham are from different ancestors than other Vietnamese. They are Hindus. They have a god called Shiva who is very powerful and very terrifying to look at and who waits to destroy the world, and I can certainly understand Karl Marx being uncomfortable with religion when I hear of this god, I do not want to believe in this god either. Maybe this woman and her god and her baby are what make me feel this thing about my body.

And how can the most important message of my life be whispered to me in a moment like this? But it can. It can. For though I am in a Saigontourist car and I am watching two ragged dogs running beside us barking at the edge of this village and though my stomach is a little queasy from the soup I had by the side of the road and my head is a little light from the smell of tobacco, it was five days ago that Ben and I made love and I told him to stay inside me and now suddenly there is something deeper in my body I clearly can feel, something, like a shifting in my bones, like a quickening in my blood, something.

But I am a clearheaded modern woman. I know things about a woman’s body. And so I count the days, a thing I have not thought to do until this moment. And from that night to my next bleeding, it is two weeks.

I sit with this for a while.

There is no thought in my head.

But there is a deep shadow all around me, a secret place inside a banyan tree where I am a child myself and I have my first most vivid thought of a woman giving birth: a princess laying one hundred eggs. I know that Ben is nearby — I feel him next to me; he is enormous there— but the world he fills is just outside the root-trunk of this tree where I am, where I listen to the tale of the dragon and the princess, and it is Tien the child who listens, but I am there, too, Tien the adult, and I am inside the child, waiting to be born from her. And we are Chinese boxes, the tree and Tien the child and me. And my baby.

I try to return now, to the car. I lean into the rush of air through the window, I squint into the bright afternoon, the air full of the smell of wood fires, some village out of sight. I close my eyes. I lay my hands on my belly and Ben is nearby. I could reach out my hand and touch him, but I do not even look at him for now. His presence makes me very happy but it also fills me with terror, for there are questions I do not even begin to let inside my head, even simple questions about where I will live for the rest of my life, in what country, questions that I cast away from me, including the question of what to say to Ben. Nothing. For now, nothing. I do not drift again to the banyan tree, but I do think of the fairy princess once more. How she took inside her the seed of a dragon, and how she must have wondered what child would come of this.

The road goes on and though there’s no white line and no flat-out running, it does me some real good. Things are clean in my head out here, with an engine in front of me and a place to go to. And Tien is still beside me. She hasn’t disappeared in order for me to feel like this. And that’s the best thing of all. I don’t have to go back to being alone to make things simple. Tien loves me. I love her. We’re on the road together. The night is coming. It’s boiled sweetly down to that.