Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

He has the motor running in the car when I come from the villa’s office. I get in and he asks, “Did she know where the village is?”

“Yes,” I say. “I will tell you where to drive.”

He nods and we pull away. I open my window and keep my face in the sea air. I must prepare myself now, to perhaps find my mother. The woman in the villa pulled out a map to show me where the village is. She has two cousins living there. It is called Trang Non, which means in English “full moon.” It is not a fishing village, as I thought. They are woodcutters and coffee growers. In the mountains by the sea. My mother might not be there. She might he dead. But if she is alive and we find her, I will say nothing. I will translate for Ben, if that is necessary, but only what he needs in order to realize that this woman is a stranger to him. Then we will go.

That is all the thought I wish to give to this day, and we bump from the dirt road and turn onto Highway One, and we travel on. I see only the turnings that we need to make. We slide into Nha Trang along the main seaside boulevard, lined with coconut palms, and then we go over two bridges and we arc through the city and we pass a great white statue of the Buddha looking out to sea, desiring nothing, except to sit by the sea and be perfect, and we take the cutoff that goes along the Hon Chong beaches.

There are mountains near us, but I do not look. One of these mountains is supposed to look like a reclining princess who married a giant who saw her bathing naked and made a handprint on some big rock and then she died. Or something like that. I am not caring to think of fairy tales at the moment. Things are suddenly very much what they seem to be. We are driving among mountains and rocks. That is all.

And then I have to find a gravel side road and we slow and I find the place and we start to climb for a ways and then the road cuts back toward the sea and we are shrouded in trees and the road squeezes into one lane and bounces us around a turn and there is only a grassy field in front of us and a wall of trees. We stop. Ben looks at me.

“We have to walk from here,” I say.

He turns off the engine and sets the emergency brake and we sit quietly for a moment. Finally he says, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

And then I find myself saying, “How sorry?”

He looks at me, a little surprised.

I am, too, at the thrashing that has begun inside me.

“What do you mean?” he says.

I say, “Are you sorry enough to turn around now and take me away from here and never think about all this again?”

“We’ve come this far.”

“I am afraid. If she is here. I am afraid of her.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He is right. I cry out to myself that he is right. If she is here, then she left me for herself, just for herself. Some part of me is afraid of that. But that is an old hurt. A thing long dead, it means nothing to me now. This is nothing to fear. But the thrashing goes on. From a darker wind. But if there is some other fear, then we must go on, or that fear will never end.

So I take Ben’s face in my two hands and I draw him to me and I kiss him on the mouth, not caring if he is ready to do this in return, though he does kiss me, but not enough, really, not as much as I am kissing him, but I do not care. My mother will not come between us. She will not hurt us. I will take these two hands and strangle her to death if we find her and she tries to hurt Ben and me. But she will be a stranger to him, and to me, as well, and we will be back in this car soon.

“I am all right now,” I say. “I want to do this thing and be done with it.”

“I do too,” he says. I expect him to get out at once. But he does not. He turns my face now, with his fingertips just under my chin, and he kisses me on the lips. Very light. Very brief. But he does kiss me.

I lean against the car door and I feel as if I have no strength. I do not need a mother. I press hard. It is for Ben. And the door opens and I move and I find myself out in the middle of the grassy place. The grass runs on to what looks like a cliff edge, and beyond is a slice of the sea. We have climbed a long way up already. Against the jade of the water is a distant fishing boat with a sail curved like a Chinese sword.

Now we can also see a wide path cut in the tree line and we move toward it. My legs are heavy. Ben does not take my hand. And we are into the trees and climbing some more, sea pines for a while, swaying high above us, silent, my legs are aching from the slope of this path, and I am breathing heavily and I can hear Ben breathing heavily and these are two breaths now, it strikes me, very hard, two separate breaths on this path, not the one breath we made last night, and I touch the baby, and I climb. And finally the pines thin and the path levels and we come out into bright sun and another clearing. To our left is a gentle slope and coffee trees planted in rows, and before us, straight on, shrouded in bamboo thickets and willows, is the village. A dog barks up ahead, out of sight, and another.

“Be careful of the dogs,” I say to Ben. “Village dogs can be vicious.”

She warns me about the dogs and wherever it is in my head that I’ve been hiding since last night, I’m chased out now. This is how we began, and she should be pissed as hell at me or scared as hell but here she is warning me about the dogs again and the only thing in her voice is concern for me. Ahead is the place. There’s bamboo all around and some trees, but I can see the palm leaf roofs of the houses and a track of smoke rising and I can smell a wood fire and the dogs are barking like crazy. I should say to her, You’re right about the goddamn dogs, let’s get the hell out of here. I turn to her and she’s gone. For a moment, I think she’s heading back down the path and this is good. Let her run like hell. I’ll follow her. She can just whisper Fuck no and we can go away and if I have to live with some weird goddamn fears once in a while, I can do it. There’s just no way ever to know for sure. Except if we end up in the States, which I figure we have to, there’s blood types and there’s DNA or whatever, so there is a way and I’ll have to know sooner or later and someday she’s going to want to know, too. Like as soon as she starts thinking about children of our own.

But she hasn’t bolted. She’s moving off to the right, toward the sea. I follow. She’s moving slow and dreamy and the sea is beautiful out there, it’s clean and the line of the horizon is sharp and wide, simple, things are simple there, and though I can’t hide the fear now, it’s too close — just along the path and behind some bamboo — I want this clean sword-cut of an answer, and I know it’ll be clean and it’ll be okay, some part of me is saying that louder and louder, to hell with fairy tales, and Tien moves to the cliff edge and stops.

I come up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. Her hands come up and touch mine. I kiss her hair and then I look beyond her and over the edge of the cliff, and it’s sheer, falling far, far away down to the rocks and the sea.

We stand like that for a long while. The breeze rustles at us but things feel very calm, all of a sudden. We made love last night along this sea. It’s ours. Her hands are on mine. I look down at them, and I see the moons there and the grinding starts again inside me.

“It’s time,” I say.

She nods and turns and she moves off without another word or another touch, and I feel this withholding—suddenly all that I feel about her hands is the yearning to take them in mine, to kiss those pale moons — but I follow her, across the grass and onto a wide dirt path, and the trees take up on each side and then the bamboo comes in and the path narrows and we turn once and again, surrounded by the stalks of bamboo sectioned like bone, and suddenly we are before a little square with a great stone cistern in the middle and ringed by little houses of thatch and palm. A woman is dipping a ladle into the water in the cistern. Her face is hidden by a conical straw hat. A dog barks nearby. I look and he is peeking around a house and when I meet his eyes he disappears. The woman turns her head. She is very old.