Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

Like the dragon who was the ruler of all the oceans, I said.

She knew this story, too. All Vietnamese know this story. She hesitated and then her hand came out and she cupped me under the chin with her palm. I wanted it to be true just as I had always heard it. But she waited and waited and then she said, This is different. Her hand fell and she looked again at the red sky. There was a dark chattering out there in the distance. Gunfire.

And then she said, This dragon did not live in a kingdom of water. He lived with his father and mother in a distant place and they were all dragons there. And his father went every day into a fiery hole and this was the wealth and the work of his kingdom. Fire. He would descend into fire and there were other dragons there and some of them were his enemies. They were killers. Your father’s father once fought a terrible fight deep in this fiery place and he killed his enemy there. He did not know this but he fought his enemy and killed him for the sake of a beautiful little girl, a fairy princess on the far side of the world, for if he had lost this fight and had died there, his own son would never have been born and then this girl child would never have been born either. But he killed the seed of another dragon and his own did not die and so your father was born and he grew from a child into an adult. His mother was gentle and feared for him but when he was old enough he, too, went into the fire. And then one day his father told him that there were places of fire far away and there were new enemies and he must go there and fight them. And he did. And he met me and he loved me and he planted a child in me with his seed, a beautiful child, but before she was born, he died in the midst of fire.

The redness of the sky was very bright now. My mother had rushed to the ending of the story and I was a little bit angry at her. I wanted her to tell this again. Tell it more slowly. She rushed through the places that I wanted to hear about the most, but now she was crying and I had much to think about already and when she bent to me and kissed me and then lay down, I let her hold me close and I said no more.

I never had a chance to ask her about that story again. A few nights later the sounds of the rockets and the gunfire would not stop and there were people running in the streets and everyone knew that the end was near. Or the beginning, as I would later learn. But my mother knew nothing of the future. All she knew was her own guilt and the fear that all she had done would be found out and destroy her and me as well. So on a night that I now know to have been April 29, 1975, she called me to her from my grandmother’s place and when I came into our rooms she had a bag packed and sitting by the door. Much of this is not very clear to me in my memory. She was dressed in black pantaloons and a drab green peasant shirt and a woven conical hat sat on top of her case. I must have known what would happen. I felt heavy in my arms and legs, as if I had just woken from a deep sleep. She spoke to me and I heard little. I am sure she told me how much she loved me. I am sure she told me how sad she was to do this. But I remember nothing clearly until she took me by the shoulders and crouched down and brought her face very near mine. She did not smell of the American soap that was so pure. She did not smell at all. There was sweat on her brow. She looked at me with her eyes full of tears, but her mouth was hard.

You must understand this, she said. You must never speak of me again. I am dead. You are an orphan. The people who are coming into our country now are hard people. They would kill me for what I have done. They would make life very bad for you if they knew whose daughter you are. They would take you away and they would hurt you. Do you understand?

I heard the words now, very clearly. But I did not understand. Still, I said yes to my mother. I knew that the world was changing in some terrible way. That was enough to know at this moment. She nodded and she looked away to the window and then her eyes came back to me and some struggle was inside her.

She said, There is one more thing you must know, but in knowing it you must now never speak of it to anyone. Do you understand? This is a most important secret. I have thought of telling you this but I was afraid. Why should you have to carry this secret? But your grandmother thinks it is right. And since you will live with her now instead of me, I must obey her. Will you keep this secret from everyone forever?

Yes, I said. Yes.

Then she told me this thing. Your father is dead, she said. He is dead.

I know, I said.

More, she said. He was an American.

I could not quite take that in for a moment. That was a sea too far away and too deep to think of. And not a sea at all, she had said. A kingdom of fire.

And steam was rising hot in my face. The water was boiling. I took the pot off the hot plate and I waited to let all these things pass from me. Ben was in the other room, I was making tea for him, and he was the only man I wished to understand.

I carried the tea tray in and stood before him and he looked up at me from where he sat cross-legged on the mat and his eyes were dark, like they had been wood burned to charcoal by some great fire. He knew there should be a picture on my altar and in his eyes were questions about me.

I gently placed the tray on the table, covering the white cranes. I crouched there and I poured the tea and I tried not to make a sound, letting the tea slide from the spout softly, one cup and then another, Ben’s eyes on me. I looked once at him and did not look again, not even a glance, and then I brought the pot to the tray very slowly, letting it settle there in absolute silence. I heard him breathing. It was very faint, but I was aware of it even then. It felt as if he was touching me. Just hearing his breath was a private thing, a touch like I had never felt before.

The shrine is for my father, I said. He died in the war and there are no pictures. My mother is also dead.

I said no more. Ben’s breath sighed out long and soft and it was a deep kiss of sympathy to my ear. I’m sorry, he said.

I did not answer. The tea was poured. I kept my eyes lowered and I did not tell my secret.

Our lips touch. Tien’s hand is at the back of my head and she pulls me to her and we kiss. This gesture of desire, the press of her hand on me to bring us to this touch: though I will soon be forty-eight years old, there has not been any moment in my life when I’ve felt desired in this way. And before I met Tien, my own desire was a ragged thing, a scrap of retread by the highway kicked up now and then by the force of a passing truck.

My first night on this return to Vietnam I wandered out of the hotel and down to the hub of the city, a circular fountain where Le Loi and Nguyen Hue cross, and I stood there in the fine mist from the rush of water and I faced toward the gingerbread City Hall, its facade full of columns and spires and lit up with spotlights and Ho Chi Minh’s bronze statue in the square in front, him sitting on a tree stump with his arm around a little girl, and behind me was the river. And all about me the streets were full of the Vietnamese on their motorbikes and they were racing around and around.

And one motorbike went around the circle a second time and a third, probably more times before that until a faint hey you slid out of the roar of motors and finally caught my attention and I saw the two faces turned to me. There was a young man with a mustache driving, and sitting behind him, her arms around his waist, was a woman in a short skirt. The second time around, their faces were turned again to me and he smiled and slipped his chin a couple of quick times and she was young, the flash of her was pretty and there was a fine mist of envy prickling at the back of my neck because of her arms around the man, even though I knew what was going on and I could buy that privilege for myself. The third time she blew me a kiss, and her night-dark hair was rolled at the back of her head and she had a long, slender neck and her shoulders were bare and she was beautiful. But she and her pimp did not have time to circle again before the mist was just fountain spray, and I wiped it away and turned from the street, and though it was my first night in Vietnam and though the first woman I ever thought I loved was a Vietnamese woman and though this face circling behind me now and wondering why I had stopped looking at her was a beautiful face, there was nothing running in my limbs hut the heaviness of night and the drag of a dozen time zones.