Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

“They are already among those I have served,” H said. “Before I forgot.” And he raised his hands and they were still covered with sugar.

I said, “Wasn’t it a marble slab?” I had a memory, strangely clear after these many years, as strange as my memory of H ’s Paris business card.

“A marble slab,” H repeated, puzzled.

“That you poured the heated sugar on.”

“Yes.” H ’s sweet-smelling hands came forward but they did not quite touch me. I thought to reach out from beneath the covers and take them in my own hands, but Ho leaped up and paced about the room. “The marble slab, moderately oiled. Of course. I am to let the sugar half cool and then use the spatula to move it about in all directions, every bit of it, so that it doesn’t harden and form lumps.”

I asked, “Have you seen my wife?”

H had wandered to the far side of the room, but he turned and crossed back to me at this. “I’m sorry, my friend. I never knew her.”

I must have shown some disappointment in my face, for H sat down and brought his own face near mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There are many other people that I must find here.”

“Are you very disappointed in me?” I asked. “For not having traveled the road with you?”

“It’s very complicated,” H said softly. “You felt that you’d taken action. I am no longer in a position to question another soul’s choice.”

“Are you at peace, where you are?” I asked this knowing of his worry over the recipe for the glaze, but I hoped that this was only a minor difficulty in the afterlife, like the natural anticipation of the good cook expecting guests when everything always turns out fine in the end.

But H said, “I am not at peace.”

“Is Monsieur Escoffier over there?”

“I have not seen him. This has nothing to do with him, directly.”

“What is it about?”

“I don’t know.”

“You won the country. You know that, don’t you?”

H shrugged. “There are no countries here.”

I should have remembered H ’s shrug when I began to see things in the faces of my son-in-law and grandson this morning. But something quickened in me, a suspicion. I kept my eyes shut and laid my head to the side, as if I was fast asleep, encouraging them to talk more.

My daughter said, “This is not the place to speak.”

But the men did not regard her. “How?” L ’i asked his father, referring to the missing murder weapon.

“It’s best not to know too much,” TH ng said.

Then there was a silence. For all the quickness I’d felt at the first suspicion, I was very slow now. In fact, I did think of H from that second night. Not his shrug. He had fallen silent for a long time and I had closed my eyes, for the light seemed very bright. I listened to his silence just as I listened to the silence of these two conspirators before me.

And then H said, “They were fools, but I can’t bring myself to grow angry anymore.”

I opened my eyes in the bedroom and the light was off. H had turned it off, knowing that it was bothering me. “Who were fools?” I asked.

“We had fought together to throw out the Japanese. I had very good friends among them. I smoked their lovely Salem cigarettes. They had been repressed by colonialists themselves. Did they not know their own history?”

“Do you mean the Americans?”

“There are a million souls here with me, the young men of our country, and they are all dressed in black suits and bowler hats. In the mirrors they are made ten million, a hundred million.”

“I chose my path, my dear friend Qu c, so that there might be harmony.”

And even with that yearning for harmony I could not overlook what my mind made of what my ears had heard this morning. Th ng was telling L ’i that the murder weapon had been disposed of. Th ng and L ’i both knew the killers, were in sympathy with them, perhaps were part of the killing. The father and son had been airborne rangers and I had several times heard them talk bitterly of the exile of our people. We were fools for trusting the Americans all along, they said. We should have taken matters forward and disposed of the infinitely corrupt Thi u and done what needed to be done. Whenever they spoke like this in front of me, there was soon a quick exhange of sideways glances at me and then a turn and an apology. “We’re sorry, Grandfather. Old times often bring old anger. We are happy our family is living a new life.”

I would wave my hand at this, glad to have the peace of the family restored. Glad to turn my face and smell the dogwood tree or even smell the coffee plant across the highway. These things had come to be the new smells of our family. But then a weakness often came upon me. The others would drift away, the men, and perhaps one of my daughters would come to me and stroke my head and not say a word and none of them ever would ask why I was weeping. I would smell the rich blood smells of the afterbirth and I would hold our first son, still slippery in my arms, and there was the smell of dust from the square and the smell of the South China Sea just over the rise of the hill and there was the smell of the blood and of the inner flesh from my wife as my son’s own private sea flowed from this woman that I loved, flowed and carried him into the life that would disappear from him so soon. In the afterlife would he stand before me on unsteady child’s legs? Would I have to bend low to greet him or would he be a man now?

My grandson said, after the silence had nearly carried me into real sleep, troubled sleep, my grandson L ’i said to his father, “I would be a coward not to know.”

Th ng laughed and said, “You have proved yourself no coward.” And I wished then to sleep, I wished to fall asleep and let go of life somewhere in my dreams and seek my village square. I have lived too long, I thought. My daughter was saying, “Are you both mad?” And then she changed her voice, making the words very precise. “Let Grandfather sleep.”