Kim Thuy - Mãn

Not knowing Luc’s true motivation, everyone was happy about this Parisian showcase — everyone but Maman, who reminded me that success attracts thunderbolts, which was why particularly beautiful newborns were given hideous names. Parents would call them such things as “dwarf” or “gnome” or “corkscrew” (a reference to a pig’s tail), and families tricked the gods by referring to them as ugly, loathsome, forgettable. Otherwise, they’d have attracted the attention of jealous wandering spirits, capable of casting evil spells.

sống

to live

I TOO TRIED TO FOOL myself by thinking of my encounter with Luc as a tragedy, a drama or a calamity that had swallowed me whole. Had I been a zealous Catholic, I would have worn a hair shirt and practised mortification for self-denial, so as to kill this sudden desire to live, to live to a great age. I heard mothers dream, make plans to attend their children’s graduations, their weddings, the births of grandchildren. Unlike them, I could never imagine those different points of arrival, those different milestones that punctuated their road. My role was limited to that of a bridge or a ferryman who would help them ford a river or cross a border, with no wish to follow them to the end. My movements had always been dictated by the humdrum life of every day, by Maman’s missions, by impossibilities and possibilities. Like her, I had never chosen one particular goal. Yet somehow here I was seated once again on an airplane taking me towards a precise destination, planned, desired, and most of all towards a person who was waiting for me, who would welcome me, take me in.

nước tím

purple water

AT THE AIRPORT’S TERMINAL 3, Luc did not appear when the doors opened, which matched one of the many scenarios I had anticipated. Instinctively, my hand had started searching my purse for the notebook on which I’d jotted the telephone number of a cousin of Maman’s who’d been living in a suburb of Paris since the late fifties.

I had visited her on my last trip. She and her husband were frozen in revolutionary Vietnam. He wore the Communist soldiers’ green cap as he was digging in his garden like a farmer, and she, in black trousers and dark shirt, was washing some freshly picked cherries for me by rubbing them together one by one as if she were still in Vietnam, where herbs and lettuces had to be sterilized with potassium permanganate that turned the water purple. She had brought out some old letters from Maman, with whom she’d corresponded regularly until Maman disappeared. She wrote to her in Vietnamese and Maman replied in French. The two women were the same age and the cousin had been Maman’s confidante during the difficult years with her “cold mother.” Maman had given me her name and contact information with no other explanation except for a brief sentence on a card without an envelope: “Sister, this is my daughter. I’ll explain someday.”

bà con

relation

THAT COUSIN, WHO’D BECOME an aging hunchback, took my photo to add to the family history, with an old camera protected by its leather case. She promised to send the photos to us and I promised to do the same with pictures of Maman and my children. I knew that I could turn up at her house without notice like the last time, like in Vietnam, where doors were opened without knowing who would be there.

Maman and I had showed up suddenly at Sister Two’s house one day without a word in advance. Maman had resurfaced to save her from imminent danger.

chính trị

politics

SISTER TWO WAS MARRIED to a retired high-ranking official in the old political regime, which turned her into an enemy of the people under Communism. At the time, one needed only live on a large property to be subjected to a variety of accusations. Sister Two’s family corresponded to the portrait of capitalists guilty not only of the country’s decline but also of its devastation and its indecency. After an absence of more than twenty years, Maman had rung the bell and Sister Two had received her and settled her into the house as if the absence had been only physical; or that time had accounted for her absence; or that the wrinkles on their faces were already recounting their respective lives lived in the other’s absence.

Thanks to her status as participant in the revolution, Maman had been able to prevent the family’s expulsion into hostile zones to clear the land and dig canals with shovel in hand and only rations of barley to eat. No one then could compare those arid and hostile territories with the ones in Siberia because most likely no one would survive in either place, according to the revenants who slept in the street, often on the sidewalk in front of their former home. I wondered if it would be unbearable to have your past planted right in front of you. Maybe they hoped that out of compassion the new occupants would take them in, give them back a corner of the house, so that the past would no longer be a flaw, so that people would no longer have to take a felt pen to erase controversial faces and flags of the old regime on photos, and, above all, to reintegrate the past into the present.

quá khứ

past

WHILE I WAS GROPING in my purse for the address book, from the corner opposite the airport exit I saw a man running towards me. In less than a second his face appeared, and at that exact moment I was in the present tense; a present without a past. He had stood off to one side to observe my arrival, to test us, to measure his resistance, which had lasted exactly seventeen seconds. An eternity, he had said, adding: “C’est l’évidence” —It’s obvious.

In my circle, I often heard the expression, C’est pas évident —It’s not obvious! — but never the opposite, and always as an adjective. As a common noun, I knew only the English definition that talks about proofs, or “a body of facts,” that confirm or contradict a belief or that help draw a conclusion. Between French and English, such faux amis —false friends — set their traps and every time, I fall in.

Luc knew that I committed millions of errors in grammar and logic, but also in comprehension. Like a sherpa, he guided me through the bends and curves, the twists and turns of the French language, undressing it layer by layer, one subtlety at a time, like stripping a rose of its petals. And so the meaning of the word évidence was explained to me, underlined and expressed in a hundred different ways, in contexts as varied as they were unexpected.

In his opinion, it was the évidence that had shown him the hooks hidden behind the buckles on the straps of my pumps, because his hands had taken them off without hesitating, as if he’d rehearsed that action all his life. It was the obvious as well that had made me feel entitled to place my lips in the hollow of his collarbones and to elect it as my resting place. For the first time I felt the urge to plant my flag in that square centimetre and to declare it mine, whereas Maman and I had left so many places without even glancing behind us. If it weren’t for the obvious, we would have seen the sun set over the city and I’d have recited to him the poem by Edwin Morgan.

When you go,

if you go,

and I should want to die,

there’s nothing I’d be saved by