The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 20

She sweeps it all aside.

"You have the pictures your father drew for you," says T. "And the one my father did. And the paper with his name among the contributors. Do you have incense? Some fruit?"

Maggie fetches her father's drawings and unfolds them on the desk. She places two squares of chocolate and an orange beside them. She lights a thick red stick of incense and the smoke curls upward, engulfing them both.

Maggie can feel the heat of T's shoulder bleeding into hers as they stand side by side and raise their hands.

Hng dreams of the artist who has just returned from America. "Sit," Hng says, thrusting a bowl into the man's hands. He watches the man slurp the noodles and drink the broth, his expression becoming human again. He burps, wipes his mouth on his sleeve and says, "I will not forget your kindness," then stuffs some bills into Hng's hands.

Hng stares at the foreign currency, knowing it is worthless to him.

"Sorry," says the artist. "Let me pay you like I do at Cafe V."

Hng says that won't be necessary, but the man pulls a notebook from his sack and quickly sketches something with a pencil. It is a drawing of Chairman Mao with a stomach full of fish. One of those fish has the face of H Chi Minh. The artist tears the piece of paper from his notebook and hands it to Hng.

"Who was that?" o asks as Hng stares at the drawing in his left hand and the foreign bills in his right.

"An artist who just came back from America."

"That must be Ly Vn Hai," says o. "Everyone used to hate him because he got a scholars.h.i.+p and left. They used to hate him because they wished they could be him. How long do you think it will be before he is punished for that American education?"

o takes the drawing from Hng's hand to get a better look. "Wow. He's not afraid of anything," says o. "I wonder if we could convince him to join us. He could do ill.u.s.trations for the journal."

o looks at the money Hng is clutching in his hand. "Hng," he says, "he paid you in American dollars. That's a small fortune. You better hide it."

Hng pats his s.h.i.+rt pocket.

"What are you looking for?"

He turns his head. It is Lan, old but still beautiful Lan, sitting by his bedside.

"The dollars," he says. "I must remember to tell the girl." "What girl is that, Hng?" she asks, reaching for his hand. "The Vit Kiu," he says, but as soon as it comes out of his mouth he doubts her existence. She must be another one of those imaginary creatures who keeps appearing in his dreams. People known becoming unknown, faces dissolving into clouds, voices disembodied. His dreams are crowded with such illusions.

"Never mind," he says.

"You mean Ly Vn Hai's daughter?"

"You know her?" Hng wheezes.

"There is only a metre between our shacks, Hng. Sometimes I can even hear you sighing in bed. That night the girl brought the chocolate fungus-after she left, you asked yourself aloud who her father might be, so I told you. The ill.u.s.trator."

Hng is still in shock when Lan pulls a small gla.s.s vial by a string out from underneath her blouse and holds it before his face, twisting it round so he can admire it from all angles. It is a collection of precious MSG crystals, most expensive and cherished of all spices, impossible to find in the decades after independence. She is proud to tell him she has collected it grain by grain over the years as payment for embroidering pillowcases. She has kept the vial nestled between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, close to her heart.

Not since colonial days has Hng been able to afford this magic powder that makes one's food burst with flavour and colour. "There's a fortune in there," he says.

She lays the vial down on his chest.

"But surely this is not for me."

"I have been collecting it for you," Lan says. "In any case, it is not so expensive these days. You can now find it everywhere."

"But still-"

"And you are the cook."

"Was the cook. Will be. If I ever get out of here," he says, tapping his plaster cast.

"It won't be long, Hng."

"Tell me, how is everybody in the shantytown? I worry about them when I'm not there to cook."

"Times are better now, Hng. No one is going hungry."

"So they don't need me anymore."

"It doesn't mean they aren't all wondering when they will next taste your food. I hear them reminiscing about their favourites. Your spring rolls, your roast duck, that pig's ear salad."

"What about Phuc Li?" Hng asks of the legless man who lives on the other side of him. "His mother told me she was teaching him to sew labels into s.h.i.+rts so he could work in a factory."

"I don't know, Hng. She doesn't talk to me. None of them do."

"But why?"

"Because of you, Hng," she says as if he is dim-witted. "Because they are loyal to you."

It is true, she has no visitors, no apparent friends; she has lived without conversation or companions.h.i.+p for years. But what is a life if you cannot say to another: Grey sky today, isn't it? Did that thunder keep you up last night? How's your cousin, your bunion, your mushroom- hunting, your game of chess? How she must suffer in isolation, must question her entire existence.

A great rush of feeling overcomes him. "You weren't literate," he says, "you didn't know the worth of those papers." He bites the tremor that now afflicts his bottom lip.

"But I should have understood, Hng. I could see what the words meant to you. I was very young. It was foolish of me. I honestly thought I could protect you."

"Protect me? How?"

"I feared they would come and find those papers."

"They did come," says Hng, his mouth hanging open. "They set fire to my shack."

"I panicked, Hng. I didn't want to lose you." Lan hangs her head, her chin falling into her chest.

They arrived too late and found nothing. They did not charge him with any crime. They did not drag him away or kill him. Take away his eyes, tongue or hands. They left him to his life on the sh.o.r.e of a muddy pond, to live in silence beside a beautiful girl named Lan. A girl who had tried to save him, but in so doing had lost him.

Provenance.

It's a brooding early morning with a sagging sky, creating a mood that T would find despairing even if they were not faced with the prospect of eating an inferior bowl for breakfast every day for the indeterminate future. The ph at the end of Ma May Street seems particularly inferior now that T has had his own experience of cooking. He thinks the problem is less the cook's failure to trim enough fat from the meat than it is his laziness in not skimming off the grease that rises to the surface of the broth before he reboils it.

"If that were his only problem, it would not be so bad," says his father, turning his spoon over unenthusiastically. "Hng would never be so lazy."

"Never," T and Maggie say in unison.

"If Hng had his own shop again, it would certainly be cleaner than this," he continues. "Can you smell the toilet?" He pinches the bridge of his nose.

"Imagine it," Bnh says, drawing an imaginary banner of a bright, lucky red sign through the air, the words Ph Hng hanging on a building on a popular street in the Old Quarter, a shop with big, clean gla.s.s windows and an open door inviting customers to take seats on proper wooden chairs inside rather than at plastic stools on the greasy pavement.

T sees a gleaming, stainless steel counter. Perhaps a gas stovetop, which would reduce the need for wood. Bright new linoleum, easy to clean. A refrigerator to keep the meat fresh and the herbs from wilting. Shelving for a stack of new, white ceramic bowls and large lidded pots.

"There's a closet full of unused dishes at the hotel," says Maggie.

T's father adds a sink with hot and cold running water. An indoor toilet and perhaps a room at the back where the old man could live.

"This is crazy," says T, putting an end to this fantasizing. They could never hope to save the kind of money this would take. Even if T and his father were men who gambled at the c.o.c.kfights, no number of wins could amount to that kind of money.

"What if we formed an a.s.sociation?" says his father.

"You're serious about this," T says, pus.h.i.+ng his bowl to the centre of the table and abandoning his soup altogether.

"Well, he can't carry on as before. And he's never going to retire. We have to find a way to make it easier for him."

"What do you mean by an a.s.sociation?" Maggie asks.

"Like a ho," says Bnh.

"It's a fund you can turn to when you need a big sum of money fast," T explains. "Like for a wedding or a funeral or to build a house. Usually the a.s.sociation is between relatives, everyone contributing a certain amount-you keep it small and close so that everyone remains honest and has his turn at the lot."

"We could invite Hng's regular customers to partic.i.p.ate," says Bnh.

Maggie asks how much everyone would need to contribute, perhaps calculating her own savings, but this raises the bigger question of how much it would cost to get such a shop up and running to the point where it could turn enough of a profit to sustain itself.

T jerks his notebook out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He's just the man for this job. Rents have soared in the past couple of years, but he thinks it might still be possible to lease the ground floor of a building in the Old Quarter for the equivalent of about eight hundred U.S. dollars a month. And then, of course, there are the taxes and licensing fees, the equipment and supplies, and the bribes that must be paid to the police. Finally, the tables and chairs and kitchen equipment and ingredients.

T estimates the various costs with his father's help, converts this from 'ong to dollars, then rounds off the number. "Twelve thousand dollars," he says, underlining the zeros roughly. "Three hundred dollars each if the roughly forty people who are his regular customers were to contribute."

T's father shakes his head. "That's far too many people. You could be dead before it was ever your turn. And it is far too much money to ask anyone to contribute, in any case."

"That's less than people spend for one night at the Metropole," says Maggie.

"What do they charge for a bowl of ph there?" T's father asks.

"About seven dollars."

T's father coughs like a cat bringing up a furball. They've never paid more than seventy cents for a bowl of ph. "Do they import the beef from France?" he says. "oi zi oi."

-- Hng has been waiting all morning to see someone from the kitchen. He is impatient and agitated by the time a young man, just a boy really, finally comes to the ward to speak with him. The boy hovers at the end of the bed, looking like a dog used to being kicked. Hng struggles to begin with a compliment: "The ph has a warm fragrance," he says, "but did you taste the broth? Did it really seem sweet enough?"

"We don't taste it, Grandfather," says the young man.

What terrible teeth the boy has. Hng leans back on his pillow. "But how can you know if the balance is right, if it is seasoned sufficiently, if you don't taste it?"

"It is because we are a hospital. We have so many to serve, we do not have the time to check and adjust."

Hng can hear the embarra.s.sment in the boy's voice; he clearly knows the shame in this. "But even a factory must check and adjust," he says. "If even the tiniest mechanism is out of alignment, the whole outcome is compromised, is it not?"

"Yes, Grandfather," says the boy.

"Did your mother not teach you the way?" Hng asks with all the kindness he possesses.

"She died when I was very small."

Hng aches for the boy, just as he once did for Bnh. "I tell you what," he says, drawing the boy toward him, touching his forearm, extracting his name. "When I am better, when this d.a.m.n leg is healed, I will teach you. Now, which bones do you use for the stock?"

"The cheap ones. From the neck."

"But no no no," Hng says, cringing. "It's all about the marrow. You want knuckle bones, leg bones, tail. And you can get these cheap if you have a relations.h.i.+p with the right butcher.

"Beyond that, it's largely about the time of year-how much rain has there been, has there been enough gra.s.s for the cows, how is the soil where your onions and ginger are grown? And what if the star anise is old and losing flavour? How might you compensate? There are ways."

"I would very much like to learn," the young man says, looking more like a new puppy now than a beaten dog.

He says he will go to temple and pray for Hng's full and speedy recovery.

Hng cannot ask the young man to spare himself the effort. He will readily take all the help he can get.

T's parents are in the courtyard, his mother feeding her new chickens, the ground now covered in seed, his father squatting in front of the brazier pouring the tart juice he has extracted from tamarind pulp into the broth for a canh chua ca. He cooks this fish soup on days when T's mother says she just can't bear the thought of cooking or eating meat, usually days she has spent up to her elbows making sausages. Bnh prefers cooking his hot and sour fish soup out here on the open fire; he bought the stove in the kitchen five years ago, but after using it once, declared he didn't like electric heat. He says it changes the taste of things.

T squats down beside his father and pa.s.ses him a series of small white bowls. Bnh tips diced pineapple, bamboo shoots, sliced red chilies, sugar, fish sauce, tomato wedges and fat cubes of white fish in turn into his rolling broth. They are engulfed in its aroma: the sourness bites the back of T's tongue.

"I've been thinking about how to get Hng that money," Bnh says, as he skims the surface of the broth with a slotted spoon, his wrist making a gentle figure eight.

"Me too," says T, tapping his temple. "The wheel is spinning but going nowhere."

"You told me about the prices that Bui Xuan Phai's work fetches now. What if we were to sell my Phai drawing to these men Maggie is dealing with in California?"

T is astonished his father would even consider such a thing, having guarded and protected the drawing for so many years. "I could ask Maggie what she thinks it might be worth," he says tentatively.

"I leave the handling of it to you."

The following morning, T removes Bui Xuan Phai's naked lady from the chest in his parents' bedroom and rolls her up carefully, wrapping her in newspaper, making sure every inch of her is covered. He holds her high above his head, not wanting her to be jostled about on these busy streets she has never walked down before, thinking how strange this bustling city would look to Bui Xuan Phai if he were alive to see it today.

When T unrolls the picture for Maggie, she gasps and covers her mouth. When she finally drops her hands, she has the face of someone who has just eaten something extremely delicious.

She puts on plastic gloves, snapping them at her wrists like a forensics expert on CSI. She smooths down the curled edges of the paper, picks up her magnifying gla.s.s and studies every inch of it for what feels like an hour.

She uses words like provenance and pedigree. She talks about the purity of the drawing's lineage, having had only one owner all these years, and the fact that it was pa.s.sed from Phai himself to T's grandfather o, directly from one artist to another. She praises its condition as pristine and unadulterated. Pure. She commends them all, o, Bnh and T, for their care and respect in handling it.