A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

, it’s all right.”

He was still beside me. This was not an awakening, as you might expect, this was not a dream ending with the bowler in Paris and me awaking to find that He; was never there. He was still beside my bed, though he was just beyond my outstretched hand and he did not move to me. He smiled on one side of his mouth, a smile full of irony, as if he, too, was thinking about the night he’d tried on his rented clothes. He said, “Do you remember how I worked in Paris?”

I thought about this and I did remember, with the words of his advertisement in the newspaper “La Vie Ouvrière”: “If you would like a lifelong memento of your family, have your photos retouched at Nguyn Aí Quc’s.” This was his work in Paris; he retouched photos with a very delicate hand, the same fine hand that Monsieur Escoffier had admired in London. I said, “Yes, I remember.”

H nodded gravely. “I painted the blush into the cheeks of Frenchmen.”

I said, “A lovely portrait in a lovely frame for forty francs,” another phrase from his advertisement.

“Forty-five, H said.

I thought now of his question that I had not answered. I motioned to the far corner of the room where the prayer table stood. “I still follow the path.”

He looked and said, “At least you became a Hòa Hào.”

He could tell this from the simplicity of the table. There was only a red cloth upon it and four Chinese characters: Bào So’n K Hu’o’tng. This is the saying of the Hòa Hào. We follow the teachings of a monk who broke away from the fancy rituals of the other Buddhists. We do not need elaborate pagodas or rituals. The Hòa Hào believes that the maintenance of our spirits is very simple, and the mystery of joy is simple, too. The four characters mean “A good scent from a strange mountain.”

I had always admired the sense of humor of my friend Quc, so I said, “You never did stop painting the blush into the faces of Westerners.”

H looked back to me but he did not smile. I was surprised at this but more surprised at my little joke seeming to remind him of his hands. He raised them and studied them and said, “After the heating, what was the surface for the glaze?”

“My old friend,” I said, “you worry me now.”

But H did not seem to hear. He turned away and crossed the room and I knew he was real because he did not vanish from my sight but opened the door and went out and closed the door behind him with a loud click.

I rang for my daughter. She had given me a porcelain bell, and after allowing H enough time to go down the stairs and out the front door, if that was where he was headed, I rang the bell, and my daughter, who is a very light sleeper, soon appeared.

“What is it, Father?” she asked with great patience in her voice. She is a good girl. She understands about Vietnamese families and she is a smart girl.

“Please feel the doorknob,” I said.

She did so without the slightest hesitation and this was a lovely gesture on her part, a thing that made me wish to rise up and embrace her, though I was very tired and did not move.

“Yes?” she asked after touching the knob.

“Is it sticky?”

She touched it again. “Ever so slightly,” she said. “Would you like me to clean it?”

“In the morning,” I said.

She smiled and crossed the room and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled of lavender and fresh bedclothes and there are so many who have gone on before me into the world of spirits and I yearn for them all, yearn to find them all together in a village square, my wife there smelling of lavender and our own sweat, like on a night in Saigon soon after the terrible fighting in 1968 when we finally opened the windows onto the night and there were sounds of bombs falling on the horizon and there was no breeze at all, just the heavy stillness of the time between the dry season and the wet, and Saigon smelled of tar and motorcycle exhaust and cordite but when I opened the window and turned to my wife, the room was full of a wonderful scent, a sweet smell that made her sit up, for she sensed it, too. This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers but instead reminded us that flowers were always ready to fall into dust, while this smell was as if a gemstone had begun to give off a scent, as if a mountain of emerald had found its own scent. I crossed the room to my wife and we were already old, we had already buried children and grandchildren that we prayed waited for us in that village square at the foot of the strange mountain, but when I came near the bed, she lifted her silk gown and threw it aside and I pressed close to her and our own sweat smelled sweet on that night. I want to be with her in that square and with the rest of those we’d buried, the tiny limbs and the sullen eyes and the gray faces of the puzzled children and the surprised adults and the weary old people who have gone before us, who know the secrets now. And the sweet smell of the glaze on H’s hands reminds me of others that I would want in the square, the people from the ship, too, the Vietnamese boy from a village near my own who died of a fever in the Indian Ocean and the natives in Dakar who were forced by colonial officials to swim out to our ship in shark-infested waters to secure the moorings and two were killed before our eyes without a French regret. H was very moved by this, and I want those men in our square and I want the Frenchman, too, who called H “monsieur” for the first time. A man on the dock in Marseilles. H spoke of him twice more during our years together and I want that Frenchman there. And, of course, H. Was he in the village square even now, waiting? Heating his glaze fondant? My daughter was smoothing my covers around me and the smell of lavender on her was still strong.

“He was in this room,” I said to her to explain the sticky doorknob.

“Who was?”

But I was very sleepy and I could say no more, though perhaps she would not have understood anyway, in spite of being the smart girl that she is.

The next night I left my light on to watch for H’s arrival, but I dozed off and he had to wake me. He was sitting in a chair that he’d brought from across the room. He said to me, “Ðo. Wake up, my old friend.”

I must have awakened when he pulled the chair near to me, for I heard each of these words. “I am awake,” I said. “I was thinking of the poor men who had to swim out to our ship.”

“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.”