“Be careful of the dogs,” I say to Ben. “Village dogs can be vicious.”
She warns me about the dogs and wherever it is in my head that I’ve been hiding since last night, I’m chased out now. This is how we began, and she should be pissed as hell at me or scared as hell but here she is warning me about the dogs again and the only thing in her voice is concern for me. Ahead is the place. There’s bamboo all around and some trees, but I can see the palm leaf roofs of the houses and a track of smoke rising and I can smell a wood fire and the dogs are barking like crazy. I should say to her, You’re right about the goddamn dogs, let’s get the hell out of here. I turn to her and she’s gone. For a moment, I think she’s heading back down the path and this is good. Let her run like hell. I’ll follow her. She can just whisper Fuck no and we can go away and if I have to live with some weird goddamn fears once in a while, I can do it. There’s just no way ever to know for sure. Except if we end up in the States, which I figure we have to, there’s blood types and there’s DNA or whatever, so there is a way and I’ll have to know sooner or later and someday she’s going to want to know, too. Like as soon as she starts thinking about children of our own.
But she hasn’t bolted. She’s moving off to the right, toward the sea. I follow. She’s moving slow and dreamy and the sea is beautiful out there, it’s clean and the line of the horizon is sharp and wide, simple, things are simple there, and though I can’t hide the fear now, it’s too close — just along the path and behind some bamboo — I want this clean sword-cut of an answer, and I know it’ll be clean and it’ll be okay, some part of me is saying that louder and louder, to hell with fairy tales, and Tien moves to the cliff edge and stops.
I come up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. Her hands come up and touch mine. I kiss her hair and then I look beyond her and over the edge of the cliff, and it’s sheer, falling far, far away down to the rocks and the sea.
We stand like that for a long while. The breeze rustles at us but things feel very calm, all of a sudden. We made love last night along this sea. It’s ours. Her hands are on mine. I look down at them, and I see the moons there and the grinding starts again inside me.
“It’s time,” I say.
She nods and turns and she moves off without another word or another touch, and I feel this withholding—suddenly all that I feel about her hands is the yearning to take them in mine, to kiss those pale moons — but I follow her, across the grass and onto a wide dirt path, and the trees take up on each side and then the bamboo comes in and the path narrows and we turn once and again, surrounded by the stalks of bamboo sectioned like bone, and suddenly we are before a little square with a great stone cistern in the middle and ringed by little houses of thatch and palm. A woman is dipping a ladle into the water in the cistern. Her face is hidden by a conical straw hat. A dog barks nearby. I look and he is peeking around a house and when I meet his eyes he disappears. The woman turns her head. She is very old.
Tien crosses to her and the old woman greets her and they speak for a moment. First Tien and then the woman and then Tien again and the woman nods her head and it is a clear yes she is saying and she motions beyond the cistern, off down another path, and I try to keep still but I can’t, not for a moment, I come forward and Tien is turning to me and her face is drawn tight.
“She’s here,” I say.
“There’s someone here with my mother’s name,” she says.
“Where?”
Tien says another few words in Vietnamese to the woman who is smiling broadly at me and nodding her head over and over and Tien moves off and I follow and it’s hard just to walk, just to put one foot in front of the other in a regular way, but we do walk, slower than before if anything. Tien is having trouble moving.
“It’s okay,” I say to her. “I’m with you. This won’t take long.”
She smiles up at me. My words sound confident. Maybe I am. Maybe I am or I wouldn’t be wanting to bolt down this path to wherever it is we’re going. She touches my hand, briefly, and my penis instantly stirs. But this first. This first.
And we are moving through another maze of growth, and chickens scatter before us, clucking furiously, plunging into a tiny break in the bamboo, and we come out of the maze and Tien stops.
There are two small thatched houses before us. She turns to the one on the left and two women are crouching flat-footed in front, their knees up by their faces, two sexless middle-aged women, dark from the sun, their hair put up in buns, straw hats beside them. And between them is a small package, cut open, of lime paste and a scattering of rust-colored arcea nuts and the pale green betel leaves, and one of the women, the nearest one, has just rolled a hit of this stuff to chew. Two aging women getting high on a Saturday morning. And the nearest one puts the roll in her mouth and she looks up at us and I am looking only at her mouth, and her teeth and gums are red from this stuff already, and then I look at her eyes and they are glazed a little and they look into mine and I don’t know how it is that I know but I do, because I never carried her face with me, except her eyes, and her eyes always seemed memorable from being like all the other eyes in this country, but now they’re before me and they’re Kim’s, the woman is Kim, and I’m taking all this in slow, and I hear Tien’s voice start up in Vietnamese and it is very distant and Kim’s eyes swing away from me. There is a moment now. Tien’s voice fades in my head but Tien remains, the smell of her and the press of her body remain, and I realize that I am complete. But I am complete only with her body and through her body, hers, my child’s, the body of my child, and Kim’s face is on her daughter and it stays and stays and there is no sound in the world and I am poised in some high place and will fall, but in this moment of suspension I am whole, at last, whole, and now in this moment a sound breaks in me, the South China Sea, and in this moment the dark beneath me is the dark of the shore beneath a golden moon, and Tien’s body is imprinted on mine, and in this act of our love, her heart and her mind and her voice are there too, and she is in my blood, and I am in her, in all ways in her, and from this moment, I feel the lift of my penis for her, and now it is a gesture that will tear us apart, my child and me, because it is for her that my body is doing this, for my child, and a terrible heat begins in that lift, in that place of my sex, a deep, hot roiling that spreads fast from my groin to my legs to my hands to my head and Kim’s face is on mine now and her eyes have gone wide and I look at my daughter, my lover, and my body yearns for hers, yearns even as this thing spreads through me like the fire that I wish had taken my father, taken him in that fiery hole and killed the seed of me that lies now inside my own child, my own.
Ben and I come out of the path and the house has two figures before it and my heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat and these figures are both women and they are coarse women, low-class women, drugging themselves with arcea and betel, and the house is ragged and of the worst construction, unplaned sticks and bamboo tied with palm cord, and I am not even looking at the faces of these women. There is a sour rushing in me, like the fumy wind of motorcycles in the city, and I want this over now. I say in my native language, “I am looking for Le Thi Huong.”