The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 21

"Your father's really prepared to sell it?" she asks.

"If it can get us the money for Old Man Hng's shop, yes, he's prepared to sell it."

Maggie's eyes sparkle as she peels off the gloves and rubs her hands together. "I think it would fetch well over ten thousand dollars," she says.

"Can we ask for twelve?"

"We can try," she says, picking up the phone.

This way of tackling things so directly, without apology or ritual, seems a bit reckless to T, but it certainly does move things along. He can just imagine what happens when deals go sour, though-no blessing to protect you, no Buddha or ancestor to make things right. This is one obvious downside to capitalism.

Maggie apologizes to Mr. Thanh for calling so late but says she has a proposal to make that she is quite sure he'll find of interest. She is in possession of a natural and fitting addition to the V collection- an immaculately preserved piece that could, in fact, serve as its celestial heart.

Maggie puts her hand over the receiver and gestures to T. "I want you to describe the piece to him," she whispers. "From your heart."

From his heart. Where feelings live. Subjective feelings. Gulp.

"One minute, Henry. I'm just going to pa.s.s you to someone. He's the best one to describe it." She pa.s.ses the phone to T, taps her chest and whispers again: "From your heart."

"h.e.l.lo," says T, clearing his throat. "Mr. Thanh? Yes, well, this is a drawing that has been in my family for fifty years. You have heard of Nhan Van? No? Well let me tell you," he begins, launching into a brief history.

"T," Maggie whispers, tapping her chest again. "Heart."

"Um, Mr. Thanh? What I can tell you is that it is a very personal drawing. Very private. Like Bui Xuan Phai must have loved this lady. She has her naked back to him and her hands to her face. Maybe they have just been intimate with each other. Perhaps she is crying."

T looks over at Maggie. She holds the tips of her index fingers to her lips and nods her head, her eyes a bit teary.

Mr. Thanh asks what they want for it.

"Twelve thousand dollars and the Ly Vn Hais," says T.

He doesn't dare look over at Maggie again. He hangs up the phone. Maggie reaches out to him and wraps her arms around his shoulders. She pulls him close, so close that he can feel the rise of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her sharp hip bones. Having never been hugged in his life, T's instinct is to turn into a plank of wood. Mr. Thanh has said he will confer with his a.s.sociates and get back to them later in the day.

The wait leaves her feeling ravenous. Maggie orders room service, her favourite-a burger and fries. Eating a hamburger in the heart of Hanoi might seem like a contradiction, but it's the type of contradiction Maggie lives every day. She is that contradiction.

The phone rings just as she's swallowing her first bite. Maggie picks up the phone, wiping her lips on a napkin.

It's Professor Devereux-Simon-from the art school. He'd asked her to keep him updated. Said generously, "If there's anything else I can do." And she'd completely neglected to do so-she'd taken the name of the dealer in Hong Kong from him and run.

"I'm really sorry," she says. "I just got caught up in the chase. I hope there will be some resolution later today."

"If you're truly sorry you'll let me take you out for a drink," says Simon.

Maggie laughs, taken aback. He's flirting. Asking her out. She places a cool palm against a hot cheek.

"Do you know Bobby Chinn's?" he asks.

"The restaurant at the end of the lake."

"Why don't you meet me at the bar there at nine tonight. We'll celebrate your resolution."

Maggie laughs again, feeling foolish. And then she surprises herself by saying yes. "But how will I know it's you?"

"I'll know it's you, I'm sure of it."

Maggie rolls her eyes. Are French men really like this?

"I have an unfair advantage," he admits. "I found your picture on the Walker Center's website."

She does her own research as soon as she hangs up the phone, looking him up on the Internet. Simon Devereux has a PhD in art history from the Sorbonne. He wrote his thesis on French influences in Bui Xuan Phai's work. His photo, though, is somewhat surprising. He's not Vit Kiu, but half Vietnamese: given his last name, his father must have been French. She pushes the tray of food on her desk away.

Every time he wakes she is there at his beside, old Lan but still beautiful, busy with some embroidery she sets aside as soon as his eyelids flutter open.

"I've forgotten all the poetry," he says.

"I'm sure you've just put it away for safekeeping," she says, patting Hng's hand. "What about that first one from Fine Works of Spring. You knew it by heart."

"Even that, I'm afraid."

She leans over his bed. "The cherry blossom has lost its scent," she says in a voice as silken as when she was a girl. "The trees of the North have forgotten the season."

"You remember it?"

"I listened well," she says. "The bird that rests here is a carrier pigeon arrested in mid-flight."

"Oh, Lan," says Hng, suddenly feeling very strange, wobbling inside like his organs have become unmoored.

"The bird has forgotten the message he's been sent to deliver. Ashamed, he begins to repeat the words of the morning's broadcast ..."

"Oh, Lan. How I've missed you."

"Ah, Hng, I've been here the whole time."

Maggie rushes over to T's house this evening, having just heard back from the purchasers in California. She feels euphoric: victorious and relieved, genuinely proud of T for being so convincing, nervous and giddy at the thought of meeting Simon Devereux later, embarra.s.sed that the latter feelings should even be part of the mix. It's a drink, just a drink with a man she's never met. Today is the culmination of a year- long search for her father's work. His timing is uncanny.

She apologizes to Bnh for dropping by unannounced, but he silences her with a smile, his silver-capped eye teeth sparkling in the light. "We are always happy to see you," he says, leading her across the courtyard by the hand.

Bnh's hair is gleaming wet under the fluorescent light of the kitchen. Maggie notices a black smudge on Bnh's neck, the same black on Anh's palms, and she's moved to think that a man with a gla.s.s eye is still concerned enough about his appearance to dye his hair.

T steps into the kitchen then with just a towel wrapped around his waist, his chest as hard and s.h.i.+ny as a polished apple. "Out of water," he says, before realizing Maggie is there. He folds his arms across his chest self-consciously.

"It's good news," says Maggie. "It worked. You made it work, T. I couldn't wait to tell you. They're going to give us $10,000 for the Bui Xuan Phai-actually $9,998, they bargained for a luckier number- and my father's drawings."

"Whoa-hoa!" Bnh shouts, leaping up and fetching the bottle of whiskey that sits prominently displayed on a shelf. "It's never been opened," he announces proudly. It was a gift from his colleagues when he left the factory years ago.

Anh fetches four gla.s.ses, which Bnh fills to the top. Maggie shudders at the mere smell of the whiskey.

"Let us toast to the health of the old man," says Bnh, raising his gla.s.s.

Maggie raises her gla.s.s and offers a toast of her own. "To the return of things that have been lost."

An Old Man's Destiny.

Hng admires the white length of his leg in its plaster, but curses it at the same time. He'll be stuck in this bed for several more weeks.

"You are longing to get back to cooking, aren't you," he hears Bnh say as he and T approach.

"Even in my dreams I am making ph."

Bnh sits down on the edge of Hng's bed. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have your own ph shop again," he says. "Just like the old days."

Why is Bnh saying this? What is the point?

"What if you had that shop today?" T asks, joining his father.

"Today it would be very different," says Hng, indulging them. "For one thing, we would have running water."

"And a refrigerator, maybe even a freezer," says Bnh. "You'd get a lot more life out of your food."

"Those stainless steel counters are good," T adds, "really easy to clean."

"If you put the kitchen in the back and had a door to the alley, you could take deliveries," says Bnh. "Anh could just send the meat up every morning."

Bnh and T continue to build this fantasy shop, discussing square footage and the relative merits of various locations. T reckons you could fit twenty tables with four chairs each on the ground floor of your average tube house in the Old Quarter.

And then they introduce reality-the cost of it all-and Hng stops them there. "Enough now. Don't agitate an old man's heart."

But they are grinning like children at Tet in the days when the government still allowed firecrackers. What is the matter with them?

Bnh puts his hands between his knees and bends forward; he has a speech to make, it would seem. But what he says could do more than agitate an old man's heart; it could break it completely. "We have the money for your shop."

But where does such an extraordinary amount of money come from?

"It doesn't matter where it comes from," Bnh says. "It matters that it comes as a gift. It matters that you accept it as a gift, because it is destiny, and one must not hide from destiny. What is rightfully yours, what was taken from you long ago, is being returned."

Hng feels the weight of loss in this moment. Of those men who taught him more about the world than a simple peasant ever could have hoped to know.

"Perhaps it is too late," he says.

Hng sinks back into his pillow and closes his eyes for just a minute. He thinks of Lan. Perhaps things do return, but never in the form that they left you. Lan is an old woman now, an old woman to his old man. The years of poverty have humbled her. She is a better person for it, Hng supposes, but in some ways, he wishes she could have lived in a world where it was possible to be young and vain. Like Vietnam today. Like these spoiled children with their cellphones and gadgets and new clothes, and their desires for bigger, faster motorbikes and their dreams that they will go to Saigon and become famous. Will they be better for it? Sometimes hards.h.i.+p forces humility and virtue where it might not naturally arise.

Hng is thankful he knows good children, children who possess the manners and values of old, like T.

Hng pats the thin skin in the middle of his chest, feeling for the vial of MSG he now carries on a string around his neck. It is not nearly so expensive these days, but having done without it for so long has become a matter of pride. Everything is available now; it would be easy to become lazy.

Imagine if he did have his own shop again. Even though he would not be bound by deference to inheritance, he would still wish to replicate Uncle Chin's shop. Forget these stainless steel counters and poured concrete floors T and Bnh are talking about. Forget hiding the kitchen away in the back like some western restaurant. He'll be out there cooking in front of the open window, chatting to everyone who pa.s.ses, inviting them in. He'll find a place with an old tiled floor that they can clean and polish. He'll nail rattan screens to the walls, a soft back against which to lean, a cus.h.i.+on to absorb sound, and he'd like some of those whirling ceiling fans the French used to install in their establishments.

He'll eschew the common trend of plastic tables and stools in favour of the old heavy teak furniture that tells people you are welcome here as long as you like. A man his age is likely to proceed more cautiously, if at all, knowing how Vietnam can do a somersault or backflip overnight and suddenly half the population is dead, in labour camps or prison or hiding in a bomb shelter or fleeing altogether because the country is tied to the yoke of some colonial master or native despot. Hng hopes the seeds of Vietnam's destruction don't lie in this fever of capitalism that has infected the country, a fever that is beginning to infect him as well, but even if that is the case, he has lived long and hard enough to know Vietnam will recover. It always does.

He opens his eyes. These two men-his family-wait expectantly. "Give an old man some time to consider all this," he says.

He dreams of Lan wading among lotuses, only to awake to find her sitting by his bedside, picking at the seam of his trouser leg. "I'll sew it up again when your leg's all better," she says.

"Is it too late?" he asks.

"Too late?"

It's a good question. He is old, but not too old to contemplate running a business. He's been running a business all these years, hasn't he? Surely it would be easier to be settled in one place. His question has more to do with a fear of failure than anything else. He would wish to be able to recreate an environment like that of Ph Chin & Hng, but how can he hope to do so without his memory? So much from that time has slipped away.

"Tell me everything you remember, Lan. Please," he says, feeling the rise of panic. "Tell me names."

"Well," she says calmly. "It's hard to know where to begin. There were so many of them. What about Chin t and Huy Phc. Their poems always sounded very similar to me. And that Chinese man with the crooked nose who wrote stories about village life. And Xuan Quo'c Quy, the mute who brought his brother along to say his words aloud."

Her recollection is extraordinary; she'd been acquainted with these men only through Hng's descriptions of them, yet physical details and specific phrases that Hng has absolutely no memory of spill without any apparent effort from her mouth.

"And, of course, o's teacher, Phan Khoi," she continues. "He was always very serious, wasn't he? He might have been the founder of modern poetry, but by the time of Nhan Van he was only concerned with essays and intellectual statements. I'm just a simple woman, but I much preferred o's work. He had a pa.s.sionate heart, that one."

It is as if decades have collapsed, and they are once again sitting together on a woven gra.s.s mat under a weak moon and her skin is pearlescent, her hair long and loose around her shoulders, only she is the one telling the stories and it is he who is hearing them for the first time.

"I've missed you, Lan," he says again.

"I'm right here, Hng."

The young man from the kitchen approaches the bed carrying a bowl of congee. He has brought two spoons.

"How would you like a job, Dong?" Hng asks. "Working for me in a kitchen."

"I would like that very much, Grandfather." There are two things he must ask of the young man, things he must ask of T and Bnh as well. First, they must never again visit H Chi Minh's mausoleum. It is very, very bad luck for business. And second, they must all go to the temple and ask the spirits for their blessings. The communists did such a good job of stamping out religion that young people today don't know whom to pray to. Buddha is no help with matters of money. Consult Buddha on matters of the heart. Ask the ancestors for help with business. This is responsible capitalism.

Lan holds out a spoonful of congee to Hng. Hng opens his mouth and closes his eyes.

T and his father have been eating inferior ph in the shop on Ma May Street for several mornings in a row, even going so far as to compliment the cantankerous old man who runs the place. T has given his father a lesson on the white lie and how it acts as a harmless social lubricant, and he seems to be taking quite naturally to this foreign practice. "Your broth has a very good aroma," T's father says, slurping it up with noisy enthusiasm.

"Do I know you," says the owner, "or do you have an evil twin at home?"

"Who taught you the recipe?" Bnh asks the next day.

"Why do you care?" says the owner.

"Look, what are you doing here every day?" the owner asks toward the end of the week.

"It's a public place, isn't it?" says T.