The Refugees

  “Don’t make me tell you one more time.” She wrapped the telephone cord tightly around her index finger. “I’m never going to quit.”

  After she hung up the phone, she returned to the task of changing the sheets the professor had bed-wet the previous evening. Her head was aching from lack of sleep, her back was sore from the chores, and her neck was tight with worry. When bedtime came, she was unable to sleep, listening to the professor talk about how gusts of the mistral blew him from one side to the other of the winding narrow streets of Le Panier, where he’d lived in a basement apartment during his Marseille years, or about the hypnotic sound made by the scratch of a hundred pens on paper as students took their exams. As he talked, she studied the dim light in their bedroom, cast off from the streetlamps outside, and remembered how the moon over the South China Sea was so bright that even at midnight she could see the fearful expressions on her children’s faces. She was counting the cars passing by outside, listening for the sounds of their engines and hoping for sleep, when the professor touched her hand in the dark. “If you close your eyes,” he said gently, “you might hear the ocean.”

  Mrs. Khanh closed her eyes.

  September came and went. October passed and the Santa Ana winds came, rushing from the mountains to the east with the force of freeway traffic, breaking the stalks of the Egyptian papyruses she’d planted in ceramic pots next to the trellis. She no longer allowed the professor to walk by himself in the afternoons, but instead followed him discreetly at a distance of ten or twenty feet, clutching her hat against the winds. If the Santa Ana had subsided, they read together on the patio. Over the past few months, the professor had taken to reading out loud, and slowly. Each day he seemed to read even more loudly, and more slowly, until the afternoon in November when he stopped in mid-sentence for so long that the silence shook Mrs. Khanh from the grip of Quynh Dao’s latest romance.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, closing her book.

  “I’ve been trying to read this sentence for five minutes,” the professor said, staring at the page. When he looked up, she saw tears in his eyes. “I’m losing my mind, aren’t I?”

  From then on, she read to him whenever she was free, from books on academic topics she had no interest in whatsoever. She stopped whenever he began reciting a memory—the anxiety he felt on meeting her father for the first time, while she waited in the kitchen to be introduced; the day of their wedding, when he nearly fainted from the heat and the tightness of his cravat; or the day they returned to Saigon three years ago and visited their old house on Phan Than Gian, which they could not find at first because the street had been renamed Dien Bien Phu. Saigon had also changed names after it changed hands, but they couldn’t bring themselves to call it Ho Chi Minh City. Neither could the taxi driver who ferried them from their hotel to the house, even though he was too young to remember a time when the city was officially Saigon.

  They parked two houses down from their old house, and stayed in the taxi to avoid the revolutionary cadres from the north who had moved in after the Communist takeover. She and the professor were nearly overwhelmed by sadness and rage, fuming as they wondered who these strangers were who had taken such poor care of their house. The solitary alley lamp illuminated tears of rust streaking the walls, washed down from the iron grill of the terrace by the monsoon rain. As the taxi’s wipers squeaked against the windshield, a late-night masseur biked past, announcing his calling with the shake of a glass bottle filled with pebbles.

  “You told me it was the loneliest sound in the world,” said the professor.

  Before he started talking, she’d been reading to him from a biography of de Gaulle, and her finger was still on the last word she’d read. She didn’t like to think about their lost home, and she didn’t remember having said any such thing. “The wipers or the glass bottle?” she asked.

  “The bottle.”

  “It seemed so at the time,” she lied. “I hadn’t heard that sound in years.”

  “We heard it often. In Dalat.” The professor took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief. He had gone once to a resort in the mountains of Dalat for a conference while she stayed in Saigon, pregnant. “You always wanted to eat your ice cream outside in the evenings,” the professor continued. “But it’s hard to eat ice cream in the tropics, Yen. One has no time to savor it. Unless one is indoors, with air conditioning.”

  “Dairy products give you indigestion.”

  “If one eats ice cream in a bowl, it rapidly becomes soup. If one eats it in a cone, it melts all over one’s hand.” When he turned to her and smiled, she saw gumdrops of mucus in the corners of his eyes. “You loved those brown sugar cones, Yen. You insisted that I hold yours for you so your hand wouldn’t get sticky.”

  A breeze rattled the bougainvillea, the first hint, perhaps, of the Santa Ana returning. The sound of her own voice shocked her as well as the professor, who stared at her with his mouth agape when she said, “That’s not my name. I am not that woman, whoever she is, if she even exists.”

  “Oh?” The professor slowly closed his mouth and put his glasses back on. “Your name isn’t Yen?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then what is it?”

  She wasn’t prepared for the question, having been worried only about her husband calling her by the wrong name. They rarely used each other’s proper names, preferring endearments like Anh, for him, or Em, for her, and when they spoke to each other in front of the children, they called themselves Ba and Ma. Usually she heard her first name spoken only by friends, relatives, or bureaucrats, or when she introduced herself to someone new, as she was, in a sense, doing now.

  “My name is Sa,” she said. “I am your wife.”

  “Right.” The professor licked his lips and took out his notebook.

  That evening, after they had gone to bed and she heard him breathing evenly, she switched on her lamp and reached across his body for the notebook, propped on the alarm clock. His writing had faded into such a scribble that she was forced to read what he wrote twice, following the jags and peaks of his letters down a dog-eared page until she reached the bottom, where she deciphered the following: Matters worsening. Today she insisted I call her by another name. Must keep closer eye on her—here she licked her finger and used it to turn the page—for she may not know who she is anymore. She closed the book abruptly, with a slap of the pages, but the professor, curled up on his side, remained still. A scent of sweat and sulfur emanated from underneath the sheets. If it wasn’t for his quiet breathing and the heat of his body, he might have been dead, and for a moment as fleeting as déjà vu, she wished he really were.

  In the end there was no choice. On her last day at work, her fellow librarians threw her a surprise farewell party, complete with cake and a wrapped gift box that held a set of travel guides for the vacations they knew she’d always wanted to take. She fondled the guides for a while, riffling through their pages, and when she almost wept, her fellow librarians thought she was being sentimental. Driving home with the box of guides in the backseat, next to a package of adult diapers she’d picked up from Sav-On’s that morning, she fought to control the sense that ever so slowly the book of her life was being closed.

  When she opened the door to their house and called out his name, she heard only bubbling from the fish tank. After not finding him in any of the bedrooms or bathrooms, she left the diapers and box of books in his library. An open copy of Sports Illustrated was on his recliner in the living room, a half-eaten jar of applesauce sat on the kitchen counter, and in the backyard, the chenille throw he wore around his lap in cool weather lay on the ground. Floating in his teacup on the patio table was a curled petal from the bougainvillea, shuttling back and forth.

  Panic almost made her call the police. But they wouldn’t do anything so soon; they’d tell her to call back when he was missing for a day or two. As for Vinh, she ruled him out,
not wanting to hear him say, “I told you so.” Regret swept over her then, a wave of feeling born from her guilt over being so selfish. Her librarian’s instinct for problem solving and orderly research kept her standing under the weight of that regret, and she returned to her car determined to find the professor. She drove around her block first before expanding in ever-widening circles, the windows rolled down on both sides. The neighborhood park, where she and the professor often strolled, was abandoned except for squirrels chasing each other through the branches of an oak tree. The sidewalks were empty of pedestrians or joggers, except for a withered man in a plaid shirt standing on a corner, selling roses from plastic buckets and oranges from crates, his eyes shaded by a grimy baseball cap. When she called him Mr. Esteban, his eyes widened; when she asked him if he’d seen the professor, he smiled apologetically and said, “No hablo inglés. Lo siento.”

  Doubling back on her tracks, she drove each street and lane and cul-de-sac a second time. Leaning out the window, she called his name, first in a low voice, shy about making a scene, and then in a shout. “Anh Khanh!” she cried. “Anh Khanh!” A few window curtains twitched, and a couple of passing cars slowed down, their drivers glancing at her curiously. But he didn’t spring forth from behind anyone’s hedges, or emerge from a stranger’s door.

  Only after it was dark did she return. The moment she walked through the front door, she smelled the gas. A kettle was on the stove, but the burner hadn’t been lit. Both her pace and her pulse quickened from a walk to a sprint. After shutting off the gas, she saw that the glass doors leading to the patio, which she’d closed before her departure, were slightly ajar. There was a heavy, long flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers, and the heft of the aluminum barrel in her hand was comforting as she slowly approached the glass doors. But when she shone the light over the patio and onto the garden, she saw only her persimmon trees and the red glint of the chilies.

  She was in the hallway when she saw the light spilling out of the professor’s library. When she peeked around the door frame, she saw the professor with his back to the door. At his feet was her box of books, and he stood facing the bookshelf that was reserved for her. Here, she kept her magazines and the books he’d given her over the years. The professor knelt, picked a book from the box, and stood up to shelve it. He repeated the same motion, one book at a time. Hidden Tahiti and French Polynesia. Frommer’s Hawaii. National Geographic Traveler: The Caribbean. With each book, he mumbled something she couldn’t hear, as if he might be trying to read the titles on the spines. Essential Greek Islands. Jerusalem and the Holy Land. World Cultures: Japan. A Romantic’s Guide to Italy. He touched the cover of each book with great care, tenderly, and she knew, not for the first time, that it wasn’t she who was the love of his life.

  The professor shelved the last book and turned around. The expression on his face when he saw her was the one he’d worn forty years ago at their first meeting, when she’d entered the living room of her father’s house and seen him pale with anxiety, eyes blinking in anticipation. “Who are you?” he cried, raising his hand as if to ward off a blow. Her heart was beating fast and her breathing was heavy. When she swallowed, her mouth was dry, but she could feel a sheen of dampness on her palms. It struck her then that these were the same sensations she’d felt that first time, seeing him in a white linen suit wrinkled by high humidity, straw fedora pinned between hand and thigh.

  “It’s just me,” she said. “It’s Yen.”

  “Oh,” the professor said, lowering his hand. He sat down heavily in his armchair, and she saw that his oxfords were encrusted in mud. As she crossed the carpet to the bookshelf, he followed her with a hooded gaze, his look one of exhaustion. She was about to take Les Petites Rues de Paris from the bookshelf for the evening’s reading, but when she saw him close his eyes and lean back in his armchair, it was clear that he wouldn’t be traveling anywhere. Neither would she. Having ruled out the travel guides, she decided against the self-help books and the how-to manuals as well. Then she saw the thin and uncracked spine of the book of short stories.

  A short story, she thought, would be just long enough.

  Sitting beside him on the carpet, she found herself next to the painting. She turned her back to the woman with the two eyes on one side of her face, and she promised herself that tomorrow she would have the painting reframed. When she opened the book, she could feel the woman looking over her shoulder at her name, written in his precise hand under that of the author. She wondered what, if anything, she knew about love. Not much, perhaps, but enough to know that what she would do for him now she would do again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. She would read out loud, from the beginning. She would read with measured breath, to the very end. She would read as if every letter counted, page by page and word by word.

  f it weren’t for his daughter and his wife, James Carver would never have ventured into Vietnam, a country about which he knew next to nothing except what it looked like at forty thousand feet. But Michiko had insisted on visiting after Claire invited them, her e-mail addressed to Mom and Dad but really meant for her mother. Michiko was the one who wanted to see Vietnam, hearing from relatives who had toured there that it reminded them of Japan’s bucolic past, before General MacArthur wielded the postwar hand of reconstruction to daub Western makeup on Japanese features. Carver, however, cared little for pastoral fantasies, having passed his childhood in a rural Alabama hamlet siphoned clean of hope long before his birth. He had refused to go until Michiko compromised, proposing Angkor Wat as the prelude and Thailand’s beaches and temples as the postscript to a brief Vietnamese sojourn.

  This was how Carver found himself in September in Hue, walking slowly through the grounds of an imperial tomb with Michiko, Claire, and her boyfriend, Khoi Legaspi. ­Legaspi’s optimism and serenity irked Carver, as did the poor fit between Legaspi’s Asian appearance and his surname, bestowed on him by his adoptive parents. The young man, perhaps sensing this ambivalence, had been solicitous of him throughout his visit, but Carver found Legaspi’s attention patronizing rather than helpful.

  Before they embarked on their tour through the imperial tombs this morning, for example, Legaspi had attempted to sympathize with Carver by mentioning how his own father was forced to walk with a cane. “That’s worse than your situation,” Legaspi said. The comment irritated Carver, implying as it did that he was somehow whining about having broken his hip three years ago, when he had fallen down the stairway of his own house. Now he was sixty-eight and limping, determined not to be outpaced by Legaspi as he led them through the grounds of the tomb, which more closely resembled a summer palace, its pavilion overlooking a moat filled with lotuses.

  “I might go back and finish my doctorate,” Legaspi said in response to a question from Michiko. Fit and slender in khakis and a burnt orange polo shirt, he resembled the college students at Bowdoin whom Carver saw loitering on the sidewalks whenever he drove to town. “But maybe not. I suppose after a while the pure research was not enough. I wanted to apply the research.”

  “I’d love to see your robot in action.” Michiko brushed her hand against the mossy flank of a millennium-old wall, varnished black by the centuries. The royal past alluded to was nowhere near as grand as Buckingham Palace or Versailles, which Carver had seen during layovers on the European routes he had piloted for Pan Am, but the tomb had its own melancholic charm. “And the mongoose.”

  “How about the day after tomorrow?” Legaspi said. “I can set up a demonstration.”

  “What do you think, Dad?” Carver saw once again the crow’s-feet around Claire’s eyes, newly engraved since her departure for Vietnam two years ago. She was only twenty-six. “It’ll be educational.”

  “Angkor Wat was pretty educational.” Carver didn’t like being educated on his vacations. “And we visited that terrible war museum in Saigon. I don’t really feel like seeing any more horrors.”

  “What
you’ll see is the future of demining,” Claire said. “Not people crawling on their knees digging out mines by hand.”

  “Won’t this robot put those people out of work?”

  “That is not the kind of work people should do,” Legaspi said. “Robots were invented to free people from danger and slavery.”

  Carver’s ears twitched. “You said the Department of Defense was funding your adviser’s research at MIT. Why exactly do you think the DOD is interested in these robots?”

  “Dad,” Claire said.

  “We have to take the money where we find it.” Legaspi shrugged. “The world isn’t a pure place.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “Jimmy,” said Michiko.

  “All I’m saying is not to underestimate the military-industrial complex.”

  “I suppose you’d know,” Claire said.

  “How about a picture?” Legaspi proposed. Carver groaned silently. He hated taking pictures, but Michiko loved commemorating every occasion, important or trivial. For her sake, he took his place obediently between his wife and daughter, who themselves were flanked by two gray stone mandarins, goateed and with swords on their shoulders. They were shorter even than Michiko and Claire, and Carver assumed they were life-size from the time of this emperor whose name he suddenly could not recall as Legaspi aimed the camera. It was true that this was the third tomb they were visiting on the Perfume River, but it still bothered Carver that he could not remember this emperor’s name, which Legaspi had mentioned several times.