Mãn by Kim Thúy

whispering sentimental songs without anyone being aware. I was absolutely not expecting that call from his wife, which petrified me. I remember seeing my hands continue to remove the pistils from the flowers, to garnish the fish and place them in the enormous
bain-marie
with the big holes, but I’ve forgotten the rest, what came next.

    xé lòng

    heartbreak
    MAMAN HAD BEEN EDUCATED by Catholic nuns all through her childhood. She knew a lot of stories from the Bible that she would tell me to back up a message or a lesson. That night, I took charge of cleaning and closing the kitchen. She stayed with me and slipped in the story of the Judgment of Solomon before disappearing up the stairs.
    I washed the kitchen floor on my knees, holding a scrub brush and weeping profusely. I sharpened the knives on the whetstone. I went out back with a flashlight and removed the wilted flowers and dead leaves from the garden. And most important, I held my breath—to cut myself in half, to amputate Luc from me, to die partially. Otherwise, he would die entirely, torn in two, in seven, in shreds, making his children into collateral injured.

    thu

    autumn
    MY SAFE HAVEN LAY IN cooking elaborate, time-consuming dishes. Julie supported me in these extravagant projects by lightening my schedule and cutting down on my usual tasks without my knowledge. For Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, I spent nights at a time boning chickens without tearing the skin, then stuffing and sewing them up. I also gave the local Buddhist temple a large plant covered with mandarin oranges hung one by one on the branches. Each fruit had a wish wrapped around its stem, intended for the one who would pick it on the stroke of midnight. For the Moon Festival in August, I made
bánh trung thu
, mid-autumn moon cakes that the Vietnamese savour while they watch the children walking down the street with their red lanterns lit by candles. The fillings vary according to taste and the time we spend on them.
    I had all of eternity because time is infinite when we don’t expect anything. And so I had decided on a stuffing with many kinds of roasted nuts and watermelon seeds that I husked by cracking the tough bark of each one very firmly. To avoid touching the delicate flesh inside required a lot of control to stop at the right moment. Otherwise, the flesh would break like a dream on waking. It was painstaking work that allowed me to withdraw into my own universe, the one that no longer existed.
    Fortunately, there are no verb tenses in the Vietnamese language. Everything is said in theinfinitive, in the present tense. It was easy, then, to forget to add “tomorrow,” “yesterday” or “never” to my sentences to make Luc’s voice ring out.
    I had the impression that we had lived a lifetime together. I could visualize precisely the position of his right forefinger pointing up when he was annoyed, his body relaxed in the shadow of the shutters, the way he wrapped his long royal blue scarf around his neck when he was running after his children.

    thẻ bài

    dog tags
    LUC’S ABSENCE HAD LED to the disappearance not only of himself and of “us,” but of a large part of myself as well. I had lost the woman who laughed like a teenager when she tasted the ten flavours of sorbet at the oldest ice-cream maker in Paris, as well as the one who dared to look at herself lingeringly in a mirror to decipher the reflection of the word written in felt pen on her back. Today, when I stand on a stepstool at the bathroom mirror, I can sometimes find the blurry remains of the letters
ruoma
if I read from the top of my spine to the bottom and
amour
in the opposite direction.
    I don’t recall exactly how much time passed before Maman intervened. In the absolute dark of her bedroom, where she had asked me to spend the night, she put a small metal plate the size of a tea biscuit into my hand. It was one of the two dog tags belonging to