Mãn by Kim Thúy Page A

Phương, the young boy who’d become a soldier and who had given her a poem when she was a teenager. The tags embossed with the same essential information about him had to be worn around his neck at all times, unless he fell on the battlefield and a comrade in arms pulled one off to take back to the base. Before he left, he’d gone to see her in uniform and given her the plate to offer her “the life he hadn’t lived” and his dream of her that would be eternally a dream if he didn’t come back to retrieve it.
    For many years, every time Maman saw a military helmet abandoned by the side of a rice paddy or insome reeds, turned right or wrong side out, empty or filled with rainwater, she thought she would collapse from inside. If her feet hadn’t been obliged to continue advancing in her comrades’ footprints, she’d have knelt beside those helmets and never got up again. Fortunately, the silence of the single file kept her upright, for a false move could trigger a mine, endangering the lives of all those soldiers ready to stop the cannons from sliding down a muddy slope by lying in front of the wheels: sacrificing themselves for the cause of a nation.

    hy sinh

    sacrifice
    WHEN SHE CAME BACK from the jungle, she went to find PhÆ°Æ¡ng, who lived in the family house with his aging parents and his child, who was still at his mother’s breast. He had become a doctor, a man respected and loved, according to the people in the village. She had observed him settle down for the noonday siesta in his hammock in the shade of the coconut palms. Bare-chested, shirt hanging on a branch, army chain still around his neck. She had watched him sleep and wake. She had expected him to get up when he moved his arm, but he had stayed motionless amid the rustling of leaves and the plashing of the tails of the carp in the pond. It was in that peaceful, everyday calm that she had noticed PhÆ°Æ¡ng’s hand hunt for the clasp on the chain wrapped with ribbon that she’d removed from her hair to give him on the night he left. The ribbon was not satin like those of her young half-sisters, because she’d had to create it by weaving and twisting very tightly the hundreds of bits of embroidery thread her stepmother had thrown out.
    Maman made PhÆ°Æ¡ng’s head turn not by advancing towards him but by walking two steps away from him. She stood with her back to him until he left for his medical clinic. Out of love, she never returned.

    Äƒn sáng

    breakfast
    NEITHER MAMAN NOR I slept that night. The next day, I fixed the children’s breakfast as I did every morning, as quietly as possible so as not to waken my husband, who preferred his mornings to be calm and solitary. I handed them their lunch boxes on the doorstep as I did every day, but that morning I sensed Luc’s hand stroking my upper back so that I would bend down to their level and kiss them, as he would have done if he’d been there, as he did with his own children every morning.
    And two days later, I slipped a tiny note into their sandwich wrappings, the same one Luc wrote to me at the end of every message, like a signature: “I love you, my angel.”
    Since then, I comb my daughter’s hair with the same movements as Luc, who cherished each strand of mine. In the same way, I apply cream to my son’s back, stroking the nape of his neck.
    Then, one afternoon, with Julie by my side, I went to see the Vietnamese beautician who had told me that her clients claimed she had the power to thwart destiny and give them new fates by tattooing red beauty marks in strategic spots recommended by “destiny readers.”

    yên lặng

    silence
    ON MY FIRST VISIT , I had a red dot tattooed at the edge of my forehead, a centimetre to the left of my nose. I made a second appointment for a second mark at the top of my inner right thigh on the day I needed a reason to look at the blue sky and wait to see the