If I Had Two Lives Read online

  “Come.” She reached out, took my fingers in her hand. We walked to the bathroom, where she guided me to sit down on the tub while she ran soap under the faucet. I was amazed—hundreds of tiny, shimmering bubbles spilled from Mother’s palm. “Were you having a bad dream?” she asked. I nodded. It was the same dream I’d always had—the one of her leaving, but I didn’t tell her this. She dipped her hand in the tub, and then put it over the crown of my head as the water droplets rolled off her fingers, down my forehead, the bridge of my nose. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise,” she said as though she’d read my mind.

  “Do you want to take a bath too?” I said, squeezing soap in my hand and forming a circle with my fingers. Through the ring, I blew a bubble. It floated to the ceiling, suspended there for half a second before popping out of existence. Mother looked at me, a rare half-smile on her lips, seeing for the first time that I was a child. Her child.

  She shook her head, “Already showered, but I’ll stay until you’re done.” In truth, she left soon after, remembering an important phone call she had to make. We would never be this close again—my mother’s bare shoulders, my own, our slippery fingers under the perfectly warm water. But I knew then as I would many years later that I was hers and would be hers still, even after she would break her promise and send me away on my own.

  2

  It was summer and I stayed inside often. After a few weeks at the camp, I grew fond of the slate mansard roofs, just as much as the peeling white walls. As soon as I was inside, I was immediately aware of the moist air. A cool, humid, and moldy smell saturated my lungs. I was fond of the perfume of rotting wood, decomposing bricks and cement, similar to the smell of a dead ant pressed under one’s finger. Though there were many windows, Mother had taped newspaper over all of them. No light penetrated the building. The few light fixtures we had didn’t work. I stood in the middle of the foyer and called up to my mother, the imprisoned princess.

  “Princess, it’s time to come out of the dark,” I called Mother.

  “It’s not dark anymore. Our room has a light,” she answered from the balcony. She looked over her shoulder to the flickering, bluish fluorescent bulb. “You can do your homework now.”

  “Will Mr. Soldier tutor me?” I said, still in the coarse and brave voice of a prince.

  “I’ll ask him. Go study your participe passé.” Mother carried a stack of loose papers to bed.

  I liked studying a language my mother didn’t speak. The front of my notebook was neat, obsessively so. I conjugated verbs, copied passages from French and German philosophers whose names I struggled to pronounce. My mother didn’t believe in segregating children and adult books. She assigned me to memorize lengthy passages and poems. Somewhere in my brain, she believed, the letters would cling and make sense when the right opportunities came. It was fine not to understand a word as long as I could say it correctly. Mother used the house phone to call my soldier. Apart from ordering him to do things for her, they didn’t talk. I didn’t remember her ever having a conversation with anyone.

  My soldier came in wearing his full uniform, but without the cap. It was the first time I saw his buzz cut. His face was exposed, his expression more relaxed than the first time we met. I wanted to impress him so I recited from heart a passage from a French novel though I didn’t understand a word.

  “Good girl.” My soldier smiled, amused by my obvious struggle. “But for next time, we’ll learn about the laws of physics. That would at least be useful for you to memorize. It’s important to understand how the world works,” he said.

  In the evenings, after my soldier left, Mother taught me. She would invent math problems, vocabulary, and grammar exercises to keep me busy. Unlike at my before-school, history lessons were entirely absent. She told me stories about the United States, France, Russia, everywhere but our own country. She was especially fond of conspiracy theories, suspicions about governments blindsiding their citizens, elaborate plots of murder and embezzlement.

  I would sing songs I learned at school, praising young boys’ and girls’ heroic deeds, but Mother said they were communist propaganda. Vietnam, she said, was built on deceit. Still, I’d memorized one about a delivery boy who had gained the trust of American soldiers. He sold them cigarettes, beer, occasionally Vietnamese sausages. One day, the boy strapped bombs around his scrawny body, went to the American campsite, and blew himself up with the enemies who had let their guard down around a child. At my before-school, teachers heralded the unnamed boy’s courage. Imagining the boy’s delicate body engulfed in flames was attractive to me. I was a timid child, afraid and easily startled, but I saw myself in him. Big things didn’t scare me. In this way I was more like my mother.

  My mother began to learn a little French alongside me. There was nothing she couldn’t be good at if she tried, she would tell me. Her bloated confidence in her intelligence might have been an attempt to make up for its absence in me. Math was my weakest and her favorite subject. One day, while I was trying to inconspicuously count with my fingers, I felt her frustrated shadow behind me. I barely touched the tips of the other fingers with my thumb when the point of a mechanical pencil jabbed repeatedly at the back of my hand.

  “How old are you to still be counting with your fingers?” she screamed.

  When I heard the slightest change of pitch in her voice, I shivered, trying to hold back my tears. I knew that seeing me cry would upset her even more. Her anger was like a tumor that grew and grew until it overtook every cell in her body. Every mistake I made, no matter how minor, was an affront to her. The more I cried, the angrier she became. I choked on my sobs, hiccupping between breaths. When her voice cracked from being too loud and sharp, I wondered which one of us was hurting more and why. She kicked the legs of my chair with a strength that shocked me. I tumbled on the floor and crawled away from her toward the leg of the bed.

  “Tell me the point of teaching someone with a pig’s brains!” She flung my textbook at me. It hit the side of my head. She towered over me, her hands shaking by her sides. She squeezed her fingers into a fist. Seeing me crouched in a corner, she said, “It would be different if your father was alive. I was different. I used to never—” She slammed the bedroom door behind her.

  When my mother was a girl, she did not think she would fall in love with a man destined for death. Once I asked how long she was married to my father, and she didn’t hesitate, “Five years, four months, eleven days.” She remembered him with an impossible clarity, as though he was still with us. She did not tuck their time together away like you might with the things that did not align with your understanding of the universe. He was there in her thoughts as she struggled to survive after his death, as she changed into a woman he wouldn’t have loved.

  When she was gone for a while and I knew I was safe, I crawled under the desk and scribbled angry, incoherent phrases in French in the back of my notebook. I didn’t realize then that learning a new language permanently separated you from yourself so that each version was neither a lie nor a whole truth. French allowed me to avenge myself in a way Vietnamese never could. My handwriting here slanted right. There were no expletives because I didn’t know any, but writing the words nosebleed or fingers would tear into me a rage fresher than any real wound and I would have to hold back the urge to rip up those pages. Eventually, my mother discovered those secret pages. She would learn enough French to decipher something I wrote, a rare, fully formed sentence amidst the trembling words of unexpressed rage. She didn’t say much except to let me know she’d seen it. Afterward, I would still sometimes turn to the back of my notebook, comforted by its luring emptiness. I didn’t need to put ink onto paper. It was enough to know the words had been there.

  I turned off the desk lamp and sat motionless in the darkness. I thought that perhaps if Mother couldn’t see or hear me, she would be less furious. I asked myself why she would bring me to the camp if she hated me so much. To kee
p myself from sobbing out loud, I’d learned to slow down my heartbeats. All you need is to stay as still as possible, pretend your body is hardening into stone. I did my best to hold my breath, inhaled and exhaled so slowly and minimally that it appeared I wasn’t breathing. In this way, I willed myself into nonexistence. The molecules of my body split away, tossed into space. Bands of twilight had surged through the front entrance of our building. For a moment, I was one of the shimmering specks of dust, circling and recircling each other, buoyed up in space.

  One afternoon, while I was studying on my own, I looked out the front door and saw a face flat against the glass pane. It was the little girl who I saw building columns of bricks the day I arrived. I knew instinctively that she had come to find me, and I regretted that I still had so many writing exercises to do. To my surprise, Mother told me to go see what the little girl wanted. Perhaps my mother felt sorry for me. Not long before that day, she’d caught me talking animatedly to my fingers. We had been living at the encampment for two months. I didn’t know I was lonely because loneliness required the experience of having had company and then lost it, or having felt oneself visible amongst others. At my before-school, I’d had difficulty making friends, so being alone at the camp was a relief at first. Here people, uniformed and not, came and went from our building all the time, but they often considered me an extension of my mother and ignored my presence.

  I jumped down from my chair and took a manga book with me, thinking that the little girl might want to read together.

  She had on yellow pajamas, the same pair I wore to bed at night. Seeing her made me blush, like I was looking at myself sleepwalk in the daylight. Without an exchange of words, it was decided that she would lead and I would follow. She was my age, or a year or two older, and was roaming the camp alone.

  “Are soldiers protecting your mom too?” I asked as we walked together.

  The little girl picked up a stick and traced a line on the ground as she walked. “My mommy’s a thief. She took daddy’s money and left us,” she said.

  “Is your dad a soldier?” I thought every man in the camp must be a soldier.

  She shook her head. “He works in the kitchen. Where were you before here?”

  “In class. My soldier picked me up at school and brought me to visit Mother.”

  “Are you going back to school? You should stay,” she said.

  “I don’t know. I want to,” I said, excited at the prospect of having a friend.

  We walked across the courtyard, past an outdoor public shower where I saw soapy and glistening male bodies for the first time. The men spoke in loud and cheerful voices. They stood legs astride, taking up as much room as possible. Though they were in our full view, they did not glance our way once. I thought that she must have taken that path to impress me.

  We ended up behind the barracks, facing a field of young green shoots. The large white sun, unveiled by clouds, was so different from the frothy white winter I read about in the translated Russian and British novels my mother left lying around.

  “I planted some sugarcanes in this row here,” the little girl said. I envied her the ability to claim something so physical, so real.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “They feed us, dummy. What else?”

  “I’ve never eaten anything like that,” I said.

  She plucked a leaf and chewed on it, “No, we don’t eat it like this. After harvest, we turn the canes into sugar or juice. A cup of sugar cane juice to cure the summer blues, my father says.”

  I nodded and pretended to understand. Though I’d seen Mother use sugar for cooking, I didn’t know where it came from. I wanted to share my new knowledge with her, but then thought better of it. Mother wouldn’t be impressed. She had no use for common things.

  “Do you eat cheese or butter?” I asked, recalling a description in a novel that made my mouth water.

  “What are they? They sound weird.”

  “No, they’re delicious.” I lied. I had not tasted either myself.

  We sat down on a dirt platform and were silent. I could tell she was entranced by the sounds of cheese and butter just as I had been when I first learned of them. I decided to tell her about snow.

  “If I have extra, I’ll bring you some,” I said, believing that snow was cold, white fluffs that I could put in a box and she could keep. I imagined packing the snow inside my music box, around the miniature ballet dancer who spun round and round.

  “You promise?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll love you forever!” She got up and tried to lift me into the air.

  Because she was so thin, she appeared much taller than me though we were about the same height. She tripped and we both fell with me still in her bony embrace, rolling down the sunbaked ground.

  I thought about the little girl day and night. I’d never had a friend like her. It wouldn’t be until many years later, when I’d find myself wholly alone again in a different country that I’d meet another like her—a woman who could get me to do anything by simply asking. I sometimes wondered if loneliness was a gift, for it intensified every interaction, every small gesture swollen with meaning. At my before-school, kids had begun to avoid me when I started getting called into the principal’s office. Men in different uniforms, sometimes green, sometimes black, questioned them about my mother. The other students took notice that I was no longer hit with a ruler when I said the wrong name or date while reciting a lesson or spanked on the bum with a broom when my grades were a few marks short of the perfect ten. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with the girl whose mother was wanted by the police. I tried desperately to rejoin my classmates by doing things that would get me punished. I pinched my table partner who was assigned to sit with me for the year, dumped my lunch meal into the trash, and stayed up talking during naptime. Nothing worked. My misbehaviors continued to be overlooked and my classmates’ feelings of envy and hatred strengthened.

  At the camp, there was no teacher, principal’s office, or other students. The little girl was not interested in my mother. She was interested in me. I knew I would do anything for her.

  I got more scrapes and bruises during the summer months. The scabs kept me busy. In between solving a homework problem and thinking of my before-home—the one with the loudest silence, a chorus of singing crickets instead of the clacking footstep of soldiers walking in unison, and an open road, wet with red mud instead of obstructed underground tunnels—I would pick at the dry skin, lifting it to expose a soft pink and slightly wrinkled layer beneath.

  When the little girl and I got tired of throwing rocks into the pond and holding funerals for dead bugs, we sat on top of a dunghill and analyzed our wounds. From the hill, we could look out at the rest of the camp, the communal kitchen where the little girl sometimes worked, the pond behind it, rows of tanks and other vehicles, and further east, an open grass field that the soldiers used for marching and playing soccer. The little girl pulled up her pants and pointed to a small, but deep cut in the space between the ankle and instep of her foot.

  “This is from when I lived in a forest of nails with a child kidnapper,” she winced as if still in pain from the memory.

  Though I knew she was making things up, I could not help feeling frightened. The cut was real. “Where is the forest of nails?”

  “Are you serious? Who doesn’t know about that forest? Children get kidnapped and taken there all the time.” She laughed.

  “Tell me about it, please.”

  “I don’t think I should. Don’t want to scare you,” she said.

  “Please,” I begged.

  “It’s what it sounds like. Everything is made out of rusty nails, the trees, the grass, the insects, even the sky. If you’re not careful, you’ll puncture yourself like I did. I was running.” It looked like there was a real tear forming at the edge of her eye. Before I could soothe
her, she frowned and looked more angry than sad.

  “I’m hungry. Do you have food?” she said.

  “Who kidnaps the children? Why?”

  “He hides in the dark so you never see his face. He asks us to play games. He’s very lonely.”

  “Oh.” That didn’t sound terrible to me. A dark forest full of bent nails seemed better than this open, cloudless sky. I swallowed to lessen my thirst. Under a maple tree in front of us, a black dog was vigorously scratching and gnawing on its ribs. I suddenly felt itchy and looked down to find a flea crawling on my collarbone toward my neck. The little girl slapped me hard where the brown speck was.

  “Ouch!” I cried.

  “It’s gone.”

  “Thanks. I guess.” I was irritated and started to climb down the hill.

  “Hey! Wait up. Where’re you going?”

  “Home,” I said, knowing I didn’t really want to go. As soon as my mother saw me, there would be more homework and more punishment. I pressed the bruise on my thigh from our last study session. It was still tender.

  “Want to catch that dog for the kitchen?”

  “He probably has rabies.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s look for a rope.”

  “Okay, but promise he won’t be killed,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t protect the poor stray if the little girl really wanted to turn him into dinner.

  As the little girl approached, the dog bared its teeth, its gums red and its mouth full of saliva. She slapped the side of its head, left then right. The dog snarled and took a few steps backward. The little girl slowly sidestepped so that the dog was to her left and in one swift motion she climbed behind it and held its body tight between her legs. The dog whimpered when she caught its throat. Then it slipped out from her clutch and snapped its fangs on her wrist.