The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read online

  “It’s diarrhea,” says Josephine.

  “Oh dear,” says Paul.

  “I’ll take her to the washroom. Can you bring a pair of pants?”

  “How would I have an extra pair of pants?”

  “The nuns must have supplies,” says Josephine. “You must have a physical education department? An extra pair of shorts or sweatpants in a locker room? It doesn’t have to be the perfect size.”

  “Of course,” says Paul. “I’ll be right back.”

  Paul does not realize that he has sweated through his dress shirt until class is done. The red-headed girl’s mother shudders when she finds her daughter in baggy sweatpants.

  “She had an accident,” says Paul.

  “You changed her?” says the mother accusingly. She hisses in relief when Paul points at Josephine.

  Josephine stays after all the other children are gone, waiting for Christian who is so absorbed with a strange looking toy that she finally has to pull it away.

  “Until tomorrow,” she says.

  “You know, I really teach fourth grade,” says Paul. “Fourth grade and up.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m just substituting for the term,” says Paul. “Until a spot opens up in fourth grade. Or higher. Hopefully.”

  “We will see you tomorrow.”

  “Certainly.”

  Thuong’s daydreams are as vivid as nighttime visions. Now, he is on a warship, looking for General Tran. The year is 1287. The Mongol naval fleet has settled at the mouth of the Bach Dang river, close to Hanoi.

  Under General Tran’s direction, the Vietnamese navy waits until high tide, and then its fleet engages the enemy’s boats. When the tide ebbs, the Vietnamese boats retreat toward the ocean. The Mongol boats give chase, not realizing that the Vietnamese have laid metal spikes along the riverbed. The Mongols’ heavier, sturdier boats become embedded in the spikes in low tide. Meanwhile, another cohort of the Vietnamese fleet have been laying in wait in the tributaries behind the Mongol boats. The Mongols are surrounded and skewered.

  Thuong is on the deck of a ship, but General Tran is nowhere in view. In fact, Thuong is among Mongols, tall, burly, bearded men wearing looks of horror. They see through him, run right through him. The ship is sinking. In the distance he can hear the victory chants of his countrymen, while the Mongols around him are helplessly bailing out water with giant clam shells.

  Once a year, on her birthday, Thuong cuts Josephine’s hair outside in the old style. Not only is it his tradition to do it outdoors, but there is no room in the basement to properly cut hair. Outside there is an old apple tree, its protruding roots radiate through the backyard. There is a nail on the tree where Thuong hangs up a picture frame mirror. There are a fold-out wooden reclining chair and a lamp stand where he lays out his implements. Thuong does his barbering bare-chested, so that he does not soil a good shirt with her hair. He keeps a folded white towel over one shoulder.

  It is unfortunate that Josephine’s birthday is at the end of September, when, in Vancouver, the sunlight is spotty at best. At least today it’s not raining. In the afternoon Josephine has set out banh uot in the kitchen when Thuong calls her outside. She knows what is coming. “I don’t need a haircut,” she says through the window, as she always does, and as always, Thuong leads her outside, arm held in arm, after Josephine puts on her blue-laced slippers to walk on the moist grass.

  He ignores his mother, who croaks out the window, “Leave her alone.”

  Josephine wears her hair long and straight, cascading over her shoulders. Every year he takes off five inches. “You know this is my true calling,” says Thuong, who is the son of a barber. “You thought you were going to marry a professor.”

  “I thought I was going to marry a Colonel.” They regard each other through the mirror, the one time the whole year they make eye contact while talking. “I can settle for a professor,” she says.

  Every year, Thuong thinks, Josephine becomes more beautiful. Every year it becomes harder to hold her gaze.

  “Wait,” says Thuong. He calls Christian out from the basement. “Grab the sprayer.” Christian mists Josephine’s hair while Thuong pulls out the scissors from their plastic cover.

  Next door is a barking Doberman. Around dinnertime it sticks its nose through the wooden fence posts and snarls at the apple tree. Now it is digging into one of the posts to loosen the soil around it. The dog’s Cantonese owners have complained to Thuong’s landlord, although it’s been months since Christian threw fallen apples at the dog. Thuong’s mother speculates that it’s Josephine’s cooking which sets the dog off. The dog gets this way no matter the dish, whether it’s beef noodle soup, imperial rolls, or even her cold shrimp and papaya salad.

  The barking usually doesn’t bother Thuong, but now he nicks his little finger with the scissors.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve lost your focus,” says Josephine. “Maybe it’s the new incense.” She means the joss sticks that he burns for his father’s altar in their bedroom, the ones he got from Chinatown. “It keeps me awake too. It smells impure.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the incense.”

  “They are opening up a temple on Kingsway,” she says. “You should get some proper joss sticks there.”

  “A temple in Vancouver? Buddhist? Vietnamese?”

  “I think so. You should also take that statue of yours. Leave it with the monks. You’ve been distracted by it. I can tell.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Josephine never complained when Thuong asked her to stow the statue in her trunk, never mentioned all the dresses she gave up, the farewell presents from her students that she had to leave behind. She had thought the statue was struck in pure gold, and was shocked when Thuong rubbed off the gold paint so it wouldn’t be confiscated by the border guards. She thought Thuong did it for love of country, so there would be one less treasure the Communists could get their hands on. She didn’t think Thuong actually worshiped the folk deity. After all, Thuong got baptized just before they got married. They go to church every Sunday.

  “Why else can’t you get your degree?”

  Thuong taps her cheek with the scissors. “Please don’t,” he says. “Not today.”

  Josephine brushes the scissors off her face. “Does the General belong in a temple or in our bedroom?” she says. They stare at each other through the mirror.

  It takes all of Thuong’s power to peel his eyes away from her. When he is done cutting he takes the towel and wipes her hair off of his chest. The dog will not stop barking.

  “Fish sauce,” yells Thuong’s mother through the window. “That’s what makes the dog crazy.” Fish sauce is the common ingredient in every dish Josephine makes.

  There is one framed quotation Josephine had not noticed until today’s class, because it hangs in the corner where the children are sent to be punished: “La vérité, comme la lumière, aveugle.”

  The truth, as the light, makes blind. By Camus.

  She loses focus the whole class. This is the guilt that Josephine cannot admit to: she has read The Stranger more times than any other book, except perhaps for the Bible. There is little that moves her, but she cannot keep her eyes from moistening when the protagonist Meursault drinks coffee idly in front of his mother’s coffin. Nothing, nothing in the great Vietnamese romantic fables touches her as much as when, at Meursault’s trial, he can blame only the sun for his shooting the motionless Arab those four times. Nothing even in the Book of Exodus moves her as when Meursault is asked if he loved his mother, and he answers yes, the same as anyone.

  She cannot explain it. She is as much an existentialist as the crucifix she wears is made out of water.

  Maybe she feels all the things Meursault is unable to. Each scene of the novel evokes in her the true Christian feelings that Meursault ought to have if he were Christian as well. Plus there is the added pity she feels for Camus, for only a writer who feels such sorrow for the world can cre
ate a figure of such tragic emptiness. And yet she cannot condemn Meursault. She comes back to the novel at least once a year, not truly convinced there is no place in paradise for such a man.

  After class she tells Paul that The Stranger is her favourite novel. She has never admitted this to anyone. Paul wipes his face wearily, as if every one of his students has told him this.

  “It’s mine too,” he says.

  “But you must love God?”

  “I do.”

  “Then isn’t it difficult to reconcile?” she says.

  “It is very difficult,” he says, with furrowed eyebrows. “But we have to try, don’t we? Even if we have to start over every day.”

  Josephine really does have a magic touch with the children. Those that fall off of their plastic chairs, or scrape their knees during recess, go to Josephine for ministrations. Paul is free to concentrate on his lesson.

  Josephine’s presence is based on a fib, and the fib is different depending on whom you ask. The nuns are told that Christian will break into tears and wet himself if Josephine leaves him for even a moment. The parents are told that she is a teacher in training. The children are told, for a laugh, that she is Gulliver’s wife.

  Among the toys is one the children don’t know what to do with. It is the size of a tennis ball, but it doesn’t bounce. Josephine cannot tell them what it is. She shows it to Paul.

  “It’s a heart,” he says.

  “It looks deformed.”

  “No. It’s the real thing, more or less.” It’s a model of a five-year-old’s heart, for medical school. The object looks like a toy, with the aorta, veins, and arteries rendered in a brightly-coloured plastic.

  Some child fished it out from Paul’s top desk drawer. It belonged to Paul’s late father, once the chief of surgery at Mount Royal Hospital in Montréal. His specialty was mending the hearts of babies and little children. If you were a youngster in Montréal during the 1960s, and if you had heart troubles, then the chances were good that you knew Paul’s father. He also taught in academies in Lyon and Paris, where Paul spent his childhood summers. Paul never thought his accent was Parisian, but if Josephine thinks so, then this was how he picked it up.

  With a father like that, Paul became an engineer. Otherwise he would merely be a sparrow walking in the footprints of a bear. He thought he would actually design things the world had never seen, which was better. For what was a surgeon but a glorified mechanic, simply maintaining the designs of a greater creator?

  Nobody told him when he dreamed of designing bridges, that Paul would end up stamping drawings for retaining walls in residential subdivisions. Nobody told him that the materials of his trade would be modest lengths of Allan Block and shotcrete over boulder stone, not miles of big bright steel.

  If only he saw the potential of retaining walls, these modest structures. Because something small can fail just as spectacularly as something big. Nobody told Paul this either.

  The day he left engineering was the day his father died, and he left Montréal soon after. If asked why he would trade Montréal for Vancouver, the Canadiens for the Canucks, Paul will never mention all the strangers he met in Montréal whose first question to him was whether he was his father’s son. He will never mention the last straw, that woman he picked up at a bar in the Old Quarter, that night in his apartment when, in tearful gratitude, she lifted the floating bottom of her left breast to show Paul the scar that his father had left on her as a child. He will not speak of the odd satisfaction he gets for being paid in Vancouver to teach something that he never really had to learn.

  And anyway, he still keeps his Canadiens key chain.

  The statue of General Tran is light and hollow. Thuong could have carried it himself down Fleming Street to the bus stop on Kingsway, but got Christian to help him. It is time for the boy to taste labour.

  Thuong and the boy carry the statue outside in repose facing skyward. The boy has the General by his heels while Thuong cradles his upper shoulders with his palms. The boy has to walk backwards. As soon as Christian turns his head behind him so that he can see the way ahead, Thuong stops.

  “Don’t lose your focus,” says Thuong. “Keep your eyes on me.”

  Neighbours stare from their yards as the pair make their way gingerly down the sidewalk. Thuong has walked this path many times before, but now it feels much longer. He starts to count the number of blocks.

  Sweat forms around the boy’s temples. It’s his mother’s fault again, putting on so many layers of clothes. “Don’t you dare drop it,” says Thuong, and the boy nods. Four blocks, five blocks, six, and he sees the sweat come down the boy’s face. Or is it tears?

  At the bus stop they set the General back on his feet. Thuong strokes his son’s ear. “Well done,” he says, just in time to see the bus with the twin sparkles of its B.C. Hydro livery.

  They get off after only a couple of stops. The outside of the temple looks like an auto-body shop, with its corrugated siding and flat rooftop. The inside smells otherworldly, but what Thuong first thinks is incense is actually plaster dust. The space was used briefly as a Tae Kwan Do dojo, but the business was unprofitable. The lowered rents have provided an opportunity for the Vietnamese community’s first Buddhist temple.

  The abbot greets Thuong with a hug. “We’re still renovating,” he says.

  “It’s already better than gathering to pray in someone’s basement.”

  The monk laughs. “It has been too long,” he says. “Are you here for a favour or a blessing?”

  “Not a favour, but I could always use a blessing. I am here to make you an offering. General Tran Hung Dao.”

  “That is a gift no man can give.”

  Thuong takes the monk outside, where Christian is guarding the statue. The General looks no more out of place on this intersection with its gas stations than the monk in saffron robes.

  “You’ll agree he is entitled to a more suitable venue than my study.”

  “But we are making a house for Lord Buddha,” says the monk.

  “Of course. The temple won’t be usurped from Buddha. Perhaps give General Tran a small space for people who want to make him an offering as well. You’ll get more visitors.”

  The monk shuffles his sandals. “If we let the General in, then who’s next? We’ll open a floodgate to more statues of deities.”

  “You shouldn’t worry.”

  “This is to be a serious place of contemplation and enlightenment.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want it to become a place where men go to make offerings to get rich, or where women go to light incense to get pregnant.”

  “It shouldn’t come to that,” says Thuong. “Besides, it’s the deity Me Sanh that the women pray to in order to get pregnant, not Tran Hung Dao.”

  “I suppose you’d want a share of the offerings,” says the monk.

  This makes Thuong smile. “I could always use a blessing.”

  The monk agrees to reserve a small space to General Tran, perhaps near the front door to ward off evil spirits. Before leaving, he gives Thuong a box of joss sticks made out of the best aloeswood from the home country. Josephine should be relieved.

  It is turning out to be a fine afternoon, and so Thuong walks home the whole way, carrying Christian on his shoulders.

  “What would you do without me?” says Josephine. Today she has untangled two girls fighting over a toy, consoled another boy, wiped another tear, kissed another bruise, plugged, once again, the floodgate of hell.

  “I don’t know,” says Paul.

  “Maybe you can pay me a salary.”

  Paul smiles. “As if that was possible.”

  “Then private lessons, for my son?”

  Paul nods. He has noticed how much further Christian has advanced than the other children. Josephine has been tutoring Christian at home. While the others are still learning single words, Christian is already making sentences with properly conjugated verbs.

  “You’re a tea
cher too,” says Paul. “What could I offer?”

  “Your voice,” she says. “Your Parisian accent. Not my Vietnamese French.”

  “Your accent is fine,” he says, but puts up only weak resistance.

  Paul takes from his desk Sempé’s Le Petit Nicolas. They find a booth in a White Spot down the street. Josephine orders all three of them mushroom burgers even though Paul didn’t ask for one. He has a sandwich at home. But when he smells the mushrooms, he is silently grateful for it.

  Paul gets Christian to read the Sempé. He has heard Christian’s voice rise above the others during class, but has never heard it alone in close quarters. Although Paul cannot take credit for the boy’s sudden grasp of the language, he can hear in Christian faint echoes of his own street Joual, something he has been trying to purge since his first summer in Paris, the way he still runs his words together. Christian’s voice is also layered with a wavering musicality – the Vietnamese accent that Josephine has imparted on her son and now wants to get rid of.

  “He reads beautifully,” says Paul.

  “Then it’s something worth working on?” says Josephine. Paul nods, and Josephine sees the little frays on Paul’s collared shirt. If only she had the money, she would buy Paul a new one.

  The Doberman breaks through the wooden fence post while Josephine is picking mint leaves in the backyard. The landlord forbids any garden, but has never noticed the mint grove that she planted. The dog heads straight for Josephine, who is on her knees with her back turned. She does not register the Doppler effect of the oncoming muzzle.

  Thuong gets in the way just before the dog lunges. She has no idea where Thuong came from, but that’s nothing new. He slams his thin bare arm lengthwise between the dog’s open jaws, like a crow bar, to the back of the dog’s mouth. The dog’s teeth drip saliva, then blood. No longer barking, it wheezes like a broken flute and retreats back through the gap in the fence.

  “Your arm.”

  “It’s nothing,” says Thuong. “It’s the dog’s blood. I broke its jaw.” Still, there are teeth marks on Thuong’s arm which Josephine has to clean up. The noodles she made are now waterlogged, wasted.