Grass Roof, Tin Roof Read online

  The road out of the city was narrow and bumpy. As it was still the dry season, dust rose in their wake. Once, they stopped and the two younger men got out of the car to urinate by the side of the road, their cigarettes still poking from their lips, while Giang and Tran waited. The unwoken world outside the car’s dirty windows was cool and blue and silent, and this made Tran aware of the silence between her and Giang. But she did not think much of it. She told herself he was just treating her as one of the men and there was no need between men to fill silences. Secretly she felt flattered; she felt her inclusion in this excursion to be significant. Proof that her insights or opinions had been heard by him and others, and noted. Especially in this time when men disregarded women’s minds. She had done all she could not to appear a typical woman: she wore her hair short and spoke casually about sex, passionately about existentialism. She wanted to show them her mind was sharp. She could handle as much as they could.

  The men got back in the car and they resumed driving. The city disappeared behind them into a crooked, cramped, hazy line on the horizon. Clumps of listing, bamboo-roofed shacks appeared at intervals alongside the road. The men were talking about the latest Communist incursions into the northern and central parts of the countryside. Now they were making inroads in the far south—where they were headed—as well. The government controlled barely more than Saigon, and that only through an excessive amount of corruption.

  “But I must believe in peace,” said one of the young men, “because I have just squandered two hundred U.S. dollars on stock options for the new Vietnam Coca-Cola!” He laughed.

  The other reporter slapped Giang on the shoulder. “Where are we going, huh? I hope there’s a bigger story this time than the last time you woke us up at this hour,” he remarked cheerfully. To Tran he said, “Last time we waited for six hours in the cold behind the garbage bins in back of the house of the supposed mistress of General Lo Minh, to catch him accepting a bribe, but all we caught were four cats and a dozen hungry rats.”

  Giang shook his head, smiling slightly, but didn’t reply, and the men didn’t seem to expect him to.

  Tran looked out the window. The spaces between shacks widened, the sky brightened. They drove past swamps and groves of tall, reedy trees and a few early travelers on the road toting straw baskets of rice or produce or prodding along their pigs and cows. The reporters arrived near the village of Ha-Kan just after dawn, where they stopped at the edge of a rice field. Giang cut the car’s engine and they listened to the rustling of the rice stalks, the twittering of birds, the whirring of crickets.

  “This hamlet was raided last night by the VC. Some of the village children fled to the jungle, where they happened upon a sight certain members of the South Vietnamese army wanted to protect, so they chased the children out of the jungle and shot them where they were hiding in a herd of water buffalo. The children will probably end up tallied among the VC dead, my source tells me. But I want to record some evidence of the truth before then. Do you have your cameras ready?” Giang turned to the young reporters.

  They went on foot by a path through the trees, across a narrow arm of the river. The sky’s faint colors changed and deepened above them like the images in a photograph developing, slowly. The fog uncurled from where it lay, low, around their knees; it seemed sentient, damaged, angry even, as if it did not want them to walk through. Then something solid came into the morning. They began to see purple water buffalo carcasses on the road, matching the pale purple swath of sky still lingering above the wet fields like a bruise.

  Once there, the four walked among the bloated purple-black bellies that were like mounds of dark earth, Tran and the two reporters wondering why they had been brought to look at dead animals and daring not to express disappointment for fear of appearing callous to the cause. Brown-black blood ran out of each wide nostril. The animals’ coats were mangy and smelled faintly like iron. Tran knelt to look more closely at a hoof. The last time she had stood this close to a water buffalo was as a child—when her family still lived in the far northern countryside where the air was so crisp it woke your skin in the morning. Tran found herself looking at the buffalo now with affection. Yet she knew it was not the death of animals they were here to mourn.

  When she glanced up, Giang was watching her (his mouth slightly open, he seemed to be searching for something), and in that fleeting look she recognized something, if for only a flash. The depth with which he was watching her watch the dead buffalo—it was as if their faint understanding of whatever this incident might mean was profoundly the same. She saw it surprised him, but it did not surprise her. She knew then that some form of a romance would occur between them.

  However: Love was not roses or white towers or any such nonsense. Rather, it was a call from some darker well of the heart possessing no regard for the rules of life, for the ideals of human sacraments, even. What love required of its participants would occur heedless of violence and happiness alike (she would write this into her story somehow later).

  Breaking the spell, Giang said, with what seemed like a levity both concentrated and painful, “It must be the season for children to turn into buffalo.”

  What they found was a house.

  They came upon it after an hour of wading through marshy fields and swooping vines. Hidden in the jungle as it was, it rose out of the foliage like a lost palace, and they felt as if they had discovered something—a sense of mission. They crept stealthily around its perimeter. They took pictures of its mishmash of new and ancient styles of architecture; the bluntly geometric shapes of its walls and windows; its few jutting towers or chimneys (they couldn’t tell which); its ornate portico; its red door, vivid and oversize; the guardian-dragon screens on either side; the gleaming tile floors they spied through its diamond-shaped windows; the courtyard with its marble benches and white stone fountain in the center; the textured clay shingles of its roof. They made out the house’s breadth and height. They trekked back through the jungle and photographed the house from a distance as it had first appeared to them, from a low, wide angle, for dramatic effect. They took notes fervently. It was an incongruity in this jungle, making the jungle itself seem suddenly an alien landscape to them. They shook their heads and communicated to each other that they were reviled. They were seething, full of a sense of themselves as justly embittered beings. When they spotted the guards (armed men not in recognizable uniform), the four lay low in the foliage and felt it encompass them. With satisfaction they let the vines scratch their skin, the mud soak their feet. And in their minds they equated comfort with corruption, with power, with envy.

  That evening, she followed him at a distance as he walked into the city’s quarter of poorhouses, a place she had never been before and knew no virtuous woman should go, and soon her curiosity turned to ire. “What kind of man is he? For what unspeakable intention can he be skulking about among such dwellings?” Her thoughts churned viciously. “Who is she? What does she have that I don’t have?” He was leading her down an alley with foul-smelling gutters. She lifted her skirts, remembering herself in front of the mirror that very morning, turning this way and that, trying on dress after dress in anticipation of seeing him and thinking desperately, "It will not do, it will not do.”

  Now she thought, “This is what I have dressed for.”

  She followed him into a narrow alley behind a row of houses, and when he stopped at a door, she hid, flattening herself against the cool stone wall. He rapped three times on the door, paused, then rapped three times more in a deliberate rhythm.

  The door opened, a shaft of yellow light fell on his face—he was so handsome still!—and he stepped inside, and the door closed. She did not see the face of the person who had admitted him.

  How long would she wait? And for what, should she find out? Would the truth about him only disgust her and force her to see plainly that he inhabited worlds in which she had no place? She wished that she were older, her life less sheltered — she wished she’d known more h
ardship. Maybe then she would have acquired some of that roughness, that bitterness, that would have made her a woman for whom he would risk shame. Anything, she thought, anything but to be the one spying and desperate and lonely—oh so!—in the shadows of real life.

  And there was a fire (later she thought of it often): the village was ablaze when they came out of the jungle. Like ghost-witnesses, the four had slunk through the tall grass. Men, women, and children were running, scattering into the trees and nearby rice fields, their black peasant rags and conical straw hats flapping. Grass roofs shriveled. (Later the military-issued report would claim that the villagers were spies and that the village had housed propaganda, tools, and provisions for the guerrilla enemy forces.) In the grass, Giang touched Tran’s arm and nodded toward the fire and said without pretense, “Take heed. No love story is complete without one.”

  They drove back to the city with their notes and film, and once home set about writing what they believed to be the truth about the secret house in the jungle and the general who they believed had pilfered government funds in order to build it. During a discussion in Giang’s office, Tran tried to interject some of her own ideas, but in their eagerness the reporters talked over her. After making a few attempts she retreated, consoling herself in her head: You don’t even care about politics. You’re a fiction writer. You’re writing a love story, more valuable in its own way.

  Once, Giang gave her a small, patient smile; he had caught her eyes wandering. She was no longer confident about why she’d been invited to come along on the investigation in the first place.

  The next day the story ran. When Tran arrived at the newspaper offices in the afternoon as usual to turn in her daily installment, which she had spent the morning writing, she was surprised at being greeted with nods and cheers from other staff members. She—it appeared—had written the story, with the field help of the two young reporters; there was no mention of Giang. Photographs of the extravagant structure in the jungle and the raided, burning hamlet nearby ran next to an exposé on the accused general’s career and crimes. Beneath his photograph ran a long list of names—other government and military officials and their illegal activities. Bewildered, Tran read the story and stared at her name in print above it. When she asked, no one knew where the two young reporters were.

  “In and out as usual, those boys,” said one clerk.

  “I underestimated you,” said another, coming forward to shake her hand.

  This was how it began. In the following months, Tran’s popularity grew—her notoriety, in fact—as more articles were printed under her name. Articles of a slyly observant, condemnatory, apolitical bent—never siding with any of the official parties, only pointing out their contradictions. Colleagues said about Tran’s pen name (which she had chosen rather naively at the beginning of her work for the paper, as she’d noticed most writers used pen names) that now it made sense. “Trung Trinh, master of the woman’s style of attack,” they said, joking that they’d previously not understood why a romance fiction writer would choose a pen name that made reference to the Trung sisters—Vietnam’s legendary women-warriors who had risen up in rebellion against their Chinese overlords in the first century a.d.

  Tran was surprised to find that even when she said little or nothing, her character was meritoriously assessed: people took her silence as knowing. They deferred to her in discussion, even when she made only vague comments. Giang had explained she need only nod and say she was “still thinking about it” if anyone asked a question she couldn’t answer; in private, he briefed her on the subjects of the articles. Gradually, she felt her confidence grow, her own writing develop irony. She learned how to absorb necessary information quickly; she appropriated gumption. Though she saw herself becoming somewhat a pawn in this game of his, she also couldn’t deny her new freedom. Her wit was sharper, as she now knew the inner workings of the paper. Sentiments, false hopes, the old yens of her former romanticism, could no longer sway her. And though she knew her new skepticism threatened to desensitize her to the actual issues about which they were writing, she could not fathom going back. Her previous position seemed now unconnected and vulnerable and embarrassingly innocent.

  They worked late many nights. They worked with their heads bent over documents or photographs, and Tran slowly became more knowledgeable about—and even on occasion contributed to—these stories attributed to her. Giang made it clear she was doing him a favor—he was grateful, solicitous, charismatic. They were great friends, he would say, each helping the other by doing the very thing each wished to do most, and was this not the philosophy of self-fulfillment unfolding as ideally as it should? Was this not Equality, that beautiful, modern, Western thought? He wrote his stories, she wrote hers. The romantic nature of her fiction protected him—the censors were slow to examine political articles written by a woman romance writer. And yet the people knew.

  (The reason he had chosen her was simple: he had to choose someone he wouldn’t mind divulging his secrets to, and it was always, he said later, better to choose a person he thought might be a potential lover.)

  It began in the midst of those late nights, the pressure, the exhilaration of secrecy shared, emotions fueled not only by personal but also worldly concerns. She knew he already had a wife and children, but she didn’t worry about this or feel guilty. She didn’t hope he would leave his family, either. According to Tran’s own Buddhist-Existentialist-derived concept of Truthful Living, it was the circumstances in which one lost all sense of time and consequence and reason that revealed when one was living one’s true destiny. And so she reveled in the immediacy of their suspended moments, in which she thought neither of futures or pasts, nor of fantasies or realities. She became shell, cavern, empty well: she became replete. A sensation of sheer life, of Meaningful Living (how else could she put it?) loomed over her like a great umbrella. As a lover he was gentle, compassionate, and warm, appropriately woeful at the could-have-beens of their situation.

  She liked the way men looked at her during this time: with energy, with challenges, with a curiosity that was intellectual and spirited—and liked how they would joke with her and tell her frank things about other women she knew they’d never shared with a woman. They trusted, even feared her; for here was one woman who couldn’t be and didn’t need to be fooled or wooed. Concerning love, she told herself she was practicing the Buddhist paradox of “living simultaneously”: immersion and nonattachment together.

  She kept busy. She was tenacious and vigilant at her work. During this period her writing sprang from her without her prescience: her fiction became more violent—sometimes this surprised her—as the calamities of war caused her characters to act out undue passions.

  ***

  “School is more important than God.” One morning Tran found herself saying this to her son.

  Thien had been contesting her and asking questions she couldn’t answer with tact. Questions concerning the rituals they did or did not perform, as Catholics, that might put them out of favor with God. It was his grandmother’s—Tran’s mother’s—influence; Thien had been spending his afternoons at his grandmother’s house while Tran was at the newspaper office. That morning, Thien wanted to practice his penmanship by copying out prayers, instead of doing his French vocabulary homework. Tran was at the stove fixing his breakfast.

  “You won’t do well in school just because you believe in God, God is not your teacher.” This was the best way Tran could think of to emphasize the importance of keeping education and religion separate—in her mind, the former was crucial while the latter was optional. “You need to do well in school if you don’t want to end up like the kids on the street or in the countryside who can’t even spell their own names!” Thien bowed his head, and Tran asked him a question in French: “Ou est le gâteau?” She meant “cake,” but he heard “boat.”

  “Le bateau est à I'ocean,” replied Thien, glumly.

  She tried to smile, teasing. “Et est-ce que tu aimes manger le
bateau?”

  He looked at her and frowned. Then he walked to the corner of the kitchen and sat on the floor, pulling his knees into his chest and burying his face in his arms. He yelled, “J’ai pas faim!"

  She set his breakfast on the floor before him. “Let it get cold, then,” she snapped in Vietnamese.

  Tran had scheduled her son’s days to be full; she wanted him to become cultured. This meant art lessons, music, English, French, literature, drama—even soccer (it was the European sport of choice, as Tran understood). How could she explain to Thien that it was in these activities that he would find salvation, not in his grandmother’s sad, persistent prayers? She saw her mother as a victim of submission; her husband, Tran’s father, was a philanderer (as so many Vietnamese men were), while God constantly required her to be on her knees. She had spoiled her sons, too, and two were now dead from drink and war; the richest one was a gambler and ruthlessly selfish; and the other two were lost to her, having “died” into lives of vice. Saigon has become like Babylon, she lamented. Now the old woman lived an ascetic existence of cooking, cleaning, and performing other duties with her unmarried daughters and their illegitimate children (Tran was the only one who’d acquired the means or drive to move out on her own). A houseful of unweddable women and a wayward husband. Neighbors looked on them with pity. Tran had grown up terrified of becoming like her mother or older sisters. She saved her allowances for months just to buy a book; she lied about running errands in the marketplace in order to attend forums on French literature.

  “You’re only a half-woman, that’s what I hear people say,” said her son, after he had begrudgingly begun to eat the food on his plate.

  Tran was at her desk, sipping her coffee. “Who says this?”