Grass Roof, Tin Roof Read online

  In the end, she went to the courtroom alone.

  What have we done wrong? I would ask God, if I believed in Him. Oh, these sad, sad days. You want to understand that the world works justly, and that war with all its atrocity and catastrophe is simply part of the greater Order, the yin to the yang of prosperity and peace we had for x number of years, et cetera. You want to believe in the story of the man who lost his donkey but won a horse. You want to believe in Philosophy. But my children, my unborn and my son, there is much that is unfair and I cannot explain why to you, though I bring you into this world to face it. I feel it crucial to tell you (should I not return or be able for whatever reason to say it to you in person): I am sorry.

  “This is it?” said the managing editor. “This is your installment?”

  Tran nodded. The page he held in his hand was more than half blank, more than half white.

  ***

  “We have before us a rather amoral and rash character. She follows her heart—to the detriment and neglect of all her relationships, even her maternal one. What kind of woman is this? She is a selfish woman. A revolting force. She is oblivious to the facts of the world, caught up in fantasy and ideas. She is also a subversive, conniving woman—secretly in love with a different man than the one she is married to. What are we to make of a writer such as Miss Trung Trinh, a.k.a Trinh Anh Tran, who creates a character so morally deprived and presents her as a heroine?”

  “But I must point out here the prosecution has no imagination, or compassion. For who of us has never known the passions, the obsessions, of love? I must also add: this is a story we are speaking about, this is fiction. Miss Trinh Anh Tran is merely a talented writer who has created a world and characters that’ve garnered a reaction of controversy. If anything, I think this controversy serves simply as testament to her talents.”

  At one end of a long table, in the square green room with the small windows high along only one wall, Tran sat next to her defense attorney, a young man who was a friend of the newspaper. At the other end of the table sat the prosecutor’s team. The presiding judge was a man whom Tran knew to be also a local Catholic priest; in her opinion he was narrow-minded and prideful, exactly the type who would not be on her side. In the middle of the table was a tall stack of newspapers—all the printed episodes of her serial novel—and her hardcover copy of Gone With the Wind, which the police had confiscated from her apartment. (The book was a gift from an American correspondent, a woman journalist, and though Tran considered herself a nonmaterialist, she cherished it. It was the 107th edition, and as she understood it, the more numerous the printings of a book, the more valuable it must be, for it was only the classics, the works of lasting merit that could possibly sell widely enough to be printed over and over.)

  Tran was only half listening. At eight months, she had begun to mostly ignore the outside world. She was awaiting the baby not with joy but rather a certain numbness, a helpless acceptance of the fact that soon she would be going through the agony and upheaval—the wrenching unpredictability—of labor. And on the other side of that, more unknowns that she did not have the energy to ponder.

  She heard herself reply to a question. “I just used history as a backdrop. I admit I did little research. Accuracy about the war was not my point.”

  The prosecutor proceeded to read from a newspaper folded open before him: “ And in the shadows he would find her; she had fallen asleep at her vigil. Such a long vigil it was! And she was tired and excited with worry, with longing, with a whole turmoil of longing she wished so to express. I can’t keep it in any longer! she thought ... How can we in this political climate not construe this as dangerous literature, alluding to insurgent action, so unfamiliar and yet exciting to our little heroine? The character who comes to find her, to waken her and remind her of her vigil in this scene, is in fact an agent of the soon-to-be Communist Party! Need we say more?”

  “But the defense would like to point out, if we are to give even slightly serious consideration to this interpretation of the author’s story, what happens to the heroine later in the story regarding her affair with this so-called insurgent Communist character. He betrays her. And we as readers are steered not to like him at all after that point.”

  Tran began to think of fires: the village at the edge of the jungle, the smoke that had woken her son that evening several months ago. She had had in mind a plan for another fire—at the heroine’s village, set alight by soldiers. The heroine would make a narrow escape (from the underground prison where Tran had left her) into the night as the fields raged about her; perhaps a second man would appear, unafifiliated with either side—a roguish man. Not unlike that famous scene in that book—though they had horses in that land. It was much more dramatic with horses, thought Tran.

  The true intent of the trial was to be presented to her in another room.

  Tran sat in a chair before the judge at his desk, and a woman (it was not clear what this woman’s role was) stood at the judge’s shoulder. She was matronly and austere of face and more frightening to Tran than any of the men. She was dressed in a black military skirt, with fringed red epaulettes on her shoulders.

  “Who is the father of your unborn child?” she asked.

  Tran had answered this question a number of times in recent months. “A friend who is dead now. He had an accident.”

  “A friend? Your moral character becomes more and more reprehensible, little sister. It would not be hard to believe you are a writer of propaganda.”

  Tran’s lawyer, next to her, did not speak up in her defense. Tran thought that was surprising. She wanted to turn to him but dared not—for fear of the woman’s attention as much as for fear of what the lawyer’s expression might be.

  The woman pointed at Tran. “What is the name of this friend of yours?”

  The judge suddenly coughed into a handerkerchief, looking away toward the window behind him. Tran saw in his eyes a flicker of something—vulnerability, perhaps. Or was it ignorance? He was trying not to pay attention, it occurred to her. She became aware then of the ineffectiveness of his authority. The two policemen standing at either end of the room also seemed mute and obligatory presences, their eyes trained on some space between them; they appeared to be staring straight at each other without staring at each other at all.

  Tran gave a name she had made up. “He is nobody important. He was a locksmith.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said the woman, and folded her arms. “What is the real name of your friend?”

  Tran replied, “I told you already.”

  “I will pass an ordinance,” interjected the judge, abruptly, as if he had been napping and someone had prodded him. “All the independent newspapers will be required to comply with stricter guidelines. A team of censors will be sent to each office. All pages with any potentially offensive material will be confiscated by the government and burned. Would you like to be the impetus for this action against your colleagues?”

  The nausea of hunger churned inside of her, perilous and urgent. Couldn’t they see how ill-suited she was for the trickery they were accusing her of having mastered?

  The woman asked again, “What is the name of your friend?”

  Her lawyer put his hand on her arm. “I must tell you, cousin,” he addressed her in a conspiratorial way. “Actually, they are trying to help you.”

  A moment later she broke down. “I don’t know his real name,” she sobbed, “I just wanted to write a love story.”

  Later, in another room, the woman gave Tran a lemonade. “Your unborn child. Do you wish to keep it?” She spoke briskly, solicitously. “I can understand if you don’t want to; it won’t be easy for you, having two illegitimate children. It won’t be easy for them, either. If you didn’t wish to keep it, I know who might take it. Your baby’s father—I know his reputation—has certainly a good mind. We can use children with good minds. Do you know what I mean? Educate them properly. You are concerned with education, aren’t you?”

&
nbsp; Tran felt around her the stickiness of a web. She had thought she could trust at least the newspaper’s lawyer but now didn’t know what to think. Every word she said could mean someone’s condemnation. Even what you believed to be undoubtably your own could be challenged.

  “I want to keep it,” said Tran.

  “I have a friend,” said the woman, with a smile. “He is looking for a wife.”

  An ordinance was passed and the newspapers began to hold clandestine meetings to discuss their options. Many people were quitting simply out of fear. They did not want to be too clearly aligned with anything potentially dangerous; they thought it safer to appear neutral, even ignorant.

  It was 1973. The American soldiers were gone. And though they had left the South Vietnamese Army massively, ridiculously, well equipped, and had dropped another round of bombs on the North in order to reiterate their conviction in the fight against encroaching Communism before flying homeward themselves, the atmosphere in the city was largely one of doubt. A few of Tran’s colleagues, it was rumored, had even defected to the Communist Party, or were just now showing what might have all along been their true allegiance, according to speculation.

  Giang vanished immediately following the trial. Strangely, Tran’s first thoughts were not of finding him or learning where he had gone, but of his wife; what would she do now, did she blame Tran? Once, Tran sent the maid to his house with a gift of rice cakes and wrapped pork and an invitation to his wife—Tran thought they might be able to speak frankly now that Giang was absent—but not surprisingly, she received no reply.

  Tran lived for the last month of her pregnancy with a midranking military official who came to be the man her family accepted as her new daughter’s father (whether they knew the truth or not, they were ready to accept nearly anyone). Tran had felt she had no choice but to accept the arrangement, despite her wariness of what kind of man her proposed husband might be; Tran knew she was being watched by the government. One month after the birth of the baby girl, Tran’s new husband was killed in a military excursion in the southern countryside. Soon after, Tran remembered something from long ago, some prophecy concerning herself and men. Though in this circumstance, the relationship should not have ended in the man’s leaving or death (as the fortuneteller had predicted all Tran’s marriages before the age of thirty would), as this had not been an actual marriage. Or so Tran thought. He had been a kind man; he had surprised her. There had been moments of tenderness, even. The presence of the baby had affected them and caused them both to surrender—though Tran was aware that their passion was grounded in a heightened sense of reality and that her own emotional state was unsteady—to the roles they had each for whatever reason agreed to play. (Tran suspected he, too, had been coerced into the marriage by higher-ranking officials, possibly as a coverup of some other scandal.) In their private moments, he had revealed to Tran a slight discontent with his career, though he had never expressed it directly; Tran suspected his death had not been an accident.

  Giang’s wife came to the hospital a few days after the delivery. Some women from the newspaper had warned Tran that Giang’s wife would be coming to see her husband’s baby. She stood at the side of the hospital bed and fixed her eyes on Tran with what seemed to Tran an undue air of superiority. It struck her that this was a woman who enjoyed confronting other women when they were vulnerable.

  But Tran felt at least partly responsible for this woman’s loss of her husband. “I’m so sorry he’s gone,” she said.

  Giang’s wife made no reply, the tight line of her red lips telling Tran she would not be forgiven. She was holding in her hands the obligatory bouquet of flowers for the baby. Swaddled in a blanket, the baby was asleep in a clear plastic bin the nurses had wheeled in on a cart and positioned at the foot of Tran’s bed; the two women looked at the baby’s fleshy, closed face. “I came to see our daughter. She is my daughter, too, you know. I harbor no ill will toward her. Children are all born innocent in the presence of God.” She set her bouquet of flowers among some others on a table by the window. “It’s not her fault you are a weak woman.”

  Tran named the baby Thuy, a girls name popular for its gentle sound and its allusion to the kingfisher bird, this her gesture toward freeing the child from the web of ill-fated events that had preceded her entry into the world. But it was only a halfhearted gesture, for Tran felt deep down that there was no conceivable escape from the sorrows of life. When Thuy was two months old, Tran returned to work. Her younger sister came to stay at her apartment, where she helped the maid with the household duties and care of Thien.

  At the newspaper, Tran allowed herself to be moved into a research position. She put in fewer hours and did not go out into the field. Occasionally, she wrote a poem for the paper, but it usually explored safe themes: new motherhood, the simplicity of a baby, glimpses of nature.

  Soon whether or not they would fold was a question provoking ongoing discussion at the newspaper office. Tran could not avoid it. She listened, though she kept her opinions to herself. What will be, will be, she believed. She felt doom in the air, but she would not quit the paper. She simply could not face the idea of quitting. That would be too much of an admission of shame—which she was not willing to let herself feel about the past year’s events.

  She attended meetings at various colleagues’ houses and stood on the periphery. The meetings usually began with a lot of shouting, which continued until a senior editor or some other commanding personality climbed onto a chair or table or found something to bang on. Then this person would attempt to mediate. Ideas about how to retaliate against or circumvent censorship policies went back and forth; there were those who favored the more subversive tactic of compromise, or appearing to compromise, while extremists in the group favored louder, more outright protestations. At one meeting, an old poet (who had lately been a contributing editor) stood and gave a speech that moved Tran.

  “Come out of your bones! What is even flesh or blood worth at a time like this? How come we cling to flesh and blood when what we really covet is ephemeral? What we covet is a concept, freedom? You are always free to think as you will: this is the true aim of freedom. My children, I beg of you—recognize this! Or you are missing the point, you are wasting the beauty of your struggle. I am an old man, and I tell you: only God lives on.”

  But Tran knew nobody was listening to the old man, mournful-eyed and perched on a plastic stool, speaking in such a soft, defeated tone. The backyard where this particular meeting was held belonged to an aggressive young reporter popular for his willingness to draw hasty and slanderous conclusions about public officials in his articles. Theirs was not a kind of journalism that had ever claimed to be impartial, reporters like him would say. The now passé poet’s esoteric philosophy on the uselessness of writing made no sense here.

  And now the extremists in the group were suggesting a great protest, a grand collaboration of art. A statement of the very reason, the need for such a thing as writing. Self-destruction, they concluded, was the best way to show the seriousness of their cause. In the end, it was those who spoke the loudest that decided what would be the manner of their protest.

  Tran was likely the only person who saw the old poet shake his head, probably dismayed at the wasted passion of the young.

  V

  The burning began. The reporters, the op-ed writers, the editors, print-layers, photojournalists threw up their arms and whooped. “We will burn our blood before we let them confiscate it!” Soon their voices rose into a chant: Burn Burn Burn! and Blood Blood Blood!

  One elderly man climbed atop a mountain of papers and waved a gun, declaring he would shoot himself in the head if the government so much as touched a single sheet—even though no government police had yet arrived. In the street, editors in chief of competing publications were shaking hands, agreeing that yes, indeed, this was solidarity! This was news! Then the militia arrived, dressed in dull green, and shouted orders through megaphones and pointed rifles in the air. T
ran stood watching from the sidewalk, occasionally jogging from one side of the action to another, helping carry a few papers or passing someone a match or lighter.

  It did not last long, as fires go. There the demonstrators stood, gasping or leaning on one another or crying up and down the street as they watched their papers burning. Tran was aware of a gathering sense of denouement, an emotional momentum, an unnatural rift. She was caught by it, too, though she had thought she would be able to remain detached. They were both a ludicrous and sad sight, her colleagues, the earnest, expended vitality of the men setting alight their papers; the women, too. These were intellectuals, and this was as close to brutal as they could get; the militia, on the other hand, could easily be violent. Tran stepped out of the way of the soldiers and policemen, stayed on the sidewalk. She watched the fire as it colored the dirty street orange and cooked the facades of city buildings; she watched the air around the flames tremble from the heat.

  The policemen and soldiers rushed forward to beat the flames with blankets; other policemen came running with buckets of water. The scene was preposterous. For though it was what they would have done themselves—burn the papers—now the policemen were trying to put the fires out. Some young reporters threw themselves onto policemen’s backs and were hauled off, thrown down and kicked, beaten with rifle butts. Ghostwriters charged forward with new torches and tossed them into piles of papers, setting them alight again. Cheers rose. “Oh, for the liberty of words!” cried the elderly man as he shot his gun off at the sky and leaped from the stack upon which he had been standing. A group of ten photojournalists stripped off their shirts and danced wildly around the largest pyre. With wiry arms they grappled with the policemen who advanced. The flames licked at the sky and black curls of ash and singed paragraphs rose in a swift and beautiful burning (this is what Tran would recall years later)—the rise into the air of a thousand blackened bits of papier like scarred and disembodied butterfly wings, weightless at their fate. Catching on hair and clothes, being rubbed into eyes, skin. That morning the news was everywhere.