Hanoi, Vietnam
Father was on a balcony on the second floor of the café, peering at the ringed fence around the lake, when he picked up the phone to dial a number. The fog was thick against the rim of Hồ Tây, in such a way that it was hard to make out what was air and what was water. It was a little bit after six, just after Father’s hospital shift. He was sipping cà phê đá on the other side of a table of men playing tiến lên, and he was making a phone call. The call rang once, the call rang twice, but no one picked up. Father put his phone on his knee and looked out at the lake, the fog curling as if ducking out for a smoke. He imagined himself for one moment in the rustic houses dotting the rice fields of his native town of Hòa Bình. There, he could smell the pig that his relatives, neighbors, and family friends were deboning; he could hear the chitter-chatter of the uncles entertaining themselves with stories of their children’s success.
As he lost himself to reminiscing a time that had either passed, or was passing, or would have never passed at all because it only existed in Father’s imagination, the flute music that was his ringtone played once more. Father picked up the phone, hoping it would be his mother. Instead, he saw whose name was blinking on the caller ID and groaned to himself. He adjusted his posture, cracked his back, and answered, “Good evening,” with as much politeness as his tone could muster.
The response, as expected from his older brother, Hoang, was, “Where are you?”
Father reminded him, ever so curtly, “I live in Hanoi. You all are in Hòa Bình. I must work.”
Big Brother Hoang was spitting something, in the way he used to slap at the back of Father’s head some sixty years ago, coarsely and with little regard. “You know,” he said, “Auntie Tran and their family lives in Hồ Chí Minh. Your younger cousin, Dang, is there, too. And so is your young third cousin, your uncle’s wife, and my wife’s brother. Hồ Chí Minh is very far from the village. And yet even your cousin’s brother, Linh, brought his entire family of six to visit.”
Father heard some youngsters walking underneath the balcony he was sitting on. They were in their baggy pants, listening to foreign pop music from their phones and shouting wildly to themselves. It made it difficult to hear what Big Brother Hoang was saying, but he appreciated the excuse. “I can’t hear you. There is too much noise,” he said, even though he was used to the city’s din and could make out what Hoang had said clearly enough.
Hoang wasn’t particularly smart, but he knew his brother well enough to make out when he told the truth and when he lied for the sake of convenience. He asked, as a result, “Do you not care that Dượng Dinh’s death anniversary is today?”
Of course Father cared, or he had cared, rather, seven years ago when his mother’s sister’s husband had departed. He responded, “What do you think I should care about more? The lives that are going to die without a doctor, or those that have already died?”
Big Brother Hoang was clearly pacing around the house, because Father could hear the thatched floor of their ancestral straw hut creaking. Not to mention the amount of noise that was coming over the phone was vacillating. Earlier, it was as if Hoang was outside because there had been next to no background noise. Now Father was hearing a lot of cacophony. He assumed Hoang was going to a place where there were a lot of people at tables, eating and talking to themselves. Hoang’s voice itself was no longer intelligible. It was as if he was speaking to someone else. Father was expecting him to come back onto the line with another round of insults. Instead, a feminine voice graced the phone: “Young brother, how are you?”
He recognised the voice of his sister-in-law, Thu, and so he responded, “I’m good, Big Sister, how are you?” Before he could say any more, there was shouting between this sister-in-law, Thu, and her husband, Hoang.
“Why did you take the phone from me?” or something along those lines was what Father could make out Hoang saying.
“I wanted to say hello to your brother.”
“You go help your mother cut the meat.”
“But I haven’t spoken to your brother in so long!”
Whatever Hoang was shouting in reply was difficult for Father to understand. Someone had put traditional flute music on the speakers, and it was blaring quite loudly. In the meantime, someone else had come to take the phone.
“Hello…this is…how are you?”
Other than it being a female voice, Father had no idea who was speaking or what she was saying, but he responded politely, assuming that she was one of the neighbours, “I am good, em, how are you?”
The voice shouted angrily, “Em? What? I’m—…”
Again, Father could not understand whatever else she had said, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to now that the person was too offended to have a meaningful conversation. Father let the noise of this speaker go on as he heard the motorcycles and trucks underneath him zip around the lake.
The speaker eventually broke her rant to cackle, “Do you even remember me?”
Father lied, “Of course.”
The random woman said, “That’s a lie…you…and then…there was…and if that were…then why don’t you remember…older brother’s death?”
“Your older brother’s death?” Father repeated.
“Huh!” the woman said. “Yes, my older brother’s death anniversary…right now!”
Father wished he hadn’t lied. He now realized he was talking to his mother’s sister, an auntie he was actually very close to. Father said, “Cô, I remember Uncle very well.”
Truthfully, he could not remember a single thing about this uncle, other than the fact that he had a lot of thinning hair that he attempted to coif so as to create the shape of hairiness against an otherwise bald frame.
“Then why did you not come back home? It made me very sad.”
So said this auntie, and yet when Father tried to reflect on her feelings by saying, “I understand. I didn’t mean to offend,” she was putting her hand against the phone, muffling whatever the person beside her was saying, and cackling in delight. As Father sat on the balcony the sun was setting, causing orange hues to percolate through the fog and douse the grey into an almost-burning red. He didn’t know what else to say, and this phone call was dragging on, so he said to the other side, “Okay, it is getting late. I must go. Tạm biệt!”
“He always says goodbye. Doesn’t ever stop to say hello.”
The person on the line who said this was Father’s Uncle Duc, or his mother’s younger brother. He said almost out of instinct, “Ông Duc, how are you?”
Uncle Duc didn’t respond. In fact, Uncle Duc wasn’t actually on the phone but just happened to be beside this auntie while she was on the phone. The phone in fact was now transferring hands and going to Father’s baby brother, Manh. “How are you?” Manh said warmly and politely.
It had been a while since they had talked, and so Father said, without any stress, “I am good, how are you?”
Manh took the question seriously, and therefore started answering it by listing all of the things he or his children had done since Father had last spoken to them. Because Manh was so sweet, it was easy to let go while talking to him and to think of other topics. Father was frankly still a little turned-off by how Uncle Duc had spoken about him on the other side of the phone. It was the first time that Father had heard his voice for some time. Though this uncle also lived in a suburb in Hanoi called Phu Lam, the two of them talked little because Phu Lam wasn’t that close to the city center of Hanoi, and Father worked a lot of odd hours at the hospital. While this was understandably a source of great shame for an elder—that he was not visited often by his younger relative—Father never understood why Uncle Duc took it so personally to the point that he had almost estranged himself completely. Even if Uncle Duc and Father met at a family reunion or festival, Uncle Duc made it a point to not say a single word beyond a pleasantry. Given how many months Father and Mother had stayed with Uncle Duc when they first moved from Hòa Bình towards Hanoi, Father thought Uncle Duc would have understood the situation better. At the same time, Uncle Duc had told him over and over again that it had never been anything personal.
In the meantime, Baby Brother Manh, the person Father was actually talking to, must have noticed that he wasn’t receiving full attention. He said something so quickly that Father didn’t understand, and just as Father was about to ask him to clarify, he heard another voice. This voice was cracked, yet warm and polished, full of love for not just her children, but for anyone. Father knew exactly who it was before he could make out the sentence. It was like the first set of words he had ever heard as an infant being spoken to him once more. It was like being corded to something eternal, yet close.
“My son, you have called,” said Ba Pham, mother to Father and his siblings, a grandmother figure to the village as a whole.
“Mẹ tôi, I have.”
Father could imagine the thinning gray hairs bunned against the back of her skull, the teeter to the way her bending body walked. He saw, too, the gape of her smile, and felt the expanse of love it brought out in those around it. The woman who had brought Father into the world was in no shape to walk, but she loved to meander. Father could imagine her pacing back and forth as she said what she was saying.
“My son, it has been so long since I have heard your voice.”
Father had in fact called her just a few days ago, but the call was short.
“I miss you, Ma,” he responded.
“I miss you, too. Where are you?”
“I am in Hanoi. I am drinking coffee at a café by the lake.”
Father had to gulp the iced coffee down, not because he was in need of it but because he needed something to chill the palpitations of his own heart. The sunset was over, but the darkness had not yet fully set over the city. Or if it had, it was only filtering now through the fog, guzzling short rays of light through the mist of the water clouds.
There was the sound of a knife running against a ceramic jar. Father assumed they were readying another knife, because after so many pigs the knives they used ran dull quickly. He asked, “Are you cutting, or is someone helping you?”
Ba Pham said, “Son, I’m no good at cutting meat. You must come help me.”
“Ma, I keep telling you, the knives are dull. You need to buy new knives.”
“It’s no good. I can’t cut like you. I’m not so strong. I was never strong like your father.”
Father did not want to engage Ba Pham on this topic. He was busy enough at the hospital as it was, and with Son soon home it would be harder yet to indulge in a trip to his village. What Father did consider was asking how his mother’s health was doing. He knew she must be making her rounds in the room, cackling and smiling and singing along with the performers and entertaining the guests with her attempts at clapping, not because she really cared about this uncle’s death anniversary—their families were not even close—but because she felt she must show happiness for the sake of anyone who loved her. But such acts were tiring, and not everyone had the energy for them. Father, for example, had never learned to dedicate himself to such contrivances, and he often felt this expectation came at the behest of the spirit of his own mother.
Oddly enough, it was not Father who had questions to ask, but Ba Pham herself, who had clearly sickened herself over the silence. She asked, “Why are you alone?”
Father gulped the air, because without any more coffee to drink he had nothing else to guzzle down.
“How did you know I was alone?”
“A mother always knows when her son is alone.”
Father not only sighed but cradled his cranium against the softness of his fingers. The sunlight had long faded. There was only the darkness, and then the lamps of the lanterns around the lake, and the headlights of the motorcycles passing by.
Could he say it? He had avoided the topic for so many days because he did not want to get his mother’s hopes up, but he also could not lie to the woman he was closest to. “Ma, I don’t know what to say.”
It did not help that in the background of the phone call was still that traditional music, the high-pitched warbles of the female singer going up and down, back and forth.
He continued, “The truth is hard to say. This is not because I have lied to you. This is because I am not brave enough to say it to myself.”
Likewise, on his side of the line was much noise: the honking of the motorcycles, and the chattering of the pedestrians who had suffered too long of a day to give concern to the peace of the streets.
“My sweet son, you do not have to make yourself suffer.”
“No, Ma, I must tell you now. I must tell you, or the curse of my heart will be to suffer.”
It really was like his heart was about to jump out of his chest, or something worse, as though it could literally collapse right while he was on the phone with his mother, literally take all of the raw emotion pounding against his ribs and force itself to explode.
“Ma, I know I should have told you a few days ago, but with these restrictions, with all of these flights that change whenever they want, I just didn’t know what to tell you. I didn’t want you to be happy for something you couldn’t have. And I didn’t want to be happy for something I myself wasn’t sure I was going to get.”
The cold flare of the mist along the balcony was infiltrating his nostrils, and a good length of his nails were scratching blood out of his elbow’s edge. He wasn’t brave enough, he was never going to be brave enough, but he had to say it, because he had said this much, and there was no other direction for his words to go towards.
“Ma, your grandson is coming back home. And after so many years, I don’t know what’s going to be the first thing I say, think, or do. Help me, Ma. If you were in this position, what is it you would say or do? What?”
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