The Darkest Little Room Page 5

  After repeated visits to the same brothel you begin to see that the same dresses are worn night after night, you imagine how dour the place must look in the daylight, and the girls who seemed so startling at first lose a little of their lustre. But the girl was more beautiful tonight than the night before.

  She stood and waited for me at the door, and I thought, at least she does not go in and call for the muscle.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ I said. ‘But–’

  ‘Do you want a drink now?’

  I was surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  We went in. The snake-faced man behind the bar eyed me but the girl waved to him to say it was alright and I grinned at him.

  I paid for two Japanese whiskies and the boy at the bar poured me a glass of the whisky and poured the girl a glass of water with just enough whisky to tint it. We went to a private room upstairs. This, she said, was ‘her room’. There was a collection of her personals before a mirror. Many nights she slept here. I sat against a wall.

  ‘You know me.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You were Ny?’

  She hesitated. As though fetching a name from memory.

  ‘My name Thuy.’

  ‘Yes. That was the name they called you. Your family and girlfriends. After Thuy Kieu, the legendary princess in the poem.’

  She laughed without mirth.

  ‘Why would they call me that?’

  ‘Because you were beautiful. Because you could sing old poetry.’

  I looked into her eyes that were green under the incandescent light. God, there can be no mistaking them.

  One of the other girls came in. She said, ‘Chi nên đưa người đàn ông này đi … Sister should take this one. He is young.’

  ‘Đúng rồi, nhưng em bệnh … Yes, but sister is sick with the cold.’

  ‘Ngay cả như vậy … Even if you are …’

  ‘Thuy wore a green vinyl dress and her eyelids were covered in aquamarine eye shadow. She wore fake lashes and red lipstick and there was glitter in the corners of her eyes. Her eyes came from the central highlands; her pale amber skin from the far north – and she had a Chinese nose.

  ‘Are you from the north?’

  ‘Once I was from the north. I do not have home.’

  ‘You are very beautiful.’

  She nodded and looked away, as though I had commented on the weather.

  She looked up.

  ‘What day is today?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  She nodded again.

  I let sentiment get the better of me.

  ‘You know, you must not work here.’

  All at once she was angry, and I knew I had spoken the single most intolerable phrase a man in a South-East Asian brothel can ever speak to a prostitute. I love you – which some of the worst-treated prostitutes in the world hear nightly – is kinder and less ridiculous.

  I apologised.

  ‘But, Ny–’

  ‘Why you call me that?’

  I sighed. I played my hand and spoke Vietnamese.

  ‘Well, if you refuse to be her … Anh đang tìm một nơi … Brother is looking for a place … một nơi đặc biệt … a special place. A place where girls are beaten. Is it here?’

  She threw the whisky-coloured water in my face and stood up to go. I grabbed her arm.

  ‘Ngoi đi,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. Please. Em chưa hiểu anh … Sister does not yet understand me.’

  ‘Không có … There is no such place. Tại sao anh hoi điều đó? … Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Xin lỗi … I’m sorry,’ I said and gently took her arm. I whispered: ‘Tôi là một nhà văn … I am a writer – for newspapers. I am not here for a girl.’

  ‘Hãy nhìn xung quanh! … Look around!’ she said. ‘Ask whether the place you speak of is here.’

  ‘Please sit down.’

  She took my drink and stirred it with her finger. We sat in silence. Then she stared at me.

  ‘What city is this?’

  ‘Little sister is joking.’

  ‘Không.’

  ‘Saigon’

  She nodded.

  ‘Vài cô gái đã nói đây là Sài Gòn … Some of the girls said this was Saigon. But it did not look the way I thought Saigon would look. But then, I only ever see this place and some shops near here. That bridge and the outskirts to north and the black river. So that must be Saigon River. Ho nói cái nay la Saigon … They told me this was Saigon but we had so many Chinese here last week I thought we must still be across the border.’ She looked over my shoulder as though staring through the wall, to the festoon of orange lights that marked the tremendous concrete bridge out there in the dark. Truly at this hour this place could have been anywhere in Asia. And these were the only hours she knew. ‘Sau đó chúng ta chúng tôi có người Campu-chia … Then we had Cambodians. I was afraid we were in Cambodia. No girl gets out of there.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Well, if this is Saigon then I am far from where I born.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘Thanh Hoa.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Có chuyện gì vậy, anh? … What is the matter, brother?’

  ‘Nothing. You say Thanh Hoa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ho Chi Minh’s home province.’

  The girl smiled.

  ‘Ðung roi … Bac Ho. He won the war. They call Saigon after him now.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Maybe two weeks.’

  A fortnight in a city she could not call by name.

  ‘And before you were in China?’

  ‘Yes..’

  ‘Is here better than China?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You are her. You are the one I am looking for.’

  ‘All Asian girls look alike to you Westerners, no?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool.’

  She grinned at me.

  ‘I will take you out,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But I am sick tonight. Please find another girl.’

  ‘I do not mean to take you to a hotel. I mean to take you out of here forever. Mai mai. Hiểu không?’

  The girl raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Em hiểu … Little sister understands.’

  Her deep distrust of men, all men, could not be wiped away in an hour of talk at a bar. I guessed I was not one of the first dozen men who had made her similar promises. And yet she was here.

  I went downstairs to get another drink and a little red light flashed in a corner of the room and all the girls put on yellow trench coats. An undercover policeman walked in and surveyed the room. When the Tet holidays came police shook down places like this to get money to buy party supplies, careful to tell their favourite girls not to come to work that night. But it was not near the holidays and the policeman tonight only scanned the room. Probably he was bored and wanted to get a look at the girls. I would have loved to have asked him what made him frightened to ask for a kickback of even a few hundred thousand from the bar, but he was already gone back onto the street and the barman collected the girls’ yellow coats.

  I came back to the private room.

  ‘How much is it to take you out tonight?’

  ‘One hundred US dollars. But please–’

  I held her hand. She smiled a little.

  ‘Hôm qua anh ta đến dây vì một ngươi Ðức tên là Hönicke … Brother came here yesterday because of a German called Hönicke. Do you know him?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Không biet … I meet many men here.’

  ‘He told me you were beaten.’

  Her eyes widened and a haunted look came to her face. She snatched her hand away.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A reporter. I told you that. Who are you?’

  She considered this in a moment of silence. She lowered her eyes.

  ‘Something awful.’

  ‘Don’t ever let them convince you of that. You’
re as precious as anyone in this world.’

  She laughed charily.

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  I whispered in English, so she would not hear, ‘More so to me.’

  I touched the silver crucifix that rested on her chest. Though I was not a believer, I could think of no better consolation than what I said then.

  ‘You are equal to a queen in the eyes of your God.’

  She sighed.

  ‘There are places in the world so dark even God cannot find them. Where nothing is forbidden.’

  ‘Căn phòng nhỏ ít tỏi nhất? … The darkest little room?’

  She kept her eyes on her drink, tinkled the ice against the glass with her little finger.

  ‘Why would you say this?’

  I gave no answer and she did not lift her eyes.

  ‘Is there such a place?’ I asked.

  She breathed deeply.

  ‘Căn phòng nhỏ ít tỏi nhất la nhân tim … The darkest little room in the world is the human heart,’ she said at last. ‘Even yours, perhaps, has black secrets that you would never let into the light.’

  ‘But the darkest little–’

  ‘What did she look like, the girl you spoke about before?’

  ‘Just like you. But she wore her hair differently. She wore it up.’

  ‘Như cái này … Like this? … Joseph?’

  I thought of the photograph in my coat pocket. That she had never seen.

  ‘I never told you to tie it on the side.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Many girls do it like that now.’

  ‘And your eyes …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your eyes are hers.’

  ‘Tinted contact lenses are not expensive. Many girls wear them.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  She leant toward me and laughed, but then pulled her face away.

  A plump girl with wide cheekbones came into the room and ‘asked’ me to buy two more drinks, and she asked for a tip. Apparently she fed off the affection men felt for Thuy and off Thuy’s sympathy.

  Thuy switched to English.

  ‘Please, Joseph, you give my friend one hundred thousand. She get very small money.’

  I took out my wallet and gave the girl the note and she left us. I was running out of cash. Thuy saw it. In a few drinks’ time I would not have enough to buy her.

  ‘You can take me out now,’ she said.

  I took the drink I had paid for at the bar and then paid what in Saigon is the average monthly wage and Thuy changed her dress and put a few of her personals from the box in the room into a bag and we walked onto the street where the heat was gone and it was showering rain. A black Citroën sat across the road and dimmed its lights and for a moment I thought the driver must be watching us, but then the car pulled away.

  ‘So this really is Saigon,’ Thuy said when we drove onto the esplanade. ‘And this is Saigon River.’

  She leant on the window of the taxi and looked down at the dark water, then at a floodlit driving range netted in beside a five star hotel.

  I had the driver pull left down back roads and we came to the river’s edge – to a boardwalk at the back of the hotel and a place where we could eat fish hotpot. The rain had eased to a spit.

  ‘Perhaps that is all the rain we will get tonight.’

  Thuy shook her head.

  ‘See the bubbles in the water where the rain falls? The bubbles mean more rain will come. Heavy rain.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Không nhớ … I do not remember. Someone when I was a child in Thanh Hoa.’

  ‘Saigon is a beautiful river.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘At this hour,’ I justified. ‘In the dark it is beautiful, when you cannot truly see it.’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘The man who told me about you said your eyes were like a Vietnamese river. The Ma River, near where you said you were born.’

  I looked out across the immense and quietly churning Saigon.

  ‘Thuy … that name means ‘water’, no?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thuy, you are her.’

  She looked away at the river.

  ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘Redemption.’ I spoke the English word, though she would not know it.

  ‘She was your girlfriend?’

  ‘I believe … I hoped she would be my wife.’

  ‘If you possessed such a girl, why did you not keep her? Why would you let her end up like me?’

  I turned my eyes to the river again. I repeated something I had heard Zhuan say.

  ‘Perhaps we can only truly know a sin for a sin once it’s committed. Once it has borne fruit. Tell me you are the girl I have searched for.’

  ‘Em tự hỏi … I wonder.’

  ‘It must be you. Your eyes are not contacts. I saw well enough in that room back there.’

  ‘Nói thật … True, they are not dark. Do you know the name bui doi? It means ‘the dust of life’. The name is given to children of mixed blood. The people in my village thought my eyes were a curse. Either I was the daughter of a whore or had Annamite blood.’

  ‘Nhưng rất đep … But they are beautiful.’

  ‘They believe that too is a curse. Like Kieu.’

  The great Vietnamese heroine: she sacrificed herself to prostitution for her people. Some nights I translated a verse or two of The Tale of Kieu into a notebook back in my room, originally to practise my Vietnamese, though no one used the old classical register Kieu was written in any more, and few Vietnamese could recite the verses offhand, yet this girl sang one now.

  Ông Vong có hai con gái đẹp

  như nữ thần của mặt trăng,

  Thúy Kiều là chị,

  Thùy Vân trẻ

  A barge glided past and a wind rose in the north and I thought how beautiful it was to be beside this girl who sang ancient song that obliterated the noise of the cars on the bridge.

  We went to some awful hotel she knew. She said all the girls at the club used it.

  ‘Don’t turn on the light.’

  ‘Alright,’

  ‘I opened the fridge.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘No.’

  I took a Tiger beer. She took off her coat and her hand went to her shoulder to unstrap her dress.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Cái gì?’

  ‘Sleep. I don’t want to touch you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sleep’

  She lay down on her side and the bones of her back were like those of a small bird. In the amber light that came in from the street her skin glowed like some strange jewel.

  I lay down too. I had promised her a night of rest, but I did not sleep easily with her beside me.

  ‘Tell me your story. How you came to be here.’

  ‘That is something you cannot pay for.’

  ‘I do not intend to pay for it.’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Không biet … I hardly remember it.’

  ‘Please try.’

  ‘I told you I was from Thanh Hoa.’

  ‘And from there you were taken–’

  She stared at me blankly.

  ‘To China, no?’

  ‘Yes. China.’

  ‘You alone?’

  ‘No. There were other girls.’ Thuy clicked her tongue. ‘Some were very young. Maybe twelve years old. We were taken to a house.’

  ‘Who took you? How?’

  ‘I was kidnapped. I have been kidnapped twice. Once by old women. Once by police.’

  ‘That is hideous,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Police are hideous. I was glad when they sold me on.’

  ‘Some police are good men.’

  ‘I do not know them.’

  ‘Could you name any of these men – the ones the women sold you to, or the police? Or the women themselves?’

  She laughed and stared out the window.

  ‘It is too long ago. I can
hardly remember.’

  ‘A year and six months.’

  ‘Ðung roi, gần hai năm … Yes, near two years.’ she said and turned to face me. ‘But a year can seem like forever. Many of the girls at Club 49 come from the north. From the Chinese border country. The girls are moved and sold by a gang that operates in the mountains of Sa Pa. That is all I know.’

  I reached for the notebook I kept with me always.

  ‘Troi oi! … For God’s sake! Can’t you just do what the others do to me?’

  She does look like a whore, I thought. She talks like a whore. I looked at her petulant tinsel eyes. That cunning mouth. It hurt to realise she was a whore and not a saint. The dream had been beautiful. Yet what if it was I who had made her this way?

  The Thanh Hoa photograph fell out of the sleeves of my notebook. I looked at it and slipped it back in.

  ‘There is one more thing I want to ask you?’

  ‘Cái gì?’

  ‘The girl I am looking for had a hairclip.’ I looked at the wall beneath the window, at the bag she had brought with her. ‘A jade butterfly clip that her grandmother gave her and she was never without it.’

  She stared at me and said nothing.

  ‘Do you have it?’

  Her eyes fell.

  ‘Even if I did … Many girls …’

  I got out of bed but she leapt and grabbed the bag.

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘There are private things I do not want you to see!’

  ‘I have seen everything a girl might put in a bag like that a thousand times already. You don’t need to be embarrassed. Please open it.’

  She did. Earrings, a mascara pencil, a box of condoms, glitter … a green butterfly hairclip.

  She stood and stared at me in the street light that came in the window. She lowered her face. She lay down on my shoulder.

  I sighed and closed my eyes.

  ‘Do you want to ask anything of me?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No. I know already.’

  We lay still and silent for an hour. I do not know if I slept.

  ‘You’d better get dressed,’ she said.

  ‘What? Let me sleep.’

  ‘But I want you to buy me something to eat before I go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How can you ask that?’

  ‘Lie down. You’re staying with me. Mai mai … forever. Understand?’

  She nodded and smiled and stayed sitting up and watching me blink with drowsiness. I tried to stay as long as I might in that pleasant march that lies on the borders of waking and sleeping, letting the evil of the night fade, and all the while watching her like watching the movements of a figure in a dream. She had learned to move around sleeping men as silently as a cat. I wondered how many wallets she had stolen this way. Without concern I watched to see if she would steal mine. I would not have cared if she had tried. I would only have smiled and kept drowsing. But she took nothing from me. She went to the bathroom. The fridge. I did not realise I had fallen asleep until a vaguely threatening and instantly forgotten dream was broken by her movements. I rubbed my eyes. She stood at the end of the bed putting on her clothes. I took my wristwatch from the bedside table. It was three in the morning.