The Refugees(28)

“Little things stay with you when you travel,” observed the professor, sniffing at the third course, a soup of bitter melon. Their children had never acquired the taste for it, but it reminded the professor and Mrs. Khanh of their own childhood.

“Such as?”

“The price of cigarettes,” the professor said. “When I returned to Saigon after finishing my studies, I couldn’t buy my daily Gauloises any longer. The imported price was too much.”

She leaned the postcard against the vase, where it would serve as a memento of the plans they’d once made for traveling to all of the world’s great cities after their retirement. The only form of transport Mrs. Khanh had ruled out was the ocean cruise. Open expanses of water prompted fears of drowning, a phobia so strong that she no longer took baths, and even when showering kept her back to the spray.

“Now why did you buy that?” the professor asked.

“The postcard?”

“No, the rose.”

“I didn’t buy it.” Mrs. Khanh chose her words carefully, not wanting to disturb the professor too much, and yet wanting him to know what he had done. “You did.”

“Me?” The professor was astonished. “Are you certain?”

“I am absolutely certain,” she said, surprised to hear the gratification in her voice.

The professor didn’t notice. He only sighed and took out the blue notebook from the pocket of his shirt. “Let’s hope that won’t happen again,” he muttered.

“I don’t suppose it will.” Mrs. Khanh stood to gather the dishes. She hoped her face didn’t show her anger, convinced as she was that the professor had intended the rose for this other woman. She was carrying four plates, the tureen, and both their glasses when, at the kitchen’s threshold, the wobbling weight of her load became too much. The sound of silverware clattering on the tiled floor and the smash of porcelain breaking made the professor cry out from the dining room. “What’s that?” he shouted.

Mrs. Khanh stared at the remains of the tureen at her feet. Three uneaten green coins of bitter melon, stuffed with pork, lay sodden on the floor among the shards. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

After he’d fallen asleep later that evening, she went to his library, where the painting she had propped by his desk was now turned face forward. She sighed. If he kept turning the painting this way, she would at least have to reframe it in something more modern and suitable. She sat down at his desk, flanked on either side by bookshelves that held several hundred volumes in Vietnamese, French, and English. His ambition was to own more books than he could ever possibly read, a desire fueled by having left behind all his books when they had fled Vietnam. Dozens of paperbacks cluttered his desk, and she had to shove them aside to find the notebooks where he’d been tracking his mistakes over the past months. He had poured salt into his coffee and sprinkled sugar into his soup; when a telemarketer had called, he’d agreed to five-year subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and Cosmopolitan; and one day he’d tucked his wallet in the freezer, giving new meaning to the phrase cold, hard cash, or so he’d joked with her when she discovered it. But there was no mention of Yen, and after a moment’s hesitation, underneath his most recent entry, Mrs. Khanh composed the following: “Today I called my wife by the name of Yen,” she wrote. She imitated the flourishes of the professor’s penmanship with great care, pretending that what she was doing was for the professor’s own good. “This mistake must not be repeated.”

The following morning, the professor held forth his coffee cup and said, “Please pass me the sugar, Yen.” The next day, as she trimmed his hair in the bathroom, he asked, “What’s on television tonight, Yen?” As he called her by the other woman’s name again and again over the following weeks, the question of who this woman was consumed her days. Perhaps Yen was a childhood crush, or a fellow student of his graduate school years in Marseille, or even a second wife in Saigon, someone he’d visited on the way home from the university, during those long early evening hours when he told her he was sitting in his office on campus, correcting student exams. She recorded every incident of mistaken identity in his notebooks, but the next morning he would read her forgeries without reaction, and not long afterward would call her Yen once more, until she thought she might burst into tears if she heard that name again.

The woman was most likely a fantasy found by the professor’s wandering mind, or so she told herself after catching him naked from the waist down, kneeling over the bathtub and scrubbing furiously at his pants and underwear under a jet of hot water. Glaring over his shoulder, the professor had screamed, “Get out!” She jumped back, slamming the bathroom door in her haste. Never before had the professor lost such control of himself, or yelled at her, not even in those first days after coming to southern California, when they’d eaten from food stamps, gotten housing assistance, and worn secondhand clothes donated by the parishioners of St. Albans. That was true love, she thought, not giving roses but going to work every day and never once complaining about teaching Vietnamese to so-called heritage learners, immigrant and refugee students who already knew the language but merely wanted an easy grade.

Not even during the most frightening time of her life, when they were lost on the great azure plain of the sea, rolling unbroken to the horizon, did the professor raise his voice. By the fifth evening, the only sounds besides the waves slapping at the hull were children whimpering and adults praying to God, Buddha, and their ancestors. The professor hadn’t prayed. Instead, he had stood at the ship’s bow as if he were at his lectern, the children huddled together at his knees for protection against the evening wind, and told them lies. “You can’t see it even in daylight,” he’d said, “but the current we’re traveling on is going straight to the Philippines, the way it’s done since the dawn of time.” He repeated his story so often even she allowed herself to believe it, until the afternoon of the seventh day, when they saw, in the distance, the rocky landing strip of a foreign coast. Nesting upon it were the huts of a fishing village, seemingly composed of twigs and grass, brooded over by a fringe of mangroves. At the sight of land, she had thrown herself into the professor’s arms, knocking his glasses askew, and sobbed openly for the first time in front of her startled children. She was so seized by the ecstasy of knowing that they would all live that she had blurted out “I love you.” It was something she had never said in public and hardly ever in private, and the professor, embarrassed by their children’s giggles, had only smiled and adjusted his glasses. His embarrassment only deepened once they reached land, which the locals informed them was the north shore of eastern Malaysia.