What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

any air, covered it, and breathed. Exhaled, as if for the first time since entering the room. Her mind ran to her mother in another photograph. A picture of Cam, whose name meant “orange fruit, sweet mountain sunset,” and Tuyen’s two older sisters. Her mother luminous, the two girls laughing. That was long before they left Vietnam, long before Tuyen was born. The picture was on the mantel at the house in Richmond Hill—Tuyen had asked her mother for it, but her mother refused. Then she’d tried to persuade her mother to let her borrow it to make a copy, but her mother still said no, she could not part with it even for a moment. Her father had taken the picture, and whoever developed and printed it wasn’t very good. But her mother’s face and the girls laughing was illumination itself.

Tuyen poured the developer out and poured in the stop bath. This is where that other photographer may have faltered. She, or most probably he, may have done this too quickly, leaving some of the silver on the film or perhaps it was at the next stage. Tuyen emptied the stop and poured in the fixer to clear the negative of all the silver, and then hung the negative to dry on the line strung across the small room. She ducked out of the room, shaking her hands dry. The picture had been taken before Quy was born too. He was the small rise under her mother’s red dress. Red? Why had she assumed red? The photograph was black and white. She had not asked her mother the colour. She must have assumed, she thought now, from the darkish hue and the luminous face. It could just as well have been blue, but Tuyen liked to think of it as red, bursting with life.

Wiping her hands on her skirt, Tuyen realized that she hadn’t changed, she was damp from the rainy walk down Bathurst. She hadn’t put the lights on either, and it was completely dark. “Why is this place so messy?” she heard herself say aloud, then laughed at herself. Carla must be invading her head, she thought. The white drape of the city’s longings seemed illuminated. The lubaio stood erect in the middle of the floor of the main room. She had cut arms into it and had every intention of carving symbols into the whole structure, but for the moment her clothing hung from the arms, along with a bag of onions and another of her beloved potatoes. This to keep them away from the mice. Her futon lay like a messy nest under the window. Her windows faced only the alley, unlike Carla’s windows, which faced both the alley and the street. She changed, gathering desperate pieces of clothing from the floor and the signpost. She felt cold even though it was June and warm. The rain was still falling mistily outside. She wished she had a fire.

There had been another photograph on the mantel in Richmond Hill. Identical except for her father’s presence. And identical except that their features were now tense, the two girls grim. The rise in her mother’s dress was no longer there, and the boy whom it represented was also missing. Someone had taken the photograph of them as they were leaving Chi Ma Wan Camp in Hong Kong. They were among the fortunate. After six months Tuan’s grease-handing had finally paid off and they had left. As awful as the place was, Cam was reluctant to go. She kept expecting the disappeared boy to miraculously disembark from another boat. Tuyen’s mother removed and replaced this picture every so often from the mantel. As if she could not decide whether she admitted or could bear the reality it suggested but that she occasionally had to face.

Tuyen turned the stove on under a pot of water. She poked into the bag of potatoes and gathered three in her hand, peeled and cut them in halves, and put them into the boiling water. For all her apprehension earlier in the day, she felt safe now, the negative of her brother drying in the darkroom, the potatoes boiling on the stove. Uncharacteristically, she hadn’t looked at the strips. She felt safe in that too. She had captured something, she was sure, and she had brought it to her cave. The thought of this studio being her cave amused her. Jackie called it that, and that is what it felt like now. Some early place where the inhabitants had no signs for decorum, no standards for neatness; where they observed an order that was purely utilitarian. The lubaio, the bits of wood, the photographs, the longings were what she brought to the cave to be handled, and thought about, and made into something she could use to create alternate, unexpected realities, exquisite corpses. That’s what Tuan and Cam were, exquisite corpses. Or were they her surrealists and she their composition? Their exquisite corpse? Not she, Binh.

Seeing him across the street in the rain, his arm around the man whose face was like an angel or a ghost or a child, she had made some discovery that she was yet to understand. The two seemed both real and metaphoric. She guessed that’s why she hadn’t looked at the negatives yet. She was still absorbing the images, freshly. She knew that by the time she looked at the images on the negative they would acquire other significances, and by the time she printed them they would be art, open to a thousand interpretations. There was one interpretation that she needed to catch. The one that had led her memory to her mother’s photographs disappearing and reappearing.

How many times had she rummaged through her mother’s possessions, going over the signs of their former life? There was only so much they could bring with them, of course, but her mother’s sentimentality could not have allowed her to come away with nothing. Perhaps their opposition to the new Vietnam