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

had been so strong that they abandoned even memory. Yet from their talk she could not sense any strong political opposition, just a fear that had taken hold of them over the course of several months and propelled them to a bay one night. Her father had not been involved politically; he had, in fact, avoided the army. Her mother was the only doctor in a small clinic. They were part, to be sure, of the striving middle class who felt themselves vulnerable under the communist government—Tuan had had hopes of being on the ground floor of real-estate development in Da Nang after the American victory. But in all this they were ordinary people living an ordinary life who were suddenly caught, the way war catches anyone, without bearings; the way war dismantles all sensibility except fear. Only when they arrived in Toronto would they fully construct their departure as resistance to communism. That is the story the authorities needed in order to fill out the appropriate forms. They needed terror, and indeed Tuan and Cam had had that; they needed loss, and Tuan and Cam had had that too. And perhaps with this encouragement, this coaxing of their story into a coherent wholeness, they were at least officially comforted that the true horror was not losing their boy but the forces of communism, Vietnam itself, which they were battling. Whatever the official story, her mother’s cache of photographs told another, a parallel story, a set of possible stories, an exquisite corpse.

There were two photographs of Quy. One as a tiny baby on his back, surprised by the flash of the camera. Then another, the one that her mother sent around the world in her quest to find him. A small, intelligent-looking boy, curious. Cam had made many copies, which she sent out with her letters. When Tuyen was little, these photographs littered the house. Their subject was the source of strange outbursts and crying. Over the years the photograph was less and less in evidence until it had virtually disappeared. It was not on the mantel of the house in Richmond Hill. It lay in the recesses of her mother’s room now with the baby picture. Well beyond the time that he could possibly still look like the curious little boy in the photograph, Cam had sent it along with her letters nevertheless. Tuyen hadn’t seen the picture in years.

Tuyen was sitting in the dark; she still hadn’t turned on any light. Only the glow of the one good burner of the stove could be seen. The pot of potatoes was crackling as if the water had all evaporated. A faint tinge of burning starch could be discerned. Tuyen ran to the stove, rescuing the potatoes from parching. The handle of the pot was hot, and she let out a sound of pain but didn’t let go until she’d put the pot in the sink. She scraped the potatoes out, putting them into a bowl, poured salt and butter over them, and mashed them by the light of the refrigerator. She closed the fridge and walked to the lubaio, and leaning against it she slowly ate the potatoes. Then she turned the lights on and went to the darkroom.

Tuyen slid the negative into the enlarger, suddenly in a hurry to see what she had captured with her camera—what secret of her brother’s. Perhaps she was too suspicious; perhaps she had simply seen her brother in his life, and this was the texture of a moment that she had apprehended and shot. She worked quickly, eyeballing the paper, figuring out the range of light, then deftly, one after the other, she printed the photographs in sixteen-by-twenty. When she was done, it was way past three in the morning. She wished she had had that smoke from Oku and Carla. They were across the hall, playing music. She could hear them giggling now and then. She hoped Oku wasn’t trying to move in on Carla, given that his hopes for Jackie were fading. A momentary panic struck her, then her vanity kicked in. No—Oku did not stand a chance, she thought. He could not begin to unravel those microwaves of kinetic energy that were Carla’s.

She strung a line across from the lubaio to the window and pinned the pictures to it. It had been dawning on her ever since she had taken the first shot, the one with Binh’s face and the stranger’s back, and now it was apparent.

“Shit, shit,” she heard herself say, looking at the pictures in sequence. The figure raising its hand, then turning, something like anger on Binh’s face, then a smile. She was convinced she saw a rough wiriness there in the body. Then the face, innocent, as a ghost’s. But unmistakably the face of an intelligent-looking boy. The face her mother, Cam, had coveted and sent all over Southeast Asia and Europe. Quy. Why did that face resemble this one? And why did Binh and the man appear to be in a quarrel? She felt disoriented, drawn to the babyness of the face against the body springy as violence. All the structures and translations of her childhood swept her, all the uncomfortable moments of explaining her parents to the world; all the insomnia endured, the regret her parents had translated into efficiency, all dwelled in the face of the man so much like the boy. Quy.

EIGHTEEN

“LOOK, ORNETTE PLAYS all this dissonance, right, and he plays it so long you’re out of breath and you think that you can’t stand it any longer and then … listen now, listen now, right …”

Ornette Coleman was playing “The Jungle Is a Skyscraper” on the CD player. Oku’s face was glowing. “Then when you can’t take it any more, right, when you have had so much confusion, but it’s not confusion at all, you see … but anyway, then he gives you the melody, see, and guess what, guess what? Then in the middle of the melody, which you wanted, right, you find