The Journey Prize Stories 25 (9 page)

Among the toys is one the children don’t know what to do with. It is the size of a tennis ball, but it doesn’t bounce. Josephine cannot tell them what it is. She shows it to Paul.

“It’s a heart,” he says.

“It looks deformed.”

“No. It’s the real thing, more or less.” It’s a model of a five-year-old’s heart, for medical school. The object looks like a toy, with the aorta, veins, and arteries rendered in a brightly-coloured plastic.

Some child fished it out from Paul’s top desk drawer. It belonged to Paul’s late father, once the chief of surgery at Mount Royal Hospital in Montréal. His specialty was mending the hearts of babies and little children. If you were a youngster in Montréal during the 1960s, and if you had heart troubles, then the chances were good that you knew Paul’s father. He also taught in academies in Lyon and Paris, where Paul spent his childhood summers. Paul never thought his accent was Parisian, but if Josephine thinks so, then this was how he picked it up.

With a father like that, Paul became an engineer. Otherwise he would merely be a sparrow walking in the footprints of a
bear. He thought he would actually design things the world had never seen, which was better. For what was a surgeon but a glorified mechanic, simply maintaining the designs of a greater creator?

Nobody told him when he dreamed of designing bridges, that Paul would end up stamping drawings for retaining walls in residential subdivisions. Nobody told him that the materials of his trade would be modest lengths of Allan Block and shotcrete over boulder stone, not miles of big bright steel.

If only he saw the potential of retaining walls, these modest structures. Because something small can fail just as spectacularly as something big. Nobody told Paul this either.

The day he left engineering was the day his father died, and he left Montréal soon after. If asked why he would trade Montréal for Vancouver, the Canadiens for the Canucks, Paul will never mention all the strangers he met in Montréal whose first question to him was whether he was his father’s son. He will never mention the last straw, that woman he picked up at a bar in the Old Quarter, that night in his apartment when, in tearful gratitude, she lifted the floating bottom of her left breast to show Paul the scar that his father had left on her as a child. He will not speak of the odd satisfaction he gets for being paid in Vancouver to teach something that he never really had to learn.

And anyway, he still keeps his Canadiens key chain.

The statue of General Tran is light and hollow. Thuong could have carried it himself down Fleming Street to the bus stop on Kingsway, but got Christian to help him. It is time for the boy to taste labour.

Thuong and the boy carry the statue outside in repose facing skyward. The boy has the General by his heels while Thuong cradles his upper shoulders with his palms. The boy has to walk backwards. As soon as Christian turns his head behind him so that he can see the way ahead, Thuong stops.

“Don’t lose your focus,” says Thuong. “Keep your eyes on me.”

Neighbours stare from their yards as the pair make their way gingerly down the sidewalk. Thuong has walked this path many times before, but now it feels much longer. He starts to count the number of blocks.

Sweat forms around the boy’s temples. It’s his mother’s fault again, putting on so many layers of clothes. “Don’t you dare drop it,” says Thuong, and the boy nods. Four blocks, five blocks, six, and he sees the sweat come down the boy’s face. Or is it tears?

At the bus stop they set the General back on his feet. Thuong strokes his son’s ear. “Well done,” he says, just in time to see the bus with the twin sparkles of its B.C. Hydro livery.

They get off after only a couple of stops. The outside of the temple looks like an auto-body shop, with its corrugated siding and flat rooftop. The inside smells otherworldly, but what Thuong first thinks is incense is actually plaster dust. The space was used briefly as a Tae Kwan Do
dojo
, but the business was unprofitable. The lowered rents have provided an opportunity for the Vietnamese community’s first Buddhist temple.

The abbot greets Thuong with a hug. “We’re still renovating,” he says.

“It’s already better than gathering to pray in someone’s basement.”

The monk laughs. “It has been too long,” he says. “Are you here for a favour or a blessing?”

“Not a favour, but I could always use a blessing. I am here to make you an offering. General Tran Hung Dao.”

“That is a gift no man can give.”

Thuong takes the monk outside, where Christian is guarding the statue. The General looks no more out of place on this intersection with its gas stations than the monk in saffron robes.

“You’ll agree he is entitled to a more suitable venue than my study.”

“But we are making a house for Lord Buddha,” says the monk.

“Of course. The temple won’t be usurped from Buddha. Perhaps give General Tran a small space for people who want to make him an offering as well. You’ll get more visitors.”

The monk shuffles his sandals. “If we let the General in, then who’s next? We’ll open a floodgate to more statues of deities.”

“You shouldn’t worry.”

“This is to be a serious place of contemplation and enlightenment.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want it to become a place where men go to make offerings to get rich, or where women go to light incense to get pregnant.”

“It shouldn’t come to that,” says Thuong. “Besides, it’s the deity Me Sanh that the women pray to in order to get pregnant, not Tran Hung Dao.”

“I suppose you’d want a share of the offerings,” says the monk.

This makes Thuong smile. “I could always use a blessing.”

The monk agrees to reserve a small space to General Tran, perhaps near the front door to ward off evil spirits. Before
leaving, he gives Thuong a box of joss sticks made out of the best aloeswood from the home country. Josephine should be relieved.

It is turning out to be a fine afternoon, and so Thuong walks home the whole way, carrying Christian on his shoulders.

“What would you do without me?” says Josephine. Today she has untangled two girls fighting over a toy, consoled another boy, wiped another tear, kissed another bruise, plugged, once again, the floodgate of hell.

“I don’t know,” says Paul.

“Maybe you can pay me a salary.”

Paul smiles. “As if that was possible.”

“Then private lessons, for my son?”

Paul nods. He has noticed how much further Christian has advanced than the other children. Josephine has been tutoring Christian at home. While the others are still learning single words, Christian is already making sentences with properly conjugated verbs.

“You’re a teacher too,” says Paul. “What could I offer?”

“Your voice,” she says. “Your Parisian accent. Not my Vietnamese French.”

“Your accent is fine,” he says, but puts up only weak resistance.

Paul takes from his desk Sempé’s
Le Petit Nicolas
. They find a booth in a White Spot down the street. Josephine orders all three of them mushroom burgers even though Paul didn’t ask for one. He has a sandwich at home. But when he smells the mushrooms, he is silently grateful for it.

Paul gets Christian to read the Sempé. He has heard
Christian’s voice rise above the others during class, but has never heard it alone in close quarters. Although Paul cannot take credit for the boy’s sudden grasp of the language, he can hear in Christian faint echoes of his own street Joual, something he has been trying to purge since his first summer in Paris, the way he still runs his words together. Christian’s voice is also layered with a wavering musicality – the Vietnamese accent that Josephine has imparted on her son and now wants to get rid of.

“He reads beautifully,” says Paul.

“Then it’s something worth working on?” says Josephine. Paul nods, and Josephine sees the little frays on Paul’s collared shirt. If only she had the money, she would buy Paul a new one.

The Doberman breaks through the wooden fence post while Josephine is picking mint leaves in the backyard. The landlord forbids any garden, but has never noticed the mint grove that she planted. The dog heads straight for Josephine, who is on her knees with her back turned. She does not register the Doppler effect of the oncoming muzzle.

Thuong gets in the way just before the dog lunges. She has no idea where Thuong came from, but that’s nothing new. He slams his thin bare arm lengthwise between the dog’s open jaws, like a crow bar, to the back of the dog’s mouth. The dog’s teeth drip saliva, then blood. No longer barking, it wheezes like a broken flute and retreats back through the gap in the fence.

“Your arm.”

“It’s nothing,” says Thuong. “It’s the dog’s blood. I broke its jaw.” Still, there are teeth marks on Thuong’s arm which Josephine has to clean up. The noodles she made are now waterlogged, wasted.

The problem is not Thuong’s loyalty but his wisdom in exercising it. Like when Josephine had heard a loud clapping of thunder and climbed up to the rooftop of her school in Saigon to watch the firefight in the distant jungle. She had been up there so long, standing in the rain, that Thuong went after her and carried her back down, thinking that she was going to jump off. On the last flight of stairs he tripped and they both fell. He broke her fall and his arm in the process.

Or the time he came home with a broken thumb. He said he had just won them a flight to Hong Kong on a diplomatic carrier by beating a Colonel at cards. Later, Josephine was told not to pay attention to the rumours that Thuong had shot a private because the Colonel had ordered him to, and was sent away to shut him up. “Don’t question fortune,” Thuong said. He never explained how he broke his thumb.

Or that night in Hong Kong when Thuong had a crisis of conscience and jumped into the harbour to swim back to Vietnam to fight for his country. The Hong Kong coast guard fished him out and found nothing on him except for his toothbrush and a wallet with Josephine’s picture.

It has become routine for them to convene after class at the White Spot. Paul looks forward to the post-classroom calm of listening to Christian’s lone voice as he reads, helping to prune the boy’s voice to a sharper, truer self.