The windows were peeled to the smell of exhaust and spices. I shivered and pulled on my jacket, careful of my bandage-swathed arm. Outside, motorbikes and pedestrians outpaced us, then the train picked up speed and Hanoi’s slums dissolved into glimmering green paddies. I looked at the passengers on the hard wooden benches around me: a smiling elderly woman who offers me peanuts, a man and his sleeping son, then a twenty-something-year-old woman who said, “Hello. Where you from?”
“Canada,” I said. “Where are you from?”
She laughed. “Vietnam!” She told me her name was Phuong and that she taught French in Hanoi. I asked her where she was going and she said, “To home village for wedding.”
“Are you getting married?”
“No,” she said. “My cousin get married. Are you married?”
“No.”
Phuong’s eyes lit up. “Where you going?” she asked.
“Ninh Binh.”
“Then you come with me.”
“To Ninh Binh?”
“To wedding.”
“In Ninh Binh?”
“Near Ninh Binh.”
Now, this is the moment: you randomly meet someone with a friendly proposition in a poor country and you hate yourself for being so jaded, for wondering the unavoidable, which is: are this person’s intentions good?
While Phuong’s teeth were crooked, her coal eyes looked sincere so said, “Great. I’ll come.”
Two hours later, we arrived in Ninh Binh where limestone karst formations hang stark grey cliffs over rice paddies, their summits a tangle of verdancy. At the station, we hired motorbikes and drove past the market, through the crumbling French town, then onto a pothole-riddled road, my rucksack jolting against my spine. After a few minutes of farmland, we turned onto a dirt path, went through a gate, and arrived at a cluster of low pastel houses. We dismounted and paid the drivers. Phuong said, “Follow me.”
We entered a courtyard shaded by the overhanging limbs of fruit trees: papaya, banana, mango… Inside, a mangy dog slept on a blue-tiled floor, surrounded by the house’s only furniture: two beds, a table, and an altar cluttered with Buddhas and family photographs obscured by winding plumes of incense. Phuong pointed to one of the beds and said, “You sleep there with grandfather.”
“With grandfather?” I asked.
“With grandfather. Grandmother sleep there,” she said, pointing to the other bed.
I told her I could just sleep on the floor and she looked offended so I said, “Never mind. I’ll sleep with grandfather.”
Just then, a stooped man in faded olive drabs entered: Phuong’s grandfather. We bowed, shook hands, and smiled. While Phuong told him about me, I took off my jacket, and like lightening, a dozen flies found my bandaged arm. The old man spoke and Phuong said, “He ask what happen.”
“I was driving a motorbike in Sapa,” I said, miming. “It was my first time. I crashed into a waterfall.”
“What is waterfall?”
“You know,” I said, “water falling, like on a mountain.”
Phuong translated and the old man looked at me like I was a fool. Clucking his tongue, he pulled a wooden trunk from under his bed and began rummaging.
“My grandfather fought the French,” Phuong told me. “He was captured, tortured: they broke his knees with bottles.”
The old man straightened up, and I have to admit, when he came at me with a tattered Vietnamese flag and a large rusty machete, I felt afraid. Then, he put a corner of the flag in his semi-toothed mouth, held another in his left hand, and with the machete, he cut away a long strip of red cloth. He dropped the machete and fixed me with his cataract-clouded eyes. Then, smiling, he tied the cloth around my wounded arm and spoke.
Phuong translated: “France, America, Canada, Vietnam—there is no difference. Grandfather says we are all good friends now.”
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Shawn Otis
