Blood and Soap Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Linh Dinh

  First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  eISBN: 978-1-60980-176-2

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Prisoner with a Dictionary

  Our Northernmost Governor

  “!”

  The Town of the Hidden Coffin

  Those Who Are No Longer with Us

  Our Newlyweds

  Eight Plots

  One-Sentence Stories

  Man Carrying Books

  Viet Cong University

  Elvis Phong Is Dead!

  A Plane Ride

  A Floating Community

  Key Words

  13

  Food Conjuring

  Food Conjuring II

  $

  A Happy Couple

  These Ants

  A Moral Decision

  Tiny Spaces

  Murder or Suicide?

  Losers

  The Fire Escape

  What’s Showing?

  Two Intellectuals

  Stewart Crenshaw

  An Idea of Home

  Costa San Giorgio

  The Self-Portraitist of Signa

  Luisa Loves Her Husband

  Parmigiano Cheese

  A Worshipper of Beauty

  A Moving Exhibition of Reptiles

  Two Kings

  My Grandfather the Exceptional

  Acknowledgments

  The following stories have been previously published: “!,” “Costa San Giorgio,” “13,” and “The Self-Portraitist of Signa” in American Poetry Review; “Our Newlyweds” and “Prisoner with a Dictionary” in New American Writing; “A Floating Community” in South; “A Moral Decision” and “Key Words” in the webzine Tool; “Eight Plots” in Interlope; “One-Sentence Stories” in Sentence; “Food Conjuring” in Michigan Review; “Parmigiano Cheese” in Van Gogh’s Ear: and “My Grandfather the Exceptional” in Tinfish.

  Many of these stories were written while my wife and I were living in Certaldo, Italy, as guests of the town of Certaldo and the International Parliament of Writers. My wife and I would like to thank the IPW and all the citizens of Certaldo for their amazing hospitality—particularly mayor Rosalba Spini and Cristiana Borghini. I’d also like to thank Dan Simon for his friendship and for his steadfast support of my work over the years. Every writer should be this lucky.

  Prisoner with a Dictionary

  And so a young man was thrown in prison and found in his otherwise empty cell a foreign dictionary. It was always dark in there and he couldn’t even tell that it was a dictionary at first. He was not an intellectual type and had never even owned a dictionary in his life. He was far from stupid, however, but had an ironic turn of mind that could squeeze out a joke from most tragic situations. He could also be very witty around certain women. In any case, he did not know what to with this nearly worthless book but to use it as a stool and as a pillow. Periodically he also tore out pages from it to wipe himself. Soon, however, out of sheer boredom, he decided to look at this dictionary. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light by now and he could make out all the words with relative ease in that eternal twilight. Although he was not familiar with the foreign language, and did not even know what language it was, he suddenly felt challenged to learn it. His main virtue, and the main curse of his life, was the ability to follow through on any course of action once he had set his mind to it. This book represented the last problem, the only problem, he would ever solve. The prisoner began by picking out words at random and scrutinizing their definitions. Of course, each definition was made up of words entirely unknown to him. Undeterred, he would look up all the words in the definition, which lead him to even more unfathomable words. To define “man,” for example, the prisoner had to look up not only “human” and “person” but also “opposable” and “thumb.” To define “thumb,” he had to look up not only “short” and “digit” but also “thick” and “of” and “a” and “the.” To define “the,” he had to look up “that” and “a” (again) and “person” (again) and “thing” and “group.” Being alone in his cell night and day, without any distraction, allowed the prisoner to concentrate with such rigor that soon he could retain and cross index hundreds of definitions in his head. The dictionary had well over a thousand pages but the prisoner was determined to memorize every definition on every page. He cringed at the thought that he had once torn out pages to wipe himself. These pages now represented to him gaps in his eventual knowledge. Because they were gone forever he would never be able to know all the words in that particular language. Still, it was with an elation bordering on madness that he woke up each morning, eager to eat up more words. Like many people, he equated the acquisition of a vast vocabulary with knowledge, even with wisdom, and so he could feel his stature growing by the day, if not by the second. Although he did not know what the words meant, what they referred to in real life, he reasoned that he understood these words because he knew their definitions. And because he was living inside this language all the time, like a fetus thriving inside a womb, there were times when he felt sure he could guess at the general implications of a word, whether it was a plant or an animal, for example, or whether it indicated something positive or negative. But his guesses were always wrong, of course. Because “bladder” sounded somehow vast and nebulous to the prisoner, he thought that it must have something to do with the outdoors, most likely the weather, a gust of wind or a torrential rain or a bolt of lightning. “Father,” with its forlorn, exasperated tone, made the prisoner think of something dead and putrid: a corpse or a heap of garbage. He guessed that “homicide” was a flower. He thought “July” meant “August.” The prisoner was also justifiably proud of his pronunciation, which was remarkably crisp and confident, the stresses more often than not falling on the right syllables. If he were to speak on the phone, the prisoner could almost be mistaken for a native speaker, albeit one of the lower class. But if the prisoner was convinced he was gaining a new language he was also surely losing one because he had, by this time, forgotten nearly all the words of his native language. By this time he could no longer name any part of the anatomy, even the most basic, hand, nose, face, mouth, etc, and so his own body was becoming vague, impersonal, unreal. Although he was surrounded by filth, he could no longer conjure up the word “filth.” The only word that came readily to his tongue, automatically, unbidden, was “prison” because that was the last thing he thought of each night, and the first thing he thought of each morning. His dreams had become entirely devoid of conversations or thoughts. Often they were just a series of images or abstract patches of colors. Sometimes they were also made up entirely of sounds, a cacophony of his own voice reciting bits of definitions. Even in his worst nightmare, he could no longer
shout out “mother!” in his own language. But this loss never bothered him, he barely noticed it, because he was convinced he was remaking himself anew. As he was being squeezed out of the world, the only world he had a right to belong in, he thought he was entering a new universe. Perhaps by purging himself of his native language, the prisoner was unconsciously trying to get rid of his horrible past, because, frankly, there was not a single word of his native tongue that did not evoke, for the prisoner, some horrible experience or humiliation. Perhaps he could sense that his native tongue was the very author of his horrible life. But these are only conjectures, we do not know for sure. In any case nights and days the prisoner shouted out definitions to himself. If one were to press one’s ear against the thick iron door at midnight, one would hear, for example: “an animal with a long, thin tail that commonly infests buildings.” Or “a deep and tender feeling for an arch enemy.” Or “a shuddering fear and disgust accompanied by much self loathing.” With so many strange words and definitions accumulating, surely some profound knowledge, some revelation, was at hand? What is a revelation, after all, but the hard-earned result of an exceptional mind working at peak capacity? The prisoner was thankful to be given a chance to concentrate unmolested for such a continuous length of time. He felt himself victorious: condemned to an empty cell, he had been robbed of the world, but through a heroic act of will, he had remade the universe. He had (nearly) everything because he had (nearly) all the words of an entire language. But the truth is the prisoner had regained nothing. He only thought that way, of course, because he had to think that way. After decades of unceasing mental exertion, the only fruit of the prisoner’s remarkable labor, the only word he ever acquired for sure, was “dictionary,” simply because it was printed on the cover of a book he knew for sure was a dictionary. For even as he ran across the definition for “prisoner,” and was memorizing it by heart, he didn’t even know that he was only reading about himself.

  Our Northernmost Governor

  If it’s true that each country is reflected by its government, then we must be the most dishonest and idiotic people in the world. In any case, we are the most superstitious. Like savages or schizophrenics, we see signs everywhere. We believe the universe is a web of causes and effects decipherable through magic and intuition. If eleven clouds were aligned in the sky and our soccer team won a match, for example, then these two extremely rare phenomena had to be related. We distrust all sciences.

  As a rational man, a lawyer and a disciple of Cicero, however, I can step away from the common stupidities of my fellow countrymen. I don’t believe you must squash the head of a snake when you kill it to prevent it from biting you three days later. Nor do I believe that buttons must be removed from the shirt of a corpse to allow it to reach the afterlife. Nor do I believe that oral sex erases short-term memories. (Our prostitutes don’t mind “playing jazz,” it is said, because they want their short-term memories erased.) But a man cannot divorce himself from the ethos of his homeland completely. I’ve had a few incidents in my life that can only be deemed miraculous. I’ll give you just one example. This happened nine years ago:

  I had just finished a meal at Fang’s, a Chinese restaurant downtown, when I opened a newspaper to see my father’s face smiling at me. Dressed in a badly cut suit, he was about to cut the ribbon at some ceremony. A glance at the caption revealed the man to be the governor of our northernmost province. Still, his resemblance to my father was so uncanny that I decided to cut the image out to show it to him later that evening. This act became so imperative that I demanded, in a very gruff voice, that the waiter brought me a pair of scissors immediately.

  The governor’s face resembled my father’s in every detail, down to the chipped tooth and misaligned eyebrows. He even wore my father’s favorite paisley tie. We’ll have a good laugh over this, I thought as I waited impatiently for the waiter to return with a pair of scissors.

  Although my father and I did not always enjoy the warmest relationship, we did get along and we did love each other. As he grew more dependent on me, I became more tolerant of him. I gradually learnt to forgive all the cruelties he had inflicted on us when the old man was the man of the house. How he had forced his wife and five children to be vegetarians until, literally overnight, he decided to become a meat eater. After that we were made to eat pork almost every night. He did not let me date a girl until I was twenty-one. I even learnt to forget the fact that he had kept many mistresses, a situation that humiliated my mother when she was alive.

  My father also crammed us constantly with a million tidbits of useless information. At every family gathering, he would blurt out weird sentences such as: “Do you know that Leonard da Vinci wrote backward?” Or: “An elephant hair can be used as a toothpick!” Or: “If a panda gives birth to twins, she would only raise one, and left the other to die!” Or: “The flags of Monaco and Indonesia are exactly the same!” He simply assumed that anything he happened to know or cared about was relevant to everyone else’s well being, but perhaps that’s not such an unusual presumption.

  But, like I said, we did get along and we did love each other. We had several interests in common. We were both soccer fanatics and went to the stadium for every important match. My father was something of a wordsmith and came up with many memorable phrases to describe his favorite players. A midfielder was said to have “the dreamlike tenacity of a marathon runner.” He praised our national goalie for having “the grunting concentration of a weightlifter.” As for the opposing team, he loved to throw batteries at them.

  We also enjoyed an occasional game of chess and a snifter or two of cognac in the evening.

  What we did not have in common was any physical resemblance. A few relatives even suspected I was a bastard. A ridiculous rumor. My mother was absolutely faithful.

  When the waiter returned with the scissors, I grabbed them eagerly from his hand. To my chagrin, the young man did not go away but stood where he was to watch me cut the image out. He even asked me impudently, “Someone you know, Sir?”

  Maybe it was because I was being observed, but my hand trembled as I clipped. I felt lightheaded and my eyes blurred. The waiter seemed to enjoy my nervousness and even started to whistle. As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father’s likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world. I had just committed patricide. The waiter snatched the scissors from my hand and walked briskly away. I thought for a moment he was going to call the police. Sure enough, when I returned home, I found the old man lying dead on the sofa.

  The coroner fixed the time of death between 5 and 6 o’clock, the exact time I spent at the restaurant. I knew in my heart I was a murderer. For years afterwards, I had a recurring nightmare of being strapped to an electric chair. I also had dreams of my father walking through a revolving door or sitting in an airport lounge, smoking a cigar. But how could I resist cutting his image out of the newspaper when the man in the photo had suggested it to me himself by holding a pair of scissors in his hand?

  In my desperation to cast off guilt, I came up with an alternative explanation: since a man cannot be in two places at the same time, my father had to die before I showed him the photo. Conversely, if I had intended to show the governor a photo of my father, then the governor would have died.

  I decided, finally, that my father’s death was not so much a murder but a suicide, or at least an assisted suicide. Bored, constantly drunk, and in poor health, he wanted his life to end but he did not have the courage to kill himself. He needed me to help him. Since he could not ask me directly, he caused the photo of our northernmost governor to appear in the newspaper to entice me into killing him.

  “!”

  In The Workers newspaper of October 10, 2000, there was a curious item about a fake doctor. A certain Ngo Thi Nghe had been practicing medicine for over ten years on a false degree, which she procured, it is speculated, by killing its original owner. She had all the accoutrements of medicine, a white suit, a the
rmometer, a bedpan, a syringe, many bottles of pills, but no formal knowledge of medicine. In fact, she had never gotten out of the eighth grade. The mortality rate of her patients, however, was no higher than usual, and she was even defended by some of her clients, after all the facts had come out, for saving their lives. “A most compassionate doctor,” said one elderly gentleman.

  There are so many scams nowadays that this case drew no special attention. Every day there are news reports of fake lawyers, fake architects, fake professors, and fake politicians doing business without the proper license or training. A most curious case in recent memory, however, is that of Ho Muoi, who was accused of being a fake English teacher. From perusing innumerable newspaper accounts, I was able to piece together the following:

  Ho Muoi was born in 1952 in Ky Dong village. His family made firecrackers until they were banned because of the war. Thereafter the father became an alcoholic and left the family. Although Ho Muoi was only six at the time, he knew enough to swear that he would never mention or even think of his father’s name again. His mother supported the children, all five of them, by carrying water and night soil for hire, a backbreaking labor that made her shorter by several inches. She also made meat dumplings that she sold on special occasions.

  Ky Dong Village is known for a festival, held every January 5th, in honor of a legendary general of a mythical king who fought against a real enemy two or three thousand years ago. The festival features a duck-catching demonstration, a wrestling tournament for the boys, a meat dumpling making contest for the girls, and, until it was banned because of the war, a procession of firecrackers.

  Those who’ve witnessed this procession of firecrackers describe a scene where boys and girls and gay men jiggle papier-mâché animals and genitals strung from bamboo sticks amid the smoke and din of a million firecrackers.

  But the excitement from the festival only came once a year. For the rest of the time, the villagers were preoccupied with the tedium and anxieties of daily life. Most of the young men were drafted into the army, sent away and never came back, but the war never came directly to Ky Dong Village.