The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [25]
"He could first get some experience by helping Ma out with her business. I mean with her chores in the kitchen. Of course, Ma's kitchen is nothing like the Governor-General's," Anh Minh quickly added, upon seeing the glint that had cracked open the Old Man's eyes. "At most, he could learn from Má how to hold a knife, how to chop and peel, work his way around a hot stove. He'll learn the finer points when he comes to work with me. Má can just get him started with the basics," Anh Minh proposed, hoping that our mother was not listening behind the closed door, hoping that her heart was still whole. No matter how many steamed packets of rice she sold, my brother knew that the Old Man would never tolerate it being called a "business." That was his word. Anh Minh deferred to him even though he knew that it was the proceeds from our mother's kitchen that kept rice on our table, that the Old Man's income only kept his bottles from going dry. "Can't be helped," the Old Man had said. "A necessary business expense," he claimed.
"As for the French, I can teach him enough to impress Monsieur and Madame, but I'd have to begin now. Every day once he's done with Ma, he can come to the Governor-General's. I'll teach him a few words during my breaks. Anyway, it'll do him good to see how a real kitchen is run."
A smile appeared on the Old Man's face, like a sudden blistering of the skin. Again, his oldest son was making him proud. Minh the Sous Chef was thinking like a man, thinking of how to turn a profit from a loss, the Old Man thought. He was right. Anh Minh was thinking like a man, thinking of how to hide away a pain he could not bear. Anh Minh sent his words swirling through the Old Man's house, searching. They found for me there a room that the Old Man never deigned to enter, the only room in the house with a dirt floor. "Good enough for her," the Old Man had said, casting a sideways glance at my mother. The gesture had the same careless force as the spittle that shot from his mouth.
The last time I saw my oldest brother, he revealed to me the heroic deeds of his spent words, how they foretold the story of my life, kitchen-bound and adrift at sea. "I have given you everything," Anh Minh said, "and you have wasted it."
Both of us were raised by the Old Man, after all. Anh Minh, like me, was always looking for something more, and he had found it, I am afraid, in the darkness of the Governor-General's kitchen. Anh Minh, what did you think you would find there? Chef Blériot and Madame's secretary, a bit of fallen cleavage, a knot of lace underclothing wrapped around her bloodless ankles, a bit of sex to leverage into something more? My dear brother, I did not waste the life that you gave me. I traded it away for Blériot's lips counting down the notches of my spine, parting at the small of my back, for my fingers wrapped inside the locks of his hair, guiding his mouth as it arched my back, as he brought us both heavenward without shame, as he made me cry "Mercy, please have mercy!"
The last time I saw Anh Minh, he stood with a fingernail moon at his back, with his heart in his throat. "How can I save you now?" he asked, repeating the only words that he had left for me that night.
6
WHILE WE WERE ABOARD the Niobe, laboring the distance between Saigon and Marseilles, Bão told me about a sailor who came from a family of basket weavers going back many generations. In the beginning their ancestors had tried to sow their land with rice shoots, but the water hyacinths that grew first in those flooded fields refused to give up their claim. For three seasons, the family struggled and the water hyacinths won. When they looked around them, these people felt mocked, cursed even, because all of the neighboring plots were a rich rice-paddy green. Desperate and starving, the sailor's ancestors said so many prayers to their ancestors that finally they received a response. The matriarch of the family one morning announced that she had