By Doan Le

My sister passed on after suffering a heart attack. Oh, my dear sister, you sometimes joked that it would be strange if your heart wasn’t broken into pieces after the life you have led. I always understood that behind that jest was the broken-hearted truth. Two marriages and both ended in failure – I couldn’t help but feel that you gambled with your heart and lost.

My sister came to live with me in Do Son after she turned fifty and got fed up with life’s disappointments. Time flew by in our small apartment, two old maids co-existing in a tranquility tinged only by the sadness that comes with knowing life’s small pleasures are all that are left. She became absorbed in painting, spending her days hunched over a canvas. Her two daughters were married and lived with their husbands and children. Occasionally they would come to visit for a day or two and then disappear, making the apartment seem empty without the cheerful chaos of visitors. Sometimes after these visits she would abandon her painting and wander the house listlessly.

I remember a conversation I had with her only a few days before her heart attack. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now it weighs on me like an ill omen.

"I keep all my letters and souvenirs in an iron box. If anything should ever happen to me, I want you to burn everything along with my body," she said.

"Why don’t you just destroy them now?"

"Don’t be silly. They are the remnants of my life. Who has the heart to watch that turn to ashes?"

"How complicated."

I had always known she kept an iron box wedged inside the drawer of her desk, but I had never been curious enough to look inside. It seemed strange to hear her talk about it.

I returned to Do Son after organising the funeral with her children. It was hard to believe that my sister was really gone. I had gotten used to her quiet presence in the house – a wandering shadow among her paint-splattered brushes and ghostly white canvases. Now the house was filled with a dead silence. I walked by her paintings, but for a long time I wasn’t brave enough to look at them. Instead I murmured a few verses I remembered from somewhere – like an incantation or an offering:

So desolate and deserted is the beach this afternoon,

I wander about and you’re pensive with sadness.

I remembered how high-spirited my sister was in those days.

"Do you think I’m sad? No, not on your life!" She would say, jutting out her chin stubbornly.

Now I found my own words failed in the face of my loss. I lit incense and opened the iron box, my eyes burning from the smoke and the tears that were already falling. The box was full of letters. At first it seemed an inadequate record of her life. "Was that all that my sister had left?" I thought to myself. "Five bunches of letters stacked neatly in an iron box?"

Then I looked more closely and noticed that she had arranged them in chronological order. As I leafed through the letters, I noticed that each bunch was from a different person and they were sometimes written years apart. I looked at the names on the envelopes and realised that the iron box was full of love letters. Some of the names were familiar to me, but I was taken aback that my sister had an entire life that I knew nothing about.

It turned out that she was a romantic, not the cold, lonely old maid I had thought. Each bunch of letters was wrapped carefully in paper, on which she had inscribed a few short lines of "tribute" to her failed love affairs. I began to understand how my sister had been tormented by her passion and how much there was that I didn’t know about her.

But I could not understand why she had parted with those men in the past. She was not supercilious. But I could see that when she wrote the letters she had been middle-aged. I wondered if she had become too set in her ways.

I carefully unfolded the letters which were crumpled and faded – like yellowed paper in a museum. I imagined my sister trembling as she opened them, reading them over and over again. I knew that the passionate words hadn’t been written for me, but I was touched to read them.

I began to see that is was men who wrote the glamorous love letters – not women at all. Their letters were like spells written to enchant her. I understood why she didn’t have the heart to burn these love charms.

Soon my attention was caught by a group of letters scattered loosely on top of the tightly-bound bundles. They were in my sister’s handwriting and I wondered who she had written them to. The paper was new and barely-creased; I saw that they had been written only a few months ago when she attended the national art exhibition. One letter was still unfinished:

"My dear wandering writer,

I would be lying to myself if I said I truly believed none of this was serious. We joke a bit to make life less dull. We tried to believe our jests in order to forget our pain and to regain control, but I now know that is impossible. The more I regain my composure, the greater my love for you seems to grow and the more I understand that I have been waiting for you all my life. My love, please tell me how I lost my soul to you? I have loved before, even with all my heart, but I have never lost myself so completely before. You once told me that love is like the crest of a wave rushing at you and total surrender is as terrifying as being plunged into the depths of the ocean. I feel I am borne away on that tide and am helpless to resist.

My darling, where are you now? Do you know that every day I wait only to hear your voice on the telephone? And when you call I am so overcome that I can’t even remember what we have said to each other. I’m, hopeless, aren’t I?

Is there anything more to say? We know everything that needs to be said without speaking the words. The only thing left is the deep emptiness of missing you. Yes, I miss you terribly. All of a sudden I will be struck by the memory of your laugh, your glance, a hand in the dark night.... I’m rediscovering my body, which has lain forgotten for years and is now remembering how to feel passion. You’ve brought me back to life with your delicate and gentle love.... It is strangely wonderful. When I am with you, I am transformed into another person – someone young and happy.

My love, you’ve promised you’ll return to me as soon as you finish your novel. Very soon doesn’t have a date or a time, does it? You’re torturing me, forcing me to sit here in constant expectation.

Today I was home alone all night because my sister Thao was at a poets’ club in Hai Phong and didn’t get home until midnight. For the first time I was pervaded with what the word loneliness truly means. Before you, I had never felt its true meaning. I spent my days coming and going, blinded by habit. Sometimes I even fooled myself that I found it freeing – being of concern to no one at all. But today, all of a sudden, the loneliness has become unbearable. I keep thinking, what’s the use of doing anything, of my standing in this spot? Who am I and why am I here? I found myself standing in front of a blank canvas and couldn’t pick up a brush. My dear, I need you awfully, more than ever.

Do you remember the first time we met? You gave me your sincere advice: "You’re an artist. You shouldn’t indulge in such loneliness. You need a good man, a lover to speak your heart to." Little did I know then that the love I had been waiting for was standing in front of me. At that moment I felt the hand of fate.

Is it possible for me to endure this long separation? At times, my heart aches with missing you. It is a sharp ache, not the throbbing that your literary circle would use to describe love. Of course I know that even though you are far away you are feeling the same. I don’t dare cry because I’m afraid that you would sense it and I would never do anything that could hurt you. We have experienced this secret sympathy before; do you remember the time I’m talking about? I was writing to you once, weeping, and you phoned me right away, saying that you suddenly felt worried and missed me so much that your heart was aching with the sadness of it. I truly believe that we share two halves of the same soul."

According to the date, this was the last letter my sister had written, only three days before she died. None of the other letters had been as passionate as this. I wondered why she never sent it and I realised that her wandering writer might not have a fixed address.

My dear sister, why were you silly enough to give your heart to a wandering writer? They only have feelings for a jumble of silly words. I wondered how all of her experience in love had failed to make her wiser when it came to men.

My sister was never beautiful, but she was vivacious and attractive. However, what beauty she possessed had faded with time. I knew that the writer hadn’t come to her because of her outside appearance. So because of what then? He is a man, after all. I wondered how long she would have been able to keep him beside her with her passionate, but pititful heart. Who knows when he too would disappear into thin air, leaving her with nothing. These letters seemed to be dripping with her illusions about love and she wanted them buried with her!

I carefully placed the bunches of letters back in the iron box. I decided I would do as she had asked and bury her with the carefully kept fragments of her life.

I heard the clock in the hallway strike midnight as I sat on the ground with the iron box on my lap. A chorus of frogs croaked in the garden, splashing around puddles left by the days of incessant rain. The sound seemed melancholy and lonely. I shivered, wondering if my sister was lonely in her cold wet grave.

All of a sudden my reverie was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the phone. Who was it? Who would call in the dead of night? I picked up the receiver, my hands trembling.

"Yes? I’m listening," I said, my voice cracking nervously.

"Are you Thao? Where is your sister?"

"Yes, I am. But who are you?" – I stuttered, struck dumb with surprise. My heart seemed to be beating out of my chest.

"I am standing outside your house. Please ask your sister to open the gate for Quang!"

I switched on all the lights and ran down the drive, gravel crunching under my feet. Out of breath I reached the gate to meet this mysterious Quang. In front of me stood a middle-aged man of medium height, with a knapsack slung over his shoulder. He looked exhausted and worn out. He must have travelled very far. Catching sight of me, he asked anxiously:

"Isn’t your sister at home?"

I fumbled with the latch and pulled open the gate, my hands shaking. The words seemed stuck in my throat.

"My sister.... my sister died. Three days ago...."

The man went white and slumped back against the gate to keep himself from crumpling to the ground. I reached out my hand to take the heavy knapsack and closed the gate behind him.

"Come in, please"

He followed me up to the house blindly, without saying a word.

I knew that this was my sister’s wandering writer. Yes, it must be. It was too late. What could I say? I made some tea with lemon and offered him a steaming cup.

"Where have you been?"

"I’m coming from Dien Bien. It’s a long story. Please tell me what happened to your sister."

I began to speak slowly. I told him how four days ago my sister and I ate our breakfast and drank coffee together, as usual. Afterwards she went into her studio to begin painting. About ten minutes later I heard a strange noise and a crash. I ran into her room and found her lying on the floor, her cell phone crushed where it had fallen to the ground beside her. Her face had turned blue — there was nothing more I could do to help her.

"Was this around nine o’clock?" he asked quietly, staring vacantly into space.

I couldn’t hide my surprise.

"Yes, it was."

My sister had died so quickly, the breath simply leaving her body, that the story didn’t take long to tell. Instead I quietly pulled her letters out of the iron box and handed them to him.

"Oh, God! It’s my clumsiness that has killed her!" he cried out.

I was dumbfounded.

He suddenly burst out crying. Men’s cries are unbearable to me. I didn’t know how to soothe him and soon found tears running down my own cheeks. Amid his sobs, his story began to tumble out. He told me that at nine o’clock sharp, the exact time my sister died, he had felt dizzy for no reason. He felt a gripping pain in his chest so severe that his friend had rushed him to the hospital. He had presentment that something bad had happened and he reached for his phone to call my sister, only to discover that it was missing. He asked his friend to run back to the market to look for it. Once his friend arrived, he found a couple of drunken teenagers using it to make crank calls and tried to get it back.

‘I had to give them some money,’ my friend said, ‘they smelled of liquour and their faces were red. I asked if anyone had called. They laughed and said that they answered the phone and told a woman that you had just fallen off a cliff and they were watching your dead body be carried away. They were crazy. After I gave them the money, they just slipped away’."

After Quang finished, I was suddenly struck by the way I had found my sister’s body: the strangled cry, the cell phone shattered on the ground. In my mind I saw the moment that she had called him and heard that terrible news, felt the paint in her chest and saw her crumple to the ground in a heap. And right then his heart too had been struck by pain in secret sympathy.

"….I truly believe that we share two halves of the same soul…."

My dear sister, I wonder if any part of that shared spirit can hear the cries of your beloved tonight?

The sky outside was perfectly black. The smell of rain was heavy in the air and the wind rustling in the leaves of the Eucalyptus tree could be clearly heard. (VNS)

Translated by Manh Chuong