Cao Xuân Tứ

DESCARTES IN AMSTERDAM

My first lesson of the Dutch language was tethering on the brink of disaster. Every time I attempted to pronounce the word 'leuk', the whole class turned into a riot.
"Look, he's obscene!" shouted the lady from Somalia.
"You dirty rascal!" A turbaned man pointed a threatening finger at me.
"Throw him out of the country!" A survivor of the Tien An Men massacre chimed in.
The younger set did not seem to mind, however. A teenage boy sporting a T shirt proclaiming 'Mobutu Stinks' raised his clenched fist in a friendly salute. He yelled in my direction: "Right on, brother! Sock it to them!"
The teacher clutched her huge breasts, trying to suppress a laughing fit. She beckoned me to her desk and quietly explained the cause of the uproar. Picking a piece of chalk and with a flourish of her hand she began to draw a huge circle depicting a head which covered half of the black-board. The way she did it, the mouth cavity almost filled the entire head itself and the tongue looked like a sausage whose tip curved upwards until it hit a spot on the dental bridge where the right sound was supposed to be forthcom-ing. But graphic details or not, I kept sinking deeper in the linguistic quagmire. I haven't told you that I hail from an area of my country where the native speakers manoeuvre their tongues in such a way that words beginning with the syllable 'l' invariably end up sounding like 'n'. Similar fate befalls my Chinese friends when they turn 'fried rice' into 'lice' that 'fly' in Shakespear-e's language. And what could ageing American presidents do when Japanese prime ministers want to congratulate them on their successful 'erections' except a round of self-congratulating applause?

By the time the teacher was about to give up on me, the noise had become so loud that the director of the reception centre had to intervene. Everybody thought kindly of him, why, because he was a most generous man, known to have given his brand-new computer to the seventy-nine-year-old asylum seeker from Bosnia, a writer of some standing according to the ex-Yugoslavian 'Literary Gazette'. This had led to complaints of discrimination from the bearded poet from Chile, a former bodyguard of Allende who had managed to escape just before Pinochet turned the guns on his boss. The case was still awaiting a decision from the European Court in Luxemburg.
"What's the trouble?" the director asked anxiously. "Another fist fight?" Some Turks and Kurds did exchange blows a few days back.
"He's having problems with the pronunciation," the teacher said excitedly, pointing at me.
The director took in the situation in stride. "Ah! Nothing to it. His tongue just needs a bit of massaging. It's all covered by the health insurance. Article so and so of the Civil Code is also applicable to asylum seekers and persons with refugee status, category so and so. Ha, ha!"
Turning to the rest of the class the director dropped hints of a day trip to Amsterdam once the language ordeal was over, and that calmed everyone down. Then he conferred briefly with the teacher. It was decided that I was to move into his house where a special programme of speech therapy would be arranged for me.

In the days that followed I was subjected to a series of experiments, some quite pleasant, some not.
"Something wrong with his diet," said Anna, the wife of the director. "Those Third World bellies are full of junk. Give him plenty of cheese. That'll straigh-ten out his tongue."
Three weeks of cheese and nothing else made me so fat and lethargic that I couldn't move my body, let alone my tongue. I began to dream a peasant's dream of a bowl of steaming rice with a dash of fish sauce and hot green pepper but I was too shy to ask. There was a scary moment when I was taken to see a specialist at the Arnhem hospital for an examination. Two hairy nurses wrapped in white coats expertly tied me to an iron chair while the specialist doctor forced my mouth open and explored its outer and inner recesses with shiny forks and tongs, touching here, pulling there. Strangely enough I really liked the sensation and almost came in my underpants. Nothing wrong with the tongue and the vocal cord, the doctor declared, but my teeth badly needed an overhaul. So they pulled out my rotten teeth and gave me a brand new set of denture.

Meanwhile the director decided it was time for a drastic change of direction in the pedagogic methodology. The bulb peeling season had just started and extra hands were needed to sustain the export drive, without which it would be impossible to subsidize the refugees' inflow, I was told. I was assigned to live and work in a shack in the middle of nowhere. Isolation was vital for concentration. Each morning at the dot of seven I was roused out of bed by the director's wife, who arrived in a van laden with sacks of tulip bulbs. After feeding me with cold rice – yes, rice at long last – and tinned sardines, she would start the day's work-and-learn routine. Sitting across the table next to a sack of bulbs, each time she passed me a bulb to peel she shouted: 'TU-LIP', which I was to repeat after her. The pace was excruciatingly fast, monitored by a mechanical device programmed to emit a piercing noise should I fall behind. After the first day I was totally knocked out and when I closed my eyes for the night I dreamt of Anna stuffing bulbs into every crevice and cranny of my body which turned into a huge bed of flowers capable of walking and running.

Days shrank into weeks and weeks stretched into months while things got better after strenuous sessions of bulb peeling and tongue twisting. By the time I was able to produce a sound agreeable enough to Anna's ears, I was taken back to the reception centre. In my absence lots of water had flowed past the banks of the Lower Rhine and a new crop of refugees had turned up. They were about to board a bus bound for Amsterdam to attend a reception and I was allowed to join them for the ride. The bus cruised past sleepy villages as pretty as picture postcards with unpronounceable names like Doorn, Maarn, Enkel--huizen. The temperature had dipped so low that the Amsterdam canals were freezing rock-solid, enough for our bus to leave the regular traffic and join the happy skaters on the ice. The venue for the party was a grand canal house. The carpeted hallway led to a big hall with a marble floor and a marble fireplace. The Queen smiled down from the high wall, her eyes soft as a dove's. A Buddhist monk sat on a straw mat, lotus fashion, chanting a prayer. A blonde girl stood near the window, smoking something fragrant. To my surprise she was wearing the traditional dress of the womenfolk of my country, a flowing thing called "ao dai." Why she didn't wear a pair of trousers under-neath to cover her long legs, I'd never know. Just sheer black stockings with several holes in them. With a big smile she beckoned me to come over.
"Problem with the language, huh?" she asked sympathetically and passed me the fragrant cigarette, which I gratefully accepted. It tasted, well, just like – what else – grass!.
So the news had spread. "Something wrong with my tonsils," I said with a poker face. "It's getting better, though." I took a close look at her dress. "Where did you get that dress? It's my wife's wedding dress." Could it be reincarnation? Had it not been for her height and golden hair, she could have been a replica of my wife who had been drowned when the boat that was to take us to the Malaysian shore capsized a mile from it. There was no mistaking: the eyes, sharp and slanting upwards like an Arabian sword, the nose slightly crooked, and the mouth in full bloom, blood-red like an open wound that had always made me shed silent tears every time we made love.

Although it had been snowing all day, through the window I could see some trees, leafy and green, then I could make them out one by one: banana, mango, breadfruit, papaya, the lot. Tropical flora lined up on the banks of the canal on a cold winter afternoon, imagine that!
The blonde girl beamed at me. "It's all for you. Courtesy of Amnesty International!"
I mumbled a few words of appreciation and followed her toward the long table set against the wall. Raw herrings were heaped on silver plates. Tiny glasses were brimming with clear liquid.
A refugee fellow started to grab the fish by the tail, threw his head back and gulped the slimy thing down in the traditional fashion he must have learned from the orientation course. I followed suit and was about to pick a herring when someone tapped me gently on the shoulder. I turned around and met the stern gaze of a man whose face seemed vaguely familiar.
"This is Mr Descartes," whispered the girl.
"Ah, Mr Descartes! I thought you were..." I struggled on incoherently.
"Dead, huh," Mr Descartes said, smiling grimly. "That's what they all want me to be. You can call me... huh... Rene."
I looked at the man in sheer amazement. Here was the great
philosopher in the flesh, the most famous refugee of them all in a crumpled suit and dirty shoes. He looked more like a tramp. His breath smelled, well, not so fresh and the high colours on his cheeks suggested fever. Or was it the little glasses of the clear liquid that did it?
"You're not feeling well, I suppose."
"I might just as well be dead," Mr Descartes chortled. Turning to the girl, he commanded: "Let me have a puff of that grass."
"That's bad for your health, sir," I said anxiously.
"This is nothing, my boy. It's just like...Comment dirai- je?... a little foreplay. She's given me much more powerful stuff. Isn't that right, cherie?" Descartes smiled at the girl lovingly, which she reciprocated by kissing him on the lips.

At last I managed to pick up a herring, and was about to thrust it down my throat neat and clean, when Descartes held back my hand and said: "Use a pair of chopstic-ks. Haven't you forgotten your manners?"
I heard what Mr Descartes said but my mind was elsewhere, searching for some quotations from the great man I'd been taught at the Lycee not so long ago.
Suddenly I shouted with joy: "Eureka! Cogito ergo sum!" Descartes acknowledged it with a curt nod. "They didn't burn my books, did they?" he chuckled. "You're a good boy.
Chinaman? I can tell by the shape of your earlobes. How's Mr Mao these days?"
"The chairman passed away a long time ago, sir. It was in the papers."
"I read nothing but poems nowadays. Try poetry yourself.
It'll do you a power of good."
"Poetry? In my country since the Americans lifted the embargo the themes have been extended to 'Long Live Coca Cola' and 'Dollars Forever'.
I didn't feel like telling Mr Descartes I was not Chinese and they did burn many books, including his, during the Year of the Mad Dog. But what difference would that make? In his presence I felt as sig-nificant as a three-legged chair. Another hole in the girl's stockings or a big gap in the ozone layer could not alter this reality.
I walked with Descartes to the door. Outside the sun had come out but the tropical trees had all disappeared. I tried to say a word of thanks but Mr Descartes already made his way through the narrow street thronged with crowds. Flags flew from windows. Balloons erupted like gunfire. Beers flowed from the cafes into the canals. The girl caught up with me as I stooped and browsed among the dog-eared books spread out haphazardly on the pavement.
"What's all this commotion?" I shouted to make myself heard
amidst the deafening noise.
"It's Queen's Day. The 30th of April. Anything goes. Where's Rene?" The girl screamed in my ear.
"How the hell do I know? Is Mr Descartes your father?"
"Well, no. We're just living together in a small room. Sharing the cost. There's no heating. Rene's been coughing up blood."
"What do you do for a living?"
"I work in the Red Light area. Just a part-time job."
"Red Light? Where's that?"
She just shrugged.
Just as well. Living and sharing. Fair and square. I wondered whether Mr Descartes had a job to share the cost.

It all happened on Queen's Day. Well, the 30th of April was the day Saigon fell. Saigon, my town. When was that? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred years ago? It no longer mattered as far as I was concerned.
Next to the books were piles of junks: chipped cups, rusty spoons, battered pots and pans. A couple of kids were playing salesmen. With a bit of luck I could bargain my way into a pair of second-hand chopsticks.
"Leuk, isn't it?" said the girl, sidling up to me.
I nodded happily, and repeated her word.
"Leuk, L-E-U-K." She burst out laughing. What did they teach you at the refugee center?"
Well, it didn't matter, really. I might as well start all over with her.

Cao Xuan Tu

Click here for the translation into Vietnamese
Click here for the translation into Dutch

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Author's note:
'leuk': Dutch for 'nice, pleasant.'
'neuk': Dutch for 'copulate.

Cái Đình - 2003