Read The Eaves of Heaven for Free Online

into some businesses in Hanoi in case things become too unstable in the countryside. There are many opportunities in Hanoi now that the Germans control the French in Europe, and the Japanese control the French here.”
    “You prefer the city. There’s nothing at home to amuse you.”
    Father did not reply. He left the following day. There were rumors, of course, that he had a mistress in Hanoi.

THE SOUTH
1959
    5. D ALAT D AYS
    M orning mist smothered the trees. The sky was overcast, threatening rain. I came to bid her farewell at the Dalat train station. It was perched on a wooded hillside at the edge of town—a two-room brick cottage with a concrete platform. Higher up the slope, the stationmaster’s shack listed to one side like a doting guard. At the far end of the landing, a pair of traders unloaded burlap sacks from an oxen-drawn wagon. The train was nowhere in sight, its empty track stretching off into the still, white haze.
    Anh waited for me at the long bench under the eaves of the station house. In her hands, the ticket that would take her back to school in Saigon. She sat on a handkerchief, the rear hem of her lavender
ao dai
folded over her lap. When I stepped onto the platform, she rose and extended both her hands. Anh was slender, quite tall for a Vietnamese girl, and had sharp cat-eyes. She didn’t say hello, or ask how I was—she never did. Instead, Anh took my hands in greeting, dipped a little curtsy, and smiled the smile that won me from the first moment. It was the sort of smile that glittered as if she had something precious to share, that coming upon me was a well-anticipated encounter, the most pleasant part of her day. It was entirely unguarded. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a smile like that. Perhaps, I thought, it was because I was a northerner, and I knew northerners were incapable of such unrestrained expressions.
    “Your dress fits you beautifully,” I said, careful not to compliment her directly. That would have been too forward. I didn’t know how she managed to wear a different dress every time we met.
    “Thank you,” she said. “And you look good in your uniform.”
    Last year, after my summer in Phan Thiet, I had returned to Saigon and enrolled in the Institute of Administration. Students who passed their freshman exams were sent to the military academy in Dalat for basic training. It was a simple summer program aimed at providing future graduates of the Institute of Administration an excuse from military service.
    “I just came from the morning session. I don’t think I’ll have time to change when I get back this afternoon. Sergeant doesn’t like us summer-cadets running around town in uniform. People might credit the
real
cadets with our bad behaviors.” I grinned and reached for her waist.
    She hugged me, giggling.
    “Where’s your valise?”
    “I left it with the stationmaster.”
    “Is that safe?”
    “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
    I shrugged. She was far more trusting than I.
    It seemed tragic that this was only our seventh date. There was so much I didn’t know about her, though what I had fathomed fascinated me immensely. She was a romantic girl who knew poems by heart and could reconstruct whole movie scenes with manic gestures and a breathless voice. A mystic, she read palms, interpreted dreams, and traveled fearlessly when the stars were favorable. We had one thing in common. She had grown up without a father, I without a mother. We were matched by our needs. I came from a rigid world of order, form, class division, nobility, and peasantry. My parents did not marry for love. It was an act of obedience and filial obligation, one that they honored their whole lives. And here before me was this wild child of sand and sea, a fatherless girl who did not know how to mask herself. She lived on her instincts, willfully and zealously; beneath sun or rain, it mattered not.
    I had asked her for this early rendezvous. The station, I knew, would be deserted. I