Excerpted: Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận

My mother died on a night of torrential rain. A night of unseasonal rain in 2004. In such a freak accident that our language probably had no word to name it. Mai, my brother, my only brother, had just constructed for himself yet another multi-storey house, this time with a home elevator, said to be the very first in the whole country. Such a momentous event called for celebration, so he bought my mother a plane ticket to Sài Gòn. Only after her inaugural push of the elevator button—he insisted—only after her round trip from the ground floor to the top and back, could his guests avail themselves of the device. Among these guests were even members of the press, print as well as TV. Such events always followed a predictable script, but I still spent the evening after my mother’s funeral watching a sixty-minute DVD and flipping through a hundreds-strong album of photos of the inauguration, and then another sixty-minute DVD and another hundreds-strong album of that day’s funeral, which I had attended from start to finish.

I’d realized at a very young age that my mother had always been something of a standout, whether alone or in the middle of a crowd, at a Party committee meeting or one for the local civil unit, as a recipient of a certificate of merit or bestower of a prize, and now, on the family altar, she was a standout among the dead, her dead, her parents and in-laws and elder siblings. And her husband. My brother had taken care to put their portraits side by side, nestling behind a vase of red roses, but they still looked like two strangers who’d never signed a marriage licence, never lived together for two decades, never birthed two children (my brother Mai and me) who gave them two grandchildren (Mai’s daughter Ngọc, and my own son, Mike). That evening, I tried and tried to evoke a family scene from our former life, but in vain; I could picture my mother’s face clearly, but had to refer again and again to my father’s portrait, wreathed by red roses and the thick smoke of incense. He had died ten years earlier.

We had dinner together, my brother and I and the two children. Mai said, “Those inspectors from the German elevator company looked into every corner they could but they couldn’t pinpoint the cause of the accident. The elevator worked perfectly well during the inauguration, perfectly well for the next three days, and perfectly well after the accident, so they simply couldn’t comprehend how the car could have stayed stationary down below, oblivious to her call, when Mother fell into the shaft, all the way from the top to the ground floor. And I can’t comprehend what on earth Mother could have been doing on the top floor at such an hour, in such rain, for such a long time.”

He gazed at me intensely as he said this. I felt like what he meant to say was that it wasn’t the rainy season, not even close, but what he said next was: “As I recall, I’d been lying on the sofa since early in the evening, I watched a beauty contest and then fell asleep, Ngọc was at her mother’s, the help had all gone home for the night, and even if the live-in housekeeper had gone upstairs to clean she would have retired to her room by nine, as she always does. And she said as much to the inspectors when they interrogated her, which was confirmed by the fact that the elevator was on the ground floor, where her room is. So, the sequence of events is as follows: Mother took the elevator to the top floor before nine, then the housekeeper took it to return to the ground floor, then at around 2:00 a.m. Mother called the elevator to go down, the doors opened, and she walked right into the shaft. The accident happened at 2:00 a.m. The coroner had confirmed that the time of death was 2:00 a.m. So what could Mother have been doing from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. on the top floor?”

I said nothing. I too was baffled as to what my mother could possibly do on the top floor from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. What can you do on a top floor from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.? What is there to do on a top floor from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.?

“Madame fell from the top floor to the ground floor, the body was a wreck, only her face was intact.”

That’s all the housekeeper had to say to me about the accident. Presumably she didn’t know much else because, as the coroners concluded, the accident had occurred at 2:00 a.m. when everybody was fast asleep. But 2:00 a.m. or whichever a.m., there was no changing the fact: my mother was gone. And I couldn’t help but visualize the way she’d fallen from the top floor to the ground floor in that dark, tunnel-like space. And I suspected that during the fall, she had tried her best to keep her face upward, and wrap her arms around her head to protect her face, at the price of a more drawn-out death, the terrible pain of which her brain would have tasted for several minutes before the end.

According to the housekeeper, moreover, the wreckedness of my mother’s body had required the tailors and funeral house staff to work for three days non-stop, while the makeup artist needed only a little over an hour. When I finally got in, her face was already properly made up, powdered, and mascaraed, the way she never was in daily life. Her body, clothed in a black brocade áo dài and surrounded with red roses, lay in a glass coffin, with AC and odour-controlled, housed in the funeral wing of a famous international hospital. Only when everything had been done to perfection did my brother let in the guests, from whose number I was not excepted. In truth, my protests were only perfunctory. I wasn’t eager to behold a wreck of a body, my mother’s or anyone else’s. My imagination, at least, was more lenient. But maybe that’s why, seeing her in her glass coffin, wholly intact, with the brocade dress and the red roses, the powder and the mascara, I was struck by the impression that she was only playing dead, and I didn’t shed a tear. And tears would have been incongruous in that oh so clean and elegant funeral house, amid the attentive and beaming staff, after crossing a door above which a sign, in both Vietnamese and English, advised that the ESTEEMED GUESTS PLEASE REFRAIN FROM MAKING NOISE.

My brother Mai was the sole orchestrator of Mother’s funeral. Most of the guests were his business partners, sleek in black, hauling giant funeral wreaths, their cars blocking the cemetery gate. The brass band in eight identical white suits, looking like eight brothers. A dozen young men with flashing cameras, perhaps hired for the occasion, perhaps press. Another dozen young men walking around talking into radios, perhaps my brother’s men, perhaps security guards from the local ward. An impressive plot of land, bounded by a thick wall on all four sides, a gravestone already erected, green granite, flanked by two one-hundred-year-old cypresses, and in the very middle of it all a censer as tall as a person. The glass coffin set in front of the censer, head to the east, feet to the west. The slanting rays of morning sun. The leisurely drift of clouds. The roses burning scarlet. “Amazing Grace.” Beyond the transparent glass, bathed in the pure, pure sunlight, my mother was an extraordinary vision haloed by the mystery of death.