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A love song

By MARINA BROWN

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 17, 2000

By day the swirling patterns of carpet and embroidered silk layered the bed, a rich and confused chaos of fabric that engulfed the slim outline within. But by twilight, in the gauzy blueness that seeped through the curtains, I could see more clearly the outline as it rose and fell, hovered in silence, then, with a rustle, readjusted and rose and fell again.

I knew that she preferred this time of day, when the noises of the living became preoccupied and quiet, and even the birds turned away. I knew that in the twilight, her eyes, white and wide open, would wander the shadows finding texture and form.

The figure beneath the fabric stirred, and her head turned slowly as if a melody had begun. I knew that she was remembering.

Meilong's black hair lies damp along her neck. The steamy Vietnamese road is splashed with shadows. She is full of youth and doesn't want the dust of the path on her dress. It is white and clean, and she is filled with spring and the sound of a war gone silent.

Ahead she sees the old women and slows as she watches them stoop to gather stones from the road. Like gulls, the old women chatter and dart forward and back, each with a stone and a curse aimed for the clean white dress, at this girl who speaks Vietnamese but is an alien among them.

Born from a black soldier and a local girl's shame and left to toddle alone in the streets of Saigon, Meilong was one day swept up by an elderly teacher and taken home to his wife to raise.

Mississippi-chocolate skin, wild black hair flying in little helixes around the high cheekbones and tilted eyes of Asia, her face told too well of a night that her countrymen would not let her forget -- a face an old man found perfect and beautiful.

She coughed in the deepening dusk, and from beneath the quilt, a frail arm extended toward a tiny radio and, with effort, switched it on. The crackling of a faraway station drifted fragments of Vietnamese music about her bed.

She curled close to the tiny machine, her head bald, with tiny sores dotting her skin. She began to hum and the bones of her fingers were moving. She was remembering again.

The refugee camp in Thailand is bleak; tents or tin and paper shacks stretch for acres. Meilong and her elderly parents have lived here for four years. People come and go, but doctors doctor and teachers teach, and slowly a community has evolved.

It is at the camp, in a tin corrugated building to which Meilong goes each day, that she has learned the ancient instrument of Vietnam. The thu cam, a tall, stringed, harp-like device, is filled with the throb of longing hearts. As Meilong plays and sings, her graying teachers, who know they will never return home, nod at this half-Asian, half-black girl, and tell her that the soul of Saigon is in her voice and in her hands.

But others hate her for it. One night as she sings for herself on a little rise overlooking the camp, sheltered with her harp in a thin stand of bamboo -- she is raped. Cruelly and with the anger of the giftless for the gifted, she is raped, and her fingers are broken. With the fury of one color for another unlike itself, she is beaten. Just as cruelly, they leave the thu cam untouched beside her, never to sing her song again.

In the quiet American town, the tiny man kneels before her. He is old, with a permanent smile and blinking eyes, which seem perpetually wishing to understand. He places his hand on her shoulder and offers her tea. In the near darkness I see her turn. Her eyes, white as moons, never leave his face. If he wants to understand, she is willing him to know -- and yet, she cannot tell him.

A passionate bond unites the old teacher and his once beautiful, half-black child. For her, the one remaining dream has been of this devoted father, to live long enough to care for him in his old age, as a child should do for her parent.

She feels humiliated by this illness and hates its shame. Yet it is the shame of others that she wears on her face and carries in her body, shame she has chosen to endure with grace.

With a Chinese herb, her father rubs her fingers, which often ache. The fingers are twisted and tight, but every night he tries to stretch them. Her eyes never leave his face. I once asked her if her father knew about the AIDS, and how she had been infected, and she told me that one day she would tell him, but she believed on that day he would stop loving her.

Meilong's pain grew worse. She rarely slept and moaned softly when she did. The old man asked me the name of this illness that had entrapped his daughter, yet with discretion, I could not tell him.

But Meilong had heard his questions and whispered that, at last, the time had come. That evening I watched from afar as she pulled herself up and into a kneeling posture before her father. I had never seen her so thin, so weak. Her body trembled beneath the gauze pajamas. Silhouetted in the dusk, he seemed a Buddha, distant and unknowable, she a penitent for whom redemption was impossible and only honor remained.

Slowly she bowed her head three times to the floor, and the old man leaned closer. Her voice came as a murmur, guttural, rhythmic, halting. She spoke until her strength had fled and the words were all used up.

When she was finished, the old man rose. He looked out at the trees, black, with the brittle chrome outline of the new moon, and then without a word or a touch he walked silently from the room. Meilong did not move. Finally she pulled her arms about her head and wept.

A week passed. Meilong had drawn near death. Her breathing was rapid, and she was conscious only from time to time. The old man stayed away. The tea had stopped and he no longer stroked her fingers. It seemed that she had been right; his love had been withdrawn, the shame too much even for this affectionate old man.

On the day before she died, the door quietly opened. Softly, the musicians filed in. They bowed to the elder father, then went to Meilong, around whose tiny wrists they tied white prayer threads. They arranged themselves around her pallet and began to play.

The old man sat alone on a chair, eyes fixed upon the ceiling. Plucked and bowed instruments, soft drums, jingling cymbals, they chanted in the voice of a faraway land. Meilong's eyes opened. She might have believed herself in paradise. The fragile muscles of her face pulled into a smile, and she gazed from one musician to the next. These were her songs singing to her again. This was her father's gift -- his gift of love, not withdrawn, but compounded.

Meilong reached weakly for her father's hand. Her eyes were hollow but riveted upon his face in gratitude. Without looking at her, as the tears coursed down his wrinkled cheeks, the old man's hand stretched down to hers, and he held her little fingers. Slowly he stroked them -- gently, ever so gently, he stroked her little fingers.

Marina Brown is a registered nurse and a case manager at the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. She visits patients in their homes during their final illnesses. To protect the privacy of this patient, a pseudonym was used.

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