Free The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs Page B

You couldn’t tell if all this water was going up or coming down, and the living room floors glistened as if they’d just been mopped. My backpack, shoved into the bottom of the wooden wardrobe, took on the smell of rotten tomatoes. The adhesive on envelopes developed colonies of blue fungus, moistened spontaneously, and sealed. Laundry wouldn’t dry at all, and the clothes hanging neatly in my wardrobe became organic and began to sprout. I tried to protect myself from so much moisture by pulling over my head a blue and gray hooded rain jacket I’d bought in Hanoi, which had the phrase SHOWER ATTACK SPORTS printed in big letters across its back. Vietnam’s markets didn’t provide much choice in rainwear, and the weather broughtout mobs of commuters decked in the exact same jacket. But it made no difference whether I was riding down the street or lying in my bed. My body was slick with the moisture of a rain I couldn’t feel.
    Winter may have been cloudy, but spring seemed worse. We didn’t see the sun for weeks. Every morning, we woke to a sky that matched the gray on our raincoats and spent our days picking paths across muddy sidewalks or riding our bikes down muddy streets. I gave up trying to keep the cuffs of my pants clean and got used to walking in shoes that squeaked with moisture. The relentlessly dull quality of the light became so familiar, so apparently permanent, that a blue sky seemed as unlikely as everyone on the streets suddenly speaking to one another in English.
    I’d been in Hanoi for more than a month and my life had settled into something resembling routine. Three mornings a week, I left the house at seven o’clock, went to a food stand down the street, and ate the typical Hanoi breakfast, a noodle soup called phở. After breakfast, I rode my bike to the Institute of Social Sciences, where my teacher, Professor Mai, and I sat from eight to ten o’clock at a table in a dim and dusty classroom going over my lessons in Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese. In a month, I’d worked my way up to “Lesson Five: Planning an Evening Out.” Now I was memorizing such dialogues as “Brother Tai: Steve, are you free tonight? Brother Steve: I’m busy tonight, but I’m free tomorrow night; do you have something in mind?”
    Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese, published in the States in 1980, was outdated and based on southern dialect. Consequently, it seldom sounded like what I heard around me in Hanoi. I was grateful enough simply to have it, but I knew that these lessons were hard on my teacher. Professor Mai was not a Vietnamese language instructor by calling. He was a linguist who had spentmuch of his career compiling a French-Vietnamese dictionary. His Russian was effortless; his French nearly perfect. Although he spoke almost no English, he had such a keen understanding of language that he never had trouble comprehending anything I wanted to say. As a teacher, he was patient and devoted, determined to help me learn. Still, the idea of Professor Mai teaching me Vietnamese made about as much sense as a professor from Harvard giving one-on-one ESL training to an exchange student. My lessons were not the most efficient use of this man’s time. But he did it anyway. At four dollars a lesson, Professor Mai could make more money in three mornings with me than in an entire week of doing research of his own.
    The only real pleasure Professor Mai seemed to get out of teaching me came when we were able to delve, however simply, into sociolinguistics. One morning, our conversation drifted onto the subject of how military terms, which came into common usage during the war, had over the years taken on peculiarly nonmilitary meanings. The word bắn, which meant “to shoot,” had become, in increasingly corrupt Vietnam, a slang word meaning “bribe.” If a wealthy businessperson “shot” an official in order to avoid some troublesome regulation, you’d know the official came out a little richer because of it.