The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs

Author:Dana Sachs [Sachs, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9781565128729
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2000-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

9. Private Rooms

TUNG AND HUONG HAD SPENT that Thursday night trying to stay calm. Sitting on the bed in their loft, he insisted that an empty room did not mean the Hueys had left Hanoi for good. Huong, never an optimist anyway, was already hopeless.

By Friday night, Tung began to admit that Mr. and Mrs. Huey probably weren’t coming back. On Saturday afternoon, when they had, in fact, failed to return as promised, Tung drove over to the home of the translator, Tuan, who told Tung that when he dropped the Hueys off at the airport, Mr. Huey had not made an appointment to meet him again. Although Tuan had never been civil to Tung, he was sympathetic to this new predicament. When it came down to it, the ties between two Vietnamese, even if they were a northerner and a southerner, were stronger than either of them felt toward a Chinese. Tuan came back to our house and telephoned Mr. Huey’s business contacts in Saigon. Late that night, not long after Tung ordered me to go to my room, they finally located a Chinese trader in Cholon who said that Mr. Huey had flown to Bangkok that morning.

The tenants had gotten away with more than the $2,000 they still owed in rent. Mr. Huey had brought total disaster on Tung and Huong in a way that any of us should have suspected.

Mr. Huey hadn’t paid for a single phone call since the day, more than a month earlier, when I’d seen him and Tung take a bag full of 5,000-dong notes to the central telephone office. Since that time, he’d made calls to Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Sometimes several times a day. When the June phone bill had arrived on Friday, the day after Mr. Huey left for Saigon, it added up, once again, to $5,000. Tung’s name was on the bill.

A middle-class American would have to owe something like $50,000 for this calamity to have the same effect; $5,000 was all the money Tung had managed to save in three years of hard labor in Germany, and he’d spent much of that building his house. The debt would eat up his entire savings.

A gloom settled over the house. Tung spent half of every day rushing around town searching for a solution to the crisis. The rest of his time he sat motionless on the couch, his face as blank as that of a man determined to let himself drown.

Huong and her family went into permanent conference. She spent mornings whispering with Nga. Later, she’d stand for an hour on the front steps, discussing matters with one or another of her older brothers. In the evenings, she and her mother stared at the television set, rarely bothering to turn up the sound.

“Mr. Huey was so polite,” Huong said to me one evening when I’d joined them.

“He sure dressed well,” I said.

On the television, three dancing swans were singing songs for children. Huong turned and faced me. “There was something in his eyes, though.

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