The Lotus Eaters: A Novel Page 6
"I mean, I hurried! Left the day I graduated college." He laughed. "And I missed the whole damned war."
How would Linh manage to get back to her?
"Maybe we can talk? Later? When you're feeling yourself? Fill me in. What it was like? I found out who you are. You've worked with everyone."
Linh made a sweeping gesture with his hand, letting go of the railing, his legs slipping out from under him.
The young man grabbed him as he was about to slide under the railing. "Watch it there, mister! You're coming with me down to sick bay." He took Linh's arm. "That was close."
"I'm fine," Linh said, although it was obvious to them both he was too weak to stand alone.
"Sorry, but I'm responsible for you. Don't worry about her. Rumor is she's charmed. They'll probably be kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours. She's well-known. The Communists don't want any bad publicity."
Linh closed his eyes and saw sun-bleached fields of elephant grass, the individual blades prostrating themselves, bowing over and over in supplication. That was how one survived, and yet Helen had never learned to bow.
"What they don't want are any witnesses to what happens next."
TWO
Angkor
1963
Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war. He stood outside his parents' thatched hut in the early morning, the touch of his wife's lips still on his, when he smelled a whiff of sulfur. The scent of war. This part of Binh Duong was supposed to be safe. He had heard no shots, but nothing remained secure for long in Vietnam.
Mai's voice could be heard rising from inside the hut, defiant, rising, the song tender and lovely among the tree leaves, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading, then the flourish of the trill in the refrain that they had rehearsed over and over. An old widowed man, coming out from his hut on the other side of the river, stopped at the sound, which was like a bow gliding across a reed, recalling his own beloved wife's face, a tight rosebud from forty years earlier.
For the river, we depend on the ferryboat
For the night, on the young woman innkeeper
For love, one suffers the fate
Of the heart... I know that this is your village.
The war was a rival stealing her husband away. Mai peeked through the door and sang clearer. Wanting to lure him back into her arms. As if they were in their school days again, and she could seduce him to miss classes and go to the river for the day, listening to her songs. The war would end soon. If she could only keep him with her, he would be safe.
Ca, Linh's youngest brother, appeared at the side of the hut and mimed Mai's performance, putting his hand delicately to his cheek and holding his legs primly pressed together while throwing out his hip like the French chanteuse in Dalat they had made fun of. Linh and Mai burst out laughing.
Mai's tears too painful, Linh had forbidden her to see him off, her belly large with their first child. A boy, the midwife had predicted, because of how high she carried the baby--tight under her heart.
The night before, the family had performed the play Linh had written, and the villagers had stomped the ground and hooted and gotten drunk in approval. Linh still felt a warm tingle of plea sure in his hands and face at the thought of its success, but Mai had not let him enjoy a minute of it. The roaring audience demanding she sing her solo four times had emboldened her, and she wanted to leave for Saigon that very day.
"How can I leave? A deserter? They shoot deserters."
"They shoot soldiers, too." Mai held her belly, a hand at each side, and took deep breaths with her eyes closed, a new habit that unnerved him.
"They have no time with poor soldiers like you. In Saigon, we'll use false names. After the baby is born, I'll get a job singing."
Linh didn't know what to do; he wanted to be a simple man, but fate pulled like a weight on his shoulders. He steeled himself with the thought that he was going off to fight so there would be no war in his son's future. Mai didn't understand that the families of deserters also suffered. Nor did he tell her that her sister, Thao, was already on her way to Saigon, even though her voice was many shades rougher than Mai's. If she had known, the earth would have broken open with her wails, and Linh couldn't deal with women now.
This is how history unfolds: a doubt here mixed with certainty there. One never knew which choice was the right one....
He tested the air again to catch the reek of fired weapons, but the odor was gone. Had it been real or only his imagination?
At thirty years old, Linh had already been in the army for four years. He had joined the northern army, then escaped to the South only to be conscripted by the SVA. A lackluster soldier. Sick of the war, but an able-bodied man had no other choice if he wished to stay alive. The flowing robes of a poet suited him better than the constricting uniform of a soldier.
Mai thought he should become a singer, a kind of matinee idol, to make the women swoon. She did not acknowledge how the years of soldiering had changed him--the slight limp from a piece of shrapnel in his foot when he was tired; the look in his eye, a new uncertainty. He was like a man with a golden tongue who is suddenly asked to conduct business in an unknown language.
His father had been a scholar, a professor of literature in Hanoi, and in his youth, Linh had shown a passion for writing poetry and putting on plays. But the war squeezed out everything else. Every young man was forced to take sides, either the northern or the southern army. Sometimes, over the years, one ended up fighting for both sides at different times. A paradox, he would later discover, the Americans could not accept.
Wounded in the foot, for a time he gladly traded in his gun for an army clerical job near his family. The workload was light, his paperwork never collected, and pretty soon he no longer bothered with it but went back to plays. A romantic young man, always dreaming, he hoped he had somehow slipped between the cracks, been forgotten. He and Mai planned their escape to Saigon, but he couldn't tell her he delayed because he was afraid. After almost a year, his father's bribe money ran out, and his company had informed him it was time to pick up a gun again.
Linh posed in front of a mirror in his uniform, playing the part of soldier. Squaring his chin. He wanted to look brave but thought he looked more confused than anything else.
Mai's fears were partly true. The last time he had left he had not seen his family or his new bride for two years. When he left now, there was no knowing when he would see them again. He lifted the large bag of rice cakes Mai had given him. Her instructions were to come back before the cakes were all eaten.
The Americans had started to join the SVA on missions as advisers. Giant, they towered above Linh and the other soldiers as they handed out sticks of gum and cigarettes. Linh learned to recognize the Americans because they smiled more than the French, and because of their perfect, straight, white teeth. Always impulsive, Linh immediately decided these new foreigners were an improvement over their old masters.
The advisers stood with their legs spread apart, feet planted in big boots, and hands on their hips, nodding and conferring with Linh's captain, Dung, who everyone knew was a fool. He wore a long white silk scarf around his neck, copied from some old American movie, and the majority of his attention was spent in keeping it clean. Jaws snapping with chewing tobacco, the Americans stood over the felled bodies of two Viet Cong, their bodies as small and gray and lifeless as river birds, their tattered black shorts barely covering their thighs. Did it escape everyone's notice that the South Vietnamese soldiers more resembled their enemies than their allies? After all his years in the army, Linh still could not bear to look at the dead, and he hurried off to check supplies.
The first American Linh met was Sam Darrow, a tall, birdlike man who didn't smile like the others. Darrow, slouched over, still stood taller than the other Americans. Thin, he had sharp limbs that jutted out from his rolled-up sleeves, the skin stretched across large, bony wrists. His thick-framed glasses were a
part of his face, head moving from side to side like a bird's, as if trying to add angles to what he saw. Linh stared at the name, DARROW
, and another name, LIFE
, stenciled on his jacket. Cameras that Linh had only dreamed about owning hung from around his neck, one on an embroidered Hmong neckband, one on plain leather.
"Come on," one of the advisers yelled. "Take some snaps of us."
Dung checked his hair in a small gold mirror that he pulled from his pocket. He preened as Darrow sauntered over.
"I don't think..." he said.
"Don't worry about thinking," the adviser said. "Take a picture."
"You got it."
Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. "That should do you," he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.
"Does America train in war better than it trains in photography?" Linh said.
Darrow smiled. "A smart guy."
"I'm Linh. Tran Bau Linh."
"You, Linh, are a sly one. How about if I ask Dung over there to assign you to help me today? Keep our little secret?"
The company decided to make camp that night about half an hour from Linh's village, planning to move out in the morning. They had not even gone to sleep when the first bombs went off nearby. The new advisers used their shiny new radios to call in for an air bombing of the surrounding area. Linh would never talk about the events of that night. The memory burrowed deep inside him and remained mute.
This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.
The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai's rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai's cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.
During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoeshine boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn't blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war--to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.
In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor's balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father's lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh's father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one's masters.
The teacher needed the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using "Don't," she said, "Give it a miss." "Don't go down the street" became "The street, give it a miss." Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.
In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is. The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are peaceful, they are the enemy. We kill; they die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.
On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh passed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life, handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face shiny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.
"You have a job?" Linh said. "I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow."
Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. "I didn't know Darrow had any friends." Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.
Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. "Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp space. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn't for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff." Gary figured the young Vietnamese man's reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn't worry about that now. He had a new assistant.
Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rushing beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.
They drove the empty, hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.
"You're right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride," Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. "People talk too much anyway." He was a man who didn't let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn't question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh's silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.
By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment--cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.
Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. "Complainer. But not when there is a tip."
Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn't moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.
Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past assistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.
"You're as red as a lobster!" Darrow said.
"The climate's killing me. Look who I found!" Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. "Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?"
"Sure." Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude. Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary's jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He cocked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. "How are you, my old friend?"
"Why don't you make foil shields for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?" Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.
Darrow let out a big laugh. "My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course."
Linh smiled but said nothing.
"You really do know each other?" Gary asked.