The Lotus Eaters: A Novel Page 8

  Before leaving Angkor, Linh dropped a sheath of torn-out notebook paper on Darrow's lap.

  During the reign of King Hung there lived two brothers, Tam and Lang, who were devoted to each other. They were orphaned at a young age and came to live with a kind master who had a beautiful daughter. As they grew up, both brothers came to secretly love the girl, but the master gave her hand in marriage to the older brother, Tam. The young man and woman were blissfully in love, so much so that Tam quite forgot about his younger brother, Lang.

  Unable to stand his unhappiness anymore--the loss of the two most important people in the world to him, and his jealousy at their happiness--Lang ran away, and when he finally came to the sea and could go no farther, he fell on the ground and died of grief, and was changed into a white, chalky, limestone rock.

  Tam, realizing his brother was gone, felt ashamed of his neglect and went in search of him. In despair of not finding him, he stopped when he reached the sea, sat down on a white, chalky, limestone rock, and wept until he died, changing into a tree with a straight trunk and green palm leaves, an Areca tree.

  When the young woman realized that her husband was gone, she went in search of him. Worn out, she finally arrived at the sea, and sat down under the shade of an Areca palm, with her back against a large white chalky rock. She cried in despair at losing her husband until she died, and changed into the creeping betel vine, which twined itself around the trunk of the Areca palm.

  "Yours?"

  "A famous legend of Vietnam. As best as I can remember. So you begin to understand where you are."

  "It's sad. Tragic."

  "These are our national symbols. We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even."

  When they returned to Saigon, Gary paced the office with a summons from ARVN headquarters demanding Linh's immediate appearance. The identity papers he had submitted were all faked. "I knew it. I knew you were too good to be true. Who's Tran Bau Linh? Huh? They think he's a deserter from the SVA."

  "Hell if I know. Linh's worked for me the last year."

  "How's that since I introduced you a few weeks ago?"

  "A year. I'll go down and talk to ARVN. You know with a little grease, they won't care."

  Linh followed Darrow outside.

  "How we met..."

  "We've worked together for a year."

  "You are sure?"

  "Want to go soldiering again?"

  "No."

  "A little flattery and some pictures of the boss go a long way. I noticed how late you stayed out so you wouldn't run into my friend." Darrow squinted in the sunlight, breaking into a grin. "We make a good team. No one is exactly begging to work with me."

  When Linh became Darrow's assistant, the war was small and new. A bush war, a civil war in a backwater country. The American presence was the only thing that led Darrow there, a reluctant last stop before retiring from the war business.

  They sat in the gloom of rubber trees in Cu Chi, the Iron Triangle region, after a firefight. Linh had stood up to get the picture, before Darrow knocked him down, and small bits of shrapnel had nicked him in the face and neck. Even the Leica he had been shooting with had been damaged. Darrow bent over the medic, making sure he cleaned out the half-moon-shaped nick on his cheek. "Now you have a beauty mark. Women love scars."

  "I can fix the camera," Linh said.

  Darrow took a long drag on his cigarette. "Don't see how."

  Linh picked up spent shell casings and a metal fork. Darrow watched him, amused.

  "Where'd you learn that? SVA doesn't teach that kind of stuff."

  Linh shrugged.

  "You're the onion man. Peel back a layer and get another mystery."

  "No mystery."

  "I've read the NVA train photographers to work under any field conditions," Darrow said.

  "I've read that also."

  Darrow laughed. "They pose shots. Making heroes. Unlike us. We're showing the truth."

  The rest of the company was out of earshot, but still Linh spoke softly.

  "Make believe that a man's father, a professor at the university in Hanoi, fought the French to free our country. And the French became the Americans. And the Nationalists became the Communists. And pretend the son learned to fix a camera with casings and a fork for the North, but that he found their promises to be lies. He escaped but was made to fight for the SVA. And pretend that after all this time fighting, all he wanted was to flee the war. If this was true, would you take this assistant?"

  "Why doesn't he run away?"

  "He is tied to his country." Linh rubbed his hand over his wrist.

  Darrow took another drag on his cigarette, handed one to Linh. "This man has suffered enough. I'd be proud to work alongside him."

  Linh turned away. He could not help feeling he had lost face by telling so much, and yet he knew the Americans expected this, needed this abasement to feel comfortable.

  "Question?" Darrow said. "This imaginary man who worked in the North, did he ever see Uncle?"

  "I imagine... yes." The more one told, the less real the story seemed.

  "Where?"

  "Outside Hanoi. Visiting a friend who served as a guard. A tiny village, just a few huts strung along a canal. A small vegetable garden, and he was bent over the rows for hours, weeding. All alone. He was only in his fifties but was sick with TB and looked ancient. Just a glimpse. He was just an old man weeding his garden. Hidden because he was in plain sight."

  They went out with an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) unit on patrol into a guerilla-dominated province. Darrow favored these small, specialized units who went native because they allowed him to understand the nature of the particular place better than the larger units that turned everyplace into an American base. Special Forces had agreed to let Darrow go along on the condition that there would be no mention of the mission, no pictures. He knew from past experience it was worth it simply to get the lay of the land even though it drove Gary crazy.

  For days they walked in silence in the dim claustrophobia of jungle, not coming across another human being. Day melted into night that melted back into day. They lost track of time, staking out spidery trails, unable to move or talk--the only sound rain slapping against leaves.

  Linh thought of the blank stone faces at Angkor staring out at nothing. Centuries passing without a single human voice intruding. Relieved by the sheer physical exertion, at night he sank down to the earth, asleep; in the morning he woke to find his hands clenched around his wrists, the skin bruised and chafed. The effect of the patrol on Darrow was unexpected. Maybe it was the time away at Angkor, sharpening his eye. After all the wars he had covered, this place spoke to him. The quality of the light on young American faces in this ancient land that was by turns beautiful and horrific. He had found his war.

  The patrol spent the night in a small clearing, a village of six huts along a small tributary river. The people were kind, even killing a chicken in their honor, while the soldiers shared their rations. The chief brought out a bottle of moonshine to sip on. Leaving at dawn, they stopped by again five days later to get out of the rain and came upon only smoldering ruins. A dozen villagers dead, stinking in a thick sea of mud. Since there would be no acknowledgment that Americans were even in the off-limits province, no report of the violence. The enemy had been watching and had taken vengeance. An enemy that ruthless commanded a certain awe. Darrow realized that Vietnam was going to be a very different thing from other wars he had covered. The surface of things was just the beginning. The surface of things was nothing. Linh had it right: things hidden because they were in plain view.

  Four of the soldiers disappeared down a path toward the west in hopes of finding the trail of the departing enemy. They would meet back in six hours. Darrow, Linh, and the remaining soldier retraced their steps to the original landing zone.

  They waited another full day in the long elephant grass, unable to talk or play music or even start a fire to heat food. The sun beat down on their backs
, the air heavy, a wet sheet, buzzing with insect energy. Linh, hidden in the tall grass, dreamed of running away. But where would he go? Finally, as protocol demanded, the soldier radioed for an extraction, although it would give away their presence and endanger the others.

  And then like three lean and hungry wolves in the far distance, the missing soldiers appeared, carrying the fourth. They were struggling, exhausted, each stumbling with a leg or an arm of the fourth, now unconscious, soldier.

  As naturally as Darrow had picked up the camera at the first sign of movement, he now put it down and ran through the field to help carry the wounded man. A decision without hesitation because it had been made and acted on a thousand times before.

  As instinctively as Darrow going out across the field, Linh forgot his dream of running and followed him. The lines and dirt on the soldiers' faces, the dry, unblinking stare of their eyes, showed the war had already started, the suffering begun.

  No one had time to notice that Linh took a picture of Darrow helping to carry the wounded soldier. He was the only one in the shot without a weapon, the only one without helmet or flak jacket. For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be too brave.

  Returning to Saigon, Darrow was gloomy. "Pictures would have shown what's going on. Now nothing. If it's not photographed, it didn't happen."

  "Those villagers don't care if they were photographed or not."

  "You have time to get out of this, you know," Darrow said. He still did not understand that the worst had already happened to Linh.

  "So can you."

  But that was not true. Darrow knew they were both caught.

  THREE

  A Splendid Little War

  Saigon, November 1965

  The late-afternoon sun cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them--either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.

  The dusty military jeep came to a rubber-burning stop in front of the Continental Hotel, scattering pedestrians and cyclos like shot, and a barrel-chested officer jumped out of the back to hand Helen down from the passenger seat.

  "What service," she said, laughing. "How much of a tip should I give?"

  "Just promise you'll have drinks with us."

  "Promise."

  "We're only stationed here a few more days."

  "I will," she said, and started up the steps of the hotel.

  "Remember we know where you live, Helen of Saigon," the soldiers shouted, laughing, peeling away from the curb with a blaring of the jeep's horn that caused pedestrians to flinch, to stop and turn. The Americans at the terrace tables closest to the sidewalk grinned and shook their heads, but the Vietnamese out on the street simply stared, expressions impossible to read.

  Linh shared a table with Mr. Bao. They both watched the scene unfolding on the street in silence, saw the tall blond woman in high spirits dusting her hands off on her pants, patting her hair back into its ponytail, the crowd parting as she moved up the sidewalk, skipping up the stairs of the hotel.

  Mr. Bao shook his head, turned and spat a reddish brown puddle on the floor to the chagrin of the busboy, who hurried for a rag. "They think this is their playground."

  Already tired of the meeting with Mr. Bao, how the old man spoke right into his face, warm puffs of breath assaulting him, stale as day-old fish, Linh signaled for another bottle of mineral water. "Another whiskey, too," Bao said. For a professed proletarian, Mr. Bao certainly seemed comfortable using the Continental as his personal lounge.

  "Add a bottle of Jack Daniel's to my shopping list."

  Linh had been working for Darrow for a year, had finally moved into his own apartment in Saigon and begun to have some normalcy in his life, when Mr. Bao showed up one night at the cafe he frequented. Although he didn't make clear which department he worked in, what was clear was that he had an offer from the North impossible to refuse. "Tran Bau Linh, we almost didn't recognize you. It does us good to see how you've prospered in the world since your untimely departure from the party," he said. He had the square, blunt face of a peasant. As well, he had the unthinking allegiance to the party line. Linh was surprised that they hadn't already killed him.

  "We have big plans for you," he said. "You will do your fatherland proud after all."

  The job was fairly innocuous. A couple times a month, he would report to Bao on where Darrow and he had been. Any frequent newspaper and magazine reader would know as much. The idea was to know the enemy. Linh made sure to bore Mr. Bao in minutiae to the point that he buried anything that could be of value. Most of their meals were spent talking of the food. If Linh chose not to cooperate, Mr. Bao made it clear that he would never hear the bullet that killed him. "You are lucky that you have a use, otherwise you would not still be here talking with me."

  The sky had turned a darker gold by the time the woman came back down into the lobby wearing a blue silk dress the color of the ocean at dusk. Her heels made a delicate clicking sound on the floor as she crossed to the bar where her date for the evening, Robert Boudreau, was standing. Linh imagined the air turned cooler where she had passed. "I have to leave now," he said, getting up.

  The bar was packed, standing room only, almost all men, but Helen spotted Robert in the corner.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "My ride back from the hospital didn't come through. I had to bum a ride from some army officers passing by."

  Robert turned with his drink and looked at her. "You clean up pretty well. I've got the prettiest girl in Saigon. That's worth the wait right there." Robert was on staff at one of the wires and had been wasting time in the front office when she came in looking for freelance work. Sensing that she was entirely overwhelmed, he quickly made himself indispensable.

  He had a squat build, beefed shoulders, and a muscular chest that caused him to move with a thick, heavy grace, like an ex-athlete. Too, like an ex-athlete, there was the sense that his best days were behind him. A little too neat in dress, a little too Southern and patriotic in politics, he didn't fit in with the younger journalist crowd beginning to filter into the city. Helen was the kind of girl he dreamed about showing off back home, but coming across her in Saigon seemed on the edge of a miracle. The coup he was devising that afternoon was sweeping her off her feet, romancing her until his assignment was up, returning home with her on his arm, a salve and a cover to an unspectacular foreign career.

  She grinned. Back home, she had been considered on the plain side, but here the attention of being a rarity was unlike anything she was used to.

  "Have a sip of rum for the road." He gave her his glass, a heavy, square one with a solid crystal bottom that made her hand dip from its surprising weight.

  "Hmmm," she said. "I needed that."

  "You should come home to New Orleans with me. Plenty of the good stuff down there. I'll put you in one of those big ol' houses in the Garden District, and we can fill it with kids."

  "Robert, honey," she said, batting her eyes and using a phony, thick Southern accent, "I came to Saigon to escape all that."

  "Let's go. Everyone's already left for the restaurant."

  They stood on the sidewalk while Robert haggled over the fare to Cholon with two cyclo drivers. Dark, lead-colored clouds had moved in and now begged against the tops of buildings, the humidi
ty and heat so intense Helen felt as if she were walking fully clothed into a sauna. A shimmer in the air. She pushed past Robert and the drivers, ducking under the umbrella covering of one of the cyclos just as a sheet of rain crashed down. The city changed from gold sepia hues to shades of silver; the air, rinsed of its smells, recalled the closeness of the namesake river. Water beaded on the bunched flowers standing in buckets along the side of the road.

  "Pay the fare, Robert," she shouted, laughing, as he climbed in the second cyclo behind her, dripping wet.

  The suddenness of the rains still seemed magical to her. Not like back home, where a few drops gave warning and then slowly increased. With the blink of an eye, a sudden Niagara. The monsoon had the tug of the ocean as if it were trying to reclaim the land.

  Especially in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, the shower didn't slow the heavy pace of business. People simply covered themselves with an umbrella, a piece of plastic, what ever was on hand, and continued on. Both of the drivers were soon drenched but didn't bother with rain gear, their shirts and shorts soaked and clinging to their stringy frames, water squelching out from their rubber sandals, as they serenely pedaled on. When they stopped in traffic, Helen turned to see her driver close his eyes and lift his face to the sky. When the other cyclo pulled next to her, she leaned across and whispered to Robert, "He doesn't seem to mind the wet."

  "Probably the only bath he gets every day," Robert said. He had been stationed in more than five countries since he started reporting, and he took pride in the fact that he remained immune and separate from each of them. He looked forward to the time when all the thrill of the exotic drained away for Helen, too.

  "Don't talk so loud."

  "He can't understand me, honey."

  "I don't care. It's not nice."

  "You're right. He's probably a cyclo driver by day, a VC operative by night. Unless he's a homeless refugee whose village we destroyed. By all means, I want to be nice for Helen."