If You Lived Here (31 page)
and sets a pot on to cook. Soon, the smell of rice drifts across the room. Long, who has spent his time napping on a mat in a corner of the room, paces a few feet away, clearly anxious to start back to Hanoi.
At six o’clock, we’re finally packing up Dario’s instruments and a few remaining medications when the sound of distraught voices comes through the door. Bac walks over to investigate, then leads a young cou-ple, no older than twenty, toward Dario. They are barefoot, their faces sweaty and smudged with dirt. The girl wears a traditional skirt and a thin yellow T-shirt, despite the fact that the mountain air has grown chilly. The boy wears army khakis and a torn button-down. On his back, he carries a sleeping child in a canvas sling.
Bac squats down next to me and Dario. “They’ve come from a village about ten kilometers away. It’s their daughter. She’s three. Several days ago, she stepped on a piece of metal that cut open her foot.”
As I explain the situation to Dario, the mother is gently lifting the child from the sling. A putrid smell fills the air. The lower half of the child’s right leg, severely swollen, has been tightly wrapped in dense lay-ers of fabric. Dario murmurs something in Italian. He stands up and takes the child out of her mother’s arms, then lays her down on the mat. For a moment, he ignores the foot, pulling at the child’s eyelids and getting no reaction, then taking her pulse. He continues his examination and, without looking up, he says to me, “This fabric has cut off the circulation to the foot. The infection is severe. She’s lost consciousness. I’m going to unwrap the fabric. Get the parents outside.”
I give Bac the information, but the parents, squatting a few feet away, refuse to move, keeping their eyes on their child. Bac brings forward another kerosene lamp. In the dim, smoky light, Dario slowly unwraps the fabric. At first, it comes off easily, but as he gets into the deeper lay-ers, they begin to stick together. The smell becomes almost unbearable. The mother begins to cry. Using a pair of scissors, Dario carefully cuts through the remaining fabric. At first, it seems endless. He’ll never get to the child’s skin. But then I realize that much of the foot has been revealed already, and the skin itself has turned as black and mottled as the cloth. A few seconds later, the mother, probably realizing the truth, begins to
scream, standing up, holding her hands to her mouth, lunging toward her daughter. Her husband holds her, and Sinh leads them to the other end of the room.
The child begins to stir. Her eyes won’t open, but her head moves from side to side and her arms flail about her. “Mai, hold her,” Dario instructs. I move closer and crouch beside the little girl, gently holding down her arms. The child’s head flops back and forth, and I lower my lips until they’re just beside her ear. From out of nowhere comes the wordless tune of one of my mother’s lullabies. I close my eyes and I can hear nothing but the sound of my song and the doctor quietly speaking to himself in Italian. The child’s thrashing slows. I’m crying, but I can’t let go of her arms to wipe my tears.
After a long while, I feel a hand touch mine. Dario is smiling at me gently. “Okay. It’s okay,” he says. “Her pulse is up, but if we don’t get her to the hospital, she will die tonight.” He pulls a blanket out of one of his boxes, picks up the little girl, and bundles her in it. “Come,” he says. “We’ll go now.”
On the way to the hospital in Hoa Binh, Dario sits in the front of the car with Long. I sit in back with the parents and the baby. No one says a word. The mother holds her lips against her daughter’s head and murmurs chants that sound like prayer.
We leave Hoa Binh at nine-thirty. By now, the child is hooked up to a hospital IV and a Vietnamese doctor has taken over her case. In the hallway just before leaving, I see Dario hand the parents a wad of U.S. dollars. Then, as our Toyota heads back toward Hanoi, Long asks the doctor, who’s returned to his old place in the backseat, for a prognosis. The doc-tor leans against the door, rubbing his eyes. “I believe she’ll live,” he says, “but they won’t be able to save her foot.”
We managed to get out of the mountains while a bit of light remained in the sky, but now we don’t even have a moon to guide us. Bicyclists and pedestrians continue to travel along the shoulder, weaving in and out of our headlights. The car passes through a small village. A couple of children toss a ball back and forth at the very edge of the road while their parents, seated in folding chairs, watch from their gravel-covered yards. Life is nothing but accidents waiting to happen.
“Opera, please, Long,” says Dario, and Long pushes a cassette into the tape player. Within a few moments, music fills the car. No one says a word, then Dario reaches down to the floor by his feet and picks up the bottle of rice wine and a bag of sandwiches that Long bought while the two of us were in the hospital. “I would have invited you to have dinner with me in Hanoi tonight. After all you’ve done, I’d like to be able to thank you. But now it’s so late I’ll be lucky to get you home before tomorrow.” He unscrews the top on the bottle and offers it to me. “Can we consider
r
U:<.
u
and a sandwich a substitute for an evening out?”
I don’t even hesitate before taking the
r
U:<.
u.
Maybe he’s just tired,
but his voice is kind and I feel grateful, after the trials of the afternoon, that he’s pleased with my performance. I don’t know why such a thing would matter to me, really, but it does. I wouldn’t have imagined that sitting on a mat for five hours could exhaust me so completely, or give me such a sense of satisfaction. Without looking at him, I hold the bottle and take a sip. The liquor tastes sweet as it slides down my throat and within seconds I can feel its warmth all over my body. We eat our sandwiches, passing the bottle back and forth. “What this music?” I ask. It sounds forlorn.
“
La Traviata.
It means ‘The Lost One.’ It’s a love story, a tragedy, of course. When I was still in Italy, I never listened to our operas. They seemed so silly and old-fashioned. But now, so far away, I find them very beautiful. Sometimes, I just need something from home.” He pulls a sec-ond sandwich from the bag and takes a bite. “And you? In America do you sometimes need something from Vietnam?”
“I cook.”
Dario takes another sip of wine. Two or three men sing back and forth, but I can’t understand a word of it.
“Why you not live in Italy?” I ask.
He shakes his head, passing me the bottle. “It’s been almost ten years since I’ve lived there.”
“Why?” I’m finished with my sandwich now. I roll the paper napkin and the plastic bag in a ball and, not knowing what else to do with them, stuff them in my pocket.
“My wife and I practiced emergency medicine in Sienna for years.”
I can’t decide if he’s deliberately ignoring my question or if he isn’t listening. Then, he begins again. “I had been reading about the war in Bosnia and I decided that we should go and help. My wife didn’t want to. She wanted us to start our family. But I wanted adventure. ‘We can always start a family. How many opportunities do we have in life to help people who are suffering?’ You know? I gave her the whole bit. It sounded so exciting. I can be very convincing, or very stubborn, so finally she agreed to volunteer for six months, Medicins Sans Frontiers. They call it Doctors Without Borders in English. It turned out that she really liked it. I liked it, too. We felt like we were superheroes—you know?—saving the world. At least, I felt that way. You get sort of swept up in a life like that. It feels good to help people, even if maybe you do it for the wrong reasons.”
I nod, though I don’t understand, exactly. I’ve had enough of war, myself, but I suppose I could see how someone else might find it thrilling. My body feels warm and sleepy. “Why Vietnam, then?” I ask. “You and your wife got tired of war?”
Dario shakes his head. He takes another sip of wine, then says, “My wife died over there.”
I look at him. “I don’t know that. Sorry.”
His second baguette, half eaten, sits forgotten on the plastic bag in his lap. He stares out the window. Then, he says, “When you go to a war, you know something bad like that can happen. But you think of it in a general way—I could get hurt someday, maybe. Day to day, though, you forget about it. And that day, we were leaving for vacation, going to Italy for two weeks. Who thinks about danger then? We got a lift in a twenty-seat UN plane headed from Sarajevo to Zagreb, but there’s engine trouble on the way. The pilots must make an emergency landing in a field. No one dies.” He turns and smiles sadly. “We thought it was a miracle.” Then he looks back out the window toward the night. “Julianna, the seat in front of her had smashed down on her legs. She couldn’t move. Other people on the
plane, same thing, trapped. Julianna and I cried. It was a miracle. We were all still alive. Many injuries, but everyone was alive.”
Dario picks up his sandwich as if to eat it, then pulls the plastic bag around it, and tosses it to the floor. His voice has grown flat, like someone reading a script without intonation. “The pilots crawled out through the front window. We could see them out there, trying to fix the radio to call for help. Julianna told me to go talk to them, find out their plan, and then see if I can find some medical supplies somewhere in the cabin. So I kissed her—sometimes I forget the details, but I do remember this—I kissed my wife, then I crawled out of the plane. It was just a big field, in a valley. We could not see any town or any farm or car or village, but the radio was working. The pilots and I stood there, trying to radio for help. That’s what I was doing. Looking down at this radio. I don’t know, one minute, two minutes. I’ll never know for sure. And then we heard this
whoosh!
And heat, air like boiling water, and it threw all three of us across the field. When I looked up, I saw the plane was only fire, nothing but fire. And my wife was inside.”
His hand has been resting against his face. Now it drops to his lap again. “Silly, to tell this story now. I don’t know why I tell this story now.”
“Sorry,” I say.
His head falls back against the seat. “It’s many years already, you know.
In some ways, it’s not so bad anymore. But I don’t go back to Italy.”
We pass the bottle a few more times. Dario sighs. I close my eyes and soon I feel like I’m swimming through the sad voice of the opera singer. The sound is water, air. I don’t even need to breathe. At some point, I may feel his hand touch mine, but by then my mind is floating between wakefulness and dreaming.
can’t account for
what I did today. It started bad—or sad, I don’t know—and then got worse. I lost my head, I guess.
After Mai left with the doctor, I walked back to the hotel and found, on the reception desk, a FedEx envelope addressed to me. The way the hotel staff lurked around the package, you might have thought I had received a commendation from the president. FedEx deliveries, the manager Tri explained, arrive rarely. Apparently, even insubstantial envelopes have a sort of glamour to them. The young women who work behind the desk looked at me with enhanced respect.
I saw immediately that it came from Martin. Even though the hotel employees were clearly waiting to watch me open it, I grabbed it off the counter and rushed upstairs. Only a small part of me held out any hope that the envelope contained good news, an itinerary for a flight to Vietnam, perhaps. But I was anxious to touch something that he had touched so recently. I felt angry, hurt, finished with him forever. But, I missed him, too.
I closed the door, sat on my bed, and tore the envelope open. It contained a sheaf of papers from the yellow legal pads that Martin uses at work, paper-clipped together and folded in half. In his spare, teacherly handwriting, he had covered nearly a dozen pages. I got up to pour myself a glass of water, then sat down and read it.
Dear Shelley,
Listen. Listen, please. In the beginning, you asked about my time in Vietnam and I couldn’t tell you, even though I knew I should. A couple of times, I planned to bring it up on my own. Once, I spent an entire Saturday at the office (I don’t remember my excuse), and wrote you a letter that included everything. Then, I threw it away. We’d only been married a year. You made me so happy. I guess I was terrified that I could mess it up somehow. Obviously, I was a lousy student of human nature. Pain comes back anyway, even after years and years. I never told you anything because I was afraid. Now, I’m afraid that you will never understand me, that I missed my chance. When you called and asked me to go over there, I refused. I refused to do the last thing that, as you said, you’d ever ask of me. And now I have the nerve to ask something of you. Will you do this for me, Shelley? Will you read this?