Only the Heart (8 page)

Part of me — the part that wasn't scared out of its wits — was proud of the way those men did what he said. Without question. I don't suppose I ever really thought of my father as a leader; not before that moment, and not often afterwards. He was just an ordinary man, living an ordinary life. But sometimes it's in a crisis that you catch. a glimpse of what lies inside someone. And standing there at the railing with his family beside him, and their whole future at stake, for that short time he was a leader, and his authority got results.

The men fanned out across the deck, collecting anything that might keep a person afloat. Crates and boxes, lifebelts, pieces of foam, a few inflated car inner-tubes. They even tore pieces from the framework of the boat itself.

And they piled them at the bow.

The patrol-boat was gaining on us and I watched it coming. Then I watched the woman on the shore. She hadn't moved. Her arm was around the boy's shoulder, but it didn't stop him from jumping up and down.

As we crept closer to the land, I could see the swimmers around us and ahead of us in the water. The curent must have been strong and travelling almost parallel to the line of the shore, because it was spreading them out along the beach. The stronger swimmers made some progress, but others were struggling. Some had already given up trying to fight the rip and were letting it take them, staying afloat and gambling that it would carry them closer in further down the beach.

Soon all but the very best swimmers were behind us, and we must have moved beyond the strongest of the current because suddenly they seemed to be making some headway. Then the patrol boat sounded its horn again and I looked away.

They were close now. Soon they would intercept us. They had stopped firing as soon as they realised that we were not going to change course. The men had called their bluff and won the hand. But the game was not yet over.

Later, I learned what they must have intended. To board us and tow the boat back out to sea. We were uninvited. We were without country. We had no rights.

We were not their responsibility.

That was when the men acted. On my father ‘s order they took axes and metal poles, and anything that could do damage, and went down the ladders into the forward and central holds.

From where we stood we could see nothing of what they were doing, but we could hear it. As the Malaysian vessel drew closer, my father and the others were tearing holes in the bottom of the boat, opening it to the power of the sea. And as they broke through, and the water began pouring in, they streamed back onto the deck and started throwing overboard all the things they had gathered. Objects that floated like debris around the boat, waiting.

And then the men and some of the women and children began to jump in.

Once in the water, they called up to their families, who leaped down to join them. My mother lifted Linhhigh over the railing, paused for a moment, then dropped her down to where my father waited. Phuong, Son and Hoang were already climbing the rail and I watched them drop the three or four metres into the suddenly crowded water. Then it was my turn.

It's strange what you remember. Hanging there in my mother ‘s outstretched hands, waiting to drop into the sea, I don't remember any fear, or even any noise, though there must have been plenty of both. The boat was filling with water and it settled to one side; not much, and not viciously, but suddenly enough for my mother to lose her balance slightly. I felt her fingers dig into the flesh under my armpits and I knew that she was about to let go, but the thing I remember at that moment is looking across at the beach and seeing the expression on the face of the Malaysian woman. She had moved away from the boy, towards the water's edge, and the terror etched on her face was vivid even to me.

Then my mother let go and I was falling. I watched my father's hands reach out, but he was too far away. Then I hit the water and went under.

The force of my fal drove the water up into my nostrils and for a moment I thought I was going to drown, but then my father's strong hand grabbed the collar of my shirt and I was pulled to the surface spluttering and crying.

My mother was one of the last people off the boat. She swam across to where we floated; Son and Hoang had managed to secure a floating inner-tube, and she and Phuong joined them, kicking their legs, to drive it towards the shore. Linh was clinging like a cat to a small crate, and my father pushed me over to it. I grabbed hold, digging my fingers into the crack between the slats of wood that formed its side, and my father began swimming and pushing the crate in front of him. And so we made our slow progress towards the beach.

The boat which had carried us so far was sinking, its bow dipping sharply into the water. In minutes it would be gone. One boat that they could never tow back out to sea.

But we were not safe yet. Not by a long way.

For ahead of us, crashing onto the distant sand, were two distinct lines of powerful breakers. And a flimsy wooden crate is definitely not a surf-board.

*

ISYAH

Spread out along the beach the refugees crawl exhaustedly ashore — those that are not struggling still, out beyond the breakers, or fighting the current which threatens to carry them beyond the headland and out into the open sea. The patrol boat has launched three rubber inflatables and they are cutting backwards and forwards trying to pick up the stragglers and ferry them to safety, but the task is difcult, and more than one head has disappeared beneath the green water, never to resurface.

She watches, unable to help, reliving the empty, sick feeling of impotence drawn from a decade of cold-sweat nightmares, which always end with them carrying the boy's limp body from the water. The only difference is the scale of the terror and the screams of the men, women and children as they are thrown and tumbled in the surf.

A huge, white-tiped wave grows out of nothing, and stranded in the foam at the crest, two small children and a man struggle frantically to ke hold of a small wooden crate. But it is a futile struggle; the sea is too powerful and today it is merciless. The lip of the wave begins to curl then collapse, and suddenly they are propelled forward down the wall of green water. The man lets go his hold on the crate and tries desperately to grab both children, one in each arm.

For a moment it looks as if he might succeed, but then the foaming backwash reaches them, and the impact is like hitting something solid. The spray obscures her view for perhaps ten seconds, and when it subsides, the man is still there, struggling in the raging soup of the break, but only one of the children remains within his grasp.

Without thinking, she finds herself waist-deep in the water, eyes darting backwards and forwards across the broken surface, and after a few seconds she sees it. A small glimpse of black hair that rises momentarily then recedes from her, as the action of the building wave sucks the beach-water inexorably into its maw. And as the emerald wall begins to tower over her, she dives towards the child, aided by the rush of the backwash.

Inside the wave is a strange silence, as if the power of it has driven away all sound. She can see nothing but the deep green of the water, and as she waits for the monster to crash her against the sand, crushing the breath from her lungs, achieving what it failed to achieve all those years before, her hand touches something. A shirt, perhaps, or a dress. Or maybe just a strand of trailing weed.

Whatever it is, her fingers close about it in a death-grip and she draws it to herself, even as the power of the wave vents itself on the sand and she is tumbled over and over in its wake. Then she is struggling to find her feet, still grasping her prize. Twice she stumbles, twice regains her balance, then she raises the child's head above the water.

A small boy.

His mouth is apen, but his lungs are filled with water, and the look of breathless panic on his face sends a shaft of fear through her. As his eyes begin to roll, she plunges desperately through the heaving water towards the shore, just as the next wave breaks, and her momentum carries her into its wash.

Within seconds they are on the beach, and the boy is lying face-down across her knees, coughing the sea from his lungs, and sucking in the life-giving air.

While further down the beach, standing amongst the exhausted survivors, Omar, her only son, looks on and smiles the smile of an excited child.

*

TOAN'S STORY

Seventeen people drowned that morning in the waters off Malang Beach. Within shouting distance of the shore, the sea claimed them. For the dream of a new life, they had gambled everything and lost. Twelve adults and five children.

But it was almost six.

Sometimes at night I dream of drowning. I'm trapped inside a wall of green water, and I feel its power holding me, toying with me. I feel the water pouring into me, and I want to scream, but under the sea, at the moment of dying, time slows, sound ceases, and there is nothing but the green.

Nothing but the slow-motion, yawning, empty inevitability of death.

And yet …

In the dream I hear a voice. A child's voice.
My
voice, screaming inside my mind. Not for my mother or my father, but for my grandmother …

And in the dream I feel the hand grasping my shirt, dragging me backwards out of the green, out of the raging anger of the sea. Out of the power of death.

And I remember a face leaning over me as I lie in the sand staring up at the blue sky; at a cloud that looks like a lion. It is a woman's face. She looks familiar, but I do not know from where. I want to thank her, but the words are lost somewhere inside my mind, so I reach up and touch her cheek.

She smiles gently.

Then my father is lifting me from the sand and squeezing me to him like he fears the sea will steal me back. And my mother throws her arms around us both and sobs her relief in huge, aching gasps.

But I am watching
her.

She walks away along the water's edge, holding the boy's hand. Her head is bowed forward slightly and she seems weary. Only when she reaches the rocks at the end of the sand does she turn and look back, and just for a moment I see her face. She is smiling still, and in that brief space of time I finally recognise her.

A six-year-old believes easily. He believes because he is told.

And dreams feed on belief. Part of me knows all this.

But in my dream, for one brief moment, her face, her smile, the way she holds her head …

I know I have see them all before.

On a statue in my grandmother's house, a statue which stands on a shelf, halfway up a wall in my grandmother's room beside the picture of my dead grandfather.

In my dream the woman has the face of Quan Yin …

8

JANGANOON

LINH'S STORY

I remember seeing a documentary once on tv. It was about the meat industry. How they keep pigs and battery hens and sometimes even cattle closed up in tiny enclosures inside large sheds, fattening them up for the slaughter. And I remember thinking,
I know how they feel
.

In fact, I think it was that more than anything else that turned me into a vegetarian. Not the thought of eating dead animals, but the thought of how they lived
before
they ended up dead. That and the fact that it was about the same time as the hormones kicked in and I started fighting with Uncle Minh, so when he told me not to be stupid and just to eat what my aunt cooked, it was like the red cape at a bull-fight. During that period, if he'd forbidden me to eat meat, I'd probably have become totally carnivorous.

But he didn't, and the sight of those pathetic animals suffering on the tv affected me so much that I became all idealistic and stuck to eating dead vegetables instead. After a while it just becomes a habit.

I guess we're all creations of the things that happen to us.

You see, the reason I could feel for those poor animals was that for the first three weeks after we landed in Malaysia, we lived in conditions that weren't all that different. Of course,
we
got to go outdoors and walk around behind the wire fences. But it was the rainy season and the weather kept us inside most of the time.

And inside wasn't a whole lot better than a battery house.

The official literature called it a “barracoon”. I looked the word up in a dictionary once. It means,
a set of buildings or enclosure for slaves, convicts, etc
. Now we weren't slaves, and we weren't supposed to be convicts either, but we might as well have been.

Don't get me wrong. I don't blame them for wanting to stop us wandering away into the countryside and taking up permanent residence. It's not as if their economy was set up to accept so many homeless families, especially as most of them had spent the last of their wealth just getting there. And they didn't treat us all that badly, considering.

It's just that the staging camp at Janganoon wasn't exactly the ideal set-up for housing a couple of hundred people.

Ours wasn't the only boat to arrive in the area that week. At least two others had used the New Year celebrations as a cover for their escape, though they'd both chosen a better landing-spot. The end result of which was that two hundred and seven of us had to wait around until the authorities could check out the situation and figure exactly what to do about it.

Two hundred and seven men women and children, crowded together in four huge tin sheds, built on stilts for ventilation — and to keep out the rain, the mud … and other things. During the heat of the day they were like ovens, and even at night, with all the sleeping bodies, it was really hard to breathe.

But it was worse when the wind blew, because the floor was made of these wooden slats, with gaps of maybe a centimetre between them, and the wind whistled up through them so that there was no way to escape it. I think that was what stuck with me, more than anything looking down through the floor at the earth beneath.

So, yeah, I know how a battery hen must feel …

*

TOAN'S STORY

A few things still stick in my memory about our time at the Janganoon staging camp, even apart from the sickening heat and the wind.

Like the times Linh and I spent crawling in the dirt under the huts searching for our fortune. It wasn't that someone had told us there was gold down there if we wanted to dig for it. I wasn't seven yet, but apart from believing my cousins' ghost stories, I don't remember ever being that gullible. Actually, what we'd discovered was a lot easier than digging for gold.

There wasn't a whole lot to do most of the time we were there, so a majority of the men filled up their days gambling away the hours. It was penny-ante stuff mostly no one had much to gamble with-but the thing is, there were these big gaps between the floorboards …

I remember watching them play once. I didn't understand much about the game, but it was fascinating to see the way they dealt and moved the coloured cards around the table. It was like a ritual that everyone except me understood. They hardly needed to discuss it; often they could go through a whole hand without saying a word, except for naming the occasional bet.

Anyway, there I was, watching, when one of the men dropped a coin on the floor. It bounced once, then rolled — straight into one of the cracks. As it disappeared, I watched his reaction. It was only a small coin, not worth worrying about really. In fact, I'm not sure he even noticed it. He picked up another one from the pile in front of him, and carried on playing as if nothing had happened.

I ran outside.

A minute later I was on my hands and knees in the dirt under the hut, with the men playing cards in the room above me. The coin was there, gleaming in the dull light like buried treasure. And it wasn't the only one.

That night I told Linh about my discovery, and for the next couple of weeks, until we left Janganoon, we spent a part of every day discovering what treasures had dropped through the gaps into our secret “bank”. Once I even found a small gold charm — a tiny horse rearing up on its hind legs. It had a ring on its mane for a chain to run through, and although she didn't have a chain at the time, I gave the horse to Linh. She promised to keep it always. For good luck. I think that was the only time I saw her smile in the three weeks we spent at the staging camp. Or for a long time after that.

But I never saw her cry either.

We didn't even think to ask who owned the stuff we found; it was like … when it fell through the gaps, it ceased to “belong”. It became a part of our world, like a gift from the gods — “pennies from heaven”.

Besides, if we had asked around, it would have put everyone onto our little secret and we might have been fighting for space down there with every kid in the place.

Hell, it was crowded enough in the sheds.

Especially at night.

You got very good at not actually looking at anyone, at letting your eyes sort of slide past them without really focusing. But still there was no privacy.

I remember the time I woke up in the middle of the night, bursting to go. I began picking my way outside, careful to be quiet so that I wouldn't wake anyone. But there were at least two people who were already awake.

I was just a few metres from the door when I heard a sort of stifled moan. I turned, and that was when I saw them. They obviously didn't realise I was there, even though if I'd bent down I could just about have touched them. I really was good at being quiet.

It was a hot night but they were lying under a blanket, which struck me as odd, but it was their actions that made me break the unwritten rule and actually watch them. They were moving together, like they were … wrestling. The woman gave another small moan then opened her eyes … to see me standing there looking at her.

Suddenly she went rigid, as if she wanted to scream but the noise had frozen in her throat. Then the man — who, naturally, had his back to me — tried to turn, to see just what had caused his partner ‘s reaction. By this time I had taken a couple of steps backwards, and I was measuring the distance to the door, so I saw clearly, as his movement dislodged the blanket, which slid silently to the floor, revealing … everything.

I had never seen a naked woman before. Not even my mother. Men, yes. Kids, all the time. But never a woman. It was the first time for me, and I didn't know where to look.

That was when I turned and ran.

Janganoon was also the place I first saw the bông màc cò — the “shy flowers”. We called them that because if you touched one it would snap shut, like it was hiding from you. I loved them, and I'd keep trying to find news ways of touching them — a blade of grass, the very tip of my finger, a strand of cotton dangled from over the top; I even tried blowing gently on them. I guess I must have thought deep-down that the plant could see me coming, because I remember trying to sneak up from different angles, just to see if I could catch it out.

Linh was always fascinated by them as well. Of course, she was almost two years older and a bit too “cool” to be seen fussing over them like me. But sometimes, when she thought no one was looking, I saw her experimenting too.

She didn't ever say much about them or anything else. I guess it was still too soon after … You know …

Still, it was strange; I once overheard my mother talking with my father about her, and she even called her the
shy flower.
I guess l can see why, but Linh was never exactly shy. She just had her reasons for shutting the world out at times.

Both then and later …

*

9 March 1977
Janganoon Staging Camp
Malaysia

LINH

High in the tree, the broad, five-fingered leaves are a light green, and as the sun shines through them she can make out the veins, branching and separating and branching again, smaller and smaller, but still distinct. And so like the diverging veins and capillaries she can trace through the pale skin on the back of her hand. She holds both hands up to the bright sun, and she can almost make out the bones of her fingers as the flesh takes on a pink luminescence, like a solid aura around their shadowy outlines.

The light breeze moves the canopy, and tiny, sharp pinpoints of sunlight dazzle her briefly, leaving behind a red afterglow when she closes her lids.

Back near the huts someone has lit a fire, and the smell of wood-smoke carries to her on the heavy air. She wrinkles her nose, but her eyes remain closed.

Somewhere nearby a bird calls.

Below and behind her the noises of the small camp sound on the edges of her awareness, like distant reminders of the reality that awaits her on the ground. But for now the whole world is contained within the branches of one tall tree. For once, the rain-clouds have blown away to the south, taking with them the memories which haunt her waking hours like lost ghosts.

Her eyes remain shut, and she stares at the sun through closed lids, as the branch beneath her sways in the breeze and the movement and the rustling of the leaves reminds her of the gentle hiss of the foam on the broken surface of Rach Gia Bay, the day she lay with her mother in the bottom of her dead father's fishing dinghy, drinking in the warm sun and talking of the future …