The Man From Saigon (28 page)

As time passes, the bombing grows less frequent, then stops altogether.

She tries to speak, but all that comes from her is a long, slow whine that she does not recognize as her own voice. It is a sound like a siren, like the stammering beginnings of a cry. The sound rings out in the well of earth in which she sits and she thinks surely she has gone mad if she cannot even make a noise with volition. Long Hair, too, must be wondering what she is doing. He gives her a puzzled look as though he, too, is confused by the strange whining. Their hearing is so distorted now, their heads ringing with the aftermath of the air strike, it is not surprising they hear phantom noises, and that sounds ring unusually in their battered eardrums. The air itself is dense
and close, vibrating as the skin of a drum. She feels like at any moment the place will combust.

She folds her arms over her knees. Son takes her hand, her arm, pulling her toward him, holding her there now that the mortars have eased, the vibrations ebbing back, the world once again left in stillness. He appears no longer to care if the soldiers see the depth of their friendship. He is covered with the same stinking mud, the same dirt and slime and sweat that is plastered over her. She is glad to have him near. She does not want to think of what it might cost him later—a man who evaded execution by claiming to be Vietcong but is now sitting with his arms around an American girl. She has no sense of “later,” of time itself. The thought of a timepiece—a watch, a clock—seems a folly to her anyway when death is so at hand. She has no idea why the Americans called in artillery on this particular patch, and wonders if it was an accidental strike, the sort that happened all the time and which usually resulted in scores of unnecessary deaths and might, this time, have caused her own.

Through the ringing in her ears she hears again the high whine and realizes now that it is not her voice but that of one of the soldiers. Their senses have all been so distorted that it is difficult to tell what is happening, who is making what noise, whether there is a noise at all. She looks up and sees that the Thin One is crying. He is shaped so differently from most Vietnamese, taller, with long, flat bones, a tubular rib cage, a narrow head as though someone once put it in a vise. He is crying as a child might cry, from fear and confusion. She has never seen a Vietnamese soldier cry, let alone a VC soldier. He seems entirely surprised by the event himself, his face registering astonishment at the tears which spill, so that he touches his face feeling for them as one might feel for blood. He speaks to the other two, who observe him as though he has just grown gills. At last, he turns to her, his fists clenched by his chin,
shaking like a crying child’s fists will shake, the muscles at his brow swelling with the effort of his emotion. He looks, in fact, like a child. Like any number of the large-headed underweight pubescent boys she sees half-naked in the villages. It suddenly occurs to her that he may be no older than fifteen.

He lunges at her, grabbing her neck with his hands. She is so startled that, at first, she does not resist. She feels the pressure against her throat, a stabbing pain, her eyes beginning to lose focus, a sudden darkness, the whole thing happening so fast she does not have time to scream. She feels the weight of the soldier’s body, his knee against her chest. She feels herself braced against him, her hands grabbing uselessly at his, trying to pull his fingers from her throat. There is a jarring sensation as he bears down on her, her ears ringing, her eyes seeming to pop out of her skull. It happens so fast and yet each second expands into the next as though they exist now in a balloon of time in which a minute is an hour. All at once, she realizes she is passing out. The edges of her vision cloud. She cannot move her head or arms. The soldier recedes from sight, far away, then close again. Her focus wanes. Just as she thinks surely she is dying, he suddenly, unexpectedly, drops his hold on her throat.

He topples off her and she struggles to breathe again, terrified because it appears she cannot. Her eyes feel as though someone has taken each eyeball and squeezed it like a lemon. Her throat throbs and expands. She can see again, but cannot move her head. She can hear a fight beside her and realizes that it was Son who pulled the soldier off and now the soldier is hitting Son, who kicks him in the face, the whole thing ending with Long Hair threatening to shoot them both, then grabbing the Thin One and throwing him off Son, so that he knocks into her again.

The soldiers continue arguing loudly in Vietnamese. Son tries to talk to her, but she is still too preoccupied with trying
to breathe. There is a sound like an engine in her throat and though she tries to gain some breath, it feels at first as though the damage to her windpipe is too great, the swelling too large. After several minutes she is able to get enough breath and the awful roaring noise inside her subsides a little. Some time later she is able to breathe normally, without gasping and sputtering and feeling she will be sick. She pulls herself up out of the slime on the ground and says, “It’s not
my
fucking air strike!” to the soldiers.

“He is upset because we cannot find our unit,” Long Hair answers.

“And that’s
my
fault?”

“The hamlet was deserted and now we have to find the next.”

The Thin One tries to say something and Long Hair raps him with his knuckles. He pulls back, making a great effort to control himself now. He wipes his eyes and then blinks as the mud irritates them. He is sniffling; they are all so covered in filth that there is no way he can wipe his nose or clean himself. Susan looks away. She does not care if he is upset, if he is worried or hungry or half mad with fear. If he is angry about Americans or air strikes or the whole of the damn war. She’d just as happily kill him herself right now.

She puts the soldier out of her mind, concentrating on the dim glow of the flashlight in the corner of her vision. Son wraps his arms around her like a cape. He does not speak, nor does he need to. He has saved her life. She is certain that if he had not been there, the other two soldiers would have let the Thin One kill her. Not because they hated her or because they thought she deserved to die, but only because they were distracted and because if they cannot find their own unit, she cannot be handed over. And if she cannot be handed over to their commanding officers, she is of no value. She will eat their food and slow them down, bringing them no reward at all. But Son had been watching out for her, as he always did. She concentrates
on the feeling of his embrace, on the miracle of the bulb that has not given out, on the letter hidden within the stem of the flashlight, a letter she cherishes. She is grateful that they have survived the bombings, that her throat is clear now. She reaches behind her, feeling for the still erect walls. She breathes deeply and thanks God for the presence of oxygen in the air.

In Saigon, Son sat with her at night as she brushed her hair, getting ready for bed. She dressed and undressed in the bathroom, balancing against the walls. They had so often found sharp splinters from broken tiles embedded in their feet that they wore flip-flops in the room, the rubber thwack of their heels a background noise, like the passing cars outside. She did not hide herself from him, but nor did she go braless or wear shorts. He appeared to have no desire at all except for her company—at least, she thought this was the case. He read aloud to her from newspapers, or chatted as he fixed his developing trays, dousing negatives, watching with anticipation as images arrived on the treated paper, occasionally holding one up for her to see. Once, when she had a head cold, he brought her soup in bed, but usually after she lay down to sleep he did not look in her direction. Out of respect or embarrassment, she did not know. It was just one of the many ways they managed to live as they did in that one small room.

Occasionally, on a particularly beautiful night during which they might be walking through the last haze of evening together, talking quietly, glad to be away from the fighting, or pleased with the outcome of a story they had covered, she felt like taking his hand. She had never done so, but it was there: the wish for an increased connection. Was there nothing more to it than that? To take his hand: what did that mean? It was innocent, she thought. Nothing more than an occasional desire to demonstrate the closeness of their friendship.

There were times when she wondered, too, if he would ever
do anything to test the waters of a possible romance with her. She did not broach the subject with him—it would have been unsettling and, after all, they spent so much time in harmony, in that familiar closeness that was precious to them both. She did not want to disturb that. In truth, weeks if not months went by without her considering whether he felt any attraction for her or, indeed, whether she was attracted to him. However, it did not go entirely unasked. Once, early on in their friendship, she edged toward the subject and he told her he knew she was in love with Marc.

The way you look at him
, he said, as though that finished it. When she seemed perplexed he added,
The way he looks at you.

We don’t always get along.
It was easy to say this, but not entirely accurate. What she meant was that they had lives that were separate, that must always be so, it seemed. She did not mean they argued, because they did not.

He loves you.

Like that would matter
, she said.
I mean
—

She didn’t know what she meant. The statement seemed coarse and she immediately regretted it. She was not suggesting that love was meaningless, only that the question of such allegiances went unasked in Vietnam. It was its own small world, a theater of extremes, and it was temporary. She had borrowed Marc. That much was perfectly obvious to her. She had loaned him from the world in the same manner in which the GIs were on loan, the missiles and the aircraft, the supplies that arrived daily in the harbors, the tanks and helicopters. Not that these temporary arrangements did not matter. They were crucial, critical, without which none of them could be here. But one day everything would go back or be destroyed, or sold on, or thrown into the ocean. Nothing could remain as it was. But she could not explain this, not at the time, how she knew and had always known that Marc would leave her. Anyway this was not how Son would see it; Vietnam was his
home. For him there was no place to retreat, no getaway, no other life or world.

So she said,
You must have a girlfriend.
She might have added that she was not used to men who slept on floors, who spoke gently to her when she had a bad dream, who did not appear ever to look at her, except as a brother might.
Perhaps you even have a wife?
she said. Had he been American, had he been white, she would have asked this question of him a long time ago. Did she think he was any different for being Asian? She must have thought so, because one of the first questions to the soldiers in the field was always whether they had someone back home. She’d asked dozens of different GIs that question, so why hadn’t she asked Son? Now, whispering, with a certain dismay at her own odd behavior, she continued,
Don’t you have someone, Son?

They were at a market. He had spent the morning trailing behind her with a string bag and a plastic sack. The bag held condensed milk, coffee, dragonfruit, batteries, limes, the pork rolls that Son always bought, a few oranges. Beside them was a newsagent, stocked with newspapers, almost all of which were censored. Great gaps in the print, whole headlines blackened as though with a giant’s mighty pen. The papers with their blocks of blank newsprint, their darkened boxes, their tales of government victories, were crammed on to a rusted metal rack or stacked, like most of the goods in the market, on sagging cardboard cartons, piled in rows.

Son stood near; anyone looking at them would have assumed they were lovers, deep in conversation over the things lovers whisper about, those forgotten questions and declarations, so important at the time. His gaze, angled at her, showed tenderness. Because of the bags in his hands, he could gesture only with his shoulders. A moment later, she took his elbow and walked closely beside him as he steered them through the crowd. She was talking quietly, head bent, her mouth near his collarbone. She would not dare to have such a conversation in the
room. To speak of these things required the presence of market stalls, the busy movement of people, women cooking in blackened pots over small fires, the pickpockets and money changers, the flasks of dark tea, the bold children pushing Cola they sold to Americans for ninety cents a can. Otherwise, it was too intimate, too close.

You must have somebody
, she said.
I can’t believe
—

I won’t say
, he told her.
But you are my best friend.

But, Son. Don’t you ever
, you
know…?
They stopped again. He faced her, standing with her bags as a good husband would. She took a long breath. It confused her, all this. Everywhere she went she was propositioned by soldiers, not always in a bad way. Some were polite, asking her to dance at a club or complimenting her in some small way, offering their cigarettes or pop, or just smiling and saying it was nice to see a woman who was a “round eye,” that they hadn’t seen one in months. Others were more direct, occasionally obscene. She let those comments bounce off. In truth, she really didn’t care what the soldiers said. She was too aware of how they spoke to one another, and how the officers degraded them with abuse that would be shocking if it weren’t so commonplace. It was all very impersonal, really. Even when men in the press corps teased her, or spoke in their brusque manner, so false, so full of bravado, she really didn’t care that much.

But she
did
care what Son said. She looked at him as he smiled awkwardly, glancing up, then away, anything not to look directly at her. He was blushing. His hair had grown a little so it fell on either side of his head like a newly thatched roof. His cheekbones, his chin, his teeth were all so large, and yet he had a delicate face.