The Man From Saigon (35 page)

It feels as though a decade has passed since then, that she is awake and reliving her life as though in a dream. She is hungry. The air strike scared away all the animals so that there is nothing for the soldiers to hunt for food. They walk and they look but the trees are empty except for their abundance of leaves and vines. There is some rice, but there hasn’t been enough time to cook the little bit they still have and it is dark and they still haven’t found the hamlet they are looking for. She has seen Anh consulting with Son about the direction they should take. It gives her a measure of reassurance to see Son involved in such decisions, because she knows him to be an excellent navigator. But so far today they’ve not come across anything that looks remotely like a village or a camp. No sign that people are here, were here, or will ever come here. It is a vast wilderness, more complicated than the most intricate labyrinth, and there seems no way out.

There is a pain behind her eyes. Her joints hurt: she can feel every vertebra in her back. She feels faceless, unidentifiable. It occurs to her that she may be getting ill at this most inconvenient time. What she would give now for that rusted ambulance, the lumpy sofas with their dusty coverings, the medical supplies in their boxes, the brusque discourteous doctor, the dark nurse whose fingers were the color of leaf bark.
As she thinks of it now, the hospital seemed a storehouse of abundance. She longs for their room with all the crates, the two small cots, the light of the candles, the comforting sound of laughter from next door.

“Will they be overrun, soon, do you think? The Montagnard hospital?” she asks Son. It is probably the furthest thing from his mind, but he answers without hesitation, as though he, too, has been thinking the same thing.

“Yes,” he says. “They have a few months.”

“You might have told them so. That would have been the decent thing.”

Son squeezes her hand. “Susan,” he says gently, “they
knew.
”

“How could they know?”

“The cook would have told them.”

“The cook?”

“Why do you think she was so scared?”

“But, then why—”

“Why do they stay? Because, I suppose, they feel they must.”

The conversation takes place between stretches of silence in which it is only their footsteps they hear. Then, all at once, there is a long call from a tribe of monkeys, the scratching noise of animals scrambling through branches. Minh points his gun up to the dark trees but he cannot see and no shots are fired.

Susan says, “The doctor didn’t believe her.”

They walk few steps, considering this.

Son says, “That German one did.”

The house, when she sees it, is so unexpected she cannot at first glean what it is. The mud walls are nothing more than darker objects against a black night. The straw roof resembles the low branches of trees. She sees the shape emerging in her vision and for all the surprise it gives her it might be an island rising up from the sea. The receding jungle, the shadows of
coconut palms, the clearing to a door, all the familiar comforting geometry of four walls and the tidy results of human labor, astound her freshly as though she has never seen such things. Beside the house lies a network of narrow, shaded pathways of a small village, a pig corral fenced with low, dark wood, a boxed shelter for a chicken house. She smells kerosene, gasoline. A cooking smell, like so many smoking ovens. The village is silent, not even a dog barking, but the house is there, planted before them as though from some different, other world. All at once she craves water. Water and a chair.

They enter silently through what feels like a gap in the wall, filling the tiny house immediately. The straw roof with its peculiar smell is startling to her, and she finds herself looking up as though at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. Normally she would expect to be greeted by children. Always in the past when she has visited villages the children flock around her in abundance, sucking the sweet wood of sugarcane, calling out what few English words they know:
okay, coca, GI, money.
But it is late and quiet; perhaps the children are sleeping. She has seen that before, how they pile on beds made from planks, arranging themselves haphazardly like the coats of guests at a party. Older sisters, toddlers, slender boys with their bony spines, they sleep like puppies, pushed together on a bed next to an ancestral shrine.

“There are no people,” she says now. “Again.”

The house is so dark she cannot see the walls, nor determine where a table might be, a bed or a chair. She hears a few indeterminate noises. A creak, the thud of a footstep, something being dragged on the ground. It is Minh, his short legs uncommonly clumsy in the pitch black of the night, the sword dragging beside him against the hard earth of the floor. He arrives through the hut entrance, breathless, and speaks to the others.

“What is he saying?” she whispers.

Beside her, Son stands erect, his attention full on the soldiers. “That the hamlet is empty. Burnt. This is the only house standing,” he says quietly.

She draws in a breath. She realizes that what she’d thought was the smell of the roof and of cooking fires was not the roof at all. It was the smell of burnt foliage, burnt houses. It is only that they happened upon the hamlet from a particular angle, so that in the blanket of night they did not see the destruction, the ruined garden plots, the sooty remnants of bamboo fences and lean-tos, the flattened remains of houses, the piles of scorched belongings. Because the razing of the hamlet has happened recently the rains have not had time to wash the remains into a muddy swell of debris. Anh gets out the penlight again, just as he did in the shelter, and casts its beam around them. This house, the one remaining house against dozens of collapsed others, is vacant, as far as she can tell. An empty shell of a room. All over the floor are candy wrappers and cans and cigarette butts and spent matches, signs of the soldiers who have been here.

She hears the word
Americans.
She looks briefly at Hien, wondering if he will blame her for this, too, wondering if they all will blame her. The three soldiers begin a fiery conversation, with Hien on one side of Anh and Minh on the other. She has no idea what they are saying. It is one of those arguments born of irritation and the fading possibility that their circumstances would now change for the better. They are all so hungry. They were always hungry—it has been almost a constant for many days—but tonight it is as though they are living at the very center of their hunger. They entered the ruined hamlet believing food would be found here—food, people, shelter—and they have discovered just as quickly that it will not. Their steps, which approached the house with energy born of hope, now slow, then stop so that now they all feel rooted to the ground like stones.

Anh is still holding the water coconut. It isn’t what any of them want, that miserable fruit, still green. They want meat and vegetables, a bowl of rice with a salty broth, tea. They want the crispy skin of fried fish, some pork, especially that. They have been walking for so long. There are times when Susan has felt as though the long bones of her calves will push right through her ankles, through her heels, and down into the soft ground like stakes, that her depleted muscles and ligaments cannot hold the bones in place any longer. She is sure they all feel something similar, that the soldiers have reached a limit. She hears their voices rise up in the darkness. Hien begins yelling so that Anh speaks sharply to him. But his voice rises even more, sounding hysterical. It continues until Anh, in one awful moment, takes the water coconut and throws it on the ground so that it bursts, making a noise like an explosion, like a gun going off.

The sound makes her imagine—more than imagine, makes her
see
—a wooden sampan loaded with watermelons that blew up in the Cai Rang floating market in Can Tho. Son had been photographing the tangle of water traffic: so many boats and barges and sampans, the barefoot vendors in their conical hats, the tea women behind clouds of steam, children poking their heads from doorways of the houseboats, melon baskets, the hairy shells of coconuts, pineapples. She was writing in her notebook, her free hand shading her brow from the sun. The blast came from nowhere, a grenade that sent the harbor water raining from above. Son dropped his camera; the notebook suddenly disappeared like a bird that had flown. The noise was so loud she saw a young mother scream and it seemed as though the scream was silent. The harbor with its sampans and junks and houseboats and floating stores was now a sea of splintered wood and torn cloth, pieces of masts and hulls and baskets of fruit drifting in the water, bobbing like buoys. In the water, too, were people. They swam, yelling for one another, climbing into
the remaining boats. She could hear children crying. She could hear the panic and the cries and the fear. She ran for a wall, expecting another blast; she took out her camera. Two pictures: one of an old woman weeping, the other of the vendor, what was left of him.

All this comes to her in the single moment that Anh throws the melon on the ground. It is as though somehow the lid on her experience has been prised open and now floats about her so that at any moment she will be blinded by it. She thinks of Marc and his dreams and how he used to wake up in the night with that desperate desire to escape.
To escape what?
she used to ask.
The bed, the room, the hotel, the city?
No matter how hard she tried, she could not understand. Now she knows exactly. The muscles in her jaw contract and expand so that her face feels pulled. She feels her leg grow warm and has no idea why it is like that until she reaches down with her hand and understands, in a moment of slow awareness, that she has wet herself.

There is silence. Nobody dares move or speak until, at last, Son clears his throat. “There will be a pump. Or a well,” he says in French.

“They will have ruined the well,” Anh says.

“They forgot to destroy this house. Maybe they forgot the well, too. We’re filthy. We need to bathe.”

“Tôi nhìn tháy môt!” says Minh.
I saw one.
Or
I have seen one
, or
I will see one.
She isn’t sure. In the darkness Minh looks like a child, his hair sticking out from all sides of his head like a hedge. In other circumstances, had he been born on the other side of the world, he’d be one of those youths who was good at many things, but whose ceaseless energy made them tiresome to adults, so that they ended up in trouble all the time. The sort of teenager who made knives out of soda cans and painted post boxes with graffiti. Here, he is no trouble at all, just a willing soldier, no doubt a volunteer. He turns toward
the entrance, and is out the door instantly, asking Anh something that includes the Vietnamese word
nuoc
, meaning water.

“Go on then,” replies Anh, or at least this is what Susan imagines he says. Anh searches the floor with the penlight once again, bending over to pick up the half-smoked butts of American cigarettes. When he bends down, he holds the back of his trousers at the same time so they do not slip. He has lost weight. All of them have lost weight, but especially Anh. He is the one who carries the largest pack. He is the oldest of the three and certainly the strongest. But even he is tired. His stomach looks as though it has been scooped out from beneath his rib cage and there is a weariness to his expression. He drops the pack on the ground amongst all the litter from the American troops, and unfastens one of its ties, fishing out the store of cigarettes, to which he adds new butts he picks from the ground. Susan hopes he will get out the remaining rice now, too, as they have not eaten since before the air raid and surely they cannot get through the night without food, but instead he pulls out some folded cloth. She recognizes it as her own T-shirt, which she has not seen since their capture.

“Here,” says Anh. “Is there anything else you want?”

She has gotten used to the way he speaks French, to the almost shy manner in which he never meets her gaze. Like many soldiers he has reached a place where he does not look at a person directly unless through the sight of a rifle. She has no doubt he would kill her if he thought he needed to, and that the act would be conducted like any chore. But she is grateful to him now. She takes the T-shirt. It has the green smell of vegetation and moisture, a little like the rice which has become damp in the course of their march, but it is soft and clean. It feels like a pillow, like something she might lay her head against.

“Thank you,” she says. The pack is still open, as though he expects she will take more. It seems that when he asked if there
was anything else she wanted, it was a genuine offer and not sarcasm. “There’s some shorts,” she says, hesitating. “And some underpants. I’d be so grateful—”

He takes out the remaining rice and then shoves the whole of the pack in her direction. She guesses he does not want to handle her things, now that he is recognizing that they are hers, or perhaps he is already regretting that he has offered them back to her when certainly the shorts—a pair of knee-length khakis—would have been useful to him. The socks, too, which the soldiers have taken to wearing at night to keep their feet warm, are in the pack, along with a few other items. She gathers her clothes, holding them away from the filthy shirt she wears so that they don’t get soiled, then smiles at Anh, bowing her head as she has seen Vietnamese do for each other. It is perhaps more than she ought to do, the bow, given that these are her own clothes, but she is embarrassed by the state of her trousers, how she has wet herself. If there were any daylight, or even if the night were brighter than it is, the soldiers would see the stain and know what had happened. Perhaps Anh already knows, which is why he is making such a gesture in the first place. “Thank you,” she says, backing away.

Minh arrives in the hut in a flurry of motion, speaking excitedly to Anh. He points behind him, then goes to the door and brings in a wooden bucket that he has found outside. It is a rusted pail the size of a horse’s feed bucket. Anh runs his finger across the joins, inspecting it for holes, then nods at Minh and the boy disappears.