The Man From Saigon (36 page)

“Looks like we have water,” Son tells her.

“I want a bath,” she says. What she means is that she wants to sit in the broad tub in Marc’s room, hearing the turbulent sound of rushing hot water, her shoulders resting on the porcelain’s smooth surface. Or even a bath in her own room. That was merely a metal affair, stained where the finish had worn away. It was only ever possible to get tepid water, and of course
you had to remove all of Son’s photography paraphernalia to get to it. But even that would seem an extravagant luxury right now, like a display of opulence available only to very few in this world, like owning a castle. Marc’s bathroom—how clearly she could see it now—had a high, white ceiling, decorative tiling, a faux marble floor. It would be heaven to be in a bath like that. She could imagine herself, her wet, pale, clean legs bent so that her knees shone with the light from a ceiling lamp, a block of white soap in her hand. Perhaps there would be music—from the radio or Marc’s record player. She could hear Marc’s typewriter keys, the flurry of metal wands, the pauses between in which she imagined him checking his notes, or rereading the pages he had already typed, or drawing in smoke from his cigarette. After the bath, she would wrap herself in a towel, lying on the bed and feeling the sweep of air made by the ceiling fan against her wet hair. Marc would come and sit beside her, unfasten the towel, lay his hand on her damp skin. How often had they done this very thing and thought nothing of it? Nothing at all of the wealth of the experience: clean skin, sheets, hot water, food, the bar of soap, the sound of music. She imagines Son and her in that same bath, the two of them together. She imagines the broad, quilted bed, the sheets ironed like table linen, the boxy pillows, but this time with Son beside her. She should not do this, should not allow the thought. But it is there, a fixed image in her mind, because he is here beside her, smiling at her clean clothes, the ones she holds in front of her, away from her filthy body. He is pleased for her. That she will at least have something else to wear after so many days in the jungle. That she has been afforded the dignity of stepping out of her wet trousers.

There is a table up against one of the walls and it provides a kind of bed for Minh and Hien, who curl up next to each other like young brothers, fresh from their sponge baths and glad,
she imagines, to be sleeping above ground, safe from the rats. Susan ties her hammock between two wooden struts, then goes outside to relieve herself. But when she returns she discovers that Anh has assumed the hammock, so she is left standing in the room, unsure where now to sleep. Anh is already asleep. The other soldiers may well be asleep, too. Nobody keeps watch any more. Just as they have almost forgotten how many days they’ve been wandering in the jungle, they seem also to have neglected the formalities of prisoners and guards. The rifles rest beside the soldiers, either next to them or across their chests, their safeties on.

It no longer feels as though she is a captive, rather that all five of them have come into a colossal bit of bad luck and are now castaways together. And though it is true that the soldiers do not speak to her often, that they in fact treat her as though she has no useful point of view, she cannot be sure they would not listen if she were to offer an opinion. The fact is, she has none. She can see that the hamlets they visit are abandoned or burnt or both, that the planes fly overhead daily, occasionally dropping their bombs. The American strategy seems to be one of random destruction, and against the incoherence of the attacks, the arbitrary, casual destruction of the rain forest, the razing of these small villages, she has little to offer.

Above her, she can already hear the scuttling of rats along the thin roof. A wedge of moonlight filters through the open window, illuminating the ruins of the village outside. The owners of the house planted herbs in cakes of earth held in shape by waxy leaves that make for a kind of pot, and it seems odd to see them there, set with care upon the ledge, while the rest of the village is in cinders.

“Susan,” she hears. It is Son, of course. He is on the floor, sitting on his poncho, his knees sticking out of his torn trousers. “Sleep here.”

Her eyes are move to Anh, cradled comfortably in the slope
of her hammock. She supposes it is only fair he gets it tonight as she’d been the one to have the clean clothes, but she doesn’t want to sleep on the ground. She is afraid of the rats for one thing, and the hammock has taken on a kind of homey comfort for her. It was
her
hammock. But she is helpless to do anything now but lie on the ground like an animal. She tries to remind herself that at least she was given the privacy of washing by herself at the well, that she was able to remove her old clothes and rinse them. Here she is in fresh clothes while Anh and the others had the same dirty ones. But she might have been allowed her poncho liner. The liner, too, is now draped over the sleeping soldier, resting beneath Anh’s dark arms and his rifle, which rises and falls gently with his breath.

Son reaches up, touching her hand, and she drops gently down next to him. She had always imagined that if a woman were to be captured, she’d be killed or raped or both. She never imagined the woman would be herself (if it happened at all) but one of the other journalists, the bolder ones whose words and photographs sometimes appeared in
Time
or
Life
, women who she imagined were much braver than she, and who took more risks. Dickey Chapelle was killed by a mine two years ago while covering a marine operation, and there is a photograph of her dying that Susan will never forget. In it, she is stretched out on the ground, her hand at her face, the metal of her earring catching the light. There is the long scabbard of her dagger across her bent hip, the blood from a throat wound pooling beneath her. It was taken by another photographer, a friend of Dickey’s, and Susan often wondered how it was that he managed to frame the shot with such apparent dispassion. The mine exploded; the shrapnel entered her throat.
It was bound to happen sooner or later
, Dickey said. She’d been in so many wars by then; she expected one day to end her life in one. Her friend, the photographer, stepped back so that she felt the sun over her face. The camera shutter moved; she may even have heard
it; then she was dead. It happened so fast, as you always imagine is the case in deaths on the battlefield.

But no women she knew had been captured. To be captured, well, that was a different thing. One expected—what exactly? A series of awful rapes, followed by an execution. Appalling, agonizing torment, then death. Once, a couple of ARVN soldiers tied a woman suspected of being Vietcong and submerged her in water over and over until finally she gave them the information they wanted. Susan knew this as fact because she saw it. She stood helplessly on the bank, willing the girl to speak, until she didn’t think she could stand one more minute of watching her torture.
Happens all the time
, a guy from UPI told her.
Try not to be too upset.
The Vietcong butchered the bodies of anyone they considered traitors. She’d seen photographs; she’d seen remains. She’d heard the stories, and not only stories but the sad, awful confessions of villagers who watched.

But she did not know what they might do to a woman prisoner-of-war, to a Western woman, to her. So far, neither rape nor murder. Instead, she is going to grow hungrier and colder, sleep on the ground, live off unripened fruit and whatever can be caught: insects, frogs, the occasional monkey or rat. The slow assault on her body that began with her feet—which have not yet recovered, though she has been allowed again to paint them with iodine, and tonight to wash them as well—has risen now to her stomach and throat. She feels a scraping in the back of her mouth when she swallows, only a low-grade virus, she hopes, and not a streptococcus infection. She is sure they have no penicillin.

Son says, “I’ll make room for you.”

She cannot see his face. If she were able to see him plainly on this dark night she would understand at once the love so obviously displayed there. He holds open the poncho and guides her gently as though her legs are glass, not muscled and tough as they are, as strong as a man’s. But this gesture, like so many
on his part, goes almost unnoticed by Susan. Perhaps she believes even now in the fictitious Han, that invention Son used to explain his frequent absences. Perhaps she finds herself so unattractive, living as she does among the soldiers, that the notion that he might love her is implausible. In any case, if she allowed herself to see what Son appears to be offering, she would be baffled by the way in which they seem to have moved from friendship into this mature, extraordinary dependency upon one another, skipping entirely the heady passions, the petty arguments, the great leaps of desire and jealousy and despair and hope that she has always associated with love. It is as though Son has come inch by inch to occupy the very core of her. If she looked into her heart she would find him there, but she is not thinking of such things.

“The rats,” she says now. She is so tired her bones feel like lead in her skin. Son arranges himself next to her, then tucks the liner up under them both, providing some small protection from rat bites. She is aware of how close he is, how her head rests on his chest, his arms over her arms. Being so close to him ought to feel strange to her, yet it does not. He feels familiar and comforting. The soldiers, asleep, are invisible in the darkness. Minh snores softly above them. Anh is comfortable in the hammock.

“The Americans are destroying all the villages in this area,” Son says.

She can hear his heart, his breath as it fills his lungs. For a moment she almost puts her hand on his bare stomach, that line of dark hair that begins around his waistband. His skin is softer than she is used to in a man and he is close to her height so that it feels as though she has been twinned with him here in the cocoon of the poncho liner.

“Perhaps they’ve had more luck than we have finding people,” she says.

“They are certainly ruining all the hiding places.”

“I don’t want to hide. I want to be found.” She hears the longing in her own voice and feels once again the weight of regret, how she wishes she could take back all the small steps that brought her here. But Son she does not regret. Meeting him, teaming up with him, being “taken in with him”—as surely that is what happened. She feels him near her and knows that his presence is the only thing that has made today bearable. Lying on the ground, listening to the rats above her, near her, hidden in the corners, occasionally rushing past the opening of the hut, would be impossible without him.

“You will be found, darling,” he says now, the endearment sounding peculiar from his lips, as though he has never said anything of the sort before to a woman, much less to her. In all the time they have been together, the months of working side by side, not to mention the long, almost unendurable days of captivity, they have spoken of battles and strategies, of what size artillery was being fired where, who was in charge, and where they might get the best information or story. They talked about Operations that had code names like Rolling Thunder and Starlight, about press escorts, Task Forces, F-100s, divisions and regiments, people they knew and places—Happy Valley, Ia Drang, Cherry Hill—the very names of which held enormous meaning. They did not often speak softly to each other, certainly not as they are now. Neither of them had before used the word
darling.
He is not touching her in any manner other than to hold himself around her as he had to do in the circumstances, given the small space in which they were lying, but he might have; it would not have seemed extraordinary. They do not kiss; nor is there the feeling that they ought to, or ought not to. It is as if they have always ended their days in each other’s arms, or, having been dependent upon one another for so long, they have become a single unit.

“You have hidden yourself all this time,” she says now, “even from me.”

There is a pause as he thinks about this. Everything they say, every small movement of muscle or skin, even their thoughts, feels slowed down, even deliberately, as though they know the delicacy of this moment, this intimacy that links them. Or as though the events of the past days have emptied them out completely so that all they can do is follow the simplest connection between them. No sudden declarations are required. They are Susan and Son, who might have been childhood friends, or brother and sister, or husband and wife, and are here now together.

Son says, “I am myself around you. More myself than without you.”

“But to be a spy—? I guess you wouldn’t call yourself a spy. What would it be?” Her voice is neutral, as though she is merely thinking aloud. She wants to understand him; she feels as though she has not been paying attention all these months and wishes she had been. “Nationalist,” she sighs. “That’s the way you would describe yourself, isn’t it?”

His arms around her are loose, circling her in the practical arrangement of their sleep. He draws closer, tightening his hold by an ounce, no more, and in that embrace she realizes she has hurt him. His fingertips brush the inside of her elbow, his breath is upon her hair. He has laid himself upon her so completely, and while it is not what she seeks or needs now, it feels as though he will tell her anything, anything at all. He is waiting only for her to ask. He is aware of the situation they find themselves in. Until now, he hasn’t been able to face it. She can sense, even in his embrace, how he longs to disentangle himself from what separates him from her. How much he loves her. He could describe the way in which he was selected for training, the classes that spoke hour by hour of the history of his country’s foreign occupation and the need to liberate themselves from it. He has not seen his family for years. He doesn’t know which of them are dead. He has known hunger
and hard physical labor and all manner of discomfort, and he has never questioned the need for such sacrifice until now, with her. Somehow she knows this. She can no longer pretend she does not. His sleeping in her room, on her floor, the way he attached himself to her. He is probably thinking how it was a mistake, all those little steps that brought him to the place he is now, loving her. She knows all of it, all at once, as though she has swallowed his thoughts whole. The world around them has closed shut and a new one has opened in its place.