The Sorrow of War (18 page)

"Just a minute, don't I know you?" he says, looking closely at the beggar.

"I'll use this scene," Kien said to himself. "I'll have the rich man and beggar as former schoolmates."

Later he decided it was a foolish idea. A fictional replacement for his true stories. But it did have the soothing effect of sustaining his interest in writing. After these encounters he would return and start work again.

It was by night that the old, true stories began to flow back, bringing their own urgency to him. He needed to trap them as they emerged, to get the details down. Parts of stories he thought he'd forgotten floated through his mind, like disconnected mathematical equations, and he'd grab them and pin them down on paper forever. He found they would float into his mind more freely if he took to the pavements at night. It was a curious phenomenon, but it worked.

Occasionally he would unconsciously begin following a pedestrian, wandering behind him aimlessly until he reached his destination.

He tried imagining how this one or that one would react to living their lives as we did. The "Holyland Boys," they called the Hanoi men as the troops lay side by side, swinging in hammocks, at some rest point.The Holylanders would test each other on trivia: Where was a certain street? Which street in Hanoi had only one house? Which had the most? Which was the oldest street? The shortest? Why was the famous Chased Market called Chased? The others would listen in fascination to these nostalgic trivia.

One of the Holylanders was "Bullhead" Thang, who was a third-generation pedicab driver working the Hang Co station, but even Thang admitted Kien knew Hanoi better than he did.

They referred to themselves not as Hanoiese but as Thang Long soldiers, after the original name of Hanoi. No Thang Long soldier knew Hanoi better than Kien did. He could name all the streets in one area starting with "Hang,"

knew scores of lakes, big and small, the street where the most beautiful girls were found, on which night the Pacific Cinema would have banned films, and also how to get in to see them.

What the others didn't know was that Kien had known almost none of this inside information about Hanoi before he left. He had picked up these trivia during the war, from Hanoi units he fought with. As a teenager he had known little of Hanoi, for he was not allowed to wander the streets alone.

Military life in the jungles over those long years developed within him a deep, tender love for his home town. When he returned, some of that passion faded as the realities set in. It was not that Hanoi itself had changed—though yes, there had been changes—but that he had changed. He had wanted to turn the clock back to his teenage days and relive those memories.

But the impressions of the friendliness and uniqueness of his home town that he had generated during those trivia sessions in the jungle had been based on hopes in a situation of despair.

Postwar Hanoi, in reality, was not like his jungle dreams. The streets revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off like cheap flashing lights in a shop window. There was a shared loneliness in poverty, and in his everyday walks he felt this mood in the stream of people he walked with. Another idea that emerged during his long walks was flashed into his mind by a written sign: "Leave!"

"Leave this place. Leave!"

He began dreaming again of returning to Doi Mo, where someone had promised to be waiting for him. The orchard at the rear of Mother Lanh's house, the view across

the stream to the forest, the peace of the rural scenes appealed to his desire for an escape.

Into his memory then flashed scenes of the B3 troop movements from Phan Rang on the coast to Ngoan Muc pass, crossing the Da Nhim hydroelectric station, past Don Duong, DucTrong, down to Di Linh to take Road 14.The twists and turns of that long, tiring march came to him as though it were yesterday From Road 14 down to Loc Ninh, then turning around to regroup for an attack on western Saigon, to end the war. A mixture of marching and troop transports, across paddy fields and country paddocks.

They were in a field when most soldiers awoke, their faces weather-beaten from days of exposure to sun and dew. They spoke excitedly, knowing they were nearing the city but unsure of their exact whereabouts. The journey itself was an adventure; that's what he needed now, to go traveling. Away from Hanoi.

His visions of the wartime journey faded as he paced along by the Hoan Kien lake in central Hanoi. He turned and walked down to the Balcony Cafe, a nightspot hidden away at the end of a narrow alley, a place he often visited late at night. No loud music, no vain poetic ramblings by aspiring authors as in other coffee shops around theThuyen Quang lake.

"Hello, soldier," said the fat host, smiling and pleased to see him. The host had a bright red nose.

Unasked, he brought coffee to Kien's table, adding a dish of sunflower seeds and a half-bottle of brandy. "Want some female company?" he asked.

"Well, well. Even you have that service now?"

The landlord smiled. "Yes. It's the new fashion."

People around him were playing cards, drinking coffee, smoking pot and other weeds, and talking business.

In the first days of peace the host had been as impoverished as all other demobilized soldiers. He had been so thin then that he resembled a pipe cleaner; the effect enhanced his dark face, the result of catching malaria in Laos. When he opened the place it quickly became unofficially known as the Veterans' Club.

All the original customers were demobilized soldiers, most of them unemployed, still gathering their wits. Little by little the money they did get upon leaving the "jungle gate" and being demobilized left their pockets and found its way into the owner's pocket, and he began to prosper.

Those early days were pleasant and hilarious. The soldiers told each other stories of their attempts to adapt to civilian life with their special brand of humor.

Helped on by a drink or two, the mood in those days was always light and for hours they would laugh almost continuously. They shared new inside knowledge of how to apply for a job, how to bribe clerks to get on the housing list, how to get a veteran's pension, how to get admitted to the university—all sorts of helpful tips. Or they came for nostalgic conversation.

Kien on this night was sitting in a seat usually reserved for "Clumsy" Vuong, a former armored-car driver who now lived at the back of the railway station. When Vuong had first returned he had openly appealed to all his friends to help him find a job as a driver. "Anything'll do," he shouted. "Trucks, cars, buses, even steamrollers. Anything that's got a steering wheel and drives on surfaced roads."

Vuong drank very little. He was a huge, tall, slightly clumsy man, but he was kind and timid.

After his unsuccessful appeal to friends to help find him a job, Vuong wasn't seen for many months. When he did

return he was whiskered, red-eyed, and hung-over. "I've given up driving, fellas. Now alcohol drives me."

For the next months Vuong was a fixture at the Balcony Cafe, sitting in "his" little corner, always with a dish of food and a glass of alcohol.

When he became tipsy he sang loud military marches or obscene ditties. "Drink up, comrades!" he would shout. "Afraid I'm broke? Hell, don't worry. Without drivers like me you'd never be considered the world's best infantrymen. That's what the brass used to boast: 'World's best infantrymen.' Well, watch out, here come the infantry vehicles!" And he would go into a pantomime of his fighting days as a combat driver.

Vuong went into a steep dive, reflecting his trauma. It was sad, almost unbelievable, that such a tough and courageous fighter could fall so quickly in the postwar days. His friends said he had hit one pothole too many. But they said it with sadness, not in jest. After a while he became a ragged, beggarly drunk.

It was in those drunken times he voiced his nightmares, as though they were stories. "Potholes are bearable," he would say, "but to ride on something squishy and soft, supple and pulpy, that used to make me vomit. There were nights when I couldn't sleep. I used to run over the bodies. That's what happened recently. I got a normal job driving, and had no troubles with potholes and puddles.

"It was the soft surfaces that brought back the memories. Then people around me, bicyclists, pedestrians, started looking hatefully at me. So I started to drink.

"Ever seen a tank running over bodies? You'd think we'd flatten them so much we'd never feel them. Well, I've got news for you guys. No matter how soft they were they'd lift the tank up a bit.True! I used to feel it lift. After a while

I could tell the difference between mud and bodies, logs and bodies. They were like sacks of water. They'd pop open when I ran over them. Pop! Pop!

"Now they've started running over me. I see the tanks coming and know exactly what's going to happen to me. Remember when we chased 18th Division southern soldiers all over Xuan Loc? My tank tracks were choked up with skin and hair and blood. And the fucking maggots! And the fucking flies! Had to drive through a river to get the stuff out of the tracks."

Vuong would drink until he dropped. Every night. There were many others like that—or well on their way.

The little club got a reputation as an interesting place and soon many more veterans, including vets from the war against the French, were joining the nightly sessions. Few were easily recognized by outsiders as veterans, including the now fat owner for one, and Kien.

One night, when he was one of the few left in the club, a roughly made-up prostitute wearing an army surplus jacket dropped into a seat at his table. She reeked of cheap Chinese perfume. "Don't stay," he said.

"You don't like me?" she asked.

"Correct."

"You piss off then," she said.

"You know plenty of places. You piss off," he said.

The whore laughed, revealing ugly broken teeth and blackened gums. Under twenty, he guessed. She looked better before she smiled, if better was the word.

"It's so cold here," she moaned, making no move to leave. "Fatty!" she called to the host. "Bring me a double Maxim."

"Drinking's no good for little girls," he replied, but went for the drink anyway.

"You're pretty small yourself," she quipped.

She swung around and slipped her hand up between Kien's legs. "Hah!" she shouted, then withdrew her hand. "God, you're dull. Let's get drunk," she said, lifting her glass to Kien.

Drunk.

In all his life he'd only been truly drunk a few times, so drunk that, as with Vuong, everything around him became meaningless and he had difficulty separating reality from hallucinations.

The Air France bar at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon was one place, back on 30 April 1975,Victory Day.

The other time was here at the Balcony Cafe in 1977, when this bitch in front of him was sucking ice-cream cones and the owner was still a skinny returned soldier.

It had been a black day all round. He'd come for a drink and a joke with a few of his old war buddies. He'd been demobbed, one of the fortunate few to have a house to return to. He'd been admitted to the university. He'd soon be graduated and marry a very beautiful woman who'd been waiting for him to return from the war. Until then it was perfect.

He'd not been back in Hanoi very long and had just discovered the Balcony Cafe. The police later said the trouble had been caused by soldiers spoiling for a fight. Not true. He had simply come here to have a peaceful drink.

Four toughs had ridden up on Hondas, parking them out front.They were fashionably dressed, like singers from a band. But they were actually thugs, and dangerous, and strode about confidendy, certain no one would get in their way or dare to bother them.

Vuong, sitting in the back of the cafe, started singing an old army song.

"Listen to that garbage," said the leather-jacketed leader. "Victory, shit! The victory we got was a victory for morons. Call that civilization and progress? Garbage!"

"You sound like garbage yourself," said Kien quietly but clearly.

Leather Jacket spun around, ready to pounce. But recognizing Kien, he whistled slowly and began to smile. "Well, well, well," he said, standing up and walking towards Kien's table threateningly.

The owner rushed out to stop what he thought would be a fight and Leather Jacket's buddies took hold of him and sat him down. But he paid little attention to them. He moved to sit opposite Kien.

"I'm garbage? Me? What, and you're honorable, are you? I seem to remember seeing you last Sunday at the August Cinema when you waltzed in with your beautiful girlfriend. What a joke! Your girlfriend. Know why she was embarrassed? She saw me looking at you both. Shit, she's a fucking tramp." He leered.

Kien slowly put down his cigarette and took another sip of coffee. But inside he was drying up and unable to respond and his heart beat loudly, anxiously.

Leather Jacket continued: "Think I'm a liar? Meet me here tomorrow and I'll bring the last guy who screwed her before you got her back. He'll tell you every itty-bitty detail." Kien stared at him but didn't move or speak.

"Fuck you! You think I don't know who you are? I know old Vuong, too. Not only was I a soldier but a commander, that's how I know him.You're nothing special. And as for her, well, they say those sort of cross-eyed ones like that Phuong of yours are the greatest performers. Do anything. Beautiful, sure, but real screamers. Ask the guy I bring here tomorrow."