The Sorrow of War (24 page)

Happiness seemed to He in the past; the older he grew the rosier the past looked to him. Life before going south as a teenage soldier now seemed to him to have been one long, beautiful day.

In one of his more peaceful moments he reviewed the new lives his colleagues had settled into after the war. Some had stayed south for the warmer climate or better economic opportunities, or perhaps they had just reached the end of their march in life. Others had stayed in the Central Highlands. Perhaps they wished to avoid returning north to a boring life.

Many of those who returned to the Highlands after the fighting now enjoyed healthy, outdoor, free living. They were farming pasturelands or working in the jungles, or in new villages created along the Poco, Sa Thay, Serepoc, or Ya Mo rivers.The hells of yesteryear were now the scenes of peaceful rural tranquillity. In the dim past a political commissar had lectured him on his postwar life. He'd forgotten which commissar, but his advice went like this: "You've been in action in the South for several years.You have suffered hardships and stained your hands with blood. From now on, you'd do better to live close to nature and be closer to ordinary working people. That will ease your suffering and bring you happiness."

Kien imagined his old friends working on the land, slashing and burning in the dry season, weeding in the wet. Going to the jungle in the wet season to pick mushrooms and cut bamboo shoots. Catching fish and hunting animals, delivering crops. Hardening calloused hands, broadening muscled backs.

The sacks of salt and rice, the cassavas, the sweat of hard labor, would they have generated in him the joy in life which seemed to have forever forsaken him?

There was one rural scene which frequently returned to Kien now. It was a symbol of paradise lost.

In the southern sector of the Central Highlands his units in the ioth Division were making a rapid march from the Ngoan Muc pass, crossing Don Duong and DucTrong, along Road 20 to Di Linh.

For the first time in his life he felt truly at home in the country. His heart surged with desire to quit the violence, killing, and destruction and settle in the peaceful surrounds of that corner of the Highlands under a calm, peaceful sky. From that point in time he used that pastoral scene both as a measuring-stick for other rural areas and as a symbol of what could have been.

One afternoon Kien and his scout team were taking a jeep along Road 20 when they decided to turn off and look at a coffee plantation. There was a neatly kept gravel road running between densely planted crops, leading to a nicely built house on stilts set well back from the road. They drove up carefully to the front of the pretty plantation house and parked the jeep, which had a machine gun mounted just behind the driver and looked threatening. They politely climbed out and walked up the steps, preparing to ask for water and a place to rest.

The house was built entirely of timber and had the tall pointed roof favored by the local hill tribes. The plantation owner greeted them courteously, taking them around the comfortable house, showing them his plough, his irrigation system, and his power generator, which ran almost silently, in keeping with the peaceful scene.

Flowers were in bloom in gardens encircling the lovely house, and at the back there was a herb and vegetable patch for the kitchen.

The owner had come from the North with his wife and they now had a seven-year-old son.When Kien's team entered they came fully armed, wearing dirty, sweaty uniforms, and it was clear the family were both embarrassed and nervous, although they tried not to show it.

They invited the soldiers to take a meal with them, but when they refused the couple did not press them. The owner spoke to them of plantation life while his wife went to the kitchen to brew coffee. He was surprisingly well educated, honest, and very polite.

"We've not seen any guerrillas, let alone northern army regulars like yourselves. We just live a simple life, growing coffee, sugarcane, and flowers," he began. "Thanks to Heaven, thanks to the land and the trees and nature, and thanks to our own hands and energy and the money from our labor, we are self-sufficient. We don't need help from any government. If the president loses the fight, then let him be, even though you are Communists, on the other side. You're human too. You want peace and a calm life, families of your own, isn't that right, gentlemen?"

No one disputed what he said, although such honesty of expression was dangerous in those times. Fortunately none of them felt like handing out indoctrination lessons, so all day long the talk was of farming, labor, family happiness. The war was hardly mentioned again.

They drank excellent coffee, which added to the intimacy and warmth of the atmosphere. The wife looked on them with soft and friendly eyes, rarely speaking but feeling part of the group. The husband spoke in his frank way and treated the soldiers like friendly guests. They were soon feeling very much at home; even the occasional harsh knock of grenade or gun on the backs of their chairs as they moved positions did not break the peaceful spell. The scent of pine wood from newly hewn logs and fresh coffee brewing seemed to cast a spell over them, and they experienced a feeling of malaise, then sweet sorrow.

Inside the house they felt part of a small family circle. Outside the house was a broad circle of war.

Driving away from the plantation in the late afternoon, no one spoke for some minutes. Finally Van, who had been a university student in economics and planning, started to speak:"There, you see.That's the way to live! What a peaceful, happy oasis. My lecturers with all their Marxist theories will pour in and ruin all this if we win. I'm horrified to think of what will happen to that couple.They'll soon learn what the new political order means."

Another replied, "Damn right they'll be unhappy. If we do win and return after the war, I wonder if they'll still treat us kindly?"

"Not unless you come back as chairman of the new cooperative!" Van laughed.

But the thought had appalled them, and when Van spoke again he was somber: "That will be sad, really. I wonder if my own district will ever develop such lovely farms. Our landscape at Moc Chau is similar to this, yet we're always so poor."

Kien didn't contribute anything to the conversation, but every word of it was etched in his memory and he recalled the visit several times in later years when down south. He had made halfhearted plans to go back and visit the plantation, but never seemed to have the time.

As for Van, Thanh, Tu, and all the others who had been at the plantation with him on that special afternoon, they were long dead.

Of all the visitors, only he was alive to remember that visit. It had been little more than a wayside stop along the long road of conflict, yet it remained to this day a special memory, taking on increasing warmth and significance as the years went by.

He can't sleep. He thinks of Phuong, then of her apartment. No more than a room, really, identical to his. Both twenty square meters with red and white square tiles like a chessboard, a stove in the corner inlaid with blue tiles, a window looking out into the street through branches and fronds of a casuarina tree.

The furniture was almost identical, too. The other common characteristic was the atmosphere of loneliness, poverty, and loss. When he had first revisited Phuong's room after a ten-year absence he noticed the piano was missing. It had been her mother's precious property and had stood for many years against the window. "I sold it," she said simply when he asked about it. "It took up too much space. Anyway, I've not got the class to own something as lovely as a piano."

It had been handed down from her father, a pianist who had died before the liberation of Hanoi from the French after the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Phuong's mother had been a music teacher. She had retired when Phuong was sixteen, intending to concentrate on teaching her daughter classical music and the piano. She was totally different from her daughter. She was quiet-spoken, thin and small. "I'm afraid her guitar-playing and singing at all those parties and festivals are doing her no good at all, Kien. Please help me get her out of those habits," she would say.

Phuong played the piano very well. She was a natural. But as she grew older she became lazier and lazier. "The piano is too big, too solemn, too pretentious for these chaotic times.These days we've got to travel light," she said.

Kien agreed. He preferred her singing, for she had such a sweet voice.

But her mother persisted, complaining to Kien, "She's just like her father, a perfectionist. She's like a saint, or a fairy, she has their sort of perfection. But that is a delicate trait, and she must be protected. Her fine soul will be warped by the coarse style of life that's overtaking us; she will be destroyed unless she's given preferential treatment for her artistry. Yet she takes no notice of me whatsoever! She'd rather listen to your father. It frightens me that she is attracted by his frightful paintings and his disrespectful opinions. You understand, don't you?"

How could he understand, at sixteen? He hardly understood the words, let alone the sense of her mother's complaints. Yet many years later he recalled that Phuong's mother had predicted a few of the character changes in Phuong accurately. The girl's soul would become warped and twisted when she played in the mainstream of life, she had said. But then the war had come soon afterwards and there was little that could be said or done anyway.

He recalled Phuong's playing when she was just fifteen. "That's lovely, Phuong," her mother had said one day. "Now play a piece from Mozart, or the Moonlight Sonata."

Phuong started scratchily and the music seemed lifeless. But as she bent to the task her hands flowed and she began to play passionate, inspired music. Her face flushed and her long hair fell across one side of her face, but she was totally absorbed. The sonata spread its gossamer wings and embraced Kien as he drifted off into a pleasant reverie.

"It was then I knew she would be a troubled soul," he thought to himself in later years. Towards the end of the third movement Phuong's cadence changed and a somber, then depressing mood fell heavily over the room. Kien had openly wept for Phuong, in admiration and love. It was an ominous passion; he knew then their souls would be intertwined forever, through the last years of peace, through war, and in peace once more. He was helplessly drawn into the involvement. "The passion will remain, and the sorrows too," he thought.

Almost from that moment on, a harsh and cruel wind had blown across their world. In another fit of depression he sat through the morning, noon, and evening recalling those few hours of so long ago.

On the table before him again, untouched, was his manuscript with the stories of so many of his dead heroes. His mind drifted from the beauty of the sonata through their wonderful final months in school until, catching the memory in a trap, he went over exactly what happened on the freight train during that air raid twenty years ago.

He had wanted to forget. It had been sheer coincidence that she had been on the train at all. It had been an unfortunate confluence of events leading to their presence together in a freight car at the Thanh Hoa railway station when the bombers had struck. She had wanted to go as far as possible with him to the front, with no concern for the consequences.

There had been two raids. The first, shorter one was when the train had been forced to stop. He had been knocked unconscious and flung onto an embankment. He was dazed. He hadn't been able to recognize which car he'd been in, and when attempting to get back on the train he had missed his footing several times and got more injuries.

Now he dimly recalled dreaming some ugly scenes; they came to him in contrasting black-and-white images, like negatives on film. Still bleeding and dizzy, he had scrambled onto the locomotive as the train started off again and fallen into a deep sleep.

The authorities had then decided the raids had finished for the night and sent the train rolling south again towards Vinh. It successfully defied the odds by crossing the Dragon Jaw Bridge in the early morning light but then stopped at Thanh Hoa station to avoid an outgoing train. Kien was wakened by a furious whistle piercing the air and the sound of a mechanic swearing angrily. He jumped down from the car without a word to anyone and looked in astonishment at what lay before him.

Thanh Hoa station was completely destroyed. Bomb craters gaped everywhere, opening their horrible mouths in the early morning sun. Their train was standing amidst the wreckage, its own freight cars heavily damaged. While Kien was taking this in, some tough-looking characters jumped down in front of him. They were filthy and stank of alcohol and were swearing among themselves. They went into the ruins of the station and disappeared behind the wreckage.

He turned from them and looked back at the car they had been riding in, sensing this was where he and Phuong had been. He pushed the door open a little wider, letting in more light. There were sacks of rice piled along both sides of the car and loose rice everywhere from burst bags. He peered into a dark corner and found Phuong there, in a sort of twilight. She was leaning on some rice sacks, her legs folded, her arms covering her face as though asleep. Her long, tangled hair fell over her scratched shoulders.

He called her name, hoping it was not she. He stepped closer and his knees trembled at the sight. He almost collapsed as she looked up at him with a curiously unfamiliar and vacant look. Her blouse was wide open, all the buttons ripped from it, and her neck was covered with scratches. "Phuong, Phuong, it's me, Kien," he said gently. But she kept on staring, showing no sign of recognition. "It's me!" he repeated. "It's just coal dust on my face, you can't recognize me. I had to jump on the locomotive after I got thrown out in the bombing. It's me, Kien," he went on, not making much sense.