The Sorrow of War (7 page)

heavenly duty that he had such a brief childhood and adolescence, then matured in time of war. The duty imposed on him in his first forty years a succession of suffering with very few joys. Those who selected Kien to perform these sacred tasks also ordained that he should survive the war, even in battles where it seemed impossible to escape death. The heavenly glow which streaked, sparkled, and vanished like a falling star had bathed him in serene light for just a few moments, then disappeared so suddenly that he had no time to understand its full import.

The first time he had felt this secret force was not on the battlefield but in peacetime, on his postwar MIA missions gathering the remains of the dead. The sacred force nurtured him, protected him, and willed him on, renewing his thirst for living and for love. He had never before acknowledged this heavenly duty, yet he had always known it existed within him as an integral part of him, melded with his soul.

From the time of that realization he felt that day by day his soul was gradually maturing, preparing for its task of fulfilling the sacred, heavenly duty of which the novel would become the earthly manifestation.

It was in summer five years ago that, totally by chance, on a lovely warm day he had stopped by the Nha Nam township. And from there he went on to revisit Doi Mo, a tiny, ancient hamlet where twenty years earlier his newly formed battalion had been based and had trained for three months while awaiting transportation to the front, called "Long B."

The landscape looked to Kien as though it had been forgotten by time. The pine plantations, the myrdes, grassy slopes, and eucalyptus in desolate and gloomy lines between

fields were exactly as he remembered them as a young recruit. The houses were scattered about as he had remembered them, one on each small hilltop and each as dull and unimaginative as before.

With no particular plan in mind, Kien left the only road through the hamlet and turned down a dirt track almost overgrown by grass.

He knew the track led to Mother Lanh's house. She had been godmother to the many young recruits, especially his own three-man special team.

The house was still there, looking exactly as he had seen it the day he left: earthen wall, thatched roof, kitchen at the rear facing onto an overgrown small garden. Near a flight of steps, almost obscured by wildflowers and shrubs, was the same old well with its windlass. Godmother Lanh had died. So now it would be Lan, her youngest daughter, who lived here.

When Lan opened the door and stepped outside she recognized Kien immediately. She even remembered his platoon nickname, "Sorrowful Spirit." Kien had forgotten everything about her.

"In those days I was just thirteen years old. I still called you uncle. And we girls of the backwoods have always been shy and unattractive," she added in self-deprecation. But what Kien saw before him now twenty years later was an intelligent woman, quietly attractive, with mistily sad eyes.

Tears welled up in those sad eyes when Kien told her that the other two in the three-man squad who had stayed with Lan's mother had been killed on the battlefield. "What a cruel time," she said, "and so very long. The war swept away so many people. So many new recruits used to be based in my house. They used to call my mother their mother, and called me younger sister. But of all of them

only you have returned. My two brothers, my classmates, and my husband, too, were all younger than you, and joined up years later than you. But none of them has returned. From so many, there is only you left, Kien. Just you."

She went with him to pay tribute to her mother. Kien burned incense sticks and bent his head in prayer for some time, letting the painful memory of those days throb through his temples while he tried in vain to conjure up the image of the godmother's face. The last rays of the sun were slanting over the long grasses, now tinged pink in the sunset.

She began speaking quietly: "If people had been patient in those days and let parents know of their son's deaths one at a time, my mother would still be alive today. But in the first weeks of peace the bureaucrats wanted to speed up the delivery of bad news, to get it out of the way quickly. My mother was here one fateful morning when an official arrived bringing a death certificate for my brother, her first son. She took the news badly, although she had feared and expected it. She was buoyed only by the expectation of her second son coming home soon. But a few hours later another courier arrived with a second death certificate, telling her my other brother, her second son, had also been killed. Mother collapsed in a faint, then lapsed into a coma. She hung on for three days without uttering another word, then died."

Kien stared down at Lanh's tombstone, noticing for the first time a second, much smaller grave alongside it. Lan said quietly, "My son. He was almost eight pounds when he was born, but he only lived two days. His name was Viet. My husband was one of the Tay tribe, far from his province of Ha Giang. He had been based here for less than one month, so there was not even time to complete the formal wedding ceremony. Six months after he left I got a letter, but not from him. It was from one of his friends, writing to tell me

he'd been killed on the way into Laos. I'm sure that's why our baby faded fast and died. It had no will to live."

They rose and slowly walked down to the house.

"So that's the short story of my life. First my brothers, then my mother, then my husband, then my son. No wonder I feel a little weaker every year. I live in this shell of loneliness, going from house to hill, hill to house, and around the hamlet, with no one paying any attention to me and me not noticing others.

"By a strange quirk of fate, my husband's was the last unit based here. After his group left no others came to Doi Mo. Now, after many years of peace, you are the only one to return here. Just you. None of the others."

She asked him to stay the night and he silently agreed. The short summer night softly enfolded them, and all that was heard was the sound of a nightbird calling from the edge of the forest and the distant rippling of the hamlet's slow stream.

Kien and Lan walked out together early in the morning; she stayed with him beyond the first hill, neither of them saying a word. The sun was warming them and the dew evaporated, rising around them. Lan's face seemed pale and drawn.

"A few years ago I decided to leave here," she said suddenly. "I intended to go south and rebuild my life. But I changed my mind. I just couldn't leave my mother and my son lying over there. I just wait and wait, without knowing what I'm waiting for. Or for whom. Perhaps I've been waiting for you."

Kien remained silent, avoiding her gaze.

"I knew who you were straight away, although you look very different now. Back then I was so small. But I knew. Perhaps you were my first love and it took all this time for me to realize it."

Kien tried to smile but his heart felt constricted. He gently raised Lan's hand to his lips, bent his head, and kissed it a long time.

"Stay. Live peacefully, my sweet. Try not to be sad, and try not to think poorly of me."

Lan leaned forward, caressing his shoulders and his greying hair.

"Forget me.Your life is an open road, go out and enjoy it. I'll find a foster-child and we'll live together peacefully. I wish I could have had your child, Kien, but it's impossible. That doesn't depress me. Just for a moment let's imagine that we've both come back from the past, while our loved ones were still alive.

"I ask you to remember one small favor for me. If you come to the end of your wandering and seem to have nowhere left to go and no one to turn to, remember you have a place here with me, always. A home, a woman, a friend. Doi Mo hamlet was where you started this war. You can make it your point of return, if you want to."

Kien hugged Lan, pressing her to his chest. She said in a muffled voice, "Please go now. I'll never forget you. Please, don't forget me completely, my unexpected lover."

He left, bending his head into the summer morning sunlight which spread across the grassy roadside. When he turned he saw his long shadow reaching back, pointing to Lan in the distance. She had not moved.

She watched as he slowly walked away, and was still watching as he turned out of sight over a distant hill.

Some years after that meeting, also on a summer afternoon, Kien and some journalist colleagues, riding a jeep back from the border, again passed through the same valley.The sight of the hills and streams, the smell of the earth brought to him

on a pleasant wind, brought back powerful memories. Only he and the driver were still awake. Kien reminisced in silence, with a tinge of regret. It was here, this very place, where Lan had promised him a final refuge. "There is always one place and one woman here for you," she had said.

The sad, doomed meeting echoed back to him, reminding him of that final act of kindness.

Some of his loved ones he had not bothered to stay in contact with. Others had vanished. He had left yet others in his wake. He had lived selfishly these last years without looking back. Time and his work had taken over his life. He had sought neither opportunities nor responsibilities. His memories that afternoon reawakened in him the sense of sacred duty. He felt he must press on to fulfill his obligations, his duty as a writer.

It was necessary to write about the war, to touch readers' hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, feel they were there, in the past, with the author.

Why choose war? Why must he write of the war? His life and that of so many others was so horrible it could hardly be called a life. How can one find artistic recognition in that kind of life? They gossip about me, the author who wishes to write of the war. They say of me that the war author cannot even bear to enter a cinema where people may be shooting each other on the screen.

Is this the author who avoids reading anything about any war, the Vietnam war or any other great war? The one who is frightened by war stories? Yet who himself cannot stop writing war stories, stories of rifles firing, bombs dropping, enemies and comrades, wet and dry seasons in batde. In fact, the one who can't write about anything else.

The author who will later have to give all credit for his unique writing style and storytelling fame to those war stories.

When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering Team, those about-to-be-demobilized soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.

But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.

He could have written about the macabre or about cruel brutality without writing about the war. He could also have written about his childhood, which was both painful and happy.

He could have written: "I was born and grew up . . . My late parents . . ." and so on. And why not write of his fathers life and his generation? That was a generation both great and tragic, a generation bursting at the seams with ambitious Utopians, people of elegant spiritual and emotional qualities, sadly now long forgotten by Kien's generation.

But when thinking of his childhood or his father, Kien becomes depressed. He feels that as a son he had not sufficiently loved or respected his father. He had not understood his father's life and remembered almost nothing about his family tragedy. He still doesn't know why his parents separated and knows even less about his mother. So it is strange that he remembers his mother's second husband so clearly.

His mother's second husband was a prewar poet who had gone into hiding to escape the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the state ideologies that came with Communism.

Kien had visited him just once in an old house in the Hanoi suburb of Chem, on the edge of the Red River. There

was a small window facing the northern dike. Kien remembered the scene clearly. His real father had just died, five years after his mother, who had left him and married the poet who became his stepfather. Kien decided he should visit his stepfather to say farewell before going away with the army. He was seventeen at the time and the visit left an indelible impression.

The house was old and greyish, surrounded by a sad, unkempt winter garden which itself was ringed by wispy eucalyptus that rustled in the light breeze.

The entire scene reflected his stepfather's extreme poverty. On a dusty family altar his mother's photo rested in a frame with broken glass. The bed in the same room was limp and bedraggled. A writing table was a mess of books, papers, and glasses. The atmosphere was depressing. Yet in sharp contrast his stepfather lived in a style which belied his conditions. His thinning white hair was neatly combed back, disguising some scars, his beard was well shaven and tidy, and his clothes were clean and pressed.

He treated Kien warmly and politely and with the correct intimacy for the occasion, making him hot tea and inviting him to smoke and generally feel at home.

Kien noticed that his eyes were blurred and his scraggy and frail old hands trembled.

He looked over to Kien and said gently, "So, you're off to the war? Not that I can prevent you. I'm old, you are young. I couldn't stop you if I wanted to. I just want you to understand me when I say that a human being's duty on this earth is to live, not to kill." Then he said, "Taste all manner of life. Try everything. Be curious and inquire for yourself. Don't turn your back on life."