From the footsteps she guessed no more than five. She heard them rushing along, their breathing ragged under the equipment they wore and their urgency. Then the first explosion came, its flash bouncing off the walls and through the turns all the way to her, its hot, dry concussion arriving a half second later. There were screams and moans. But then — the sound traveled surprisingly well under the ground, for it had no place else to go except straight to her — she heard the scuffle of feet.
Mother, they are still coming.
I hear them.
This surprised her. In the war, the Americans almost always turned back when they took casualties. On the surface, when they started losing people, they withdrew and called in the airplanes. But in the tunnels there were no airplanes; they simply retreated. Yet these footsteps came on, if anything, more determined than before.
She turned, upset, now frightened, and began to withdraw deeper still into the tunnel.
Hurry, Mother. They must have found the second grenade and disarmed it. They are coming faster.
She raced into the tunnel. By now it had almost disappeared into a trace and the beams the miners had erected for their operations’ had long since vanished; instead, it was the classical Cu Chi passage, a low, cramped crawlspace, fetid and dense. She rushed through it, her fingers feeling the way. She felt as if she were crawling back into the black womb and knew she was very deep and very far.
She halted after a time, turned, and listened. She could no longer hear the men. She thought she was safe.
Am I safe?
Mother, be careful. You must wait.
She was still. Time slowed.
Mother, be patient. Haste kills.
What was
Her hand slipped to her belt. She removed the knife. She willed herself to stillness. She willed her body into the walls. She lay motionless and silent in the dark and the loneliness with her daughter. She felt herself attempting to enter into the fabric of the underground, to still the whirl of her atoms and the beat of her heart. She thought she heard something once, and then another something. The time passed; she had no idea how much.
Then again something else came. The sound of men in heavy equipment crashing through the tunnel, much farther back now, much more frightened, much more reluctant to go on now that the tunnel was shrinking.
She could imagine them right where the bigger tunnel was absorbed into the smaller one, their bravado frozen by its sudden shrinkage and the difficulty of the path that lay before them. Western people did not like to go into the dark alone, where they could not maneuver or talk or see or touch one another. It would stop them if anything would: their simple terror of the close space and the darkness.
The men made brave sounds. They were arguing. One seemed louder. She could not quite understand the distorted sounds. But the yelling grew louder, and then halted entirely. She heard them walking away. Their sounds slowly disappeared.
She almost moved then. But she did not.
Wait, Mother. When you move, you die. Wait. Wait.
The dark pressed upon her like the lid of a coffin. Her hip was wedged against a jutting rock; she could feel it bruise. Her muscles stiffened and began to ache. Her scalp tingled. A cramp tightened her upper arm. Her whole body screamed for the release of movement.
She tried to think of her village before the war came. It was near a place called Ben Suc in the Thanh Dien forest. She had a sister and nine brothers; her father had been a Viet Minh and fought the French with an old carbine until it fell apart, and then he fought them with bamboo spears. But for a time it was a prosperous area, Ben Suc; there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been easy, but they lived well enough by their modest endeavors. She was fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was obliterated by bombs.
She tried to remember: she thought of it as the golden time, those few years before the bombs came. She held on to it, sometime, in the tunnels, and would tell her daughter, Some day you’ll see. Well live in the sunlight. There will be fruit and rice for all. You’ll see, my little one. Then she would sing the child a lullaby, holding her warm and tight and feeling her small heart beating against her own:
There, Mother. Her daughter spoke to her from her heart. Do you feel it? There is another.
Phuong lay very still because she felt his warmth.
He was very good, and like her, he was barefoot. He had no equipment. He moved like a snake, in slow, patient strokes, nothing forced or hastened. He had come ahead under the noise of the men who had halted, covered by the loud drama of their chatter and yelling. He’d moved quickly and soundlessly, hunting her. He was immensely brave, she understood, the very best of them. He was a man she could love, like her husband. He was a tunnel man. Now only the faintest blur, a different shade of dark, he grew larger as he drew nearer; she felt his heat. And then she felt the softness of his breath, and the sweetness of it, and his terrible, terrible intimacy.
I must abandon you, my daughter, she thought. Where I must go next and what I must do, you cannot be a part of. I love you. I will see you soon.
Her daughter was silent … gone. Phuong was alone with the white man in the tunnel.
They were as close as lovers in the dark, his supple body so close to hers that she felt a terrible impulse to caress him, to
But she had him with her blade. It struck with amazing force in the dark as he crawled by. She felt it sink-into the living muscle and she felt the muscles knit to fight it as she forced it deeper, and their bodies locked. Their loins embraced. In the hole sex and death were so much the same it was terrifying. She felt his arms enclose her and his breath was labored and intense as if with sexual energy. His blood felt warm and soft like a spurt of sperm. In frenzy he thrust his pelvis against hers, and the friction, bucking and taking, was not unpleasant. Somewhere in all this his blade probed desperately after her, and he cut a terrible gash into her shoulder, through the cloth, through the flesh, almost to the bone. She felt the knife sawing against her and muffled her scream in his chest.
She pulled her blade out. And jammed it home again. And again. And … again.
Then he was still. He had stopped breathing.
Spent, she pulled away from him and cupped her shoulder. She was covered with their mingled blood. She could not even see him anymore. Her arm throbbed, and she managed to rip a strip of cloth off her tattered shirt, which she tied into a loose tourniquet. Inserting the knife blade, she screwed the thing clockwise until the bleeding stopped and only a huge numbness remained.
She tried to crawl ahead somehow, but her exhaustion was endless. She surrendered to it, lying back, her mouth open, her eyes closed, in the dark of the dark tunnel in the very center of the mountain. It was completely silent. The roof of the tunnel was an inch from her face; she could feel it. She wanted to scream.
And then she heard it from just ahead: a drip of water striking a puddle. And then another. She reached out and felt the water, and pulled herself to it. She drank greedily from the puddle, and only when she was done did she think to reach into the pouch on her belt and find a match.
The light flared dramatically, hurting her eyes, which she clamped shut. Then she opened them. There was an opening in the roof of the tunnel. She looked and realized it was another tunnel, impossibly small.
But, more important, it led up.
