I wanted to take her back to her unit, but she said, “No, this is where I’m stationed. Go ahead—leave before sunrise, and don’t worry about me. This is just a minor wound. I am perfectly fine.” Wild roosters crowed somewhere around us. I still had to fulfill my assigned delivery duty, so we said good-bye. I held her bloody hands and promised, “Tomorrow I will come see you.”
I got back in the truck and drove extremely fast to my outpost. I felt excited and happy, but still I worried about Nguyet. The image was burned in my memory—Nguyet in her blue shirt with a wounded shoulder, carrying her bamboo bag and walking away from the truck. Sometimes I pictured her looking back at me and smiling beautifully.
“So what happened next?” asked one of the comrades who was listening to the driver’s story. “You went to visit her the next day, didn’t you?”
The audience in the bamboo hut was still listening attentively, though it was already two o’clock in the morning. There were roosters crowing and birds chirping in the woods.
I drove very fast that night after saying good-bye to Nguyet, and when I arrived at the base and completed my delivery it was almost dawn. It was too late to drive the truck back to the Sang Le woods, so I hid it where it was and camouflaged it with leaves.
The next night, my commander assigned me another drive to the same outpost near the Blue Stone Bridge. This time, I was able to stop by my sister’s unit for a short visit. The female construction workers’ huts were located in a beautiful area. The women were always neat and took care of things better than the men; their huts were well kept and neatly organized. When I arrived, my sister Tinh and some other women gave me a warm welcome. These women liked to tease and joke around, but I wasn’t in the mood. I looked at my sister Tinh. For the past two days, I’d been fairly confident that I’d already met the woman I’d heard about all those years before. But I also thought about the Nguyet who had died heroically three or four months ago.
Tinh took me inside the hut and asked, “Why didn’t you come here yesterday? Nguyet took the day off to come here—she waited for you all day, but you didn’t show up, so she went back to the headquarters.”
“Why did she have to return to the headquarters?” I asked.
“She is attending a class for new Party members,” Tinh replied.
While we were talking, a chubby woman carrying bamboo shoots entered.
“So, this must be your brother, Lam,” she said. “He should have come and said hello to me. You’re kind of cute. Are you a driver? You know you messed up, right?”
My sister Tinh laughed. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Later I learned that she was the head cook of the unit and her name was Elderly Nguyet, my sister’s close friend.
“You should have told her if you were interested or not,” Elderly Nguyet said, blaming me for making the young Nguyet wait. “She was here yesterday. A soldier gave her a ride. She was injured during the drive here.” Elderly Nguyet paused for a moment then asked, “You haven’t seen her, right?”
She pulled me toward a far corner of the hut where a photo of my beloved Nguyet was hanging on the wall. I could tell that the photo was from several years earlier—Nguyet looked no older than a teenager. In the photo, she stood on a cliff holding a drill balanced on one shoulder, gazing off into the distance. The photo reminded me of the phase of the war when it seemed like all we did was build bridges. There were hundreds of female construction workers back then; they used to tie leather ropes around their waists and then bravely climb the cliffs in order to choose the best spots for anchoring the bridges. I remembered that the beautiful Blue Stone Bridge took almost two years to complete. It was only a few months later that American bombing completely destroyed the bridge.
Later that afternoon, my sister Tinh and Elderly Nguyet saw me off at the riverbank. Teasing, Elderly Nguyet said, “Lots of soldiers want to marry Nguyet, but she loyally waits for you. I should really help set you two up.”
Hurriedly I slipped an envelope into the pocket of her apron. I had spent the entire afternoon writing a letter to my beloved Nguyet.
When I reached the Sang Le woods, I walked toward the remnants of the Blue Stone Bridge. I could see the mountain reflected in the river water below. Fresh grass had grown tall around the old bomb craters. The bridge had been cut in half. Blue rocks that had been used to build the bridge had long ago fallen into the river. Only the columns were still standing and intact.
After so many years of living with bombing and destruction, I thought, Nguyet still hadn’t forgotten me. Bombs can destroy man-made bridges, but nothing could destroy her strong spirit and optimism about life.…
The storyteller stopped suddenly, as if something had crept up into his throat from the bottom of his heart. The other soldiers didn’t say a word. Nobody asked him to finish his story. It was almost sunrise. The birds had stopped chirping, probably because they had already found their mates. A bright light appeared in the sky to the west. The moon rose high over the woods. Leaves scattered on the roof of the hut sparkled like pieces of silver. Moonlight illuminated the bamboo hut and the crater-filled road winding from it.
The storyteller looked up and saw the moon. Then he returned to his corner of the hut and lay back down.
“Let’s get some sleep,” he said. “We have to get back on the road in the morning.”
6 / MS. THOAI
HANH LE
