I couldn’t take my eyes from the picture.
“Perhaps he carried this photo with him during the entire war,” the guide continued. “A visitor from the country that lost the war offered a million dollars to buy this photo and take it with him back to the United States, but we refused to sell it.”
I left finally, because I didn’t want to let myself be deceived. It must have been a different woman. Because if it were me …
No, it’s impossible! He is still alive and in the military hospital that I haven’t visited yet.
But that mole under the lower lip of the woman in the photo …
How have I never noticed that mole before? I want to smash the deceitful mirror!
…
For three months I’ve been wandering around desperately with this sorrow.
I returned to the stone bench outside the military hospital. The same veteran from before was sitting there again. I had the sense that he had been alone for a long time. Where the cuddling couple sat before, someone had left a flower, a purple flower that looked like spilled blood.
“It’s getting dark.”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“What are you looking for here?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to come back.”
“I knew that,” he said.
“What did you know?”
“I knew that you would come back.”
“How strange,” I said.
“Yes, it is strange. But why else should I have survived being crushed by a heavy piece of metal shrapnel? I knew there would be someone out there looking …”
“The person I am looking for is dead,” I said all of a sudden, surprising even myself. “Sometimes I think he is just like you. Have you ever imagined that there might be a woman like me waiting for you?”
“No,” he said, hurriedly. “Both of us are liars. You’re looking for something that is already lost, and therefore irreplaceable, and I am waiting for someone who doesn’t even exist.”
He stood up unsteadily.
“I was eighteen when I joined the war,” he said. “I didn’t have a fiancée, which was a fortunate thing. Nobody was tormented when I left.”
He looked at me more seriously.
“Please leave this place immediately,” he said. “You shouldn’t live in your dreams. Let it pass.” As he started to walk away he added, “I probably won’t live much longer.”
I felt my heart beating wildly as the sound of his wooden leg against the ground gradually grew distant.
…
Days later, I heard him return, the same determined clomp of his wooden leg against the ground.
“I knew you would be back,” I said.
“Really?” he said.
“You wouldn’t leave me here all by myself when it’s dark.”
He looked deeply into my eyes, and for a moment his face brightened like that of a child.
I’m not sure why I cried so much when I gave myself to him. He cried as well. In that moment, I think I honestly believed that if my tears and his ran together, something divine would happen.
…
I have never seen a man’s face that is as strange as his. There is anger in his eyes, and something like sorrow on his lips.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“It’s been a month,” I replied.
He sat there quietly, touching the small veins on my hands. I wondered if he could hear what I was hearing: sounds from some distant world, the beating of two immortal hearts.
“You’re serious,” he said, looking for confirmation.
“Yes, I am serious.”
He stood suddenly and began shouting like a maniac.
“Yes! Oh, yes!”
His wooden leg beat the ground in a way that sounded musical.
Three days later he died from a recurring illness.
Anyone who visited the village and asked about Tuc would hear the story of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. She had been lovesick and gone crazy and left the village, the gossips would explain. When she finally returned, she had a child and lived the rest of her life like a mute, reclusive woman. But her child was beautiful, as if he’d stepped out of a painting.
Well, ill fate was always associated with beauty, the gossips would say, sighing. If only Tuc had not been too picky and married Hao, she would’ve had a great life. In my entire village, only Hao was wealthy. He joined the military but never shot a gun or fought in a battle, and still he was promoted to the rank of major. Though his wife was eccentric and unattractive, she came from a powerful and rich family. Hao needed only to rely on his father-in-law for his own upward mobility. Who else from our village could’ve done better than he?
Nobody remembered that Tuc had once been the most beautiful girl in the village.
10 / BROTHER, WHEN WILL YOU COME HOME?
TRUONG VAN NGOC
Truong Van Ngoc was born in 1973 in Hung Yen and currently lives in Hanoi. He is a high school teacher and an emerging author whose short fiction has been well received in Vietnam. Every summer, he devotes his time to searching for the remains of soldiers who died in the war with America. Over 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers are still missing, a staggering statistic that impacts hundreds of thousands of families, mostly in northern Vietnam. The trip to Dien Bien in “Brother, When Will You Come Home?” is typical of the privately funded search missions organized by the families of the missing. These private search trips were enabled mostly by improved economic conditions in the wake of the market reforms of the early 2000s; families suddenly had the financial means to actually go look for their loved ones. These searches continue today and, like the trip in the story, often employ a mix of spiritual and logistical methods for tracking down a missing soldier.
There were six of us crammed into the white Toyota SUV as it bounced violently along the road. The mountain road from Hanoi to the northwest was full of twists and turns, ups and downs.
