Mrs. Trung clapped her hands and said, “Bach and I congratulate both of you on this reunion!”
They spent two delightful hours eating and drinking together. Everybody talked about the past. Bach felt so happy sitting with these older people whom she still saw as adults, though she herself was a schoolteacher now with two children of her own. She felt that she still had permission to lean on Mrs. Trung’s shoulder and smell her sweet-scented hair. She didn’t care what the adults were saying. She closed her eyes and remembered the day before Smith was scheduled to return to America.
Bach had cried when she’d said good-bye to Miss Trung and Smith. That night she couldn’t sleep; she felt that she loved them and was scared about the possibility that they would never return. Finally at the break of dawn she drifted off into sleep and had a strange dream in which she ran into Smith and Kiet out walking along the railroad tracks behind her house. Both men were walking very fast, as if soaring along the iron tracks. They picked Bach up and the three of them flew toward the lights of an oncoming train. Both men were laughing, while Bach screamed and cried, absolutely terrified.
In the morning, Bach went to Miss Trung’s house to look for her and Smith, but they had already left for the airport. She felt a sudden emptiness that filled her with a fear of being lonely, so she walked across the bridge to the rice paddies to look for Kiet in his duck hut. But the hut was empty.
She had no idea where he had gone. But later, once Uncle Ho’s forces had liberated the city, she heard that people had seen Kiet sitting on one of the tanks leading the convoy.
The reunion at the restaurant eventually had to end. A car came to pick up Smith and Mrs. Trung and take them to the airport. Although everyone promised to get together again at some point, nobody wanted to leave. Mrs. Trung eventually had to pull Smith away from the table.
“We have to go,” she said to her husband. “And you should give Kiet’s stuff back to him before we leave.”
“What stuff?” Kiet seemed surprised.
Smith pulled a bag out from underneath the table.
“These are the weapons I found in your pockets when you were drowning in the creek,” Smith said, placing the bag on the table for everyone to see. “I knew that if I left them there you would have gotten in trouble. And I was right, because the police came to search you right away.”
“You’ve been keeping them all these years?” Kiet asked, astonished.
“No, of course not! I could never bring weapons like these through customs. But a few days ago we visited Mrs. Nam Bong, the former landlady, and dug them up from underneath a banyan tree in her backyard. Fortunately, nobody ever cut down the tree or built a house there.” Smith opened the bag and showed Kiet. “Here, take a look. It’s been over thirty years, so they’re a little rusted, just like the old bridge that leads to the rice paddies.”
Kiet’s hands trembled as he picked up one of the old rusted guns. He was so moved and emotional that he couldn’t even manage to utter a “thank you” to Smith.
Then the couple got into the waiting car and drove off in the scorching midday heat.
Bach was left alone with Kiet in the restaurant now. She poured him a glass of water. Kiet seemed distant and lost in his thoughts. It took a little while before he smiled cheerfully again. He patted Bach on the head, like he used to when she was little.
“I can’t believe that American!” he said, still surprised. “He hid my weapons under a tree without telling me. I went back to the creek the next day after the water had gone down and looked for them until my feet and hands were swollen.”
“Did you steal the guns from the prison that afternoon?” Bach asked.
Kiet smiled. “Who else would it have been? But I got unlucky that day. The water was too fast and aggressive and the guards kept shooting at me. Bullets were flying over my head. Plus my legs started to cramp up as I tried to swim away.”
“How many times did you steal guns?” Bach wanted to know.
“A few, I can’t remember exactly. Everyone in the hamlet already suspected that it was me. And they were right.” Kiet smiled again. “Bach, drink this glass of wine with me, okay?”
“What are we drinking to?” Bach asked, picking up the glass.
“We’ll drink to the fact that Smith and I can be both enemies and friends at the same time.”
Bach drank and emptied the glass. But she didn’t drink to Kiet and Smith’s specific situation. She drank instead to a belief she still clung to firmly, over thirty years after the end of the war: that in difficult situations people were still capable of showing some kind of natural kindness toward one another.
16 / LOVE AND WAR
NGUYEN NGOC THUAN
Nguyen Ngoc Thuan was born in 1972 in Binh Thuan and currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City. He is a visual artist but has won several literary awards for his writing, including the Swedish Peter Pan Prize in 2008 for his children’s book Open the Window with Closed Eyes. His story “Love and War” is notable for its postmodern, surreal style, rare in the tradition of socialist realism typical of most Vietnamese war fiction. While on the surface the story seems to function as a simple allegory for war and its destructive, all-consuming nature, the nuances of the narrator’s feelings toward the unnamed cannibalistic female character—the woman he trusts and loves and continues returning to, despite the fact that she seems
