He felt an isolation that would grow to become a new part of him, an additional limb. Among the Americans on board, he was a Vietnamese, but even among the refugees, he had little in common. Most were happy to have escaped. Some had sacrificed everything, including families, to be on board. But he had never taken sides. His only allegiance was to Helen, and she had forsaken him.
A young man walked up to shake his hand, and Linh had a dim memory of his face aboard the helicopter. A full, childish face with skin too tender and unformed for a beard.
“Shouldn’t you be down below?” the young man said. He had been moping around for hours, sorry for himself that he had missed the war and thinking of how to make an interesting story of the little that he had seen. When he saw Linh, his eyes lit up with possibility.
“Do you know where Helen is?” Linh’s legs were shaky, and he gripped the railing to keep standing.
“Not to worry. I gave the cases to a reporter from your office. They’re being transferred as we speak. I had no idea who she was. Man, she’s a legend.”
“Is she on board?” Linh repeated, sterner, closing his eyes with the strain of thought in his addled brain.
“No, not on this ship at least, no. Isn’t she staying to cover the changeover?”
Linh said nothing, simply looked into the opaque blue surface of the water. He had suspected that she might try such a thing, but he never guessed that she would try it without him.
“I just arrived in Saigon two weeks ago.” He glanced at Linh hopefully. Linh remained silent. Over the years, he had doubted her love, if that love could only exist in war, if she insisted on staying partly because their love was only possible in his own country. But now he knew that she did love him. Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.
“I mean, I hurried! Left the day I graduated college.” He laughed. “And I missed the whole damned war.”
How would Linh manage to get back to her?
“Maybe we can talk? Later? When you’re feeling yourself? Fill me in. What it was like? I found out who you are. You’ve worked with everyone.”
Linh made a sweeping gesture with his hand, letting go of the railing, his legs slipping out from under him.
The young man grabbed him as he was about to slide under the railing. “Watch it there, mister! You’re coming with me down to sick bay.” He took Linh’s arm. “That was close.”
“I’m fine,” Linh said, although it was obvious to them both he was too weak to stand alone.
“Sorry, but I’m responsible for you. Don’t worry about her. Rumor is she’s charmed. They’ll probably be kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours. She’s well-known. The Communists don’t want any bad publicity.”
Linh closed his eyes and saw sun-bleached fields of elephant grass, the individual blades prostrating themselves, bowing over and over in supplication. That was how one survived, and yet Helen had never learned to bow.
“What they don’t want are any witnesses to what happens next.”
TWO. Angkor
1963
Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war. He stood outside his parents’ thatched hut in the early morning, the touch of his wife’s lips still on his, when he smelled a whiff of sulfur. The scent of war. This part of Binh Duong was supposed to be safe. He had heard no shots, but nothing remained secure for long in Vietnam.
Mai’s voice could be heard rising from inside the hut, defiant, rising, the song tender and lovely among the tree leaves, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading, then the flourish of the trill in the refrain that they had rehearsed over and over. An old widowed man, coming out from his hut on the other side of the river, stopped at the sound, which was like a bow gliding across a reed, recalling his own beloved wife’s face, a tight rosebud from forty years earlier.
For the river, we depend on the ferryboat
For the night, on the young woman innkeeper
For love, one suffers the fate
Of the heart… I know that this is your village.
The war was a rival stealing her husband away. Mai peeked through the door and sang clearer. Wanting to lure him back into her arms. As if they were in their school days again, and she could seduce him to miss classes and go to the river for the day, listening to her songs. The war would end soon. If she could only keep him with her, he would be safe.
Ca, Linh’s youngest brother, appeared at the side of the hut and mimed Mai’s performance, putting his hand delicately to his cheek and holding his legs primly pressed together while throwing out his hip like the French chanteuse in Dalat they had made fun of. Linh and Mai burst out laughing.
Mai’s tears too painful, Linh had forbidden her to see him off, her belly large with their first child. A boy, the midwife had predicted, because of how high she carried the baby-tight under her heart.
The night before, the family had performed the play Linh had written, and the villagers had stomped the ground and hooted and gotten drunk in approval. Linh still felt a warm tingle of plea sure in his hands and face at the thought of its success, but Mai had not let him enjoy a minute of it. The roaring audience demanding she sing her solo four times had emboldened her, and she wanted to leave for Saigon that very day.
“How can I leave? A deserter? They shoot deserters.”
“They shoot soldiers, too.” Mai held her belly, a hand at each side, and took deep breaths with her eyes closed, a new habit that unnerved him.
“They have no time with poor soldiers like you. In Saigon, we’ll use false names. After the baby is born, I’ll get a job singing.”
Linh didn’t know what to do; he wanted to be a simple man, but fate pulled like a weight on his shoulders. He steeled himself with the thought that he was going off to fight so there would be no war in his son’s future. Mai didn’t understand that the families of deserters also suffered. Nor did he tell her that her sister, Thao, was already on her way to Saigon, even though her voice was many shades rougher than Mai’s. If she had known, the earth would have broken open with her wails, and Linh couldn’t deal with women now.
This is how history unfolds: a doubt here mixed with certainty there. One never knew which choice was the right one…
He tested the air again to catch the reek of fired weapons, but the odor was gone. Had it been real or only his imagination?
At thirty years old, Linh had already been in the army for four years. He had joined the northern army, then escaped to the South only to be conscripted by the SVA. A lackluster soldier. Sick of the war, but an able-bodied man had no other choice if he wished to stay alive. The flowing robes of a poet suited him better than the constricting uniform of a soldier.
Mai thought he should become a singer, a kind of matinee idol, to make the women swoon. She did not acknowledge how the years of soldiering had changed him-the slight limp from a piece of shrapnel in his foot when he was tired; the look in his eye, a new uncertainty. He was like a man with a golden tongue who is suddenly asked to conduct business in an unknown language.
His father had been a scholar, a professor of literature in Hanoi, and in his youth, Linh had shown a passion for writing poetry and putting on plays. But the war squeezed out everything else. Every young man was forced to take sides, either the northern or the southern army. Sometimes, over the years, one ended up fighting for both sides at different times. A paradox, he would later discover, the Americans could not accept.
