During the last year all Linh saw was his country being destroyed, faster and faster, in larger and larger bites. He couldn’t explain to Helen the sense of physical sickness it gave him, the sense of despair. The desperate idea that anything that stopped this destruction was better than its continuing. What she didn’t understand was that both sides were willing to destroy the country to gain their own ends. Whose side was he on? Whoever’s side saved men, women, animals, trees, grass, hillsides, and rice paddies. The side that saved villages and children. That got rid of the poisons that lay in the earth. But he did not know whose side that was.
When they contacted MACV in Danang, they were directed to a relocation center the villagers had been sent to. After another day’s jeep ride along rutted roads, Helen stood, dusty and aching, in front of a wired-in prison-villagers from different locations herded together, living on the open ground under a tarp after more than two months. Without work, they queued each day for food handouts from the military.
No record of Lan’s family, but after walking through the sections that had self-segregated into their original villages, Linh found a neighbor of the family. For a few dollars he whispered to Linh that they had fled early, not trusting the American military, and moved to the next province, Quang Ngai. “They were smarter than I was,” he said. “They said nothing is for free.”
Over a period of a week, Linh and Helen traveled from hamlet to hamlet, driving along bumpy roads, each day ending with no luck. At times, they heard wisps of the truth, at times lies-the family were Viet Cong and had disappeared into the north; the girl had magically grown a new leg; the girl had died; the mother had run off-each new rumor seeping into the last until their heads were as dusted with possibilities as with the dirt that blew across the valley and plain each afternoon.
“What is the difference?” Linh asked. “This is just one more girl.”
She didn’t answer that it was because the child had mattered to Darrow. But it was also something else. As the war grew larger, her sense of futility grew with it. Since coming back, she had been unable to focus her experience except by narrowing it down to one soldier at a time, one child, one village. This was how she could tell their story.
As the search prolonged, the rough travel and poor food weakened her. Gary, troubled at the delays, called them back to Saigon, telling them to give up, but she refused. She leaned on Linh’s knowledge of the country to unravel the truth. Tell me, her eyes pleaded, as one more villager began yet another story, what to believe in and what to ignore.
Linh worried what would happen if they didn’t find the girl; he also began to worry if they did.
At a roadside tea stand along Highway 1, he gossiped with a man about his punctured bicycle tire, only to find out he was a cousin of Lan’s mother. He told them to go to a village an hour south. It seemed there was a falling-out in the family over money. They drove to the village and after asking around, Linh discovered that the biggest, most lavish house belonged to Lan’s family. When they knocked on the door, a young girl holding a broom greeted them. Lan’s mother was out on business and the father was busy holding a meeting in the dining room. They were told to wait. As they sat on a bench in the courtyard, a dozen people came in and out on errands. After half an hour, the father strode out, a short, bowlegged man with the rough hands of a farmer, and shook Linh’s hand.
“We’d like to interview Lan,” Linh said.
“Fine, fine. But there will be… gift?”
“We have things to distribute.” Linh waved his hand across the house. “You are doing well.”
The father looked at the house, puffing his lips. An expensive gold watch hung loosely from his wrist. “Hard work. Very busy. The girl will take you to Lan.”
He left, and the girl with the broom came back, took the cloth and pots from Helen, then led them to a back room. Lan sat on the floor with a stack of dolls. Other girls sat around her, wearing plain clothing, but Lan sat in a shiny satin dress, a black patent leather shoe on her one good foot. Her prosthetic was nowhere in sight.
“Lan,” Helen said.
The girl looked up, puzzled. She had grown fat, and the satin of the dress stretched across her stomach
“Remember me? Helen?”
The girl nodded. “You never bring camera.”
“I did today.”
The girl’s face brightened. “Let’s see.”
Helen pulled it out and handed it to her, but after a quick look, Lan put it down, unimpressed.
The servant girl came and brought soft drinks and peanut butter spread on crackers. Lan’s parents had used the money from the magazine, plus donations that came in, to start several businesses and were thriving on the black-market economy. When Linh asked about the relatives in the camps, the servant girl whispered that the parents got angry when they had come with outstretched hands.
After they finished the soda and crackers, Helen asked Lan to put on her prosthetic so they could take pictures outside; the girl answered there wasn’t one.
“Why not?”
“The old one hurt,” Lan said.
“No one have time to go to Saigon,” the servant girl whispered. “She’s grown too big.”
“People bring me things now,” Lan said. “Much better.” After pictures were taken, Lan grew bored and returned to her game with the other girls. She didn’t bother saying good-bye.
As they packed their equipment in the jeep, the father reappeared. “You get good picture?”
“Yes,” Linh said. “Many thanks.”
“I know other children with problem. More pictures.”
Linh, red-faced, shoved the last bags in.
They drove in silence. A convoy ahead of them stopped, the road had washed out; at least an hour before traffic moved again. They turned off the motor, left the jeep in its queue of vehicles. At the edge of the road, a farmer plowed the rice paddy that abutted the ditch. As a reflex, Helen took pictures-it would be decades before the market needed more scenic shots. Maybe decades from then, these pictures would be historical, like the ones hanging in her bedroom, showing a vanished world.
Linh stood off to the side, his hands in his pockets.
“I wanted to rescue her,” Helen said. “Rescue fantasies. I needed to rescue her.”
“She wasn’t yours to save.”
“Of course not.” She wasn’t Darrow’s, either. He had been just as naive, thinking that Lan would give him meaning after all these years of feasting on war. No, better to just kick out all the props, to be clear-eyed about one’s reasons for being there.
Linh shrugged. “When my father was a young boy, the French wanted the people to forget their country. They taught us that our ancestors, the Gauls, had blue eyes. Now we forget with gold watches and peanut butter.”
They stared in silence at the rice paddy, the late-afternoon sun sending sparks off the water, the farmer and the water buffalo gone home.
“My mother told me,” Linh said, “if I got up very early in the morning before everyone else and went down to the rice paddy, I would hear the hum of rice growing. The women sing a ca dao, a work song:
Helen stretched. “I’m taking you out for a big dinner when we get back to Saigon.” She had felt ashamed at Lan’s house, so obvious that the American’s beneficence simply corrupted.
