photographing the scene.
Once they were airborne, the wind whipped through the open doors, diluting the stench but also creating a frightening ripple of bags, a hard flapping and flaying that was as bad as the earlier smell. Helen closed her eyes and tried to think of anything but where she was.
During the steep descent into Tan Son Nhut, fluids from the seeping bags sloshed forward in a small wave, and Linh felt a cool, viscous liquid soak through his pants. When the source of the wetness became evident, he put his hands down to try to stand up, but the slickness was like egg white against the metal floor, and he slipped back. Everything blacked in on him. He opened his mouth, but the engines drowned out sound.
Helen pulled him to her, her arms a vise around his waist, turned him away from the sight until they both stood clinging to the webbed wall, but even after he had regained his balance, still she kept her hold tight on him. This she could do. She would not let him go.
SEVENTEEN. Nghia
Love
His heart had been locked away for a very long time.
From the moment he shifted the weight of Mai’s body from his own arms to the earth, he chose not to feel again. He hadn’t held another woman in his arms until he picked up Helen from the sidewalk and carried her back to the room in Cholon.
One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.
The weight of Helen in his arms broke open memory. She invaded his heart, first in Darrow’s pictures, and then later through the casual touch of her hand, the smell of her hair, and finally the weight of her pain in his arms.
After she returned to Vietnam, he would wait for her in the crooked apartment, and while waiting he would roll an earring of hers in the palm of his hand, comforted by the thought that it had been against the delicate skin of her earlobe. He did not intend for Helen to know of these feelings; he was perfectly content not acting on them. The invisible carrying just as much weight as the visible in his world.
____________________
After Dak To, Helen asked Linh to take her back to the hamlet in the delta where she had stayed with Darrow. She wanted to recapture that sense of serenity she had glimpsed there. But the hamlet was nothing but ashes now, the villagers refugees. “They declared it a center of enemy activity.”
“We were there. It was safe.”
Linh shrugged. “Maybe we were wrong; maybe they were wrong. Either way the village is still destroyed.”
Helen was silent for a moment. “Don’t you care what is happening to your country?”
He turned away, angry, intending to leave until he regained possession of himself, but instead, for the first time, he turned back. He’d been around Americans long enough to get used to their blurting out feelings, and the desire in him to do so was overwhelming. “My war has been going on for nine years so far. I can’t take a vacation from it and go home and come back. The war is in my home.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those you can save. You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That’s a tourist’s sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographers who are tourists of the war.”
“Why are you any different than us?”
“I was on both sides. Left both sides. Only they don’t let you leave. Being a photographer was my only choice.”
“And they allow it?”
“I pretend that I’m influencing coverage. I give them bits of information I pick up after the fact. Only to convince them I have value alive.”
Now Helen was the one to turn away. Her face burned at the memory of herself playing at war when she first came, how Linh and the whole country had merely served as backdrop for her adventure.
“I will take you to a place that is peaceful,” he said.
____________________
They caught a ride on a cargo plane to Nha Trang, then took an army jeep to a small village of a dozen houses tucked against a crescent of beach. The sand was bone white, the ocean the color of unripe green papaya. The houses closest to the water stood in the violet shade of a thick grove of coconut palms. The quiet of the place was the first thing one noticed-no sounds of war, no sounds of people-so rare.
The house was owned by Linh’s aunt. It was large, made of stone with a red tile roof. Sheltered by trees, the front garden contained a half-moon pond of stone. Inside, the two rooms were bare of furnishings but clean.
“Where is everyone?”
“They evacuated the village six months ago. The old people escaped the center and returned to care for things until the rest are released.”
“Where is your aunt?”
“Visiting relatives.”
By the quick way he said it, she knew he was lying. “She didn’t have to leave. I would have liked meeting her.”
Linh nodded. “Maybe it’s better for her to pretend she doesn’t know I brought an American visitor.”
It was the end of the dry season, only afternoon showers, the sun baking the sky into a hard mineral blue each morning, the air heavy and wet as if it could be wrung out. The rains were late, refusing to come. To the east the sky remained empty over the ocean; to the west, by noon one would see a lone tall cumulus cloud hang over the mountains, gathering others around it until by mid afternoon a white-cloud mountain range lay on top of the solid one of earth. But the clouds did not spread; the sky remained hard and dry.
Helen spent whole days hiding in the lukewarm shade inside, sleeping on a woven mat on the floor. She stripped down to shorts and T-shirt but still woke in the late afternoon drenched. Her dreams stopped, and she felt a relief in the black denseness of sleep.
Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in a limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game.
At dusk Linh came with a tray of food prepared by a neighbor woman, Mrs. Thi Xuan, usually grilled fish or shrimp, a bowl of rice, and eggplant in soy sauce. They ate at the open doorway, waiting for the evening breeze off the ocean, sitting cross-legged on mats. They stared out at the garden and the ocean beyond it until it grew too dark to see. Then Linh would strike a match and light the oil lamp between them and bring out a deck of cards.
A few months before, Helen had taught him gin, and they played at every opportunity. At first Linh had lost every game, but gradually he racked up wins. Now he was obsessed. He kept a note pad and pencil by his side, recording wins and points with the precision of an accountant. They played deep into the night; at particularly close games, one or the other would let out a loud laugh or howl that would wake up nearby villagers.
In those evenings he learned the intricacies of her face-the curve of her mouth, the laugh lines that ran lightly from the corners of her lips to her nose, the delicate arch of eyebrow, the vertical furrows between
