fibers scratched. Parts of it thinned and softened from rubbing against the wood stays, other parts caked in mud and manure. He cut off part of it and tied each member of the family together, each person’s left wrist becoming communal, no longer one’s own, a sacrifice so that we wouldn’t get lost or separated, so that in a panic the weak would not get left behind.
Nha refused the rope, saying she had to hold her baby. She swayed in indecision. I said I would carry him, but she only looked down. “Things have to be looked after,” she whispered.
“No.”
“The baby’s fever…” She shook her head. “A rope?” She let out a sad laugh and turned away. Father said we would return for her. As we escaped through the front gate of the village, a woman came asking for help to lift a sack of rice into her cart. Although he had not been in a classroom in over ten years, had spent more time buried in paddies than in books, Father still felt the obligation to set an example. He untied himself.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
His jaw was braced. “Toan, come with me.”
“No,” I said as Toan undid the rope from his wrist. “It’s too late.”
Father and brother left. Minutes passed. The whistling of shells came more rapidly. Earth and flesh being ripped like paper. Fire fed and burned on fire. Bullets flew like hot, sharp insects. People we had spent our whole lives with pushed past like strangers.
Although we might die standing in place, I didn’t dare disobey. “Should we leave?” I asked Ca, but he remained silent.
“There,” Ca said and pointed to Father and Toan jogging toward us. They retied themselves, and we had begun our walk on the path when a mortar screamed over our heads, striking two huts on the other side of the village, the thatch blazing up in a hiss of fire like a match. As quick as a bolt of lightning. Father wanted to turn back again, both of us sensing where it had landed, but I held his eye, shook my head. Move quickly. Save what is left.
We ran in the dark, confused by sounds all around, following in the wake of my fleeing company, who would stop to take random shots behind them, imagining that would stop an enemy they couldn’t see. Many of the wild bullets struck villagers seeking them for safety. A family ahead of us was struck by a grenade, all five scattered like dolls in the field. I worried about my mother and Mai, but they were dazed, in shock, stumbling forward. I recognized this from being with soldiers in battle, how the mind shuts down and there is only instinct.
We came to a rice paddy and plunged into the cold mud, crouching, bewildered, going on. Mud squelched around our feet. The rope, soaked in water, grew heavy. No matter which way we turned, a spitting wall of gunfire from every direction. We had taken the wrong way, straight into a fire field. I cursed myself for not being a real soldier, for only pretending, for not taking control. More frightening for me not to be among my fellow soldiers. Instead, exposed with my family, who had no expectation except for obedience to my poor, blind father. My hand groped emptiness at my side, and I was defeated by the realization that I had left my gun behind in the hut during our hurried escape. What kind of soldier forgets his gun? Courage emptied from me again. I could barely lift my legs. Our progress was slow, the women slipping, falling in the mud, dragging the men’s arms down till we stood bent in half. The only hope to get on the other side of my panicked company, but the soldiers, unburdened, moved away faster than we could approach them. The rope chafed and tore my wrist.
I always wondered what if-What if I had taken charge, turned left, not right… What if I had taken them to hide in the forest and not in the paddy-but in the middle of that night, fear itself hunted us. Because I was not sure, I did nothing.
It was while we were in the paddy bordered by trees that Toan was shot in the throat. The noise around was so deafening, the darkness broken only here and there by the ghost light of a fl are, that we noticed only because of the inert weight on the rope. Mai in front of him pulled down on her knees. My mother crouched in the mud, trying to sop up blood with a piece of cloth. Toan, whose favorite sport was catching frogs in the paddy as a boy and dressing them in crowns of palm husk. Toan, my brother, who was afraid of the dark. Father untied him, and I saw ten years of age suddenly line his face. No choice but to leave the body half-submerged in its gentle blanket of mud, his head propped up on a dike.
Time stopped or raced on. Minutes or eternities spent lost, running. Rain trembled in the air, drops coming at first lightly, then pounding on our backs. Our feet wore heavy boots of mud, stretching already bruise-weary muscles. A bullet punched its way into Ca’s chest with a small ripe sound like an arrow hitting the heartwood of a tree. Ca, whose greatest joy was bringing sweets to Mai. His body jerked backward as if blown by a hard wind, dragging Mother onto the ground. Father groaned, grief squeezing his chest. He fumbled with the long, slippery rope, losing his knife in the mud. He bowed his head, face aged to that of an ancient man, and said to me, “You must take over now.”
I ordered the women to turn away and took my knife, cutting the rope that bound us. I paused, then moved to each family member and cut through the knot on each wrist. If we survived, it would be each alone. The rope fell in pieces to the ground like a serpent.
Mai moaned and pulled at her hair in fistfuls, crouching in the mud. “Get up, Mai.” She shook her head. I lifted her to her feet, her belly large and hard and jutting, but she buckled her knees and went down again. “Please, my love.” She moaned louder, eyes on Ca, hands pressing against her sides. I pulled her up and slapped her across the mouth. “Enough! You will walk.” My first harsh words to her since we married. She nodded, chastened, took one somber step and then another. We did not look back.
This is the way one learned to survive.
Two hours later, the fighting was more sporadic, only sniper bullets and the occasional faraway thump of mortars as they drummed into the earth. The rain had stopped; our bodies soaked and cold and tired. Easier to move without the rope, but I felt its loss like a missing limb.
Mai let out a soft cry and sat down hard on the ground, leaning against a splintered tree, heavy pear belly listing toward the earth like a magnet. In the dark night, her blood black as it poured from between her legs. She squeezed her legs together and remembered aloud how we had laughed only that morning at Ca mimicking her dance. “How long ago it seems.” A deep, dragging ache pulled at her. She had been wrong, she said, had selfishly prayed for her own and my happiness, even to the point of secreting away money to buy a gold necklace for the baby. She had angered fate. “I wanted us to go to Saigon so you could see… I am not a useless wife.”
I rubbed her feet, frozen hard like small river stones. “We’ll go now.”
Mother whispered with Mai, laid a hand on her belly. She took a blouse out of her bag and told Mai to press it up between her legs, stop the baby coming out on such a night. Mai was calm and quiet, suddenly matured from girl to woman, nodding wisely. So unlike her I worried.
“We are going to Saigon,” I said louder, and began to make a sling with the remaining coil of rope across my chest like a pack animal.
Father came and touched my shoulder. “We must return to the village.”
“You can’t.”
“Better for you two to go on alone. Maybe later, with Nha…”
Too exhausted to argue, I nodded. Mai sat wearily in the saddle of the rope sideways across my back, leaning her head on my shoulder. As I made my way off, Mother and Father remained standing by the splintered tree, and even now, in my mind’s eye, that is where I still imagine them.
“Forgive me,” Mai whispered, “my foolishness.” But I didn’t listen. I started the walk south, in the direction of the army and safety, the direction of illusion.
I lost track of time, but during the night Mai laid her fingers along my neck, my only comfort, my only goad.
I walked through the night. I lost my sandals in the mud, walked on blisters, and then on bloodied, raw feet, not daring to stop even when I grew thirsty, until my throat cracked like a riverbed with dryness, but still I kept walking. I would die walking. During the night, Mai fell asleep, her hand falling away.
And then like an angel, a bodhisattva of compassion, the sky lightened to a pearl gray in the east, and the great tired face of the sun appeared. As if the day itself were shamed to light the earth. So quiet that I heard the singing of a single bird in a tree as I passed, a miracle that day could follow such a night, and I reached the highway south, joining a throng of refugees like ourselves draining from the countryside. I murmured, throat like
