"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

THIRTEEN. Ca Dao

Songs

Name: Samuel Andre Darrow

Rank/Branch:

Unit:

Date of Birth: 7 May 1925

Home City of Record: New York City, NY

Date of Loss: 14 November 1967

Country of Loss: South Vietnam

Loss Coordinates: 14127N 1074920E (ZA045798)

Status: Missing in Action

Category: 1

Acft/Vehicle/Ground: OH6A

Other Personnel in Incident: Captain Jon Anderson

The mission to recover bodies had been denied for months because of enemy movements, the area considered extremely dangerous, but then recon reported the enemy had pulled out. An invisible veil lifted, and although nothing to the eye had changed-the hills remained just as green, the paths stretched out in their promise of innocence-the land officially became neutral again.

Linh and Helen went in with a Green Beret unit and two South Vietnamese rangers familiar with the terrain of that part of the Ho Chi Minh trail network. They went in on cargo transports, linking with a contingent of Montagnard mercenaries led by Special Forces officers.

After hiking through the morning, the main force went to destroy enemy bunker complexes, while their unit branched off and went on the five clicks to the crash site. Because the bodies had not been recovered, Darrow and the pilot were listed as MIA. The mislabeling of the truth angered Helen, and she climbed the hills in a spirit of righteousness. She had not wanted to bring her camera, but Linh insisted that they bring a minimum of equipment.

From a neighboring hill, Helen focused binoculars and saw the blackened smudge of the crash site, the surrounding vegetation burned to charcoal in the fire. “There it is,” she said, feeling foolish at the excitement in her voice.

Linh watched her, his eyelids half closed in the bright sun. Without a word, he followed one of the rangers down a steep ravine. He had been angry at her insistence to come, thinking there was no point in endangering herself.

Helen stayed in close to the man assigned as her escort, Sergeant James. He was a tall man with reddish hair and fair skin. Whenever they stopped for a break, he would take out a zinc stick and run it along his face and neck till his skin was white with the stuff. “I’ve burned and peeled so many times, I’m down to my last layer of skin.”

Absurd as it was, Helen rushed her steps, walked ahead of James and passed Linh in her frenzy, as if time were still a factor, could change anything that mattered.

The crash site lay near the top of the hill, a view of green mountains extending all the way to Laos and beyond. The afternoon light slanted through the sky, cast everything in shades of greenish gold. The scent of grass was blurred by charcoal. The wind came up, a faint rustling of leaves, a clicking of bamboolike chimes in a graveyard. The most sacred place she had ever been.

She remembered Darrow waking her at dawn, watching the sun pour slowly across the Cordillera. The mountains too far away to ever reach, but now, deep inside them, they still stretched out of her grasp, unknowable.

“Ever been here before?” she asked.

“Not likely. This is beaucoup dangerous bandit country. But recovery isn’t bad. Once they’re already dead, the enemy usually isn’t interested in scoop-up.”

Sergeant James joined the other soldiers surrounding the burned-out hull of the helicopter, already so weathered it looked as if it had been there decades. The men crouched over blackened mounds on the ground, unzipped a body bag, put on plastic gloves, and used spades.

Head pounding from a threatening migraine, Helen stood, her purpose gone. Of course, there was nothing there for her, but she had been unable to stay away. Her whole being unmoored, the excuse of going out was her only relief. A death to suffer through with no ceremony, no commemoration of who they had been to each other. A red drop fell on her shirt and then blood began to pour from her nose.

Linh was quickly at her side, pulling out a handkerchief, settling her in the shade of a tree.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Altitude. Heat.”

She sat with her head tilted back, the metal taste of blood stripping her throat raw. “Don’t be angry with me.”

Linh was cleaning a lens with cloth. “For nosebleed? We all miss him.”

“Then why the looks?”

“You have been here long enough but still you act like a child.” Linh remembered Darrow’s theatrics over Samang’s snakebite death in Angkor. Why couldn’t any of them accept fate? Why the long march out here? Of course, he must ask himself the same question. The answer that he feared for her and didn’t fear for himself. More and more he believed detachment the only answer to the constant onslaught of loss.

“Just be my friend.”

“I am always your friend.”

Later she walked back and forth along the outside of the site, searching debris scattered a good distance from the crash. Between tall swales of elephant grass, she found small fragments of 35mm film, the emulsion burned away so that it had a milky, blinded look. Linh recovered a piece of the embroidered neckband that Darrow used for his favorite Leica; it had been wedged under a stone. Although he would have liked to have kept it, he handed it to Helen, and she held it carefully between her fingers, as if it still burned.

Sergeant James came over to her and handed her his canteen. “Miss?”

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Heat.”

“We need to be pushing off.”

Helen nodded. Her fingers still searched the charcoal ground for slips of film.

“Ready to leave.” He took back his canteen and screwed the cap back on. “Sorry for your loss. They died like heroes. Trying to rescue two of our own.”

“Khong biet.” I don’t know.

He crinkled his nose as if from a bad smell. “How’s that?”

“Too many heroes in my life. All gone.”

Her fingers were soot black as she pocketed three small pieces of film. When she wiped the sweat off her forehead, a black smudge trailed behind. The time of extravagant grief over; now she was dry-eyed and quiet. Something had changed, she feared, what ever connection she had felt for the land or the soldiers broken.

Linh came up to her and motioned to her forehead.

During those convalescent days he had nursed her in the Cholon apartment, Linh had decided the only tribute he could pay Darrow was to send Helen home safely. She agreed to go only once the body was recovered. When they got news of the crash, Gary insisted that Linh go with him to the apartment. As soon as Helen opened the door and looked into Linh’s face, she knew. The worst part how little a surprise it had been, how easy to accept. She pulled Linh inside and closed the door on Gary. But even the fatefulness of the death did nothing to diminish her grief. The sound of her crying tore open his own wounds. An agony to stay with her; an agony to leave.

During those long days, she had asked him about his life, and for the first time he revealed parts. She had earned this trust. He told how his father had been a nationalist, simply wanting in dependence for his country. When Ho embraced the early promise of Communism, he followed. Linh had joined the NVA, believing his father. Soon, they both realized it was a false promise. The family had been willing to lose all, escape. But they found the South, too, corrupted, filled with puppets for the foreigners.

Now Helen untied her bandanna and wetted it from his canteen, wiping the charcoal from her brow and then spreading the wet cloth open to cover her whole face. Under torture, men suffocated this way.

“It’s time to leave.” He plucked the cloth off her face.

Sergeant James stood at ease with the other soldiers, facing the ravine they had come up, feet spread, arms clasped behind his back like a sentinel. Two improbably small body bags lay at the soldiers’ feet.

Far away the hollow thrum of underground explosives could be heard like a heartbeat. Many hilltops over, delicate white puffs of smoke hung in the air.

The Montagnards were supposed to carry the remains out, but they did not show up. James said they were probably still blowing bunkers, so the soldiers decided to carry the bags themselves and not risk getting caught out overnight.

In single file the soldiers walked step by step down the dirt path, the ground loose and red under their boots, each of them shouldering the end of a splintery wood pole, and the unevenness of their strides and the small slips in the crumbling soil caused the bags to sway and squeak. Linh and Helen followed-the ravine plunging, hairpin and overgrown-alternately blinded by the sunlight and then plunged into dark shade as they made their way back down the steep mountain.

Thorn bushes crowding the path snagged at Helen’s pants, and once, as she gazed out over the valley, a large thorn dug a long scratch along her arm. Beadlike drops of blood formed along the wound, but she was oblivious to it until Linh came up next to her and rubbed it roughly with a piece of cloth, his eyes glittering.

“You must watch where you’re going. Be more careful.”

When they made it back to the LZ it was sunset, and a helicopter was on its way to drop supplies and take them out. Helen ached to go back to the city, to the crooked apartment she had not moved out of, boxes half packed. She waited with her back to the two bags lying by the side of the clearing.

As they waited, four LRRPs, called Lurps, walked in from the bush. They high-fived the platoon digging in for the night, nodded thoughtfully to the bags at the edge of the clearing, then squatted under a tree and began to boil rice and dried meat. These types, MacCrae’s kind of guys, worked in deep cover, adapting to native ways and language.

Linh went over and joined them. Exhausted, Helen sat on a box of rations. She was surprised when one of the men held out a plastic cup to Linh, and more surprised when he accepted, squatting down to drink with them. By the jerk of Linh’s head and the guttural laughter of the soldiers, she guessed it was the local hill tribe moonshine, a fermented alcohol made of rice, lethal stuff.

The helicopter came in, and everyone turned away to shield their faces. The whole camp pitched in to unload supplies. Two of the Lurps jumped up, jubilant and drunk, and each took one end of the first body bag and swung it up on the floor of the helicopter, where it landed with a hard thud.

“Careful!” Helen yelled.

The two men stared at her with blank expressions. “They won’t feel a thing anymore, dolly,” one of them said to the howling laughter of his companions.

Helen stared at them and at Linh sitting there, a part of them. “I’ll remember that when I carry your bag.”

The soldier made a motion with his hand as if he had touched something hot. “Sssssss!”

Helen watched as the next bag was loaded in carefully, almost tenderly.

Linh staggered up to her. “We’re not going out. We’re going on patrol with them.” He nodded his head back to the Lurps eating their dinner.

“You’re drunk.” Helen’s gaze took in the group of men who were oblivious to their presence. “Do they know this?”

“Already arranged.”

“By who?”

He wagged his head. “Me.”

She rubbed her boot back and forth in the dirt, a long, tired arc. “I’m beat. You go. I’m going back on this ride.”

Linh grabbed her arm. “For me, this time. Without questions.”

She hesitated. After Darrow’s death, she felt strange around Linh. The memory of the three of them together making the absence more painful. “I don’t have enough film.”

“Enough for the job.”

“Which is?”

Linh studied her face, looking for something. “You said you wanted to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail. Still do?”

After three days, Helen no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon. Even Darrow changed from a pain outside, inflicted, to something inside, a tumor, with only its promise of future suffering. The fastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war-would outlast time itself.

They traveled straight west for three days, illegally crossing the border at some point, and continued on. They moved beyond rules; she, in her grief, was also beyond rules. Gradually, as happened each time, Helen was absorbed by the details of the patrol-the heat, the terrain, the soldiers-till nothing else existed. She was impressed by the obvious relish with which they went about their job, hardwired for it in a way other units were not. They lived deep in the land; traveled through it like ghosts. No base camps or supply drops. Understood there would be no mercy if they were caught. They made do with very little-whatever was on their backs or taken from the land.

Deep in the wilderness, Helen experienced the longed-for slipping beneath the surface, losing the sense of herself as separate from her surroundings. After five days all thought of the war was gone. Only movement and land covered, the safety of the men and herself. She lost her tiredness, lost her appetite. Simply ate and slept enough to have the strength to keep walking. The idea of taking photos small and beside the point. The Lurps mostly ignored her except for the one who had made the body bag comment. After a week he came up and complimented her: “You’re almost invisible.”

On the tenth day they received a click-hiss on the radio, a signal an NVA convoy would be passing within hours. They set up positions in the bush with a clear view of a wide dirt path that crossed a quick-moving river. The sound of the water concealed them against accidental noise.

Linh and Helen cut branches to create a tripod inside a large bush, then hid the camera and zoom lens with leaves. Linh attached a cable release for the shutter. “When they come, no movement. No framing. We have to be lucky. If your hands shake, no problem.”

She listened and did what Linh told her without question. Enacting a ritual to summon a spirit, conjuring an enemy that had for the most part remained invisible and otherworldly. Beyond belief that such a force could be made up of individual people, and she wondered if it was the same for the North Vietnamese-did they fear the magic of the Americans, with their planes and bombs? Their endless machines. Each time the Americans came across fresh footprints of rubber sandals, they stared at them with a kind of queasy awe. The only tangible evidence of the enemy’s existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.

Hours passed that held the weight of days. Ten feet away, Helen heard the click-hiss of the radio again as the Lurp nodded up and down the line and then shut it off. More hours, with only a minimum of movement. The day overcast and cooler, a thin fog curled at the top of the mountains, and the first enemy soldier materialized on the path without a noise.

How young they seemed.

Barely out of boyhood in their shabby khaki uniforms, thin so that their pants, rolled up, revealed the large knobs of knees. The AKs strapped across their chests looked too big for them to handle, children playing war with their fathers’ guns. Their faces so serious and yet they moved with the energy of teenagers, confident in their steps. When the first soldiers came to the river, they stopped and scanned it up and down, but they were at the narrowest and slowest-flowing part-the Lurps made sure of that before setting up positions-and Helen pressed down on the cable release over and over, hoping that just by sheer numbers she would come up with a usable frame, the click of the camera inaudible over the gravelly sound of the running water.

The first soldiers waded in their rubber sandals halfway across the river, the rushing water reaching waist-high so that they had to raise their weapons. Behind the point guard, soldiers came with heavy loads strapped onto bicycles, a bamboo pole across the handlebar and another from the seat of the bike for steering. One of them said something to a soldier in the stream, and the young man again scanned the river up and down and shrugged.

The bicycles shuddered in the river, the rushing water tugging against the canvas bags, forcing the drivers to cross quickly, almost at a jog because the power of the current would tire them, soaking the bags heavy and making their jobs harder. More than fifty bicycles passed in an hour.

Next came a kind of crude wagon balanced on four fat rubber tires. Two soldiers directed it, one front and one back. Halfway across the river, a front tire caught on something underwater, and the force of the soldier pushing from the back made it go in deeper, splaying the wagon sideways so it was at a forty-five-degree angle to the bank. The two soldiers tried to straighten it, then back it up, but the vehicle wouldn’t budge.

Now the soldiers closest to the Americans stopped on their side of the riverbank, laid their bikes down and slipped off their packs, and waded into the water to free the wagon. It took eight men to get it moving, and when they reached the other side, the steep bank was too slippery, and the wheels couldn’t gain traction. An order was given to cut down poles to create a ramp.

Five soldiers, including one young boy, took out small hatchets shaped like half-moons and began combing through the surrounding brush. Four of them moved upstream, away from the Americans, but the young boy moved downstream, straight toward them.

Helen held her breath and moved her head in time to see one of the Lurps nearest her pull the pin out of a grenade and then the boy soldier was near them, but he was not looking for a pole. He seemed glad to stop marching, and he looked up at the sky and down the stream and reached in his pocket, pulling out something white that he quickly stuck in his mouth, and as he began to chew, Helen realized it was gum, and the surprise made her smile. An order was barked from one of the soldiers holding the wagon in the stream, and the boy soldier veered directly toward Helen and Linh, seeing the easy lure of their cut branches. He reached for one of the poles holding the camera, bringing his right hand with the hatchet up. When the pole came away in his hand, he found himself looking eye to eye with Linh. The boy soldier’s eyes grew big, and his chest inhaled a yell when his vision caught the movement of Helen’s hand on the cable, and his eyes grew larger.

Helen looked at him and knew that it was probably the end for all of them, but something in his face and gestures made her unafraid. Gently she raised her hand and ran her index finger lightly across her neck, more a statement of the situation they all found themselves in than a threat, and the boy soldier exhaled without a sound, stepped back, his eyes traveling again to Linh, who raised his own hand to cover his face, palm down, slowly dragging his hand down his features, fingertips finally grazing his chin, a mime to erase all that had been seen, and the boy soldier turned quickly at the new barked orders from the men soldiers in the stream, and again he looked at the river, squinting as the sun reflected off of it, motionless for a moment before he moved away, blowing a big, sugary bubble.

Poles were cut and put under the wagon, and it tracked up the muddy bank. The last of the soldiers, including the boy, crossed, and then the clearing was empty, only footprints proving the whole thing had not been a dream.

When they returned to Saigon they did not stop to shower or change but went straight to the magazine’s darkroom and kicked out all the assistants.

Gary got word of the pictures and left his apartment before curfew to spend the night at the office. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? How’d you do it?” He was grabbing at his collar around his neck as if there were a pressure there. With shock, Helen realized that in the last month his hair had turned white.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I forbid you to take chances like that. Or at least, tell me first.”

Helen looked at him coolly. She had long suspected that Gary cared more than he let on, yet it was in the nature of the business that they all wanted to please him, that he created, subtly, the competitive drive and risk-taking that produced the pictures. “We were on our own time.”

“Do it again, you’re fired.”

“And get five better offers the next day.” She was beyond the point where he could make demands, unspoken that she would take the same risks anyway and simply sell to another magazine if need be. The pictures didn’t matter anymore.

“Don’t make me go through losing another photographer,” he said. And with that, she was chastened.

“The pictures all go under a dual byline, okay? No one else in the darkroom till we finish. No one touches the negatives.”

“Let me have a peek, okay? At least the first contacts.”

“We’ll see.” She worried about the quality of the exposures, the dim light and the lack of aperture adjustment.

“You’re my top paid feature person now. Tell Linh I’m putting him on staff full-time.”

Helen nodded her head and gently closed the darkroom door behind her.

Linh began with test clips. As Helen feared, the light had been too dim. Linh left the negatives in the developer longer to increase the contrast and sharpen the edges. His first test got better and better, but at the moment both of them thought the exposure perfect, fog developed over the shadows. “Too long,” he said. “We’ll shorten the next one.”

Helen sat on a stool in the dark, the red light on Linh as he moved back and forth. “What do you think?”

He studied the next test negative, then turned the overhead light on. He handed it to Helen, and the air went out of her when she saw the poor range of tone and the weak edge markings on the film. “It’s not going to work. These are terrible.”

“We can fix it. We’ll leave it in developer longer. Use two baths. I’ll make it work.”

Helen chewed her nail. “How’d you learn to do all this?”

“This is nothing. I used to work in the forest at night with only stars. I rinsed negatives by letting water run over the strips in the stream. Dried them by hanging them along small leaves.”

“Gary is making you staff photographer.”

Linh bowed his head a moment before he reached for the printing trays. “That’s a great honor.”

“Honor, BS. He’s afraid to lose you to a competitor. It means that they can transfer you out of the country if you want.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for taking me out there. To see that. It was a dream. After doing this for me… I’m keeping my word. I’m going home.”

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

Linh said nothing.

“Robert will give you a good job.”

“I cannot.”

“Not even for me…” Helen said, more statement than question.

“It is too much to ask.”

Hours later they printed the closeup shot of the boy soldier. Linh burned in highlights, and as he promised, the picture was decent in quality, extraordinary in subject. They handed the print to Gary, who stood at the door like a nurse waiting to carry off a newborn, forgetting Helen and Linh as soon as he collected his prize. They sat in the darkroom, door open, the red safelight a dull star. Both were tired and heavy-eyed but unwilling to leave.

“We make a good team,” she said.

Linh smiled.

“Will they hurt the boy when they see his picture? Will they think he’s a traitor?”

“No,” Linh said. “He’ll think fast like he did with us. He’ll survive.”

“I felt good out there.”

“Go to California. It will be better there for you.”

She was hurt by his constant dismissal. “What about you?”

“Nothing to worry about. With you gone, I will be the best photographer in Vietnam. Maybe I will marry Mai’s sister. She need a husband for her children.” He kept thinking of his debt to Darrow, how Helen’s safety would have mattered to him more than anything else.

Helen’s back stiffened. “I had no idea.”

“It’s a Vietnam tradition. To care for family,” Linh said.

“Darrow wanted you to be happy. Have a good life for him.” Helen scrambled to her feet and turned on the overhead light. “I’m going to grab a couple of hours on the cot.”

“We got good pictures.”

“How can I top this? Go out on top, right?”

Helen moved out of the apartment in Cholon, handing the keys over to Linh, and went back to the Continental, where she had started. The next morning, she made arrangements to fly home. She did not feel more or less grieved than before she went out with Linh in the field, but something had changed. She knew it and suspected that Linh knew it, and they did not speak of it but instead acted as if nothing had shifted between them.

Late at night Helen stayed awake in her hotel room, sleep no longer a thing to be counted on, and she lay in bed, propped up by pillows, staring into darkness until she could see the patterns of the tiles on the wall, the blades of the fan above as they pushed against the heavy air. She stored a bottle of bourbon on her bedside table, and it slackened the thirst and loneliness she felt during those long hours, sure that there would be no knock on the door. Helen slowly trained herself to believe in Darrow’s death. He had been her guide and mentor, as well as her lover, and she did not feel up to the challenge of the war without him.

Was it the same for others? Like children, did they all wait for the reappearance of a loved one, death simply a word, the lack of a knock on a door? She knew better, had seen the two bags on top of the steep ravine, had watched them sway on poles on the shoulders of the living.

And yet. The sight of the pale NVA soldiers had changed everything for her. Just when she thought there was nothing more but repeating herself, a whole other world, formerly invisible, appeared. No American had yet photographed the other side. As thrilling as exploring an unknown continent on a map. No one could understand except Darrow and MacCrae, who were gone. Only Linh, who now was determined to send her home. Frequently she dreamed of the boy soldier who had held their fate in his hands, who saved them and himself for another day, and how the Lurps sat, tensed, how one wet his index finger and marked it in the air, one down, like a sports score.

Helen woke groggy in the morning, her room too hot, mouth sour with alcohol. Her room boy served her Vietnamese coffee, thick and sweet with condensed milk, out of a silver pot, laid down fresh rolls on a china plate with three small pots of jam-marmalade, strawberry, and guava-both knowing she used only marmalade. She slathered the bread with butter but used the orange sparingly so that the boy could take the two unused pots home with him each day. Why, just as she was leaving, did she finally feel at home?

When Helen expressed the desire to see the crooked apartment one last time, Linh told her Thao had already moved in, that the whole building shook from the running of children up and down the stairs.

“Good,” Helen said. “Something to break the bad luck.”

After the remains from the crash site had been identified, Gary brought out Darrow’s will stating he wished to be cremated in Vietnam, but his wife made an official complaint to the magazine, and they gave in to her wishes, shipping the body back to New York for burial.

Helen, ready to fly out, felt all the original grief renew itself. She was nothing to Darrow. She begged Gary to read Darrow’s letter over the phone to the wife, but the woman remained unswayed, convinced that he had not been in his right mind the last year. In the end, the body went to the States, and the staff had a Buddhist funeral with an empty casket, done frequently as the numbers of dead grew and recovery of bodies became more problematic.

The procession began at the apartment in Cholon. Helen looked up at the window, hoping to see the sister-in-law and her children crowding the sill, but it remained empty. Was it possible that Linh had kept her away so memory would not change her mind about leaving? The Vietnamese in the procession wore traditional white scarves of mourning on their heads. Monks chanted and burned joss. They wound their way to downtown, stopped in the plaza next to the Marine Statue, beneath the office’s windows.

Helen was dry-eyed. Her head ached. At the plaza, Gary leaned against a tree, facing away from them, and all she could see was the curl of his shoulders, his newly white hair. But she wasn’t able to comfort him. Weren’t they all children, pretending tragedy when it was clear the danger they placed themselves in? Shouldn’t they just damn well accept it? When they passed the Continental, the head bartender carried out a glass of Darrow’s favorite scotch on a silver tray.

At Mac Dinh Chi cemetery, Linh scattered a trail of uncooked rice and paper money. Clouds gathered and wind blew as a mat was unrolled at the gravesite. A plate of cracked crab flown in from Vung Tau, a bowl of rice, and the glass of scotch were laid out. Tangible things that Helen understood, compared to the generic funerals of flowers and coffins and organ music she had attended back home. A bundle of incense was lit and then it was over.

The clouds darkened, the longed-for rain fell, and people scattered for any available shelter.

Helen looked for Annick in the procession, but she had warned that she would not come. Too many funerals, she said. If she went to them all that’s all she’d do. But Helen was leaving that night and wanted to say good-bye, so she walked, covering herself with the umbrella, moving through the flooding streets, skirting small moving streams of dirty water floating with trash. The rain kept falling, gray and hard, pounding the earth, and a gust of wind blew off the river, lifting the ribs of her umbrella inside out until she was gathering the rain rather than sheltering from it, and she let the umbrella fall on the road, knowing it would be picked up, repaired, and used within minutes. Each item reincarnated countless times. One thing she had learned in Vietnam-that reincarnation was not only in the hereafter but also in the now. She continued on, rain pelting her, and reached the milliner’s and stood under the awning, wiping water off her face. In the display window was a wedding dress she hoped had been created for some jilted bride and not her.

Inside, the Vietnamese seamstresses sat on their accustomed rush seats, sewing away faster and with more concentration than usual. From outside, over the sound of rain, Helen had thought she heard talking and laughter, but inside, the store was as silent as a tomb. She stood at the counter, but Annick did not come out from the back where she usually hid out, smoked cigarettes, and drank wine. The seamstresses took no notice of Helen’s presence, so she tapped the bell on the counter.

At the sound, the older one stood. She wore the same black dress Helen had seen her in the first time and each subsequent time she came to the store, so that Helen was convinced that the madames owned seven identical black dresses, one for each day in order for the worn ones to be washed and starched and made ready. Her head pounding, Helen felt feverish as she stood, dripping water onto the floor. The elder madame mumbled to herself as she made her stiff, slow way to the counter, all the while looking down to study her suddenly idle fingers.

“Bonjour, madame,” Helen said, and the seamstress returned the greeting in her singsong French, more as a refrain than greeting, still without making eye contact.

“Ou est Madame Annick?” Helen asked.

The seamstress sighed. “Madame est parti.”

“Ou?” Where?

The seamstress looked up, and her gaze startled Helen, the eyes the pale gray of cataract. “Elle est parti.” The woman bent sideways under the counter, pulled out a small flat box tied in satin ribbon. Helen opened it and saw a card from Annick on top of a gold scarf. No good-byes. Bon voyage, ma chère.

“Merci. Au revoir,” the seamstress replied, and with a small curtsey she returned to her chair in obvious relief to again pick up her embroidery.

At the hotel that evening, Linh apologized for not being able to take her to the airport. He made no attempt to give an excuse. He could not trust himself not to betray her departure. Beg her not to leave. They stood awkwardly at the hotel entrance.

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

As Linh walked away, a soldier was arguing with the doorman, and Helen was distracted by his loud voice. When she looked back to the spot where Linh had stood, it was empty. But as the cab pulled up to take her bags, he reappeared.

“Everything’s fixed. I can come see you off.”

They rode in silence. Again he offered no explanation for his change in plans, and Helen, hurt that he had not wanted to see her off, now wondered why he had changed his mind.

As the plane rose steeply on takeoff, the passengers remained quiet, but as it swung out over the South China Sea applause broke out. Helen was the only one not smiling. Below on the dark sea, squid boats floated like carnivals, bright with light.

After Helen left Saigon, Linh sat alone in the crooked apartment. No sister-in-law, no children. When he had turned down Thao’s proposal of marriage, she had promptly set her sights on a mechanic and was now living on the other side of town with him and the children. Linh still sent them money.

Linh had stood helpless at the gate of the plane; he had broken his own discipline and confused her by his actions. In his weakness he asked Helen for something to remember her by, but it was too late. All she had was a gold scarf around her neck that was brand-new and not hers yet, but she took it off and handed it to him. Now he held it to his nose, but there was no scent of her on it. Slowly he twisted it and wrapped it tight around one wrist, when someone knocked at the door. He did not want to answer, did not want to endure Mr. Bao at this moment, but to continue to avoid him would be worse. He opened the door.

Mr. Bao walked through the room, now needing a wooden cane, taking in each object although only the bare furniture remained. “Now it seems I must come to you. It’s been months since we’ve talked.”

“There are no developments. Other than my being a staff photographer.”

“That is very good. Keep your ears and eyes open.”

“That’s my job.”

Mr. Bao looked at him sharply, his small eyes behind the glasses magnified. “Don’t forget whose side you are on. Sentiment is turning to our side. Men like you are credited with helping that. Don’t make us doubt you.”

“Why pretend? It’s not as if this has been voluntary on my part. How is the heroin trade? Prosperous?” It amazed Linh how naive the North still was about the Americans, not realizing Westerners’ quest for news was more powerful than anything he could have ever led them to.

Mr. Bao picked up a figurine of a Buddha, a trinket from the markets, left behind. “So your little adventuress is gone?”

“Yes.”

“Too bad. Why didn’t you convince her to stay?”

“I have no control.” The truth was, and he felt shame in his pride over it, that he could have persuaded her to stay. But his loyalty to Darrow outweighed his love and his anger. The Americans did not yet realize that they would lose the war. There was a kind of hopeless certainty in Linh that no harm would come to him in this war, that he was one of the charmed, although he did not particularly care about that survival. He was angry that he had not been with Darrow, thwarted his death.

“It doesn’t matter. Better to not deal with a woman anyway. What if she falls in love with you?” Bao chuckled and eyed the scarf. “What’s that?”

“She left it behind.” He saw Bao’s eyebrows rise, and quickly added, “She asked me to deliver it to a friend to send on to her.”

Mr. Bao reached out and touched the fabric. “Then you shouldn’t wrinkle it so. Too bad. It is good quality-my wife would have liked it.”