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

FIFTEEN. Hang Hum Noc Ran

Tiger Den and Snake Venom- A Place of Danger

November 1968

It was a prodigal’s return. Helen arrived in Vietnam at night; as the plane approached the darkened runway of Tan Son Nhut, the lights on board blackened to avoid rocket or mortar attack. Blind, she could only feel the magnetic pull of the place, dragging her back to earth, and she suspected it had exerted itself, however faintly, all the way to California.

She stood in the open doorway of the plane, unable to see anything in the pitch-dark night of the tarmac, the air shrill with the sound of jet engines revving for night runs. The physical weight of the heat and humidity made her feel like a fish being released back into water. She breathed in deeply, and the scent that had teased her in the States came to her, forgotten and familiar, a third-world emanation of jungle and decomposition, garbage and dinner and unwashed skin mixed with the fumes of sewers, diesel, and rain. Home.

In the chaos of the airport stood Linh, unchanged, as if their months apart were nothing. Her relief to see him in the flesh, as if she dreaded that he, too, had become a ghost, was so great she dropped her bags and ran to hug him, kissing his cheek.

He pulled away, embarrassed, and looked around to see who might have been observing. She had forgotten too much already; all the difficulties and barriers to life in Saigon had disappeared from memory in her rush to return. Linh handed her the golden scarf.

She took it and wrapped it around her neck. “I missed it.”

Linh shrugged. “It was always yours. It waited for your return.”

“Good to be back.” She tried to hide her disappointment at the formality between them. When she had wired him announcing her return, she took his answer that he’d pick her up as approval.

She saw there had been a change in him, his face more tired and drawn than she had ever seen it. The war had not stopped simply because she went away.

“Is it really good?” he asked, and picked up her bags.

“Believe it or not,” she said. “It’s more terrifying there than here.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

They rode into the city in silence with a new distance. Without the barrier of Darrow, the easy camaraderie between them strained. Helen was very aware of Linh as a man, and her former playful intimacy, up to the kiss she had just given him in public, embarrassed her. Clear that they had had a unique window of friendship because of Darrow, and this allowed her to know him in a way that would not have happened otherwise.

Things appeared smaller and dirtier and shabbier than she remembered. The car idled at the mouth of the alley in Cholon, dawn just beginning to lighten the edge of the sky, the first merchants stirring. They walked single file to avoid the large puddle, Linh ahead, carrying bags, until they reached the crooked apartment, its worn, stained stucco and tipped blue roof, the faded Buddha door. Helen stood in the alley and looked up, and her heart flooded at the sight of the red lamp in the window. A guilty plea sure like smoking a cigarette after months of abstinence. Her vision swam. Unreal to accept that Darrow was gone when she felt his presence here stronger than she had in months. Nothing was the same and yet a teasing that one could rewind time.

“Did you marry, Linh?”

He watched her face, not able to guess her feelings. “No.” He stopped, but when she remained silent he continued. “Thao fell in love with a mechanic. They married last year. She is expecting a child.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I’m happy for her.”

Helen seemed far from him. So far he feared he’d never reach her; he half-expected that she would know the imagined conversations he had with her in the intervening months, the intimacy gained in his thoughts. “Sleep and I’ll come by in the afternoon.”

“Stay and let’s talk-”

“It’s better to rest, I think. Be patient. Good night.”

At the press briefings, Helen was surprised how filled the room was, how many unknown faces. New journalists jockeyed for information and packed the restaurants and bars. She recognized a handful of veteran reporters, and when she caught their eye, they nodded, unsurprised by her return. For those who had the appetite, it was as simple as wanting to be where the action was. For the first time in months, Helen felt she was where she belonged. Doing what she was good at. Being at the source of history in the making and not reading about it in the paper. But she noticed there was no more talk at the parties and restaurants and briefings whether the war was being won or lost. It had ceased to be an issue.

When she first went back to the magazine’s offices, Gary met her with a big hug and stony silence.

“Come on,” she said.

“You weren’t supposed to come back.”

“I missed you too much.”

“Liar.”

“And Linh sent me a letter.”

“Don’t worry about Linh. He hasn’t been exactly mooning around. He’s my new star reporter.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Things have changed. Be careful. It’s getting uglier by the day.”

Linh and Helen went out on patrol in the Bong Son. She could not wait to leave the hot house of Saigon. Orders were delivered that she not shower with soap or shampoo, and not wear perfume. Ambushes had been discovered because the Vietnamese could smell the deodorized, scented Westerners from far away. That morning, in preparation, the platoon had purchased gallons of nuoc mam, fermented fish sauce, and amid laughter from Linh, they had smeared it all over the canvas parts of their gear and on their uniforms.

A nineteen-year-old PFC named Kirby slapped a big gob of it on Helen’s back and rubbed it around. “If you’ll allow me, ma’am.”

Helen acted the good sport even though the smell sickened her and she’d have to throw away her tailor-made uniform afterward-no number of washings would get rid of the odor. “Aren’t they going to be suspicious of a patch of jungle that reeks of fish sauce?” she asked. But she felt excited and alert for the first time in months, energized by the patrol; in her new confidence, the debilitating fear seemed vanished.

“Naw, after a few days we’ll just smell like any other gook.”

Helen looked to see if Linh had heard.

But instead of lessening, the odor of nuoc mam seemed to grow more rancid, more lingering. It rubbed off of the canvas and onto her skin, sank into her pores, until Helen was so overwhelmed it distracted her from the danger of walking patrol. Sweat reinvigorated the paste; it stuck in her throat and burned her eyes, permeated her hair like cigarette smoke until that, too, reeked.

Two days into the patrol they were deep in the jungle, hunkered down for the night under a canopy of umbrella trees. Hot meals and mail had been delivered earlier, and Kirby made his way over to Helen, who sat on a rock, staring at her serving of ham and beans.

“Not hungry?” he said. He had a slight frame and a sleepy expression; one could almost see the fear in him. “I’m hungry all the time.”

“The fish smell makes everything taste bad,” she said.

“If you’re hungry enough, it doesn’t matter.”

“Want mine?” They sat in silence for a minute. “Get any mail?” she asked.

“From my parents.”

“Miss home? I do.”

“I hear you loud and clear,” Kirby said, his face relaxed now as he settled back, resting his head in the crook of his arm, relieved at the shared acknowledgment of fear. “I dream of that plane ride home. Girls waiting to jump the war hero. People so grateful, they give me a parade. Life like one of those stupid commercials.”

“It’ll happen,” Helen said, stirring at her dinner that now seemed more, not less, revolting. “You’re one of the lucky ones.”

He looked at her and crinkled his nose. “You’re putting me on.”

“No. Trust me.” She did not want this new role, giving encouragement where it wasn’t particularly warranted. She did not like knowing in advance the poor odds for a scared boy with no heart for danger.

“I can’t exactly collect if you’re wrong,” he said.

She handed him her dinner. “You’ll be on that plane.”

Kirby studied her face for a moment and moved closer to her, and Helen smelled the strong odor of the nuoc mam mixed with something sweet like candy. He spoke in a low whisper.

“Can I tell you something personal?”

“Sure.”

His face tightened. “That dream before was just a wet dream. I know it’s not going to be like that. I worry…” He stopped talking for a moment and swallowed hard. “What if everything’s changed? What if my parents are ashamed? What if I lose an arm or leg and my girlfriend goes off with one of those guys who thinks the war is a crock?”

Now she was the one scared. “You’ll be lucky, lucky, lucky.”

The next morning a fresh gallon of nuoc mam was opened with orders to swab down once more. They reached a supply road that showed signs of recent travel and set up an ambush. The renewed strength of the fish smell made her queasy; she couldn’t get down her breakfast. She sought out Linh and together they curled behind a berm to wait. The lack of fear was a new experience, but she’d reached the point of being almost bored. After half an hour she decided to tie a handkerchief over her nose; she began to root around in her bag when a loud explosion went off to her left.

Her eyelids closed and behind them a bright flash exposed a pink-veined starfish shape. The vision had a floating calmness to it so that she did not want to immediately open her eyes.

The platoon around her rose to crouching positions, firing round after round into the surrounding jungle until the air was thick with the smell of fired weapons. The captain signaled for end fire, but it took another minute before the order was passed along, and another after that before the firing actually stopped. In the middle of the path they saw the body of a lone Viet Cong who had come up to the ambush and lobbed a single grenade.

“Put a hose in his mouth, he’d be one heck of a sprinkler, man,” Kirby said.

Their cover blown, the captain radioed for an extraction. Helen, her ears still ringing, moved to get up when she felt a dull pain. She pushed up onto her knees and her head swayed hard to the left; a gush of warm liquid wet her lap. She reached down and gingerly touched her abdomen as the medic looked over.

“Oh,” she said absentmindedly, as if she had misplaced something.

Compresses and bandages applied, she lay back in the dirt, aware of how quiet all the men were around her. She had felt so sure of her invincibility that day that it seemed a poor joke that she got injured. All the warnings she had heard over and over came into her head-the sight of a wounded woman demoralizing the men.

“I’m okay,” she said to the medic. “Just a scratch. Cocktail time.”

The morphine made its way through her limbs, cushioning and cottoning sensation. It frightened her to be so lucid about her surroundings and yet unable to care about the outcome. Her first time in-country she had been obsessed with getting hurt, but this time the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. In her grief she had felt immune. The hard jarring of the stretcher into the helicopter registered as pain, but too far away to have anything to do with her. The last thing she saw as they lifted off was Kirby’s betrayed face. What kind of prophet couldn’t predict her own demise?

Linh squeezed her hand, spooled back her attention like a kite that kept straining away. “You okay?”

“Bad luck,” she said. “First time out.”

“Just a scratch, I think,” he said hopefully, but they both feared otherwise.

The initial surgery in the field hospital was a success, but that night she developed a fever, and by the next morning she was bleeding internally and was rushed back to surgery again, passing in and out of consciousness. All she remembered was waking up groggy in post-op, and the nurse shaking her head, saying it didn’t need to happen like that, the surgeons were butchers who weren’t used to operating on women. Later still, when she was more awake, the doctor came in and held her hand and said the hysterectomy had stopped the bleeding and saved her life; he wiped his face and said it had been a long night and then he left, and she was alone, listening to the clatter of incoming helicopters, the slow, labored breathing of the wounded in the beds around her.

When Linh came in, he bowed his head. “I’m sorry…” All the awkwardness between them since her return vanished.

“I survived.” She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.

“It should have been me.”

“Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it.”

When she was strong enough to be moved, she transferred to the abdominal ward on the USS Sanctuary off the coast. The recovery took more than a month, the wound slow to heal. The doctors on the boat blamed the field hospital doctor, who cut too many muscles; the field doctor blamed the medic for not cleaning out the debris sooner. Linh visited every day. The smell of rotting flesh so pervasive in the ward that he took lemons aboard with him and cut them in half, holding them to his nose and squeezing juice on his hands before and after going in.

As soon as she was strong enough to leave, Gary and he took her home to the apartment in Cholon. It would have been easier to stay at the Continental, but she insisted on the quiet of those rooms.

“What you see in this dive, I don’t know,” Gary complained. “I’ll have to have meals sent from the hotel.”

Linh and Helen looked at each other and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Everyone knows this is the center of the universe.”

Linh had a single shelf of books given to him by Darrow. In her confinement, Helen pulled down a volume, the cover splayed, the pages swollen and wavy with humidity. She read at random, her concentration shaky, following Darrow’s scribbling in the margins and his underlined passages. In Tacitus she found:

Fear and terror there certainly are, feeble bonds of attachment; remove them, and those who have ceased to fear will begin to hate. All the incentives to victory are on our side. The Romans have no wives to kindle their courage; no parents to taunt them with flight; many have either no country or one far away. Few in number, dismayed by their ignorance, looking around upon a sky, a sea, and forests which are all unfamiliar to them; hemmed in, as it were, and enmeshed, the Gods have delivered them into our hands… In the very ranks of the enemy we shall find our own forces.

She closed the book quickly. This was the way she dealt with books now, plunging in and out of passages as if they were glacial rivers too cold to be endured long. She could not imagine reading a book from cover to cover, the idea of narrative old and quaint, like a tea cozy in this new fractured world.

This was not a book she would have chosen; to Darrow such a book had still seemed valid.

But something in the passage made her think not about the obvious analogy to the American soldiers, but instead about Linh; since her return she found herself wondering about him often, speculating. Wasn’t Linh without wife or family, except for the brief, mysterious appearance of Thao? What had happened? He never spoke of them, although Helen left many opportunities when she told about her own family. Linh was in his own country, but he was not part of that brick wall. Where, she wondered, was his heart? How did one reconcile being on one side, then the other? What went through his head on patrol when American soldiers distrusted him? Or worse, when they tortured Vietnamese? Didn’t he still have more in common with a fellow countryman, even if he was the enemy, than he did with them? What did he feel when he heard gook and slant-eye? Whose victory, finally, would constitute winning for Linh? Maybe the only real victory for any of them-peace.

When he walked through the door with dinner, she turned and moved away guiltily, dropping the book, as if she had been caught doing something private and self-indulgent.

Each day Linh brought something to interest Helen. One day, a smelly durian like ripe cheese, the next a box of incense, then a lacquered river stone. She took a childish delight in the new, waited eagerly for it. He brought a record of classical Vietnamese music, which they listened to each evening. One night, they were playing cards, and Helen said she was tired.

“Would you like to sleep?”

“Tell me a story.”

And so Linh began with all the fairy tales he had grown up with. When he ran out of those, he brought the epic poem The Tale of Kieu, and translated it to her a page at a time, explaining this was the most beloved of all Vietnamese tales. During these weeks, they began to understand each other in a way that had not been available to them before. Without telling her, one night Linh read aloud the play he had written for himself and Mai, the last one they performed together. When he finished, Helen held still for a moment.

“That was so beautiful-what was it called?”

“It’s not well known.”

“Who wrote it?”

He hesitated. “I did.”

“I had no idea you could write.”

“Before… I dreamed of being a playwright.”

Helen nodded. “You would have been a fine one. You can still be.”

“Those things are unimportant during war.”

“Maybe that’s when they’re most important.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you have other stories?”

For the first time, Linh brought out the writings he had worked on, off and on, starting with the spiral notebook Darrow had given him in Angkor. Each night, they ate dinner, then Helen waited to hear more. Linh had not felt such intoxicating attention in a very long while. When the stack of pages grew thin, he began composing again. In this way, he came back to his real life.

After a month, she had recovered sufficiently to stay alone. Linh went for longer periods to check assignments downtown. One day, although he left her with food-sweetened rice and fresh oranges and pomelo-she longed for a spicy, hot bowl of pho. At the hospital she had endured a diet consisting solely of bland starchy foods, Jell-O and mashed potatoes. As she lay in bed hour after hour, the thought of the clear, pungent broth obsessed, and she was convinced that one bowl of it would bring back her strength.

She did not want to admit that the real reason for her planned assault on the pho stand might be that she did not want to be alone with her thoughts. The injury and the hysterectomy had happened so quickly, and she had not dealt with the aftermath. She had hoped eventually to have children in the distant future. Now the option had been taken away. She avoided writing to her mother with the news, showing what she had done to their family’s future. But that mourning seemed indulgent when so many lives were being lost all around her, so many children, so many mothers and fathers. Her own pain slight in the ocean of grief all around her.

Helen dressed carefully, the pain in her belly a stab each time she moved. Using a cane, she slowly climbed step-by-step down the two buckling flights of stairs. When she was halfway down, it was obvious the trip was a mistake, but sheer will pushed her to continue, like a soldier carrying out an order, the most important thing not to admit defeat. Sweat beaded her forehead, and her legs wobbled, threatening to go out from under her. She gripped the cane tighter, rested against the wall. Now she could get in real trouble, fall and break a leg and be stranded for hours. The painkillers had worn off, but she had resisted taking more, worried about dizziness until she returned from her journey. Her plan was to swallow a pill when she was back in bed with a stomach full of soup. Panting, she braced herself on each step until finally she reached the Buddha door at the bottom.

From the dim stairwell, she noticed for the first time that the wood at the back of the door was black with oxidation; one of the panels had a hairline split through which sunlight showed. From outside the door had appeared sound, unbroken, and it was only her unlimited time that allowed her to notice this.

On the street, the heat and sunlight stranded her again, but at least she could shuffle along the even ground. By the time she made her tortured way through the alley and onto the main thoroughfare where the soup stall was, her whole body was shaken by tremors of pain and fatigue.

The soup vendor recognized her, patted the empty stool, and made soup the way Helen liked, with plenty of chilies and soy sauce, but when she handed over the bowl, Helen hunched over, rocking, and could only shake her head.

The old woman studied her face for a moment, then barked out orders to her young nephew who worked for her. He took off at a run.

Half an hour later, the boy reappeared in a cab. Linh jumped out, leaving the back door hanging open, the driver unpaid, and ran behind the soup stall to where Helen was curled on a mat, under the shade of the vendor’s umbrella. Kneeling down, he placed his hand on her forehead.

“Are you okay?”

“Dizzy. I shouldn’t have gone down…”

“Can you sit up?”

Helen moved delicately, fearing she had ruptured something inside, the effort making her grind out her words as her forearms gave out, and she slipped back down, a black wave coming over her, threatening, then receding.

“Can you put your arms around my neck?”

Pulling herself up, she made the effort to concentrate on Linh’s face. She nodded. Lifting her as if she were broken, he carried her down the alley. Helen laid her head on his shoulder, her hair winding around his wrist.

The body, he knew, has a memory all its own. The shape of a baby in one’s arms will be imprinted forever, the cup of a lover’s chin. The weight of Helen in Linh’s arms broke his heart open. He wished the journey back to the apartment was ten times, a hundred times as long, wished that he could walk with the weight of her in his arms all day and all night and still keep walking. To repeat the journey of that night until it ended with a different outcome. He would gladly die walking for that, and he knew this desire was wrong, but kept looking down at her face.

With the snap of a grimy plastic sheet over the counter, the old woman declared her stall closed; she, the boy, and the cab driver, who shut off his car and took the keys, walked ahead, yelling at people to step aside. The boy was caught up in the drama; the old woman was scandalized; the cabdriver wanted to get paid. When they reached the building, the old woman opened the Buddha door and followed them up the two flights although her bad leg kept her from climbing any faster than Linh under his burden.

When he laid Helen down on the mint green bedspread, the old woman shooed him away and drew the curtain between the rooms, changing Helen’s clothes and washing her face. Men had no place there, even if this was one of those loose Western women.

Linh went to the door and paid off the driver, in his worry forgetting to tip until the driver reminded him. Half an hour later, the pain pills in effect and Helen resting, the old woman got up to leave. Linh offered her money, which she refused.

Helen turned her head, sleepy. “Cam on ba. Chao.” Thank you, Grandmother. Good-bye.

The old woman broke out into a black-toothed smile and asked Linh, “Co ay biet noi tieng Viet khong?” Can she speak Vietnamese?

“Da biet, nhung khong kha lam,” Helen answered. Yes, but not too well.

Grandmother shook her head in amazement and told her nephew to go run for some tea. “I have to read your fortune, daughter.”

Linh frowned. He wanted to be alone with his new feelings, not stuck with some superstitious old woman. “Not now. She’s tired. Anyway, she doesn’t believe in that hocus-pocus.”

“It’s okay,” Helen said. “Let her.”

Grandmother looked at him in triumph. “She might be a foreigner, but she is wiser than some who were born here.” She stared around the bedroom as she waited, and saw a plate on the dresser that held earrings and necklaces.

After the tea had been poured, Helen watched as the old woman took her cup and studied the insides, frowning, then went to the window and threw the contents into the courtyard below. “There is someone who loves you. You must be careful his love doesn’t cause this person harm.”

Helen, her mind drifting, said nothing.

“I told you it’s all nonsense,” Linh said. He turned to Grandmother. “Let’s give her some quiet to sleep now.”

“No, she’s right,” Helen said. “Maybe for Westerners their fortune is only clear after the fact. Backward.”

“This nonsense keeps this country backward.”

“Toi di.” I’m going. She glared at Linh. He was a tricky one, but she wasn’t afraid of him in spite of the rumors of powerful connections with both Viet Cong and the drug lord Bao.

“Xin loi ba,” Helen called. “Ten ba la gi?” What is your name?

“Thua, ten toi la Suong. Ba Suong.” Grandmother said something to Linh that Helen couldn’t understand, and he chuckled, exasperated, as he shepherded her out the door.

“What did she say?”

“She said she is Grandmother Suong, who will bring your pho every day so you won’t break your neck going down the stairs.”

Each day after that, true to her word, Grandmother made the journey down the alley and up the stairs herself; her nephew carried a lidded container of soup while she carried a newspaper sleeve of flowers she got from a niece who worked in the market. Everyone heard the story of the American woman who risked her life for a bowl of Suong’s pho, and no matter how long she took visiting, there would be a line of people waiting for her return. Business had never been better. Some fool had even started the rumor that the pho had a medicinal herb that returned fertility and that was why the American had wanted it so badly. Business was booming, so much so that she considered opening another stall a few blocks away to handle the overflow. Fate worked in mysterious ways.

She sat for a moment in the chair by the open window, her legs spread far apart in their loose pajamas, her calloused feet dusty in sandals. Helen and she exchanged the same few sentences that they shared, always receiving them as if new. Grandmother was insulted by tips above the price of the soup but was not averse to occasional gifts of packs of American cigarettes.

She fingered the necklaces on the plate on the dresser, holding them against her neck in the mirror. Once, when Helen was looking away, the old woman considered pocketing a thin gold chain, but at that moment Helen turned and offered her the necklace if she liked it. Perhaps this one was only American on the outside, Vietnamese on the inside, like people said. Grandmother quickly put the necklace down, almost ashamed. It was a reflex, mostly, a bad habit, taking advantage of foreigners.

On the days when Linh was away, Grandmother heated up water for a pot of tea, poured the cup, and allowed Helen to handle it. Each time she frowned over the contents, the fortune always the same.

“No, no, I want to know the future, not the past,” Helen said.

Grandmother nodded. “Will be.”

“But the man who loved me died.”

The old woman shrugged and got up to leave. “Is. Now.”

When Linh returned to the apartment and found Grandmother’s flowers, his face froze. He grabbed them up out of their vase and threw them out the window.

“What are you doing?” Helen asked.

“Makes me sneeze.”

Helen said nothing. The next day when Grandmother came, she stopped and stared at the scattered flowers on the courtyard brick. The day after, she brought yellow paper flowers, which Helen stuck in a bottle next to her bed. Linh spotted them as soon as he walked in. He grabbed the blossoms, crushing the paper, and then tossed them in the coal brazier and set them on fire with matches.

“Don’t tell me you’re allergic to paper,” she said.

“Tell her to stop bringing them,” he said, his face grim. “Never mind, I’ll tell her myself.”

“Give me a hint what’s going on? What’s wrong with flowers?”

He stubbed out the last of the ashes. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a Vietnamese thing.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Ask me something else.”

Helen sat back in bed and thought. Her face lit up with a sly smile. “There are jokes about you working with Ho Chi Minh. That you are some kind of spy and that’s where you disappear to. That horrible man I’ve seen you with, Mr. Bao. Where do you go?”

“It’s complicated,” he finally answered.

“Make it simple.”

“Sometimes one’s past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don’t know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time.” Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the Americans, genuine and false. He had wanted her to leave and had lured her to come back. That division inside him the same as his father’s uneasy relationship with the French. How could she understand? Even through all her hardship, she still saw the world through privilege. How could she know how it felt to be on the outside? Especially in one’s own country? That the Americans, in their optimism, had backed the wrong side. A side that could not hold without them.

After Helen recovered enough to return to work, Gary assigned her to do another follow-up on Lan, who had been sent back to her family. She had avoided seeing the girl, but now bought bolts of cloth and cooking pots, the most valuable commodities other than food, for the family. She pushed away the thought that these were bribes. For Lan, she got a simple automatic camera with lots of film. The plan started to form in Helen’s mind of bringing the child to live in the crooked apartment in order to be close to medical services and schools. During the war, it was common for families to farm out children to those who could offer help.

Linh didn’t approve of her traveling in the countryside; he worried it would be too difficult physically. He argued with Gary about the assignment, and Gary looked at him in surprise but said nothing. He had not realized Linh was so far gone. “You’re not responsible for her anymore. It’s up to her to go or not. You or her, doesn’t matter to me who covers it. People made donations, they want follow-up.” When Helen was determined to go, Linh gave in.

He sulked on the plane ride. “You answer a question now. Why do you push to do this?”

Helen was tired of his interrogating her. “It gives me a reason to get up in the morning, are you satisfied? And yes, it has to be me. A woman sees war differently.”

They made their way to the family’s village in Quang Nam province, only to find it had been burned down. The military didn’t have records of the clearing. Linh discovered the village’s name only by accident, walking through the charred remains of houses when he stumbled upon a small wooden sign in Vietnamese staked into the ground-THIS IS WHERE QUANG BA VILLAGE WAS.

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:

For a single grain of rice

So tender and scented

In your mouth…

What effort and bitterness!

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.

Linh began to refuse but stopped when he saw her look of disappointment. After their intimacy during her illness, he didn’t know how to act with Helen in public. He didn’t know what to do with this woman.

“Good. It’s settled,” she said.

He smiled, at a loss.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I am thinking I would like to sit at the Continental and drink a very cold gin and tonic and eat a club sandwich.”

On assignment as part of a “pink team,” a hunter/killer helicopter team, Helen and Linh squeezed together in the observer seat of a tiny Loach on their way to join Cobra gunships going out on a mission. The pilot was early and asked if they wanted to run a little “scenic recon,” a joyride through the mountains along the Laos border.

“The two of you together aren’t as heavy as the gunman.” The pilot laughed, finding the idea especially hilarious that morning.

They sat pinned against each other, the front of the helicopter a bubble floating over the land, nothing blocking their view but the metal floor and control panel. The razored mountaintops tangled in fog. The observation heli cop ter hung, birdlike, over trees and wrapped itself between rocky peaks plunging hundreds of feet into narrow ravines, dark even at noon. They hovered over giant waterfalls, bamboo thickets, hardwood forest, broadleaf jungle, all interlaced with small, jewel-like fields of elephant grass. In an hour, the only human they spotted was a lone Montagnard tribesman.

Helen’s eyes hurt from the strain of searching for movement in a sea of green, the ride so vivid it was like a dream of flying, a magic carpet ride. Trees flew beneath her feet. The rush of green and sunlight lulled her, the pilot pulling up and the machine shuddering against gravity. She had a vision then, an infinity of green, her body tingling with heat despite the cool air in the helicopter. She burned and closed her eyes.

Linh, sitting next to her, scanned the terrain through binoculars. He placed his hand over hers, then gave her the glasses and pointed to a rocky cliff. “See, Helen? Come back now,” he said in her ear above the roar of the engine.

As she focused the glasses on the dirt track under the cliff, a tiger stepped out into full view. The orange and black stripes burned against her eyes after the torrent of green. The animal stood calm, detached, eyeing the land below him. Only total isolation would give him the arrogance of ignoring the pounding machine overhead. He stood for another moment, head lifted, testing the air, as the helicopter swung around to pass over him, the pilot maneuvering for a closer sight line, his hand reaching for the M16 at his feet, but in a single flex of movement the animal stretched, his body attenuated long and thin, a wisp of smoke blown away, and the rock ledge was empty.

“Damn, did you see that?” the pilot shouted, elated.

Helen smiled at the pilot and looked ahead, but what she felt was the brief second Linh’s hand had covered her own. Like a single jolt of electricity. He was right. She had been far away, closed off, but now she could see. She leaned and whispered, “I’m here with you now.”