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

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 her brows when she frowned, which was often, as if she were studying a problem located deep inside her.

Although conversation had been easy between them, here it moved clumsily, by fits and starts. They both praised the food and the night to excess. Neither dared look into the other’s face unarmed with words. Moments passed, absorbed in eating or card playing, the only sounds the waves and the soft scurrying of geckos running up and down the walls.

“Thank you for this,” she said.

Linh nodded, peeled an orange, and laid a section into her outstretched hand.

It occurred to her that even when Darrow had been alive, she had spent most of her time in Linh’s company. Now there was a new weight when they were together, each conscious of a pull toward the other that had been hidden before. She thought back to the time in the delta, the only time she had been alone with Darrow and away from work. Although they had been in love, there had always been a sense of jealousy, her suspicion of where his thoughts were. Always he had seemed focused elsewhere. Always a small element of friction and competition between them. Darrow had not wanted a relationship of smoothness and satiety.

After their meals, Helen took her bath, pulling a screen around the half-moon pond. Then, still damp, she would be asleep again before the first stars appeared.

Still the rain did not come. The water in the cisterns scraped low, then became brackish with silt along the bottom of the clay jars.

At night, the air did not cool but remained hot and prickly, weighted with rain that would not drop. Linh chose a hammock strung between two palms in the garden, hoping to catch any breeze that came off the water. The thick, overlapping fronds of the palms sheltered him from both the sun and the rain, if it came.

This is how the invisible became visible.

The sound of waves filled his head before he drifted off, and made its way into his dreams so that he was surprised one night at the sound of splashing water that woke him. Although his hammock was in the deep shade, a place of perfect darkness, the full moon illuminated everything around him. Again, splashing. He turned his head toward the half-moon pond.

Helen was submerged in the pool, only her head showing, her hair slicked back. She bent back and stared up at the moon, her face a lily pad on the water’s surface. For a brief moment, Linh had the image of a Vietnamese princess out of legend who drowned herself from sorrow in such a pond, sorrow for a missing lover. He had not told Helen this legend. He pushed it from his mind. Americans didn’t do such things.

He felt strange, confused, sure that Helen knew where he slept but guilty nonetheless for being there. Could it be a dream? Resolutely he turned over, his back to the pond, and squeezed his eyes shut. Still, he held his breath, straining for the sound of splashing water. He grabbed his shirt from the end of the hammock and wadded it up, putting it over his head to muffle the sound. He longed to see her body once, but he willed himself not to. Lines from Kieu came into his mind:

He woke, shocked that he could have fallen asleep, then certain again the whole thing had been a dream. How long had he slept? His shirt fallen to the ground, he turned over toward the pond and saw Helen still there, standing with her back to him, the long blade of her body in the moonlight.

She turned, face in her hands, then looked up, straight to the darkness where he lay. She hungered, and felt guilt over the hunger. “Cover me.”

Was it the sound of the wind in the palm fronds, perhaps his own desire playing tricks on him?

And then she said it once more. “Cover me.”

If he went to her, his life would change, and if he didn’t go, his life would change also, withering away. He had no choice but to go to her. He rose, the wrist of one hand braceleted by the fingers of the other. Five years since he had lost Mai. He walked into the pond, the water cool on his burning skin, and covered her shoulders in the wings of his shirt, holding her to his chest, tight under his heart.

He didn’t expect more than this moment, already more than he thought he would ever have again.

His hands trembled as his fingers traced the tender cliffs of her collarbone. She reached with her fingers under his chin, brought his eyes up to hers.

“It’s okay if you don’t love me,” she said.

He shook his head at the absurdity, it being so obvious that he had loved her from the moment he first saw her, the love only growing and deepening in time. Darrow’s greatest gift that he never mentioned the obvious infatuation so that Linh did not have to remove himself from their friendship.

Desire made them again strange to each other. They walked hand in hand to the house, Linh leading, and lay down on the mats. Urgent, after all this time, suddenly intolerant of another passing moment without knowledge of each other. A whole Braille of touch-tooth on lip, eyelash on nipple, pubic bone on swell of calf. He explored her body in the smallest of increments, the width of a finger, as if she were the unknown space on a map, and he knew it was her he desired, and not simply his desire for desire. She cradled his head in the hollow of her hip bones. He ran his tongue along the scar on her belly that sealed the future.

He heard the rough breaths that passed through her lungs, cries that no one else could hear, meant only for him. The frailty of her closed eyelids, the blue veins visible underneath the skin; he was protective of the long curve of her back, the soft indentation of the spine. He bandaged his fingers and then his wrists in the healing strands of her hair.

They woke each day in the tangle of each other’s limbs. Relieved and content simply to find the other within reach. Long hours spent in the shade of the palm trees, watching the movements of the villagers among the houses and down to the ocean and back. They didn’t speak for long periods of time, talk unnecessary. This new stage of intimacy simply the fruition of their prior ease in each other’s company. In the late afternoon, they went down the beach, away from curious eyes, walking separately until they found a deserted strand. Entering the water the temperature of blood, swimming easily in the warm salt liquid, tunneling toward each other like electric sea animals. Touches glancing: hand against hand, arm against chest, trunk against back.

Spent, they returned to the house, fell on mats, warm and heavy-limbed. Passion a narcotic. Linh rested his head on her lap, feeling the heat of her through the thin sheet, pressing his nose against the fabric to inhale the salty scent of her.

“What will we do after the war?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘after’? Wars don’t end anymore,” she said. She rolled away from him and laughed. “I think Mrs. Xuan is spying on us. She and her friends stand very close to the fence during the afternoon.”

This happiness would have to be paid for. Irrefutable evidence for Mr. Bao to use against him. Linh pulled her back to him and pressed his head into the softness of her thighs. Any price for this moment. “Gossiping old women.”

“Maybe they don’t like you here with an American.”

“Gossiping old hags.”

She stared at the ceiling and ran her fingers through his hair. “Tell me something about Linh. Something I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re lovers. Because it’s time. Who was Linh before Darrow?”

He shrugged and sat up. “I’ve told you about the NVA and the SVA.” He had caught the long sideways looks of Mrs. Xuan during the last week but had ignored her. Probably paid to spy by Mr. Bao. “If you don’t know me now, how will you find me in the past?”

“Tell me about your wife. How did you meet?”

Linh slumped back down to the floor. “My family were city people, demoted to living in the village after the partition, when we left for the South. So the customs were strange to us. In the village, the boys would go down to the river on a full-moon night and sing songs to the girls on the opposite shore.”

He remembered eating shrimp with hot red chilies no bigger than the tip of his finger, leaving his mouth burning; he and friends drinking beer his older brother, Ca, had bought for them. His stomach tightened at the memory of the colored lanterns hung along the river so they could see each other better, the reflection of the lanterns on the river. He squinted to see the faces of the girls, each bathed in a pool of pure color. But Mai’s face was perfectly clear, the blue lantern showing her features like moonlight against the night.

“And the girls would sing a song back in reply. Back and forth all night long. We were both fifteen when I saw her singing to me across the river.”

“She picked you.”

He bent his face into Helen’s lap. “She picked me.”

“That’s a beautiful story.” She caressed his shoulder and neck lightly with her fingers. “How did you and Darrow meet?”

“I went to Gary for a job. He needed an assistant for Darrow.”

“Amazing.”

“He flew me to Angkor the same day.”

“That’s when he fell in love with the place?”

“ Gary said no one else would work with him.”

Helen laughed. “I’m glad you stuck it out.”

Linh stood up and excused himself. Helen had almost fallen asleep when he came back in, dripping water.

“Did you go for a swim?”

He shook his head. “I met him once before.”

“Darrow?”

Linh nodded. “He came to photograph a joint movement with my SVA regiment and American advisers.”

“Oh.”

Pulling away, Linh told the story he had been unable to tell, the only story that mattered. Wide-awake now, Helen shivered, knees drawn up, face cupped in her folded arm. Without thought, Linh grabbed both her ankles as anchor, one in each hand, fingers tight around the sharp knobs of bone, grounding himself or her, he did not know which.

Danger that after the telling he would not be able to stand being with her any longer, the wound too deep to share, but her tears fed him. His anguish had grown skeletal in its solitude. He wished it didn’t have to be so, that one could ingest pain and keep it from others, but instead it seemed one could only lessen it by inflicting little cuts and bruises of it on another.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

A miracle how she appeared beneath him, how she unfolded and folded him into the wings of her arms and legs. He kissed the bony globe of her knee before descending.

Our company had been near the paddy fields settling in for the night when scouts ran into a camp of VC. Quickly, we pulled back toward my village while the American advisers stood alone in the field, yelling at us to stay put. But we abandoned our positions, and the Americans, cursing, called firepower in to target the adjoining forest. Planes came, bombs dropped that shook the earth many kilometers away, so powerful the villagers sent up prayers that the world would not end.

After a shaky perimeter guard had been set up, I slipped away to see my family and reassure them.

My mother and father were bundling belongings, ready to flee with Mai, my older sister, Nha, with her baby, and my brothers, Toan and Ca. My mother was more weary than frightened. She cried that she had been leaving one home after another since she was a young girl in the North. Tears ran down Mai’s face, and she held the sides of her belly as if it pained her. She shook like an animal sensing the approach of the hatchet. Begging me to take them away to someplace safe. To her sister, Thao’s, home. “Please, take us. Take me away.”

“I can’t.” For a brief moment, Mai’s selfishness angered me. For all her girlish charm, if I had to pick again I would have chosen the practical Thao. My mother had worried that Mai would be too fragile, too high-strung, to make a good wife.

“You promised to take me to Saigon,” she said.

“My company knows I’m here.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Mai shook her head, her eyes wild and glittering, not seeing me. “I’ll go anyway. Alone.”

Nha, listening, turned away, embarrassed for her sister-in-law. Her own baby whimpered in her arms, still feverish after a cold. Nha, as homely as Mai was lovely, took comfort in her virtue and self-sacrifice.

I promised that the bombs were to protect us, that the VC would have retreated by now, nothing to fear, trying out the words in my mouth as I said them, not knowing myself if they were believable. “I met an American. I don’t know why, but they are helping us.”

“The eyes and ears in the trees see soldiers retreat here,” my father said, shaking his head.

My family was still frightened, but as the air grew quiet, nerves calmed. My mother built a small fire and boiled tea and fresh rice for a meal. When Mai offered to help, she slapped away her hand. “I remember in Hanoi, the servants made a full meal, even mang tay nau cua, asparagus and crab soup, as the Communists rolled into the city. No matter what, one must eat.”

Mai rolled her eyes, a steady private complaint that the old woman turned everything into a story of her former wealth.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have some asparagus and crab now?” my mother went on.

Incense was burned for the ancestors. A bowl of rice held out as an offering. I bowed my head to the ground three times at the altar. We ate in silence.

“Did you notice,” Mai said, “during the play, at the song-”

“Please,” said Toan. “Stupid girl, can’t you think of anything more important than that wretched play?”

Mai’s lips puckered, and I refused to look her in the face, certain she would burst into tears again. She struggled to her feet, unable to stand until Nha came over and lifted her under her arms. Mai went outside with her bowl. I could say nothing because Toan was my older brother, bitter at his own unmarried state, but nothing would have pleased me more than to talk about the play. Anything to forget the present fear.

Because they had no choice, they tried to share my faith that the Americans were different. I knew I should report back to the company but couldn’t. After a year’s absence, what could one more night matter?

By midnight everyone fell into a fitful sleep in the communal room, within touch of one another. Later, I would remember dreading the coming morning, when I would be alone again. I woke and heard the suck of Nha’s baby. I wished, and was ashamed to wish, that I could be alone with Mai one last time before our separation. Was Mai right? Should we have escaped when we could to Saigon? The thought of desertion was always present, like uncooked dough in my stomach.

A terrible howling noise. Like a roar from inside the earth. We woke, disoriented, in the middle of the night. Outside, mortars bit at the edge of the village, shards of fire and metal and earth flying. Palm trees, thatched roofs of houses, in fl ames. I could hear screams, could hear Mai’s shrill sob rise up, her breath catching, and then another sob. Where had the mortars come from? Which side? A sound, pull, puff, and then another three mortars landed all around the hut. Plumes of earth rising more than double the height of the tallest palm. Soldiers from my company ran by, abandoning their camp and leaving the village exposed. The enemy attacking from close by if not from inside the village itself.

“Quick,” I yelled. “We must leave.”

Now the Americans would call in airpower and raze the village. My father, still in the vigor of middle age, ran and brought back a long rope that he used to tie our buffalo to the plow. It was stiff and heavy, the 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 an open wound, over my shoulder, “We are close now.”

I walked until I felt a tug at my sleeve and looked into the wrinkled face of an old grandmother. She shook her head sharply, as if shrugging off a ghost. I could not make out her words, so tired I simply noticed her sunken lips and the few blackened, betel-stained teeth in her mouth. She motioned with her hands to lie down, and the idea of sleep was suddenly overwhelming. I would have walked till I dropped over. I struggled to the tall grass at the side of the road, and only as I worked to loosen the knot of rope around my chest did I notice the cold heaviness of Mai’s body, and as I slowly knelt down to let her off I realized I had felt no movement all night long, no warm breath, and now as I laid her in the long, lilac-tinted grass, and as her long hair draped down to the earth, I saw that she had the pearl gray pallor of death, and I knew, as the grandmother shook her head, quick as a bird, and handed me a small spray of yellow paper flowers before she turned away, that I had carried a corpse the whole night through, but somehow Mai’s spirit had saved me.

This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.

I crouched in the grass and saw that we were both covered in blood, that she had bled to death with our child. I looked up and down the highway, saw other bodies fallen by the side, and when I looked into the faces of the people, I saw we were all the living dead, no one had escaped.

I bowed my head, the spray of flowers still gripped in my fingers. The paper ones the poor bought to place on family altars. Petals faded yellow and dusty from long use, the paper crumpled in places where the old woman had clutched them. But when I brought the spray to my face, I smelled the fresh orange blossoms of Mai’s hair. And so I buried my wife, Mai, under the tree the bird sang in, placing the spray of flowers in her mouth. The blossoms were paper, yellow faded, already dusty from mourning, but they were all I had left to give.