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

EIGHT. Xa

Village

Helen and Linh flew low over the southern Mekong area to An Giang province, controlled by the Hoa Hao sect that opposed the Viet Cong. One of the few safe areas in the country, it was where Darrow had decided to stay and recuperate.

The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange-fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun. The soil so rich from the emptying of the Mekong that crops grew year-round, and the local food supply remained ample even during war time, allowing villages and hamlets to unspool loosely along the canals and rivers instead of circling tightly in privation behind bamboo hedgerows as in the north.

As they made a first pass over the dirt airstrip, Helen could see Darrow standing by a jeep with two other civilians. He stood straight, slightly too formal in this loose, watery world. A white short-sleeved shirt, his right arm supported by a cotton sling, he looked thinner, his brown hair shorter, eyes invisible behind the glare of his glasses.

She ducked under the wash of the rotors and ran, embracing him so that he winced as she pressed his shoulder. Linh followed, forgotten.

The reality of Darrow’s injury struck her with new force, frightened her all over again. “Are you okay?”

“Except from your manhandling,” He smiled and held her off. “Meet some friends. They’ve offered to put us up while my shoulder heals.”

Both of the men worked for USAID, handling rice production and irrigation in the area. The younger one, Jerry Nichols, had a sunburned face and blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, giving him an albino look. He pumped Helen’s hand and smiled, his mouth crowded with large teeth. The other man, Ted Sanders, was portly, with buzz-cut hair, also retired military, polite and formal in front of her.

“How long are you here for?” Helen asked. Darrow’s attitude irritated her, the presumption she had nothing better to do.

“An eternity. Four weeks. But I haven’t had a vacation in five years, so I’m overdue.”

His hesitation went unnoticed except by Linh. Only he would understand how Darrow must have bargained as the plane went down-how many times could one escape unharmed? The fear that the crash had paralyzed him again like in Angkor.

Linh came up, and Darrow moved to embrace him. Seeing the easy friendship between the two men, Helen thought how stupidly she had handled things.

“You took good care of her.”

“But you have got sloppy without me, it seems.” He would have given anything for it to be only him and Darrow in the village, the way it had been in Angkor. A woman changed everything.

“These damned helicopters can’t seem to stay in the air.”

They got into the jeep, Helen sliding across the hot and dusty canvas, stepping over the semiautomatics lying on the floor. Nichols drove them a short way along the washboard dirt road to the hamlet of thatched buildings straddling a wide bend in the Hau River. The jeep stopped in front of a small hut in a shaded grove of coconut palms and mango trees.

“Home, sweet home,” Darrow said.

“Are you sure this shack’s okay?” Ted asked.

“She’s a girl with simple tastes.”

“We don’t all go native like Darrow,” Nichols said. “If you get tired of it, we can offer steaks and hot showers.”

“Go away, guys. If she changes her mind, we’ll show up for dinner.”

The two men ignored Linh; he had hardly gotten out of the jeep with his bag before it raced off, covering him in dust.

The front of the hut was a narrow veranda of dirt floor and thatched overhang supported by thick poles of bamboo. Large clay cisterns filled with rainwater formed the boundary with the outside. The framework was bamboo, walls and ceiling interlaced palm fronds with a layer of rice straw on top that smelled thickly of grass in the heat of the day, reminding Helen of sleeping in a barn loft as a child.

Inside was a single room with a dirt floor, a low wood table used for eating, sitting, and sleeping. Around the sides of the room were additional clay pots filled with rice. In the corner was a stack of woven mats.

A young woman in dark blue pajamas, Ngan, carried in a tray with small ceramic cups of mango juice. An older Vietnamese man entered, and she bowed low. He was the village chief, Ho Tung, an elegant man with flowing silver hair and features softened by time like soapstone. After he welcomed them, he stalled long enough to share a cup of juice before leaving.

“We are very cosmopolitan in An Giang, used to Westerners,” he said. “After all, my granddaughter lives in St. Louis.”

“Really?” Darrow said.

“We have not heard from her in two years, but her last letter said that in St. Louis it snows. That things move very quickly.”

“I’m sure that is true.”

“That is how I’ve learned most excellent English.”

Helen pictured the granddaughter living alone in the great foreign city, working long hours in some invisible job, yet back in her village she was a celebrity. After Ho Tung left, Ngan carried in their bags.

“I’m supposed to take it easy at least a month. Not much use for a one-armed photographer. I’m hoping a couple of weeks will do it. So I thought we’d have a little in-country R amp;R.” He wished it were that simple. Since the accident, night sweats, insomnia, shaking, everything back with a vengeance. He couldn’t say aloud that he hoped to be saved by her.

“And you just assumed I’d drop everything?”

Darrow picked up her hand and kissed it. He hadn’t counted on her being standoffish, prickly, and he almost wished for the company of his native women, their docile willingness. After saying good-bye to the chief, Helen went back under the shade of the roof, sat down, but it was hardly any cooler than standing in the road.

“How about it, Linh? You could use a rest, too,” Darrow said.

“I need to do some errands,” Linh said.

“Stay and relax. They’ve got a place for you up the road.” He wanted to say, Stay and keep me company.

“I’ll be back at the end of the month.” The smallest intuition that Darrow longed for the days at Angkor also. Instead, he had saddled both of them with this woman. He remembered how Mai used to exasperate him, and yet now he would give almost anything to have that irritation back. Was it like that for Darrow?

“What in the world are you going to find to do around here, in the middle of… nowhere?” Darrow asked.

Linh spoke in Vietnamese to Ngan, and they both laughed.

“What’s funny?” Helen said.

“That we are in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows this is the center of the universe.”

“Don’t go all Buddha on me,” Darrow said.

During lunch the two men talked about people they knew, upcoming operations that might be interesting to go on, although they agreed it all could change in a month’s time.

“I’ll keep an eye out for things,” Linh said.

It struck Helen how differently Linh acted now, at ease and forthcoming to Darrow where he had been so strained with her.

Darrow sighed and pushed his plate aside. “I hear you two got a little trouble outside Pleiku?”

“Yes,” Linh said. “They sent in a suicide convoy. We waited till next morning and then we went in.”

Darrow turned to Helen. “Bad?”

Helen continued to eat. She burned with humiliation.

“It’s okay.”

When Linh was ready to leave, he stuck out his hand to her, but she moved around it and hugged him. A silent peace offering. “Come back soon. Let’s have a little fun together, the three of us, okay?”

He nodded but was already walking off down the dirt path. He loved them each separately, but he was ashamed he did not want to see them together.

“Where does he disappear to, do you think?” Helen asked.

“Maybe he has a beautiful little bar girl that he keeps. Or he’s a Viet Cong spy.”

She laughed. “What? Linh?”

“You’ve got to start seeing underneath things. Finding the real story.”

“You sound like MacCrae now.”

“Once when we were in Cu Chi, my camera got… smashed, and he constructed spare parts out of nothing. I worried about the film, and he said he would process it in a bunker if I wanted. Since it was dark, we did it by starlight. He traveled with two porcelain plates-one for the developer, one for the fixer. Tied a small stone at the end of the strip and dipped it into the stream to wash it. Only the NVA are taught that.”

Helen laughed. “You’re joking. Not Linh. That’s impossible.”

At dusk, Helen and Darrow sat inside the doorway of the hut. Ngan served them dinner-bowls of sticky rice and fried paddy crab and shrimp-and then bowed away. The USAID workers had sent over a cooler of beer, and Helen pressed an icy bottle against her neck.

There was an element of performance when Darrow was around others, but alone, he seemed tired, distracted. Although she was happy to be there, she had not had time to wind down from the mission. She traced the scar on his good arm; the warmth of his skin made her realize how happy she was to be with him again.

“At least I’ll know the cause of this new scar.”

“It’s a sign that something worse didn’t happen. It’s a sign that I survived.”

“Linh stopped me going on that convoy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“In Pleiku. I wanted to show off how ballsy I was. I thought he was a coward for not going.”

“It’s experience. But he’s a guardian angel.” “So who guards him?”

Darkness fell; the jungle suddenly quieted. The only sounds the faint pulse of flame in their kerosene lamp, the lapping of water against moored boats along the river’s bank. Small bats fluttered over the trees and river in loose rolls like drunks.

“I love… this country,” Darrow said. “My dream is to photograph the North and South in peace.”

“Why did you ask me to come down here? I mean, we could have met in Saigon.”

“This is the third time I’ve been in a helicopter that went down. One time we ran out of gas and crashed into a hillside. One time we were rocketed. My mind was always clear before, ready; this time all I thought of was you.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Helen took a long sip of beer. All his words were the right ones, but she wondered if they had just come too late for her to hear them. “What exactly did you think about me?”

“You’ve made me selfish,” he said. “You’ve made me greedy for life again.”

In the middle of the night, a rustling on the roof woke Helen. She grabbed a flashlight and poked it through the opening of the mosquito netting and onto the ceiling. In the corner, a greenish gold gecko turned to pose in the light, in his mouth the wiggling body of a scorpion.

Stealthy as a thief, Helen rolled off the straw mat and stood in the doorway, watching the night.

A golden moon hung over the outlying palms, casting a light so bright she could make out individual grains of dirt on the ground. A faint coolness to the air, more lovely because of the previous heat. The surrounding roofs of pale thatch gave Helen a feeling of calm and protection. Everything she had thought she wanted within her grasp, perfectly all right with her if time stopped at that very moment, but already something had changed. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. The scene in front of her not just itself, but a potential shot: the widest aperture, the slowest shutter speed. Allow in every drop of light. Shallow range of depth, focus on one thing. But were they the thing to focus on?

In the distance she watched an old woman come out of one of the huts and stretch her arms over her head in the moonlight. She walked to the well, pulled up a bucket, and drank heartily from the ladle. A frame. She pulled a pin from the bun at the back of her head and let her long silver hair spread over her shoulders. A frame. She made her way to the riverbank and onto the wooden dock, hooked her bare foot on the edge of a boat that had been knocking against its mooring. It wasn’t until the noise stopped that Helen was aware of its earlier irritating thump. With expert, practiced movements, the woman bent down and wound the rope more tightly. She then walked back up past the well and disappeared between a clump of trees. With a slow enough shutter speed, the woman would have blurred to nothing, become a ghost.

From around the corner of the house, Ngan appeared. “I get you something?”

“No.” The girl’s sudden appearance annoyed her, breaking her reverie, but she tried not to show it. “Can’t sleep.”

Ngan folded up her leg and stretched it out, like the egrets Helen watched along the riverbanks. “Warm night.”

“Who was the old woman down by the dock?”

“No one. Just old woman. You go back to sleep.”

Helen watched Ngan disappear behind the house again until Darrow’s voice broke the stillness, and she laughed, a great flood of happiness that she wasn’t awake alone.

“Why’re you up?” he asked.

“This place is like Grand Central. Promise we can stay here forever.”

“Come sleep. All I promise is pineapple pancakes for breakfast. And a day of fishing.”

She turned away from the dark mystery of the village.

At dawn they rose and, at Ho Tung’s invitation, joined the villagers gathering to go out into the rice paddies. Helen asked Ngan to make coffee in the morning, but the girl only knew how to boil tea. When Darrow came back from a shower, he was balancing a pot of French roast and cups on a tray in his one good hand. He poured two cups as they watched the dawn color the tops of the palms.

“Where did you get that?” Helen asked.

“A good reporter never gives his sources,” he said, bending, kissing her neck, her collarbone, her elbow.

Out on the road, the women gossiped as they walked along the half-mile of dirt road. Children flitted back and forth like sparrows. Two girls told the story of a ghost in a tree who gave out money. Their mother boxed their ears for lying but admitted that she had saved the coins. When the girls saw Helen, they screamed and ran away. The men remained solemn, smoking cigarettes, their eyes on the sky, divining the day’s weather. At the edge of the paddies, the women kicked off sandals and waded into the brackish water. They tied on hats under their chins to free their hands, began the movement of bending and swaying, back and forth through the rows of green rice stalks, weeding.

A miracle that the war had not touched this place. One could almost pretend that it was peacetime, but they owed that to the cleverness of the Hoa Hao.

Helen took pictures, listening to Darrow’s advice on framing. She motioned three young girls to move closer together as they bent over their work, faces hidden under identical conical hats, only the differing patterns of their shirts separating them from each other. Behind them stretched the sunlit water of early morning. Small, bright green rice plants surrounded them like the subtle brushstrokes of a painting.

“Here you have time to move things around. In the field, you have to find an anchor for the picture-a soldier’s face, a background, and you just start shooting. You can never go wrong zeroing in on a face. Shoot all day, you might get one good picture.”

As the farmers moved farther into the paddy, Helen and Darrow sat down under trees on the bank. High white clouds dissolved in the rising heat until the sky became hard white and as empty as an eggshell.

When no one was looking, Helen touched Darrow on the chest, the knee. His physical proximity made her feel content, and the great urgency she had felt when she first arrived began to fade.

“You stroke me like I’m your pet dog.”

“When you were a boy, what was your favorite game?”

He watched her stretched out on the grass, her hair wrapped over her throat. “I don’t remember being a boy.”

Helen sat up, kissed his eyelids although the villagers would see. She didn’t want to hear the sad details just then. “You are my pet dog. A golden retriever. Rover.”

Darrow nipped at her fingertips. “Rover’s hungry.”

At noontime, Ngan appeared with a basket of food. After she had set it out, she sat in the shade some distance away, ignoring their invitation to join them. One of the women started a singsong chant, a ca dao, and the other women joined in the refrain.

“They think we’re useless,” Darrow said. “If my arm were better, I’d join them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

Helen stood up, took off her own sandals, and rolled up her pants.

“What’re you doing? Come back.”

She waded in. The women stopped working and, pointing, talked and laughed excitedly. Ngan hurried to the edge of the water, giggling and covering her hands over her face.

“I was joking,” Darrow shouted, but Helen waved him off. He was filled with enviousness, recognizing his old impulsiveness in her. “Showboat!”

The water and the mud squished warm between her toes. She sank several inches into the muck, then midcalf-deep, and could feel things squirming underneath her feet. Each time she lifted a leg, a pull of mud on her ankles. The vision of Michael rose, unbidden, his struggle against the suck of mud, helpless, shooting, betrayal as the helicopter took off, the pain and panic as he realized he was dying, but she pushed this away quickly. She could not lose face and return to the bank; she waved and moved farther out. After she joined the line of women, one of them showed her how to weed the seedlings along a row. When Helen accidentally uprooted a clump of rice, a woman grabbed it away, chiding, and replanted it. This was serious business-the difference between eating and not. These were not bad people, she and other Americans were not bad, only the war had made them appear so.

From far away, the scene looked graceful, but up close the work was grueling. The heat tore at her. Women’s faces wet with sweat, drops running down their noses and chins into the water.

After an hour, Helen’s back ached from the constant strain of bending. She stood to ease the pain, jamming a fist into the small of her back. Her sunglasses kept slipping off, so she had to put them in her pocket. One of the women handed her a hat, but still the glare off the water blinded her so that she had to squint to see the bank and Darrow. She was surprised how he appeared from far away-shoulders hunched, head down, almost convalescent.

As their feet dredged the bottom, a sour mash smell filled the air, a green smell of algae mixed with the reek of waste used as fertilizer. The chanting of the women was the only thing that kept her going-casting a spell. She remembered as a young child going with her father to the base for drill instruction, the sound of cadence as she waited sleepily on the grassy track field.

After half a day’s work, blisters formed on her hands. She returned the hat and trudged sheepishly back to the bank. Even in this limited way, she had a feeling for what Linh had described-a brick in the wall, invisible except as part of the whole. When she stood on dry ground again, Darrow was leaning against a tree, reading a book.

“Blisters,” she said, holding out her hands, palms up.

He smiled and closed the book. “Why? Token suffering?”

She smiled and wiped her wet hands on his shirt. “I’ll never eat rice the same way again.”

At first Helen was relieved to be away from combat, but as time passed, her thoughts returned to the soldiers she had met; what had happened to them; what it meant. The old curiosity gnawed, and she thought she wouldn’t last, would need to make an excuse and rush back to Saigon. The seeming importance of events, and her desire to be there to record them. But with the passage of days, it grew difficult to remember the shape and taste of the fear that had enveloped her; she stopped believing in its power. Distance and the land worked on her. The lure of the war diminished, got quieter, lost its ravenous pull. The world shrank to the size of the village and then opened back up to the infinite in the same breath.

Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo’s heavy footfalls. Their ears grew accustomed to the cocoon of Vietnamese, living like young children oblivious to meaning, only Ngan’s painstaking, slow words requiring the effort of understanding; she, like a nurse, making every day comfortable. Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.

Monsoon showers came, and with it the percussion of water against the broad leaves of banana and rubber trees that lined the paths of the village. The heavy earth smell of rain. Drops pummeled against the thatched roof; rivulets curled down the inside corners of the walls.

In the afternoons they would lie in the darkness of their hut under the mosquito netting, wearing the thinnest of clothing, drenched in sweat. Darrow tracing a lazy finger along the damp of Helen’s inner arm, her neck, down between her breasts, along the hollow of her stomach.

“I’m taking you to Switzerland.”

“Really? Why Switzerland?” she whispered, reluctant to break the moment with her voice.

“To a small inn on the tallest mountain. Dufourspitze. So high there’s snow in summer. We’ll burrow under a thick featherbed in front of a roaring fire, and we won’t be able to remember we were ever so hot.”

“Let’s go now.” A revelation that they could be together somewhere else in the world, somewhere there was no war.

“Soon.”

Helen shifted, aware she had gone too close to the edge, their tacit agreement not to discuss the future. Although she herself didn’t exactly want to leave, his hesitation goaded her. “I’d miss Ngan’s cooking. How she tucks us up in the mosquito netting at night. How she listens to us making love each night.” She paused. “We shouldn’t be here, should we?”

“What do you mean?”

“In this country.”

“No.”

“Then why do we stay?”

“We want to know the end of the story.”

“How will our story end, you think?”

Darrow frowned. “I was in Eastern Europe, covering the Hungarians who were fleeing their country before the Communists took over.

“At night it was below freezing, and Russians with machine guns patrolled the borderland. It’s flat farmland out there, no landmarks. People got lost crossing the fields in the dark, walking for hours in circles, getting caught or dying of exposure. So the Austrian farmers on the other side of the border started building these bonfires in their fields that could be seen for miles. Night after night, until they had to burn up their crops to keep it going. If people could get far enough to spot the fires, they had a chance.

“At the time building those fires seemed like the best thing you could be doing in the world. Shedding a little light. Being there I felt my life was bigger than it had been before.”

Evenings, Ho Tung would invite Darrow to join the village men. They’d sit in the communal house in the center of the hamlet to drink beer.

Helen tried to read by lamplight, but she found it impossible to concentrate on the words of the page, so abstract and distant compared to the moonlight through the trees outside or the thick sweetness of grapefruit and frangipani blossoms. She closed her book, blew out the lamp, and gazed into the night sky. Words superfluous. She had reached a point of absolute stillness in her life, empty of wanting. Nothing could be added that would not unbalance the perfection of the present.

She fretted over Darrow’s words because she halfway believed them. The picture of Captain Tong had created headlines. It had opened eyes, made the old man’s death not in vain. In Darrow’s words, it had made her feel her life was bigger, more important than before. But to repeat that, Helen would have to be willing to go out again and again on missions. She longed to be in that chalet in Switzerland, almost willing to turn her back on the Captain Tongs of the world for it. What was wrong with a small, selfish life?

Ngan came in on the nights that Helen was alone, bringing a bowl of scented water and a towel, insisting on sponging her down. When Helen at first refused, Ngan sulked until she reluctantly agreed.

The girl, only twenty, was already a widow with a small boy of two. She had bright, clear eyes and a high forehead, and Helen thought her quite pretty.

“Ngan, why no boyfriend?”

She giggled, squeezed water out of the sponge, let it run along Helen’s arm. “No one interested.”

“That’s not what I hear.” The other women in the village gossiped that a certain middle-aged farmer had proposed and been refused.

“Minh?” Ngan shuddered. “I study in Saigon one year. I want to be teacher. I learn more English.”

“But no boyfriend?”

Ngan frowned, turned Helen onto her stomach, and made long strokes along her back. “Not farmer’s wife. I go back to Saigon, back to study for teacher.”

“No Minh?”

Ngan laid her head on Helen’s back. “He is old and ugly. Smells like buffalo,” she whispered, giggling, and Helen laughed.

“You want a young, handsome man?” She could feel Ngan’s head nodding on her back.

“A good man, like your husband.”

Helen did not correct her. “There’s no one you like?”

“Linh.”

Helen was silent for a moment. “Oh.”

“His wife die. No family. No children.”

Helen pulled the sheet around her and sat up. “He told you this?”

Ngan smiled and nodded. She stood up to throw the contents of the bowl outside in the bushes. “No woman friends, either. Very proper.”

Helen feigned a yawn. “I’ll go to sleep now.”

The girl left the room, but not before Helen took new note of the straightness of her back, the small and delicate curve of her feet.

Alone, her breath slow and deep, she meditated on the tragedy of Linh’s family. If one’s meaning came from being a brick in the wall, what did it mean to have no one? To be unmoored? What did it mean in Vietnam not to be part of any family? Was that the answer to the sadness she sensed in him? The answer to his devotion to Darrow? Half asleep, she waited to hear Darrow’s footsteps, waited for him to take off his clothes, to part the white netting surrounding their bed and close the folds behind him, for his lips to find her. A husband in every way that mattered.

Perfect stillness and perfect communion, and yet she struggled to stay in the present of her happiness, thoughts returning again and again to the puzzle of Linh. Of course, there was what had happened with the convoy in Pleiku. She probed that like a sore tooth, testing the impact of her mistake. But also, this news from Ngan. Was it true that he had lost family? What of Darrow’s sanguine attitude to his possibly being a spy? Where had he gone off to now while she was camping out in this village backwater? Darrow. She suspected that even if she closed her eyes to the evils of the Captain Tongs of the world to live her insulated happiness in a chalet in Switzerland, it was a fool’s choice because Darrow had already decided long before he met her.

The wariness of the villagers grew to friendliness-Darrow and Helen enfolded within the life of the village. Grain by grain, Helen’s restlessness fell away; she became part of Linh’s brick wall. A madness to consider going back into battle. But as Darrow’s arm strengthened, she noted he again listened to AFVN on the radio and read what ever newspapers he could cadge from the USAID compound.

Each morning and evening, Helen joined the women to bathe in the river, in an area upstream of the hamlet partitioned off with cotton sheets. The women disrobed under the soft greenish light filtered through trees leaning over the bank. They slowly soaped while talking, the beautiful smooth bodies of the teenage girls next to the sinewy dark limbs of the old women. Many of the married women stood with jutting bellies while they nursed babies at their breasts.

Ngan now kept far from Helen during bathing. The girl had been shy around her ever since their talk, and Helen guessed that she regretted her revelation. Two small girls stood naked in the shallows, washing themselves while watching Helen. She called to them, but they ran away.

Helen handed out coveted bars of Ivory soap as gifts and created a sensation when she pulled out a razor and sat on a rock to shave her legs.

She had regained some of the weight she had lost out in the field. She slept long hours, a deep and dreamless sleep fed by the rich life around her.

Twice a week Helen and Darrow went to the USAID house quartered in an old French colonial building in the neighboring town, for both the American food and the conversation. Nichols had just retired from active military duty and now thrived on projects to increase agricultural productivity. He was in charge of building storage houses for fertilizers, pesticides, and improved grain for planting. Rumors were that he loved the lifestyle, including his young Vietnamese mistress, too much to leave.

The longer Helen stayed in the village, the more she made excuses to not visit the USAID house. She felt awkward in front of the Vietnamese servants, who were treated poorly by the American men. Darrow seemed oblivious; or rather, he chose not to notice. He happily listened to music and drank scotch while scouring the magazines and newspapers.

Nichols and Sanders were loud, both in their conversation and the music they played. Helen shivered in the cold gale of air-conditioning. The platesize steaks grilled on the barbecue and the endless cocktails made Helen feel dull. At first, she brought a towel with her for the civilizing effect of a hot shower, but as weeks passed, she found she preferred the river.

During the long evenings, she watched Nichols’s mistress in the background, the one whom the village women gossiped about. Only fifteen, the girl’s family had disowned her because of the liaison but had just bought another parcel of land with money she sent. She received more spending money in a week from Nichols than her father could earn from farming in a year. Nichols didn’t include her during the meal-like a stray, the girl stayed in the background, along the edge of their evening.

“Why don’t you ask her to join us?” Helen asked, poking at a baked russet potato imported from the States.

Nichols turned and eyed the girl walking down the hallway in her unstable high heels. “Khue? She’s happier on her own. Getting some time off.”

“I bet.” Helen cut at her meat with a large saw of a steak knife.

Nichols squinted, his skin flushing a darker red. “You said she had a sharp tongue.”

“Actually,” said Darrow, “what I said was that she was too sharp for you.”

Nichols looked at him for a moment, weighing things, and then deciding to take it as a joke, broke into a barking laugh. “That’s it. That’s what you said, all right.” He puddled ketchup and A.1 on his plate.

The room fell silent. Sanders, his food untouched, cleared his throat. He had lost a lot of weight since Helen and Darrow arrived in the village. They guessed he had developed a pipe habit. “You must be dying to get back to the life in Saigon.”

“Not really,” Helen answered.

“I’m ready to test this arm,” Darrow said. “Send someone down as soon as a message comes from my assistant.”

“You contacted Linh?” She felt betrayed not only that Darrow had been plotting his return all along, but also at her own feelings of panic at the prospect of going back. Why had he chosen this public setting to announce his intentions?

Nichols smiled. “Oh, boy, did I cause trouble?”

“They’ve already replaced me on a couple of assignments,” Darrow said. “Pretty soon I’ll be taking pictures of supermarket openings in Amarillo.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be in Saigon,” Nichols said, swallowing a small bite of meat and daintily licking his lips.

“Looks like you’re doing fine here,” Darrow said, nodding his head in the direction the girl had gone. He intended the jab at Helen, his declaration at her possessiveness.

“Sanders gets the pipes, and I get the poon.” Nichols looked in the direction the girl had gone. “But there would be so many more goodies to choose from in Saigon.”

Helen excused herself and went down the hallway. She hated these men and hated Darrow when he was with them. This was her last visit. She applied her lipstick in the mirror, readying her excuse to leave.

When Khue came out of a room, she was startled, as if caught. Up close, the girl looked even younger. Pointing at the lipstick, she smiled, revealing a front tooth with a large chip. Helen motioned for her to try it. Self-consciously, Khue closed her lips and applied the color.

Why didn’t Nichols take her to get the tooth fixed? Infuriated, Helen decided to take the girl to a dentist herself. Khue studied the rose sheen on her lips with great seriousness; too sad and wise for such a young girl. Forget the dentist, the girl needed to be taken away from there, put into a school. How would Helen manage that?

Khue handed back the lipstick, but Helen patted the girl’s fingers around the tube. “For you.” When the two of them entered the living room, Nichols was sprawled out on a lounge, drunk. He took one look at Khue and yelled, “Come over here! Come now!”

A small, throbbing vein appeared along Khue’s temple, visible as she stepped forward.

“Leave her be-” Darrow said, noticing that Helen had not come to sit next to him but remained standing.

Nichols grabbed Khue by the hip and pulled her down on his lap, wiping her mouth with his sleeve. “You look like a whore, honey. No good. Look like a little whore with that stuff on.” He patted her cheek. “That’s my girl. My good, clean girl.”

Helen turned around and walked out.

“What’s wrong? I just don’t want you showing her bad ways,” Nichols yelled.

Outside on the dirt driveway, Darrow stumbled getting his shoes back on. “We walking home?”

Helen marched down the road without a word. The darkness and the warm air were a relief.

“You mad at me?”

“Not at you. No… Yes. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“If you’re choosy, you’re not going to have too many friends out here.”

“I’m never going back there.”

“Fine. But you’re punishing the girl, too.”

Helen slowed, shaking pebbles from her sandals. Darrow laughed and grabbed her arm. “What’s funny?” she asked.

“What a puritan you were, how self-righteous. How outraged. I had no idea.”

Helen said nothing.

“I lost that capacity some time back. But I admire it.”

“You’re ridiculing me. And you didn’t tell me your plans to go back to work.” As she said it she knew her outrage on Khue’s behalf had also been for herself.

“That’s the thing, I didn’t want it official,” Darrow said, suddenly serious. “All good things and all bad things come to an end.”

Preparations for the summer festival frenzied the village, and Helen and Darrow were invited to take part. Ho Tung knew their plans to leave but insisted they stay through the celebrations.

Helen had been thrown out of her stillness. All she could think was that she was losing something she wanted. But she couldn’t tell Darrow what it came down to-them or the war, no longer both. Apparent to her that she could no longer go through a village from the outside, as before. Impossible to cover the war with such conflicting loyalties. Was that what had happened to MacCrae, she wondered, too many angles of loyalty?

Pigs were butchered, the cries of slaughter haunting her till she escaped to the river. When she returned, the communal house had been hung with lanterns. They were seated in a place of honor next to the chief. He talked about how expensive it must be to send a letter from America, especially St. Louis, and Helen didn’t know what else to do but agree. “I know young girls get distracted,” Ho Tung said, “but how can she forget where she comes from?”

Women swayed under trays of food, delicacies such as glutinous rice, sweet boiled rice cakes, shredded pork with bamboo shoots. Toasts were drunk with fermented rice alcohol. Darrow spent long hours with a translator to figure out what they should contribute. Finally it was decided beer for the adults and ice cream for the children.

During the afternoon of the festival day, a decorated plow was taken to the communal rice paddy outside the village and a ceremonial furrow plowed. Later, the villagers gathered at the community house for the ritual enactment of the rice harvest, a fertility rite with four goddesses chosen from the village girls to represent Phap Van, the cloud; Phap Vu, the rain; Phap Loi, the thunder; and Phap Dien, the lightning.

Work was forgotten; paddies lay untended. The women wore their best clothing. Unmarried girls washed their hair in perfumed water and wore it long and dark down their backs. Platters of food were there for the taking; at almost any hour one could find a crowd of people busy at some game. Darrow’s arm healed well enough to get rid of the sling, and he and Helen photographed boat races, kite flying contests, rice cooking and rice cake competitions, stick fighting, wrestling, and traditional dances.

“I love this,” Darrow said. “We’ll travel the world, do cultural layouts. Wildlife shots in Africa. No more wars.”

“You promise?” she said, trying not to show how much she wanted the answer.

On the final night fireworks shimmered along the river, ribbons of light reflecting on the water as young couples escaped into the darkness. A leniency in behavior was allowed for the night, and Ho Tung laughed that many new marriages were celebrated shortly after the festival. He had urged Ngan to reconsider Minh’s proposal. Helen saw the two walking awkwardly together along the river, Ngan frowning. But the chief shook his head. “Ngan refuses to settle down. She has caught the strange, unhappy-making new ideas.”

The next morning at dawn, everything returned to its normal state-the women again hidden under their dark clothes and conical hats; the men bent under the weight of their plows. The paddies inhabited again, plaintive songs hanging in the air, the previous week as distant and separate as a dream. Helen dreamed of a third way for Darrow and her to exist other than Switzerland or the war-staying in the village for a full year until the next harvest.

She ignored the fact of Darrow’s healed shoulder. But after her dismissal of Nichols, and all that he represented, Darrow went alone and spent his days at the USAID compound. He had already absented himself from the place. Something barely started, already ended.

As she walked back from bathing at the river one morning, Linh appeared on the road, and her heart sank. “You’ve come back,” she said when they were within speaking distance of each other. She held out her hand and touched his arm. “I’ve been dreading this day.”