Lost Soldiers

by Lost Soldiers (retail) (epub)

  ‘Precisely, Brandon. That’s another thing. I’m not sure I’d trust him with this piece of information. It could be volatile.’

  Condley shrugged, his eyes burning with challenge. ‘I just have a feeling he’ll help us. If nothing else, why would he turn down a free trip for a sentimental journey back to his old stomping grounds?’

  ‘You want to take him with you?’

  ‘You got any better ideas?’

  ‘Except for this Mathew Larkin business, I don’t have any ideas at all.’ The two stared at each other for several seconds, and then finally Professor Muir nodded, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Come with me to Australia. I’ll come back here while you’re in Moscow. I’d be in the way there, and my paperwork is piling up anyway.’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Condley picked up the manila folder. ‘Some sick, treasonous deserter named Deville meets an Aussie photographer who had a wild hair up his ass and ran off to do a story on the VC, then murders him on a muddy trail in Ninh Phuoc – Ninh Phuoc, a scabby little village that doesn’t even have an outdoor toilet – and we end up on paid vacations to Australia and Russia.’

  ‘Now, didn’t I tell you that anthropology was an exciting profession?’ laughed Hanson Muir. ‘I rest my case.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sai Gon

  Dzung’s cyclo clattered slowly along the broken concrete alleyway a few blocks from his house. The cyclo swayed in the pavement’s gullies and Dzung swayed with it, side to side, leaning and muttering as he pedaled, urging his carriage along as if it were a tired old horse headed for its stall. It had been a long and disappointing day, nine hours of pedaling after his usual morning session at the firing range with Manh. And all for just under fifty thousand dong, less than five dollars.

  Dzung’s feet moved steadily on the pedals, almost robotically, requiring neither thought nor conscious action on his part. He was exhausted, ready to fall immediately into bed when he reached his shanty of a home. But as he pedaled past one house and looked into the open windows of its front room, Dzung’s body immediately became electric with an unwanted, dreadful certainty. Quoc, his eldest child, was not at his usual position against one inside wall. And Dzung knew something was seriously wrong.

  Nguyen Van Tam, once an ARVN soldier, now a shoemaker, lived two blocks away from Dzung’s house along the same crumbling alley. The dimly lit front room of Tam’s two-story concrete house was the District Four equivalent of a factory floor. Lacking even benches and chairs, a half dozen local workers spent their days sitting on the floor against a wall, chatting and smoking cigarettes as they cut patterns from synthetic leather. The patterns were then taken upstairs, where Tam and his wife formed them and sewed them into shoes. Twice a week Tam took his shoes to the Ben Thanh and Sai Gon markets, selling them for four thousand dong, or about forty cents.

  Quoc had begun working for Tam three years before, when he turned ten. Little Quoc worked eight hours a day. He learned fast and worked hard, cutting fabric insoles, for which Tam paid him five thousand dong a day. Quoc was deeply proud of his employment and frequently bought the family extra water and rice. A responsible, serious child who bore the sorrows of his father as a personal burden, Quoc had never missed a day of work.

  But now Quoc was not inside. When Dzung pedaled slowly past and looked beyond the open doorway for his son, the others in Tam’s front room stopped talking. One of them waved perfunctorily, then returned to cutting an insole. The others avoided his eyes.

  He did not want to, but Dzung continued to pedal down the familiar broken sidewalk, feeling his legs move ever more slowly, as he neared his home. He clutched the handrails on his cyclo. He squeezed his eyes together. He shook his head. He stared up at the hot and cloudless sky. But it did no good. There were no answers. He was pulled like a magnet to his wife and children even as he wanted more than almost anything to avoid the sad sight that he knew awaited him.

  Paralysis, that was his karma, propelled by the inevitability of suffering. Going home would hurt, but staying away would kill him. And so the only thing that was left was to keep pushing the pedals of the cyclo until some outside force intervened, deciding what should happen next.

  His daughter Thuc was crying, a mix of bewilderment and sorrow. He heard her long before he maneuvered his cyclo around a narrow bend and saw her standing on the sidewalk outside their home. She appeared so small in the middle of the concrete, almost infantile, with one hand pulling at her lower lip as she stared bleakly inside the house. As he neared her it was hard for him to comprehend that she was really even nine years old. And yet the look on her face told him she would never be young again.

  The baby had given Thuc her first faint glimpse of adulthood. How many mornings had her little brother sucked hungrily at her shoulder as she stood barefoot next to the bed, her toes crimped into the dirt, cradling and loving him so her mother could have another five minutes of sleep?

  She saw Dzung and ran toward him on the cracked pavement. Her small triangle of a face was desperate. Her arms were outstretched. Her eyes told him she wanted him to make this go away, that she needed to be a baby again. He stopped the cyclo and picked her up, kissing the tears out of her eyes and clutching her to him. He was rocking her now, and she began to bawl.

  He did not know what else to do. That seemed always to be his curse. So he tried to do everything all at once. He held her in one arm, kissing and consoling her as he pulled the cyclo out of the narrow roadway with his free arm and then locked it. He stood next to the house, holding her close to him for another long moment, trying to calm her. He angrily waved away the old women from across the lane, who now peered out of their upstairs windows with their rheumy, remembering eyes. And finally he carried Thuc with him into the house.

  His son Quoc was standing alone just inside the doorway, next to the shelf unit that blocked the view from the road. Quoc’s small hands were clenched into fists. His head was bowed, as if he were fighting off his own indecision. Yes, thought Dzung, walking up to his oldest son and putting his free hand on the boy’s back. He’s like me. He’ll always be like me. When bad things happen he wants to do too many things. And so he stands there doing nothing.

  More wailing came from the other side of the shelf unit. Dzung did not want to go any further into the house. He began to take another step forward; Thuc, clutching his neck, crying louder, caused him to halt. Standing for another moment with Thuc in his arms, he nestled Quoc’s head against his chest.

  ‘Come, son,’ he said to Quoc, pressing the boy in the small of his back as he moved into the house. ‘Your mother needs us.’

  His wife, Tu, saw him and stopped wailing. Her eyes embraced him with sadness as she sat motionless on the edge of their bed. Her face was wan with exhaustion. Her arms hung limply around Vong and Hao, the two middle children. Vong, the daughter who was eleven, sat numbly on Tu’s lap. Hao, the younger son, stood as Dzung entered, and walked over and clutched his leg.

  ‘The baby is dead,’ said Hao.

  On the bed the mosquito net was drawn up toward the ceiling. His wife had never lost a child but she knew the traditions, the proprieties, all the little, intricate, mandatory ceremonies that drove their culture, even when there was no money, even now at the point of death. She had put down a clean straw mat and a white cloth over that. The baby was lying on the white cloth, dressed in pale-blue cotton pajamas. Underneath his head was a pad made of thin white linen. A white handkerchief had been placed over his face.

  Little Thuc looked at her dead baby brother’s corpse and suddenly began screaming again. Dzung rocked her for a few more seconds and then carefully handed her to Quoc. She was almost too big for Quoc to hold, but the young boy who in his heart was already a man managed to clutch her to him. Quoc patted her almost mechanically on the back, his face a terrible mix of confusion and duty.

  I must have been very bad in my last life, thought Dzung as he silently moved forward to embrace his wife.

  At that
moment he missed his father more deeply than at any time in his life. And he found himself wondering if his mother might somehow still be alive. So many things had happened since those young days on the sandy banks of the Han River just outside Da Nang with his father walking and singing in the fields among the mulberry bushes and his mother at the cook pot, watching from the house on the road just up the rugged, red-clay hill. And his grandmother looking after him, with her twist of tobacco always dangling low from her lips, beneath her chin. And his brothers, like sentries at the edge of the far road, waiting. And then in the time it takes to say goodbye, all of them together gone like chaff blown by a sudden wind, off to be soldiers, refugees, prisoners, corpses, ghosts.

  So many things, so many people gone. But no tragedy could have prepared him for staring at his own dead child.

  His wife eased little Vong from her lap, leaving the young girl on the bed, and walked over to Dzung, embracing him. They said nothing, for there was nothing left to say. A ritual as old and deep as the culture that spawned them drove them instead to action.

  As the children sniffled and watched, Dzung and Tu began moving silently through their home, as if propelled by unseen commands. Dzung found a small rice bowl and filled it with uncooked rice, placing it just above the baby’s head. His wife boiled an egg and put it on a plate next to the rice bowl, along with a small mound of salt. They lit two white candles, placing one above each of the baby’s shoulders. Dzung brought three joss sticks, lighting them in a candle’s flame and placing them into the bowl of rice. The three joss sticks glowed in the dim, ever-darkening room, filling it with sweet, sad smoke, a wispy fog over their tiny dead son.

  His wife moved to the small family altar at the house’s entrance, where she lit two red candles. Dzung joined her there with three more joss sticks, again lighting them in the candles’ flame. The joss sticks always came in threes when a family member died: one for heaven, one for earth, one for hell. He placed them in the sand jar at the center of the altar, and then he and Tu clasped their hands, moved them six times, and prayed.

  To a lost child, dead of bad hygiene and disease.

  To a new ancestor, protector, and adviser.

  To themselves, trapped by fate, bound by love, grieving with four children in this waterless, mud-filled hovel somewhere between heaven and hell.

  Little Thuc was crying again, clinging to Dzung’s knees. Hao, now again the youngest living child, had walked over and buried his head into his mother’s waist. Quoc, so much like Dzung himself, was again motionless, paralysed by his very energy. And Vong still sat limply on the bed next to the dead baby, her eyes shut tightly as if to remove her from this scene of massive sorrow.

  The narrow road in front of their home was beginning to fill with onlookers, the curious and the kind, mostly neighbours who soon would offer condolences and who tomorrow might bring small portions of rice and cakes as a gesture of their sympathy.

  Suddenly it all overwhelmed Dzung, making him think for the first time in his life that he might go mad. The eyes of his neighbours, the wailing of his children, the sweet smoke and the glowing candles, everything his senses touched seemed to pour their memories inside him like some hot and bitter brine. They finished praying and Dzung felt he was swelling up with anguish, as if he might soon burst like a balloon from his toes to the top of his head and leak his hopelessness onto the packed-dirt floor until his ability to endure was completely gone.

  At that moment only Quoc’s steadfast eyes saved him, loyal and inquiring. Their very gaze infused him again with dignity. Quoc wanted him to do something. His eyes told Dzung that there was indeed a tomorrow, and that only he could take them there.

  It was a massive thought after twenty-five years of hopelessness, that he might find a way to prevent this moment from happening again. And it bordered on the impossible to think that he could ever bring his family a future, one that was more than a grinding, daily battle to endure, one crowned with hope and possibilities. But Quoc’s eyes told him that he must try – indeed, that if he did not try, he was betraying his own blood into eternity.

  A quiet agony propelled Dzung forward. He called again to Quoc as he pushed his way through the onlookers outside his door and began to unlock his cyclo.

  ‘Take care of your mother. Boil the rice.’

  It was nearly six o’clock. He had to hurry.

  His neighbours watched him departing with querulous, disapproving faces. He ignored them as he guided the cyclo through them and jumped onto his seat, pedaling away. Little Thuc howled behind him, running onto the concrete and watching him leave. He pushed hard on the pedals, driving too fast along the narrow alleyways, ringing the small bell on the cyclo handle when he negotiated the tighter turns. Children and small dogs raced out of his way. Old men called to him to be careful as they sat at their small plastic-table thrones with their cigarettes and beer and tea. Young men laughed and pointed, viewing his recklessness as wild abandon rather than a suffocating grief.

  On the main roads the traffic serenaded him with its very chaos. Its noxious fumes were like a drug that calmed him. Yes, this was normalcy, more than a decade of it now, he in the middle of this frantic churning, this massive, elemental striving, pushing the pedals, feeling his chest heave and his body sweat, the sun baking down on him and the fumes burning his eyes. Pushing toward something, pedaling away from something, waiting for Buddha to stop laughing long enough to allow him a real destination.

  But now there was a destination. He wondered at his own audacity as he made the turns and headed toward it. On the surface of it, he had no leverage, none. He had nothing at all to bargain away, and he had nothing more to offer than what they knew they already had. He could not refuse to carry out Manh’s orders if and when the time came. The implicit threat of harm to his family was already the guarantor of that. They could cause the trigger to be pulled at their target, and pulled well. But there was one intangible that they never could demand, and which he had never believed he would offer.

  His loyalty.

  In the dark, cool lobby of the Interior Ministry building, the small-faced guard was sitting with a grand self-importance behind his wide old French-made desk, smoking a cigarette, guarding his precious few hundred square feet of tomb-like emptiness as if it were heaven’s very door. As Dzung entered the lobby, the guard waved commandingly, summoning him to the desk, ever scowling, ever stupid, thinking nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Dzung burst past him, ignoring the usual mandatory, humiliating courtesies, and started up the now-familiar flight of moldy old stairs. The guard rose from his chair in protest, but Dzung froze his motion with a threatening finger and violent eyes.

  ‘Stay where you are, frog. He’s waiting for me. Room 212. I don’t have any time for you today.’

  Inside Room 212 Manh was sitting behind his desk, smoking a cigarette and looking casually across the room. He jolted upright when Dzung burst through his door. Dzung walked inside and stood in front of Manh’s desk, heaving with exhaustion, his face racked with tragedy, trying to gather the composure to speak. And then he noticed a woman of about his age sitting in the chair where Manh had first interrogated him. She was well-dressed and plump, too well-dressed and too plump to be living inside Viet Nam. From her clothes, her haircut, and the heavy jewelry on her wrists and fingers, it was clear she was an overseas Vietnamese, probably back from France or America for a visit. And she and Manh were comfortable with each other, even intimate, although in a non-sexual way, as if they had enjoyed a long and prosperous business relationship.

  Or political partnership, thought Dzung as his eyes moved carefully from one to the other Was this woman one of the Interior Ministry’s many foreign agents, back in Sai Gon under a tourist visa to give them information about the political activities of Vietnamese living overseas?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Manh harshly, recovering from his initial surprise. ‘Why didn’t you knock? Who do you think you are?’

  Dzun
g felt the woman’s eyes on him as she slowly inspected him from the plastic sandals on his unwashed feet to the old baseball cap that covered his rough-cut hair. Following her eyes, he became acutely conscious of his sweat-stained, faded clothes and the gaps between his teeth. And of her obvious opulence, gained from a life in another country, even as she reported on those who had escaped the sad, misguided system that kept him and others in bare feet with their broken teeth and dead children.

  ‘You must go outside until I’m finished,’ ordered Manh, ignoring the woman and speaking directly to Dzung. ‘I tell you, I am in a meeting. You wait outside!’

  Dzung stubbornly held his ground, standing half-way between Manh and his overseas informant, suddenly shivering from the whirring coolness of the air conditioner as he alternated his gaze from one to the other. ‘I’m not leaving until we have spoken privately, Manh. Until I am satisfied. Check my file. I can be very persistent.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the woman. She rose quickly from the chair and began walking toward the door. ‘I am sorry. It is time for me to go. Good night.’ And she was gone, the door clicking quietly behind her as she pulled it closed.

  For a long moment Dzung and Manh stared quietly at each other, neither of them moving from where they sat or stood. Above Dzung’s head the air conditioner whirred, bringing the only sound into the room and causing him again to shiver.

  ‘You forget yourself. Remember your family.’ Manh fairly blurted the words, causing Dzung to tremble with rage.

  ‘Yes, my family, Manh. I am remembering my family. I am trying to take care of my family, which now stands together in our luxury home in District Four as it watches over the dead body of my baby. He is properly attended to, all decked out with the appropriate linens. The egg has been cooked. Are you surprised we had the money to buy it? We have lit the candles and the joss sticks. His soul has passed to join the ancestors. Yes. And I am remembering my family.’