Lost Soldiers

by Lost Soldiers (retail) (epub)

  ‘Dai Hoc Kinh Te, you mean?’

  ‘Take me there.’

  Dzung glanced at him with surprise, for he knew that Dai Hoc Kinh Te, the School of Economics, was where Mai had studied. ‘You don’t go there, Cong Ly. I remember that.’

  ‘I go now.’

  ‘That girl who died?’

  ‘It’s time.’

  Dzung smiled, gladdened at the thought. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘We go now.’

  ‘That is good, Cong Ly. It makes me very happy for you.’

  Dzung pulled into the traffic. The car was impressively new. Its interior smelled as though it had just been delivered from the showroom floor. A question gnawed at Condley as he watched Dzung drive. ‘How did you pay for the car?’

  ‘I don’t pay yet,’ said Dzung carefully, turning onto Hai Ba Trung Street. They stopped at a red light and he glanced briefly at Condley. ‘They tell me I can drive the car and pay for it from our business.

  ‘A loan from the government?’ asked Condley, amazed at the thought.

  ‘They tell me that,’ answered Dzung.

  ‘They don’t have any money.’

  Dzung shrugged. ‘Maybe they do.’

  The light turned green and a swarm of motorbikes whined past them, weaving in and out of the traffic lanes. Dzung drove smoothly. The old Duc Ba Chapel was off to their left, as was the huge post office built at the same time by the French a century ago. Soon the limo would turn left onto Nguyen Thi Minh, near the grounds of the Reunification Palace and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Dzung seemed to gather himself a bit as he drove, and now he looked at Condley again. ‘They move my family out to Song Be. I have a house now.’

  ‘Song Be?’ Condley began to eye Dzung carefully. ‘All of this good luck, and I’ve been gone only a month?’

  ‘No space to park a limo in District Four,’ said Dzung. ‘I must tell you the truth. I was worried when you made the business application. But now I think it was a smart thing to do, Cong Ly.’

  Another light. The palace itself was two blocks off to their left. In the park between them and the palace, dozens of Vietnamese sat languidly in the grass and on old benches, waiting to be interviewed inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so that they might emigrate to the United States. The locals called this area Re-education Camp Park. Thousands of long-term re-education camp survivors had sat on its benches over the past decade, waiting for the visas that would allow them to leave.

  Dzung turned left onto Nguyen Thi Minh. The road was jammed with trucks, cars, bicycles, cyclos, and people walking. He moved very carefully in the traffic. Condley studied the former cyclo driver, as if trying to see him for the first time. He could not take his eyes off Dzung’s haircut as his old friend maneuvered in the thick traffic. Dark flashes burst inside his memory, from guns that were trying to kill him. And then a silhouette in black pajamas, shooting with the precision of a trained assassin. Could it have been?

  They turned right onto Pasteur Street and soon reached the low walls of the university. Dzung slowed the car, pulling over to the curb next to the gate that led into the grounds. ‘I wait here?’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  Dzung smiled fondly, his eyes reading Condley’s emotions. ‘Like going to temple?’

  Condley looked off toward the double-decker buildings, his mind filled with unquenchable memories. ‘A little.’

  ‘This will be good for you, Cong Ly. Now all the ghosts will be gone.’

  Condley began to open the car door, and then suddenly stopped. He leaned toward Dzung in the car, giving him another curious look. ‘That was you in Bangkok, wasn’t it?’

  Dzung kept smiling, serene in the silent majesty of a courage that he knew could never be openly acknowledged. ‘You can’t ask me that, Cong Ly. It would be very dangerous for my family.’

  Condley laughed, looking left and right along the street as if for spies. ‘I know, I know. And I will never ask again. But it was you.’

  ‘I think,’ said Dzung, shrugging enigmatically.

  ‘I’ve never seen anybody shoot like that.’

  ‘And you save me, Cong Ly.’

  ‘Hey, that was an easy shot.’

  ‘And so now we have a good business,’ smiled Dzung. ‘And we keep our mouths shut.’

  ‘Partner,’ said Condley, extending his hand.

  ‘Partner,’ laughed Dzung, taking it in both of his. ‘I drive the limo. You pay the bills.’

  ‘Duoc,’ said Condley. Then he climbed from the limo and stood for a long moment on the sidewalk, facing the small yard and aging buildings of Dai Hoc Kinh Te. And finally he walked inside the grounds.

  He had not visited the tiny, French-built university in all the years since Mai had died. Even the thought had been too painful, like staring too long into the sun or putting one’s hand inside a flame. His life had changed inalterably on the first day that he watched her pass through this very gate, in her white ao dai with her hair flowing down her back and her schoolbooks tied in a strap and clutched against her chest. And it had changed again just as dramatically the last time he had walked out of it, following a memorial service held by her former classmates. Her family had watched him throughout that service, blaming him and yet unable to denounce him, for to publicly denounce him would have been to admit that Mai had loved him, and their only satisfaction was to keep that recognition from him as she disappeared into her grave and they faded from his life. But their unforgiving eyes had scarred him more deeply than any war wound.

  Walking inside the gate, he found himself glad that he had come. So much had changed since he last stood on this spot. And yet as he looked around him, he found that on the surface almost everything inside the gates had remained the same. It wasn’t the same, he knew it. But he knew also that one had to look closely and understand deeply to comprehend that it was different.

  Classes had just ended. A sea of young women wearing the white ao dais that marked them as students poured out of the buildings, ready to leave the campus through the gate that he had just entered. They reached him and flowed endlessly past him, as if he were walking through a valley of flowers or a heaven crowded with young angels. They smiled curiously at him as they passed, amused at his silent, remembering stare, and then went back to their playful chatter, forgetting him in the instant it took to reach the gate. Their white ao dais were nun-like, and yet ineluctably inviting. Their long hair cascaded down their backs, marking the white silk of their identical dresses like necessary vestments. Their voices were musical as they laughed and teased in that difficult, tonal language that had over the long years become almost as normal to him as his own.

  As the girls flowed through the gates he found that Mai was with him, laughing also, whispering her delight. He felt her buoyant presence. Yes, he decided, Mai was here, and she was happy. He had been in Viet Nam long enough to believe that such visits were possible.

  And he sensed that Van had been right in the frantic note that she had left underneath Francois Petain’s perfume bottle in the bathroom of the Riverside Hotel all those weeks or maybe lives ago. Not about herself, only time would tell with that. But about him. Now he was free. Someday he might even find a woman to love for a lifetime, yeu instead of thuong. There was still time for that. Van herself might return someday, wiser and more loving from her journey, and who knew what would happen if she did?

  And yet what Van had said was inalterably true. He might love another woman, and he hoped that someday he would. But no woman could ever fully own his heart. Because he would always be in love with Viet Nam.

  Viet Nam, Viet Nam. The whole land laughed at him with fresh delight every morning, winking playfully as it set out once again to betray him. It dangled its mysteries before him, puzzles that only deepened every time he tried to solve them. It embraced him so tightly that in a way he had become it, looking out at the rest of the world from inside its eyes as if he were Brer Rabbit, gummed up in the Tar Baby.

&
nbsp; Viet Nam, Viet Nam. It had suborned him all those years ago like a wily beggar, luring him inside the tangle of its tragedies and stealing away his boyhood. It had wounded and punished him as he dared to believe he could change it. It had shown him that he could love and then relentlessly destroyed the very treasure it had offered him, finally driving him away as if he were a demonic madman. And after all the years in the wilderness it had welcomed him back again only to tease him, asking everything of him but giving nothing in return except his heart, the same heart it had once so cruelly stolen.

  But despite it all he had remained, unable to end his passion for its jungles and its alleyways. Was that not a monumental sort of love?

  Dzung was waiting for him at the curb, watching his movements with ever-careful eyes. His friend smiled shrewdly as Condley reached the car, having seen the right signs in his stride.

  ‘So, she was with you, Cong Ly. The girl who died.’

  ‘You always know, don’t you, Dzung?’

  ‘About these things, I think.’

  Dzung’s smile turned sentimental. His hands were cupped together in front of him and now he looked down at them. He opened them a bit and Condley saw that he was holding a small white pigeon. The bird looked this way and that as Dzung gently stroked its head with a finger.

  ‘My father came to see me. He landed on the roof of the car!’

  With a slow, uplifting motion, Dzung tossed the bird into the air. It fluttered a bit, finding its wings, and then flew away toward the school. For a long moment Dzung watched it, his hands remaining high in the air as if he were reaching for the sky.

  ‘He went over the school, Cong Ly! A good sign.’

  ‘A very good sign,’ agreed Condley, watching the pigeon disappear.

  Satisfied with this good fortune, they climbed into the car. Dzung grinned at him as he started the engine. ‘So, where we go now?’

  Condley leaned back against the seat, enjoying its firmness and the fresh, new smells of the car’s interior. He felt very, very free, and even slightly prosperous. Dzung pulled carefully into the traffic and then looked quickly over to him, his eyes asking for directions. Where did he want to go? Condley did not know and at that moment he did not even care.

  ‘Di dau, ma chang duoc,’ he finally said, drawing a quick laugh from his friend.

  Anywhere we want.

  Acknowledgments

  A special thanks to Nita Taublib, Katie Hall, and Tracy Devine, who shared my passion for this book and made it happen.

  And to my family, for enduring the odd world of a writer.

  And to my many Vietnamese friends, both in Viet Nam and overseas, whose struggles, insights, hopes, and affection fueled these pages.

  Arlington, Virginia

  February 2001

  Credits

  Grateful acknowledgment is make to the following for permission to quote from previously published material:

  ‘What Was Lost’ by W. B. Yeats. Reprinted in the United States with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, copyright renewed © 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Reprinted in Canada with the permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

  The lines from ‘Mandalay’ by Rudyard Kipling are reprinted with permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Bantam Press

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © James Webb, 2001

  The moral right of James Webb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788635202

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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