The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  ONE of my close friends from college, Hanh Vu, arrived at the camp a few days after me. Hanh was a lanky northerner from a lower-middle-class merchant family. He was an easygoing cynic. We spent most of our time smoking, drinking beer, and musing about the mistakes that had landed us in this bad situation. I told him that if they hadn’t drafted me, I would have received tenure at the school by the end of this year and would have had a draft exemption.

  Hanh shrugged. “Maybe you’d have had a few months of freedom and then they’d cancel that exemption too. The way the war is escalating, they’ll eventually cancel all the exemptions.”

  “It’s impossible to plan your life when they keep changing the rules.”

  “You should have stayed in the Institute of Administration. You probably would have been one of the big guys handing out these exemptions instead of one of us.” He grinned. “Remember Thu?”

  “He was a fun guy. We were study partners. I heard he graduated from the Institute of Administration,” I said, smiling at the hilarious times we shared.

  “Thu is a first-level manager in the Customs Office. They’re all exempted from the draft over there.”

  I sighed, pleased for my old friend, pitying myself.

  Hanh pounded me on the shoulder and chuckled. “Scoring high on your exams was probably the worst thing you could have done to yourself. Funny, isn’t it? I barely passed, but here we are in the exact same lousy place.”

  Hubris brought me down the difficult path while wisdom would have led me toward comfort and wealth. How did I miss it? I had come of age in a time of opportunity. They were trying to form a new government under the guidance of the American advisors. New colleges and universities sprang up to educate those who would one day run the country. Admission into any program was easy. Education was inexpensive and accessible for those who wanted it. Ministries were handed out like rewards to college graduates. Students ranking in the top percentiles had the posts of their choosing. It seemed impossible for someone in my position to lose, and yet I had managed to do precisely that.

  I FIRST saw Thien sitting beneath the trees with a stack of novels and chain-smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes, another unopened pack in his breast pocket. I showed him my book. “You want to trade?” Without glancing at it, he grinned a mouthful of rotted teeth, shoved his whole pile at me, and said, “Take whatever you want.”

  Thien was a warehouse manager with a salary four times an army lieutenant’s. His desk job had plenty of perks, including time to indulge in books and sideline deals for extra income. Thien was one of the medical postponement aspirants who starved themselves to make their bodies unfit for service. His determination was profound. For breakfast, he took a cup of black coffee. Lunch, his only true meal, consisted of one small bowl of steamed rice. At night, he drank one beer to dull the hunger pangs. This was his third time in the camp. It was a long, tortuous road: three to four weeks in the staging camp waiting for the physical, which he must fail, and then another two weeks waiting for the army’s medical board to review and grant a service exemption. With two medical deferments already on his record, Thien was aiming for a third, which would qualify him for a permanent discharge. Thien was hopeful because he had learned how to emaciate himself and had the proper contacts, as well as some money to bribe the doctors. But, he confided to me, he would need to take his body to the very edge this time.

  I asked him if the postponements were worth abusing his body over and over without any guarantee of success.

  “Have you ever been in a hospital?” he asked.

  “Yes, and that’s why I didn’t study medicine.”

  When we first arrived in Saigon, my cousin Lang contracted typhoid. Lang had gone south with his stepmother, Aunt Thuan, and her children. Lang’s own mother had stayed behind at the estate in Tong Xuyen, hoping to safeguard the ancestral land. For three weeks, my cousin Tan and I took turns sleeping on the floor next to Lang’s bed in the general infirmary of a public hospital, feeding, sponge-bathing, and medicating him. The depressing experience put off any dreams I ever had of a career in the medical field.

  I shook my head.

  He said, “I mean the veterans’ hospital. Until you’ve seen maimed and wounded men laid up in the convalescent ward, moaning and crying, you don’t know what war is. Whatever I put my body through now, it’ll recover, but there’s no recovery from losing an arm or a leg. Death would be better than that.”

  “If there were a sure way out of the draft, I would try it.”

  “Without trying, you never know which way is sure.” He wheezed out a laugh. He opened his wallet and showed me a picture of himself—unrecognizable as a robust young man—standing next to a slim, gorgeous woman.

  “She is the other reason why I can’t be in the army. We’re engaged. She’ll marry me if I get a permanent exemption.”

  I watched him deteriorate day after day. I wasn’t certain if he would make it. A week later, he stopped eating rice. Before his medical examination, Thien lost consciousness and they carried him on a stretcher to the infirmary. I never found out if he got the girl, the army, or the grave.

  THERE was a small group of men in my situation. We were older, married, and resigned to our fate, knowing that we wouldn’t qualify for postponements. We didn’t want to be drafted, didn’t want to harm ourselves for a physical exemption, and didn’t have enough money to drink ourselves into a stupor. We paired off in small groups and spent those long infernal days pacing like inmates around a broiling pen. We talked about our life at home as if it were another world—and after talking awhile, we realized that it was. We just wanted this part to be over quickly and start soldiering so we could send money home to our wives and children. A day in this hot dirt field was a day’s wages lost.

  ON my fifteenth day, I was called with twenty other draftees for medical examination. Two army trucks took us to a place on the edge of Saigon. Going through the outer suburbs, I felt as though an old film reel was playing in my head—flashes of the time when my family had just migrated from Hanoi. We had traveled on these roads from the refugee camp to the city. Although eight years had passed, the scenery was much the same, just more houses than before. I felt as though my refugee life had happened only yesterday. Then, thinking of what had occurred to us since, I knew a lifetime had passed and I had failed to seize the right opportunities.

  The hospital campus was one of the most impressive institutions I’d seen. An iron fence went around the perimeter of the compound. All the buildings, even the guardhouse at the gate, were built with brick and roof tiles. The roads and walkways were paved, the gardens trimmed. A circular flowerbed with a flagpole fronted the main building.

  The trucks left us at the side of one of the small buildings. The sergeant told us to line up by the door. An orderly came out, took four men inside, and told the rest of us to wait our turn. The queue broke apart as everyone sought the shade. Some stretched out beneath the trees and napped; others sat against the wall and smoked. The sergeant ground his teeth and shook his head. I could tell he wanted to order us back in line, but we weren’t soldiers yet. After a few weeks in the camp, not a single man cared how he looked. Un-shaven, unkempt, and filthy, we sprawled haphazardly around the grounds, looking like a work detail on break. The officers walked by smiling, laughing as if they were having a grand time, their eyes slipping easily over us. They knew who we were.

  The examination was cursory, but it took two doctors, several nurses, and orderlies five hours to examine the fifty men in our group. They called us inside, four men at a time. When it was my turn, I was surprised that it took them less than ten minutes to take my name, weight, height, blood pressure, and urine sample.

  The doctor was around my age, although his chubby face made him look much younger. He came in without glancing at me, a captain’s insignia on his shirt collar. He didn’t return my greeting and began by listening to my chest with his stethoscope.

  “Turn your head left and cough,”
he said. “Do you have hearing or vision problems?”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Pull up your pants,” he grunted. He was behaving as though he was a member of the elite class and I was a commoner.

  I wasn’t surprised to see him carrying that superior air. He must have felt godlike with his power to determine the fate of so many lives. Standing in front of him half naked and obeying his order to turn around this side and that, I thought of my high school friend Duc, whom I had tutored. He had surpassed me. Duc had become an army doctor working in this very hospital. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that my life up to that point had been a failure. I didn’t feel ashamed or humiliated. I felt utterly beaten. I desperately needed a cigarette.

  He barked out a code to the nurse who was filling out my form. Realizing he hadn’t dismissed me, he said in an irritated tone, “You can go.”

  I grabbed my shirt and rushed out. My chest tightened, a constriction in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sit down. I paced the hot pavement, blood pounding in my ears. All the choices I made since the day I set foot in Saigon replayed themselves in my head. The hard work and sacrifices had amounted to nothing. My best efforts had been defeated. My mind was hammered blank. I was dizzy.

  My hands shook as I lit a cigarette. I burned up a knuckle-length in two pulls, but for the first time since I started smoking, it tasted like medicine. I pulverized the cigarette under my shoe. I never had the urge to smoke again.

  THE NORTH

  1944

  13. THE ORPHAN

  Uncle Thuan and the village elders had foreseen the disaster, but not its magnitude. They had expected hard times from the very beginning of the occupation when the Japanese conscripted coolies and imposed heavy crop requisitions at two to three times the rates of the French. In the quest to conquer all of Southeast Asia, the Japanese were ruthlessly sapping the countryside of manpower and resources. As one season passed into the next, hungry peasants ate deeper into their seed stocks. Each new planting saw fewer seeds going into the fields and fewer hands to tend the crops. While rice yields spiraled downward, the Japanese quotas rose as the war went against them. The unsustainable drain on the peasantry was culminating in the country’s most devastating famine, one that would decimate more than two million people.

  That year, when the Japanese levied another large requisition on the October harvest, the poorest peasants realized that they did not have enough rice to last the winter and certainly not enough for the spring planting. Entire families abandoned their homes and took to the road. It was the first time we saw old folks, women, and children among the migrants, arriving daily by the dozens from distant domains.

  I was nine years old the winter of the Great Famine. One afternoon, when Tan and I were playing hide-and-seek, we found a boy bundled in a blanket beneath a pile of hay at the back corner of the barn. Shriveled and bloated with starvation, he looked like some sort of bug, all head and belly, big-eyed and heaving ribs, almost hairless, semiconscious and possibly mute. He was past talking. It appeared he had crawled into the stable to die. From the first moment, I knew there was something very unusual about him.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” Tan said, hunching down over him. “What’s your name?”

  The boy stared back at us, expressionless, watchful. His lips were cracked and dried with sores. He didn’t flinch when Tan poked his swollen gut.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have a tongue, like Old Man Ngu,” Tan said.

  I pried open his mouth. “He’s got one.”

  The boy was unperturbed at our prodding.

  “You can talk, can’t you?” Tan shook the boy’s shoulder. “How did you get in here?”

  “Hey, don’t you know it’s polite to answer when you’re spoken to?”

  The boy blinked at me. His eyes looked sad and alert, though oddly lifeless. They seemed too big for his head, and his head seemed too big for his body. Neither Tan nor I recognized the boy. We knew he wasn’t from our village. Starvation hadn’t yet set into Uncle Thuan’s domain.

  I said, “There’s no food here. You might find some eggs in the henhouse, but there’s nothing here except hay for the horses.”

  “Don’t try to eat hay. It’ll make you sick.”

  The hog trough was empty. Uncle Thuan had ordered most of the pigs butchered and salted, saying that it was a sin to waste food on pigs. In fact, there wasn’t much food anywhere on the estate. Dried fish, spices, pickles, and rice, foods that were usually left in jars and bins around the kitchens and courtyards, had been locked up in the storerooms. Fruits were picked green from the trees, for fear of the scavenging birds, and the vegetable gardens were guarded.

  “We have to tell our mothers.”

  “No, we don’t. They won’t let us keep him,” said Tan. Since his mother died when Tan was two years old, his father and stepmothers allowed Tan plenty of freedom. Tan didn’t share my fears of adults.

  “You want to keep him? Like a pet?” I didn’t like the idea, and I wasn’t sure if I liked the boy. There was something very strange and mysterious about him. A mole the size of a housefly perched in the middle of his forehead like an ominous marking, a sort of dark third eye. I said, “I have to tell my mom.”

  Tan threw up his hands. “She’ll tell my father! And Father will send him to the temple like he did with all the other kids!”

  Four boys had been left at our gate, but Uncle Thuan sent them all to the temple, each accompanied by a donation of rice to help the monks run their orphanage. During the famine, it was common for the poor to leave their babies or children at the doors of the rich in hopes that they would be adopted. People who thought they might come back someday to reclaim their children often left them at the Buddhist temples.

  When I hesitated, Tan reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of dice. “You win, we tell. I win, we keep him.”

  I nodded, and he rolled a nine in the dirt. The boy’s eyes darted back and forth between us. He understood the wager.

  I shook the dice in my palm. “What if I roll a nine?”

  “Then we roll again!” Tan grumbled.

  The dice tumbled on the ground and came up with a six and a five.

  “I’ll give you my best cricket,” Tan offered.

  It was a good deal, and I sealed the orphan’s fate with a nod.

  We went to the kitchen and brought back a bowl of rice porridge and salted fish to feed the boy. I knelt on the ground to raise the boy’s head while Tan tried to spoon some food into his mouth. We got about a spoonful into his mouth when we heard someone rushing into the barn.

  “Stop! Stop that!” the gardener cried, flapping his arms above his head. The old man grabbed the bowl and spoon from Tan and told me to put the boy down.

  Gardener Cam said, “What are you trying to do?”

  “We didn’t do anything! We didn’t bring him in here!” I said.

  The old man guffawed, taking a moment to collect himself, and then said, “I know that. I found him in the hog pen yesterday. I gave him some sugar water.”

  “He’s very hungry. Shouldn’t we give him some rice?” Tan said.

  “You can not feed starving people like him any solid food, not even that thick rice porridge. When they get to this stage, their stomachs and intestines can no longer digest normal food. Many have died of indigestion because they ate too much or ate solid foods that their systems can not process,” the old man replied, glaring at us. “You could have killed him.”

  “We’re sorry. We didn’t know,” I said. “I guess we should tell Uncle Thuan about him.”

  “No, no. Let’s keep this a secret between only us,” said Cam. “If we tell your uncle and aunts, they’ll send him to the orphanage at the temple. There are too many kids there. In his condition, he’ll die for sure.”

  Tan and I had been to the temple several times with the staff when they took food donations to the monks. The place was filled with sickly children. We looked at the gardener and nodd
ed.

  The old man breathed a big sigh of relief. A lifelong bachelor without any child of his own, he had taken a liking to the orphan.

  TAKING care of the orphan in secret was an exciting game. We clothed the boy with our old shirts and shorts. When he could process food again, tidbits of dinner meats found their way into our pockets, and we sneaked into the barn to feed him before we went to bed. We gave him a black cricket in a matchbox to keep him company. Day after day of mothering the boy, we knew no more about him than we did the first time we laid eyes on him. Whenever we asked him a question about his family, he would just stare blankly at us. He was as helpless as a baby. He never told us his name or even thanked us when we fed him. He made almost no noise, as if he knew the delicacy of his situation.

  It wasn’t long before Aunt Thuan discovered our orphan. She scolded Cam and ordered him to take the boy to the village monks, but the wily old man convinced her that the orphan could be a sign from heaven. Bad fortune could befall the estate if she turned her back to a helpless child. Suitably worried, Aunt Thuan agreed to let the boy stay until he regained his strength.

  With the mistress’s permission, the estate staff gladly helped Cam nurse the boy back to health, taking him under their wing as a member of their extended family, even though no one was any wiser about his real name or origin. Such a profound silence, they speculated, could only have been brought on by terrible trauma. Soon he was well enough to help around the kitchen and the gardens. The staff taught him to endear himself to Aunt Thuan. When Aunt Thuan, Aunt Thao, and my mother sent messages between their households, the orphan would be on hand to run them, a chore that naturally earned him favor among the decision makers in the estate. Slowly but surely, the staff integrated him into their world. The gardener was very happy because the boy quickly became the son the old man had always wanted.