The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  “That’s fine with me.” I said quietly, trying to hide my annoyance. Anh was not argumentative. She rarely expressed her thoughts, but I knew she was disappointed too. A heavy silence fell on all of us. The fear and tension in our car was so palpable the children became very quiet, no longer laughing and playing like this morning when they thought we were going home.

  As we re-entered Rach Gia, the lead escort turned down a side street.

  “They are not taking us to the town hall!” Uncle Khanh cried.

  His wife gasped, “Are they going to torture us?”

  Our convoy turned toward the gate of a huge compound enclosed by walls and barbed wire. There was a sign at the gate: rach gia city prison. My heart jumped in my chest. Uncle Khanh slowed the car. I could tell he wanted to flee, but there was no escape.

  “This is a prison!” Aunt Han wailed.

  The escort had us park next to a dozen other civilian cars and ordered us to leave everything in the car. Anh and Aunt Han begged them to let us take some belongings, pointing out that our little children needed clothes and food. The escorts relented and they were able to pack a small bag for each of the adults. Khanh locked his precious Beetle, still thinking that we would be released soon. I did not realize that we would never see the car again and that our fifteen years of hard work and savings were forever lost to the VC. Almost our entire fortune, stacks of gold leaves, lay hidden in the door frame of the Volkswagen.

  IT was a typical small-town prison, a compound of four long, single-story buildings forming a square and enclosing a large courtyard. The main entrance had a thick iron door. In the courtyard, a crowd of about two hundred sat, guarded by fifteen guerrillas and civilians with red armbands. We were told to sit and wait. The escort gave our identity cards to a clerk.

  At first, the crowd reminded me of the refugees that flooded Saigon the past month. They had small bags and luggage by their sides, babies crying in their arms. Their children ran around playfully, oblivious to the situation. But instead of fatigue and sadness, I saw fear. An ominous air hung over them. They gathered in family units and whispered among themselves. Some glanced at us when we sat down next to them, but they didn’t say a word or even give a signal of acknowledgment. Everyone was waiting his turn to be called into the gazebo at the center of the courtyard to fill out some sort of declaration form.

  Since we got inside, Uncle Khanh and Aunt Han really seemed to want to distance themselves. They did not converse with us or even look our way. The four of us sat in silence. I glanced at Anh and knew she felt very uncomfortable, but she didn’t complain. I was miserable because I had brought her into this predicament. Why wasn’t I wise enough to see the risks in Uncle Khanh’s idea of finding a boat through his contact? Anh wanted to go because she was worried for my safety under the Communist regime. She knew that her Uncle Ha, a high-level Communist official, would keep her and our children out of harm’s way. Although my grandmother-in-law had not seen her son for more than twenty years, she could make Uncle Ha protect Anh and our children at any cost. I was angry with myself. My bad decision had pulled Anh into this ordeal. Even if Anh got out of here, we had just lost a major part of our savings. How could she survive and raise our children in the difficult years ahead?

  Our turn did not come until sunset. There was barely enough light to fill out our declaration forms. We were not allowed to talk. Although the Communists had been telling us all day over the loudspeaker that the more truthful and complete we were in our declarations the sooner we would be released, I did not trust them. Judging from the number of detainees that day in the courtyard, I figured they had at least five hundred forms to review. And they would likely have many more in the coming days. I became very depressed. This could be the end for me.

  Once we finished with the forms, they immediately took us to our cells. They put Anh and Aunt Han in the two wards reserved for women and children. Uncle Khanh and I went to two different wards reserved for men. He was in one on the right-hand side. I was in the one at the back facing the front of the compound.

  MY cell was a single large room, roughly 30 feet wide and 140 feet long. At one end of the room was an open washing area equipped with only one squat toilet and a cement tank filled by a single faucet. The person using the toilet had to hold up a sheet of newspaper for a modesty screen. A bank of small windows with iron bars lined the inner wall above head height. To look outside, one had to jump up and grab hold of the bars. During the day, they opened the outer sheet-metal door to air out the cell. Twice a day, guards passed food through the inner door’s iron bars: mildewed rice and a foul broth that gave everyone diarrhea.

  As one of the first inmates, I was able to pick a spot on a raised cement platform far away from the toilet. Our captors had arrested so many people that they didn’t even have time to search our bodies. All they did was take our names, then incarcerate us. With only the clothes on my back and a money belt lined with thin gold leaves hidden beneath my trousers, I took off my shirt and laid it down on the floor to mark my place.

  My neighbors were a young man in his late twenties and another man my age, both of them northerners. I could tell they were of the middle class by their mannerisms and speech, which was a relief since it was unlikely that they were spies planted among the inmates to gather information. Tong was a twenty-six-year-old ARVN sergeant who had fled Saigon with his wife, whose family was from Rach Gia. Bang was a forty-year-old police officer. His wife had a gold shop in Phu Nhuan, a lower-middle-class district in Saigon, midway between downtown and Tan Son Nhat Airport. Like me, they were banking on finding a boat to escape.

  The jailhouse quickly filled with detainees. The Communists were sweeping the entire province for anyone they deemed loyal to the former regime. They didn’t assign us numbers for identification and didn’t call us “prisoners” or “inmates.” They called us traitors. “Traitors come to the cell door.” “Traitors eat.” “Traitors shut up.”

  WITHIN days, the huge room became crowded with traitors. At night when we lay down to sleep, it was impossible to walk across the room to the toilet without stepping on bodies. There was not even space to hang-dry our clothes, so despite the mosquitoes, we wore only undershorts. We slept next to each other, cramped, a jumble of elbows and knees. We exercised by standing up and sitting down.

  As I had feared, an announcement finally came over the loudspeakers: “Attention all traitors: You now have a chance to confess your crimes against the country. You will be judged on your honesty. You are to write down every detail of your life, jobs, family, and background. Any inaccuracies will be considered an attempt to deceive the liberation government and you will be severely punished. If you lie, you will be executed.”

  They brought us outside a few at a time, sat us down at the rows of tables, and handed out pencils and booklets of paper. I pretended to scribble for the benefit of the moles among us, but I couldn’t write a word. I couldn’t bring myself to reveal my service record, but I was equally afraid of being caught in a lie. What came to my mind most clearly was Vi, the orphan who became my adopted brother. He had said that there was no forgiveness in the Communists’ canon.

  If they knew my background, they would have executed me already. Ironically, if I had been caught in Phan Thiet, the neighborhood informants would have promptly exposed me. In Rach Gia, I had the singular advantage of anonymity although I did not know how long that would have lasted.

  I suspected three things: First, the VC had no qualms about executing anyone they deemed guilty. Second, they gave no honor to their enemies, so in their minds, promises made to prisoners were meaningless. Third, I had never heard of Viet Cong showing mercy to those they could not brainwash.

  I wrote that I was merely a high school teacher who was exempted from the draft.

  THE following day, we were given another chance to write down our crimes against the country. They repeated this tactic several times, trying to find discrepancies in our confessions. During the first week
, they held public trials and executions in the town’s market square.

  I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher, I insisted unvaryingly in my tablet.

  I was a high-stakes gambler at a roulette table, the little white ball going round and round. In a room so crowded, you couldn’t move two feet in any direction without touching someone, yet I felt utterly alone. My secret settled in my stomach, as indigestible as a rock.

  AFTER a few weeks, they started releasing the women and children. When Anh got out, I felt my chances of survival increased significantly. She walked out of the prison gate and went directly to the market. With the money she had sewn into the lining of her pants, she bought food, medicine, a straw mat, and toiletries, and then came right back to the prison. She brought me the first of many supply packages that kept me from succumbing to illness. The next day she took the kids back to Saigon and began the long, arduous bid to secure my release.

  In the coming months, Anh would spend most of her energy riding buses back to Rach Gia from Saigon—which was now renamed Ho Chi Minh City—to visit me and bring the necessities that kept me alive. The new regime issued drastic curfews and travel restrictions that even limited movement between neighboring districts. The simple act of going from one province to another now required permits from several offices. A prospective traveler must first bribe himself through a labyrinth of bureaucracy before queuing for hours to buy a ticket on an overcrowded bus.

  With my son An, Anh braved the round-trip journey once every two weeks. From Saigon, it took two ferry crossings of the Mekong River and ten hot, dusty hours on a rickety bus packed to the ceiling with people, produce, and livestock.

  In Rach Gia, most hotels and guesthouses had either been ordered to close or simply shut their doors due to the lack of business. Anh stayed for days at the home of a sympathetic woman whose husband was also imprisoned for being drafted into the South Vietnam army. The jailers allowed supply packages, but did not permit prisoners to have visitors. Still, she came to see me without fail, bringing me food and medicine. Knowing that there were hard times ahead, she had scoured the city and bought huge quantities of pharmaceuticals: painkillers, aspirin, anti-diarrhea pills, quinine, ointments, and antibiotics. Without her, I would not have survived.

  My strength was ebbing. An overpowering lethargy pressed down on me. My face developed a strange puffiness. My legs swelled up and became heavy. I lost the enamel on my teeth. Near the gums, my teeth blackened. I could wiggle the incisors with my tongue. My whole mouth ached when I ate something hot or cold. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the early stage of a disease brought on by severe vitamin deficiency.

  Many other inmates were in worse condition. At the peak of incarceration, the Viet Cong kept more than a thousand men in the prison, packing people into all four buildings until there was no space left to walk. We were kept like diseased beasts waiting for slaughter, unworthy of the least measure of compassion. We lay on bare concrete. The reek of feces and urine from the clogged toilet was unbearable. The mosquitoes feasted on our flesh. It was so crowded in the cell that we couldn’t hang mosquito nets even if we had them. Lice were everywhere—in our clothes, hair, armpits, and crotches. The itching bites and rashes were enough to a drive a man mad. I chewed my nails to the nub to keep from clawing my skin to shreds. In here, a simple infection could lead to gangrene or an agonizing death.

  Once a week, they let us outside for ten minutes to bathe and wash our clothes at the large cement cistern in the middle of the prison. It was such a relief to cleanse the grime from my skin that I sometimes forgot what a pitiful sight we were—dozens of pale, withered men in their boxer shorts frantically soaping themselves and scooping water with their rice bowls under the scrutiny of armed guards.

  PRISON was the cruelest of man’s inventions. Within the walls, the days stood still. We played games and made up trivia quizzes. We invented dozens of little devices to ease our suffering—the best of which was a candle stove made from a Guigoz tin, a can of baby food powder.

  Mostly, we filled the emptiness with words. We talked, knowing well that there were moles among us. We could not help ourselves. We talked because infinity didn’t span centuries, it lay within each second.

  I shared my dreams for the future, the fine food I would eat with my family, the vacations we might take, and the bungalow I’d like to build by the sea. In my mind, I had sealed off my past. I never talked about my childhood. I did not give a single hint of military knowledge. So I became the ardent listener, casting myself as a silent character in the lives of other inmates and losing myself in their past dramas.

  But reality returned every evening after dinner. The loudspeakers came on and called out the names of those who would face judgment. A stage had been rigged right outside the prison for the public trials and denouncements of traitors—a ghoulish entertainment.

  When it was over, someone would strike the first match. The tiny flare of the flame brought us out from the darkness. We stirred as if the light were a confirmation of our existence. Each man fussed over his own Guigoz to boil some water for coffee or tea. It helped to be busy. It helped to have some caffeine and sugar in the blood to brace the spirit.

  In the flickering candlelight of hundreds of Guigoz stoves, the names of those who had just vanished from our midst were never spoken.

  POOR Uncle Khanh, a leader of men and a man of his word, believed the Viet Cong’s promises. He confessed, and they sent him to a reeducation camp in the north. His service in the Special Forces bought him ten years of gathering human waste from the latrines and fields to make fertilizer. They forced him to use his bare hands to scoop up the excrement and refused him soap to remove the stink. He buried his hands in the mud banks, crushed leaves in his palms, and scoured them with pebbles in the creek until they bled. The reek of feces could not be banished. He could not bear to touch himself with those hands, even to bathe. Without utensils, he ate food off his plate like a dog.

  IN another building at the prison was Gia, one of my colleagues from Phan Boi Chau High School in Phan Thiet. He was a nice fellow from a good family who had once been madly in love with my sister Huong. He had wooed her for three years without success. Drafted into the army, Gia served several years as a lieutenant in the logistics department in Saigon before his decommission in 1972. With his harmless, non-combatant background, Gia thought they would not consider him an enemy of the country. He confessed his rank and army service. They rewarded him with years of hard labor in the mangrove swamp—a disease-infested cesspit so vile half the prisoners did not survive their term.

  ONE by one, my cellmates were called away by the loudspeakers, each leaving behind a few items of clothing, sandals, toothbrush, candles, and a Guigoz stove. These bits and pieces were all that was left of them. Those of us who remained dared not use their belongings for fear of inheriting the same bad luck. Next to the toilet, a pile of goods collected like bones.

  I REMEMBERED how, in my impassioned youth, my heart had swelled with pride at the sight of brown pajama–clad fighters, our brave young men and women—our Resistance—coming to my family’s estate for supplies. How thrilled I had been when they defeated the Algerian Mohammed and drove the French from our land. How I had wanted so desperately to join our Resistance, to fight injustice, to strike back at the oppressors. I would have become a part of this.

  Do the ends truly justify the means?

  And to what ends had we arrived?

  They had won the war, the populace, and the country in its entirety. This was barbaric. This was ridiculously vindictive. It was all so senseless.

  MY time came after sixty-five days of confinement. Dawn brought smoky clouds. A drizzle haunted the long afternoon, fading at twilight. The loudspeakers screeched to life and began calling out names. Pham Van Thong. I heard it as clearly as I had heard it in my nightmares.

  I put on my slacks and shirt, the same garments I had last worn as a free man. Everything else I left behind: my extra clothes, str
aw mat, food supplies, toothbrush, toothpaste, even my precious Guigoz stove. And there against the wall, rolled up in my ragged undershirt, a small fortune in gold.

  I had thought I would be terrified. I had expected to soil myself or vomit or scream. But when they came for me, I wasn’t afraid. Perhaps I was beyond fear. There was only an overwhelming sense of sadness that I would never see my wife and children again.

  A numbing emptiness calmed my limbs. I did not think of my father, my siblings, or anything else. I did not think about whether the execution bullet would be painful or whether death, in its ultimate mercy, would come quickly. I did not think about where my soul would go, or if a heaven existed beyond this hell.

  The sky was dark, starless, the air scented with deep, heavy earth. I felt a piercing love for my dearest ones. It did not occur to me to say a prayer.

  THE NORTH

  1954

  33. THE PEASANT GIRL

  There were three rules to managing a French whorehouse.

  First, never say no to a soldier.

  Second, never challenge a soldier.

  Third, never fall for a girl who went with soldiers.

  Mai first came to sit outside our inn late in the final colonial winter. I saw her on a stormy afternoon, coming home from school. She was huddling alone beneath the awning of the beverage kiosk; her blue dress, drenched from the waist down, clung to her legs. In the pale, bent light, she seemed half melted into the puddle at her feet. It was a striking image and I couldn’t help but ask her permission to take a picture. Photography was my new hobby.

  She said no, but smiled, pleased.

  We stood under the drumming rain. Then I blurted, “Miss, please come inside. You’ll catch a cold out here.”