The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  “The ground is very wet and soft. We can dig just enough space to crawl under the fence and then swim down the creek with the current,” Tin said quietly. “We would have at least six or seven hours before they mounted a search party.”

  Tung shook his head. “It’s a trap. It’s just too easy.”

  “Do you have someone nearby who can help? You can’t go far without money,” I said. The new government had issued a new currency.

  “I know some people in Rach Gia,” Tin said.

  Tung was not convinced. “Do you really have to go?”

  Tin seemed on the verge of saying something, but thought better of it. I was relieved. I didn’t want the responsibility of someone else’s secret. We recently heard that the Viet Cong had captured the entire data file of the South Vietnam army, containing hundreds of thousands of personnel service records. Countless men would suffer because the bureaucrats who manned the personnel offices had fled without destroying the files. I had heard two of my team leaders in the RD program had been arrested and executed. I suspected that, like me, Tin had been less than forthright on his confession. It was simply a matter of time before they investigated our service records.

  “You know you can’t go home. That’ll be the first place they look,” Tung said.

  I nodded. “There’s no place to hide. Where can you go?”

  The country was practically under martial law. People needed permits to leave their hometowns. Each neighborhood had its own party member representative—and spies who knew every resident.

  “Cross the border into Cambodia,” said Tung.

  I looked at Tin; he had already arrived at this conclusion. He grew up in the countryside and was very resourceful in the wilderness. If anyone had a chance crossing the jungle alive, it was Tin.

  He had every reason to flee. If I were Tin, a man without a wife or children, I would have been gone yesterday. He was still healthy and strong, as fresh as I had been six months ago. The longer he waited, the greater the chance he would become one of us sickly inmates.

  Life in Minh Luong was harsh. Every day we woke in darkness. They marched us out of the compound to work at the crack of dawn. We cleared minefields, exploded charges, cleared brambles, dug irrigation ditches, and repaired roads. Our first meal of the day came at noon with an hour of rest. We labored until dusk. We had two hours to bathe and eat dinner. Some nights they held trials and sentenced those of us whom they claimed had discrepancies in our confessions. Other nights, they sat us down for three hours of reeducation where a party official lectured us about their battle victories; the struggles of the Vietnamese, first against the French Colonialists and later against the American Imperialists; and the ideals and advances of communism. On special evenings, we watched propaganda movies about VC heroes, battles, Ho Chi Minh, and the success of socialism in Russia and China.

  Occasionally, they summoned us from the field, a dozen at a time in the middle of the day, and put us through investigation sessions. We filled out scores of repetitive questionnaires about our family, friends, colleagues, jobs, social views, and political inclinations. We wrote detailed essays on our lives and thoughts. The more we answered, the more precarious our situations became.

  “PHAM Van Thong. Come to the door!” the guard shouted.

  I jumped, startled. Other prisoners gestured for me to hurry. I came to the door in my boxer shorts. The guard, a young fanatic with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, stood next to an old man dressed in the ascetic pajama slacks and black cotton jacket of the revolutionaries. I could tell by the deference the guard showed to the stranger that he was a high-ranking party member. The man was in his mid-sixties with hair streaked with white. He was wiry and straight-backed. He had calm eyes.

  He introduced himself as my wife’s uncle, and I immediately saw the resemblance. Although we had never met, I was well acquainted with my wife’s family history. Uncle Ha was my mother-in-law’s cousin. During the Great Famine, Anh’s entire extended family fled south. When the French came back to Vietnam, Uncle Ha joined the Resistance to fight the French. After the Geneva Accord, he regrouped to the North with the Resistance forces. Uncle Ha returned home after the Liberation to see his family for the first time in twenty years. His mother had always maintained that her son was first and foremost a patriot. Their reunion was a godsend for me.

  “You should try to eat more vegetables,” he said.

  “Vegetables?” I was confused. Prisoners did not get enough food.

  “You have beriberi. I’ve seen many cases. It was a common condition for our Resistance fighters. Unless you get more vitamins, your face and legs will keep swelling, then your vital organs will break down.”

  I thanked him for the advice. “How is my wife? Is she well? The children?”

  “They are all doing well.”

  “Did Anh come with you?”

  “She’s at the inn. Spouses are not allowed visitation. You know that.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  I realized he was telling me to be cautious. Even though he was probably one of the highest-ranking party members the locals had met, Uncle Ha was careful not to show any impropriety and had not requested to meet me privately without the proctor. These walls had ears. Perhaps he was afraid that I was foolish enough to blurt out something dangerous.

  “Your wife asked me to explain to the local authority that you are a good citizen, and that you fled Saigon because you were afraid. You had no intention of leaving the country.”

  He was saying that I must stick to my original confession, harp along that line in every interrogation, and never deviate. I nodded and said, “Thank you, Uncle. Please tell my wife that the comrades here are treating me well and teaching me the importance of socialism. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn.”

  Uncle Ha wished me good luck and good health. Then without another word, he turned and left. I was touched because I knew he had a reputation of integrity and high morals. I wondered what made him decide to help me. My mother-in-law and I believe that Uncle Ha, like many fighters of his generation who joined Viet Minh, was more a patriot than a Communist. Many high-ranking officials and party members of his age were not hardcore Communists. They had joined Ho’s government to defeat a common enemy. They relinquished their political ideology until it was too late to do anything but become reluctant Communists.

  When Uncle Ha went north, he left his mother and eldest daughter, Nga, behind in the care of my mother-in-law. Nga grew up and married a South Vietnamese lieutenant in the Special Forces. He was a decorated soldier who lost an eye in the war and was sent to a reeducation camp after the fall of Saigon. Upon seeing Nga, who could not remember her long-absent father, Uncle Ha mobilized his considerable power and secured the release of his once-enemy son-in-law.

  I thought of Aunt Thao’s husband, my cousin Quyen, Uncle Ti, my adopted brother Vi, my best friend Hoi, and schoolmates from my village. Every person I knew had brothers, sons, cousins, or uncles on opposite sides of both wars: first the French, then the American. It was a conflict between brothers. No matter which side won, the family lost.

  FOR several nights after Tin made his intention known, I stayed awake, eyes and ears trained on the dark spot where he lay ten feet from me. Night after night, he tossed and turned, but never left his sleeping mat. When I had thought his courage had surely deserted him, he vanished. I rose early one morning to go the latrine. Tin’s place was vacant. Climbing up to the latrine set over the pond, I knew he was gone. I was the first one up, the only person at the latrine.

  We never heard from Tin again. The guards made no announcements about their single escapee. They neither questioned nor punished us for his disappearance. From time to time, his name would come up in conversation, and someone would quip, “I bet Tin is in Thailand by now, drinking whisky and eating roast pork.” It would stir up a round of chuckles and more speculations of marvelous things Tin could be doing at that very moment.

  One by
one, we fell victim to illness, accidents in the minefields, or the Viet Cong’s trials. Some were pulled from our ranks without explanation. We never knew if they were released, sent to crueler camps, or executed. After they took Tung away, I often found myself looking to the creek. I could follow Tin to the Cambodian border, but I couldn’t leave my family behind.

  DURING one interrogation, I collapsed with a high fever. The inspector splashed water on my face, but couldn’t revive me. Two prisoners carried me back to my quarters. Fellow cellmates nursed me with aspirin and penicillin from my stash of medicine. Three days and two nights I lay on the cold ground, wrapped in four layers of borrowed clothes, sweating, freezing, delirious. The body was ready, the spirit nearly there. Colleagues had fallen all around me, worthier men had perished, and I was learning to let go of my fears.

  I thought of the Buddhist’s third truth of existence: Death is a natural condition. There is no way to escape death.

  In the long descent, I arrived finally at a place where what I had lost did not matter as much as what I had had, however briefly, in life. Here, I was free of bitterness and sorrow. Things, the essence of them, came to me, caressed me, entered and passed through me like familiar spirits.

  Riding the border of sleep and wakefulness, I dreamt of the green fields of March, the yellow wind of summer harvests, the eternal gray of October rain, the blush of Hanoi winters, the gold foil on a champagne bottle buried in Tong Xuyen.

  THE NORTH

  MAY 1954

  35. FAREWELL, HANOI

  When I first met him a year earlier, Lieutenant Gerard was a good-looking twenty-three-year-old. He strode into our inn, a tall, fair, and bespectacled young man, confident and full of promise. He struck me more as a scholar than a soldier. In fact, Gerard did enjoy reading and had borrowed many French volumes from our library during the dozen times he stayed here. But the war and his part in it had changed him. The longer he stayed in Vietnam, the less he read, and the more he smoked and drank. In the final days of the French occupation, he was wounded and discharged from service, a veteran and a wreck of a man at twenty-four.

  “What will you do?” Gerard asked me in French, the morning he was due to be shipped back to France. He was slouching on a stool, his chest against the bar. He pushed his glass across to me.

  “Go south,” I said and poured him his fifth whisky of the morning. “We’ve lived under the Viet Minh once; we won’t do it again.”

  “The inn?”

  I shrugged. “My relatives will take care of it.”

  “After we’re gone,” he said, meaning the French, “who are you going practice your French with?”

  I canted my head in that French manner of ambiguous acknowledgment without conceding a point. I didn’t bother mentioning that I would probably no longer need a language that I had spent more than ten years learning.

  “I’ll miss our conversations,” he said, looking into his half-empty glass. Gerard had expressive eyes, and I could tell he was referring to something else. The days of the empire were ending, and so with it the opportunities for French commoners to rise above their class by going to the colonies.

  “Merci, monsieur.”

  “You should go to France. A man can not consider himself civilized until he has seen Paris,” Gerard declared with a magnanimous wave of his hand. “Come with me.”

  He was joking. Playing along, I protested, “Monsieur, what would I do for work?”

  “France is full of Annamites.”

  I smiled. Although “Annamites” meant “the people south of China,” I somehow never got used to the tone in the way the French used the term. It sounded derogatory in my ears. They called our land “Indochine,” but I had never heard a Frenchman used the proper term “Indochinoise.”

  He continued, “There are plenty of jobs for your countrymen.”

  Indeed, I aspired to go to college in order to be a servant in France. Surely he must have remembered that only recently did France repeal the law requiring the highest paid colonial subject to be paid less than the lowest paid French worker. A Vietnamese professor’s salary had to be lower than a French janitor’s wage at the same university. For a Vietnamese, France held little promise, certainly in my lifetime.

  “Ah, Monsieur, but where would I find a girl?”

  He jutted out his lower lip and shrugged. “Whores are everywhere. Some go with Annamites.”

  For a French soldier, Gerard was not a bad sort. I liked him. One simply had to learn to be deaf when convenient. Gerard had come here directly from the hospital, hoping to convalesce in the arms of a woman. He was looking for Yen, one of the working girls he had seen regularly. I told him she went back to her village to find her family. Many refugees had left the city since the government declared a ceasefire. The last two nights, he was the inn’s only guest. He was drunk the whole time, shouting to no one in particular: “C’est la vie! They abandon you when you need them most.” It was impossible to tell if he was referring to the girl or the French army.

  I took the good whisky bottle from beneath the bar and filled his glass to the rim. “On the house, monsieur.”

  “You’re a good man, Thong.”

  “Merci, monsieur.” I raised my glass of grenadine to avoid his eyes.

  It was no easy task managing the halfway house to hell. The last few months had been particularly bad. The French knew they were losing the war. Both the French regulars and the legionnaires behaved as though it was the end of the world. Those with orders to go to the front caroused as if they did not expect to return. The convalescing wounded on their way home to France poisoned themselves with alcohol binges. Soldiers spent money like barons. They drank, fought, and beat the girls with a vehemence I had not seen before. Then Dien Bien Phu fell, sending a palpable shudder through the French population in Hanoi. But it was more than that. It was the death knell of the French empire of Indochina.

  Secretly, I was proud that the Resistance had defeated the French against horrendous odds. And I was also devastated that my family would lose our life of comfort and all our worldly belongings because of it.

  Cung came into the lounge and said, “Monsieur’s taxi is ready.”

  Cung took the suitcase. I held the stool for Gerard as he struggled onto his one good leg. The other had been recently amputated below the knee. His face reddened with the effort and his hands shook. We walked him slowly out the gate. On the shady sidewalk, old man Nghi was still in his kiosk selling his icy pickled lemonade. Gerard glanced at the tables where the girls and their pimps usually sat waiting for customers. All gone.

  He sighed, then hobbled the rest of the way to the curb. We helped him into the cab. Gerard sank into the seat, head lolling backward against the cushion. “Bon voyage, Lieutenant,” I said. His eyes were closed. The young lieutenant neither looked at me nor said good-bye. Indochina had already faded for him.

  I locked the gates, feeling more carefree than I had felt in a long time. Hoa Inn was closed. Its last French guest had checked out.

  THAT evening Father took the family to La Maison, his favorite French restaurant. The Vietnamese owner was an old acquaintance. We dressed formally—the last time we wore our tailored suits, which would be left along with everything we owned in Hanoi when we went south. The restaurant’s specialty was a superlative bouillabaisse. French expatriates and rich Vietnamese filled the tables. They drank and dined, laughing as though nothing had changed. Father called for champagne. Even Hung and Hong were allowed sips. Father raised his glass, and we raised ours. There was no toast. Father smiled. His hair was combed and slicked back, a dated style he had carried over from his younger years. Father was thin, but straight-backed. The opium’s toll was not yet visible on him. He was a debonair and striking man just past his prime at thirty-six.

  At home, we gathered in the lounge. Father announced that Uncle Chinh would manage the villa with the current staff. We were to pack one small valise each. Everything else must be left behind. Father had registe
red our family and his new in-law’s family for airplane transport to Saigon the day after tomorrow. My mother’s side of the family, Aunt Thuan’s family, and nearly all of my relatives were due to follow us within weeks. My cousin Lang would go with Aunt Thuan’s family, but his mother would stay behind to safeguard the clan’s interests. It was the greatest of her many sacrifices for the greater good of the clan and harmony of her family, one with a terrible price that she would pay for the rest of her life. Father’s younger sister, Aunt Thao, also chose to stay. Her husband, a former clerk, was now a ranking Communist party member.

  I walked through the empty inn. There was nothing I wanted to take. The villa had been in our family as long as I could remember. As a toddler, I had played in these rooms; I knew their every nook. I remembered Father’s famous parties, afternoon teas in the garden, my mother hosting dinners for relatives. But now these rooms also bore the markings of foreign soldiers and cheap sex. I went down to the bar and mixed myself a glass of grenadine. The villa was wonderfully silent. No music, no raucous games, no shouting. No drunken soldiers. At last, it was over.

  A light was on in Father’s room. I came to the door. He was sitting on his divan, a suitcase open next to him; inside a single change of clothes and stacks of loose photos. Father looked up and motioned for me to join him. He went to the cabinet and took out his opium apparatuses arranged on a tray inlaid with mother of pearl.

  He picked up the pipe and handed it to me. It was the color of a dark plum. “It’s truc bamboo.”

  “It looks like lacquered wood.”

  “It’s a polishing treatment the old craftsmen used. Truc is lighter and never cracks like wood. See how perfectly the end ivory pieces flow into the bamboo? Slim and graceful.” He handed me a thin brown bottle the hue of chicken liver. “Look at the opening on the bottle; it’s all silver.”