the Lotus Eaters

by Tatjana Soli

  Only a couple of weeks after meeting MacCrae, word reached her that he had been killed. She felt a grief all out of proportion to the brief time she had known him. Maybe it was his age, but he reminded her of the generation of her father. So clear that they had had unfinished business with each other. The pilot who introduced her to him handed her a bag MacCrae had left for her, and in it was her camera and a KA-BAR knife in a beaded Montagnard sheath. She took the camera to Gary, asked if he would help her expose the film. One shot, the rest of the roll empty--a newborn, still smeared with blood and mucus, umbilical cord stanched, in large white hands. Behind, unfocused, a woman lay on the ground. The mother? She seemed peaceful, seemed asleep, but it was a worrying picture. Whose hands? Why outside?

  "Let me buy it," Gary said.

  "It's not mine to sell."

  She walked with Robert through the bookstalls in Saigon as she told him about MacCrae's death, and he frowned. A young American civilian passed them and greeted Robert.

  "Excuse me a minute," he said. The two men stood aside and talked quietly, heads bent.

  Helen moved off toward the books, wondering if there was any truth to the rumors about Robert feeding information to the CIA. Probably it was her hurt feelings over his waning interest in her. Which was fine. What he did was his own business, but she didn't like his muddying what it meant to be a reporter. The table was piled high with weathered paperbacks in English. Many had pages stuck together, wavy with humidity. She opened a book, Pride and Prejudice, the pages brittle and yellowed. The incongruousness of reading Jane Austen in Vietnam made her smile. "Five cents," the boy behind the table said. Helen nodded and took out the change.

  After a few minutes, Robert returned, clearly pleased but offering no explanation of who the man was. He could have an informant. "I didn't even know MacCrae was still around. He turned against the SVA. Against us. Forgot whose side he was on. Insisted on living, eating, sleeping right there with the tribal people."

  "Isn't that what Special Forces is supposed to do?"

  "Forget MacCrae," Robert said. "He was an old crazy. Thought he knew better than we do how to win the war."

  "I trusted him," Helen said, testing the words out and realizing they were true. "He's what I came to find."

  A note at the hotel told her where to jump a ride to a hamlet for MacCrae's funeral. Since he had been operating in an area officially off-limits to the United States, his death and funeral were being hushed. She would not invite Robert; it pained her, the new distance between them. His own secrets and now hers.

  By the time the ceremony started, darkness had penetrated the hamlet. Rain poured down on the tin roof of the small, open-air school house. It needled the metal roof with a loud, continuous hiss that depressed Helen. In the threadbare, damp room, she waited on a rough bench, staring at the plain pine coffin surrounded by candles. The circle of flame extended only as far as the concrete floor, only as far as the glistening, bowing banana leaves that crowded to form a wall of the room. She had been asked to bring a copy of his last photo, and now she placed an eight-by-ten print of the newborn on a small table by the coffin. The hurt inside her was unreasonable, but that did not help stop it. MacCrae had been killed with enemy-stolen American weapons; his will stated that he wished to be buried in the hamlet he had lived in those last years, all his money and belongings divided up among the villagers.

  Various men entered in ones and twos to pay respects. These were not the military she had met so far. Like MacCrae, most were older; like him also, many wore the tiger stripes and black berets of the elite divisions. She read the crest insignia on a Green Beret who came in--De Oppresso Liber... To Liberate the Oppressed. Most were accompanied by Vietnamese and spoke the native language freely. She heard names of hill towns and base camps. Lang Vei, A Luoi, Duc Pho, and Plei Mei. MACV-SOG, marker of clandestine activities, whispered behind her. When a man wearing a Ranger uniform spoke to her, it was hesitantly, the rusty English words forming themselves slowly on his lips. She thought of her father, how he would have felt right at home in this group.

  A voice behind her made her turn. Darrow stood with Linh in the doorway, talking to a Special Forces lieutenant.

  When Darrow saw her, he bowed his head briefly, then came forward. "Why are you here?" He had hoped to hear news of her departure, heading back to California. Her presence irked him. When she was gone, he would stop wanting her.

  "You treat this like your personal war. Think I'm crashing a funeral?" All of her longing for him instantly turned to dislike. She regretted Linh moving off to give them privacy.

  Darrow stared at the coffin, kneading the back of his neck. She had gotten further than he would have thought. He couldn't imagine MacCrae befriending her, exactly the kind of amateur he loathed. "We were good friends."

  "Robert said--"

  "Frank," he said, "was part of the old guard. The men here are the last of it."

  She fingered the beaded sheath on her belt. "He left this for me."

  So Frank hadn't quite dismissed her. Of course, he was human, too. A pretty face must have appealed to him. "He must have thought you needed protecting."

  "I left my camera for him." She looked around. A lonely way to end. As if he read her thoughts, Darrow reached out his hand and laid it on top of hers. An impartial hand. She let it sit there for a moment, warming her skin, then pulled away before she got used to it. She would stay a little longer because Frank had taken her aspirations for real, not wanting to let his faith in her down.

  With a shock Helen realized she had stayed till Christmas, a disreputable and wistful holiday in the tropics. A large dinner party was organized for all the journalists stranded in-country. A hot and rainy afternoon, but the evening held a touch of coolness, a token of it being the dry season. As Helen waited in the hotel lobby for Robert, it could not have felt less like Christmas Eve.

  The party was being hosted in one of the rented old French villas near the embassy. When Robert and Helen walked in through the gates set deep in the high walls surrounding the compound, the courtyard was crowded with overgrown plants--heavy, succulent leaves, overblown blossoms beginning to wilt, heavy rotting mangos and papayas fallen on the ground from the overhead trees--all of it lit by thousands of small candles flickering throughout the grounds. White-coated Vietnamese menservants greeted them in the doorway with silver trays of champagne.

  Everyone in the expat community was there. The few that had them brought family. The majority brought doll-like Vietnamese girlfriends who wore either garish Western dresses or demure ao dais. They giggled like children and wrinkled their noses at the taste of eggnog. Helen had invited Annick, and Robert had brought along a friend as her date. The four of them sat on sofas and drank rum-laced eggnog while Frank Sinatra played on the record player. A pine tree from Dalat had been helicoptered in, hung with items from the PX: packs of chewing gum and cigarettes, tubes of lipstick, decks of cards.

  Dinner was served at two long tables with white linen tablecloths that resembled long galley ships. The tables seated twenty each, while the rest of the people went through a buffet service and balanced plates on their laps. The prime rib, mashed potatoes, and candied yams, all cargoed in from Hawaii, weighed down and crushed with nostalgia all in attendance.

  Someone down the table asked where Darrow was.

  "Oh," Robert said, "probably in some foxhole below the DMZ, warming up C-rations with a match." Laughter from the table. "During incoming fire." More laughter. "In the rain." Everyone laughed. Helen gave a tight smile. She had not seen him since the funeral. "Making us all look bad," Robert continued. "Especially when he gets the cover of Life next week."

  After dessert, guests went back into the living room. A Santa-dressed reporter handed out gifts, mostly bottles of scotch and brandy. Helen had gotten up to get coffee when Darrow walked in. His clothes so caked in dirt that only the deep rumpled creases were clean. His forehead had a few long bloody scratches across it, and the beginning of
a brownish purple bruise was swelling under one cheekbone. She almost laughed because it seemed an extension of Robert's joke, and he saw her smirk and turned away with no acknowledgment.

  "Where have you been, Darrow?" the host shouted.

  "I have an announcement to make," he said, pausing to cough into his fist. "Jack was killed to night. We were ambushed in a jeep patrol in Gia Dinh."

  The holiday mood destroyed, the host clapped a hand on his back and then poured him a drink. They went off to the kitchen.

  "The war doesn't stop for long," Robert said.

  "It's been that way forever," Annick said, and finished a full brandy in one gulp. "A land of continuous siege."

  "Jack knew that. He said it didn't matter who we backed, that the people didn't care. So why do we?" Helen said. She herself felt trapped, too scared to go out in the field, too scared to give it up and leave. "I mean... we have a choice. Why don't we leave?"

  Nobody spoke.

  "I'll be back." Robert went to the kitchen.

  Annick leaned over. "Is that him?"

  Helen nodded.

  Annick shook her head. "Poor Helen."

  Lights were turned off in the living room, and small white candles were passed out. " 'Silent Night.' In memory of Jack."

  Helen looked at the faces around the room, at the makeshift decorations, and felt closer to the people in that room than to people she had known all her life back home. It had only just begun for her--people disappearing from her life. Not only people she loved, but people she knew only casually, people whom she knew only by sight. The familiar world chipped away each day.

  After dessert, guests made excuses to hurry away. No one could rebound from the news. Robert came and said they should get back to the hotel before curfew. Helen nodded, hoping that Darrow would come out, would take her away again to the crooked apartment, but, of course, that was all over.

  In her hotel room, Helen kept the lights off. With difficulty, she banged open the rusted window to let in fresh air. In Vietnam everyone wanted windows shut to keep things--heat, humidity, bugs, bullets--out. After midnight, the only noise the swish of a police jeep blading down the wet streets. The male reporters were still enjoying themselves inside bars or in the brothels that locked their doors till dawn.

  She took off her clothing and, with the deliberateness that came from drinking too much, hung each piece on its hanger. In the morning, she'd go out to Ben Cat and tag along on a sweep made by combined forces. She would eat Christmas Day rations with the soldiers. The thought of the greenish half-gloom under the trees depressed her. Already sick of the war. The overhead fan creaked as she paced the room, smoking and drinking bottled water to stop the spinning in her head.

  She had gotten used to water at room temperature. Annick could spot Americans across a room because of their insistence on having ice. Ice tinkling in glasses. Anything to deny the crazies-inducing temperature. The military had contracted out the manufacture of ice-making plants to keep up with the insatiable American demand for ice cubes, ice cream, anything frozen, and now the Vietnamese were beginning to have an appetite for it. Helen had taken picture upon picture of Vietnamese children eating ice cream, and those were the ones always printed--they made readers happy, an example of America's civilizing process.

  She longed for the refuge of Darrow's room, but she denied herself its Spartan comforts. It was true--the soft beds and rich food and even the ice cubes, all of it a kind of game, keeping her from feeling things. The beginning of some kind of understanding had come as she sat in the tin-roofed school house at MacCrae's funeral, but it had been too ephemeral, had disappeared before she could get her mind around it.

  A soft knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She stood still, fingering her necklace, her mind flooding with horrors.

  More knocking, more insistent.

  Her heart jumped against her ribs. If it was the police, no one would be able to help her till morning. There were always rumors of arrests, people disappearing.

  "It's me. Please open," Darrow said.

  She grabbed a robe and pulled it over herself as she unlocked the door. Down the hall, her room boy with the long eyelashes was lying on his mat. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at them, a smile showing crooked, gleaming white teeth.

  Darrow pushed her inside and shut the door.

  "What is it?" she asked, but his hands gripped her shoulders, his mouth hard on hers. He had come straight from the party, clothes unchanged, skin still smudged with dirt and sweat, chin unshaven.

  He pulled off her robe and pushed her back on the bed, his mouth on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

  They made love urgently, without tenderness or words.

  Afterward he buried his head in her neck, his arms so tightly around her that it hurt to breathe. A shaking in his shoulders. He wept, his head on her stomach, face turned away from hers in the darkness. Their first intimacy nothing, the usual war time coupling of people escaping fear, but now they entered a place of their own, invisible and not describable. Words like adultery small and meaningless against where they now were. When she woke at dawn, her room was empty.

  It became their ritual--his arrival in her room at night. Sometimes to make love, sometimes simply to sleep.

  No promises. When she did not see or hear from him for weeks, it no longer upset her. She understood; the war consumed. Her bags were finally unpacked by her room boy, who carried the empty suitcases away for storage.

  Something shifted, infinitesimal, frail as a hair root reaching down through soil, anchoring the plant; no longer were there thoughts of leaving.

  SIX

  Haa

  To Civilize, to Transform

  After months of pestering military command, she obtained permission to go out on ground search-and-clear missions. The military was not happy having a woman out in the field overnight, but they relented. She learned the art of shouting like a drill sergeant, cussing out officers with expletives when they tried to deny her access, realizing that it gave her a surprise advantage in making her demands. They figured any woman that tough could hack it on her own. They trotted out the worn-out old objections of lack of bathroom facilities and lust in the soldiers.

  "It can't be worse than fighting them off in the officers' club, can it?" Helen asked.

  Chuckles and permission granted. It was also a trick she played on herself: knowing that if she was successful, it would be too humiliating to back out of going. At first, with the newness of the experience, there was an undeniable excitement as well as paralyzing nerves. But even with that, the fear didn't stop. The hardest thing was to give meaning to what appeared to have none.

  She woke at three in the morning and two hours later was riding a clattering helicopter through the dark. They were dropped in the Phong Dinh area in the smudged light of predawn. A known hostile area, as most of the countryside was now turning. The South Vietnamese troops insisted on flying in the next day straight to the village, letting the Americans patrol the surrounding area in advance.

  The officers were unhappy having her along, so she knew if she couldn't keep up on patrol they'd use that as an excuse to send her back. The only way she could keep up in the heat and physical exertion was to lighten her load. She stripped out a normal supply pack from thirty to fifteen pounds. Although she was issued a flak jacket and helmet, she stopped wearing them out in the field. She sat on the flak jacket on the choppers like the men did, but then she left hers behind. The soldiers laughed that she was trying to out-John Wayne them, but it was just a matter of mobility.

  The captain in charge of the mission was a twenty-six-year-old Swede from South Dakota named Sven Olsen. He was stocky and muscled, with a bulldog jaw and a smile that quickly flashed and then was gone. His eyes were a cool, hard blue that did not give away his thoughts.

  "The most dangerous times for the FNGs are the first few times out. They get themselves killed by stupid mistakes. Stay in the middle of the formation,
next to me, that's the safest place. Don't crowd up on the guy in front of you because if he trips something, we don't need two dead for the price of one. Try to walk in the footsteps of the guy in front of you. If he's okay, you'll be okay."

  They waded through greenish gray paddy water the temperature of blood. Two hours later they climbed up to a dirt road and stopped for a break; the temperature was already ninety. When Helen took off her boots, her feet were bluish and shriveled, with a circle of black leeches feeding on her ankles. She pulled iodine Syrettes out of her pack and opened them, dousing the leeches till they dropped off. The point man, Samuels, came over and started burning them off her with the end of his cigarette. Olsen had given her an army pamphlet outlining VC explosive devices to be on the lookout for.

  Helen buried her face in the booklet so she wouldn't have to watch the leeches spasm and smoke as they burned. "This says to bypass booby-trapped areas," she said.

  Samuels paused and took a drag of his cigarette before he started on the leeches again. "Then we should be patrolling Wyoming because this shit hole is honeycombed with the stuff."

  He had the wide-open face of the Midwest, empty and innocent, but his eyes reminded her of the men stationed at firebases too long. His tanned arms were knotted with muscles, a green dragon tattoo wrapping around the left forearm under his flak jacket. He had been in-country for eight months.