by Tatjana Soli
She fretted over Darrow's words because she halfway believed them. The picture of Captain Tong had created headlines. It had opened eyes, made the old man's death not in vain. In Darrow's words, it had made her feel her life was bigger, more important than before. But to repeat that, Helen would have to be willing to go out again and again on missions. She longed to be in that chalet in Switzerland, almost willing to turn her back on the Captain Tongs of the world for it. What was wrong with a small, selfish life?
Ngan came in on the nights that Helen was alone, bringing a bowl of scented water and a towel, insisting on sponging her down. When Helen at first refused, Ngan sulked until she reluctantly agreed.
The girl, only twenty, was already a widow with a small boy of two. She had bright, clear eyes and a high forehead, and Helen thought her quite pretty.
"Ngan, why no boyfriend?"
She giggled, squeezed water out of the sponge, let it run along Helen's arm. "No one interested."
"That's not what I hear." The other women in the village gossiped that a certain middle-aged farmer had proposed and been refused.
"Minh?" Ngan shuddered. "I study in Saigon one year. I want to be teacher. I learn more English."
"But no boyfriend?"
Ngan frowned, turned Helen onto her stomach, and made long strokes along her back. "Not farmer's wife. I go back to Saigon, back to study for teacher."
"No Minh?"
Ngan laid her head on Helen's back. "He is old and ugly. Smells like buffalo," she whispered, giggling, and Helen laughed.
"You want a young, handsome man?" She could feel Ngan's head nodding on her back.
"A good man, like your husband."
Helen did not correct her. "There's no one you like?"
"Linh."
Helen was silent for a moment. "Oh."
"His wife die. No family. No children."
Helen pulled the sheet around her and sat up. "He told you this?"
Ngan smiled and nodded. She stood up to throw the contents of the bowl outside in the bushes. "No woman friends, either. Very proper."
Helen feigned a yawn. "I'll go to sleep now."
The girl left the room, but not before Helen took new note of the straightness of her back, the small and delicate curve of her feet.
Alone, her breath slow and deep, she meditated on the tragedy of Linh's family. If one's meaning came from being a brick in the wall, what did it mean to have no one? To be unmoored? What did it mean in Vietnam not to be part of any family? Was that the answer to the sadness she sensed in him? The answer to his devotion to Darrow? Half asleep, she waited to hear Darrow's footsteps, waited for him to take off his clothes, to part the white netting surrounding their bed and close the folds behind him, for his lips to find her. A husband in every way that mattered.
Perfect stillness and perfect communion, and yet she struggled to stay in the present of her happiness, thoughts returning again and again to the puzzle of Linh. Of course, there was what had happened with the convoy in Pleiku. She probed that like a sore tooth, testing the impact of her mistake. But also, this news from Ngan. Was it true that he had lost family? What of Darrow's sanguine attitude to his possibly being a spy? Where had he gone off to now while she was camping out in this village backwater? Darrow. She suspected that even if she closed her eyes to the evils of the Captain Tongs of the world to live her insulated happiness in a chalet in Switzerland, it was a fool's choice because Darrow had already decided long before he met her.
The wariness of the villagers grew to friendliness--Darrow and Helen enfolded within the life of the village. Grain by grain, Helen's restlessness fell away; she became part of Linh's brick wall. A madness to consider going back into battle. But as Darrow's arm strengthened, she noted he again listened to AFVN on the radio and read what ever newspapers he could cadge from the USAID compound.
Each morning and evening, Helen joined the women to bathe in the river, in an area upstream of the hamlet partitioned off with cotton sheets. The women disrobed under the soft greenish light filtered through trees leaning over the bank. They slowly soaped while talking, the beautiful smooth bodies of the teenage girls next to the sinewy dark limbs of the old women. Many of the married women stood with jutting bellies while they nursed babies at their breasts.
Ngan now kept far from Helen during bathing. The girl had been shy around her ever since their talk, and Helen guessed that she regretted her revelation. Two small girls stood naked in the shallows, washing themselves while watching Helen. She called to them, but they ran away.
Helen handed out coveted bars of Ivory soap as gifts and created a sensation when she pulled out a razor and sat on a rock to shave her legs.
She had regained some of the weight she had lost out in the field. She slept long hours, a deep and dreamless sleep fed by the rich life around her.
Twice a week Helen and Darrow went to the USAID house quartered in an old French colonial building in the neighboring town, for both the American food and the conversation. Nichols had just retired from active military duty and now thrived on projects to increase agricultural productivity. He was in charge of building storage houses for fertilizers, pesticides, and improved grain for planting. Rumors were that he loved the lifestyle, including his young Vietnamese mistress, too much to leave.
The longer Helen stayed in the village, the more she made excuses to not visit the USAID house. She felt awkward in front of the Vietnamese servants, who were treated poorly by the American men. Darrow seemed oblivious; or rather, he chose not to notice. He happily listened to music and drank scotch while scouring the magazines and newspapers.
Nichols and Sanders were loud, both in their conversation and the music they played. Helen shivered in the cold gale of air-conditioning. The platesize steaks grilled on the barbecue and the endless cocktails made Helen feel dull. At first, she brought a towel with her for the civilizing effect of a hot shower, but as weeks passed, she found she preferred the river.
During the long evenings, she watched Nichols's mistress in the background, the one whom the village women gossiped about. Only fifteen, the girl's family had disowned her because of the liaison but had just bought another parcel of land with money she sent. She received more spending money in a week from Nichols than her father could earn from farming in a year. Nichols didn't include her during the meal--like a stray, the girl stayed in the background, along the edge of their evening.
"Why don't you ask her to join us?" Helen asked, poking at a baked russet potato imported from the States.
Nichols turned and eyed the girl walking down the hallway in her unstable high heels. "Khue? She's happier on her own. Getting some time off."
"I bet." Helen cut at her meat with a large saw of a steak knife.
Nichols squinted, his skin flushing a darker red. "You said she had a sharp tongue."
"Actually," said Darrow, "what I said was that she was too sharp for you."
Nichols looked at him for a moment, weighing things, and then deciding to take it as a joke, broke into a barking laugh. "That's it. That's what you said, all right." He puddled ketchup and A.1 on his plate.
The room fell silent. Sanders, his food untouched, cleared his throat. He had lost a lot of weight since Helen and Darrow arrived in the village. They guessed he had developed a pipe habit. "You must be dying to get back to the life in Saigon."
"Not really," Helen answered.
"I'm ready to test this arm," Darrow said. "Send someone down as soon as a message comes from my assistant."
"You contacted Linh?" She felt betrayed not only that Darrow had been plotting his return all along, but also at her own feelings of panic at the prospect of going back. Why had he chosen this public setting to announce his intentions?
Nichols smiled. "Oh, boy, did I cause trouble?"
"They've already replaced me on a couple of assignments," Darrow said. "Pretty soon I'll be taking pictures of supermarket openings in Amarillo."
"What I wouldn't give t
o be in Saigon," Nichols said, swallowing a small bite of meat and daintily licking his lips.
"Looks like you're doing fine here," Darrow said, nodding his head in the direction the girl had gone. He intended the jab at Helen, his declaration at her possessiveness.
"Sanders gets the pipes, and I get the poon." Nichols looked in the direction the girl had gone. "But there would be so many more goodies to choose from in Saigon."
Helen excused herself and went down the hallway. She hated these men and hated Darrow when he was with them. This was her last visit. She applied her lipstick in the mirror, readying her excuse to leave.
When Khue came out of a room, she was startled, as if caught. Up close, the girl looked even younger. Pointing at the lipstick, she smiled, revealing a front tooth with a large chip. Helen motioned for her to try it. Self-consciously, Khue closed her lips and applied the color.
Why didn't Nichols take her to get the tooth fixed? Infuriated, Helen decided to take the girl to a dentist herself. Khue studied the rose sheen on her lips with great seriousness; too sad and wise for such a young girl. Forget the dentist, the girl needed to be taken away from there, put into a school. How would Helen manage that?
Khue handed back the lipstick, but Helen patted the girl's fingers around the tube. "For you." When the two of them entered the living room, Nichols was sprawled out on a lounge, drunk. He took one look at Khue and yelled, "Come over here! Come now!"
A small, throbbing vein appeared along Khue's temple, visible as she stepped forward.
"Leave her be--" Darrow said, noticing that Helen had not come to sit next to him but remained standing.
Nichols grabbed Khue by the hip and pulled her down on his lap, wiping her mouth with his sleeve. "You look like a whore, honey. No good. Look like a little whore with that stuff on." He patted her cheek. "That's my girl. My good, clean girl."
Helen turned around and walked out.
"What's wrong? I just don't want you showing her bad ways," Nichols yelled.
Outside on the dirt driveway, Darrow stumbled getting his shoes back on. "We walking home?"
Helen marched down the road without a word. The darkness and the warm air were a relief.
"You mad at me?"
"Not at you. No... Yes. Why didn't you say anything?"
"If you're choosy, you're not going to have too many friends out here."
"I'm never going back there."
"Fine. But you're punishing the girl, too."
Helen slowed, shaking pebbles from her sandals. Darrow laughed and grabbed her arm. "What's funny?" she asked.
"What a puritan you were, how self-righteous. How outraged. I had no idea."
Helen said nothing.
"I lost that capacity some time back. But I admire it."
"You're ridiculing me. And you didn't tell me your plans to go back to work." As she said it she knew her outrage on Khue's behalf had also been for herself.
"That's the thing, I didn't want it official," Darrow said, suddenly serious. "All good things and all bad things come to an end."
_______
Preparations for the summer festival frenzied the village, and Helen and Darrow were invited to take part. Ho Tung knew their plans to leave but insisted they stay through the celebrations.
Helen had been thrown out of her stillness. All she could think was that she was losing something she wanted. But she couldn't tell Darrow what it came down to--them or the war, no longer both. Apparent to her that she could no longer go through a village from the outside, as before. Impossible to cover the war with such conflicting loyalties. Was that what had happened to MacCrae, she wondered, too many angles of loyalty?
Pigs were butchered, the cries of slaughter haunting her till she escaped to the river. When she returned, the communal house had been hung with lanterns. They were seated in a place of honor next to the chief. He talked about how expensive it must be to send a letter from America, especially St. Louis, and Helen didn't know what else to do but agree. "I know young girls get distracted," Ho Tung said, "but how can she forget where she comes from?"
Women swayed under trays of food, delicacies such as glutinous rice, sweet boiled rice cakes, shredded pork with bamboo shoots. Toasts were drunk with fermented rice alcohol. Darrow spent long hours with a translator to figure out what they should contribute. Finally it was decided beer for the adults and ice cream for the children.
During the afternoon of the festival day, a decorated plow was taken to the communal rice paddy outside the village and a ceremonial furrow plowed. Later, the villagers gathered at the community house for the ritual enactment of the rice harvest, a fertility rite with four goddesses chosen from the village girls to represent Phap Van, the cloud; Phap Vu, the rain; Phap Loi, the thunder; and Phap Dien, the lightning.
Work was forgotten; paddies lay untended. The women wore their best clothing. Unmarried girls washed their hair in perfumed water and wore it long and dark down their backs. Platters of food were there for the taking; at almost any hour one could find a crowd of people busy at some game. Darrow's arm healed well enough to get rid of the sling, and he and Helen photographed boat races, kite flying contests, rice cooking and rice cake competitions, stick fighting, wrestling, and traditional dances.
"I love this," Darrow said. "We'll travel the world, do cultural layouts. Wildlife shots in Africa. No more wars."
"You promise?" she said, trying not to show how much she wanted the answer.
On the final night fireworks shimmered along the river, ribbons of light reflecting on the water as young couples escaped into the darkness. A leniency in behavior was allowed for the night, and Ho Tung laughed that many new marriages were celebrated shortly after the festival. He had urged Ngan to reconsider Minh's proposal. Helen saw the two walking awkwardly together along the river, Ngan frowning. But the chief shook his head. "Ngan refuses to settle down. She has caught the strange, unhappy-making new ideas."
The next morning at dawn, everything returned to its normal state--the women again hidden under their dark clothes and conical hats; the men bent under the weight of their plows. The paddies inhabited again, plaintive songs hanging in the air, the previous week as distant and separate as a dream. Helen dreamed of a third way for Darrow and her to exist other than Switzerland or the war--staying in the village for a full year until the next harvest.
She ignored the fact of Darrow's healed shoulder. But after her dismissal of Nichols, and all that he represented, Darrow went alone and spent his days at the USAID compound. He had already absented himself from the place. Something barely started, already ended.
As she walked back from bathing at the river one morning, Linh appeared on the road, and her heart sank. "You've come back," she said when they were within speaking distance of each other. She held out her hand and touched his arm. "I've been dreading this day."
NINE
Tiens
Fairies
Linh had taken a picture of Helen with him while he was gone, had stared and dreamed over it often during the whole long month, an impossibly long time to keep away, but he had forced himself. When he first caught a glimpse of her on the dirt road, he was struck by how she had filled out, how her skin had bronzed. She looked younger, a flushness in her figure he had not seen before. But as he came closer her face went downward and hardened as she recognized him, and he froze.
"Darrow said it was time to go."
"I know." She fell into step beside him, back to the village.
He was a fool, he berated himself. Wasting so much dreaming.
The afternoon Linh had delivered Helen into Darrow's arms, he was a tired man. After he took his leave of them, stowing his camera gear in the USAID compound, he dressed in the plain clothes of a farmer and hiked down a dirt road. Outside the village, he climbed down the bank of the river to an isolated grassy spot, took off his clothes, and went for a swim.
The grass along the bank was plush and long; it fell in swaths one direction and then an
other, like a hand-mown lawn. The spot reminded him of the place Mai used to lure him to during their school days to sing to him.
The water cooled his body, the solitude a deep plea sure. A relief simply not to have to speak. In his earlier life, he had lived so much in his imagination, writing in notebooks, that it was now a constant strain to keep his mind directed out into the world, trying to understand others more than himself, to rewrite his thoughts into a foreign tongue.
After his swim, he climbed back up on the grassy bank, put his clothes on, and fell asleep under the trees.
The sound of children's laughter woke him in the late afternoon. Two young girls trawled the shallows for crayfish and shrimp for dinner. More interested in splashing each other than in catching anything.
Linh sat up, startling the younger one so that she fell back and landed on her rump in the water.
"You scared us!" the older girl scolded.
"I'm sorry," Linh said. "Come closer here, and I'll give you a present." The girls giggled and moved closer, and Linh handed them each a stick of Juicy Fruit gum.
The oldest girl had a smooth oval face like a polished river stone. Linh stroked her blue-black silken hair as she tore the first piece in half and handed it to her sister. She put the second piece in the waistband of her pants for safekeeping.
"Do you tell stories?" the younger girl asked.
"I used to."
"Please, please," the older girl said.
"There is one I've been thinking of," he answered.
"A poor woodcutter's wife passes away. He is very lonely, and in the market he sees a picture of a beautiful tien, a fairy, whose image he falls in love with. He takes the picture home and hangs it on his wall, and he talks to it at night, setting a bowl of rice and chopsticks in front of it at meal times.
"One day he comes home and his hut has been cleaned. There are delicious dishes prepared for him to eat. This happens every day with no sign of who is taking care of him. So the woodcutter decides to solve the mystery. He pretends to be going to work one morning and instead doubles back and peeks through a crack in the wall to find the fairy from the picture come to life. He rushes in and forces her to stay and marry him. As insurance, he locks the empty picture frame into a trunk. They live happily together and have three sons.
