The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  Grandmother shook her head in amazement and told her nephew to go run for some tea. "I have to read your fortune, daughter."

  Linh frowned. He wanted to be alone with his new feelings, not stuck with some superstitious old woman. "Not now. She's tired. Anyway, she doesn't believe in that hocus-pocus."

  "It's okay," Helen said. "Let her."

  Grandmother looked at him in triumph. "She might be a foreigner, but she is wiser than some who were born here." She stared around the bedroom as she waited, and saw a plate on the dresser that held earrings and necklaces.

  After the tea had been poured, Helen watched as the old woman took her cup and studied the insides, frowning, then went to the window and threw the contents into the courtyard below. "There is someone who loves you. You must be careful his love doesn't cause this person harm."

  Helen, her mind drifting, said nothing.

  "I told you it's all nonsense," Linh said. He turned to Grandmother. "Let's give her some quiet to sleep now."

  "No, she's right," Helen said. "Maybe for Westerners their fortune is only clear after the fact. Backward."

  "This nonsense keeps this country backward."

  "Toi di." I'm going. She glared at Linh. He was a tricky one, but she wasn't afraid of him in spite of the rumors of powerful connections with both Viet Cong and the drug lord Bao.

  "Xin loi ba," Helen called. "Ten ba la gi?" What is your name?

  "Thua, ten toi la Suong. Ba Suong." Grandmother said something to Linh that Helen couldn't understand, and he chuckled, exasperated, as he shepherded her out the door.

  "What did she say?"

  "She said she is Grandmother Suong, who will bring your pho every day so you won't break your neck going down the stairs."

  Each day after that, true to her word, Grandmother made the journey down the alley and up the stairs herself; her nephew carried a lidded container of soup while she carried a newspaper sleeve of flowers she got from a niece who worked in the market. Everyone heard the story of the American woman who risked her life for a bowl of Suong's pho, and no matter how long she took visiting, there would be a line of people waiting for her return. Business had never been better. Some fool had even started the rumor that the pho had a medicinal herb that returned fertility and that was why the American had wanted it so badly. Business was booming, so much so that she considered opening another stall a few blocks away to handle the overflow. Fate worked in mysterious ways.

  She sat for a moment in the chair by the open window, her legs spread far apart in their loose pajamas, her calloused feet dusty in sandals. Helen and she exchanged the same few sentences that they shared, always receiving them as if new. Grandmother was insulted by tips above the price of the soup but was not averse to occasional gifts of packs of American cigarettes.

  She fingered the necklaces on the plate on the dresser, holding them against her neck in the mirror. Once, when Helen was looking away, the old woman considered pocketing a thin gold chain, but at that moment Helen turned and offered her the necklace if she liked it. Perhaps this one was only American on the outside, Vietnamese on the inside, like people said. Grandmother quickly put the necklace down, almost ashamed. It was a reflex, mostly, a bad habit, taking advantage of foreigners.

  On the days when Linh was away, Grandmother heated up water for a pot of tea, poured the cup, and allowed Helen to handle it. Each time she frowned over the contents, the fortune always the same.

  "No, no, I want to know the future, not the past," Helen said.

  Grandmother nodded. "Will be."

  "But the man who loved me died."

  The old woman shrugged and got up to leave. "Is. Now."

  When Linh returned to the apartment and found Grandmother's flowers, his face froze. He grabbed them up out of their vase and threw them out the window.

  "What are you doing?" Helen asked.

  "Makes me sneeze."

  Helen said nothing. The next day when Grandmother came, she stopped and stared at the scattered flowers on the courtyard brick. The day after, she brought yellow paper flowers, which Helen stuck in a bottle next to her bed. Linh spotted them as soon as he walked in. He grabbed the blossoms, crushing the paper, and then tossed them in the coal brazier and set them on fire with matches.

  "Don't tell me you're allergic to paper," she said.

  "Tell her to stop bringing them," he said, his face grim. "Never mind, I'll tell her myself."

  "Give me a hint what's going on? What's wrong with flowers?"

  He stubbed out the last of the ashes. "You wouldn't understand. It's a Vietnamese thing."

  "That's what you always say."

  "Ask me something else."

  Helen sat back in bed and thought. Her face lit up with a sly smile. "There are jokes about you working with Ho Chi Minh. That you are some kind of spy and that's where you disappear to. That horrible man I've seen you with, Mr. Bao. Where do you go?"

  "It's complicated," he finally answered.

  "Make it simple."

  "Sometimes one's past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don't know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time." Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the Americans, genuine and false. He had wanted her to leave and had lured her to come back. That division inside him the same as his father's uneasy relationship with the French. How could she understand? Even through all her hardship, she still saw the world through privilege. How could she know how it felt to be on the outside? Especially in one's own country? That the Americans, in their optimism, had backed the wrong side. A side that could not hold without them.

  After Helen recovered enough to return to work, Gary assigned her to do another follow-up on Lan, who had been sent back to her family. She had avoided seeing the girl, but now bought bolts of cloth and cooking pots, the most valuable commodities other than food, for the family. She pushed away the thought that these were bribes. For Lan, she got a simple automatic camera with lots of film. The plan started to form in Helen's mind of bringing the child to live in the crooked apartment in order to be close to medical services and schools. During the war, it was common for families to farm out children to those who could offer help.

  Linh didn't approve of her traveling in the countryside; he worried it would be too difficult physically. He argued with Gary about the assignment, and Gary looked at him in surprise but said nothing. He had not realized Linh was so far gone. "You're not responsible for her anymore. It's up to her to go or not. You or her, doesn't matter to me who covers it. People made donations, they want follow-up." When Helen was determined to go, Linh gave in.

  He sulked on the plane ride. "You answer a question now. Why do you push to do this?"

  Helen was tired of his interrogating her. "It gives me a reason to get up in the morning, are you satisfied? And yes, it has to be me. A woman sees war differently."

  They made their way to the family's village in Quang Nam province, only to find it had been burned down. The military didn't have records of the clearing. Linh discovered the village's name only by accident, walking through the charred remains of houses when he stumbled upon a small wooden sign in Vietnamese staked into the ground--THIS IS WHERE QUANG BA VILLAGE WAS

  .

  During the last year all Linh saw was his country being destroyed, faster and faster, in larger and larger bites. He couldn't explain to Helen the sense of physical sickness it gave him, the sense of despair. The desperate idea that anything that stopped this destruction was better than its continuing. What she didn't understand was that both sides were willing to destroy the country to gain their own ends. Whose side was he on? Whoever's side saved men, women, animals, trees, grass, hillsides, and rice paddies. The side that saved villages and children. That got rid of the poisons that lay in the earth. But he did not know whose side that was.

  When they contacted MACV in Danang, they were dir
ected to a relocation center the villagers had been sent to. After another day's jeep ride along rutted roads, Helen stood, dusty and aching, in front of a wired-in prison--villagers from different locations herded together, living on the open ground under a tarp after more than two months. Without work, they queued each day for food handouts from the military.

  No record of Lan's family, but after walking through the sections that had self-segregated into their original villages, Linh found a neighbor of the family. For a few dollars he whispered to Linh that they had fled early, not trusting the American military, and moved to the next province, Quang Ngai. "They were smarter than I was," he said. "They said nothing is for free."

  Over a period of a week, Linh and Helen traveled from hamlet to hamlet, driving along bumpy roads, each day ending with no luck. At times, they heard wisps of the truth, at times lies--the family were Viet Cong and had disappeared into the north; the girl had magically grown a new leg; the girl had died; the mother had run off--each new rumor seeping into the last until their heads were as dusted with possibilities as with the dirt that blew across the valley and plain each afternoon.

  "What is the difference?" Linh asked. "This is just one more girl."

  She didn't answer that it was because the child had mattered to Darrow. But it was also something else. As the war grew larger, her sense of futility grew with it. Since coming back, she had been unable to focus her experience except by narrowing it down to one soldier at a time, one child, one village. This was how she could tell their story.

  As the search prolonged, the rough travel and poor food weakened her. Gary, troubled at the delays, called them back to Saigon, telling them to give up, but she refused. She leaned on Linh's knowledge of the country to unravel the truth. Tell me, her eyes pleaded, as one more villager began yet another story, what to believe in and what to ignore.

  Linh worried what would happen if they didn't find the girl; he also began to worry if they did.

  At a roadside tea stand along Highway 1, he gossiped with a man about his punctured bicycle tire, only to find out he was a cousin of Lan's mother. He told them to go to a village an hour south. It seemed there was a falling-out in the family over money. They drove to the village and after asking around, Linh discovered that the biggest, most lavish house belonged to Lan's family. When they knocked on the door, a young girl holding a broom greeted them. Lan's mother was out on business and the father was busy holding a meeting in the dining room. They were told to wait. As they sat on a bench in the courtyard, a dozen people came in and out on errands. After half an hour, the father strode out, a short, bowlegged man with the rough hands of a farmer, and shook Linh's hand.

  "We'd like to interview Lan," Linh said.

  "Fine, fine. But there will be... gift?"

  "We have things to distribute." Linh waved his hand across the house. "You are doing well."

  The father looked at the house, puffing his lips. An expensive gold watch hung loosely from his wrist. "Hard work. Very busy. The girl will take you to Lan."

  He left, and the girl with the broom came back, took the cloth and pots from Helen, then led them to a back room. Lan sat on the floor with a stack of dolls. Other girls sat around her, wearing plain clothing, but Lan sat in a shiny satin dress, a black patent leather shoe on her one good foot. Her prosthetic was nowhere in sight.

  "Lan," Helen said.

  The girl looked up, puzzled. She had grown fat, and the satin of the dress stretched across her stomach

  "Remember me? Helen?"

  The girl nodded. "You never bring camera."

  "I did today."

  The girl's face brightened. "Let's see."

  Helen pulled it out and handed it to her, but after a quick look, Lan put it down, unimpressed.

  The servant girl came and brought soft drinks and peanut butter spread on crackers. Lan's parents had used the money from the magazine, plus donations that came in, to start several businesses and were thriving on the black-market economy. When Linh asked about the relatives in the camps, the servant girl whispered that the parents got angry when they had come with outstretched hands.

  After they finished the soda and crackers, Helen asked Lan to put on her prosthetic so they could take pictures outside; the girl answered there wasn't one.

  "Why not?"

  "The old one hurt," Lan said.

  "No one have time to go to Saigon," the servant girl whispered. "She's grown too big."

  "People bring me things now," Lan said. "Much better." After pictures were taken, Lan grew bored and returned to her game with the other girls. She didn't bother saying good-bye.

  As they packed their equipment in the jeep, the father reappeared. "You get good picture?"

  "Yes," Linh said. "Many thanks."

  "I know other children with problem. More pictures."

  Linh, red-faced, shoved the last bags in.

  They drove in silence. A convoy ahead of them stopped, the road had washed out; at least an hour before traffic moved again. They turned off the motor, left the jeep in its queue of vehicles. At the edge of the road, a farmer plowed the rice paddy that abutted the ditch. As a reflex, Helen took pictures--it would be decades before the market needed more scenic shots. Maybe decades from then, these pictures would be historical, like the ones hanging in her bedroom, showing a vanished world.

  Linh stood off to the side, his hands in his pockets.

  "I wanted to rescue her," Helen said. "Rescue fantasies. I needed to rescue her."

  "She wasn't yours to save."

  "Of course not." She wasn't Darrow's, either. He had been just as naive, thinking that Lan would give him meaning after all these years of feasting on war. No, better to just kick out all the props, to be clear-eyed about one's reasons for being there.

  Linh shrugged. "When my father was a young boy, the French wanted the people to forget their country. They taught us that our ancestors, the Gauls, had blue eyes. Now we forget with gold watches and peanut butter."

  They stared in silence at the rice paddy, the late-afternoon sun sending sparks off the water, the farmer and the water buffalo gone home.

  "My mother told me," Linh said, "if I got up very early in the morning before everyone else and went down to the rice paddy, I would hear the hum of rice growing. The women sing a ca dao, a work song:

  For a single grain of rice

  So tender and scented

  In your mouth...

  What effort and bitterness!

  Helen stretched. "I'm taking you out for a big dinner when we get back to Saigon." She had felt ashamed at Lan's house, so obvious that the American's beneficence simply corrupted.

  Linh began to refuse but stopped when he saw her look of disappointment. After their intimacy during her illness, he didn't know how to act with Helen in public. He didn't know what to do with this woman.

  "Good. It's settled," she said.

  He smiled, at a loss.

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "I am thinking I would like to sit at the Continental and drink a very cold gin and tonic and eat a club sandwich."

  On assignment as part of a "pink team," a hunter/killer helicopter team, Helen and Linh squeezed together in the observer seat of a tiny Loach on their way to join Cobra gunships going out on a mission. The pilot was early and asked if they wanted to run a little "scenic recon," a joyride through the mountains along the Laos border.

  "The two of you together aren't as heavy as the gunman." The pilot laughed, finding the idea especially hilarious that morning.

  They sat pinned against each other, the front of the helicopter a bubble floating over the land, nothing blocking their view but the metal floor and control panel. The razored mountaintops tangled in fog. The observation heli cop ter hung, birdlike, over trees and wrapped itself between rocky peaks plunging hundreds of feet into narrow ravines, dark even at noon. They hovered over giant waterfalls, bamboo thickets, hardwood forest, broadleaf jungle, all interlaced with small, jewel-like
fields of elephant grass. In an hour, the only human they spotted was a lone Montagnard tribesman.

  Helen's eyes hurt from the strain of searching for movement in a sea of green, the ride so vivid it was like a dream of flying, a magic carpet ride. Trees flew beneath her feet. The rush of green and sunlight lulled her, the pilot pulling up and the machine shuddering against gravity. She had a vision then, an infinity of green, her body tingling with heat despite the cool air in the helicopter. She burned and closed her eyes.

  Linh, sitting next to her, scanned the terrain through binoculars. He placed his hand over hers, then gave her the glasses and pointed to a rocky cliff. "See, Helen? Come back now," he said in her ear above the roar of the engine.

  As she focused the glasses on the dirt track under the cliff, a tiger stepped out into full view. The orange and black stripes burned against her eyes after the torrent of green. The animal stood calm, detached, eyeing the land below him. Only total isolation would give him the arrogance of ignoring the pounding machine overhead. He stood for another moment, head lifted, testing the air, as the helicopter swung around to pass over him, the pilot maneuvering for a closer sight line, his hand reaching for the M16 at his feet, but in a single flex of movement the animal stretched, his body attenuated long and thin, a wisp of smoke blown away, and the rock ledge was empty.

  "Damn, did you see that?" the pilot shouted, elated.

  Helen smiled at the pilot and looked ahead, but what she felt was the brief second Linh's hand had covered her own. Like a single jolt of electricity. He was right. She had been far away, closed off, but now she could see. She leaned and whispered, "I'm here with you now."

  SIXTEEN

  Tay Nguyen

  Western Highlands

  The war changed, and she was changed within it.

  A major battle was mounting in the Dak To valley area in the Central Highlands, the same area that had seen horrific battles years earlier in the war. A paratrooper squadron that Helen had covered several times before had been defeated, and now infantry companies were being sent up to fight entrenched enemy positions.