by Tim O'Brien
Once they hit a dead end. The street simply stopped. Doc swore and jumped out and waved Oscar back with a flashlight, then pointed a new way north through chains of alleys and winding stone lanes.
Flight, Paul Berlin thought. Down the depths of Tehran, running.
He opened his eyes. The streets were wider now, the buildings better spaced. They were in the outskirts, it seemed, or in a section of the city that was mostly deserted. Fires burned in vacant lots. The sound of gunfire kept chasing them.
“Eisenhower Avenue,” Oscar said, reading from a passing green sign. “They like Ike.”
“Impossible,” Doc said, but it was Eisenhower Avenue, all right, and when the lieutenant spotted a second sign he began chanting old war ditties. Spittle dribbled down his chin.
Speed, Paul Berlin was thinking. He felt giddy. Speed, sped, spent—watching flashing lights, sponge dice jiggling on the mirror.
Eisenhower Avenue emptied into a huge traffic circle.
Suddenly, as they entered the rotary, the sky ignited. There was a booming sound overhead, then light, then heat. Parachutes held flares high over the traffic circle. An ambush, Paul Berlin knew, and Oscar said it.
“Bushed,” Oscar whispered.
He braked hard. The Impala skidded sideways into the rotary. Something exploded in the sky, a brilliant white light. Then the whole sky opened.
“Bushed,” Oscar said.
Paul Berlin huddled deep in the backseat. He heard the sound of artillery, the crash of illumination, the lieutenant’s singing.
“Bushed!” Oscar shouted.
At the center of the rotary, as at the core of a merry-go-round, a dozen tanks and APCs were coming to life. Their turrets began swiveling like tracking radar. Soldiers fired from behind the tanks—rifles and machine guns—and red tracers made pretty darts in the wind. The car bucked. There was the sudden smell of burning metal, then tearing sounds. The red darts made holes in the doors. A window crashed open and the wind sucked in.
“Bushed,” Oscar kept saying. They spun fast around the rotary. Slow motion, it seemed, but also fast.
One of the tanks fired. The traffic circle turned a funny violet color. The Impala was picked up, held for an instant, then dropped. It came down hard, still skidding around the rotary.
Stink’s door had bounced open. He was weeping, hanging on to the elbow rest, but the spinning forces were dragging him out. He screamed and clawed at the door.
“Bushed!” Oscar was shouting. “Bushed, bushed, bushed!”
A second tank fired. There was the same purple light. A gray stone building behind them lost its middle. The top floors dropped to the bottom floors. A mix of dust and smoke and bits of stone showered down.
Stink was screaming. He held desperately to the elbow rest, bawling, then a third tank fired, and a fourth. Holes kept opening in the doors and windows.
Paul Berlin tried to make it stop. “Stop,” he said, then louder—“Stop!”—but it was beyond his powers of control.
Stink’s screaming went higher. Eddie grabbed for him, caught him by the collar and held on. Stink squeezed the elbow rest. He wept and screamed, and round they went, weaving, braking hard, then speeding, and the firing continued.
Oscar hit the brakes.
“Reverse!” someone yelled, but they were already in reverse, moving backward now as the tank turrets swiveled to track them.
Then, fleeing backward, they were suddenly beyond the roadblock, outside the rotary, moving fast up a busy expressway, only backward, and Stink Harris was still bawling and clinging to the open door. The gunfire was now behind them.
A mile up the road they stopped.
“Bushed,” Oscar said softly. “I believe we been badly bushed.”
They helped Stink in, locked the doors, then turned into the expressway’s west-going traffic.
There was no talking. They rode along quietly, letting the flow of traffic carry them out of the city. Miracles, Paul Berlin thought. He watched the gentle evening traffic. Vacations ended, families going home. A smooth tar road that climbed out of Tehran, up a steep grade that finally leveled off on a plateau. Below and behind them, except for a sky still fuzzy with illumination, the city was already gone. Soon the traffic died away. A few incoming headlights, a stalled truck, and then darkness. Ahead was open road.
So straight on through the night, flat out through quartermoon dark as in the steppes of the far Dakotas, wolf country, and the road was smooth and fast.
Paul Berlin drove now.
The others were sleeping. Sarkin Aung Wan slept with her head in his lap. Oscar slept silently, Doc slept with his nose held high, the lieutenant slept with messy wet breathing.
And Paul Berlin drove. His eyelids hung on speed. Run, rush, recede—a rhyme to keep his eyes open, and he clutched the wheel the way he’d once clutched his rifle, unloving but fearful of losing it. The feeling of being flung over a waterfall, a landfall, spun out to the edge of the speeding dark. No control.
He thought of the sea. And for a time he was in two spots at once. He was there, speeding through zoo country, but he was also up in his sandbagged tower over the sea, where the tips of the farthest waves had turned pink like orchids and where, if he squinted to see, the coral of the shallow waters was beginning to glow the same sweet pink. Hurry, he thought. So he pressed down hard, foot to the floor, just hanging on. It was all he could do.
Out of control, and maybe it always had been. One thing leading to the next, and pretty soon there was no guiding it, and things happened out of other things. Like the time Cacciato went fishing in Lake Country. Raining like a bitch, the whole war sopped in rain, but there was old Cacciato, out fishing in Lake Country for perch and walleyes and bullheads. He remembered it. “Everybody has to touch it,” was what Oscar Johnson had said. “He’ll listen to you. Go talk to him.” So, sure, he’d gone down to the crater to talk sense to the kid. “Hopeless,” he’d said. “And it’s for your own damn good, and even if you don’t join in, even so, it’ll happen anyway, but, look, it’s for your own good.” So he’d pressed the grenade against Cacciato’s limp hand. Was it touching? Was it volition? Maybe so, maybe not. “That’s everybody,” Oscar said afterward.
And then Lieutenant Corson came to replace Lieutenant Sidney Martin. The way events led to events, and the way they got out of human control.
“A sad thing,” Cacciato had said on the day afterward.
“Accidents happen,” said Paul Berlin.
And Cacciato had shrugged, then smiled, and kept fishing in Lake Country. He fished seriously. He fished without the least show of temper or fatigue. He fished the crater from all sides, shallow and deep, and he did not give up.
A very sad thing. Cacciato was dumb, but he was right. What happened to Lieutenant Sidney Martin was a very sad thing.
Paul Berlin squeezed the wheel and hung on.
Late in the night he crossed into Turkey. The border station was deserted. For an hour afterward the land was mostly flat. Then it began climbing, and to keep himself awake he did the old counting trick. He counted mesas. He counted flattopped hills with sides dropping like the walls of skyscrapers. Buttes and summits and ridges as in Old Mexico, ravines cut by sheer cliffs, caverns, gullies and dried-up streams and land faults, lost sheep and wild dogs, dividing stripes flowing down the center of the road, howls behind him, beats of the heart, Tatars hunting him on horseback through canyoned country.
He drove hard across the moonscaped plains.
An hour before dawn he reached Ankara. The city lay in a gentle valley, sound asleep. He pulled off onto the shoulder, got out and rubbed his stiff thighs. The coming dawn was cold.
When he got back into the car Doc Peret was awake.
“Nomad land,” Doc said. He hesitated for a moment. “You all right?”
“I guess.”
“Not what you expected, is it?”
“No,” Paul Berlin said. “It never is.” He started the engine and pulled back onto the ro
ad.
It took an hour to circle the city and pick up the road to Izmir. Doc did his map reading in the hazardous light.
“Another two hours,” Doc finally said. “Maybe less if you wing it.”
So Paul Berlin winged it. Flat out through the Anatolian flatlands and down the townless, lightless country toward the sea, hellbent for water, knowing now the full meaning of desperado.
Dawn came up in the rearview mirror.
It crept up slowly, pinkish and bright. The land descended, icy streams tracing slopes toward the sea. The streams came together into a large river that paralleled the road.
Late in the morning, in a village called Salihli, they stopped to take on gas, had breakfast, then continued along the river for fifty miles before turning south toward Izmir. The country was green again. There were farms along the road. The fields were cultivated, and goats and sheep grazed peacefully behind fences.
“Salt,” Doc said. He touched his nose.
Stink rolled down the window and put his head out and shouted. The wind was warm.
Eddie sang sea chanties.
Then a last line of hills bulged up. They crossed the hills, and coming down they saw the sea.
They skimmed down from the hills. They passed across acres of flat white sand. Old olive trees stood in neat rows along the road, and sprinklers turned in the sun, and the countryside was brilliant with all the colors.
Paul Berlin drove fast. There were no speed limits. They were beyond the law. Soon they came down to the first low buildings of the city, white stone and white plaster, cool-looking.
He drove straight to the harbor.
He parked on a side street. Oscar paid two boys to watch the car, then they hurried down to the water.
It was exactly as he imagined it.
Tubs of iced fish and vegetables lay in rows along the wharves. Boats and tugs and sailing ships, whitewashed buildings close in against the water, the smell of fish, the salt smell.
They walked to the edge of the longest pier. They shook hands all around. Oscar was grinning, even Oscar, and Eddie and Doc and Stink were laughing like kids, teary, and Sarkin Aung Wan kissed them, and the lieutenant sang Blow the Man Down. The sea stretched to the horizon.
“It can be done,” Paul Berlin said. He pointed west to where the sky touched the sea.
“Yeah,” Doc smiled. “Maybe so.”
“It can be. By God, yes it can be done.”
Thirty-seven
How the Land Was
What Paul Berlin knew best was the land. He did not know the people who lived on the land, but the land itself he knew well. He knew Quang Ngai the way a hunter sometimes knows his favorite forest, or the way a farmer knows his own acreage. He knew the dangerous places and he knew the safe places. Digging his holes in preparation for night, turning a spadeful of earth and letting it fall, he sometimes felt fear, or suspicion, but mostly he was struck with a powerful wonderment about the physical place, the texture of the soil, the colors and shadings, the slopes of countryside in relation to grander slopes and higher angles of vision.
Quang Ngai was farm country. There was some fishing along the coast—shrimps and red snapper and squid—and far to the west there were mountains with rubber and fruit, but otherwise it was all farming.
Village-owned and village-run, the farms were worked not as private enterprise but as the enterprise of community; the land was planted and tended by the people who lived in the villages, and the harvest was placed in huge clay jugs, some of which were buried, some of which were taken to market in larger villages. But he did not know the economics. What he knew was the land. He knew that the villages, at the center of the land, were part of the land. He knew that the commodity was rice, and that the rice was grown in paddies.
The paddies gave depth to the land. Depth that he’d never known before, not in Fort Dodge, where the land was smooth with corn in August, not in cities, where the land was concrete. In Quang Ngai the land was deep. He knew from long days on the march that there was nothing loathsome about the smell of the paddies. The smell was alive: bacteria, fungus, and algae, compounds that made and sustained life. It was not a pretty smell, but it was no more evil or rank than the smell of sweat. Sometimes, when there was no choice, he had slept in the paddies. He knew the softness and warmth, later the chill. He had spent whole nights that way, his back against a dike and his feet and legs and lap deep in the paddies. Once, on the very hottest day at the war, he had even taken a drink of paddy water, and he knew the taste. He’d swirled the water in his hands, letting the biggest chunks of filth settle, then, because his thirst had been greater than the fear of disease, he’d swallowed. He had done this knowing it was dangerous. “Don’t never pee in a paddy,” he was once told by a helpful PFC stateside. “You do, you’ll get this sickness called elephantiasis. Real bad shit. The viruses live in the paddies, see, so when you pee, the little buggers’ll swim right up your urine stream, right up into your prick.” But Paul Berlin peed when he had to pee, and sometimes he had to pee in paddies: standing knee-deep in the slime, imagining a billion brave viruses paddling hard in search of unpolluted waters.
Whenever he thought of the land, he thought first of the paddies. But next, almost in the same thought, he thought of the hedgerows. They were not the hedges found in museum gardens or on the front lawns of old Iowa houses. They were thick, unclipped, untended tangles. Twice the height of a tall man, the hedgerows served the function that fences serve in richer countries: They held some things in and other things out. But more than that, the hedges were a kind of clothing for the villages. From far off a village was not a village. From a distance, even seen through binoculars, a village was a thicket of vines and shrubs, and only behind the hedges did you see the true village. Guarding, but mostly concealing, the hedgerows in Quang Ngai sometimes seemed like a kind of smoked glass forever hiding whatever it was that was not meant to be seen. Like curtains, or like walls. Like camouflage. So where the paddies represented ripeness and age and depth, the hedgerows expressed the land’s secret qualities: cut up, twisting, covert, chopped and mangled, blind corners leading to dead ends, short horizons always changing. It was only a feeling. A feeling of marching through a great maze; a sense of entrapment mixed with mystery. The hedgerows were like walls in old mansions: secret panels and trapdoors and portraits with moving eyes. That was the feeling the hedges always gave him, just a feeling.
The earth was red. He saw it first from the air, on the day he joined the war. A coral pink, brighter in some spots than in others, but always there. Later, as he looked closer, he saw it like film on the men’s weapons and clothing and boots, under Stink’s fingernails, on Vaught’s sallow skin, clouding Doc Peret’s glasses. The red, Doc explained, most likely came from a high iron content in the soil, and from an oxidizing process, but for Paul Berlin the origins were unimportant.
The war was fought with the feet and legs, so he knew the trails. Dusty paths connecting one village to the next, or the pressed mud along paddy dikes, or the beaten-down grass of soldiers who had passed that way before. Sometimes the trails were roads, though never tar or concrete: The roads were called roads if they showed marks of cart traffic or the wear of wheeled artillery. It was best, of course, to stay off the trails. But often, when the men were tired or lazy or in a hurry, they used the trails despite the dangers. The trails, like the land, were red. They were narrow. They were often dark, or shaded, and they mostly wound through the low places, following the contours of the land, and for this reason they sometimes flooded out during the rainy season. They were dangerous. No one was ever killed by a land mine or booby trap unless it was along a trail. Exposed, always watched, the trails were the obvious spots for ambush. Still, there were many times when it was better to face these dangers than to face the wet of a paddy or the itch of deep brush. There were times when a fast march along a trail, however perilous, was preferable to a slow march through tangled, hostile country. There were times when mission requi
red the use of trails. And there were times when it simply stopped mattering.
Small, unprofound things. The land’s peculiar heaviness. The slowness with which things moved—days and nights, bullocks in the paddies, the Song Tra Bong. The squatness of the trees, the way foliage seemed to grow outward rather than upward. Few birds: It was one of those details that Paul Berlin noticed but never understood. “Where have the birds gone?” he asked Eddie Lazzutti one evening.
Eddie stopped and listened. “What birds?” he said.
He had seen it in the movies. He had read about poverty in magazines and newspapers, seen pictures of it on television. So when he saw the villages of Quang Ngai, he had seen it all before. He had seen, before seeing, hideous skin diseases, hunger, rotting animals, huts without furniture or plumbing or light. He had seen the shit-fields where villagers squatted. He had seen chickens roosting on babies. Misery and want, bloated bellies, scabs and pus-wounds, even death. All of it, he’d seen it before. So when he saw it—when he first entered a village south of Chu Lai—he felt a kind of mild surprise, fleeting compassion, but not amazement. He knew what he would see and he saw it. He was not stricken by it; he was not outraged or made to grieve. He felt no great horror. He felt some guilt, but that passed quickly, because he had seen it all before seeing it.
Quang Ngai started at the sea. The beaches were clean, white, beautiful. It was the sea that Paul Berlin liked best. Beyond the sea was paddy land. Beyond the paddies, going inland, was another kind of country altogether, meadows and uncut brush that climbed into foothills with few villages or people. Beyond the foothills were the mountains. Beyond the mountains, and beyond Quang Ngai, was Paris. He did not think beyond Paris.
Thirty-eight
On the Lam to Paris
From Izmir they booked a three-day passage to Athens. Oscar Johnson made the arrangements in a series of shady tavern dealings, and on a mild Sunday morning in March they boarded the Andros, an old freighter repainted and made over to accommodate thirty paying passengers. The decks were simple sheet steel. Rust covered the chain rigging and rails. Below, the passengers’ quarters were cramped, dim lighting flickering in the companionways, but still it was a smooth and restful crossing. A true tourist feeling. Oscar and Eddie organized a shuffleboard tournament, Doc spent time reading, and Paul Berlin staked claim to a rattan recliner near the ship’s bow. Sitting there through the warm afternoon hours, he watched the islands slide by like pictures in a travel magazine. He had a sense of immense calm. Pale Mediterranean waters, the sun’s heat, mixed smells of oil and machinery and brine and fish.
