by David Bergen
Ada shook her head.
“I have seen the Olympics. All the beautiful sports of the Olympics. Of course there are very few Vietnamese athletes at the Olympics. We have never won a medal. Why is that? Because we are poor. We do not have time to train for figure skating or jumping or throwing the spear. We maybe have a good athlete in shooting or Tae Kwon Do, but, no winners. Still, I love to watch the Olympics. Do you, Miss Ada?”
Ada was aware of Yen’s feet and his small ankles. His shins were bruised and pocked by what looked like old insect bites. He hugged his knees as he talked. His hair was cut short and this made his dark eyes larger, two pools that appeared to alternate between longing and impudence. But he seemed innocent enough. She asked him if he was thirsty or hungry.
He said he wasn’t.
She offered him the apple from her bag. He took it and wiped it against his shorts. Put it in his pocket.
She sat up and pulled her hair back into a ponytail and told Yen she was going for a swim. He said that he would watch her things, that anything of hers would be safe in his hands.
She walked down to the water and waded out up to her waist. She dove in and came up for air and dove under again. She swam out past the breakers, feeling the occasional tug of the undertow. She swam for a while, looking every now and then toward the shore, where she could see the small shape of Yen and the canopy of the umbrella. When she came out of the water, he stood and waited for her to lie down on her mat, and then he resumed his position at the edge of the shade.
He told her that everything was safe.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”
“Oh, Miss Ada, you don’t understand. There are thieves everywhere. You can trust no one, especially here on the beach. Why are you here?”
She wrung out her hair. “What do you mean?”
“You and your brother walk around town talking to shopkeepers and taxi drivers. There is something you are looking for.”
She eyed him and asked if he went to school.
“Sometimes. When I am not busy with my customers.” He jabbed his cigarette into the sand. His smile was crooked, and this made him look older than he was.
Ada asked where he had learned his English.
“Why, is it bad?”
“No. It’s very good.”
He said that there were things he could improve on. “I know about contractions,” he said. “It is very difficult to remember to squeeze the words together. Isn’t it?” His tongue tripped slightly. “I am very lucky,” he said. “I have people like you to teach me.”
Ada was lying on her back. She said, “I don’t need a translator. I have one.”
“Oh, yes, I have seen the one you have hired. Dinh. He is very well educated but he doesn’t understand people.” Yen patted his stomach. “Here,” he said. “He doesn’t understand things right here.” He laced his fingers and announced that Dinh was well on his way to becoming a dentist and what did she need, someone to fix her teeth or someone to show her the path?
Ada ignored this and closed her eyes.
Yen said, “I can see that you are sleeping and so I will leave you. I will go up to the verandah behind us and I will watch over you. When you are ready to leave, just whistle.”
Ada opened her eyes. She said that she didn’t need his help. He might as well go away. And besides, she didn’t know how to whistle.
He stood. She saw his dark face above her.
“Good-bye, Miss Ada.”
She closed her eyes again and heard the call of a child down the beach and the movement of the water against the shore. When she sat up, the boy was gone. She swam once more, and when she was ready to leave, she packed her things and put on her shorts and top and walked up to the road behind the restaurants. She looked for a taxi or a cyclo but there was nothing, just the sun and the dirt road and a few houses lining the road. She asked at a restaurant about taxis, but the woman in charge shook her head and shrugged.
Ada looked around for Yen, but he had disappeared. His umbrella was still in the sand, where he had put it. She imagined he would be back and she thought she could wait and he would find her a taxi, but this would be hypocritical. So, she retraced the path that had taken her to the beach. It was easier going home. The sun was lower and the path descended slightly.
On the ferry, an old woman held out a plastic bowl and Ada gave her some change. Then she sat back and watched the harbor. She loved the light at this time of day, just before five, an hour till darkness. It carried her away from herself, from her reason for being here, and she welcomed the lightness of the moment, however brief. The sky was dusty and the ships in the distance were a soft gray.
WHEN ADA AND JON HAD FIRST ARRIVED IN DANANG BY TRAIN from Hanoi, they took a suite at the Binh Duong Hotel and then spent the next two weeks walking the streets, entering shops and handing out pictures of their father. Written on the backs of the pictures, in Vietnamese and English, was “This is Charles. Have you seen him?” They enlisted a university boy named Dinh, the son of the hotel owner, to translate for them.
Everyone had seen Charles. They had seen him walking, or riding a motorcycle. One woman, a young hairdresser wearing tight jeans, thought she had had him as a customer, though she couldn’t say for sure. Maybe not, she said. And she smiled. A hotel sentry had seen him with a prostitute. At first Dinh appeared to have trouble telling them this. He said that Charles was with a woman of ill repute. A woman of the night. He looked at the ground. Stared off into the distance and then sighed. “A prostitute,” he said.
“I doubt it,” Ada said. “He had his demons but that wasn’t one.”
“That is what the man saw,” Dinh said. “Though he can’t be sure.”
“Of course he can’t. Nobody is ever sure in this country,” Jon said.
Dinh nodded slowly. He said something to the sentry and the sentry gazed off into the distance, as if pondering a deep and impossible question, and then he spoke for a long time and when he was finished he looked at Ada and smiled.
Dinh said, “He thinks now that it probably wasn’t Charles. That it may have been someone who looked like Charles. He said there was a man here, a German, who had the same kind of eyes as Charles. It was probably the German man who spent three hours in the room with the girl of ill repute. That is what he believes.”
Ada pushed past the sentry and went into the restaurant and sat down and watched from the window. Jon was talking and Dinh was wiping sweat from his forehead with a blue handkerchief. Finally Jon walked away and joined Ada in the restaurant.
“It’s so calm in here,” Ada said. She motioned at the lobby and the marble columns and the beautifully dressed waitresses and she said, “I was imagining Dad coming in here and sitting down at a table with a woman he didn’t know. What would he talk about? What language would they speak?” Jon listened to her but did not say anything.
A few days later, near the harbor, a cyclo driver said he had taken Charles over the bridge and down along the sandy road to Maryann’s, a restaurant on China Beach. The driver said he had waited there and then driven him back. Charles hadn’t talked to anyone. He hadn’t been with anyone. Ask Maryann, the man said.
So Jon and Ada went to Maryann’s. They passed down through the furniture market, beyond a factory that produced mattresses, and over the bridge to the island, where a few empty hotels sat stranded and forlorn. They followed the beach road to the shantylike restaurants that served beer and pho to lovers who huddled out of the wind and watched the waves break against the shore.
It was a wet day. The rain drove against their foreheads and faces as they walked along the beach toward the entrance to Maryann’s. They sat inside, out of the rain, and ordered two beers. Ada used Jon’s jacket to wipe her hair and face. Her shirt, thin and white, clung to her body and her skin showed through. Jon wiped a few drops of water from her forearm. They shared a cigarette and then they pulled out their father’s photo and showed it to the young girl who w
as serving them. She turned the photo in her hands and studied it, made a face, and then looked at them and smiled. “Very handsome,” she said.
“Have you seen him?” Jon asked. “That is our father. His name is Charles and he was in Danang last month. A cyclo driver said he came here, to Maryann’s. To this restaurant. Do you remember him?”
The girl walked over to a stairway and yelled something, twice, and waited.
“Brilliant,” Jon said. “She understood every word.”
An older woman appeared, holding the railing of the stairs, stepping carefully down onto the cement floor. She took the photo from the girl and looked at it. The girl spoke quickly and quietly, and then the woman came over to Ada and Jon. She said, “I am Maryann.”
Ada introduced herself and Jon and then asked Maryann if she spoke English and when she nodded Ada said, “Did you ever see the man in the photo? He’s our father. We were told that he came here, maybe a month ago or so.”
“I saw him. He was here three or four times. He sat over there on the deck and drank and ate and then he went away.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“A little. He said that he had come to this same restaurant thirty years ago as a soldier.” She shrugged. “This is probably true. I was a young girl then. Many Americans have come back and told me the same thing. That is good. I need the business.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Jon asked.
Maryann said that it was probably at least three weeks ago, maybe more. On a windy day. “Like today,” she said, and she hugged herself and offered a mock shiver.
The young girl brought over a plate of fried fish and raw carrots. She placed it on the table. They ate the fish and watched the rain fall. Ada began to speak and then she stopped, aware that her words would mean nothing at this point, because they were words that had already been said, and so they each drank another beer and rode back on the cyclo they had come out on.
THAT EVENING SHE WALKED ALONE TO THE EMPIRE HOTEL AND drank coffee in the dining room and ordered a strudel and ate it slowly, looking out at the street. When she was finished she stepped outside. Down the road, closer to Bach Dang Street, two women stood side by side. Their faces were powdered white and they waved at passing cyclists and pedestrians. Ada approached them. They were young, maybe twenty, perhaps less. One had a round face with a smile that revealed bad teeth. Her breasts were small and she wore blue stockings. She looked at Ada and said, “Want to fock?”
Ada shook her head.
The girls giggled and the one with bad teeth touched Ada’s arm and ran her hand up and down the silkiness of her skin. “Beautiful,” she said, and then she chirruped, “Twenty dollars. For you.”
Ada turned away and walked back up toward her hotel. The boy Yen appeared and, walking beside her, asked if she truly wanted to buy one of the women back there.
Ada said, “You’re impossible. I don’t want you following me.”
Yen nodded. “I see,” he said. “So, you don’t like me?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“The girl you were talking to? She has bad teeth. I know a girl who has beautiful teeth. She is lovely to kiss.”
“I don’t want a girl.”
“But, you were talking to one back there. Were you asking her the time?”
Ada shook her head. She stopped walking and faced Yen. “Good-bye,” she said. Yen grinned and said good-bye. Ada crossed over to the harbor side of the street and sat down on a bench and reached into her purse for a cigarette. The air was warm; a few mosquitoes circled her head. She brushed at them and looked out over the water, aware of the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of the waves lapping at the retainer wall.
She heard footsteps and turned. A man stood a fair distance away from her. He bowed slightly and said, “Don’t worry, you are not in danger. I have been watching you and you are safe. Though you are foolish to be sitting out here all alone in the middle of the night. You are a woman and beautiful and you are a foreigner and you probably have lots of money. It is not safe for you to be sitting by yourself near the harbor on a dark night.”
He took a step forward. The dim streetlight revealed his face. He was short and older, probably fifty, though Ada couldn’t be sure. He wore suit pants and a white shirt buttoned all the way up, and glasses that were black-rimmed and thick. He seemed harmless, though it might have been the glasses that projected safety. He spoke English perfectly; the only flaw was in the perfection.
“I’m Canadian,” Ada said.
“Of course you are. This is even better. But still, the average criminal on Bach Dang Street is not going to stop and ask the nationality of his victim. And even if he did I do not think he would be partial to certain groups. Do you?” As he spoke he crept forward. He was now standing in front of her and she saw his clean leather shoes and his hands, which were cupped as if he were about to dip them into water.
Ada stood. She was looking down at the man, who shuffled his feet and stepped backward to give her more space.
“Vo Van Thanh,” he said. “Or just Thanh.”
Ada looked around and was conscious of their isolation.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will walk you back to your hotel. Is that okay?”
She allowed this, and as they walked Thanh kept a good space between the two of them and he spoke to her about the places they passed: the photo shop that sold yeast imported from Thailand; the pool hall that fronted for cockfights and boxing matches—he said that his son, who was an excellent lightweight, fought there sometimes, and as he said this he raised his own fists and feinted left and right and his leather shoes flashed; and the library in which there were numerous appalling novels about the glory of the Vietnamese state. As they approached the Binh Duong Hotel, he said that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Duong, had married a woman who was too beautiful for him. She had a fondness for men from other countries, typically workers from Czechoslovakia and Russia. “Miss Binh likes Germans as well and the occasional American. Perhaps you should warn your brother.”
Ada wondered how Thanh knew about Jon. She said, “My brother would not be interested.”
Thanh did not respond, though he did cup his hands once again and clear his throat. At the entrance to the hotel they paused and Ada turned to thank Thanh.
He said, “I knew your father, Charles Boatman.”
Ada lifted a hand as if to fend off a bright light and she asked, “Oh? How?”
“I was his guide. His translator. For the month that he was here. And then he was gone and you arrived and now we are standing in front of the same hotel where he stayed. What do you call this? Symmetry? Serendipity?” He said that there had been a sadness that emanated from Charles Boatman, and no amount of talk or food or even the love of a woman could remove that sadness. “He disappeared one day. I came to pick him up and he was gone. Miss Binh did not see him. The bellhop did not see him. No one saw him. That was a month ago.”
“What do you mean, love?” Ada asked.
“Oh.” Thanh took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. He put them back on and said, “There was someone.” His hands moved about as if he were willing them to pluck the words from the air.
“Who was the woman?”
“It is not for me to say. I observed. He did not tell me.”
Ada wondered what was true and what was not in this man’s story.
He said, “I will come back. Tomorrow. Please, do not worry. I do not want to be a bearer of unhappiness. I am simply a translator. Do you understand?”
His hair was dark and combed to the side, and Ada realized that he was a careful man, both in his dress and in his speech. She said good-bye, and when she reached her fifth-floor room she was breathless and she stood for a moment in the darkness. She knew that Jon was not there but still she said his name, softly. She said it again, and when she received no answer she went over to the window. There was a lightning storm far out at sea. The flashes were dim
and brief except once when the lightning went on for several seconds and lit up both the sky and the water. Ada saw what she imagined was a large ship but might also have been a gargantuan raft or a house floating out to sea.
She thought about time, about the future and the past. She thought about the mountain back in British Columbia where she had been raised, and how one year around Christmas her father had shot a deer that wandered onto their yard. Del, her younger sister, had wept and beat at her father with her small fists. Ada had been most amazed at the flatness of her father’s face as he held his younger daughter until she was done flailing.
And now her father was gone, and Del was living with a sculptor, an older man who had captured her and pinned her, just as Del claimed would not happen, like a butterfly to a corkboard. And she, Ada, who for so long had floated about, brushing up against people with whom she had little connection, had left her small apartment in Vancouver and was standing in a hotel room looking out at a perplexing and alien place where the language she heard was more beautiful because she did not understand it.
2
CHARLES BOATMAN GREW UP IN MONROE, WASHINGTON, AND IN 1968 at the age of eighteen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was not pleased to be drafted. He had seen the Time magazine photograph where a Marine pilot was killed in a CH-34 and the crew-man was crying in the background. The photograph of the dead soldier frightened him and the Marine’s tears surprised him. He was also about to get married to Sara Fonce, his pregnant girl-friend. They had talked about running up to Canada but she said she would wait for him. And so, after his training and during his thirty-day home leave, Charles and Sara married and moved into his parents’ basement and then, with the same resignation that would carry him through his next thirty years, Charles left for Vietnam. He was situated in Danang and was in the country when Lieutenant Calley and his battalion shot dead five hundred villagers in My Lai. He learned of it only months later, when he was back in the United States.
When he returned, Charles told people that he had killed only one man during his tour in Vietnam and that the man was an enemy soldier. His battalion was usually holed up in the hills that ringed the harbor of Danang. However, one day, near the end of his tour, Charles was walking point on a sortie near Marble Mountain when he came face-to-face with a North Vietnamese soldier and he fired into the soldier’s chest. This was the story he told.
