The Time in Between (David Bergen)

by David Bergen

  Kiet did not answer. He ate and looked at the sky, which had turned a bright blue. He told the blind boy about the color of the sky, comparing it to the bowl out of which he had eaten rice as a child.

  Perhaps because of the heaviness of their meal, or perhaps because of the satisfaction taken in providing for themselves, when they had finished eating, they lay down near the bank of the river and fell asleep.

  They were rudely awakened by a trio of soldiers who stood above them, giants extending into the blue sky. Two of the soldiers were young, one was old. The eldest spoke. He accused Kiet and the blind boy of being deserters. He said that he would have to shoot them.

  They were bound and blindfolded. The blind boy said, “Look at my eyes, you don’t need to cover them.” He offered them the rest of the pig.

  The men laughed and said that they should be ashamed of their fear.

  Kiet, blindfolded, was aware of the sounds of the river and the click of the magazine in the gun. One of the men was chewing loudly. A match was struck. The smell of cigarette smoke. The blind boy said that he would like a cigarette. This was denied him. The blind boy said that he had to urinate; he didn’t want to soil himself. The men said he was already soiled. Every time someone spoke Kiet tilted his head to catch the timbre and tone of the voice; he listened for possible forgiveness, tried to sense which of the three men might be most lenient. There was one man who had barely spoken. Kiet called out that he had a story to tell. Would they please listen to his story? And then they could shoot him. One man was interested. He asked what the story might be. Was it an important story? Was it erotic? Or was it tragic?

  Kiet said that it could be whatever they wanted.

  So it is not a true story? the men asked.

  Absolutely true, Kiet answered.

  Tell us then.

  Kiet said that he could not tell a story in the dark. He had to see his listeners. He lifted his chin to indicate his need.

  It was the quiet soldier who removed his blindfold.

  Take off the other’s as well, Kiet said. The soldier standing before him was young and thin. He was barefoot and he carried nothing except a stick that he used as a staff.

  The young man freed the blind boy as the other two soldiers grumbled.

  Kiet was prodded with the barrel of a rifle. Go on.

  He said that the story was an age-old one. He asked the men if they had lovers or wives at home. Two of the men said they did. Kiet confessed that he too had a lover at home and it was the idea of reunion with her that kept his feet moving each day. He said that he carried in his mind an image of his lover and there were days when he was no longer sure if that image was true or not.

  One of the soldiers interrupted Kiet. He said that the story wasn’t a story at all but a confessional. He, personally, was hungry and interested in eating the pig and if Kiet had nothing better to say then he might as well be shot.

  Kiet said that a story was only a story if it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. He was still at the beginning. And so he spoke. He said that there was once a young man from Hanoi who went off to fight in a war. He left behind a lover and a child. The lover was beautiful, but it was the child that remained forever in the soldier’s mind. The child was his blood. The woman wasn’t.

  The man fought in many battles and learned that death was indiscriminate. In his last battle all of the men around him were killed. He was not. That night he left the battlefield and ran. He crossed rivers and mountains and bypassed cities and fled from bandits. He was going home to his lover and child.

  Kiet paused. He looked at the soldiers and then continued. But at this point he began to tell his own story. He explained how the soldier stumbled upon a woman and a baby beside a stream. And how the woman tried to deceive the soldier, first by lying with him, and then by calling out for help. And so, said Kiet, the mother and child had to be killed.

  He stopped. Looked at the three men, who had laid down their guns and were squatting near the pig. At that point, aware that the ending to his tale should remain as distant as the hills beyond the fields, he threw himself back into the story and discovered details he himself had not known. He described the woman’s hair, her clothes, and the way she lay back against the grass and invited the young soldier to hold her. He detailed the length of her neck before it had been cut. He talked about the young soldier’s grief after he committed the act. “Don’t you see?” said Kiet. “He had no choice.”

  Kiet said he was thirsty. Could he take a drink from the stream?

  The youngest soldier agreed. The other two said no. An argument broke out. The oldest soldier said that the story was almost finished and he wanted to hear the end. The thin young soldier said that if the teller of the story was thirsty, certainly he should be able to drink. And besides, he was not sure if the story was nearing completion. He asked if it was.

  The three soldiers looked to Kiet, who shrugged and said that though all endings were elusive, a conclusion was inevitable. In the distance, beyond their backs, a small black figure ran toward the group, brandishing a gun. He was not noticed by anyone except Kiet, who thought it might be a comrade of the three bandits, or another wandering madman, or perhaps someone sent to save him. In any case, understanding that fate could not push him any nearer to death, he said nothing until the figure in black, who turned out to be the farmer, stood before the five men, pointed his gun at the oldest soldier’s head, and asked who had killed his pig.

  Kiet was aware of the sun behind the farmer’s head. He was aware that the first to speak would save himself. And so, he spoke. He said that he and his blind friend had been lost and had come across these three men feasting on this pig. He motioned at the pig, and then at the soldiers, who stood and backed away. Their guns lay on the ground and they glanced at them as if gauging distance and opportunity.

  In a rage the farmer shot above the heads of the soldiers and chased them off. Then, without another word to Kiet and the blind boy, he contrived a way to carry the dead pig home. As he tied a rope around the pig’s rear legs, Kiet took the blind boy’s hand and led him down the stream and out of sight.

  “We are alive?” the blind boy asked. Kiet said that they were, though barely.

  IN ORDER TO PUT DISTANCE BETWEEN THEMSELVES AND the farmer, they walked through the day and the night until heavy rain forced them to take shelter in a cave. They stayed there for three days with a monk who was traveling south. The monk did not speak for the first two days and on the third day he woke from what appeared to be a deep sleep and he asked Kiet and the blind boy where they were going. Kiet talked about finding the blind boy and he told the story of the three soldiers and the accusation of desertion and the blindfolds and the rescue.

  The monk listened to Kiet and then, as monks are wont to do, he spoke in riddles and half-truths. He wondered why it was always necessary to cover the eyes of a man you were going to kill. He said that sight was not everything; in fact, the blind often saw more than those with two good eyes and it was unfortunate that this was not understood. He talked about life and death. He said that there is always a yes and a no and that you cannot have one without the knowledge of the other. He said that life feeds on death and death on life. “Look around you,” he said. The monk had some fruit and some cooked rice and the three of them shared this food until it was gone.

  At the end of the third day the monk disappeared; Kiet woke from a sleep and saw the blind boy lying on his back, but he did not see the monk. The boy said that he had heard him leave several hours earlier. Then the boy asked Kiet to complete the story of the woman and the baby.

  Outside the rain had stopped. The leaves were still dripping but the sun was shining and Kiet saw the light as it fell through the trees. He said that there was nothing to tell. The story wasn’t finished yet.

  The blind boy considered this information and then said he preferred stories that had doors on them, so that when you were finished, you could shut the door and be done with it. “Did you make
it up?” he asked.

  Kiet said that the story was true.

  The blind boy nodded. He did not speak for a long time after this.

  Four days later, in a small village outside Dong Hoi, they passed a school courtyard where a beauty contest was taking place. Kiet and the blind boy stood back from the crowd and listened to the girls recite poetry and sing. Kiet described the movements of the girls and the color of their ao dais. He said that the most beautiful girl was perhaps the oldest; when she moved it reminded him of water flowing over a smooth rock. He said that her neck was long, her back was straight, and her breasts were barely visible.

  A week later they slept close to the bank of a fast-flowing river and in the middle of the night were set upon by a lone crazed soldier who waved his pistol in the air and demanded they feed him. They had not eaten in three days, not since a farmer and his wife had offered them manioc and a few grains of rice. Kiet told the madman that they had nothing. Nothing to eat. Nothing to offer.

  He did not believe them. He had them strip. He went through their rags and, finding nothing, circled them. He waved his gun before the blind boy’s eyes and elicited no response. He repeated the gesture. He turned to Kiet and asked if he was a soldier.

  Kiet said he wasn’t. He was aware of the blind boy’s thinness and of his own nakedness.

  “And this one?” the soldier asked.

  The blind boy answered that he had been a soldier with a North Vietnamese battalion fighting near Saigon, but that he had been discharged because he had been injured. He said that a blind man could not shoot a gun.

  The soldier leaned toward the boy as if to sniff him. He touched his scars and pushed a finger against one of the milky eyes. Then he said that a blind man could shoot a gun, he just had to practice. He took the boy’s hand and put the gun into it and raised it so that it was pointed at Kiet. He said, “Shoot.”

  Kiet did not move or speak. He saw the barrel of the gun and the blind boy’s finger on the trigger. He felt nothing. A few days ago—or had it been even longer?—he had decided that death might be preferable to wandering the countryside, being pushed about by the whims of man and nature. His hunger had left him weak. He no longer had a conscience; he was a rat tunneling his way from one disaster to another.

  The blind boy did not shoot.

  The soldier became impatient and told the boy, once again, to shoot. He had stepped back and was midway between the boy and Kiet. The boy’s hand, the one that held the gun, began to shake. He said that he did not know where his friend was and he did not want to hit someone by accident.

  The soldier laughed and said that there would be no accident.

  Kiet spoke then. Very calmly, he told the boy to shoot the soldier. He told him to aim at the voice. “Aim lower than the voice,” he said.

  The soldier laughed, thinking this impossible, and the boy, hearing the laughter, pointed the gun at the sound and pulled the trigger. He shot six times. The first bullet hit the soldier in the chest and the rest of the bullets missed because the soldier had fallen immediately with the first shot, which had killed him.

  They buried the soldier in a shallow grave near the fastflowing river. He wore boots, possibly stolen from some poor victim. These they shared, switching left for right and so on as they walked. Two days later, the blind boy announced that he could not walk further. Kiet said that he would carry him. He sat down, pulled the boot off the blind boy’s left foot, and put it on his own. Then, he stood and picked up the boy. It was like hefting a sack of chaff. There was no weight. As Kiet walked he talked to the blind boy. He said that soon they would find someone to feed them. They would eat and drink and they would sleep under a roof and when they had regained their strength they would carry on. He told the blind boy that he knew a girl in Hanoi and that he loved the girl very much and that he had promised her he would return.

  The blind boy answered that there were many men who had promised the same thing but they were dead and would not return.

  Kiet said that he would return. He would not die.

  He carried the blind boy for three days until, on the evening of the third day, the boy died. He must have died on Kiet’s back because, when they stopped for the night and Kiet rolled the boy off his shoulders onto the ground, there was simply a loosening of the body and a snapping back of the head.

  Kiet stood and looked down at the boy. He did not need to test for breath or pulse. He knew. He slept that night beside the boy, waking often to see if perhaps the boy had not been dead at all but only sleeping. In the morning he picked up the body and continued north. He walked alongside the rail tracks, waiting for a train. When one finally passed it did not slow down and he saw that the cars were full and that some men were sitting on top of the cars. He waved with one hand and even dropped the boy and chased after the train, but it eventually disappeared and he returned to retrieve the boy’s body. He was weak and had to rest often, sitting beside the tracks with the boy at his feet. There was a sweet smell rising from the boy, and as he walked, the boy’s arms and legs draped over his shoulders, Kiet knew that the boy was decaying and that soon he would have to bury him.

  He did this one evening in Quang Binh Province. Near a small river he set the boy down and piled rocks on top of him. He worked through the night, pausing to sleep and then waking to seek out more stones. By morning the cairn was complete. He left the boy and retraced his path to the rail line and sat down to wait. A woman passed by and gave him a piece of bread. He chewed slowly and felt the ache of his jaw and stomach. He saw the bones in his hands and arms and legs. The boots he wore were too large, and the legs and ankles that protruded from them were the limbs of a small bird.

  He slept. And in his sleep he saw the blind boy and the pig and the beautiful girl with the small breasts and the dead soldier’s mouth moving, commanding the boy to shoot, and he dreamed of the girl to whom he was returning and he woke from his dreams believing that he had crossed over and that all was well.

  THE SUN THAT FELL ONTO CHARLES’S LAP WAS WARM. IT WAS early morning. There was no fire in the stove and so the cold of the night had crept into the house and touched at his feet and hands and seeped up under his shirt and the sun was a blessing. He stood and laid the book down. Looked out the window at his yard, the pickup, the stack-log shed, the one goat grazing beside it.

  He would not have been able to explain, to anyone who asked, why this particular story had moved him, but he felt kinship with something. Perhaps it was Kiet returning from the war only to find he was alone, or the disappointment in the betrayal of a lover, or the shedding of innocent blood, though in Kiet’s case it seemed less random and more necessary. The fact was Kiet was a creation, a ghost wandering north toward Hanoi. Charles was intrigued by the author of the novel, by his brooding photograph and the sadness that seemed to hover behind or above him. Charles set the kettle on the stove and turned the element to high. He thought about his children. He thought how lives could slip away, undiscovered. He saw himself as a liar, though he didn’t know that the truth would necessarily help anyone.

  All through that day and the next he worked around the yard and pondered different possibilities. Then, on Friday, when the sun was trying to appear but not quite managing, he called on Tomas and, for the first time in all the years he had known him, asked if he wanted to go hunting over the weekend. He told Tomas that it was time to build a little trust and there was nothing better for trust than hunting. They were standing in Tomas’s kitchen and Charles was looking at the décor, the cement walls and the metal conduit for the wiring, and he imagined he was in a prison. Tomas grinned and put his arm around Del’s small shoulders. She was twenty-five now and had filled out happily, though sometimes she came back to the caboose for the night to get away from the moodiness of Tomas, who because he was an artist, thought he had the right.

  Tomas gave Del a squeeze and said, “I’d like that, Charles.”

  They left on a Tuesday morning. Drove up Highway 97 toward Princ
e George and stayed in a motel with two single beds. At night Charles woke and he heard Tomas breathing deeply, with a slight whistle at the intake. He thought of Del lying beside this man. The evening before, they had eaten dinner at a restaurant in town, and they had talked about Tomas’s art and about luck and about Del. Tomas claimed it was all luck, his success, his meeting Del. “I was invited to a dinner just by chance, and at that dinner I met a girl who happened to like me and I happened to like her and from there love took its own route. It’s funny, but I’m certain that we can’t plan love.” He had been eating asparagus in hollandaise as he spoke, spearing tails and folding them into his mouth, and for some reason Charles pictured the asparagus as intimate parts of his daughter. Then Tomas talked about the gift shop Del was running in the Valley and how they planned to sell some of Tomas’s art down there. It was Del’s idea. “The smaller pieces,” Tomas said. “She figures there’s a market, that I should be selling as well here in Canada as I do in Europe, and who am I to argue with that?”

  Charles finished his baked potato and drank the last of his beer and said that he had had his doubts but it was obvious Del was happy and he, Charles, wasn’t a destroyer of happiness.

  Tomas said, “There was a time, at the beginning, when you frightened me.” He smiled slightly and eyed Charles. “That day you came to visit me in my shop. You remember?”