by David Bergen
He asked Thanh if this was it. Was he sure this was the village Charles had asked for.
Thanh addressed an old woman. He asked her a question and the woman looked around and said something. Thanh turned to Charles and said that this was the village.
Charles said, “Ask her if she was living here during the war.”
Thanh did this. The woman shook her head and spoke quickly.
Thanh said, “There is only one family left from the war. The mother is in Danang today with the grandfather. The son is at work. There is nobody else.”
They walked through the village and then turned and walked back toward the car. Charles looked for the road, the rice paddies, the ditch. Nothing was familiar. He pushed the children away and walked out toward the fields and then stood and looked back at the village. The children had followed him. He told them to go away. They laughed and one boy kicked dirt at Charles’s feet.
In the car, driving back, he asked Thanh how he had survived the war.
Thanh said that the story of his own life was insignificant and he went on to say, “It is just my life.”
Charles asked him again what he had done. How he had lived.
They were sitting in the back of the car. The driver was an older man who wore a chauffeur’s hat. Thanh placed a hand on Charles’s forearm and leaned into him and said that his story was meager, that it was one thing to survive the war but another to survive after the war. But if Charles insisted, he would tell him.
And so he told his story. In May 1975, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers who had fought for the South were ordered by the new government to register and attend reeducation camps. Each person was to appear with enough paper, pens, clothes, mosquito nets, personal effects, food or money to last ten days. Thanh, who had served with the South Vietnamese Army in Danang as an airtraffic controller, did not trust the promises of the new government, and so he left his wife and three young boys and ran into the hills and hid. He survived on roots and manioc and the occasional bowl of rice from a farmer. In March 1976, he was turned in by one of these same farmers, and he was placed in a reeducation camp.
He was in the camps for two years. There was constant hunger, he had to work six days a week, autobiographical essays were written in which he confessed to atrocities that he had not committed, he was beaten, his fellow prisoners were beaten. They were given one cup of water per day, and with this one had to quench his thirst, bathe, and wash clothes.
But it was the hunger that consumed the prisoners. Thanh said that when he slept, he dreamed of food. He would wake, and all around him in the dark was the sound of chewing and he realized that the prisoners were chewing in their sleep and that everyone, like him, was dreaming of food. He killed mice and slipped them into his trouser pockets. He ate them at night, his knees curled up to his chest. He ate the head first and then the feet and tail, and finally the body. He chewed slowly, and when he was finished he was even more hungry than before. All prisoners caught both mice and lizards, but eventually these disappeared and then the prey became centipedes and worms and spiders. Early one morning, Trinh Bao, a doctor who would die within the week from an infection, roasted a lizard over a fire and slowly ate it while the other prisoners squatted, coveting his feast.
Everyone talked of eating: while they worked, while they walked to and from work, and always before sleeping. When they did not talk of food, they thought about food. Thanh remembered his mother’s barbecued pork with the finest slivers of ginger. One night he heard Hien, his neighbor, chewing quietly on something. Hien was weak and small and, during the day, was expected to dig up large roots with a small wooden spade. Thanh tried to help him, but it was difficult. The guards were not sentimental and disliked one prisoner helping another. Thanh touched Hien’s back in the dark and whispered, “What are you eating? Be more quiet, or you’ll be heard.”
Hien stopped chewing, but later in the night, Thanh heard him again. In the morning Thanh noticed that the tip of Hien’s finger was missing. Hien had eaten it. That day, Thanh caught a small snake and crushed its head with a shovel. He carried it back to the camp and tried to share it with Hien, but Hien refused. Again, at night, Hien chewed at his hand. Madness settled in like a fog. Thanh did not know who was mad, he or Hien. During the day Hien wrapped his hand in a dirty cloth and during the night he ate. The hand became bruised and swollen. Thanh told Hien to go to the clinic. Hien laughed at him. His teeth were falling out, his hair was thin, his knees were bigger than his hips. He had been a pharmacist in Hue and he had four daughters and a wife who were waiting for him. His pharmacy had been turned into a government office. One night, in a moment of clarity, he told Thanh that he would not see his daughters again. The following morning he attacked a guard who was using the South Vietnamese flag as a dusting rag. Hien was beaten and then tied to a pole in the middle of the camp. He died two weeks later.
Thanh said that everything seemed distant. “Like Hien. I talk about him, but with little passion. He is dead. I am alive. And every day I need to feed myself, to feed my children. History does not fill my stomach.”
Charles was aware of Thanh’s affect, of the movement of his hands as he spoke. He seemed both animated and sorry, as if his desire to speak should be a cause of shame. He asked Thanh what had happened. How did he survive?
Thanh said that yes, he had survived. Obviously, he said, look at me. I am here sitting talking to you, Charles. He said that he was moved to Dong Hai, another prison outside of Hue. There he worked all day and through the night, slinging pieces of clay. When he was released in 1978, he went back to Danang, and to his wife, Nguyen Linh, and his three sons, who were now three and five and seven. He did not want revenge.
He taught his sons English. He read to them from books that he had stumbled across, or from books that his father, a former university professor, had kept from among his large library. He read Tess and Hard Times. There was a tattered copy of The Old Man and the Sea and this he read over and over again. Ivan Denisovich he read once, and he learned that all prisons are the same, only some are a little bit worse.
Of his three sons, he said, one would run to America, where he would study architecture at the University of Michigan, one would move down to Ho Chi Minh City to study medicine, and the youngest would stay in Danang and become a teacher and a boxer.
Because of his politics Thanh said that he could not go back to the job he had left. So, he acquired a small shack on Ong Ich Khiem Street and he set up a hardware store. He sold nails and turpentine and screws and lightbulbs and electrical wire of various gauges and brushes and bolts. He did not make enough to support his family. His wife worked as a cleaner at the hospital. His mother-in-law took care of the boys when they were young. And Thanh worked as a translator; for the Gouds family, sometimes for other foreigners. A sister in Canberra sent twenty dollars a month. He saw himself as defiant; sometimes he told friends that he was the true proletariat—he had no car, no real business, and no home. He had nothing to lose.
But still he behaved. Because to behave was to survive and survival was something he had learned while in prison. Survival required patience and a subtle cunning. And loyalty, Thanh said. When the last U.S. helicopters had prepared to lift off from the airport in Danang, Thanh had been on one. He had stood in the open doorway, the downdraft beating at his hair, and he had looked out at the city in the distance and the crowds of Vietnamese pushing against the wall of soldiers and he had thought of his mother and father and he had thought of his wife and he had turned to his friend who was also on the helicopter and said, “I cannot.” He had climbed off the helicopter and walked back into the city. Two months later he fled into the hills.
WHEN CHARLES HAD TOLD ELAINE THAT HE WAS LOST—A CONFESSION for which he was immediately sorry—she had not said anything, simply offered him a drink. She poured him a beer and handed it to him and he was aware of the shape of her body beneath her dress. He thought that he might be attracted to her and this was alarming. Here he w
as, sitting across from Elaine Gouds, and they were drinking together, and in his mind he was removing her dress while her husband was off roller-skating with their children. Becoming involved with an American woman from Kansas City had not been the goal of this trip.
He stood and looked over the balustrade at the street. He said, “Thanh told me his story today. About his life after the war.”
“Oh,” Elaine said. “I have heard bits of it. It sounds so sad.”
“I don’t know if he would put it that way.”
“You’re right, I sound patronizing.”
“He was so matter-of-fact.”
“Jack is convinced that grief and despair are a luxury and that a man like Thanh does not have the money or time or even the physical space for that luxury.”
“He may be right,” Charles said. Then he told her that he had traveled to a small village with Thanh. He had hoped to find something there, perhaps recall a memory, and he had found very little. He shrugged and said that the village had been tiny and dirty and nondescript, not the kind of place where anything momentous would have happened. “It felt small,” he said. “Really small.” Elaine crossed her legs. Her right sandal hung loose and Charles saw the narrowness of her foot. She seemed to be considering what he had just told her. She said that Jack and the children would be returning soon and did he want another beer. He accepted.
While she was gone he wandered from the balcony into the adjoining room. It was set up as a guest room, with a small cot and a side table and bamboo dresser. There was a photo of Elaine as a younger woman, standing beside a horse. She wore riding gear: the breeches, the boots, the hat, the gloves. The horse stood high above her. The shape of her bent elbow and the tightness of the breeches around her calves. The hat shadowed her eyes. He recognized the posture, the same one she used when she and Jack were at each other; sardonic and skeptical, yet precise too, especially in the way she held her head.
Elaine came back and touched his shoulder as she handed him another beer. She said, “What you were talking about. Being lost. Every morning I wake and imagine that today my life will tip over into chaos. And then when it doesn’t, when I come safely to the end of the day, I am so relieved that I begin to think that Vietnam is not such a bad place and that any fear I might have felt must have been my imagination.”
Charles watched Elaine carefully as she spoke. She had moved away from him and he saw her profile and the movement of her mouth. He wondered what it would be like to kiss her neck.
WHEN HE MET THANH, THE NEXT TIME, AT A CAFÉ NEAR THE harbor, Thanh was sitting with another man, whom he introduced as Hoang Vu. Thanh said that Vu was an artist, quite well known, but not as well known as Pablo Picasso. He chuckled, called for more iced coffee, and then lit a cigarette and studied Charles. “It is a fact,” he said, “that a man from North America would not know many Vietnamese artists.”
Charles had to admit that this was true, though he had just read a novel written by a Vietnamese author. “Dang Tho,” he said. “Do you know it?”
“Everyone has read Dang Tho’s novel,” Thanh said. He confessed that he had certain misgivings about the novel. “This is a book that wants to say it is telling the truth, but it is very individualistic. Dang Tho took all those horrific years and said, ‘This is about me.’”
Charles said, “The author had a story he needed to tell. Besides, any war and any suffering is about the individual. When I read the book it was like the author was sitting beside me and telling me secrets that he had not told anyone else. A young soldier starts out naïve and then realizes what he’s gotten into, the danger, the chance, the throwing of the dice, which are probably loaded, and all he wants is to get back to Hanoi, to his lover. I haven’t been able to climb up out of it.” Charles paused, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled.
Vu had been sitting with his legs crossed, looking out at the street as Charles and Thanh talked. He was a thin, sharp-featured man with long dark hair. Now he said, “Poet. That is what Tho means. His novel has been banned here in Vietnam. Some say that it didn’t recognize the glory of the North’s victory, or the sacrifices, others say it was too bleak.” He shook his head. “An artist shouldn’t try to please the public, he simply tells the truth as he sees it. Dang Tho wrote the novel five years ago, became famous, and since then only his close friends see him. He is, what is the word, a hermit?”
Charles said that hermit was right. Or recluse.
Vu repeated the word recluse, emphasizing the first syllable. “Sort of that,” he said.
“Though,” Thanh told Charles, passing a hand across his glass, “Vu here has met him.”
“Once or twice only,” Vu said. “In Hanoi. I know that he lives with his parents in an area close to the university, and that he has two children and that he cannot find work because his book has been banned. He also drinks at a certain café every evening until nine. His wife is an artist, this is how I met him. She is ten years younger than he is.” Vu looked up. “A good artist.”
For a moment, knowing this man had met Dang Tho, Charles felt estranged, as if the author had become suddenly separate from his character, Kiet. An image had been presented of a man who was cut off from the world and he imagined Dang Tho flailing helplessly.
Vu studied Charles. He leaned forward and confessed that Charles appeared to be a man who was more serious than most visitors. He was curious if this was true or not. He would like to talk more. He took from his bag a pen and paper and he wrote down his address. He handed it to Charles, who slid the paper into his pocket.
Thanh, as if to reenter the conversation, said that there were two things to remember in Vietnam. “First, everyone you meet will promise you things that they cannot give, and second, do not let this country defeat you.”
He said, “Let me tell you a story. About me. About Vietnam. My son was to go to America on a scholarship. University of Michigan. We had the airline tickets and everything was set except for the final approval. A signature of course. Well, I had a friend who could get the signature for me. He said, ‘Thanh, you will have to do this and this and this.’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Thanh, you don’t understand.’ And this friend, this colleague, then refused to help me. Over a six-week period I went back to him again and again, and still he refused. Then two days before my son’s flight I returned to this man and I said, ‘I need the signature tonight or it is too late.’ We stayed up till midnight talking. Then at the end of the evening he leaned forward and said, ‘Thanh, I trust you, you are my friend. I will get the signature for your son.’ I was surprised. I said good-bye, went home, put some money in an envelope, and returned to this man’s house under the pretext of having misplaced my motorcycle keys. I knocked on the door. He let me in. I pretended to search. I slipped the envelope under his pillow, I found my keys, and we said good-bye.”
Thanh paused here.
“Did this man know you had given him money?” Charles asked.
“Of course.”
“And how did you know how much to give?”
“I gave as much as I had.”
Walking home later, Charles put his hand in a pocket and felt the piece of paper that Vu had given him. Back in his room he slid it into the novel and then he sat at his desk and began to write a letter to his children. He spoke of the sights and smells and sounds of the country, of the old women who called out for rubber or glass or paper. He said that just today he had passed by a man wheeling a cart in which there lay a whole fish the size of a couch. A marlin, he thought, or perhaps a kingfish. It had shone silver and black. He said that in the late afternoons, down by the tennis court, young boys in their school uniforms played soccer barefoot, and their brown skinny legs reminded him of when Ada, Del, and Jon would run through the forest on the mountain, their voices calling out, and with each cry he’d known where they were.
ONE EVENING, LATE, HE PLAYED SCRABBLE WITH JACK AND ELAINE out on their balcony. The mosquitoes were persistent, so Jack lit some coils and
placed them near Elaine’s ankles. As he squatted he put his hand on Elaine’s thigh, very lightly, very briefly, and then he stood. Charles realized that he had never noticed any physical contact between Jack and Elaine before. He suffered a moment of jealousy and pushed it away.
Elaine served Brie and crackers. She was quite happy to have found the Brie. There was a store down the street that catered to Europeans, and she had bought the Brie and some dark chocolate. She had also found a bottle of Beaujolais that tasted slightly sour. Still they drank and ate. Jack talked about his vision for the people in the province of Quang Ngai. It was an area of the country that during the war had been sympathetic to the North and to Communism. They still were, and the challenge excited him. He said that two Vietnamese pastors had been beaten there a few days earlier. He related this with a certain glee.
Elaine said, “Jack wants to be a martyr.”
Charles didn’t want to talk about Jack, whose religion bored him. Charles said once, after too much to drink, that the Vietnamese should be left alone to find their own god.
Jack shook his head and said that the incredible mishmash of animism and ancestor worship and Buddhism only served to confuse the people. Clarity was needed. He said that there was nothing stronger than a church that was persecuted. The world was full of complacency.
That evening Jack saw Charles to the door. They stood on the sidewalk and looked out over the street to the noodle stand where a man berated a woman and waved a flyswatter in her face. The woman swung a fist at the man and someone laughed. The man fell down. The woman walked away, the glow of her white shirt disappearing into the darkness. Elaine called down from the balcony to say that Sammy was awake and asking for Jack. And Charles had forgotten his cigarettes, she would bring them down. Charles could see her face and her arms and part of her neck as she stretched over the balustrade. Jack sighed and said good night. He touched Charles’s arm and went inside.
