by David Bergen
He offered her coffee. She refused. He asked if she wanted her brother to be present. She said that she did not know where her brother was. He had not come home the night before. Dat raised his eyebrows. He seemed to want to say something but didn’t.
Ada looked at her watch and then called the hotel and let the phone ring and ring but there was no answer. She hung up and said that she didn’t know what to do.
“You can wait for your brother if you like. Or you can identify the body by yourself. It appears to me that you are old enough to recognize your father. Yes?”
She heard Dat speak, and she knew that his words were cruel, but she did not acknowledge them. She asked where her father’s body had been found. Dat said that a fisherman had found him at My Khe that morning. Ada nodded. Saw Dat’s small head, his dark shirt. Beside him a blue ashtray on a gilded stand, the polished desktop. She said finally that she would go with him and look at the body.
At the hospital she was led down many hallways and through rooms that were full of crying children and sick people on small cots, down the stairs to the morgue, where a doctor in a lab coat took her to a gurney and pulled back a sheet to reveal her father’s face. It was swollen and the head had been rotated slightly. She saw his left ear, a distended mouth. She turned away. Looked again. Then she nodded and the doctor drew up the sheet.
Back in the hallway, she asked about her father’s eyes, what had happened. The doctor explained in perfect English that sea animals had probably viewed the body as a form of shelter and food. He shrugged, said, “I’m sorry.”
She put her hand to her mouth. She was panicking. She swallowed and said, “How did he die?”
“He drowned.”
“But was he killed?” she asked.
The doctor looked at Dat, who said, “We don’t think so.” He said that there was no reason to suspect this. “And so we believe he may have killed himself.” He squinted, as if trying to see a small object from a great distance. “He tied something to his ankle. I do not know how he got out into deep water. Perhaps a small boat.” He shrugged again and sighed, as if to say, “And that is that.”
Ada realized that what she had wished for earlier, for someone to climb the stairs and give her the news of her father’s death, had now happened.
The doctor shook his head and then said in English, “I beg your pardon.”
Once outside the hospital, Ada said that she wanted her father’s belongings, and so Dat rode her to the police station on the back of his motorcycle. As she held on to the edge of the seat, her eyes were level with the back of his hairline and she saw his neck and the mole close to his ear. A long black hair grew from the mole.
She had felt nothing at the hospital. She still felt nothing. What she had seen was simply a corpse. Of course, she was willing to accept that it was her father: his wallet had been found; the ring he wore on his right hand was still there. But the fact of his death was like some far-flung tragedy that had befallen someone else. It did not matter.
Dat proved to be unexpectedly solicitous. At his desk he sat her down and gave her a cup of tea, saying he would be back in a moment. He disappeared for a long while and returned with apologies and her father’s suitcase. He said that this was everything. “So,” he said. He removed his glasses and cleaned them with his shirttail. He tucked his shirt in again. “There is a small café close to your hotel. I will take you there for a drink.”
Ada was unsure. She had no desire to spend more time with this lieutenant, but perhaps he had some extra information. She asked, “Do you have details? Do you want to tell me something?”
“Tell you something? No, no. I have nothing. I simply want to be of assistance. Your father drowned. You are unhappy. You need a drink.” He said, “Please,” and he picked up the suitcase and led her out to the motorcycle. The sun was shining now after the storm, but the streets were still littered with toppled electrical poles and palm trees and sheets of plastic roofing. At the café, Dat walked in without a word, carrying the suitcase, leading Ada toward the back and into a garden, where he pulled out a chair for her. There were two birdcages hanging nearby. A parrot talked to them in a language that Ada thought might be Vietnamese. “What did he say?” Ada asked.
“That you are beautiful,” the lieutenant said.
She did not respond but thought that Jon should be with her now, not this lieutenant with his black suit jacket, small shoulders, and breezy innuendos. She ordered a Pepsi and the lieutenant asked for a whiskey. He said, “In your father’s suitcase you will find nothing important. There are clothes and a passport and some Vietnamese money and there is a novel, by a Vietnamese writer, and in that novel someone has written some notes. I do not know what they mean.” He shrugged. “We found the remains of some drugs, but they are gone now. Hashish.”
He said this word quickly, slurring the s’s, and then leaned toward Ada. “I must warn you that if you have drugs you will be arrested. It is a serious crime here in Vietnam.”
“I don’t. My brother doesn’t.”
“But your father did.”
She lifted her shoulders, as if to say “So?” and then she said, in a tired and distant voice, “I didn’t know.”
The drinks arrived. The waitress wore a tight uniform with a Tiger beer insignia on the chest. Dat eyed the waitress and then he spoke sharply to her and she bowed her head and turned away, but there was a slight smile on her face. When she had gone, he said, “It is easier to be a man than a woman in Vietnam. That is a fact, but it is our culture, our way. I think it is quite possible for men and women to be equal, though not in a Western sense. Equality here has to do with respect for one’s place. Take my wife and me, we respect and trust each other. We were, what do you call it, high school sweethearts. But in the end I am the provider, I allow her independence by making enough money. I want my wife to behave the Vietnamese way, to show her thoughts and feelings through actions and not words. I do not want to come home and have her say, ‘Oh darling, you look so tired.’ No, I want her to offer me soup or get me a cloth, or guide me to a chair. Words do nothing. In Vietnam, actions are more important than words. Respect. For each other. You are married?”
“No.”
“In Vietnam a woman over thirty is too old.”
The waitress placed a plate of clams on the table. Dat leaned back, lit a cigarette, and exhaled upward. “Please,” he said to Ada and motioned at the plate.
She turned away from the gray flesh of the clams and said no thank you.
He watched her, then said, “And so you will go home now.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“I would advise it. Your brother.” He shook his head. “It gives me a hard time to say this but I must. What your brother does is dangerous.” He lifted his head and stared at Ada, who wanted to leave.
“I’ll take care of my brother,” she said. She stared back at Dat, expecting him to argue.
He said, “Your brother took a car to Quang Ngai. He went with an American man. Did you know that?”
Ada was surprised but did not want to show her surprise. She said, “My brother can make his own decisions.”
Dat smiled. “Of course he can.” He said that he wanted the best for her, that he liked her. “If you are going to stay, you will need a translator and guide. I have the man for you.”
“I have someone already, thank you,” Ada said.
“Thanh?” He smiled.
“Yes.”
He raised his eyebrows and then licked his lips. Then he said that perhaps she misunderstood. Every stranger who came to Vietnam misunderstood. “I have come to see that you think differently from the way we do. And sometimes you do not think at all. You believe that if you want something you will ask for it and it will show up. Nothing is that simple. This is not Paris. It is not New York. Vietnam is an unusual place, and people who come here, strangers like you, they arrive naïvely, with all kinds of plans. There is a word that I have heard used. Nostalgic. That is a good wo
rd. To be nostalgic is dangerous. The Vietnamese have no time for the past. We are too busy trying to survive. Do you understand?”
Ada shrugged. She was aware of the suitcase at her feet. She said that she wanted to go back to her hotel now.
Dat said, “You expected that your father was dead.”
Ada said she had, but even so it was difficult.
Dat dropped his eyes to the table, where the clams lay untouched. He moved an index finger in a small circle. “If you want something,” he said, “you must come to see me. I speak English almost as well as Thanh.” And then he said, as if thinking she might not have heard him, “And, please, if you want something more.” He finished with a grand gesture of his hand, and for a moment Ada saw his vulnerability, the pleading of a man who was trying to survive.
Ada picked up the suitcase, dipped her head slightly, and left the café. She walked over to the hotel and climbed the stairs, resting on every landing, until she reached her room. She thought about Jon, who had run off to Quang Ngai with the American. Obviously it was Jack Gouds. She was angry, at Jon, at Jack, and at Elaine for her blindness.
Ada placed the suitcase on her bed and studied it, running her hand along the metal ridges and over the snaps. Then she opened it. On top were clothes, neatly folded. She took these out and placed them on the bed. Several T-shirts and underwear and pants. A dress shirt that had never been worn. An older blue blazer with a button missing. She lifted one of the T-shirts, smelled it, and was overwhelmed by the latent scent of her father. She composed herself and took out her father’s notebook and his passport. She found a letter from Del that was illegible except for a few words and Del’s name. A plane ticket to Hanoi whose date had expired. A credit card with the magnetic strip washed away, a few Canadian coins, no other money. The novel that Lieutenant Dat had mentioned. It was black, with no dust jacket. It was called In a Dark Wood. Her father had written on some blank pages at the back: dates, disconnected sentences, the odd name. Some scraps of paper fell out. There were a few Vietnamese names in handwriting she didn’t recognize, and some addresses. She slipped the pieces of paper back into the book, and as she laid it back in the suitcase she noticed the corner of something and discovered a sealed envelope stuck in one of the pouches. She took it out, opened it. In it she found a letter from her father, which she unfolded and began to read.
The letter was addressed to the three children, and in it her father was matter-of-fact, almost cold in his writing, and yet poetic and wistful as well. He talked about sitting at the desk in his room, looking out over the harbor of Danang, and contemplating, with great peace, his own death. He described the call of a ship out on the ocean and, on the street, the sound of a bicycle bell, or voices and footsteps. He said that he had imagined coming back to this place and solving some mystery, that then he would understand what had happened to him. But it was not the same place. Oh, the streets were familiar and he recognized certain buildings and the landscape, but everything else had vanished. All the inside things, the things felt when he was an eighteen-year-old, that was gone.
He said that he had gone back to some of the places where terrible acts had taken place and all he had found was grass and fields and dirt roads and young children tugging at his pants and small hands pulling him. Nothing made sense.
This place, he wrote.
He said that he was uncertain of how much knowledge about him they needed, or how, when that knowledge arrived unexpectedly, they would respond. Several times he had tried to tell them what happened but then he had stopped because it had seemed selfish and almost untrue. And so, he was telling them now because he didn’t want them to have to enter into a strange place in search of something that wasn’t there.
He said that a few months before he had finished his tour in Vietnam, his section had been sent into a small village in Quang Ngai Province. The village was supposedly sheltering the enemy, and their group was supposed to go in carefully, make contact, kill whatever enemy was there, and then get out. It was intended to be simple, but it wasn’t. There was no one in the village except women, children, and old men, and it was some of these people that they ended up killing. Not all of them, but he got scared and heard gunfire and shouting and everything went to hell.
He shot a young boy. The boy was standing in the doorway of a hut and he shot him. That’s what he did. He wrote that he couldn’t tell them anything different because there was nothing different to tell. He said that he saw right away that it was a young boy and not a soldier. And then, immediately after that, he said he shot a pig and a dog. The pig had been squealing between the houses and he shot it. And then the dog as well. About all of this he had nothing to say other than to say it. He said that after the shooting stopped—and there had been other innocent people killed by other soldiers—they chased the remaining villagers out into the fields and called in an air strike. And everything disappeared. The boy that he had shot. The old woman that someone else had shot. All of that disappeared.
Only it didn’t.
He wrote that things were never what they seemed. Still, he wanted what he had written to be clear. He said that he loved all three of them.
When she was done, Ada folded the letter and stood and went over to the dresser. She put the letter into the top drawer and picked up her cigarettes and lit one and stood by the window and saw the sky and the sea. Her hands were shaking. A woman passing by on the street below called out for something over and over again. When Ada began to cry, she let the tears come. After, she went to the bathroom sink and washed her face, changed into a clean shirt and jeans.
She climbed the stairs to the rooftop and sat back on a wooden chaise longue. The sky was milky and deep and far above her, in the middle of all that depth, three birds hung in the air as if dead. She had been watching them for a long time and during that time they had not moved. She closed her eyes and opened them and the birds were still there. A baby cried from the street below. A dog barked. She thought the birds might be carrion eaters and were waiting for her death. Or they might be hawks seeking out some small animal, though she was not aware that this country had hawks.
She heard quick soft steps on the stairs, the jangle of keys, and then Jon’s voice. “I looked for you in the room,” he said, “but you weren’t there.”
She turned to look at her brother and said, “Dad’s dead. I just saw his body.” Then she went to him and they stood there on the rooftop and he held her and whispered her name. When she pulled away he looked smaller and worn out and his voice was weak as he said, “Tell me what happened.”
“His body’s at the hospital,” she said. “I just got back from there. They took me to identify the body.”
“What happened to him, Ada? What are they saying happened?”
She paused, then said, “He drowned, probably a month ago.”
“That long? All that time.”
In the street below, a horn sounded. Above them, the birds had disappeared and a few clouds, white and oblong, had replaced them. Jon went over to stand at the edge of the roof. Ada waited for him to turn or say something, but he didn’t. She saw Jon’s outline against the sky. She began to speak. She talked about the hospital. “His eyes were gone.”
He turned. “Christ, Ada.”
“You should have been here. I was all alone, Jon. Looking at our father dead.”
“Are you sure it was him? There couldn’t be a mistake? A body that’s been in water.”
“I have his wallet. His ring.”
“So, all this time we’ve been looking, he’s been dead. He was already dead when we arrived in Vietnam.”
“Jon,” she said. “Dat told me, you know. He told me you were with Jack Gouds.”
Jon nodded. He sat down in a chair and lit a cigarette. He said, “Was he swimming or what?” Then he asked what they were going to do.
She closed her eyes. Her mouth was dry, she could hear her own heart. She said, “I don’t know, Jon, you tell me. I’ve never done this befo
re, you know.” She rubbed her temples and said that she had a headache. She wanted to go down to the café for something to drink. He took her by the arm and led her down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the late afternoon light.
The noise and the people in the café seemed distant, muted. There was a monkey chained to a nearby chair and it tilted its head and looked at Ada and grinned. Jon began to talk. He said, “I didn’t mean to be gone. He invited me and I went. We weren’t planning to stay for the night. It got late, he called Elaine, I should have called you. No one knew that any of this would happen.”
The monkey held out a paw, blinked, then screamed and tried to hide behind a leg of the chair. Ada wanted to say something about the letter and the notes but the monkey was chattering and the waiter arrived carrying a yellow drink for her and somewhere nearby a man was singing about a hotel in California and her brother’s hand appeared holding a cigarette and Ada shook her head, no, and she closed her eyes and opened them again and the monkey was gone. Her headache was worse, it pushed against her temples. The beer tasted bitter and even the bottled water was foul. She made a face and said, “I’m getting sick. It started last night.” She wiped at her face with a wet napkin and put her head in her hands. “People are simple,” she said. “Everything we do. What Dad did, what you do, Mr. Dat, myself, Del and Tomas. We are all simple. Our waiter. I looked at his hands when he put down the beer earlier and I was thinking about where he came from, and if he had a wife and children or if he had a lover or another job or maybe he gambled in his off hours. Simple. We do things because we have needs. We feel something, and then we act.”
Jon held Ada’s wrist. “You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s your fever.”
They left the café, and once in the hotel he half-carried her up the stairs, holding her under her arms. In the room he covered her with the thin sheet.
“I’m so cold,” she said, and she pulled her knees up to her chest. She was shaking. Jon told her not to worry. He pulled a woolen blanket over her and said he was going downstairs for more blankets.
