by David Bergen
At the entrance to the hotel she released him, tottered, and rested her head against his chest. “I am drunk,” she said.
“Good night, Ada Boatman.” He said he would come by in the morning with a car. At seven.
She agreed and pushed a fist against his shoulder. She said, “Good. Good.” And then she turned and walked into the lobby.
VU APPEARED WITH A CAR AND DRIVER THE FOLLOWING MORNING. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt that was open at the collar. He had on leather shoes. No socks. His pant legs were short and Ada could see his ankles and calves, which were hairless and perfectly smooth.
They were quiet. Vu smoked and exhaled out the half-open window while Ada watched the countryside, her face turned toward the fields, aware of Vu and his proximity and the gestures of his hands. Once, she saw a pig tied to the back of a bicycle and she pointed this out to Vu but he did not find it remarkable. He said, “You are surprised by such practical things.”
She did not answer, but she felt some irritation; it was as if he had called her naïve. Vu did not seem to notice. He blithely smoked. And then he closed his eyes and put his head back and appeared to sleep, though it was possible that he was simply resting, because at some point he began to speak. With his eyes still closed he said that he was forty-seven years old and sometimes it seemed like he had lived forever. He had survived the war and he had survived the hard times after the war and now it felt like the hard years were turning easier. “In our country we say that an artist who draws with his left hand is doing so in order to put food on the table. It is not real art.” He didn’t want to be too hopeful, but for many years he had drawn with his left hand and now, finally, he was beginning to draw with his right hand. “True paintings,” he said. He lifted his head and asked Ada if he could take a picture of her and then, when she was gone, he could draw her.
Ada smiled. She said, “Sure.” She turned toward the window.
“I’ve embarrassed you,” Vu said.
Ada laughed. “That’s impossible. You couldn’t.”
“Well, then I’ve said something that’s not right.”
“Not at all. It’s just you’re predictable. You’re an artist and so you want to draw me, but rather than asking me this, you ask for my picture. It’s funny.”
“Funny.” Vu repeated the word.
“Humdrum funny. Banal.”
“I don’t know those words,” Vu said.
Ada sighed. “My sister’s relationship with her artist began with him drawing her. Every artist thinks he can seduce women by drawing them. I won’t be seduced like that.”
Vu laughed. “You think I am seducing you?”
She smiled. Turned to look out the window and then asked how much longer to the village.
“Very soon,” Vu said.
SHE DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE EXPECTED COMING TO THE VILLAGE that had haunted her father, and she saw, as soon as the car stopped, that she had built an image based on his letter, and she saw that that image had been wrong. The village was not really a village but a collection of shanties made from scrap pieces of wood and corrugated tin. There was one larger house built of brick and mortar, and it had wooden frames for windows and dark blue shutters. People, mostly very young or very old, were going about their lives. When they got out of the car, Ada asked Vu, “Are you sure this is it?” and then she looked about and walked the length of the village and then down a footpath to the stream at the base of a small hill. At the stream a young woman squatted on a rock. Vu said something to the woman, and she looked at Ada and then looked away. She picked up the clothes she had been washing and left, pressing a large bowl against her hip.
Ada walked back up the path, followed the swaying hips of the woman. There was the sound of the wind. Nothing but the wind. The palm branches moving above her. It might have been here, or here, or here. There was the sky and the earth and up from the earth popped a little boy, a chicken tied to his shorts with string. The chicken was upside down, its head brushed the dirt. A girl in bare feet who touched Ada’s kneecap. The top of the girl’s head, the flat crown. And then a multitude of children, swarming her, calling her names, and she turned and turned again, calling out for Vu, who waded into the pack and took her arm. He pulled her into some shade, close to several old men. Ada caught her breath and then asked if Vu thought anyone here remembered the war.
He shook his head. “No one knows anything. There’re all too young, and if they’re old enough, they don’t want to remember.”
Ada said, “Ask them.”
Vu lit a cigarette and spoke to the men. One of them began to talk and his voice went up and down and he gazed out over the treetops and sometimes he closed his eyes. When he was done, Vu said, “He remembers fire coming out of the sky and animals dying. He remembers people dying but he cannot remember how or why. It was a war.”
Ada observed the old man. He had few teeth, he was wearing dark pajama pants. His knuckles were large and his hands were thin.
“Tell him my father was here as a young man.”
“I don’t know,” Vu said.
“Please, I want to tell him this.”
Vu obeyed. He spoke to the old man, and then the old man spoke.
Vu translated. “He is sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is sorry that your father is dead.”
“You told him that.”
“I said that he had drowned in the ocean.”
Ada sighed. “Did you tell him that he was here as a soldier.”
Vu said he had. “I told him and everyone else to go home for lunch.”
Ada, Vu, the old men, and the children formed a crowd. The quick brown hand of a child flashed and touched Ada’s arm. Vu pushed the child away.
Ada said, “Do they know that my father was here with five other soldiers. Do they know they came here and shot villagers and that my father killed a young boy.”
“What are you saying?” Vu had folded his hands in front of his stomach and he was studying Ada.
“That’s what happened. I want them to know. Will you tell them?”
“It will serve no purpose. They won’t believe me. They are farmers. They don’t care about a war that happened thirty years ago. They care about their crops and their next meal.”
“Tell them, Vu. Please.”
Vu nodded and then he held his hand, palm skyward, and he spoke slowly and quietly. As he spoke he gestured at Ada and then he made a circular motion with his arm and he stopped talking.
The old man looked at the ground. One small child had crouched at Ada’s feet.
Vu said, “There.”
After some time, Ada spoke. She said, “Did they understand what you were telling them?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Do they remember?”
“Not yet.”
“What about the boy my father shot?” She knew that she was speaking too quickly and that she must have sounded desperate but she did not stop. “Does anyone here know about a young boy an American soldier shot?”
“I don’t know.” Vu tried to take her arm but she shrugged him away.
“My father left a letter. My father left a letter and in it he said what he did here. What he did here during the war.” Then she told Vu what the letter had said.
Vu turned to face Ada and his face told her nothing of what he was thinking. She felt that the words she had just spoken were still inside her. Her throat began to ache. She closed her eyes.
Vu led her back to the car, along the dirt path. A dog crossed in front of them, running sideways. The children chattered and called out. Vu spoke to the driver and the car pulled away and the children chased it, their quick hard voices fading. Through the dark glass of the window Ada saw the old man in the doorway. He was squatting now, staring out at something beyond the children and the car and the trees, and finally she began to breathe more easily.
When Vu spoke he said that time climbed upward in layers and that with each co
nsecutive layer the past became buried. He said that an old man like the one here in the village was happy simply to eat his soup every day, sleep in a dry bed, and have regular bowel movements. He said that the old man had no wish to tunnel back through the years. “Your father, on the other hand, needed to go back. As do you, Ada.” He paused, and into that silence Ada whispered, “My brother thinks that our father was a coward.”
Vu shook his head and said that he did not know what a coward was. He had heard the word used before. On people who tried to escape suffering, on people who refused to act in certain ways, on people who ran from danger. He said that he did not see anything wrong with running from danger. In her father’s case, he said, it was different. Killing one’s self required strength. It was like running toward danger. Running toward the unknown. It was not easy. “Your father was a good man,” he said.
When they got back to Danang, she asked Vu to join her for a meal, but he said he was tired. Speaking English tired him out. In any case, he wanted to go home and drink. She was surprised at this confession and asked him if he was making a joke.
“Not at all,” he said. “I am thirsty.” Then he said that the following morning, maybe, he would take the train over the pass in the mountains to Hue, where he would visit a friend, and if she wanted she could come with him. He would introduce her to this friend of his, a man he had gone to school with who was also an artist—but not predictable like him, he laughed—and she could visit the famous Citadel there. His voice lifted and then fell away. She thought then of Elaine, and how on the beach she had talked about Charles and the train and the trip they had taken, and how Ada had realized then that they had been intimate.
That night she went to bed early and dreamed she was riding the ferry across to My Khe with her father. They both had bicycles and every time she turned to ask her father a question he would shake his head and shush her, as if she were a baby. They left the ferry and rode up past the swinging tire that hung from the tamarind tree, on up the trail past the metal factory where men with bare torsos worked beneath the welder’s arc, swinging their large hammers against the heavy metal. On toward the beach. At one point her father passed her and she called out for him to slow down but he didn’t acknowledge her cries. Then he disappeared. She did not reach the beach. She turned back and retraced her route, alone now, down the sloping path toward the ferry. When she boarded, she saw a man who was talking to a large group of people. He was pointing and talking as if describing something in the distance. The man turned to her, and she saw that it was Hoang Vu. She stood for a while and listened and then moved on, toward the bow of the ferry, and stood looking out to where the lights of Danang burned holes into the night.
THEY TOOK THE EARLY AFTERNOON TRAIN AND THE SUN WAS above them and from her window seat Ada saw the ocean below, and as the sun hit the water and the waves rolled against the shoreline, she thought of her father sitting on one of these benches beside Elaine Gouds and holding her hand. Ada remembered her father’s hands and the scars on his fingers and she thought of the tenderness with which he had so often touched her face, even when she was a grown woman, and of how he used to whisper her name. She thought of the ocean taking him, or of him giving himself up to the ocean.
As the train began the slow climb that led to the pass, she turned to Vu and told him that she had dreamed of him. She described the dream: her father, the men in the factory, the bicycles, Vu. She touched his hand, and later, she put her head against his shoulder. His suit jacket was old and worn, and she saw the frayed cuffs and his thin wrists.
“You are missing someone,” he said.
She said that that was probably true. She wanted to touch his face but did not.
An hour went by. The train continued its climb. Ada slept briefly and woke with a start as a southbound train passed them. Vu was smoking, his feet were resting on the seat in front of him. Ada yawned. The sun fell onto her lap and then disappeared.
Vu said that as she slept her knee had jumped. “From here to there,” he said, indicating the distance.
Ada let her head fall again on his shoulder. She said, “Tell me something. About yourself. All I know is your name and your age, and even then I don’t know if it’s true. And where you live. The shape of your hands. That I know. But that’s all.”
Vu looked at his hands as if to verify their size and shape. “You don’t want to know more,” he said.
“But I do.”
He said that he would tell his story but he would dwell only on simple facts. He put out his cigarette. As he spoke he stared out the window and his voice was soft and Ada could feel her hair move as he exhaled. He said, “I grew up in Hanoi. I was a boy and then I was a man. I became a man at eighteen, when I fought in the war. When I came back to Hanoi from the war in 1975, my father was very happy. He gave a party and invited many guests to our small apartment. Some of them I knew, some I did not. My father gave a speech. He rattled on about the glory of victory and the strength of the victors. At the end of his speech he spoke about how fortunate I was. He raised his glass in a toast and people called out. Much was made of my survival. My wife, Ly, was dancing with one of our neighbors, a police officer. Yes, Ada, I was married. I was very young. Too young. In any case, my wife, Ly, had been dancing with this man all night. At one point my father said to me, ‘What is that man doing, dancing all evening with Ly?’ I looked at my father and said that I was no dancer and it was a good thing that she had somebody. I had been drinking cung, and then I switched to whiskey and then someone handed me vodka.
“The following day my wife said that I was a different man than before the war. My father defended me. My wife said that I drank too much. In fact, I was drinking when they had this argument. We continued to live as a husband and wife and she stayed in our house—she made money and brought it home—however, sometimes at night I woke and the hollowness of the house and the unhappiness of my wife made it hard for me to breathe.
“There was a famous historian who lived across from our apartment. His name was Nguyen Khac Vien, and in the mornings before I went out I could see him typing by the window. He had many books on the wall and there was a woman who served him tea and sometimes she stood beside him and talked. She was younger and quite handsome. Children came and went out of his apartment. I was curious about him because he was many things I was not. He was respected, he was an intellectual, he was offering the world something new. He had weight and privilege that had been earned. One day he was not there and my wife said that he had TB and was quite ill. I looked for him, but his chair by the window was empty and I thought that even a man who had studied in Paris and could translate from various languages and who would be given a king’s burial, even that kind of man had to die. And then one day he was back, and feeling the time was favorable, I went over to knock on his door. His wife invited me in for tea, and I sat with the famous man. We drank tea and he spoke slowly. He had collected an enormous anthology of Vietnamese literature beginning before A.D. 1000, and as I opened the book and paged respectfully through it I had a brief but important idea: I saw my own life as inconsequential and small.”
Vu stopped talking. “I am boring you,” he said.
“No, not all.” Ada said that she wanted him to go on. She said that she loved the sound of his voice.
“And the story, the essence? That is nothing?” He smiled.
“Of course it is. I meant that your voice makes the story richer. Please.”
“As my father indicated earlier in his speech, I survived the war. Of course, we won the war, but even so I felt no joy. I suppose I should have spent time with the men from my brigade, the ones who survived, but I didn’t. The few I might have shared an hour with lived in the countryside, but I did not see them. I have not told anyone how I survived, because I myself do not know. My wife said that it had to do with when I was born, the year of the goat, but I knew that Khuc, who was in my brigade, and who had both legs blown off by a land mine and then bled to death, wa
s born in the same year, and so I did not put much faith in my wife’s words.”
The train had halted at a siding. There were a few small shacks and there were children standing in the shade. Two dogs copulated near a bicycle. They ran in circles while a young boy beat them with a stick. Chickens bathed in the dust. Ada, holding Vu’s arm, did not say anything, but she was aware of the movement of his muscles beneath his thin shirt.
When the train finally jolted and began to move again, Vu said, “My mother sold bread. Early in the morning she would ride her bicycle down to the bakery and put bread in her basket and then ride through the street calling, Ban mi, oy. It was humiliating for a woman who was well educated to have to work like a peasant. But when she lost her job because of the war, she began to deliver bread.
“My father was the director of a linguistic institute. He came home one day and told me that if I wasn’t going to work I should write. When I asked him what I should write about, he said the war. I should write about the war.
“He seemed surprised at my rejection of that idea. He was sitting across from me, drinking tea. He said that I might like to work as a librarian at a teachers’ college. I said that I could not be a teacher or a librarian. He said that I wasted money on drink. He had never said this to me before. The pride he used to feel for me was gone. Now all I saw on his face was disgust.
“After that, I drank every day. I began to carry my notebook with me to the café, though I never wrote anything good or important. My father, when he saw me with my notebook, told his friends and neighbors that I was a poet. My wife mentioned this one night. She whispered that my father was very sad because his son was useless. And so now, to save face, he had begun to call me a poet. ‘Is it true?’ she asked.
“In order to please everyone, I enrolled in biology at the University of Hanoi. I told my father I would do my studies in a political school. This pleased him and he wanted to give another party. My mother convinced him that we should wait until I had graduated.
