The Time in Between (David Bergen)

by David Bergen

  After her second beer, she walked back to her hotel and slowly climbed the stairs to her room. Her door was open and she pushed at it and looked inside. The light was on. Yen was standing by the bed. He was holding something and talking. She looked around to see if anyone else was there but he was alone. He was holding her underwear and whispering to himself.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He turned and put the underwear onto the bed. “Hello, Ada,” he said as he stepped away from the bed.

  She repeated her question and moved toward him. Then she thought again, and moved back, wondering if he was dangerous. She looked around for an object to hold, something to protect herself. There was nothing.

  “Don’t worry,” Yen said. “I am harmless. I came here to talk to you about your bicycle but you were gone and the door was open and so I stepped in and then you came home.” He smiled and bowed his head and then looked right at her.

  “Get out,” she said.

  He held up his hands and moved sideways. “You don’t understand, Miss Ada. You don’t understand my sadness.”

  Ada was breathless. After, she would think how she had leaped at Yen and she would wonder why. But this is what she did. She took two long steps, and reaching him, she struck his head with an open hand. He ducked and because he ducked and seemed so helpless, she struck him again. This time with her fist and she felt the softness at the side of his face. “Go,” she cried. “Go. Go.” She beat at him with both hands until he ran from the room. She heard his footsteps and the sound of her own breathing, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Later, after she had checked her bags and clothes and found nothing missing, after she had showered and changed into jeans and a shirt because she was not ready for sleep, she went downstairs to the lobby, past the night clerk, and out into the street. She took the bicycle and walked it down the sloping road toward the ferry. There was little traffic. At one point she called Yen’s name and then realized how foolish this was. She stopped at the ferry landing and looked out past the dark gates to the boats. No one was there. Again, she called Yen’s name.

  For an hour she walked the streets. Once, she passed three boys and she said Yen’s name but they did not look at her and she saw that Yen was not one of them. She went to the Chess Hotel and knocked on the service door. No one came, and so she left the bicycle and pushed the door open and entered. There was a dim light on at the end of the hallway. She called Yen’s name. He was not there. She called for Yen’s uncle Minh and when he did not come she turned and went back outside and stood in the darkness. She recalled Yen saying that his sister worked the street near the Empire Hotel. She walked there, still wheeling the bicycle. There were two women standing on the sidewalk, one wore yellow, the other black. Ada approached and said her name. She said that she knew a boy called Yen and the boy was her friend. Did they know the boy? The women looked at Ada. They talked together and then one repeated Yen’s name.

  “Yes,” Ada said. “Are you his sister?”

  The woman laughed. “Sister?” She shook her head. “No sister.”

  “He has no sister?”

  She shook her head. “No sister.”

  Ada said that they didn’t understand. Yen was a small boy, about fourteen, and she wanted to give him the bicycle. She moved it toward the woman in black, who stepped back and said, “No.”

  She crisscrossed the streets in the rain calling his name. After a while, she stopped calling out and at some point she found herself back down by the ferry landing. She leaned the bicycle up against the blue shuttered door of the ticket booth. Then she stood, looking out at the boats anchored throughout the harbor. The first time she had come here it had been raining as well. Back then she had carried an umbrella and the wind had been warm. It had been early evening, just after dusk, and the lights of the approaching ferry had appeared as many small beacons to carry a traveler home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While living in Vietnam, I encountered the generosity and kindness of complete strangers, strangers who then became genuine friends. Thank you to Tran Cau and Hoang Dang, who, through their conversations and late night company, guided me deeper into the heart of their country. Thank you as well to Vinh Quyen, Nguyen Van Muoi, and Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien. And thank you to Kathryn Munnell, who turned a small light onto the life of the historian Nguyen Khac Vien, and who opened her home to my family.

  Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War had a significant influence on the writing of my own novel, as did, to a smaller measure, The General Retires by Nguyen Huy Thiep.

  Thanks to Denise Bukowski, who pushed me to write this story.

  Finally, a special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Stephanie Higgs, and Daniel Menaker.

  THE TIME IN BETWEEN

  David Bergen

  A Reader’s Guide

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

  FOR DISCUSSION

  David Bergen’s writing style is distinctive—so plain as to seem “styleless,” yet capable of great eloquence. Choose some sentences or paragraphs that strike you as particularly successful, and analyze what gives them their power.

  On the surface, this could be described as a sad book. Yet the main characters—Charles, Ada, and Jon—make emotional or spiritual journeys during the course of the novel, in addition to geographical ones. Describe the inner journeys of these characters. In what ways are they ultimately redemptive?

  The Bible talks about the sins of the father being visited on his children. Jon tells his sister Ada, “His [Charles’s] love for you is like a weight that you have to carry” [p. 60]. In what ways does Charles’s “sin,” as well as his love, weigh on his children? Describe the different ways Ada, Jon, and their sister, Del, deal with their father and his love.

  Discuss the various possible meanings of the title The Time In Between.

  Tomas Manik and Hoang Vu are visual artists; Vu is also a writer, as is the elusive Dang Tho. Each has a different status in society. Consider these differences and discuss what Bergen is saying about the Artist and how he is regarded in Vietnam, as opposed to in North America or in Europe. Discuss in what ways being artists have shaped Vu’s and Dang Tho’s lives.

  David Bergen wrote that Ada Boatman was “given some sort of gift” from Vu, her Vietnamese lover. Discuss Ada and Vu’s relationship. What do you think the gift was?

  The Boatmans are an American/Canadian family temporarily in Vietnam; the Goudses are Americans planning a longer stay. How do these characters try (or not try) to understand something of Vietnam? What assumptions do they arrive with? What, if anything, does Vietnam teach them? At one point, as she leaves Vu and returns to Danang, Ada becomes “aware that a window had been flung open onto a view of an alien and foreign place, and then, just as suddenly, it had closed”. What brings Ada to that moment? Do you think the author is making a general point about Westerners in foreign cultures?

  David Bergen says he doesn’t see his book as a war novel. How would you describe the book’s relationship to war? Are Charles’s experiences universal wartime ones? Could they have taken place in World War I or II, or in the American Civil War? Or is there something about his killing of the boy in particular that seems specific to this war?

  The Vietnamese veterans of the war, as well as the civilians, deal with their memories of the war quite differently than the Americans do. How would you characterize these differences, giving instances from as many characters on both sides as you can?

  The Time In Between is concerned with conflict on two vastly different levels—with the Vietnam War, and with the struggles within the Boatman family between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. Discuss these conflicts. Does Bergen suggest any connection between the public and private struggles in the novel?

  Charles Boatman carries a terrible secret for years, but he’s not the only person in the novel with a secret. The Boatman family has its share, some of which have been revealed before the trip to Vietnam, some of
which come to light later. Elaine and Jack Gouds also have secrets. Discuss these various secrets and their connections to the book’s themes.

  Structurally, The Time In Between is unusual in that the body of Charles Boatman is found about one hundred pages before the end of the book. The “quest” in the novel, in that sense, ends early. Or does it? What significant things happen after the discovery of the body—and can only happen, as a matter of fact, once Charles’s fate is known?

  The most prominent of the five senses in this novel is that of smell. How does Bergen use the sense of smell in the story, and why does it seem so important?

  There are two blind characters in this book—the blind soldier befriended by Kiet in the Vietnamese novel Charles reads, and the blind American veteran Ada meets in a cafe. When Charles’s body is found, fish have eaten away his eyes. What is the significance of blindness in The Time In Between?

  Charles tells his children stories while they sit in the bunker he builds, and Ada believes that “each successive story was like a piece of thread, and she was collecting those pieces”. Stories play a crucial role in this novel: the various versions Charles tells about his war experiences; the story that Kiet tells to save his life in the Vietnamese novel-within-a-novel (another story in itself ); the life stories that characters do and don’t want to tell or hear. What is the author saying about the role of stories in our lives, and in the lives of the book’s characters?

  When Ada disbelieves Elaine Gouds’s description of her relationship with Charles, “She saw that sex could leap out of nowhere and obscure a person, make them stupid” [p.169]. Who else does this happen to in the novel? How do various characters in the novel approach sexuality?

  “Safe” is an important word and concept in The Time In Between. Characters promise to watch over each other and their belongings. Charles builds a bunker to keep his children safe. Having read Bergen’s novel, what kinds of safety do you think he believes are possible?

  Charles says that there is “nothing better for trust than hunting,” as he invites Tomas to go hunting with him. In the novel, there are several acts of violence against animals. How do they connect with the main story and its themes?

  The young Vietnamese boy, Yen, tells Ada that “everybody wanted something that they couldn’t have”. What are the characters’ impossible wishes? Are they the things that Yen tells Ada, or shows her, about herself?

  DAVID BERGEN is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: A Year of Lesser (1996), a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award; See the Child (1999); The Case of Lena S. (2002), winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction; and The Time In Between, winner of the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Sitting Opposite My Brother (1993), which was a finalist for the Manitoba Book of the Year. Bergen won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000. He lived and taught in Southeast Asia for three and a half years, and currently lives with his wife and four children in Winnipeg.

  ALSO BY DAVID BERGEN

  The Case of Lena S.

  See the Child

  A Year of Lesser

  Sitting Opposite My Brother

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance

  to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2005 by David Bergen

  Reading group guide © 2006 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bergen, David.

  The time in between: a novel / David Bergen.

  p. cm.

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction.

  2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Canadians—Vietnam—Fiction.

  4. British Columbia—Fiction. 5. Divorced fathers—Fiction.

  6. Missing persons—Fiction. 7. Vietnam—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.B413T56 2005

  813’.54—dc22

  2004051495

  www.atrandom.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43268-1

  v3.0