The Boat

by NAM LE

  The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can wither on the page.

  "Why do you want to write this story?" my father asked me.

  "It's a good story."

  "But there are so many things you could write about."

  "This is important, Ba. It's important that people know."

  "You want their pity."

  I didn't know whether it was a question. I was offended. "I want them to remember," I said.

  He was silent for a long time. Then he said, "Only you'll remember. I'll remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget." For once, he was not smiling. "Sometimes it's better to forget, no?"

  "I'll write it anyway," I said. It came back to me – how I'd felt at the typewriter the previous night. A thought leapt into my mind: "If I write a true story," I told my father, "I'll have a better chance of selling it."

  He looked at me a while, searchingly, seeing something in my face as though for the first time. Finally he said, in a measured voice, "I'll tell you." For a moment he receded into thought. "But believe me, it's not something you'll be able to write." "I'll write it anyway," I repeated.

  Then he did something unexpected. His face opened up and he began to laugh, without self-pity or slyness, laughing in full-bodied breaths. I was shocked. I hadn't heard him laugh like this for as long as I could remember. Without fully knowing why, I started laughing too. His throat was humming in Vietnamese, "Yes . . . yes . . . yes," his eyes shining, smiling. "All right. All right. But tomorrow."

  "But – "

  "I need to think," he said. He shook his head, then said under his breath, "My son a writer. Co thuc moi vuc duoc dao." How far does an empty stomach drag you?

  "Mot nguoi lam quan, ca ho duoc nho," I retorted. A scholar is a blessing for all his relatives. He looked at me in surprise before laughing again and nodding vigorously. I'd been saving that one up for years.

  ***

  AFTERNOON. We sat across from one another at the dining room table: I asked questions and took notes on a yellow legal pad; he talked. He talked about his childhood, his family. He talked about My Lai. At this point, he stopped.

  "You won't offer your father some of that?"

  "What?"

  "Heavens, you think you can hide liquor of that quality?"

  The afternoon light came through the window and held his body in a silver square, slowly sinking toward his feet, dimming, as he talked. I refilled our glasses. He talked above the peak-hour traffic on the streets, its rinse of noise; he talked deep into evening. When the phone rang the second time I unplugged it from the jack. He told me how he'd been conscripted into the South Vietnamese army.

  "After what the Americans did? How could you fight on their side?"

  "I had nothing but hate in me," he said, "but I had enough for everyone." He paused on the word hate like a father saying it before his infant child for the first time, trying the child's knowledge, testing what was inherent in the word and what learned.

  He told me about the war. He told me about meeting my mother. The wedding. Then the fall of Saigon. 1975. He told me about his imprisonment in reeducation camp, the forced confessions, the indoctrinations, the starvations. The daily labor that ruined his back. The casual killings. He told me about the tiger-cage cells and connex boxes, the different names for different forms of torture: the honda, the airplane, the auto. "They tie you by your thumbs, one arm over the shoulder, the other pulled around the front of the body. Or they stretch out your legs and tie your middle fingers to your big toes – "

  He showed me. A skinny old man in Tantric poses, he looked faintly preposterous. During the auto he flinched, then, a smile springing to his face, asked me to help him to his foam mattress. I waited impatiently for him to stretch it out. He asked me again to help. Here, push here. A little harder. Then he went on talking, sometimes in a low voice, sometimes grinning. Other times he would blink – furiously, perplexedly. In spite of his Buddhist protestations, I imagined him locked in rage, turned around and forced every day to rewitness these atrocities of his past, helpless to act. But that was only my imagination. I had nothing to prove that he was not empty of all that now.

  He told me how, upon his release after three years' incarceration, he organized our family's escape from Vietnam. This was 1979. He was twenty-five years old then, and my father.

  When finally he fell asleep, his face warm from the Scotch, I watched him from the bedroom doorway. I was drunk. For a moment, watching him, I felt like I had drifted into dream too. For a moment I became my father, watching his sleeping son, reminded of what – for his son's sake – he had tried, unceasingly, to forget. A past larger than complaint, more perilous than memory. I shook myself conscious and went to my desk. I read my notes through once, carefully, all forty-five pages. I reread the draft of my story from two nights earlier. Then I put them both aside and started typing, never looking at them again.

  Dawn came so gradually I didn't notice – until the beeping of a garbage truck – that outside the air was metallic blue and the ground was white. The top of the tin shed was white. The first snow had fallen.

  ***

  HE WASN'T IN THE APARTMENT when I woke up. There was a note on the coffee table: I am going for a walk. I have taken your story to read. I sat outside, on the fire escape, with a tumbler of Scotch, waiting for him. Against the cold, I drank my whisky, letting it flow like a filament of warmth through my body. I had slept for only three hours and was too tired to feel anything but peace. The red geraniums on the landing of the opposite building were frosted over. I spied through my neighbors' windows and saw exactly nothing.

  He would read it, with his book – learned English, and he would recognize himself in a new way. He would recognize me. He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering – how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me.

  I finished the Scotch. It was eleven-thirty and the sky was dark and gray-smeared. My story was due at midday. I put my gloves on, treaded carefully down the fire escape, and untangled my bike from the rack. He would be pleased with me. I rode around the block, up and down Summit Street, looking for a sign of my puffy jacket. The streets were empty. Most of the snow had melted, but an icy film covered the roads and I rode slowly. Eyes stinging and breath fogging in front of my mouth, I coasted toward downtown, across the College Green, the grass frozen so stiff it snapped beneath my bicycle wheels. Lights glowed dimly from behind the curtained windows of houses. On Washington Street, a sudden gust of wind ravaged the elm branches and unfastened their leaves, floating them down thick and slow and soundless.

  I was halfway across the bridge when I saw him. I stopped. He was on the riverbank. I couldn't make out the face but it was he, short and small-headed in my bloated jacket. He stood with the tramp, both of them staring into the blazing gasoline drum. The smoke was thick, particulate. For a second I stopped breathing. I knew with sick certainty what he had done. The ashes, given body by the wind, floated away from me down the river. He patted the man on the shoulder, reached into his back pocket and slipped some money into those large, newly mittened hands. He started up the bank then, and saw me. I was so full of wanting I thought it would flood my heart. His hands were empty.

  If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn't have said the things I did. I wouldn't have told him he didn't understand – for clearly, he did. I wouldn't have told him that what he had done was unforgivable. That I wished he had never come, or that he was no father to me. But I hadn't known, and, as I waited, feeling the wind change, all I saw was a man coming toward me in a ridiculously oversized jacket, rubbing his black-sooted hands, stepping through the smoke with its flecks and flame-tinged eddies, who had destroyed himself,
yet again, in my name. The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over – to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world – and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.

  Cartagena

  IN , LUIS SAYS, the beach is gray at dawn. He points to the barrel of his G3 when he says this, steel gray, he says. He smiles. The sand is white, he says, this color, tapping his teeth. And when the sun comes up on your right, man, it is a slow-motion explosion like in the movies, a big kerosene flash and then the water is sparkling gray and orange and red. Luis is full of shit, of course, but he can talk and it is true that he is the only one of our gallada who has seen the Caribbean. Who has been to Cartagena.

  And the girls? Eduardo asks.

  Luis tosses back his greasy black hair. He knows we will wait for his answer. He is the oldest of us (except for Claudia, who doesn't count because she is a girl), and he has told this story many times with pleasure.

  The girls, he says. He looks at me and it is proper, he is showing respect. Together we smirk at the immaturity of Eduardo.

  No, says Claudia. The fishermen. Tell us the part –

  The girls, Luis says, speaking over Claudia, they are the best in all of Colombia. They wear skirts up to here, like on MTV, and boots up to here, and it is not like the country, where the autodefensas will shoot them for it. They are taller and whiter and have beautiful teeth and can talk about real things. Nothing like here.

  He pauses. Luis has grown a mustache that looks like it has been drawn on with wet charcoal, and now he strokes it with his thumb and finger. I remember a line from a movie.

  With that mustache, I say, you look like a shit-eating faggot. Eduardo laughs happily. And it is you who would be shot for your long hair.

  Luis ignores me. He says, speaking slowly, In Cartagena, everything is nothing like here.

  We are five, including Claudia, and we are going downtown to do some business on behalf of Luis. Apart from me and Luis and Claudia and Eduardo, there is little Pedro, who walks behind the group with his hands in his torn pants pockets in order to fondle his testicles. It is not even funny anymore.

  I have not seen any of them, except for Claudia, in the last four months. Claudia –the only one who knows where I have been staying – told me yesterday about this business. I did not want to come but she told me how strongly Luis had insisted.

  They look younger than I remember. Only Pedro has grown - he looks like he has been seized by a fistful of hair and stretched up two inches. I wait for him to reach me and say to him, Ay, you are almost a man now!

  Ask him if he has any hair on his pipi, says Eduardo.

  Pedro keeps his hands in his pockets and does not react.

  See, even now he is molesting it!

  Come on, says Luis. He sounds distracted. Claudia is smiling to herself. I look away from her.

  To do this business there would usually be more of us, but our old gallada, the core of it anyway, is three short. Carlos was shot in the throat outside the Parque del Poblado: it was night and he was selling basuco to the crackheads when the rich kids came in their yellow jeep and cleansed him. Salésio joined his elder brother in the local militia, where he sent back a photo of himself in a balaclava, holding an Uzi sub and a Beretta .45. You could see the shape of his stupid smile through the black cotton.

  And then there is Hernando. I do not want to think about Hernando now.

  We stop at the border of our barrio, in a dump at the bottom of a ridge. A thin ditch of water runs through the debris. Without a word, Pedro and Claudia take lookout positions. Luis and Eduardo straddle the sludge, one foot on either bank, and clear away the moldering cardboard and plastic junk. Soon they uncover the nylon three-seater that we stole, months ago, from a public bus. They tip it forward to reveal the large concrete tunnel into which the water runs. I stand sentinel as they crawl, one by one, into the hole.

  This is one of our old mocos. Only the five of us know its location. It is a runoff from the main storm sewer, but smells like a sewage pipe. I am glad it is dark.

  Over there, I say.

  Eduardo and Pedro go where I point, navigating by the blue light of their cell phones. At a waist-high ledge they peel back a thick, water-resistant cover, and Pedro lets out a whoop, then muffles his mouth. The sound echoes against the wet concrete.

  Luis grins. You come back after four months, he says, and already you think you are the dog's balls. He is grinning widely. These are yours?

  On trust, I say.

  Handheld grenades, he says, picking them up, weighing them in his palm like they are pieces of fruit. A new AR-15. And these?

  Glock nine millimeters. You can throw away your thirty-eights now.

  I heard the forty-fives are better.

  They look like toy guns, Claudia murmurs from the darkness.

  Well, Luis says to me, still grinning. Well, well. El Padre is a generous man.

  Aside from Luis's G3, we take one of the Colts and the two pistols. As this is Luis's mission, I do not ask whether this is too much or too little firepower. Pedro is a child and will carry the bullet bag. He insists on bringing a couple of grenades. Just in case, he says.

  In case what? jeers Eduardo. In case the target is hiding inside a FARC tank?

  It is getting dark when we finally arrive in the correct neighborhood. We are on foreign turf and I am uneasy because it is the worst time of day to identify a target. I am also pissed off at Luis because he made a detour to check his emails. Luis is pissed off at me because I told him we could take a chiva bus and he replied, No, puto, they don't go that way, and just now a green one came by and almost ran us over on the narrow street. And we are all pissed off at Eduardo, who failed to dodge a pile of warm dog turd.

  You sure you have done the recon? I ask Luis.

  Fuck you, he says. Maybe I have no office job but I am no child.

  And the target is not protected?

  Listen to you and your fancy language, says Eduardo. Is the target not protected?

  Under the darkening sky, everything melts into shapes of brown and gray. We pass buildings made of brick, of cement blocks, of wood and plastic. Faces of people merge back into the material of their houses. Street kids scavenge for food by the roadside, some of them inhaling the pale yellow sacol from supermarket bags - their eyes half-open and animal and unblinking. We pass unattended stalls, half-filled wheelbarrows, hot pillow joints, then there are no more houses and we reach an abandoned railway line running along the edge of a cliff. We cross the tracks and look down. The road dips steeply into a gorge jumbled full of bamboo poles and torn tarpaulin sheets and hundreds upon hundreds of boxes. It is our destination. The tigurio: the city of cardboard.

  The few inhabitants we see do not interfere. We walk through dimly lit trenches, toward the northeast corner. Shadows of faces move behind candles and gas lamps. Luis lifts his fingers to his lips and points to a shack at the end of an alley. He creeps forward. Yellow gaslight glows from behind the gaps in the cardboard. Coming closer, I see a black man on his back chewing a sugared red donut. Luis goes in and grabs him by the hair and flips him onto his stomach. If it is the right person, Luis has done his recon excellently. The target looks older than all of us –even Claudia, who has sixteen years. His skin is a darker black than mine, and burnished with sweat in the gaslight. His mouth is still crusted with little sugar bits. Luis rests his boot on the side of the target's face as he reaches inside his pants to pull out the rifle. He frowns as the magazine gets stuck in the elastic of his waistband-this is a common hazard with the G3 – a beginner's mistake. Eduardo has dropped to his knees, pinning the target's legs down.

  Who is the son of a bitch now? Luis says. His voice is
light and breathy as it is when he is excited.

  You are, puto, squeaks the target. His lips strain to spit, and fail.

  Claudia comes in and crouches down; there is not enough room to stand. We all sweat from the heat of the gas lamp. Luis succeeds at last in removing his rifle from his trousers and jams the barrel into the target's eye socket.

  Do I kill him fast? he says. He is looking at me. Claudia and Eduardo are looking at me too. Pedro stands watch at the edge of the tigurio.

  For a moment I am taken aback. Killing has never been the business of the gallada, unless things have changed with that too, in the four months I have been away. Maybe they are seeking to impress me, now that I have my office job. Or maybe that is why they asked me to come with them.

  Do I kill him fast? Luis says again. His voice is tight - it sounds as though he is really asking for my answer.

  What is his crime?

  Luis falls silent. He lifts his gun and paces two steps this way, two steps the other way, stooped underneath the cardboard roof. The target twists his head up from the dirt and looks around for the first time. He sees Eduardo, who is holding his legs, and Claudia, and then Luis. He sees Luis's hand, trembling on the trigger guard.

  He has many crimes, says Luis. But he called my mother the offspring of a dog.

  I don't even know you, the target says. He swings around in my direction. And I am protected. Ask anyone.