The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  “There are no people,” she says now. “Again.”

  The house is so dark she cannot see the walls, nor determine where a table might be, a bed or a chair. She hears a few indeterminate noises. A creak, the thud of a footstep, something being dragged on the ground. It is Minh, his short legs uncommonly clumsy in the pitch black of the night, the sword dragging beside him against the hard earth of the floor. He arrives through the hut entrance, breathless, and speaks to the others.

  “What is he saying?” she whispers.

  Beside her, Son stands erect, his attention full on the soldiers. “That the hamlet is empty. Burnt. This is the only house standing,” he says quietly.

  She draws in a breath. She realizes that what she’d thought was the smell of the roof and of cooking fires was not the roof at all. It was the smell of burnt foliage, burnt houses. It is only that they happened upon the hamlet from a particular angle, so that in the blanket of night they did not see the destruction, the ruined garden plots, the sooty remnants of bamboo fences and lean-tos, the flattened remains of houses, the piles of scorched belongings. Because the razing of the hamlet has happened recently the rains have not had time to wash the remains into a muddy swell of debris. Anh gets out the penlight again, just as he did in the shelter, and casts its beam around them. This house, the one remaining house against dozens of collapsed others, is vacant, as far as she can tell. An empty shell of a room. All over the floor are candy wrappers and cans and cigarette butts and spent matches, signs of the soldiers who have been here.

  She hears the word Americans. She looks briefly at Hien, wondering if he will blame her for this, too, wondering if they all will blame her. The three soldiers begin a fiery conversation, with Hien on one side of Anh and Minh on the other. She has no idea what they are saying. It is one of those arguments born of irritation and the fading possibility that their circumstances would now change for the better. They are all so hungry. They were always hungry—it has been almost a constant for many days—but tonight it is as though they are living at the very center of their hunger. They entered the ruined hamlet believing food would be found here—food, people, shelter—and they have discovered just as quickly that it will not. Their steps, which approached the house with energy born of hope, now slow, then stop so that now they all feel rooted to the ground like stones.

  Anh is still holding the water coconut. It isn’t what any of them want, that miserable fruit, still green. They want meat and vegetables, a bowl of rice with a salty broth, tea. They want the crispy skin of fried fish, some pork, especially that. They have been walking for so long. There are times when Susan has felt as though the long bones of her calves will push right through her ankles, through her heels, and down into the soft ground like stakes, that her depleted muscles and ligaments cannot hold the bones in place any longer. She is sure they all feel something similar, that the soldiers have reached a limit. She hears their voices rise up in the darkness. Hien begins yelling so that Anh speaks sharply to him. But his voice rises even more, sounding hysterical. It continues until Anh, in one awful moment, takes the water coconut and throws it on the ground so that it bursts, making a noise like an explosion, like a gun going off.

  The sound makes her imagine—more than imagine, makes her see—a wooden sampan loaded with watermelons that blew up in the Cai Rang floating market in Can Tho. Son had been photographing the tangle of water traffic: so many boats and barges and sampans, the barefoot vendors in their conical hats, the tea women behind clouds of steam, children poking their heads from doorways of the houseboats, melon baskets, the hairy shells of coconuts, pineapples. She was writing in her notebook, her free hand shading her brow from the sun. The blast came from nowhere, a grenade that sent the harbor water raining from above. Son dropped his camera; the notebook suddenly disappeared like a bird that had flown. The noise was so loud she saw a young mother scream and it seemed as though the scream was silent. The harbor with its sampans and junks and houseboats and floating stores was now a sea of splintered wood and torn cloth, pieces of masts and hulls and baskets of fruit drifting in the water, bobbing like buoys. In the water, too, were people. They swam, yelling for one another, climbing into the remaining boats. She could hear children crying. She could hear the panic and the cries and the fear. She ran for a wall, expecting another blast; she took out her camera. Two pictures: one of an old woman weeping, the other of the vendor, what was left of him.

  All this comes to her in the single moment that Anh throws the melon on the ground. It is as though somehow the lid on her experience has been prised open and now floats about her so that at any moment she will be blinded by it. She thinks of Marc and his dreams and how he used to wake up in the night with that desperate desire to escape. To escape what? she used to ask. The bed, the room, the hotel, the city? No matter how hard she tried, she could not understand. Now she knows exactly. The muscles in her jaw contract and expand so that her face feels pulled. She feels her leg grow warm and has no idea why it is like that until she reaches down with her hand and understands, in a moment of slow awareness, that she has wet herself.

  There is silence. Nobody dares move or speak until, at last, Son clears his throat. “There will be a pump. Or a well,” he says in French.

  “They will have ruined the well,” Anh says.

  “They forgot to destroy this house. Maybe they forgot the well, too. We’re filthy. We need to bathe.”

  “Tôi nhìn tháy môt!” says Minh. I saw one. Or I have seen one, or I will see one. She isn’t sure. In the darkness Minh looks like a child, his hair sticking out from all sides of his head like a hedge. In other circumstances, had he been born on the other side of the world, he’d be one of those youths who was good at many things, but whose ceaseless energy made them tiresome to adults, so that they ended up in trouble all the time. The sort of teenager who made knives out of soda cans and painted post boxes with graffiti. Here, he is no trouble at all, just a willing soldier, no doubt a volunteer. He turns toward the entrance, and is out the door instantly, asking Anh something that includes the Vietnamese word nuoc, meaning water.

  “Go on then,” replies Anh, or at least this is what Susan imagines he says. Anh searches the floor with the penlight once again, bending over to pick up the half-smoked butts of American cigarettes. When he bends down, he holds the back of his trousers at the same time so they do not slip. He has lost weight. All of them have lost weight, but especially Anh. He is the one who carries the largest pack. He is the oldest of the three and certainly the strongest. But even he is tired. His stomach looks as though it has been scooped out from beneath his rib cage and there is a weariness to his expression. He drops the pack on the ground amongst all the litter from the American troops, and unfastens one of its ties, fishing out the store of cigarettes, to which he adds new butts he picks from the ground. Susan hopes he will get out the remaining rice now, too, as they have not eaten since before the air raid and surely they cannot get through the night without food, but instead he pulls out some folded cloth. She recognizes it as her own T-shirt, which she has not seen since their capture.

  “Here,” says Anh. “Is there anything else you want?”

  She has gotten used to the way he speaks French, to the almost shy manner in which he never meets her gaze. Like many soldiers he has reached a place where he does not look at a person directly unless through the sight of a rifle. She has no doubt he would kill her if he thought he needed to, and that the act would be conducted like any chore. But she is grateful to him now. She takes the T-shirt. It has the green smell of vegetation and moisture, a little like the rice which has become damp in the course of their march, but it is soft and clean. It feels like a pillow, like something she might lay her head against.

  “Thank you,” she says. The pack is still open, as though he expects she will take more. It seems that when he asked if there was anything else she wanted, it was a genuine offer and not sarcasm. “There’s some shorts,” she says, hesitating. “And
some underpants. I’d be so grateful—”

  He takes out the remaining rice and then shoves the whole of the pack in her direction. She guesses he does not want to handle her things, now that he is recognizing that they are hers, or perhaps he is already regretting that he has offered them back to her when certainly the shorts—a pair of knee-length khakis—would have been useful to him. The socks, too, which the soldiers have taken to wearing at night to keep their feet warm, are in the pack, along with a few other items. She gathers her clothes, holding them away from the filthy shirt she wears so that they don’t get soiled, then smiles at Anh, bowing her head as she has seen Vietnamese do for each other. It is perhaps more than she ought to do, the bow, given that these are her own clothes, but she is embarrassed by the state of her trousers, how she has wet herself. If there were any daylight, or even if the night were brighter than it is, the soldiers would see the stain and know what had happened. Perhaps Anh already knows, which is why he is making such a gesture in the first place. “Thank you,” she says, backing away.

  Minh arrives in the hut in a flurry of motion, speaking excitedly to Anh. He points behind him, then goes to the door and brings in a wooden bucket that he has found outside. It is a rusted pail the size of a horse’s feed bucket. Anh runs his finger across the joins, inspecting it for holes, then nods at Minh and the boy disappears.

  “Looks like we have water,” Son tells her.

  “I want a bath,” she says. What she means is that she wants to sit in the broad tub in Marc’s room, hearing the turbulent sound of rushing hot water, her shoulders resting on the porcelain’s smooth surface. Or even a bath in her own room. That was merely a metal affair, stained where the finish had worn away. It was only ever possible to get tepid water, and of course you had to remove all of Son’s photography paraphernalia to get to it. But even that would seem an extravagant luxury right now, like a display of opulence available only to very few in this world, like owning a castle. Marc’s bathroom—how clearly she could see it now—had a high, white ceiling, decorative tiling, a faux marble floor. It would be heaven to be in a bath like that. She could imagine herself, her wet, pale, clean legs bent so that her knees shone with the light from a ceiling lamp, a block of white soap in her hand. Perhaps there would be music—from the radio or Marc’s record player. She could hear Marc’s typewriter keys, the flurry of metal wands, the pauses between in which she imagined him checking his notes, or rereading the pages he had already typed, or drawing in smoke from his cigarette. After the bath, she would wrap herself in a towel, lying on the bed and feeling the sweep of air made by the ceiling fan against her wet hair. Marc would come and sit beside her, unfasten the towel, lay his hand on her damp skin. How often had they done this very thing and thought nothing of it? Nothing at all of the wealth of the experience: clean skin, sheets, hot water, food, the bar of soap, the sound of music. She imagines Son and her in that same bath, the two of them together. She imagines the broad, quilted bed, the sheets ironed like table linen, the boxy pillows, but this time with Son beside her. She should not do this, should not allow the thought. But it is there, a fixed image in her mind, because he is here beside her, smiling at her clean clothes, the ones she holds in front of her, away from her filthy body. He is pleased for her. That she will at least have something else to wear after so many days in the jungle. That she has been afforded the dignity of stepping out of her wet trousers.

  There is a table up against one of the walls and it provides a kind of bed for Minh and Hien, who curl up next to each other like young brothers, fresh from their sponge baths and glad, she imagines, to be sleeping above ground, safe from the rats. Susan ties her hammock between two wooden struts, then goes outside to relieve herself. But when she returns she discovers that Anh has assumed the hammock, so she is left standing in the room, unsure where now to sleep. Anh is already asleep. The other soldiers may well be asleep, too. Nobody keeps watch any more. Just as they have almost forgotten how many days they’ve been wandering in the jungle, they seem also to have neglected the formalities of prisoners and guards. The rifles rest beside the soldiers, either next to them or across their chests, their safeties on.

  It no longer feels as though she is a captive, rather that all five of them have come into a colossal bit of bad luck and are now castaways together. And though it is true that the soldiers do not speak to her often, that they in fact treat her as though she has no useful point of view, she cannot be sure they would not listen if she were to offer an opinion. The fact is, she has none. She can see that the hamlets they visit are abandoned or burnt or both, that the planes fly overhead daily, occasionally dropping their bombs. The American strategy seems to be one of random destruction, and against the incoherence of the attacks, the arbitrary, casual destruction of the rain forest, the razing of these small villages, she has little to offer.

  Above her, she can already hear the scuttling of rats along the thin roof. A wedge of moonlight filters through the open window, illuminating the ruins of the village outside. The owners of the house planted herbs in cakes of earth held in shape by waxy leaves that make for a kind of pot, and it seems odd to see them there, set with care upon the ledge, while the rest of the village is in cinders.

  “Susan,” she hears. It is Son, of course. He is on the floor, sitting on his poncho, his knees sticking out of his torn trousers. “Sleep here.”

  Her eyes are move to Anh, cradled comfortably in the slope of her hammock. She supposes it is only fair he gets it tonight as she’d been the one to have the clean clothes, but she doesn’t want to sleep on the ground. She is afraid of the rats for one thing, and the hammock has taken on a kind of homey comfort for her. It was her hammock. But she is helpless to do anything now but lie on the ground like an animal. She tries to remind herself that at least she was given the privacy of washing by herself at the well, that she was able to remove her old clothes and rinse them. Here she is in fresh clothes while Anh and the others had the same dirty ones. But she might have been allowed her poncho liner. The liner, too, is now draped over the sleeping soldier, resting beneath Anh’s dark arms and his rifle, which rises and falls gently with his breath.

  Son reaches up, touching her hand, and she drops gently down next to him. She had always imagined that if a woman were to be captured, she’d be killed or raped or both. She never imagined the woman would be herself (if it happened at all) but one of the other journalists, the bolder ones whose words and photographs sometimes appeared in Time or Life, women who she imagined were much braver than she, and who took more risks. Dickey Chapelle was killed by a mine two years ago while covering a marine operation, and there is a photograph of her dying that Susan will never forget. In it, she is stretched out on the ground, her hand at her face, the metal of her earring catching the light. There is the long scabbard of her dagger across her bent hip, the blood from a throat wound pooling beneath her. It was taken by another photographer, a friend of Dickey’s, and Susan often wondered how it was that he managed to frame the shot with such apparent dispassion. The mine exploded; the shrapnel entered her throat. It was bound to happen sooner or later, Dickey said. She’d been in so many wars by then; she expected one day to end her life in one. Her friend, the photographer, stepped back so that she felt the sun over her face. The camera shutter moved; she may even have heard it; then she was dead. It happened so fast, as you always imagine is the case in deaths on the battlefield.

  But no women she knew had been captured. To be captured, well, that was a different thing. One expected—what exactly? A series of awful rapes, followed by an execution. Appalling, agonizing torment, then death. Once, a couple of ARVN soldiers tied a woman suspected of being Vietcong and submerged her in water over and over until finally she gave them the information they wanted. Susan knew this as fact because she saw it. She stood helplessly on the bank, willing the girl to speak, until she didn’t think she could stand one more minute of watching her torture. Happens all the time, a guy from UPI told her. Try
not to be too upset. The Vietcong butchered the bodies of anyone they considered traitors. She’d seen photographs; she’d seen remains. She’d heard the stories, and not only stories but the sad, awful confessions of villagers who watched.

  But she did not know what they might do to a woman prisoner-of-war, to a Western woman, to her. So far, neither rape nor murder. Instead, she is going to grow hungrier and colder, sleep on the ground, live off unripened fruit and whatever can be caught: insects, frogs, the occasional monkey or rat. The slow assault on her body that began with her feet—which have not yet recovered, though she has been allowed again to paint them with iodine, and tonight to wash them as well—has risen now to her stomach and throat. She feels a scraping in the back of her mouth when she swallows, only a low-grade virus, she hopes, and not a streptococcus infection. She is sure they have no penicillin.

  Son says, “I’ll make room for you.”

  She cannot see his face. If she were able to see him plainly on this dark night she would understand at once the love so obviously displayed there. He holds open the poncho and guides her gently as though her legs are glass, not muscled and tough as they are, as strong as a man’s. But this gesture, like so many on his part, goes almost unnoticed by Susan. Perhaps she believes even now in the fictitious Han, that invention Son used to explain his frequent absences. Perhaps she finds herself so unattractive, living as she does among the soldiers, that the notion that he might love her is implausible. In any case, if she allowed herself to see what Son appears to be offering, she would be baffled by the way in which they seem to have moved from friendship into this mature, extraordinary dependency upon one another, skipping entirely the heady passions, the petty arguments, the great leaps of desire and jealousy and despair and hope that she has always associated with love. It is as though Son has come inch by inch to occupy the very core of her. If she looked into her heart she would find him there, but she is not thinking of such things.