Only the Heart

by Brian Caswell

  It was this kind of joke that had once made the adults laugh, but the kind that they could no longer tell aloud …

  He stands to face the two men, and the younger of them smiles, trying to appear friendly — and failing.

  “This is the house of Vo Van Minh?”

  The boy stares for a moment, then nods. It is hard to find your voice before such men, and part of him is nervous.

  “And he is home?”

  “Yes …”

  The single word sneaks out, and the boy watches the younger official’s smile grow cold and set, as he turns and looks at the other man, indicating the house with an almost imperceptible movement of his head.

  Then they move away and the boy is forgotten.

  He watches them enter his grandfather’s shop, which occupies the ground floor of the family’s three-storey home. And the feeling grows within him that he has just done something unforgivable …

  *

  TOAN’S STORY

  When they took my father away, I blamed my self for a long time. I felt as if it was me who had betrayed him. I should have lied to them. Told them that I didn’t know who Vo Van Minh was.

  It was stupid to feel that way, I realise that now. They knew about him already, about his role in the war. Which meant that he’d already been betrayed by someone. They would have found him in the end. Nothing was more certain.

  Looking back, I think he was resigned to it. He’d made his choices more than a year before.

  As an officer in South Vietnamese intelligence, he must have known that he would be a target when the fighting was over. I found out later that he almost escaped, that he’d had his chance and had chosen to stay.

  On 30 April 1975, just before the capital fell, a ship left Saigon, full of personnel who had worked in “sensitive” positions. But not their families. Things were frantic and there was just no room. For most, it was the final desperate chance to escape the advancing Communists, and my father was on board with the others.

  He told me later that he’d panicked. There is a fear inside each of us, he said, that blinds us to what is truly important. That when the others ran, he ran with them.

  He could have escaped.

  He had escaped.

  In the chaos that was the capital in the final days of the war, it was hard to think straight, he said. He had joined the mad rush and crammed himself onto the old vessel with a thousand other frightened people, without a thought for the consequences.

  But as he stood there, crammed against the railing of the ship, waiting for the engines to start and the ropes to be cast off, suddenly the panic disappeared.

  “There are worse things than dying,” he told me, years later. “I stood there imagining what it would be like, if I was safe somewhere, alone, while my family was still here. And I looked at the others. Some of them were dead already, but they didn’t even know it. What were the Communists going to do? Kill everyone who worked for the South — or for the Americans? Perhaps, but there are worse things than dying …”

  Just before the ship pulled out, he ran off and returned home. He threw his gun in the river, and burned his uniform and any papers or photos that tied him to his job, then he sat down on the balcony, and just stared at my mother for a long time.

  Sometimes, I fancy I remember that day. I was young, but I think I remember being confused. Knowing that something was wrong, that something had changed. Maybe even being a little scared.

  But I can’t be certain. Sometimes, we construct our memories from what we learn later.

  My father tells me that he came into our bedroom that night and held his three sons for a long time. I should remember that. It isn’t something he did very often. Perhaps he was saying goodbye. Just in case.

  As it was, it took them a few months to track him down. Most of the paperwork had been shredded or burnt in the capital, and the interrogations and the betrayals were a slow process.

  He’d had the chance to prepare himself for the day they knocked on his door.

  For the inevitable.

  He was ready, and it was no one’s fault. Least of all mine.

  But that’s not the way it seems to a five-year-old when he watches his father being marched out of the house under guard.

  While the whole street looks on in silence.

  As they pushed him into the jeep, I remember he looked at me. The family were all standing on the street, outside the door of my grandfather’s shop, unable to find the words to say, or the movements that might make the two officials change their minds. But my father didn’t look at them. Not right away. He looked at me. And he smiled.

  I think he must have known what I was feeling, because he spoke, just loudly enough for me to hear.

  “Không sao ààu con,” he said. Don’t worry, son …

  There was no time for him to say anything else. The door slammed closed, and the older of the two officials put the jeep in gear. As it began to roll, I saw my father look back at my mother.

  She was crying, but he just shook his head and smiled gently, as if it was all a big mistake, and he would be back for the evening meal.

  It was six months before we saw him again.

  *

  27 October 1976

  Long Xuyen Re-education Camp

  MINH

  Through the wire of the fence the view is depressing. Not because the scenery is bleak, but precisely because it is not.

  Barely half a kilometre away, across a stretch of cleared land, the river curves gently around a wooded outcrop, and across the water the rice fields stretch into the distance, rising in tiers; a patchwork, covering the land, as far as the eye can follow.

  Somehow, a bleak, empty landscape would be easier to take.

  As he stands with his fingers entwined in the links of the inner fence, the peace of the scene fills him with a longing that drains the power from his anger and leaves him passionless.

  “Minh?” Thanh’s voice. Standing a few metres away, his friend speaks his name.

  He turns slowly — because he recognises the voice, and because without the need for words its tone conveys the news that he has dreaded.

  He nods his understanding sadly, and for a moment they stare at each other in silence.

  “Did he wake at all?”

  A slight shake of the head. “He was peaceful. He slipped away in his sleep, like … smoke on the breeze.”

  Thanh, the poet. Thanh, who fills the dust of the exercise yard with images of peace and beauty, for the prisoners — and the guards — to read. Or trample under foot. Even Thanh struggles for a satisfying image to mark such a passing, such a useless death.

  “He should never have been sent here. He was an old man. He could have done them no harm. They could have let him be …”

  Suddenly he realises that he has been griping the wire of the fence so hard that his fingers are bleeding. The blood is warm and sticky on the skin of his palm.

  Thanh is shaking his head.

  “No. They couldn’t. He was too high up. Too responsible — even if he never actually pulled a trigger or dropped a bomb. He knew that, but he stayed anyway. Maybe he felt responsible … Did you know, the Americans offered him a seat on the last plane out? He could have taken it, but I think he was just too tired.”

  Minh shakes his head. The damaged skin of his fingers is beginning to sting. He licks the blood absently and stares at his friend.

  “What harm could he possibly have done them, Thanh? He was an old man. The war is over.”

  Thanh shakes his head again, like a teacher with a slow student.

  “He was the enemy. And he was one of the losers. The winners decide who the ‘war-criminals’ are, and the winners decide when the war is over. You should know that.”

  For a moment longer Minh looks at his friend, but his arguments have evaporated. He sighs, then turns and looks out again. Beyond the fences.

  The river gleams in the sun like liquid gold …

  *

  TOA
N’S STORY

  Years later my father told me about his superior, Nguyen Quang Vu, who died in the re-education camp at Long Xuyen. He was old, and their ranks had been very different, but they were friends, and as he had worked in intelligence during the war, he was considered “a danger” to the new order.

  His family were all dead, so there was no one to pay the bribes, and … well, I guess he just ran out of reasons to keep living.

  My father was luckier than most.

  Our family was not particularly wealthy, but we were in business, and we were … comfortable, and even before the war ended we had already converted most of our wealth into gold, so we had enough to pay the bribes to all the officials, from the local Party bureaucrats to the head guard at the re-education camp itself. It took six months, but finally my father was freed.

  Thanh Tran spent over ten years being “re-educated”, partly because he was an “intellectual”, but mainly because of his rank. My father would gladly have paid the bribes, if that was what it took, but the higher you had been in the system, the harder it got to buy your way out. And Thanh had been a colonel.

  So Tran Van Thanh, intellectual, “war-criminal” and threat to the new order, watched the rice fields and the river through a chain-mesh fence for ten long years, listened to the re-education propaganda and wrote his famous first collection of poems.

  And when he came out, we were long gone.

  2

  GHOST STORIES

  LINH’S STORY

  Some of my earliest memories are of the visits we made to Saigon. The war was still on, and the capital was … chaotic, I guess. With the American soldiers on leave and the business that they represented to the shops, the bars, the sidewalk food-vendors—and the girls—the streets were even more crammed and disorganised than they had been before the French left and the war escalated out of control.

  Of course, I was only five or six at the time, so I don’t remember the city before the war, but you pick up on what your parents say, and it becomes a part of your memory, almost as real as your own recollections.

  “That was Huyen’s house,” you say, like a parrot, though Huyen died years before you were born.

  I do remember the visits, though: the long bus-ride from Rach Gia, where we lived; eight hours to travel about three hundred kilometres, waiting at the river-crossings for the barges to carry us across, while children my own age bargained with my parents over fruit and sweets and the delicious-smelling bánh bao. And then arriving at the centre of Saigon, drained from the travel-sickness, but excited all the same.

  There was a life there that was different from the easy-paced existence of the coastal town I had spent my whole life becoming familiar with: the packed streets, the noise, the hundreds of bicycles and the tinny motor-scooters that wove in and out of each other’s way, like strange buzzing insects. But almost no cars.

  When everyone you know and everything you need is within walking distance, there is really no need to own a car, and that was always how it was. Very few people had ever ridden in a car, let alone owned one, even before the war.

  The war had just made transport more difficult still. Apart from the few ancient buses and taxis, about the only vehicles with more than two wheels were the military ones: jeeps, trucks, the occasional car — every one with a uniformed driver.

  It was a city in a country at war, tuned to the needs of the soldier.

  People lived and breathed and did their shopping and went about their occupations as they had probably always done, but woven into everything was the war, and the business of war.

  I remember, I was fascinated by the strange faces of the American soldiers. Especially the black ones …

  *

  14 July 1974

  Saigon, South Vietnam

  LINH

  Sweating inside his uniform, the young GI sneaks a look at the clock on the building across the street.

  Two more hours.

  The passing crowd is a blur, and he blinks the sweat away from his eyes. If he could stand apart and look at himself, he would see the sheen on his dark skin, and the beads of perspiration marking the lines of his cheekbones and the ridges beneath his eyes.

  But Corporal Travis Sloan cannot stand apart. He cannot stand anywhere but exactly where he has been ordered to stand. For two more hours. Guarding one of the buildings inside which his superiors sit planning how to make the best of a lost war.

  Vaguely he hears music from one of the bars down the street. Jim Morrison and the Doors.

  Come on Baby, light my fire …

  He smiles ironically and continues to sweat.

  And he notices, through the jostling crowd, a young Vietnamese girl, maybe five or six, standing quietly beside her mother, who carries on an animated conversation with another woman. The girl is staring straight at him. No embarrassment, no fear. Studying him. He feels like some strange specimen under a microscope. She stands, she stares, her almond eyes unblinking.

  He has seen it before. The fascination of children with his size and the colour of his skin. But always, when he stares back, they look away, or hide behind the nearest adult.

  Not this one. She holds his gaze, her face expressionless, taking in everything. For a few seconds he stares back, feeling the power of her self-possession like a physical force. Then he smiles, and winks at her across the crowded street.

  She winks back, then pokes out her tongue. Just as a convoy of trucks moves past, blocking her from view.

  Try to set the night on fire …

  When the view is clear again, she is gone. He looks both ways along the street, but She has disappeared.

  And he will never see her again.

  Three weeks later, near a bombed-out village whose name he will never be told, he will lose his left leg below the knee to the shattering pain of a sniper’s bullet. He will almost die from shock and infection, and it will earn him a medal and a free trip back Stateside.

  But through days of pain, in the half-world between agony and the morphine dream, with death beckoning, and the long tunnel stretching before him, through some trick of the mind, the memory of that tiny face, those almond eyes and that short encounter will stay with him, holding him back. Delaying the journey long enough for the doctors to claim their victory.

  And years later, when his own child is born, though her skin will be dark like her father’s, she will have the same eyes. Almond eyes. Eyes like her mother’s.

  Like those of a tiny girl he glimpsed once across a crowded street, in a doomed city, near the end of a useless, brutal war …

  *

  LINH’S STORY

  In Saigon we got to sleep upstairs. It was a kind of attic room, and they rolled out thin straw mats for us kids to lie on. Two to a mat — top and tail.

  But we had to wait of course. The men used the room for gambling — cards mainly; blackjack and Chinese poker. Sometimes it went on late into the night, and we had to hang around downstairs until they were finished and we could go up to bed.

  There were compensations. Usually the winner would celebrate by sending Phuong or one of my cousins out to one of the street-vendors to buy bánh ú or some other treat for supper. There was usually change which he would give to the messenger. If it was Phuong, she would often share it with me.

  I loved those late suppers, and the feeling of security that being there gave me. But I was only young, and exciting as it was, sometimes I just wouldn’t make the distance.

  I remember lots of times being woken up where I’d fallen asleep on the floor behind the shrine or under the window, and being taken upstairs to bed, secure in my father’s arms.

  That was before he disappeared one night, and never came back …

  They were fun times.

  If we got to bed early enough, and we were still awake, Phuong or one of the older kids would tell us ghost stories. Really creepy tales of lost souls and monsters that looked like beautiful humans — until they got you in their clutches.

 
But I wouldn’t pull the pillow up around my throat, like the other girls, when they told how the fangs bit into the hero’s neck and the blood began to spurt. I’d always ask questions, trying to satisfy my curiosity about things that struck me as a bit dumb.

  Like, “Why would anyone be stupid enough to follow a beautiful woman into a dark cave, when everyone knew it was haunted?” or “Why would any spirit powerful enough to destroy a whole village choose to live on top of a cold, windy mountain-top, instead of down in the valley?”

  In the end, they got into the habit of telling me to shut up before I even opened my mouth. I suppose questions of logic do ruin the atmosphere of a scary story.

  Toan was too young to think of asking those sorts of questions. And you could tell the stories scared him, even when he tried to act really brave. He always gave himself away. A couple of times he even asked me to go with him to the toilet, because he was too scared to go alone. He whispered it in my ear, and I never told a soul.

  It doesn’t do to show your cousins and their friends that their stories have scared you. They know how to make the most of it later on.

  Still, it was pretty obvious that they’d scared him. He hadn’t developed his acting skills yet. Which meant that he was no challenge.

  I think they were more interested in scaring me. But they just never could. Maybe I had no imagination, I don’t know.

  Toan reckons I was just born tough.

  You have to love him. He always says the right things. If he wasn’t my cousin, and I wasn’t already … attached, I’d probably end up marrying him, in spite of the fact that he’s eighteen months younger than me. As it is, I’ll just have to make sure he chooses the right girl. The way they’re throwing themselves at him just at the moment, it would be easy for him to make a mistake. It’s the sort of thing that happens when you become an “overnight celebrity” …

  Look, just stop me any time I start rambling, will you? I get side-tracked easily. And I doubt you’re the slightest bit interested in Vo An Toan’s love life — even if I am.

  I was just making the point that I was never afraid of stories. Or real life. I guess I took after my mother.