Only the Heart

by Brian Caswell

  Just as there would be no choice for Minh, except to go along. How many other families had been split by such inescapable decisions?

  A child begins to cry, its distress muffled by the intervening deck. Below, out of sight, fifty-five people huddle in silence. They began arriving in small, frightened groups a little after midnight, in the boats which Tan is using to ferry the refugees the kilometre and a half from a number of pre-arranged staging posts — like the riverside house of Van Nguyen, who is taking the risk in return for a reduced passage-cost for his family.

  For the hundredth time, Minh strains to catch the sound of the dinghy’s two-stroke motor, and he peers into the blackness of the harbour night. The buildings of Rach Gia line the shore; solid lumps of shadow against the lighter shading of the sky, but the black skyline is dotted with the glow of the lights that still illuminate the occasional all-night gathering.

  From time to time odd sounds carry across the water. Another baby, crying faintly in the distance. The tin-can insect-rumbling of a lone scooter, heading home.

  And soft music …

  Lòng me nhù biên Thái Binh Dùòng …

  A mother’s love is as large as the Pacific Ocean …

  Somewhere close a fish jumps, slapping the water-surface with its body as it disappears.

  The sounds of a new year.

  He listens with the ears of a man about to start a new life …

  5

  RISING TIDE

  TOAN’S STORY

  Linh hates the water and boats.

  We planned a trip to the zoo once, and we had to drive across the bridge and all the way around the harbour because she refused to go on the ferry, and no matter how much my mum and dad pleaded and threatened, she wouldn’t budge. She was ten or eleven at the time, but she was quite willing to spend the whole day in the car on her own rather than step on board anything that had to travel across water deeper than a bath-tub.

  It’s not like she was always scared of water. After all, we were born in a sea-port, and we’d all learned to swim early in the river and the sea. We even went fishing from the rocks, or from small boats in the bay. I’m not sure that she’s so much scared of the water even now. I think it goes a whole lot deeper than fear.

  She certainly wasn’t afraid on the night we finally made our move to leave.

  It was a little after two in the morning, and we’d been woken up and dressed in warm clothes. Then we’d sat on the deck out back of Van Nguyen’s house, waiting. I was asking questions and getting no answers, but Linh just sat there patiently, as if she knew exactly what was going on. Which, of course, she did.

  She wasn’t nervous or upset; she didn’t even look tired.

  My mother looked all three, as she fussed around her three sons, making sure that we were wrapped up and comfortable.

  Aunt Mai just sat there quietly with Phuong on one side of her and Linh on the other and didn’t say a word. I remember my mother had a statue of the three wise monkeys on a shelf at home, and my cousins and their mother looked so much like them that I started to giggle. Until my mother snapped at me and told me to be quiet.

  Something in the way she said it made me realise the seriousness of the strange situation, more than the fact that we were up and dressed and waiting for a boat at two o’clock in the morning.

  As a kid, I guess I was a bit of a slow learner …

  *

  28 February 1977

  Rach Gia

  HOA

  2.45 am. Somewhere in the near-distance she picks up the sound of the motor, a soft throbbing pulse that signals the small boat’s approach.

  No one on the wooden veranda behind her has heard it yet. Perhaps they are not listening as carefully. Perhaps what her mother always said is true after all, and she does indeed have the ears of a mouse …

  It seems strange that she should think of her mother now, after all these years. Now, when she is on the point of leaving her whole life behind.

  Time heals the bleeding soul …

  A dozen years of regrets and anger, sitting undigested in the pit of her stomach; the choice that tore her heart, but made her strong.

  Sitting on the deck, waiting for the boat to arrive, she finds the time to pity an old woman. One who should have known the happiness of her only daughter’s children before she died. Who could have shared the years of war and hardship with a family that cared for her.

  If only she had been less proud …

  “Your father’s family can trace its history back four hundred years, and you would throw your heritage away on this … grandson of a dirt-farmer. On this son of a peasant storekeeper!”

  Nineteen sixty-five, and already the old ways were dying. But her mother was too proud to let them go. Too proud to accept her daughter’s choice.

  Just as her daughter was too proud to bow to a mother’s will, as it was her duty to do.

  Twelve years, and the pain still lingers. But it is a night for putting off the past, and as the sound of the approaching motor grows gradually louder, finally she finds the words to speak inside her head. A plea for understanding, a prayer of forgiveness. A silent, sad farewell.

  Then the boat scrapes the side of the deck. It is long and not very wide, with room for perhaps three adults and a child to lie, side by side in the bottom, beneath the boards that Tan’s man is now removing. He looks up and hisses instructions. A family of three; a man, his wife and their small child. They step aboard, and lie down at the front of the boat.

  The sailor fixes her with his gaze, then nods toward Hoang.

  “Him too. Come on. We don’t have all night here. ”

  Hoang looks at her, and she nods. Then he steps into the boat and squeezes down next to the man and his family. He looks up at her, his face showing no emotion, as Tan’s man replaces the boards, hiding them from view.

  “You and the two boys.” He is removing the boards covering the rear section of the boat.

  They move to the edge and step down into the rocking boat one at a time, Son first. She stumbles slightly as she takes her turn, and the boat moves under her weight, but then she steadies, and reaches up to help Toan. He looks so small standing there on the edge, and she wonders what he must make of all this.

  Then he is in the boat, and lying beside his brother.

  Mai and the girls have not moved. They are waiting for the second boat. Before the sailor growls again Hoa sneaks a look at her husband’s sister.

  Mai, who rarely smiles any more. Who never laughs.

  And seeing the three of them in the dim light which hangs above the back door of the house, she notices, perhaps for the first time, how different her two nieces are.

  Phuong, beautiful and delicate, who wears her emotions on her face for the world to see and know. Who cries when she hurts, and smiles most of the time.

  And Linh.

  Eight years old, and already so much like her mother, she watches the world without comment, hiding a child’s hurts behind an old woman’s mask; neutral and impassive, allowing nothing out — and nothing in.

  Hard as granite. Or brittle as old glass? Only time will tell. The thought takes less than a moment, and she realises that the man is speaking.

  “The girl.” He points toward Linh. “She’ll fit.”

  For a moment it seems that Mai will resist. Anything could go wrong. Maybe the boat will not come for them, and they will be …

  But then she makes her decision. Her gaze shifts from the man’s face to the face of her brother’s wife, and Hoa answers the silent question with the slightest movement of her head.

  She will be safe with me …

  The child steps down and takes her place beside Toan. And as she moves to lie down next to them, Hoa comes face to face with her niece. She smiles encouragement, but the child’s mask is in place; fixed and unreadable.

  As the boards close over them, and she feels the boat move away from the river’s edge, she watches the sky through the gaps in the wood.


  And slowly she becomes aware of the girl’s small hand finding hers. Not a grip of fear, but a touch. Soft. Drawing wordless comfort from the contact.

  On the deck behind Van Nguyen’s house, eight people remain, waiting for the boat which will carry them away. Down the river, across the bay. The first stage of their journey to a new world.

  They watch Tan’s man as he ferries the boat into the middle of the stream, and they look further off in the direction from which their ride will come. No one speaks. There is no point.

  Sitting apart from the others, Mai places a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Phuong turns to look at her mother, and finds herself staring into the blank depths of eyes whose pupils scan the stars, but whose gaze is turned inwards.

  She lays her head gently against her mother’s breast, and lets her lids drift together …

  *

  TOAN’S STORY

  3 am. It was cold, lying there in the bottom of the boat. With the boards a couple of centimetres from your face, the whole experience was … claustrophobic, I guess. like floating along the river in a coffin. The sound of the motor, the drip of the spray which fell onto the boards and sought out the gaps between them. And the sky through the cracks; purple-black and scattered with stars.

  No one made a sound. The others because they knew what was at stake; me because I was confused and more than a little scared.

  By raising my head to the boards, and placing my eye next to the crack, I could look right and left, and even a little way ahead. On both sides of the river the buildings loomed like physical threats, dark in the cold night, and up ahead the old wooden bridge arched over the water, black against the skyline.

  I heard my mother gasp and felt her stiffen as she looked up. We were maybe fifteen metres from the bridge, just moving into its moonshadow, when I caught the movement in the corner of my eye and the red glow of a cigarette. Two soldiers, standing on the bridge, leaning over the railing, straight down at us. My mother reached across and gripped my arm tightly, hurting me, but I knew better than to complain.

  Son, of course, knew what was going on, and I felt him shrink with fear, his muscles tense against me.

  As the dinghy slid beneath the old wooden structure, just before the soldiers passed from view, one of them raised his hand from the railing and waved to the man sitting in the boat above us, and I felt Son’s tension drain away.

  I looked up as we passed into the blackness beneath the bridge, watching the lighter dark of the night sky through the holes in its wooden deck. The structure smelled old a combination of damp and rotting wood and urine. Suddenly I sensed a slight movement. With a chittering squeak, a huge rat darted out from behind one of the pylons and along the beam. I watched until it moved beyond my line of sight and disappeared. Moments later, close by, I heard a faint splash.

  Then we were out of the shadow again and I could smell the sea-breeze.

  My last memory of Rach Gia is the sound of music. As we passed from the river mouth into the wider bay, it drifted out across the water. It was gentle and soothing, but I can’t remember what the song was …

  *

  PHUONG

  3.15 am. She begins to cough.

  The wind has grown stronger since they entered the bay, and the tiny ripples have grown to small white-caps, which strike the point of the bow and turn into a fine spray that drifts back over them as the boat heads directly into the rising tide.

  Her mother places an arm around her shoulder, drawing her close, sharing her body-warmth, while her other arm she gently massages her daughter’s back. The child has always had a slight chest problem, and the cold night and the onshore breeze are exactly the sort of conditions she has been taught to avoid.

  Slowly the shape of Tan’s boat begins to materialise out of the darkness, as the dinghy closes the gap. It looks just like any other fishing boat preparing to sail. The small crew is busy and the decks are clear. The rest of the “cargo” is already below decks, and this boat contains the final few items.

  As they climb aboard, the girl recognises a couple of the crew. Her uncle stands nearby as they are herded below. Tan is a businessman. The less real crew he has to employ, the more paying passengers he can squeeze on.

  A few moments later she feels the hull shudder as the engines cough into life. On deck the crew is busy preparing for sea, and she can hear the scrape of the anchor as it drags across the side of the boat.

  Then they begin to move.

  She watches her Aunt Hoa praying. She has her eyes closed, and she sits leaning against the boards of the hull with her legs drawn up to her chest, rocking slightly, with a movement that has nothing to do with the motion of the boat.

  Her mother sits staring at the sky through the open hatch. The moon is setting near the horizon, and though it is out of view the clouds shine with its reflected light. Much later she will wonder what thoughts occupied her mother’s mind as the boat began its journey.

  But some things about her mother she will never know …

  6

  FAIR EXCHANGE …

  TOAN’S STORY

  I was never jealous of Linh.

  I mean, you hear stories sometimes … They call it “the cuckoo syndrome”. A kid moves into a family, like a stepsister or someone the parents decide to adopt, and then they begin really moving in. And pushing the other kids out. It’s easier I think, at least with some families, for the new kid to imprWe have companess with little touches. To use the sympathy and the uncertainty of the parents to get what they want, while the kids who were there already suffer.

  You hear stories …

  But that never happened with us. I guess, really, we’d always be more like a brother and sister than cousins. Back when my uncle disappeared, and Aunt Mai brought Phuong and Linh back to live with us over the store, I was hardly old enough to be aware of it. And I think the twins secretly liked the idea of suddenly becoming ‘’big brothers” to the girls. Even if Phuong was a couple of years older than them.

  So it wasn’t such a huge adjustment to have them living with us permanently when Aunt Mai …

  Anyway, in those first few months after we left, there was no chance that any of us was going to get spoiled.

  So I was never jealous of Linh. Not when we were kids, not later. I always loved her in a way that’s impossible to explain without it sounding … wrong. She was my cousin, my surrogate sister, and something a whole lot more. She was my friend.

  I wasn’t even jealous of Miro. In spite of the fact that he seemed to be better than I was at just about everything and Linh seemed to have no time any more for just “hanging out”. I tried to volunteer for “chaperone duty” wherever possible, partly to be around them but mainly so that they could have a bit of freedom, and I always covered for her when she asked me to.

  It wasn’t hard to see how she felt about him. How they felt about each other.

  Which made Linh’s reaction later on so strange. I mean, even when everything went so horribly wrong, it was the last thing you would have expected … At least, it was the last thing I expected.

  But then, I never claimed to understand girls. Especially not Linh.

  The thing is, Linh never trusted happiness.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love. She did. It’s just that she never expected life to be fair.

  “I loved my father,” she told me once. ’’To me he was the whole world. He knew the answers to all my questions. He was strong enough to carry me on his shoulders in the marketplace, so I could look down on everyone. He made my mother smile in a way no one else ever could. I thought he was … invincible.“

  I remember we were sitting in the car and she was staring off into the distance as she spoke, as if she could see the things she was recalling. Then she suddenly pulled back, and her eyes fixed on mine.

  “But then he died. It wasn’t heroic or earth-shattering. They didn’t announce it on the news. He just disappeared and never came back, and everyone knew. At first I coul
dn’t forgive him for that. For not being invincible. For leaving us without warning. For being human, I guess. I watched my mother not crying, and I taught myself to do the same …”

  *

  2 March 1977

  South China Sea

  7°N, 104°E

  MAI

  Morning.

  The time of day matters little. Some light finds its way below, driving back the shadows, but light alone cannot lift the gloom which rules their foetid prison.

  Hold on. Focus on the future. Endure. Soon it will be over.

  Phuong whispers a request and she nods assent, watching her eldest daughter move across to the ladder and climb out.

  She smiles to herself and turns to watch her other child.

  Linh’s eyes are closed, but she is not asleep. Sometimes she likes to pretend she is, but her body gives her away. She tenses with the rolling of the boat, and grips the spaces between the planks to keep herself from slipping towards the filthy bilgewater. Mai leans over and pushes a lock of hair away from her daughter’s eyes.

  Suddenly they are open and Linh smiles. The act is over.

  “You are awake. ” The girl’s hair has fallen back. She brushes it away again, licking her fingers before attempting to flatten it into place. “How did you sleep?”

  The little girl stretches theatrically but does not answer the question. She is looking at the empty space on the other side of her mother.

  “Where’s Phuong?”

  Mai looks up at the hatch and indicates with a movement of her head.

  Linh moves closer, whispering.

  “Toan was sick in the night. He threw up in the water.” She looks sympathetically over towards her sleeping cousin.

  But her mother’s eyes are turned upwards, staring at the clouds.