Old Man

by David A. Poulsen

  The North American English Language School. I’d been thinking about what Jen had told me about teaching English here someday. The more I thought about it the more I thought it might be a cool thing to do for a while after I got through school.

  I know what I said before about thinking about stuff that was a few years away, but it really couldn’t hurt, could it?

  I wasn’t sure what time it was, I was guessing maybe six o’clock, so maybe there wouldn’t be anyone at the North American English Language School. But that didn’t make sense either — a lot of people taking the classes must work during the day, so evenings should be like action central around the place.

  I found the place, no problem, in maybe forty-five minutes, and lights were on all through the building. It was two storeys high, and looked like a combination office building/Canadian Tire store. It didn’t really resemble a school except that there were a lot of people going in and out of the place. Most of them were carrying books. Students.

  Over the front door of the building — where you’d expect to see the name of the school — was a massive Coca-Cola sign. There was a high chain-link fence around the outside of the schoolyard, but you could walk right through the schoolyard and up to the front door. I did.

  I hesitated when I got there but finally decided to go inside. I walked in and up a few steps just inside the door to what was the main floor. There were classrooms on both sides and ahead was what looked like an administration office. I stopped outside one of the classrooms and leaned against the wall next to the open door. I could hear perfectly everything that was going on.

  I took a quick peek, then stepped back and just listened. The teacher was maybe my mom’s age and was speaking English with a German accent. At least I think it was a German accent. Sometimes he’d say something in Vietnamese, but most of what was going on in there was in English.

  It seemed that the class was discussing the weather. Specifically, winter weather. I heard one of the students say, “That is a very bad blizzard outside.” Then the teacher said, “Yes, we will need to wear our parkas and scarves today.”

  Yeah, I bet that blizzard topic comes up all the time around here. I had heard that in the northern part of the country there were more mountains, and they did get some cold and snowy weather. But right here in Saigon, the parka business was doing right poorly.

  Still, I liked what I was hearing in the class. I took another peek. The students in this class were all adults, maybe twenty to a lot older — people the old man’s age, maybe even older than that.

  The atmosphere in the classroom seemed happy. There was some laughter, but I couldn’t tell if they were laughing at something the teacher had said or if it was at each other and the way they were pronouncing the words. Some were better than others. Some were pretty hard to understand. The teacher put up a slide of a snowman and that brought big-time laughs.

  A couple of people walked by me in the hall and looked at me a little funny. Suspicious. I figured I’d better move on. I went to the office and thought about going in to talk to someone, but there were brochures in racks on both sides of the door, so I took a couple and drifted off.

  I went out a different set of doors than I had come in through. Just outside, sitting on a concrete retaining wall was a little Vietnamese girl maybe seven or eight. She was reading an English picture book, something about a farm. There was a horse and a pig and a chicken on the cover of the book.

  There was something wrong with the little girl’s face. One side kind of drooped and one eye seemed to sit lower than the other. I couldn’t tell if it was from an injury or if it was a birth thing, but it didn’t matter. Somehow, even with the defect, she was really pretty, especially when she smiled, which she did right then.

  “Hi,” she said, practising her English.

  “Hi,” I said back to her.

  A dog on a leash was lying at her feet looking up at me.

  “It is a very nice tonight.”

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed. No blizzards, don’t even need a parka.

  She held out her book. “This is a book.”

  I took it and looked at it. “Yes, it is. It’s called Fun Day at the Farm.” I pointed to the words on the cover.

  “Fun Day at the Farm,” she repeated.

  I handed the book back to her. “Are you a student here?”

  She nodded. “Student, yes.”

  “Do you like English?”

  She said “yes” but looked a little puzzled.

  “You like to speak English?” I pointed to my mouth as I said “speak English” and that seemed to help.

  She smiled the big smile again. “Yes, I like to speak English.”

  I wasn’t sure how long I should talk to her. In Canada you have to be really careful around little kids. People get suspicious in a hurry. In a foreign country, I didn’t figure I wanted to push it. I turned to leave.

  “What is your name?” She was still smiling. Enjoying the conversation in English.

  “My name is Nate.” I turned back to her. “What is your name?”

  “My name is An Lien.” The dog stood up, stretched.

  “That’s a very nice name, An Lien.”

  I took a half-step back. The dog was small, looked like a bichon or something. The tail was wagging. But it was still a dog.

  “You like my dog?”

  “Uh … sure, I like your … dog. Is he friendly?”

  She tipped her head to one side and looked at me. Didn’t understand … probably the word “friendly.”

  “Your dog … uh, what is its name?”

  “Name … is Tu.”

  I remembered that Madame Benoit, our French teacher, always made us answer in complete sentences. And because Madame Benoit was très gorgeous and had a très nice body, I remembered this part of my French education.

  “My dog’s name is Tu,” I said.

  An Lien looked at me like I was nuts. I also had a dog named Tu?

  I pointed at her. “You say, ‘my dog’s name is Tu.’”

  She smiled and looked down, petted the dog and looked back up at me. “My dog’s name is Tu.”

  “Awright.” That confused her too, but I didn’t explain that. I didn’t know how.

  “I have to go now,” I said.

  She nodded. “You like … touch my dog Tu?”

  “We say ‘pet’ the dog. Yes, I would like to pet your dog, Tu.”

  Which, of course, was bullshit. For all I knew, Tu might mean “Kill that white bastard” in Vietnamese. But I’d kind of got myself in it. No choice unless I wanted a little Vietnamese girl to know I was afraid of a dog that stood maybe twenty centimetres high from bottom to top.

  I bent down slowly. Reached my hand gently towards Tu. Back of the hand first. I’d read that in an article somewhere. I hoped that Tu had read the same article. I left my hand a few centimetres from Tu’s nose. He looked at it, took a couple of tentative steps forward and sniffed my hand.

  I felt hot. Maybe I was sweating, I wasn’t sure. I mean this wasn’t anything like Hill 453, but I still wasn’t having a nice time. I left my hand there, hoping the dog wasn’t thinking of my fingers as tasty looking hors d’oeuvre. He looked up at me, then back at my hand. Gave a couple of fingers a little lick, then another one.

  I slowly extended my hand a little farther, gently petted his back, my eyes totally focused on his tail. Still wagging, good.

  I scratched behind his ears, and Tu flopped down on his belly. He was liking it.

  An Tien laughed. “He likes you. He likes you pet him.”

  Pet. She had learned a new word. I had taught her a new word. How cool was that?

  I stood up, took a deep breath. “I like him too,” I said.

  “You live here — Ho Chi Minh City?”

  “No, I live in Canada. I am going home, back to Canada — in a few days.” Then for the second time, “I have to go now, An Lien.”

  She nodded and jumped down off the retaining wall. “I go in c
lass now. Goodbye, Nate.”

  “Goodbye, An Lien.” Her hands were kind of full with the book and the dog leash so I reached over and opened the door for her. She went inside, climbed the stairs and looked back at me.

  “Will you come back to Vietnam … Nate?”

  I laughed. “An Lien, I might. I just might come back to Vietnam one day.”

  She nodded, smiled, and hurried off down the hall.

  I turned and headed for the Rex. I stopped along the way at one of those food stands and got myself a bowl of noodles. I ate them as I walked.

  Noodles, for god’s sake.

  2

  It was the second time I had run into the old man in the lobby before I got to the elevator.

  He was sitting on the arm of one of the couches in the lobby. Looking serious. I thought I must be in shit.

  “You got any plans for tonight?”

  No hello, hey, how ya doin’. Nothing.

  “Not really.”

  “There’s someone I’m going to meet. I’d like you to come along.”

  I shrugged. “Sure, but I wouldn’t mind a bathroom stop.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll wait here for you.”

  It didn’t look like he was pissed at me, but he wasn’t joking around either. I went up to the bathroom, had a quick look at my phone — nothing — then back down to the lobby. The old man was standing up, ready to go.

  I tried to get a read on his mood. He was bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. Looking around. Having trouble standing still. Nervous. Not like when we went to Hill 453 but nervous.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Let’s go.”

  He wasn’t telling me. Now there’s a surprise. We went out to the parking lot and climbed in the Land Rover. Eased out into traffic, traffic that was barely moving. It was worse even than usual. More yelling, more honking, more arm waving from the people on motorbikes. The old man wasn’t trying to weave his way through traffic, so I figured we must be okay for time — whatever it was we were doing.

  We got as far as a stoplight, then stopped dead. Now we could see the problem. An accident just ahead. A car turned totally sideways. A motorbike on its side. A couple of guys standing in the street screaming Vietnamese insults at each other.

  It didn’t look like we’d go anywhere for a few minutes at least. I reached forward to turn the radio on.

  “Don’t,” the old man said.

  I pulled back and looked at him. He was looking ahead, but it was like on the hill. He wasn’t seeing what he was looking at.

  He didn’t say anything at first. When he did, his voice was soft, flat.

  “About four months after I was in country, we relieved a company of marines over near Hue. They’d been in some hell-shit fighting for weeks, lost a lot of people. They finally took control of the area, and we were sent in to mop up.

  “We’d just got there, been there a couple of hours maybe and a Chinook, that’s a helicopter, came in to re-supply and pick up some of those guys, take them back to Hue. While the Chinook was coming in, the door gunner was shot, fell out of the chopper, maybe two hundred feet to the ground. When the guy hit, some of those marines cheered.”

  He stopped. I waited for more. Nothing.

  “You mean, they cheered when their own guy got killed?”

  He nodded. “War makes people crazy, Nate.”

  I still thought there might be more to the story. There wasn’t. The road was opening up ahead of us, and we started moving again.

  We made a few turns, and after a while I wasn’t sure where exactly we were. But it looked familiar. I’d seen some of this before. Then I remembered. We’d come this way from the airport that first night in Saigon.

  Cholon, the Chinese sector of the city. Lots of shopping, a big market. We’d walked through here the day before we went to the A Shau Valley. The old man pulled over and parked the Land Rover, motioned at me to get out.

  A woman was waiting near a building. She was watching us. When we got out of the car, she started forward.

  So that’s it. The old man’s got himself a Vietnamese girlfriend. Probably met her online from back in North America. Finally figured the kid should meet her. That explained the condoms.

  Actually, it explained exactly zero. Didn’t even make sense. I couldn’t see a guy planning a trip to Vietnam to relive some of the shit of a former life and then thinking what the hell, I might as well go online and see if I can get hooked up while I’m over there.

  I guess my mind goes off in weird directions sometimes.

  The old man stopped in front of the woman. “Thank you for coming. For doing this,” he said.

  He started to take money from his pocket, but the woman shook her head. “You pay later.”

  Pay for what?

  The old man looked at me. “This is my son, Nathan … Nate. He’ll be coming with us. Nate, this is Madame Nguyen Thi Soon, Mrs. Soon. She’s an interpreter. We’re going to speak to someone, and I know a little Vietnamese but not enough. Not enough for tonight. Mrs. Soon will interpret.”

  I nodded at Mrs Soon, who nodded back at me.

  The old man said to her, “You’re sure she’s the person I’m looking for.”

  “I have spoken to her. She is the one.”

  “What did you say to her about me?”

  “I told her a man from North America requests the honour of speaking to her about her brother. That is all I told her.”

  Mrs. Soon didn’t look like someone who smiled a lot. Not unfriendly exactly, just not a lot of fun. She was taller than a lot of the Vietnamese people I’d met so far. She was well-dressed, expensive-looking clothes. She was pretty too, and I guessed she was about Mom’s age.

  She was looking at me. “Are you sure you want him there, Mr. Huffman?”

  Mr. Huffman. First time I’d heard him called that. It felt weird to be reminded that we had the same last name.

  “I’m sure. Let’s go.”

  Mrs. Soon led off down the street. The old man walked beside her some of the time, behind her when the sidewalk got too crowded. Both sides of the street were lined with shops. Commerce. It looked like you could buy anything in Cholon. Everything from live chickens to incense to pictures of Ho Chi Minh.

  We stopped walking. I remembered this place too. It was the vegetable vendor’s stall. The old man had told the taxi driver to stop here. I thought back to that night. The old man had jumped out of the cab. Stood right here for a long time. He’d spoken to the vegetable seller. I looked and could see the guy inside his shop. I wondered if it was him we’d come to see. But no, it couldn’t be — the old man had talked about a woman when he spoke to Mrs. Soon.

  We went on past the stall — in the direction the vegetable merchant had pointed that first night. We walked, not far, then turned into a little street, actually more of an alley than a real street. Mrs. Soon pointed ahead.

  “It is just there,” she said. We walked a little further, stopped in front of a place that looked more like a shack built onto the back of some kind of shop.

  Mrs. Soon went to the door, but the old man stopped her. He turned to me. “Nate, you remember I told you about the Tet Offensive, when the VC … the Viet Cong attacked cities and towns all through the south.”

  “You said it was pretty bad in Saigon.”

  He nodded. “I was here because it was right after the fight on 453. I’d been wounded in the hand, was put on light duty until my tour was over and it was time to go home. I helped load a few trucks with supplies, but I spent most of my time doing bugger all. Then Tet happened. There were VC everywhere. Lots of fighting in the streets. Stuff blowing up all around us. No one knew who the bad guys were. Everybody was scared, spooked —”

  Mrs. Soon interrupted. “Americans were everywhere too.”

  “Yes.” The old man nodded. “Americans were everywhere too.”

  He turned back to me. “You asked about My Lai. I told you then that I killed people. We were brought here to kill
people, and I did what I was supposed to do. I believed at the time that the people I killed were the enemy, all of them. I believed it. But I didn’t know. Not for sure.”

  He nodded to Mrs. Soon. She knocked on the door of the shack. When no one came, she knocked again. Called something in Vietnamese.

  The door opened. A woman stood looking at us. Small, bent over a little. Poor, I’d say, but she was clean; her clothes were old and well-used but neat. I tried to guess at her age. Not as old as the old man maybe, but quite a bit older than Mrs. Soon.

  Mrs. Soon spoke to her for a couple of minutes. The woman didn’t say anything at first but looked back and forth between Mrs. Soon and the old man. She spoke a few words to Mrs. Soon, who turned then to the old man.

  “She is Ba Li.” (I found out later that “Ba” was a term of respect that people called older women. It was sort of like “aunt” but it wasn’t just for relatives.)

  The old man dipped his head toward Ba Li. “Have you told her I was a soldier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell her I was in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, January, 1968.”

  “I don’t have to tell her when Tet was. Our people know that. We celebrate it.”

  “Tell her I was here. In Saigon.”

  Mrs. Soon spoke again to Ba Li. She nodded. She was looking at the old man.

  “Ask her how old she was then.”

  “She might not tell you that.”

  “Ask her.”

  Mrs. Soon said something to the woman who said something back. Madame Soon looked surprised. “She was eight years old.”

  About the same age as An Tien.

  “Was her brother older or younger?”

  Mrs. Soon translated, and then, after the lady spoke, said, “She wants to know why you ask about her brother.”

  “Was he older or younger?”

  Mrs. Soon shrugged, and as near as I could tell, repeated the question. Got an answer. “Her brother was twelve years old.”

  The old man nodded, seemed to think about what he wanted to say next. “The day her brother died, they were on the street, that street.” The old man pointed to the street we’d come from, the one where the vegetable vendor’s shop was. “There was a curfew. Why were they on the street after curfew?”