That night the rains stopped for the first time in weeks. I took it as a sign that I would live. That I would get through this. In the morning I was still weak, but I felt strangely happy. Almost like songs were returning to my soul. When the rice was presented that day, it was like the world had changed. I gave it all to my friends—Lumpkin getting the lion’s share. She brought me another load later that day, and then another that night. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and wept at the generosity and grace of the rats. I could not help even wondering if perhaps I was dreaming and in reality had passed out in a state of starvation and was witnessing the last throes of my famished brain constructing a fantasy rescue before it winked off permanently. But no, it continued. One-eye joined Lumpkin in feeding me and every day I grew stronger and more alive.
At last the rice rations were starting to increase, if only a small amount. The famine, or whatever had caused the lack of food during the rainy season, was abating and a small piece of fruit was being added. I surmised that over the course of the monsoons the rats had plenty to eat, but adored rice as a treat, because they continued to gather at meal times. Even so they continued to insist that I eat a little of it.
The rat vomit varied and included such diverse things as fish, which I was sure they were stealing from the camp officers’ discarded meals, noodles, various forms of fruit and once or twice pork. I became accustomed to it and started to enjoy it more and more—looking forward to the arrival of Lumpkin and One-eye with their offering of heaved-up goodies.
About a month after the rains, the camp started to return to normal. I reckoned I had been a prisoner a year, although the passage of time was hard to mark. One day for the first time we were brought out for our breakfast, and the POWs were queued. The sight was one of horror. Skeletons, reduced in numbers by about half, stood in the line. I could not believe the skullish nature of the faces, I had not seen countenances like this before, save in magazine pictures of liberated Nazi concentration camps. I let everyone line up before me and joined the end of the line. Silke, who I was glad to see had survived, was near the front looked at me with a hollow empty gaze and came back to where I was. I thought she wanted to talk so I smiled at her. She looked at me and said, “So queen pig, you look no worse for wear.” I was surprised and could not formulate an answer. It was true, thanks to the rats, while still thin, I was not like the thin hide-covering-bones aspect of those around me. I looked at her, my mouth quivering but with nothing coming out and she said, “But then who would not fuck their enemy for a bite at such times?” I started to protest when she answered her own question, “I wouldn’t!” Then she spit in my face and walked back up to the beginning of the line. The man in front of me in line whispered back at me without turning around, “You fucking traitor. Bitch.”
The group gathered under a small tree where they ravenously ate their breakfast. I walked up and tried to defend myself, but I was unused to talking and my tone sounded desperate and false even to me, “I did not ‘fuck’ anyone. The rats fed me.” Colonel Pike, one of the older men who I had come to admire for his cheerfulness and calm, said, “You can’t look that well-fed from eating rats. I know. And once you’ve offed a few they get as wary as coyotes.” Many of the men nodded. Silke would not look at me. I squawked, “I didn’t eat them, they brought me food.” Silke gave a sardonic laugh and spat, “Bullshit.” A few of the men laughed. A young lieutenant whose name escaped me mocked, “Did they bring it on silver trays? Or did they use the regular dishes?” That brought a few more laughs. Someone muttered from the crowd, “I hope if it wasn’t cooked to your satisfaction you sent it back.” Then from somewhere else, “Oh, she was satisfied all right. Likely on well-stuffed sausages!” That brought as much laughter as those starving prisoners could muster and, except for Silke who laughed the longest, it quickly died down. Then Colonel Pike said quietly, but with considerable force and bitter unkindness, “Go away Gilda. You are not wanted here. What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn’t you be dining with the rats? Go away. I can’t look at you.” As one, as if in a military formation, they all turned away from me, leaving me standing there alone holding my bowl of rice.4
Over the next year, Gilda does not interact much with the Vietcong or with the other POWs who continue to shun her. Because she cannot work in the fields, she spends much of this time in a kind of solitary exclusion. She was now allowed out to exercise. She thinks the camp director thought she was a holy person. After all, she had survived the famine in an apparently almost magic manner. He let her wander the grounds with the understanding that she stay in the courtyard area in the center of the camp. When she was not walking in circles in this area she had to return to her cell, but the door was not locked until the other prisoners returned. She felt like this contributed to the rumors that she was exchanging sexual favors with the guards or the camp director.
However, now begins the strangest part of the story. Gilda continued to be fed by the rats. She grew strong under their care and her experiments, or as she called it, choir practices, became more elaborate and more organized. She trained them to squeak on command. To sing. After breakfast, a group of about fifty rats gathered in her cell and formed small clusters each made up of four to six rats. The rats would practice together singing in a strange and wonderful way. At first she would, after a fashion, play them as a kind of instrument. She would indicate by pointing which cluster of rats was to vocalize, and the height of her finger would indicate the note. However, as time went on this rat ensemble became more and more complex in its musical practice. Let me return to her words:5
The musical range of the rats was only about five notes, centered around eight octaves above middle C. Unlike a human choir, they randomized themselves in small scattered groups whose function I never quite made out, but seemed spatially consistent, meaning they arranged themselves in these same spatially defined groups every time they came to practice in my enclosure, even though the members of the group varied. This required some work. Some were arranged on the windowsill or on my mat or in the corner. Some gathered clinging to the walls some with heads aimed at the ceiling, others facing the floor, and still others horizontally, but the individual members of the groups that formed, all pointed their heads in the same direction. For example, the cluster that hung directly above my pillow always pointed their noses up. I have wondered if this spatial and directional arrangement conferred some tonal quality that the rats enjoyed or found meaningful.
At first I would try to ‘play’ them in ways that made sense to my human musical values, but as time progressed they began to extemporize and innovate. I was reluctant to let them do what they wanted, but in the end I just stepped back and let them sing while I listened. It was so different from human music that I feared it would be dismissed as irrelevant or nonsense by other musicians. If ever heard it would likely be ridiculed as a kind of random noise, yet as time went on I began to appreciate its complexity and nuance. The combination of voices the rats used in their compositions was not done in harmonies that humans would have found pleasing, but their consistency of use indicated to me that the rats preferred and even enjoyed a combination of notes that made no musical sense to me. I wondered if someday a rat Pythagorean mathematician would arise who would find mathematical principles behind these note combinations. Some brilliant rodent soul who would produce a ratty equivalent of harmonic intervals, ratios that formed natural combinations and chords different from ours but that the rats found pleasant. Though the music was not pleasing to the human ear, or at least my ear, I learned to appreciate their effort. It had certain minimalist tendencies, with long pauses between notes, blasphemous note combinations, or odd sections where the timing changed in strange ways. The rats had no way to lengthen their notes. So for a long extension of tones they achieved it by overlapping their barks and cries in ways that allowed a single note to be held as it was passed from rat to rat and from group to group; some of these continuing for as long as several minutes. The music remind
ed me a bit of Morton Feldman and John Cage, but the comparison is in some ways absurd because the rat music was too other to be characterized in human terms; its deployment and directions so unexpected and chaotic. Just when I thought I knew where it was going, it changed and surprised and perplexed me and left me wondering why they had done what they had done. Why make that move? Didn’t it seem obvious that it should have gone elsewhere? Why did it go this way? Sometimes these compositions would last for several hours. I also noticed that there were repeated phrases that I came to recognize and commit to memory. For the first time since I arrived I wanted to live. I wanted to take this music to the world so that others of my species could enjoy the magic of these compositions.
We had two concerts a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon while the other prisoners were working in the fields. The rats had an incredible sense of situational awareness. If a guard came toward the building, they would go silent. If he approached too closely, they would scatter with a swiftness that bordered on witchcraft. However, these occasions were rare and the concerts were usually uninterrupted.
The concerts began with the slow arrival of the rats. First Lumpkin and One-eye would arrive and feed me. As the food situation improved away from whatever had caused the famine (a disruption of supply lines, a bad harvest, or whatever) it was clear I was dining on the leftovers from the officers’ kitchen, fruit and cassava. I even began to put on a more normal weight, which offered further proof to my fellow POWs that I was sleeping with the enemy.
The rats would arrive and mill about my cell. I would pet them and scratch their backs and bellies. Then, without a signal I could recognize, they would arrange themselves in their choir positions. The music always started the same way with the rats pointing down beginning the concert. From there it took off.
These gave me strange dreams if I fell asleep while the rats were singing. They were often about Idaho and my mother. In one, we are standing in the barn looking at rats running around in a strange formation like some kind of Rube Goldberg invention. It was not our real barn filled with a cement floor and modern farming machines, but an old-fashioned one with a hayloft and stalls for the cows. In the dream, my mother is standing on an alfalfa bail and trying to peer into one of the stalls, I can hear a cow moving around in it. My mother turns to me and looking at the strange formation of rats running through the rafters and struts says, “These rats are special. You are their God.”
I laugh, “Don’t be silly they don’t worship me.”
She looks at me and picking up an old-fashioned milking pail says, “It’s not what they do that makes you a God, it’s what you do!”
She then seeing I do not understand, quotes a famous Mormon passage attributed to its founder Joseph Smith. In the dream she seems to say it flawlessly, but I quote the real thing here:
“God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits.
This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. They are given to me by the revelations of Jesus Christ; and I know that when I tell you these words of eternal life as they are given to me, you taste them, and I know that you believe them. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know that it is good; and when I tell you of these things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet, and rejoice more and more.6”
In the dream, my mother says, “Your rats are like these spirits God found floating about the uberverse. You are lifting them. Opening them to higher realms of glory. Like God did for us.”
Suddenly the dream shifts and we find ourselves running along a high beam in the rafters in a long line of rats. As we join them in running, my Mom is shouting, “Keep up! Keep up! We could get passed very easily!”
The first time I had it, I awoke to find the rats still singing. It felt real. I thought about the dream, how they were moving to new unrat-like levels of consciousness. I thought about what my mother said in the dream, and perhaps in real life, for during my captivity I took these dreams to be a genuine connection with my mother. Not direct, like a telephone call, but indirect, mediated through a kind of spirit world like the shaman’s visit. I thought about the shepherds that I had seen in my vision, lifting and helping other evolved creatures. Is that what I was doing? I wondered. Perhaps as my mother said, I was a God to these rats, not because they worshiped me, but because I was helping them. Lifting them to something new? I smiled at the thought. But I did not laugh.
From what we understand, these concerts go on for about a year, except rarely during the rainy season when the prisoners could not work in the fields and were kept in their billets.
One late afternoon the prisoners were pulled out of their barracks after their daily work was done. They were lined up and marched to the area where the officers stayed. Once there, they found a group of Westerners dressed in uniforms. Soviets.
The Soviet relationship with the North Vietnamese government was complex. They supplied weapons and advice but did not want to be drawn directly into the conflict with the Americans. Therefore they did not wield a strong consistent influence. Its strength depended on the mood in Hanoi at a given time as to whether they were involved enough to satisfy the government. The group gathered at Gilda’s camp was apparently on a tour to assess the state of the war to consider a request for aid.
The prisoners were lined up for inspection. They were not as skeletally thin as they were a year ago during the famine, but they were a ragged bunch—unwashed, unshaven, and filthy. Two of the Russian delegates walked the line of POWs in a bored pretense of caring. They stopped in front of Gilda.
“A Woman.”
In Vietnamese one of them asked the camp director something. The camp director answered something back and the man nodded.
Looking at Gilda, but addressing his companions, he said in Russian, “These Americans are disgusting. Not even the most depraved Slav would allow themselves to become so degraded. Truly, capitalism is decadent.”
Gilda then answered in flawless Russian, “Perhaps you should become a prisoner of war under the Vietcong to test that theory.”
The man literally step backwards, tripped, and fell on his rear. With some dignity and help from the camp director he got back up and addressed Gilda, “Where did you learn Russian?”
“I lived a year in the USSR.”
“What did you do there?”
“I studied religion with the Orthodox Sisters.”
“What is your name?”
“Gilda Trillim.”
The man looked closely at her face then said something in Vietnamese to the camp director, who gave a long and detailed answer to the Russian.
“He says you are a spy.”
“He is wrong.”
“How did you come then to be a prisoner?”
She explained she had been on a USO tour, that they had gotten lost, and their helicopter had been shot down.
He looked at her and then down at her arm and its missing hand.
“Did that happen in the crash?”
“No. I lost it before that.”
“Then you no longer play badminton?”
It was her turn to be surprised. She tried to say something, but nothing came out except a weak, “No.”
The man smiled strangely, “My wife’s cousin’s daughter played badminton. She took fourth place in 1961 in the first national championships. She lived near the Black Sea where she trained in anticipation of it becoming an Olympic sport, which of cour
se never happened. On her wall was a picture of you. She talked of no one else. It is a strange world. I look at your face and am reminded suddenly of pleasant summers on the Black Sea.
Gilda Trillim Page 14
