The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 16

"We haven't gotten off to the greatest start," she said.

"Sorry?"

"Me making a fool of myself."

Linh shook his head as if shooing away a pest. These Americans still took getting used to, their bald honesty, their constant confessing of deficiencies. In Vietnam, etiquette prevented such things from being talked of. He had been married for six months, bringing Mai sheet music every week, but she never sang the new songs before having him sing them out loud first. When he got angry at her, she finally admitted she couldn't read; he thought she meant read music, but then it dawned on him she had also been memorizing his words.

Now he looked at Helen and was shocked by her naked admission. And yet it was disarming and made him feel protective of her as over a small child who was helpless and too trusting. "I saw you for the first time at the restaurant. You come in drenched from rain."

Helen made a face. "Another bad impression."

"No. A hungry woman, I thought." They laughed. Why had he omitted the true first time he saw her, getting out of the military jeep in front of the hotel, while he sat at the bar with Mr. Bao? Was it because he did not wish to be remembered in Mr. Bao's company? Or was it that he wanted to keep his first glimpse of her private? Or, worse, was it because the habit of deception had become so ingrained in him, he preferred lies to

truth?

The next morning Linh walked to her hotel and spent the whole day seeing the walked to her hotel and spent the whole day seeing the city again through her eyes. This happened each day, day after day; the realization dawned on him that now he was showing her his home.

Her first request was to learn enough Vietnamese so she could put the people she photographed at ease. No other American, not even Darrow, had made such a request.

During the monsoon downpours, they would duck inside small tea stalls. She would hold a ceramic cup laced in her long fingers, listening to the drumming of the rain on the tin overhang of the roof while they practiced speech. Often children gathered at the sight of the foreign woman in their neighborhood, still a novelty, and giggled at her misp.r.o.nunciation. They sat on the ground around the battered table, loose pieces of plastic wrapped around thin shoulders against the rain. Helen called over a food vendor and bought banh da banh da, rice cakes with sesame seeds, for everyone. Linh was sure they, too, felt as if they were in the presence of a tien tien.

"How do you say 'Thank you'?"

"Cam on."

"Come on?"

" Xin ba noi lai." Please say it again Xin ba noi lai." Please say it again.

" 'Com on'?"

"Better." Linh laughed.

"How do you say 'Can she speak English?' "

"Chi ay biet noi tieng Anh khong?"

The words came in a flood, impossible to separate them, guttural stops and starts that she felt she would never understand. "Sorry I asked."

"We'll go slowly. Use the words every day. Listen to stories. That's how I learned English."

Helen poured more tea from a dented aluminum pot. "I know it's a letdown to go from working with Darrow to working with a beginner."

"What is 'letdown'?"

"A demotion. Step down."

Linh took his cup. Again, this stating of what should remain unspoken, and yet he flushed in embarra.s.sment that she guessed his feelings. "When the words form on your tongue naturally, you enter the heart of the country, I think."

"But you've never been to America."

"Once upon a time. My favorite was Chicago."

But just as she started to question him, a group of children rushed in and swarmed them with questions.

After taking her back to the hotel that day, he walked along the river. How could he have made such an admission? Shameful. Yet he had been alone so long, had not talked from his soul to another person, that at the first sign of interest, his mouth flooded with words. No one should know about his years abroad.

His father had gotten caught up in politics at the university. He chafed under the unfair French restrictions for Vietnamese to advance to any real power. Studying the life of Uncle Ho, he was convinced of the importance of seeing the world. He spent a great deal of money and used many promises to get Linh a berth on a freighter going to the Middle East, and then on to Europe. Linh went one better in going on to America.

Although those had been the happiest years of his life, there had never been a question of not returning, of not fulfilling his father's wishes that he be of service to his country.

He was still haunted by what he had seen. In Phan Rang, dockworkers drowned and floating like milk fruit in the port after being ordered to jump into the water to salvage s.h.i.+ps. On sh.o.r.e, French officials laughed, jiggling bellies of fat. Linh became as lean as a dagger. In Dakar, he watched the same horrors of colonialism, watched as natives were ordered by the French to swim out to his s.h.i.+p in a storm. Helpless, Linh watched from the deck as they drowned like heavy, dumb animals in the water. Although he had been called Chinaman in America, the freedom had been heady. But then he had gone into the South. His experiences taught him the need of freedom at all costs.

Gary's first a.s.signment for Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the paG.o.das around Saigon. At Xa Loi, the bonzes orchestrated protests against the Ky government. Linh described the marches three years before against Diem, telling her of the chaos then. Monks and nuns using their bodies as tinder throughout South Vietnam, horrifying and alienating the West. In Linh's village, a nun described how she had daintily tucked her robes around herself in the town square, how a circle of bonzes formed a barrier against outside interference. "What could the military do? Shoot them?"

The absurdity in Saigon of antisuicide squads equipped with fire extinguishers patrolling the streets.

Gary wanted Helen to get pictures of daily life in the paG.o.das. They took pictures of boys in brown robes receiving instruction and old bonzes reclining inside dark rooms, sipping tea and strategizing. Young men ran back and forth in their orange robes like waiters in a busy restaurant, pamphlets fluttering, directing traffic and arranging interviews with the head monks as if they were rock stars.

The noon heat and the thick smell of burning joss sticks drugged Helen, slowed her movements to those of a sleepwalker. When everyone retired for the noon break, she photographed a more peaceful mood--a single white-clad nun sweeping the grounds in front of the carved columns of the building, the shadow of a Buddha statue inside barely perceptible.

Under a banyan tree, Helen leaned back into a cradle of gnarled roots. Her s.h.i.+rt clung to her back. Linh motioned to a vendor who brought them coconuts filled with sweet, brackish juice. When he handed her a straw, she hesitated.

"Drink it."

She nodded, emptying it in one gulp. "I'm tired of being afraid."

"The VC are cunning, but they haven't yet trained the coconut trees to grow poison."

They watched women, young and old, enter the paG.o.da grounds carrying prepared dishes or baskets of fresh vegetables.

"Does the community supply food?"

"The community is the paG.o.da. They bring food or money, what ever they can, what ever is needed."

"But they don't have enough for themselves."

"One is like a brick in a wall, interdependent; one has no meaning outside one's relation to family and others."

Helen sat up and pulled the fabric of her s.h.i.+rt away from her back. "Do you know why I came here?"

Linh shook his head, wary of more confidences.

"I wanted to be famous. I had dreams of being the only American to get pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Stupid, huh?"

Linh smiled. "Darrow is very happy every time he gets a cover."

"Really?" Helen laughed.

"He sits in his room and drinks a gla.s.s of scotch and stares at the cover for a half hour. Then he puts the magazine in a drawer and doesn't look again." Linh shrugged.

"But he's pa.s.sed up shots that could have been his, too. And he mourns every death until it seems impossible that he can continue."

"That's why I love him," she said.

He couldn't stand hearing more. How could he go on day after day listening to this woman bare her soul to him? "I should go back to the office with the film."

"Where is your family? I mean, what you said earlier, bricks in a wall?"

"I don't want to insult. We are different from Americans. We only share important things with people who have earned our trust. Otherwise we dishonor our memories."

She flushed, chastised, and tried to brush it off. "I ask too many questions. Join me for dinner to night?"

"I'll meet you in front of the hotel early tomorrow."

She turned back to the paG.o.da to hide her hurt feelings.

Linh walked down the crowded street and stopped at an outdoor cafe. He crowded street and stopped at an outdoor cafe. He motioned to a busboy and paid him to run the film over to the office, then ordered tea and nursed it. He felt guilty about his gruffness toward her, but he had changed since coming to Saigon, grown a second skin that insulated him from others. It would have been smarter to be kinder. After all, that is what he liked about the Americans--their innocence, their willingness to share their life story with a stranger. After fifteen minutes, he crossed the street and surveyed the paG.o.da grounds.

The area was still empty, but he spotted her in a deserted courtyard. She sat alone, crying. He felt discomfited, her face so naked, as if she stood before him unclothed, and he knew the right thing would be to leave un.o.bserved, yet he stood rooted to the spot. He recognized such pain. The reason--Darrow had told of her losing a brother to the war-was it enough to cause her to put herself in danger's way? A place not fit for a man, much less a woman. He made a show of reentering the compound and stood in front of her.

When she saw him, she showed no surprise, simply held her hand out to him.

"I'm sorry about prying. I hate when people ask about my father. Having to say that I hardly remember him. Or my brother."

He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. "I think telling a friend this story is a great honor."

She gave him a sly, crooked grin. "Cam on." "Cam on."

Before he could react, she stood and hugged him. No one had held him in a very long time. His head felt light, blood rushed hot to his skin. He made an awkward, panicked escape.

"I will be gone for a few days. A week at most."

"But we have the story to cover."

"Can't be helped. You'll be fine."

Back at the cafe, he ordered a whiskey. He was meeting with Mr. Bao the next day in Tra Vinh, and had to have his head clear. He would gather maps and stop by the American commissary and pick up Mr. Bao's new pa.s.sions: two cartons of Marlboros and four loaves of Wonder Bread.

Linh allowed Mr. Bao to believe that they were having an effect on the American reporting of the war, although the reporters ended up being far more disillusioned by the truth than anything Linh could craft. "You just can't manage to stick to one side," Mr.

Bao had said after finding him. Ironically, Linh's intelligence gathering now included Mr.

Bao, too, and his new sideline of drug trafficking, using the military for protection. He was making millions. Besides his dabbling in small-time brothels. His corruption made him the ideal partner for Linh--a man always open to compromise.

A week later, the helicopter dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early morning. The change in geography was startling: the sultry flatness of the Mekong, with its inland oceans of rice paddies and white-hot sky, all replaced by the thinner, cooler air of the Central Highlands with its burned gold of elephant gra.s.s, olive drab of bamboo and scrub, its ancient menace of mahogany and teak forests.

Inside the military compound, a mission was being patched together to rescue an earlier convoy headed for a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border. According to the last radio dispatches, only a few survivors were holding out.

Helen argued with the head sergeant, Medlock, a hound-faced man, and finally got permission to accompany the rescue. She felt jittery but swallowed the fear, already getting used to having Linh at her shoulder.

"You willing to share some of that?" Helen asked a first lieutenant, Reilly, sitting on an ammunition crate eating a chocolate bar.

"Sure." He broke off a piece and handed it to her. "Need my energy for this baby."

Helen nodded and put a piece of soft, melted chocolate on her tongue.

"You and I better keep our hats on." He pointed to his own hair, the color of redlicked flame. "Our heads are like target practice." He pulled out a beaten-up bush hat.

"This here is my lucky one. Some shaman or something blessed it by p.i.s.sing on it."

Helen gave a short laugh. "No kidding?"

"Yeah, but he said whoever wears it won't get hurt. So far not a scratch."

"Makes up for having to put it on your head."

"I got two. 'Case I lose one. You want to wear it?"

"Already have my own." She touched the bush hat that Olsen had given her, that led to the Captain Tong pictures. She stood up. "Thanks for the chocolate."

"You find me if you change your mind."

Medlock gave a shout, and Helen searched for Linh, finding him with a group of Vietnamese paratroopers. "Let's go," she said. "We're on."

He looked at her and then looked back at the Vietnamese officers. He picked up the film and camera bags and followed her. In the background she could hear snickers from the paratroopers. "We're not going," he said under his breath.

"What?"

"This convoy will be ambushed."

"Well, a chance of that. But we're going." She couldn't let on that her stomach was sour, her hands clammy. Shouldn't she be getting over this by now?

He put the bags down. "This time, no."

Helen looked back at the paratroopers and then at him. Trucks lined up and loaded with supplies; jeeps filled with machine guns and grenades. A queer, unreal look to everything, and now Linh was spooking her. "Do they know something?" she said, pointing her chin toward the paratroopers.

"Let's move out," Sergeant Medlock shouted again.

"Listen to me this one time," Linh said. He looked her in the face because this was more urgent than his politeness. "Stay behind."

"I'll look like a fool," she said. "Gary's expecting pictures."

"Be a fool then." His throat grew tight. " Here Here you listen to me. you listen to me. Here Here I know I know better."