Lost Soldiers

by Lost Soldiers (retail) (epub)

  He had shrugged, now standing close to her. ‘For the money I would pedal a waterbull all the way to hell.’

  ‘They don’t have any money.’

  ‘Then why are we here?’ Now they both had laughed. Dzung touched her hand and folded down the seat pad in his cyclo. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘If you give me a mango, I’ll take you wherever you want to go.’

  Her name was Tu. She was eleven years younger than Dzung and had seen the war only through a child’s eyes. Slowly, with a delicacy that made him ache, she sliced the mango for him. And then she climbed into the seat. He drove her away on his cyclo, devouring the mango as he pedaled, pointing to this old building and that former hotel as they passed through the haunted, quiet streets of the dark days. He took her to the Ben Thanh market near the old abandoned railroad station and showed her how to sell her fruit. And by the time he left her at the crowded bus stop for her trip back to Bien Hoa, Dzung knew he would always love her.

  She came into Sai Gon twice a week. From then on he would meet her at the bus station, taking her to the Ben Thanh market, hovering over her like a protective hawk while she sold off her father’s fruit. Then they would spend hours as he pedaled her along the city streets, talking and laughing, sometimes even daring to trust each other and speak about the past.

  Within a month he had travelled with her to the small village near Bien Hoa to meet her family. He brought her father a small dog in a wire cage and gave her mother a silk scarf a Cuban woman had dropped and abandoned on Dong Khoi Street one afternoon during a violent rainstorm. Then he apologized to them for coming by himself when tradition required that he bring his own family with him, assuring them he meant no disrespect but that all of his family was dead or missing from the war. Her father understood and judged Dzung to be an honest and industrious man. And in another two weeks they were married.

  That was fourteen years ago. Now, five children later, she lay exhausted next to him, starting to stir from the wails of their newest child. Their nine-year-old daughter, Thuc, had crawled sleepily from another bed and picked up the baby. Still half asleep, Thuc was holding him in the dank darkness of the shack, rocking him back and forth, her toes digging into the mud of last night’s rain as the baby sucked hungrily at her bare shoulder.

  Looking at the two children together made Dzung feel deeply proud. There was so little one cyclo driver could do to bring harmony to the world, and yet Thuc’s gentleness assured him that his life was a success. But Dzung was also somewhat worried. Thuc was beautiful, with her big round eyes and small triangular face. His daughter stroked the baby’s back and head with a certainty that seemed inbred. Dzung would do anything for her, and Tu, and the other children. But there was so little he could do.

  Tu was awake. She sat in the bed, taking the baby from Thuc and putting him to a breast. She smiled softly to Dzung, a reassurance that made him worry even more about her exhaustion. For her size she was incredibly strong, and she had never complained about their life. Over the years he had lost nearly everything, suffered the deaths and dislocations, the torture of not knowing whether family members were dead or alive, the cruel spite or perhaps the masked incompetence of the conquerors or liberators. But he knew that if he ever lost this one person, this woman who had married him and in whose arms he collapsed every night, he would want to lay down and die.

  A good Vietnamese woman is tot nhat, he liked to brag in passable English or French to the foreign customers he sometimes would pedal through Sai Gon, the best in the world. Beautiful, man, dep qua. They take care of you, love you till you can’t let go.

  Their home had no doors. Shafts of sunlight poured into the front entranceway, lighting the inside of the shack. His two older sons began to stir on their boards near the opening. Outside, he could hear the neighbourhood awakening, mothers calling to their children, small dogs yapping, pots clanking as the rice was being made. Odors moved toward him, smoke from the cook fires and cigarettes, dank memories of last night’s rain, someone else’s food. A motorbike started and soon passed along the narrow sidewalk that made a road between the shacks of District Four.

  Dzung walked to the rear of the shack and then outside, standing on a small piece of mud that was his back porch. The mud sloped slightly, a natural stream-bed that passed between two other houses and then disappeared. The slope was filled with clutter, trash, and effluvium. Other houses pushed toward his from all sides. The sun was up, high and hot, and it had already begun to bake the mud.

  Dzung stretched like a cat, scratching his chest and rubbing his face and head. He waved lazily to a neighbour. He squatted, making a cook fire. Then he dipped a bucket into the ceramic pot that held the family’s water and put it over the fire. Lighting a cigarette, he took a deep drag and then measured out that morning’s rice, pouring it into the bucket and stirring it while the water heated. And as the rice softened it filled Dzung with a sense of calm, an odd tranquillity.

  Women’s work, boiling rice. He often found that thought ironic. In the city, in peacetime, a man was laughed at if he cooked rice for his wife. And yet on the battlefield and in the re-education camps it was the very symbol of manhood, that one could find and make his own meals, could provide for himself. In the cold and lonely mountains more than twenty years before, Dzung had become quite the envied epicure, knowing just which weeds could combine with the rice to make a gourmet stew.

  The rice was cooked, fluffy and white, filling the bucket. As was his custom Dzung scooped out portions for each of his children, then for his wife, and finally for himself. They had no table. He handed the children their bowls and then carried his own, along with Tu’s, to the bed, where she still sat in the shadows, feeding the baby. They ate quickly, silently, and without ceremony, holding the bowls just under their mouths and scooping the rice with quick movements of their chopsticks.

  The neighbourhood was now pulsing with noise and motion, as if the packed dirt underneath him and the thin walls around him had come alive. The sounds of the motorbikes passing and the two old grandmothers across the alley beginning their daily argument and the dogs forever yapping energized Dzung as well. He put on a stained white T-shirt and pair of baggy black trousers, found his old black baseball cap and his gray plastic flip-flop sandals, and waved goodbye to his family. Outside the front doorway, he unlocked his cyclo, climbed onto its high seat, and set out for work.

  It would take fifteen minutes to reach District One. Dzung pedaled along the narrow cracked concrete alley that fronted his home, waving to familiar faces squatting in the doorways. Then he turned onto a slightly larger road, bordered by tiny sidewalks that were filled with an interminable row of small tables and stools. Older men were gathered at most of the tables, drinking tea or beer, smoking their first cigarettes, and arguing about the past. They wore shorts and rubber sandals. Their hair was gray and their eyes were vacant and red. They had lost a war twenty-five years ago and after wounds, terror, humiliation, and re-education, this was their final repayment: to sit idle in the squalid isolation of District Four, with no work permits, no permission to relocate, and nothing to look forward to but the long hot days of sitting and smoking and remembering.

  He reached Nguyen Tat Thanh Street and turned left, heading toward a bridge that would take him into District One. Nguyen Tat Thanh, which bordered the Sai Gon River, was the major artery of District Four. Dzung found himself immediately lost in a swarm of vehicles, large and small: cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, and cyclos, all mixed together in no particular lanes or order.

  Dzung blended in with the flow, a wave of contentment rushing through him. He was at one with his cyclo now, his body swaying slightly side to side as he pedaled, his hands resting on the curved metal of the cyclo’s carriage as he maneuvered the vehicle in the traffic. Motorbikes sped past him, some holding whole families. Large trucks honked their horns and threw sand and dust into the heavy air. He passed another bicycle that had been mounted to a flatbed trailer, where two boys sat
together in the driver’s seat, their feet sharing the pedals on each side as they pushed a load of six pigs stacked onto the trailer. The pigs had been stuffed into individualised cylindrical baskets that froze them motionless. A yellow ‘meter taxi,’ new to Sai Gon, slipped in and out of the traffic, its driver hauling some well-heeled foreign customer. Dzung looked enviously at the taxi as it disappeared in front of him. It was his dream to someday own one.

  On the old concrete bridge a small girl squatted, her heels on the curb and her trousers lowered as she defecated onto the road. Nearby, her mother sat languidly in the morning sun behind a small pushcart, from which she was selling drinks and pastries. A wiry dog trotted over to the little girl and sniffed curiously at her haunches as she continued to squat. The girl looked nervously behind her at the dog and began to cry. Twenty feet away, a British tourist snapped a picture of the girl and the dog. The girl’s mother now stood and screamed an insult, then rushed toward the tourist. The tourist backed away, apologising and protecting his camera. And in the time it took Dzung to pass them, they had all reached a smiling compromise when the tourist agreed to buy two cans of cola for what was obviously an exorbitant price.

  Sai Gon, Sai Gon. Dzung laughed, watching the impish satisfaction on the woman’s face as she pocketed the money and returned to her tiny stall. Everything had its price, especially forgiveness.

  A beautiful butterfly landed for a moment on the cyclo seat, and Dzung’s father entered his thoughts. Dzung felt immediately certain that the old man’s soul had been carried to him on the butterfly’s wings. His father had disappeared during a battle in the mountains of Laos thirty years before, when the division he was commanding had been surrounded and attacked by the North Vietnamese Army. Some had said his father was captured, others claimed he had been killed. Sometimes the uncertainty still bothered Dzung, but it no longer really mattered. His father was dead by now. Why else would he be visiting on the wings of the butterfly?

  Swaying side to side as he pedaled the cyclo, Dzung began to sing. It was a song his father had taught him when he was a young boy, as they washed together in the shallows of the Han River among a row of beautiful fishing nets that in the morning drooped above the water on long poles like sails. His father would sing as they rinsed in the river and the fishing boats floated slowly past them and the pretty girls drove their bicycles along the nearby bridge, heading from Da Nang toward the salt-white beaches at My Khe. A long time ago, with his mother chewing betel nut, standing above the rice pot in their house up from the beach, and his grandmother smoking a twist of tobacco as she squatted comfortably on the porch, and his father now laughing and clutching him with thin but powerful arms, carrying him over one shoulder from the river back into the house. And his brothers playing along the road, young and still alive.

  A long time ago, before he had lived enough to understand its meaning. And in his heart Dzung was happy, because he heard his father singing also.

  We stood in front of our house and the

  scent of the night air

  Brought the memory of a thousand

  years returning,

  The night so peaceful on the road

  where the young men

  Came and went, offering their lives,

  their hearts filled with love

  For this land. Now the moon hangs

  overhead, and the winds

  Bring the scent not of flowers but of

  everything they lost.

  The butterfly departed, fluttering behind him, back toward the river. For a moment Dzung felt abandoned, but finally he smiled again. It was a good sign, his father coming to see him.

  He turned right at the end of the bridge and pedaled toward Nguyen Hue Street, home of the oldest and best hotels. Cyclo drivers fought jealously for their territory, stationing themselves every day at the same street corner or office or hotel. For several years he had kept a waiting place just across the street from the Rex Hotel, where during the war years the Americans had housed mid-level military officers. The Rex was well-remembered by foreigners and was almost always full. And the right tourist might pay ten dollars simply for a slow tour of the historic sights.

  Yes, ten dollars, if they chose a cyclo over the motorbikes and taxis that were crowding him out of his business. It could happen. And Dzung felt very lucky today.

  Chapter Three

  Brandon Condley loved Sai Gon. It was the museum of his own heart, a tortured and yet insistently happy city where along the streets his memories could once again race and dive amid the fecund ferment, the mangled but sly-eyed beggars, the crumbling old yellow French buildings now conquered and abused, the rivers muddy and eternal, the toothless cyclo drivers suborning him from the roadsides, the motorbikes loud and reckless, begging for the future, the never-ending stares, the measuring smiles, welcoming and wary, the con games of bright minds trapped inside dumb lives, the odd, funky food cooked on the streets, the black puddles on the sidewalks, wet from rain and urine and wash water thrown out of doorways, the stench of all that mixed together. In all an insistent beauty, pushing up through the muck of a fierce and dreadful past like Buddha’s lotus, a beauty just as real as what his own past might have become, always pushing, insistent as a weed, fresh as the future.

  It was six o’clock. Dusk hovered over the center of the city like a dark descending blanket, giving the lights of nearby hotels and shops a special glow. Condley walked up from his place near the river, passing the old Sai Gon Opera House as he headed toward Nguyen Hue Street. It was hot, even for Viet Nam. The gluey puddles of water gathered along the street smelled like other people’s sweat.

  In the small park across the street from the Rex Hotel he could see a half dozen cyclo drivers camped side by side on the seats of their cabs, chatting as they watched the hotel’s entrance for possible customers. From a hundred yards away, Condley searched their clothing and baseball caps. He knew that business had not been good for the cyclo drivers lately. Even as they watched and waited, a steady stream of motorbikes, limousines, and taxis informed them of the inevitability of the future. They were stuck on their cyclos, offering up a quaintness that linked them to yesterday as tomorrow unraveled before their waiting eyes.

  The park behind where the cyclo drivers lazed was dominated by a crude statue of Ho Chi Minh ministering to a small child. Its grounds were packed with perhaps the greatest mix of people one could find anywhere in Viet Nam. Vietnamese of all ages milled about as if at carnival. Some of them were young parents who had motorbiked from the outskirts of the city, mother and father and tiny children all packed onto one Honda, to buy their kids a balloon or a toy and let them play on the sidewalks and in the grass. Some of them were old, dressed in traditional ao dai clothes. Some were in groups, come to take pictures of themselves at the very center of everything that had always been Sai Gon. Foreigners of all colour and stripe walked through the park, largely ignoring both the Vietnamese and those from countries other than their own. Japanese, Korean, French, British, overseas Chinese, and every now and then an American milled about, and even an occasional Russian in from a ship in Sai Gon Harbor or one of the oilers off Vung Tau.

  Among the tourists the usual gang of local vendors, hustlers, and beggars plied their trade. A worn old man in a fading blue beret walked through the crowd, selling helium-filled balloons. A scarred, one-armed veteran with black powder burns on his face from some long-ago explosion stood at a curb, hawking an armload of toy helicopters he had made from Coca-Cola cans. A beaming, slick-haired young hustler wearing a gold necklace offered books of worthless Vietnamese stamps, his dancing, mischievous eyes promising a host of more delightful alternatives if the right deal could be made and the proper money changed hands. Young children danced in and out, insistently selling chewing gum, postcards, newspapers, and souvenir booklets. In front of Uncle Ho’s statue a large wedding party had formed a wide reception line, and as the bride and groom laid a wreath at Uncle Ho’s feet the ceremony was being filmed with
a home video camera.

  Situation normal, thought Condley, grinning madly as he crossed the street and made his way through the park. Even as he fought off the entreaties of a dozen hustlers, he did not take his eyes off the cyclo drivers. Noticing his searching stare, the drivers immediately alerted, and in an instant several of them recognised him. They jumped from their cabs and ran toward him, calling to him as a long-lost friend, waving and jabbering, their thin faces electric with friendship and even hope.

  ‘Cong Ly! Hey, Cong Ly! Hey, lau qua, lau qua!’

  Behind them, across the street, the doormen of the Rex Hotel watched with faintly muted disapproval as Condley indulged the cyclo drivers. The doormen did not like the cyclo drivers, even though they tolerated their presence. The reason was very complicated, unless one was Vietnamese, and then it was very simple. The doormen were in. They had jobs and protection. Their family histories were clean when it came to examining the past. The cyclo drivers were out. Many of them were former South Vietnamese Army soldiers. Others were the sons of former soldiers. In an unspoken but firm apartheid, they were blocked by their past from the benefits of whatever Viet Nam’s future held.

  It did no good to question this distinction, because everything else flowed from it, and if one questioned it he had to question everything else. But having shared their past, Condley felt a special need to recognise and in some odd, minimal way to protect the cyclo drivers. And so this welcoming celebration in front of the Rex Hotel whenever he returned to Sai Gon had become a great game among Condley and the drivers over the past five years.

  They had collectively altered his name from Condley to Cong Ly, which pronounced correctly in Vietnamese meant ‘justice,’ a sobriquet now widely used by other Vietnamese who knew him. And he had nicknamed many of them as well, pronouncing their Vietnamese names in various ways that had given them his own characterisations of their personalities. In front of him just now were ‘Lazy,’ ‘Happy,’ ‘Tiger.’ And now, moving slowly from the rear with a quick, knowing wave of the hand, came ‘Fearless.’ Fearless was Dzung. And Dzung was Condley’s best Vietnamese friend.