The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  The veteran laughed, as if to break the tension, but it sounded too hearty, unreal. “Just joking!” he said. “That was just a joke.” We all laughed politely, but the embarrassment grew worse. He bowed to us and turned away. Within a few seconds, he had disappeared into the crowd.

  The unease he left behind him lingered. “Was he joking, really?” I had to know.

  Son considered the question for a moment, shifting from an interpreter of language into an interpreter of meaning. “I suppose he was half joking, half serious. If you’d offered him the money, he would have taken it.”

  Carolyn looked devastated. “Should we have given him the money?” she asked me. “It was only five dollars.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I had no idea.

  “But I can’t give money to everyone in Vietnam,” said Carolyn. “And that guy had gold caps on his teeth.”

  “But what about his leg?” I asked. The two of us stood there debating every word and innuendo, trying to mine the motivations of the one-legged veteran. Crowds of pilgrims filed past, stopping, even, to stare at us. We ignored them. Beside us, Linh and Giang stood waiting quietly, but Son soon lost patience with the Americans’ angst. He had a schedule to follow. Finally, he interrupted us. “Don’t feel too bad about that man,” he said. “I’m sure he killed some American soldiers, too.”

  In the pagoda, the air was thick with the smoke of incense, and I wiggled away from all of them, disappearing into the foggy darkness, into the maze of alcoves and crannies and altars filled with Buddhas. In front of every altar, people stood in prayer, their hands raised, their eyes closed, their faces tense with concentration. Exhausted, I sat down on the edge of a raised brick platform where several old women were squatting, carefully arranging their offering trays. They made me forget everything, except that I wanted to believe with a faith like they had. Here I was, a Jew, standing before a pagan altar. For the first time in my life, though, I felt that here in this dark and smoky cave, I might actually make some meaningful contact with God. I looked around at the carefully constructed pyramids of fruit, at the urns full of burning incense, at the big, fat, dreamy-eyed Buddhas. And in that moment, it all became holy to me. It wasn’t a holiness that sprang directly from God, but one that emanated toward God, moving outward from the intense devotion of all these people praying. Maybe, I thought, God is love, or, more specifically, within each individual.

  I sat there for a long time, letting the sensations of the past few hours wash over me—the liquid gray sunrise, the smoke of incense, gooey mud, the glint of gold-capped teeth. I put my hands over my face and rubbed my eyes, then I stood up, walked over to an altar, pulled some sticks of incense out of my backpack, lit them, and raised my hands in the gesture of prayer. “A Di Đà Phật!” I said softly.

  I hadn’t moved when I felt a hand take mine. I looked up at Linh and she smiled at me. “I’m a Jesus Christ person, not a Buddha person,” she said, “but I like it here.” We stood there for a long time, watching the smoke of all the incense float like a great cloud of prayer out of the mouth of the cave and up toward the sky.

  It was Son’s voice that finally pulled us back. “Dana, I need to discuss something with you,” he said. Beside me, Linh rubbed her eyes, as if she had just woken from a nap. “I can see that you and Carolyn display a keen historical interest in matters of the war. Am I correct?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to continue or not. Finally, he said, “Does the name John McCain sound familiar?”

  “Of course,” I said. We all knew how Senator John McCain had been shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and had spent years as a POW at the famous “Hanoi Hilton.”

  “You may not know that when John McCain’s plane was shot down, he parachuted into the Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi. He almost drowned.” Son looked at me severely, as if Americans would never have heard this side of the story.

  I waited for him to continue.

  “A Hanoi man rushed to the side of the lake and pulled him out. That man saved his life. Did you know about that?”

  I shook my head.

  “That man is an old man now,” Son said. “He’ll probably die soon. It’s important that America knows his side of the story. Would you like to meet him?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  6. War Stories

  WHEN I WOKE UP ON THE MORNING of our appointment with the man who’d pulled John McCain out of Truc Bach Lake, I felt as though I’d gotten one of those lotus-seed candies stuck in the bottom of my throat. Three days earlier, we’d driven back from the Perfume Pagoda in the pouring rain. The weather hadn’t let up since, and I’d been out every day in it, slogging through the mud. The whole city was waterlogged and gloomy. Now I felt the same way. Carolyn had developed a head cold that had somehow migrated down to the muscles of her neck. She’d become so stiff that she couldn’t turn her head independently from the rest of her body.

  But neither one of us wanted to miss this meeting. We managed to make it to Linh and Son’s house just a few minutes past our scheduled appointment time, at eight. Linh greeted us at the door with her baby in her arms. Giang sat on the floor watching a Chinese martial arts serial on television. All I could see was the back of his head, silhouetted by the light from the TV screen.

  Linh and Son’s house was, in actual fact, a single room with a concrete floor. It was less than half the size of my room over on Dream Street. The kitchen was in a shed in a weedy garden out back. Water came from a cold-water faucet in another shed by the front gate. The family urinated into the drain beneath this water spigot. Whenever they had to do anything more than pee, they squatted over a metal bucket, the contents of which they later dumped when the night-soil collector passed on the road. The only sign of wealth was the small Sony television. The only sign of decoration, aside from a few knickknacks and pieces of pottery, were several amateurish oil paintings. One was a nearly pornographic portrait of a buxom, Aryan Virgin Mary with a lecherous-faced baby Jesus suckling her breast. In a second, another well-endowed and scantily clad maiden lay in a green meadow with a wine cask at her side and deer and tiny chipmunks dancing around her. The artistic style was reminiscent of paint-by-number, but the subject matter must have relied, at least in part, on the artist’s imagination.

  Linh had a sour look on her face that I suspected had something to do with Son. The day before, she and the baby and Carolyn had spent the morning in my room. Squatting over my electric cooker making rice porridge for the baby, she’d made up a song to describe her feelings. “I hate my husband, I hate my husband, I hate my husband,” she sang gently, as if these were the lyrics to a lullaby. According to Linh, Son was selfish and she couldn’t stand it any longer. Every day she had to ride her bicycle to work at the Metropole, which took forty-five minutes each way. Son had a motorbike, but he would never let her drive it, and he told her he didn’t have the time to give her a ride.

  Now, instead of hello, Linh said, “Son makes me so pooped off.”

  Carolyn rolled her eyes. She walked slowly over to the bed, the only place to sit in the room, and, with a wince, lowered herself into a sitting position.

  Linh put the baby down on a mat on the floor, then she looked up at us, her eyes suddenly glowing, and whispered, “But I’ll tell you something. Last night, Son make me very happy in my coont.”

  Carolyn gasped. “Don’t say that word. Where did you learn that?”

  Linh looked confused. “I learned it from my friend at my Metropole. Why I can’t say ‘coont?’”

  “It’s ‘cunt,’ not ‘coont,’” Carolyn said. “It’s a terrible word.”

  Linh’s lips started to tremble, as if she were being unfairly denied a new privilege. “But I like the slang word, Caro-leen. Why?”

  Carolyn began to explain the difference between slang and obscenity, but Linh wasn’t listening. “Why?” she wailed. “Why?” The baby started to cry.

  Carolyn grabbed Linh’s hand.
“Get hold of yourself,” she said.

  Son walked into the room from the back porch, and Linh picked up the baby and walked out.

  “Good morning, Carolyn. Good morning, Dana. You are late,” Son said. His face was flat, expressionless.

  “Son, I don’t feel well,” said Carolyn, trying to control the irritation in her voice.

  “Oh,” he said. “Our friends are waiting for us at the hour of our appointment. We must hurry with great dispatch.”

  Carolyn looked at me but said nothing. We got up and followed him out the door. He turned down a narrow lane lined with rows of ugly concrete houses. Son walked quickly, a few paces ahead of us, ducking under eaves to keep out of the rain. Beside me, Carolyn, who hadn’t bothered to put on her poncho, held it above her head. She looked upset. Personally, I was depressed over the whole subject of marriage in Vietnam. I never heard about anything but problems. Linh’s admission that she was happy in her “coont” was the best thing any of the wives I knew had said about their husbands.

  Our destination turned out to be only a few minutes’ walk down the lane. Son’s friend, a prematurely balding man named Bac, was standing in the rain waiting for us. “Hello!” he said, taking my hand in both of his and shaking it passionately. He turned and did the same to Carolyn.

  We followed Bac into a large, simply furnished room that had a mud-speckled motorbike in one corner, a wooden bed in the middle, and a blackboard hanging from a center wall, on which had been written, in English, HE WALKS TO THE SHOP. HE WALKS FROM THE SHOP. HE WALKS AROUND THE SHOP. Bac was an English teacher, and it quickly became apparent that having two Americans in his home was a very big deal. Not only were we the first Americans he had ever entertained, but we were the first ones he had ever met. He unrolled a straw mat on the concrete floor and invited us to sit down. Son and I sat. Carolyn perched on the only chair in the room, a large wooden armchair that sat against the blue mildew-stained wall.

  Bac was anxious to tell us his story, which he did as soon as we were sitting down. “When I discovered English—your native language!—I fell in love,” he explained. Then he jumped up, pulled four glasses and a bottle of mulberry wine out of a cabinet, and poured some for each of us. Lifting his glass, he proposed a toast. “To both of you, my wonderful new American friends, whom I have the honor to welcome into my home.” I raised my cup for the toast, then took a sip. It tasted like melted Slurpee, but it felt good on my throat.

  The morning passed slowly. Neither Bac nor Son mentioned Senator John McCain. Occasionally, Carolyn and I looked at each other in confusion, but neither of us had the heart to interrupt the pleasure that Bac was getting from hosting us. The conversation meandered in different directions, with Bac and Son doing most of the talking. We heard about their days as students in the Soviet Union, how they always wanted to learn English more than Russian, and how, when they formed a band with a group of friends, they agreed to sing every song in English. I knew they weren’t just flattering us. I had heard Vietnamese make enough disparaging remarks about the Russians to realize that, despite Vietnam’s history of animosity with the United States, and despite the fact that the Soviet Union had been a solid friend, Vietnamese felt a much greater attraction for English and American culture.

  With the mention of the band, Bac got up and pulled a guitar from underneath the bed. He handed a notebook full of sheet music to Son, who paged through for a moment, then announced, “We will play Abba for you. They are the most important international pop stars, so you will like it very much.” He looked at me. “You like Abba, don’t you?”

  “Abba!” was all I could say in reply.

  I can’t say that Abba sung by Vietnamese amateur musicians was really that much worse than Abba sung by Abba. Son and Bac began their serenade with an upbeat version of “S.O.S.,” slowed it down with “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” then slid right into “Dancing Queen.” They sang with merciless enthusiasm, their eyes half-closed. Bac handled the notes with spiritual appreciation, as if he believed himself a conduit for an angel’s hymns. Son was less devotional, but his voice carried the conviction of a member of the Communist Youth Brigade chanting slogans of revolution. Neither of them could actually carry a tune. The thin black minute hand of the chicken-faced clock on the wall had made significant progress before Bac finally slid the guitar back beneath the bed. “I am in Vietnam,” he told us, “but, you see, my spirit is American.”

  Carolyn and I offered him weak smiles.

  Bac sighed, then added simply, “This is the happiest day of my life.”

  It was nearly eleven when we heard the front door open. A white-haired man appeared in the doorway, clutching a cap in his hands. He was wearing a thick brown turtleneck sweater and a dark green army coat. “This the man who saved the pilot,” Son explained, ushering him into the room. “We will talk to him now.”

  Looking at me, then Carolyn, the man made quick but solemn bows of greeting. He was an old man, but I couldn’t tell if he was closer to sixty or ninety. Deep wrinkles traced diagonal lines from either side of the bridge of his nose to the edge of his chin. But his body was supple, and he moved with grace.

  Son and Bac made space on the mat, but the stranger refused to sit down. He slid his feet out of his shoes and squatted in his socks. Son lit a cigarette and handed it to him. The old man took a long drag, then began to speak.

  He explained that in 1967 he was working as a cadre for the government. Although most of Hanoi had been evacuated because of the bombing of the city, his work was considered necessary and so he had remained in town. Walking home for lunch one day, he suddenly heard an airplane overhead and the sound of artillery fire. He looked up and saw the pilot parachuting toward the ground.

  The old man’s voice was soft and carried the unmistakable quirk of a working-class Hanoian—a tendency to switch his “l’s” for his “n’s,” which made him pronounce his birthplace as “Haloi, Vietlam” instead of “Hanoi, Vietnam.” On top of that, he spoke quickly, mumbled, and used words I couldn’t identify at all. I could hardly understand a word he said. Luckily, Son was translating for Carolyn. As I’d learned during our day at the Perfume Mountain, Son was a very conscientious translator. But I could understand enough of what I heard to know that something important got lost in the translation. This old man was not a government official speaking in the exacting style of modern political debate. Over the course of nearly thirty years, his vision of an American pilot falling into a lake had grown into an epic tale, its cadences less similar to the officious arguing of diplomats than to the mesmerizing chants of the Buddhists I’d seen worshiping in the pagoda. But Son approached his mission with a diplomat’s agenda and the condescension the educated classes, even in Communist society, reserve for those they consider beneath them. Son didn’t even bother to introduce the old man to us by name, referring to him instead as “this man,” as if his identity were irrelevant to his story.

  “This man ran toward where he’d seen the pilot falling,” Son continued. “It took him only a few seconds before he spotted the pilot floating in the Truc Bach Lake. The pilot was struggling in the water. He couldn’t get the parachute straps off his back, and the weight was pulling him under. He was gasping for breath. Before this man had time to think of anything else, he grabbed a bamboo pole and held it out to save the pilot. The American took hold of the pole and this man pulled him onto the shore.”

  Son’s translation may have sounded like a just-the-facts-please testimony at a criminal trial, but the old man’s presence conveyed much more. Because he couldn’t understand a word of English, he didn’t recognize the way that Son’s translation dehydrated his story. Every time he paused to let Son speak, he looked down at the floor, nodding slightly at the sound of the English words. His concentration was reverent.

  Son took another swallow of his mulberry wine. “Within just a few minutes,” he said, “people were swarming around the two of them. These people, these Hanoi citizens, were angry. They grabbed things
from the pilot, snatched pieces of his clothing as if they wanted souvenirs. This man, however, only took one thing. He took a knife with a red handle. He did not steal a single thing.”

  The difference between taking a knife with a red handle and stealing a souvenir was lost on me and Carolyn. “Why did he take the knife?” Carolyn asked.

  Son translated the question into Vietnamese. The old man looked up at both of us and, as he spoke, fear, dug out of memory, hung on his wrinkled face. “He wanted to protect himself,” Son explained. “He was afraid this foreign pilot might try to hurt him.”

  Son picked up his cup, saw that it was empty of wine, then said something to Bac in Vietnamese before telling me and Carolyn, “You will have some more wine.”

  Bac poured more wine into my cup and I took a sip. The old man was still squatting motionless, staring at the mat beneath his feet.

  “But why did he even bother to save the pilot?” I asked. “That man was the enemy. He ended up in that lake because he was bombing Vietnam.”

  When Son translated my question, the old man looked at me and chuckled. He and Son exchanged a few words, then Son said, “Of course, he supported Vietnam’s fight for victory. But he could see that the young pilot was a human being, too. Watching him out there in the lake, this old man felt that he could not let him drown. He says that he cannot explain to you his reason why.”

  All of us were silent. Despite the blandness of Son’s words, some flash of feeling from that long-ago moment did slip through. The ash on the end of the old man’s cigarette, forgotten now, dropped off. After a while, he looked up and spoke again.

  “There was one moment,” Son translated, “right after this man pulled the pilot out of the water, when he looked into the pilot’s eyes and thought about the wife, the children, the elderly parents in America who must have been waiting for this young man to come home. That was the moment he says he stopped seeing the American as his enemy. After that, the crowds swarmed around them, then the police arrived and dragged the pilot away.”