Strum

by Nancy Young

  “Yes. It has just started. It is a very beautiful sound. It will put everyone to rest even if they don’t hear it. I think the air of anxiety around us with every roll of the plane has made it — I don’t know how to explain it — but, perhaps sympathique might be the word? I cannot suppose that you hear it, do you? It seems that only my mother and I can actually hear and feel the simpatico.”

  “Are you hearing it now?” she asked, straining to catch the sound of the music he spoke of. Under the incessant hum of the plane engines she imagined she heard a melody among the roar, but she could not be certain.

  “Yes. Listen with your heart. The music is low and droll, a kind of barcarolle, a lullaby sung by a gondolier in the clouds.” He closed his eyes and began to hum the melody that filled his ears. Suddenly her eyes felt heavy and then, surprising herself, she relaxed willingly into the humming of the plane which now receded seamlessly into the background, blending and pitching perfectly into his tune. It entered her head from a place all around her, engulfing and welled up through the vessel of her body and then settled into her very core. The music was rich and deep, as he had said. Like a love song full of plaintive yearning, it rose and fell in waves like a sterling sea lapping and overlapping upon itself. She could feel hands softly upon her hair smoothing the tresses as they did nightly before he was gone. Through the silver of translucent lashes, a delicate hand gently caressed the strings as if they were strands of her hair, quietly stroking out a melody that would transport her to the place that she once shared with him.

  •

  The rudimentary airstrip in the interior of the Laotian jungle was primed for the arrival of Joël and Philippe’s small military plane, which would take them to Hanoi. It had been a five-hour jeep ride across the border from the refugee camp, and it was the closest airfield from which the North Vietnamese military would agree to pick up the diplomat. His French intermediaries in Bangkok had bargained hard with the North Vietnamese government to allow him to negotiate, but they refused to fly into Thai airspace to retrieve him in Chiang Rai. The landing area was merely a long, temporary clearing on the edge of the jungle and two young Lao soldiers accompanied them with their guns at the ready as they all watched impassively for a small plane to clear the top of the rainforest. But after a fruitless five-hour wait and much vociferous swearing, the plane failed to show. Joël’s consternation nearly unhinged his son, but the two soldiers stood impassively deflecting the angry epithets with disinterest.

  Joël’s immediate task in Hanoi was to ask the powers-that-be to rehabilitate a well-respected doctor whose plight had reached the French diplomat press in the weeks before his departure from Paris. He knew he did not have much time to spare. This particular doctor was married to an academic who had trained at the Sorbonne as a scholar of early Asiatic linguistic history, and had published a definitive work on ancient languages before returning to Vietnam after Independence. He had been instrumental in re-establishing the department of Languages and Linguistics at Indochina University on his return from Europe and had held the highest honors, including President and Dean of Linguistics.

  Twenty-one years later, the Communists developed a disdain for intellectuals interested in preserving the past. Professor Huey was banished to hard labor and re-education in the countryside alongside his “useless” academic brethren, but he was sent further still into the rural backcountry for his audacity at receiving a foreign doctorate. It was whispered among those who had witnessed the round-ups that all reading materials were confiscated and eye-glasses destroyed before these former scholars were sent out to perform hard labor.

  The diplomatic press article had landed on Joël’s mahogany desk one Paris morning two months before the plane was to meet him on the jungle tarmac. The article raised alarms that now academics were being singled out for exile and harsh labor. It was reported that many scientists and professors were being particularly mistreated if they were known to have a French diploma and connections with Europeans. What caught the diplomat’s attention however was the black and white photo of Professor Huey and his wife standing at the front of the University entrance during less tumultuous times. Joël’s eyes opened wide with surprise and disbelief. Her face was fringed with strands of smooth black hair streaked with gray — the face was more familiar to him than his own hands, which now rustled the newspaper with its slight trembling.

  With all the alacrity his official position could afford him, Joël collected intelligence on the current situation. He discovered that the professor had been sent to an undisclosed location, but his wife was still in Hanoi under house arrest. She was a physician and head of staff at the Hanoi General Hospital, which had been taken over by the People’s Army in recent months. All the while working through her external contacts secretly to find the whereabouts of her husband and to reach out to French and European governments for assistance, Mae Anh stoically administered to the wounded. After so many years of civil war she knew instinctively that the press in France was her only hope to reach out for international assistance in a situation that had no hope of internal resolution.

  As guerrilla fighting escalated on the fringes of her country, she heard of scores of villages being scorched to the ground and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam, and, more recently, Laos, trying to flee into Thailand across hostile borders. Mae Anh wrote letters to hospitals and aid organizations in Paris, Brussels, and Geneva asking for doctors and medics to consider coming to the aid of these innocent refugees who were being wounded mercilessly by guerrilla gunfire and caught in the crossfire of chemical warfare as they attempted to cross borders. The Thai government, in an effort to remain neutral in the conflict and not be seen as a haven, refused to treat these unwanted patients. They begrudgingly set up refugee campsites but forbade their own hospitals and doctors to send either supplies or personnel. While Mae Anh’s letters slowly made their way into sympathetic hands in various agencies, it was at the National Hospital in Paris that they finally found their champion.

  But Mae Anh found herself under house arrest one morning when it came to light that the French embassy, which still had one office in the region, was looking for Dr. Anh to discuss the cooperation of the Hanoi General Hospital in assisting a European medical corps arriving to aid refugees in Thailand. The soldiers who held Dr. Anh captive had strict orders to bring the prisoner to the makeshift jail they erected at the town hall, but to let her first contact relatives and then she was to remain there until further notice.

  •

  Philippe watched his father from across the tarmac, as he ducked his perfectly combed head under the hatch of a small plane that eventually arrived eight hours later. It was, however, to Joël’s great annoyance, not taking him to Hanoi, but to Bangkok. The Royal Thai Army pilot had received radio communication instructing him to bring the French diplomat to the capital city to deal with a crisis that had arisen due to the Thai government’s sudden refusal to cooperate with the European medical team. It had come to light that the head of the Hanoi General Hospital had been arrested by the People’s Army and they were threatening to execute her if the medics continued their mission to help “the traitors” leave Laos to escape into Thailand. No plane from the People’s Army ever materialized. Rather than go to Bangkok or return to the medic camp near Chiang Rai, Philippe asked his father to leave him with the two soldiers at this camp in the Laotian jungle that also served as the temporary airstrip and outpost for the Pathet Lao.

  “I must spend time learning and observing their job. I cannot come this far, and not see for myself what it means to be a real soldier. I must feel their passion and experience their plight. This is the time to live our lives as if it matters!”

  Joël marveled silently at the young man’s obliviousness to danger and stubborn idealism. “You are mad. These so-called ‘soldiers’ are just children — no older than the youngsters being treated at the refugee hospi
tal. You should spend another week there, and then you will have learned the lesson of war. It is not glamorous, nor is it glorious as your Communist propaganda machines will tell you. Has no one told you yet the collateral damage of idealism? The machine gun wounds, the amputations, the severe burns — are those not the real lessons in your Socialism?”

  The son remained silent and looked at his feet as he remembered Sophie’s tears as she swathed a three-year-old girl in bandages around her nose and eyes, which had been irreparably burned in a village fire. He had only spent one evening at the refugee camp as his father had already scheduled the special flight to Hanoi for the following morning.

  The father continued. “Those boy soldiers — they are taken from their villages and promised many outrageous things, like ‘Glory’ and ‘The Greater Good of the Proletariat.’ ‘Comrades’ they would all be, but they are all lies and propaganda. Those boys are taken by force or simply killed if their parents do not hand them over obediently. We have intelligence on this fact. It is not the great glory of Socialism that you idealize.” The father paused, and then continued, “Come to Bangkok with me. I will find a way to get us to Hanoi after that. I must go negotiate for the lives of a doctor and her husband, a professor of languages there. She is an old friend of mine from when I was your age, attending lycée in Indochina.”

  Philippe shut his ears to the warnings, although he knew in the back of his mind that his father might be speaking truths. His father had always been a conservative career politician and as risk-averse as any bureaucrat in a comfortable office in Paris. The fact that he was now in the jungle on his way to negotiate for the lives of a local doctor and professor did not fit into the square box he drew around his father’s image. His own radical, youthful passion forced him to seek the truth on both sides of any story, but he could not know yet that it was also a blindfold obscuring the truth amongst so many lies being told.

  The father watched his son’s expression carefully as it changed from resistance to surprise and back to resistance. He knew there would be little he could do to dissuade his radical and intractable progeny from changing his mind once he was resolved to do something. So he expressed a change of heart and surprised his son by agreeing to allow him to continue his stay in the interior of the Laotian countryside, promising to send a diplomatic plane when his negotiations were completed in Bangkok. Joël knew it was the only way his brilliant but stubborn son would learn the bitter truth, but he hoped the boy would be safely back home before his mother ever found out.

  The young soldiers were roughly Philippe’s age, and although they were uneducated country boys, they were sufficiently francophone to understand Philippe’s offer to teach them to play the guitar, if they taught him to load and shoot their Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles. By the second evening at the small encampment, Philippe learned the basic gun handling techniques taught at the boot camps, and began the first guitar lessons. By evening of the third night, he found his reluctant companions had suddenly become his best friends.

  These two young men felt particularly fortunate because they had been randomly chosen to hold the fort at the obscure landing strip, and after six months they only ever had one plane visit and it was from Joël and Philippe. Analu and Thao did not know each other prior to the assignment but they became fast friends as they were from neighboring villages and could reminisce about local swimming holes and what-not to pass the time. When the occasional official came to give orders or instructions and supplies, they pretended to be enemies and spoke harshly to one another. It seemed to be the way comrades spoke so they continued the tradition while in the presence of others. Philippe’s company under these austere circumstances was welcome although it took more than a few days for the initial chill to thaw. Joël had brought food supplies along in case of an emergency and these were unloaded alongside Philippe’s duffle bag and guitar. They were plentiful compared to the rations the soldiers had in their spare makeshift larder. The young men allowed themselves to savor the exotic fare on the fourth night around a campfire.

  When the guitar rang out in the jungle night, it was unlike anything either of them had ever heard, including Philippe. In all the years he had played the instrument, never had the sounds rung out the way they did in the rainforest, like a murmur of voices. The sounds defied being tuned and as soon as Philippe tightened a string it loosened itself and emanated its own sound so hypnotic that the deafening drone of cicadas was drowned out temporarily by this human-like chant. The jungle felt to Philippe like an acoustic sound shell. The canopy of phayom, pinang and white meranti trees created an arena of faultless perfection while the scent of rosewood filled his senses with a heady fragrance redolent of tropical cardamom.

  “This is wild and beautiful country,” he mused out loud, stroking new sounds from the strings. “It’s like a forgotten land.”

  “Yes, and it is rough and dangerous if you do not know your way,” Analu began. “We search sometimes for a way out. You move slowly, bashing and slashing your way. Once we found a clearing and what seemed like an old rice paddy. But it was abandoned. The trees and vines grew over whatever might have been there. There is a river also about half a day’s journey that way,” he continued gesturing over his left shoulder.

  “We followed the river once,” Thao interjected, taking up the story. “We camped for two nights far away from its banks.” Philippe stopped playing and his questioning face was met with menacing laughter. “Crocodiles, don’t you know? They will grab you by the head or foot while you sleep and drag you into the water to drown you, and then they eat you!”

  “But, the river only took us further into the jungle,” Analu continued. “Nothing but jungle every direction. When we came back we realized that without the plane we could never leave the jungle. We would die in there.”

  “We were actually more worried about running into drug smugglers,” Thao finished. “You know, opium growers. They grow them here and nobody knows where they are, but they are in the middle of the jungle. Only secret planes know where to land. This here...I am sure it used to be a drug trafficking strip!”

  “Ahh! And how often do they bring food and supplies here for you?”

  “Not often enough!” the two soldiers replied in unison. He then heard the boys give their first confidential account of the truth. They told Philippe about how enlisted soldiers of the Pathet Lao like them were predominantly very young boys — they were as young as seven and never older than fifteen or sixteen and were basically dragged forcibly from their homes by the recruiting soldiers if they or their parents dared resist. The boys were invariably promised expert training, mentoring, and good treatment by the older soldiers and a future as leaders in the Righteous Government. What they found, instead, was months of grueling marches, very little food, long stirring speeches and lectures by their elders, and a severe, sometimes fatal beating if they ever questioned authority. Philippe felt a dread in the pit of his stomach. His father’s words echoed in his ear.

  The guitar then unexpectedly resonated with a reply — an approving crescendo of a melody like a rushing river with crashing and frolicking waves of sound. The young men all looked at each other in turn, the soldiers standing at attention and looking around to see if the sound had come from an external source beyond the camp. A cry from a monkey pierced the night and this sent the boys abruptly into their tents, ending the camaraderie.

  Before the first rays of sunlight could break through the thick fog of the jungle the next morning, Philippe was awakened by noisy chattering just outside his tight fabric-walled enclosure. When he poked his head out, he found his hosts arguing loudly in their sing-song dialect just beyond the tree to whose canopy he had fixed his canvas tent.

  “What’s the matter?” he called out. The two boy soldiers stopped momentarily and then continued their bickering without an answer to his query. Philippe pulled himself out of his enclosure and stood up to his ful
l height to stretch before he ventured toward his comrades. But he found suddenly both boys pointing their guns at him at waist level. Their stances identical, both were simultaneously menacing and comical. “Hey! Hey — what’s this?” the young Frenchman asked, putting up his hands to show he was still friendly and unarmed. “What’s going on, my friends? What’s the purpose of the guns?”

  It was Thao who answered, first in his dialect, then slowly in French. “That guitar, where is it?” Philippe opened his eyes in wonder.

  “The guitar? It’s in my tent, of course. What’s wrong with the guitar?” Then he remembered the sound that had emanated from it which had sent them undercover several hours before. “Do you want me to get it?”

  “Yes. Wait. No, Analu will get it. I want you to come here closer to me, and keep your hands up.” Analu grabbed Philippe by the arm and spun him around and placed the barrel of his sub-machine gun into his back. He walked him abruptly over to Thao and then left them to open the flap of the canvas tent. Philippe kept his hands in the air, but cried out.

  “Wait, please, don’t damage the guitar. It’s just a guitar... nothing more! It was my mother’s, it was made by a friend in Canada. I swear — it is nothing more than a guitar!”

  “We are not so sure. We believe it is a spying machine. And you must be a spy of France, or the U.S.A. government. You are under arrest!” Thao forcefully pushed Philippe to the ground so his knees and forehead hit the dirt before his hands could brace his fall. The light was just beginning to break through the canopy of trees and the two captors were surprised by the amount of blood that flowed from the fallen prisoner’s head. He remained recumbent as the two soldiers fell back into their dialect and continued to argue over what to do next. After some time, Philippe slowly sat up and removed his khaki shirt and held it to his head as he applied pressure to the wound. The other two ceased their arguing and stared at their dusty boots. Neither would lift their head to see their handiwork.