by Nancy Young
Neena was silenced, her mind reeling from the enormity of her feelings, her remorse for having allowed Col to continue up the final ascent on the mountain. Ellen, on the other hand, felt distressed at her loss, but somewhat buoyed by the fact that Col, her husband of over five decades, had died a happy man walking nearly to the highest peak in the world. If he had had time to say it, she was sure he would have said, “This is as close to heaven as I’ll ever get!”
Neena traveled to Canada from Kathmandu with the Tenderfields, one sitting beside her and the other in a casket below. Neena had undertaken the painful tasks of retrieving her elder friend’s body and signing the death certificate as the attending physician when they reached St.-Gérard. It was Bernard and Neena who held Ellen’s hands tightly in each of their own as the casket was slowly lowered into the ground. Two weeks later, Neena prepared herself to return to the little schoolhouse at the rooftop of the world. The children she knew would be surprised to find someone other than the Tenderfields in the classroom, but Neena was ready. She knew of no child in the world that was not fascinated by stories of wild animals or backyard bird calls. She had a whole arsenal of defense against the protestations of small children, not least of which was the rich sounds of a guitar which Ellen had urged her to take as a gift for her friendship and loyalty.
The classroom became her new wilderness and the children her own, until one day nearly two years later, she chanced upon a tattered copy of a newspaper amongst the litter at the Base Camp on her annual summer trek to Everest. The edition of Le Monde was nearly four months old but this was still news for her in far-away Himalaya. She scanned the page casually and then stopped at a special advertisement calling for doctors to sign up for a new endeavor organized to help save the lives of children at a refugee camp on the Thai-Laotian border. She knew instinctively that this call to action would be her new frontier. Even before she could sling both Ellen’s guitar and her dan nhi back across her shoulder alongside her rucksack, she heard the arpeggio ascend like the angled rise of a falcon’s wingspread as it skims above a mountain thermal high upon the open skies.
10
Philippe (Chiang Rai), 1976
In the early morning dawn, Philippe arose from the dirt where he had collapsed the night before. He wandered aimlessly through the camp; the unfamiliar rainforest beyond beckoned to him as he gathered his meager belongings, collapsed his tent, and stashed the sack of provisions and guitar. It was at that moment he heard the sound — the haunting music, refined and familiar, coming to him through the silence. It was a cool breeze on a humid night. He absorbed it, drank it deep into his soul and with it felt a renewed sense of purpose. Something in this music drew him out of his body and he was visited by the vision of an old growth forest in a land he hadn’t seen since he was a small boy.
It flashed vividly before him. His feet paced out the rhythm of the music and although it took him eleven hours of walking before the music allowed him to rest, he felt no tiredness, his sense of purpose still strong. Philippe’s journey through the deep of the rainforest was slow-moving, but the extreme patience and equanimity required of the young man was equal to his resolve. His exhaustion and loss of directional certainty distressed him to a point of paralysis, but the thought of returning to the medics’ encampment and finishing the business of saving the children was the essential vision he formed and held firmly in his mind with clarity only surpassed by his purpose.
At this point he had been in the midst of the rainforest for nearly two weeks. In that period he had partaken of only the provisions he could carry with him, supplemented sparely but sufficiently by edible vegetation found along the forest, mostly jackfruit, wild guava, and elephant ear stalks. He was now grateful for the knowledge bestowed upon him by his camp companions on one of their short treks into the interior. This resourcefulness sustained him through the extreme measures of his exodus through the rainforest. Since the first day of his journey, a strange music filled his head. It led him, the spirit of some sort of guide. It featured nightly in his dreams as he slept on the soft forest floor, and each evening it was the same dream.
Floating over the treetops by moonlight, bringing him to a tall cedar whose nightly calamity befalls with a thunderous roar. Two spirits rise up to join him in this mystical flight, their presence stirring like the shifting fog of music filling the night air with its crescendos. Then suddenly they disappear, as swiftly as they appeared, back into the forest as the music explodes into a cacophony of sound.
Abruptly Philippe sat up in his sleeping bag. A mixture of shock, sadness, and relief overcame him as the music ceased and the solid reality of the ground below him conspired with the early morning mist to fully awaken him. When he gathered his few belongings and the guitar, he had to close his eyes and trust his instincts to deliver him to his destination, like a young beast tracking its own scent to return to its den. But every turn seemed identical to the last. Conjuring up the music in his head served useless; nothing came to him except the weak confidence he felt in his gut that he was on the right path. After two weeks, disorientation and exhaustion became his companions — he did not know for sure whether he had been walking in great circles through the unfamiliar forest, or whether his progress was linear. But with the assistance of the weather and the elements, the alignment of the stars and sun, an ancient and well-worn footpath through the thick rainforest, and purity of heart and spirit, he pressed on. What does not kill me, he repeated to himself, will sustain me.
Then all at once, crouching down in the thick of the foliage, Philippe heard it. A very distant roar of a plane overhead, then an explosion. It seemed far away and yet the voices shouting and the horrific cries were perceptible, drifting as they were in on the wind, and immediately his heart quickened and stomach clenched with fear. A few minutes later he received the slightest inkling of an acrid smell in those winds and he retraced his steps, running purposefully for hours, grateful that he had marked his path with his machete on the way inward. After three full hours of retreat and feeling now that he was out of danger, he collapsed in a heap at the side of the trail, wedging himself under the cover of a huge stand of elephant ear. After a while his heart stopped pounding and he fell into a fierce deep sleep.
He was floating down a river in a canoe. By the position of the sun it was afternoon and he was somewhere between the headwaters of a creek and the junction of a river. He scanned the horizon for landmarks. There were no mountain tops to give geographic proximity, just a sea of green — luxuriant waves of emerald, jade, viridian, khaki, olive, lime — washed across the landscape in infinitely watering-down layers one behind the other on both banks of the river and beyond them.
The unstoppable lateral movement of water downstream shunted him into an illusory sense of progression in the opposing direction although his canoe was at a virtual standstill in the slow churning of the eddy. Then he saw it in the corner of his eye — a silvery flash, a flicker in the water that could only mean one thing.
He lay low for six days before preparing to retrace his steps back into the jungle toward the awful explosion. It had rained for several days after the event and this he saw as extremely good luck. The rains would have diluted some of the chemical impact of the bomb, and although it wasn’t entirely safe, he knew he had to return in that direction to get back to the refugee camp across the border.
His pack was now empty of food and he found that he could stuff the guitar into it if he strapped his sleeping bag to the outside. This allowed him to travel at a faster pace. After almost running back along the beaten path for several hours, he began to smell the burnt acrid odor once again. He carefully pulled the sleeping bag around his head as he got closer to the site, covering his mouth and breathing through the fabric layers. Even his eyes were beginning to burn somewhat, to a point where he knew he would run into trouble if he kept advancing. At this juncture, he deviated from the main path and took a 35-degree angle
d turn. Walking as swiftly as he could, he bush-whacked with his machete as he traversed through the undergrowth of the jungle. After several hours he angled again in the opposite direction and continued his progress, hoping to skirt the bombed area and regain the path out of the jungle.
He listened carefully for signs of wildlife, knowing that if a bird could be heard here he would be in a safe environment. Alternatively, he listened for a melody in his inner ear, any sound that would help him sense the right direction. But it was eerily silent. Not a sound was present when he ceased his bush-whacking, except for the occasional roll of distant thunder. And then he saw it. A body strewn across his path face down, the clothes burnt to shreds, and skin charred black and brown exposed through the gaps. He nearly stumbled and retched once he recognized it, but avoided the obstacle just in time. He tramped carefully through the undergrowth for another thirty feet or so before he found the second corpse, this one also a soldier it seemed, with clothes shredded in the back exposing the blackened skin underneath. It looked like he had been crawling on the ground for some time and his prone, face-down position showed that he had died as he dragged his painfully destroyed body on all fours as far away from the explosion as he could manage, succumbing eventually.
By the fifth body, Philippe was gagging with repulsion, grasping at his sleeping bag and pulling it as tight around his mouth and nose as possible, averting his eyes from the carnage. He came across fifteen bodies before he found the last one quite a distance from the others in the midst of a meranti grove, lying chest down, curled in the rooted embrace of an old bodhi tree, the face turned sideways. He could just make out that this one was alive — still breathing, the back rising ever so slightly with every breath — not quite dead yet barely alive. The profile was blackened by the blast but the filthy shirt was in one piece. He could not tell if it was a boy or a man, a few years younger than himself probably … fifteen or sixteen perhaps. In his right hand he clutched a sawed-off machine gun, its magazine of bullets still engaged. Philippe approached the body gingerly, removing the machine gun carefully as a first safety measure. The hand did not give up easily at first but then the gun was freed and he placed it a safe distance away. He then sat back for a moment and removed a water bottle from his pack, holding the cloth against his mouth and nose with one hand. He had recently refilled his four bottles with rainwater collected from the crook of tropical leaves in the rainforest, and this he poured now into the mouth of the dying boy and spoke to him quietly.
“It’s okay now. You are going to be okay. Are you in pain?” The boy did not answer, but his eyelids fluttered for a few seconds before they relaxed again. Philippe poured another small amount of water into his open mouth and watched as the lips closed slightly as if to savor the water. He stayed for several hours with the boy repeating the water dose every few minutes until at one point the eyelid fluttered again and the eye seemed to actually move in the socket. Several minutes later the eye opened a tiny slit and he asked once again if his patient was in pain. A slight nod was just perceptible. At this point he felt confident enough to turn the boy over gingerly onto his back and could now see the whole of the damage on the young face.
One side of the face was blackened, blistered, and caked with blood from the hairline to jaw and partially on the neck, and the other side was burned only from the hairline to the cheekbone. There was a pristine section from the cheekbone to the neck which remained untouched although it was lined with mud. Luckily, the rest of his body was intact, although his exposed forearms were also blackened and blistered. Philippe slowly dissolved four aspirin pills in the cup of the water bottle and fed it slowly to the patient, also dripping a little of the liquid onto the blackened skin where he could reach it.
That night he built a small fire and read a book by firelight to the boy, wondering whether it might be his former camp-mate Analu. He could not be sure because there was very little left of the face that would have given him that knowledge. The boy’s voice was also gone; whether from pain and fatigue or taken away by the chemical burns, he would never know. All he knew was that as long as his patient was breathing, he would not leave his side. Every few hours he poured the pain-relieving liquid onto the cracked and blistered mouth-hole and stoked the fire until all the dried wood he could find was exhausted. In the near dark he swept away the leaves and debris from a small area beside the fire and climbed inside it, stretching his long thin body out beside his companion and continuing the story in a whisper. He had finished reading the novel weeks ago at the camp, and in the dark he repeated the chapters as best as he could remember them, not sparing any details or leaving out a character description.
Sometime in the early hours the boy’s breathing stopped mid-contraction with a death rattle that startled Philippe awake. He peered into the darkened face to find a thickened whitish substance oozing from the mouth-hole of his patient. The dawn brought stirring strains of the ghost music in the air and he mourned the passing of his friend and wept with the whole of his being.
•
Mae Anh lay on the low bunk in the hospital prison with her bruised back turned to her cell door, while the warden, a barely pubescent Vietcong soldier holding his gun high across his chest, his young brown face impassive, guarded the door on the other side. Beaten and starved by her captors when she refused to confess her crimes as a traitor to the Righteous Government, the woman weakly drifted in and out of consciousness, intermittently visited by dreams of an earlier time, decades before the tragedy of this horrendous civil war.
She is young and happy and in love with a man whose life is laid out before him like a lotus flower of good fortune and he invites her to share it with him for the rest of their days. They walk hand-in-hand along a paved path which runs alongside a large placid lake brimming with fish, turtles, and water lilies. Hoan Kiem Lake. She is dressed in a flowing white silk áo dài that he had given her as a gift for her eighteenth birthday.
She turned her head slightly, thinking she heard the door open, feeling his presence for the first time in so many years. Her fiancé is holding his hands out to her, palms open.
The warm breeze flutters the long skirt of her tunic and the rustling of silk triggers a memory of her home where the washing of the silk is the woman-folks’ ritual. It is here, peering across the shimmering water to Turtle Tower Island that he brings her delicate hand up to his lips, kisses it tenderly, and he asks her to run away with him to Saigon so they can be married. They have no bags or much money but together they hire a bicycle taxi to Lao Cai Station and board the southbound train. They feel fully alive and at last fulfilling their destinies. In his arms and beneath his kisses, her body unfolds as she receives him in the dim light of the cabin. As the lush green countryside peels past them through the window against a darkening black and orange sky, her love like the budding vessel of her young body blossoms into full womanhood.
But the happy tale does not end well. Once she is home in Saigon, her parents are not as receptive as they had hoped. Within hours the word on the diplomatic grapevine is received and several persuasive guards in the employ of the French intelligence are sent to her parents’ humble home and the young man is forcibly taken into a waiting car, where he is whisked away back to Hanoi before he could even say farewell to his beloved. He is not there to see the baby girl in her arms, her beautiful round infant eyes blinking away the tears shed by the young mother as she hands the small bundle to the waiting nuns. Tied to the bundle is the young mother’s treasured dan nhi, the family heirloom given to her by her own mother when she was six. “Please don’t let her go without it,” she sobs. “She must always know where she came from.”
Hours later, the soldier rapped on the hospital prison door and opened it to announce: “Get up. They are releasing you.” But the woman did not awaken.
•
He was crouched under cover of an old banyan tree in the courtyard of an ancient deserted temple
when he heard the chopping wave-like sound of a helicopter before he saw its boxy metallic form in the early morning sky. His skin was now blistering in all the exposed areas, particularly the palms and fingertips, and he soaked his damaged hands in the old stone fountain in the courtyard for as long as he could, occasionally splashing its cool water on his blistering face as well. The machine had passed by once earlier in the day but Philippe was too fearful of leaving the safety of the stone structure to peer into the open sky for it. He had fled from the carnage of the bomb’s aftermath and wandered in a state of shock for a day and a half before stumbling upon the abandoned temple and finding adequate refuge in it. His breathing was rasping and labored now, his body weakened and his head splitting down its middle as he relived in his mind the desperate day and a half attempting to rehabilitate the helpless bomb victim. Philippe was sickened by the horrors of this bloody war, and for the first time ready to abandon all his convictions.
The old stone wat was completely overgrown with persistent figs and banyans that grew into the crumbling structure, twisting their languid arms possessively like miasma or ghosts petrified mid-stream while passing through the walls. After the helicopter’s first pass he had convinced himself that it would have been too miraculous to be a rescue plane, and he fell into a deep sleep. But on the second approach, he felt a sense of enormous relief and forced himself to investigate from under cover of one of the banyan trees to see for himself whether the aircraft was friend or foe. As it drew nearer, his relief turned to exhilaration when he saw the large Red Cross on the helicopter’s sides and viewed it again on its undercarriage as it flew directly above him.