Strum

by Nancy Young

  He stumbled out from under his cover and stood in the center of the courtyard waving his arms. When this did not register with the pilot, Philippe willed the helicopter to circle around again, but instead the machine continued unabated in its original direction. With the last vestiges of his strength, he re-entered the wat as quickly as he could to retrieve his battered flashlight, wedging it between his ruined hands, now more like the claws of an animal or bird, and returned just as the helicopter was quickly disappearing into the sky. He switched the torch on with his mouth and waved it frantically with both hands, arching its light as his arms passed over his head several times. But it was to no avail; the pilot missed his second signal and was out of sight as quickly as it came. Philippe’s panic was complete but he struggled mightily to not let it annihilate him. He remembered the bodies, fifteen or more, and imagined the others who would have lain closer to the detonation site, ground zero. He wept for them, and then himself.

  •

  After two days of waiting for a helicopter to be secured from the International Red Cross, Bernard was eager to begin his work. Once a machine was secured, he spent the first two days making wide sweeps across the forest canopy with a medic in the navigator’s seat, but they found nothing. It was now the third day and he had taken to the skies alone but it was becoming apparent the mission could quite possibly be unfruitful. He had a picture of the young man on his instrument panel and he marveled at the likeness to the boy’s beautiful mother. He had never seen the father, but he was sure the man was handsome.

  As he surveyed the forest canopy for the final time, he was beginning to feel the frustrations of possible failure, yet something in his gut told him not to give up. With this vague assurance he decided to do something he had never done before while in flight. In one motion, he swept off his headphones and shut off the electronic radio that regulated his hearing device. Tell me now if this is the place, he whispered to himself.

  Almost immediately a long-unheard music began in his inner ear, its familiar strains as soothing as a love song. He had covered nearly forty square miles of this area already on an earlier day, but had seen nothing although its proximity to the red “X” marked on the map which the French intelligence officials had given him indicating where the diplomat’s plane crash had taken place made this area prime for finding the lost fellow. On this second rendezvous he decided on a ground-level reconnaissance. Nodding to himself, he turned the helicopter sharply around 180 degrees and there below him, as clear as day, was a structure that he had not seen before — an old temple perhaps that was being reclaimed by the forest. As he swept around the west side of the landing area at a low cruising speed, he caught a movement in the near distance through one corner of his eye. He replaced his headphone and radioed back to base that he had seen a signal and was going in to have a look. He gave his coordinates and then prepared to land his craft onto the temple grounds.

  Although over a ten-year veteran of helicopter piloting, Bernard felt his heart pound excitedly. He felt an urgency and exhilaration that was almost inexplicable. Less than a mile away and descending in a straight line at a ground speed of twenty knots, he brought the helicopter into a hover above the clearing, being careful not to rush the landing. He settled the machine to the ground, and then turned his eyes toward the ancient ruins to see a young man stagger his way out of it with the last vestiges of strength. His arms were over his eyes to protect them as the helicopter blades in the narrow clearing swept the grounds clear of leaves and debris, sending them into the air like a tornado.

  Bernard carefully climbed out of the helicopter with his head down low and then saw the boy teeter in his boots, steadying himself against the stone wall, an exposed tree root snaking above his head like a stream of smoke above a candle. The older man immediately leapt into action and just missed catching the lad before he fell in a crumpled heap at his feet, face blistered and gaunt, hair matted, shirt and trousers dirty and damp with mud. When the man lifted the unconscious boy, he seemed only slightly heavier than an armchair, perhaps no more than a large musical instrument, like a cello.

  Lifting the unconscious patient into the rear area of the helicopter with ease, he checked the boy’s breathing, which was slow but steady and rasping, and placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Carefully wrapping him in several blankets, he strapped him onto a stretcher fixed to the floor. Just as he was climbing into the pilot seat, he heard the familiar music rising from the ruins where the boy had collapsed. There on the temple steps lay a large canvas rucksack where Philippe had dropped it when he fell unconscious. The pilot retrieved it and noted its bulky weight with surprise but did not open the pack. He simply placed it carefully into the navigator’s seat and hopped in beside it, radioing back to the station to inform them that the mission was accomplished. He would be returning immediately and would a medic please be available at the tarmac on his return, which he estimated to be in one, or one and a quarter hours?

  •

  Neena stood quietly on the makeshift helicopter landing waiting for the transport to arrive in the half-light, the air heavy with jasmine and the vapors of fuel. She had only arrived at the medic base near Chiang Rai two days beforehand, but she willingly took the assignment to meet the search helicopter and bring in the latest casualty. Neena had worked in the burn center of a hospital in Surrey during her early years of training as a doctor, and even though she insisted that her experience was limited and she had been out of practice for several years, the organizing staff was overwhelmingly amazed at their good fortune to receive an experienced burn physician. Her command of French and the local languages, furthermore, set Dr. Tan apart from the others.

  Philippe remained unconscious for nearly three days while Neena, Sophie, and a whole team of medics treated him for first- and second-degree burns, toxic inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

  When Lorraine returned from France where she had flown with Joël’s remains to bury him in his family’s catacombs, she stayed constantly by her son’s bedside, strumming the guitar softly as she did when he was a baby until the moment he opened his eyes. Immediately he sat up and tried to explain in a state of delirium that he was all right, not realizing that he had been in a coma for several days. He had no recollection of the helicopter rescue, or his ordeal in the forest. An intravenous drip tethered him to his bed in the recovery ward but he agitated for immediate release, shouting that he had to return to the camp to meet his father. Lorraine eased him back onto his bed and brought him the news of his father.

  “Mon fils, please do not try to get up. You are not well.” She held his chest while he coughed violently, bits of spittle with blood making its way up with every vociferous cough. When his spasms ceased, she continued gently, “You cannot go to your father — you don’t remember this, but your father is dead. His plane was shot down on his return from the interior. You were with him, weren’t you? He’s dead.”

  “He’s dead?” Philippe replied incredulously. “But he...” He stopped short, the memories abruptly flooding back. Like a film reel he saw in his mind’s eye the camp where Analu and Thao first smashed his head and then became his friends over the campfire where they shared a fortnight of music and companionship. They trained him on the use of the Russian machine gun, and showed him the underground trenches and the spiked bamboo booby-traps. He remembered the scribbled note and the stirring music once again.

  “He is buried in the family estate now, Philippe, next to your grandfather in Aubigny-Sur-Nère. I will take you there when you are better.” She saw her son’s eyes darken and his head drop to his chest as he began to cough again. His breathing became labored and she called out to a nurse to administer the oxygen. The young man sank back into his hospital bed and turned his head away from his mother so she could not see his tears and shame.

  “It’s my fault,” he cried. “I asked him to take me out there. So I could learn to be a gue
rrilla. I was such a fool!”

  “Philippe, please do not say that ever again. You were brave to go experience what others are afraid to see. If our politicians could...”

  “No, Maman. I am a fool! The guerrillas...? Communistes...? Americans...? Us French? We are all fighting a dirty war. No one is virtuous. No one!” Lorraine nodded sadly in agreement and her own tears found their way to the rims of her eyes. But he continued, “And, no, I was not with him. He left me at the camp and promised to return in a week. He was supposed to fly to Hanoi.”

  “Hanoi?” she asked, surprised, hearing this information for the first time.

  “Yes, Hanoi, he was meeting someone there. He did not say who. I was to stay at the camp until he came back. I asked him to do that for me. But then they all left. They abandoned me there.” Philippe pictured the empty deserted camp and relived the sickening fear, and the dread in his stomach as he realized there was only one way out. The walk would be treacherous with poisonous snakes, without maps, and worst of all, amongst the opium smugglers and ruthless mercenaries wielding the Russian machine guns he knew too well. “Father was shot down and could not come back to me.”

  Lorraine now understood. He was flying to Hanoi, at long last — but he never made it. The sadness stuck in her throat and the guitar moaned, articulating the heartbreak of both a life and love cut short, and a father lost. Lorraine looked sadly at Philippe as the young Australian doctor entered the tent. Beneath the layers of bandages that covered his face Lorraine could only guess at what her son looked like. Neena knew, though, that his face was blistered and reddened and his eyes frighteningly bloodshot — not permanently disfigured but certainly a shock for anyone who knew his handsome face before the ordeal. But it was his fingers and hands that worried her most. Lorraine had explained to her that the young man was an exceptionally talented guitar player, a musical prodigy who had picked up his mother’s instrument at two and half years old and already knew how to play the tunes she had introduced pre-birth. Neena, being a virtuoso violinist herself, knew that although he might regain the use of those fingers, to play a musical instrument at master level required a highly sensitive sensory touch and manual dexterity that he would never regain fully. Even with physical therapy for several years, the likelihood for rehabilitation of his guitar mastery would be slim.

  When Philippe awoke again, he opened his eyes. It was early morning but he could not see any light. Bandages completely covered his eyes and face and he lay helplessly for hours before he heard anyone enter, his mind returning again and again to the bodies he had discovered in the jungle, and the last survivor before him. His friend Analu? Of this he would never be sure, but it did not matter. He was his brother-in-arms; they shared a deep grief for youth and idealism lost. He mentally searched his body for pain, and then for his hands but could not find them, nor could he move. It seemed he was strapped to the bed and immobilized but he could not be sure since his sight was completely obscured.

  Then he heard someone enter and he sensed them watching him as he lay completely still, almost feigning death. Neena had entered the tent silently and stood beside his cot observing him quietly. She had an idea. The dan nhi. This was the instrument that would rehabilitate him. Its two simple strings were much more forgiving, and it was the wielding of the bow that required true genius. Damaged hands like his could still fulfill the promise of a song from the harvest moon on an autumn night with sounds from such an emotional instrument. She knew instinctively that it would be his element. She drew the bow now slowly across the first string, its sonorous sound like a falcon’s cry.

  He wanted to call out, but feared that he might still be in the jungle, or in an enemy camp. He could not be sure. Then he remembered the rescue. It all came back to him in a flash, and he let his mind wander to that miraculous event while the strange but stirring melody wooed him into a state of complacency.

  The helicopter flew over the temple and it was as if the silence of the forest had suddenly intensified and only the sound of the helicopter blades in a slow pulse reverberated across the sandstone ruins. It was an eerily familiar sound. He wanted to try to replicate the haunting sound with his guitar, but was debilitated at this point from lack of food and the intense burning sensation in his hands and face, and in his lungs. His entire body ached from several days of coughing. He lay himself low and waited, hoping in deep prayer that the helicopter would come back eventually. He willed it to but fell into a deep sleep while doing so.

  Jagged rows of conifers wound down, down, and down yet more; layer upon green-black layer, from where he kneeled on the ridgeline to the very bottom of the ravine. There it was, that sharp bend in the creek and a beautiful giant lying waiting on her splintered back. It was several hundred feet down below, but the tree appeared as clear as day. Almost as if clouds had parted and the vision was thrust upward in a perfect moment of transference. The vision was crystalline and inspired in him a sense of infallibility.

  He was awakened again several hours later by the sound of the whirling blades overhead. He remained still for a moment, sensing relief wash over him and noticing that his lungs burned a little less as it did so. And then there it was again, that familiar strum.

  Epilogue

  The Concert (Sydney), 2000

  Under the resplendent proscenium arch of a world famous opera house not reminiscent of any of the great cathedral halls of Europe, a tall man in dark sunglasses holding a baroque guitar emblazoned with a red sunburst in one hand moves purposefully to center stage towards a pair of carved wooden chairs. He eases himself slowly and deliberately onto the one to the left, while from the opposite side of the stage a woman enters, joining him at center stage. She is dressed in a flowing white silk tunic, with swooping sequined scarlet swallows, her dark hair falling in soft waves down one shoulder. In her delicate arms she carries like a child a black lacquered lute-like instrument covered with burnished gold, snakeskin, and mother of pearl, with a long white silk-string bow entwined. She now holds her instrument out to the man, and receives his guitar with her other hand.

  Behind them enter four musicians — two hold guitars, the other two violins, their eyes fixed in front of them toward the endless sea of faces in the audience. The man brings the dan nhi upright against his torso, draws the attached bow, and turns the keys one at a time until both are tuned, and then returns to a stirring single-string melody. The woman begins a rising arpeggio on the guitar in tune with the one-string note, opening the concert with an uplifting masterwork, a work of intimate subtlety. He bends it and shapes it with his fingers, as her singular accompaniment begins to fan it with the winds of a fertile river valley. Seven strings now meld with a single drawn bow, before twenty more add their voices to it. The mesmerizing melodies take their audience aloft with the great churning stick of the sky, ringing a symphony of disparate voices six in total.

  Over two thousand pairs of ears are trained on the trilling melody which skips above them like a nightingale’s warble from a wood surrounding an alpine convent. Another strain blows in on a high thermal, straddling the rocky peaks of a different shore. Fired one upon the other, and then back again in a continuous overlapping point-counterpoint, steaming like lava flowing into a cold sea. It is an aural phenomenon to behold: the musicians and their ancestral forebears all contained in those furies. A string of chimes set against a melodic measure, from the moraine of a bare-breathed mountain down to ancient temples and watery passageways.

  When the last strains of the symphony finish, the audience is silent for a full seven seconds while each individual allows the dulcet notes of the musical brilliance to sink fully into their bones. The sound waves of those four thousand hands clapping caress the small nautilus-shaped cochlear device inside the ear of an old man in his seat beside me. On the other side of my grandfather is the woman he has loved for a lifetime, my grandmother’s thin hand in his, fingers lightly squeezing his as their son a
nd daughter-in-law — my parents — allow their prodigious music to sweep across the many frontiers they both know deep in their hearts, deeper yet in their soul and sinew.

  Acknowledgements

  A writer needs her champions. I thank my family and friends, some who read early chapters and encouraged me to keep writing, including: David Smith, who gave me my first glimpse into the world of book publishing. The Divine Six: Ellen Sherwood, Martha Jeffers, Daphne Vandergrift, Merry Parrish, and Ruth Klein. My family: Susan LeClair; Jean Young-Jones; Mary Young; John, Linda Young and the Girls; Peter Young. In California: Chi Bui; Mike Burchfield; Jane Lin; Victoria Link; Pablo Miralles; Alex Perel; John Spielman; Cindy Steffen; colleagues at Long Beach Public Library Foundation. The folks at Inkwater Press: Linda Franklin, Emily Dueker, Sean Jones, John Williams and Jeremy Solomon. In Australia: The Meyers Family; Laura Brennan; Mark Bromilow; Ben Davison and his guitar; Rod Howard; Sian Lauw; Janine Lewis; Jacqui Tyack; colleagues at Arts Queensland and Australia Council. And last but not least, my daughter Marina, to whom I dedicate this book— you let me disappear for hours and days over many years to write it.

  Family Tree

  Copyright © 2013 by Nancy Young

  Cover and interior design by Emily Dueker

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