The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  "The street says the soldiers will be here tomorrow. Whoever doesn't hang a Communist or a Buddhist flag, the people in that house will be killed."

  "Oh, I don't know. I've heard those rumors--"

  Grandmother gave her a hard look. "I don't have a flag."

  Helen sipped tea in silence, watching the leaves floating through the liquid, imagined them settling into her doomed pattern again and again against the curved bottom of the cup. The future made her weary.

  "The way it works, from what I know of what happened in Hue and Nha Trang, is that the women scouts come in before the soldiers. They go through the streets and hand out the flags. Then you hang them. Welcome the victors and sell them soup."

  The old woman nodded, the furrows in her face relaxing as if an iron had passed over a piece of wrinkled cloth. "They season very differently in Hanoi than we do." She rapped her knuckles lightly on the back of Helen's hand. "Listen to my words. They are killing the Americans, even the ones without guns and uniforms. Their soldiers and our own. All the Americans leave, but you stay."

  Helen shook her head as if she could dislodge an annoying thought. "Linh is hungry."

  "I took him soup hours ago. You are too late. War is men's disease."

  Helen finished her tea and set the cup on the crate that served as table. The old woman filled a large bowl with soup and handed it to her as she stood up. "You eat to stay strong."

  "Did you read for Linh?"

  The old woman's face spread into a smile. "Of course. He pretends he doesn't believe. That he is too Western for such notions. For him there is only light and long life. Fate doesn't care if he believes or not."

  Helen dropped lime and chilies in her soup.

  "Da, cam on ba. Thank you. I'll bring the bowl back in the morning."

  "Smash it. I won't be open again after today."

  "Why, Mother?"

  "Chao chi. Toi di. I'm going to the other side of town so maybe they forget who I am. Not only Americans but ones who worked for Americans are in danger. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup."

  _______

  Helen stood in the stairwell, a cold, tight weight in her chest making it hard to breathe. She was afraid. Not so afraid of death--that fear had been taken from her years ago--but of leaving, having failed. Time to go home, and the thing that had eluded her escaped. Always it had felt just around the corner, always tomorrow, but now there would be no more tomorrows. Grandmother's words of doom had spooked her. More time, give us more time.

  Her reputation had waxed and waned with the course of the war. Never a house hold name synonymous with Vietnam the way Bourke-White and Higgins were in their wars. Or the way Darrow had been. At thirty-two already middle-aged in a young man's profession, but there was nothing else she was prepared for but war. Her ambition in the larger world had faded until there was only her and the camera and the war. She knew this war better than anyone--had been one of the few to live in-country continuously, out in the field, taking every risk. She wanted to stay for the end, cover the biggest story of her career, especially now since the news services and the embassy were insisting that all Americans leave. The holy grail, an exclusive that would fill both her depleted reputation and her bank account. But what if the promised bloodbath did happen? There was Linh. She would not endanger him.

  Chuong, the boy who lived under the stairs, was again nowhere in sight. Helen paid him daily in food and piastres to guard the apartment and do errands. Mostly she paid him so the landlord would allow the boy to sleep in the stairwell, so Helen could be sure he ate. The small networks of connection falling apart. His absence was unusual, and Helen climbed the stairs, trying to ignore her sense of dread. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup. The old woman was usually accurate about the manic mood swings of the city. What if the city itself turned against her? Rumor swirled through the streets like burning ash, igniting what ever it settled on. She could still feel the bony rap of Grandmother's knuckles on her skin.

  Inside her apartment, Helen put the bowl on the floor, slipped out of her shoes at the door, and set them next to Linh's. She threw off the smock, pulled the neckband of her camera over her head, and laid the equipment on a chair. The camera was caked in dust. She would have to spend most of the evening cleaning the lenses and the viewfinder. The shutter was capping exposures, so she'd have to take it apart. A long, tedious evening when already she was dead tired.

  She pulled off her T-shirt and pants, the clothing stiff with sweat and dirt. The laundry woman had stopped coming a week ago, so she would have to use a precious bottle of Woolite from the PX and wash her undergarments herself in the small basin in her bathroom. She tugged off the black scarf and shook out her hair, standing naked in the dim room for a moment, enjoying the feeling of coolness, the air touching her skin. Outside, she had to protect herself, had to become invisible. No hair, bared throat, absolutely no hint of cleavage or breasts, no hips or buttocks or bared calves were permissible. When she had first gone into the field, a veteran female reporter, happy to be on her way out, advised her to use an elastic bandage wrapped over her bra to flatten the outline of her breasts. Even in the cities it was advisable to wear pants with a sturdy belt, the woman said, because it was harder to rape a woman in pants.

  It had all come down to this. Losing the war and going home. Her heart beat hard and fast, a rounding thump of protest. Would she go home, missing what she had come for?

  Helen picked up the kimono and quickly slipped it on. In the darkened mirror, she tried to see the effect of the robe without looking herself in the face. The war had made her old and ugly, much too late for any of Annick's lotions to make a difference. She pulled a comb through her hair and started to take out the hoop earrings in her ears but decided against it.

  "Is that you?" Linh called.

  She heard both the petulance in his voice and his effort to conceal it. "I'm coming." Tying the sash of her kimono, she went to a cabinet for a spoon and picked up the bowl of soup.

  In the bedroom doorway, she stood with a grinning smile that felt false. Lying in bed, staring out the window, he did not turn his head. The soft purple dusk blurred the outline of the flamboyant tree that had just come into bloom. Impossible to capture on film the moment of dusk, the effect of shadow on shadow, the small moment before pure darkness came.

  "I brought soup, but Grandmother said she already fed you."

  "I worried."

  She could tell despite his hidden face that his words were true, but what she didn't know was that since he had become house bound, he spent the hours while she was away imagining her whereabouts, visualizing dire scenarios. Each time he heard her walk through the door, he said a quick prayer of gratitude, as if torturing himself in this way saved her. Too close to the end to take such risks, and yet he was helpless to stop her.

  "I was trying to get home, but things kept catching my attention."

  She came forward in the dim room and sat on the edge of the bed to eat. She bent over him and kissed him gently on the lips. No matter that they had been together years, always a feeling of formality when they first saw each other again, even if the separation had been only hours. It had something to do with the attention Linh paid to her, the fact that he never took anyone's return for granted. The feeling disappeared with his quick smile, the way he always reached out a hand to establish touch. He wore old pajama bottoms, stomach and chest swaddled in gauze that had a dull glow in the room.

  He was unhappy, and she was the cause of his unhappiness, and yet she was perfectly willing to bull herself through the conversation as if the feelings underneath their words didn't exist. Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

  "I had many things to do today, my love."

  "The old crone read my fortune. Always the same--plenty of luck and a big family." The remark made to sting.

  When Linh turned to look at her, she noticed how sharp his ch
eekbones were, how his eyes were unfocused by pain. She caressed the half-moon scar on his cheek with her fingers. Whenever she asked how he got it, he changed the subject.

  "You didn't take your shots?" she said.

  "Forgot."

  With his infection, unsafe even to be still in the country. When Linh reached out his hand, she saw a belt twisted around his wrist. "What happened?" She held his hand and unwound it, feeling the cold heaviness of the flesh underneath, the welts left behind. She rubbed briskly, willing the disappointment from her face.

  "I was just bored, fooling around. Eat your soup."

  She looked at him. But this wasn't the time to confront. Just shrug it off, move on. "I'll change the dressings and give you a shot. Then I'll front you a game of Oklahoma gin." Linh was tall, slender, with the finely etched features of the warrior princes of Vietnamese legend, perfect until one's eyes traveled to the scar that formed a half moon on his cheek and the ribboned skin on the wrist that he couldn't leave alone, an ache. Both of them full of scars.

  "Sit with me a minute. Tempting me with cards?" He fingered the sleeve of the kimono. "You couldn't resist?" Equally appalled and in love with the fact that she could think of a kimono while their world was about to be lost.

  She buried her face in his neck for a moment. Her only rest anymore when her eyes were closed, the images stopped. His skin felt hot and damp against her cheek. Fever. "Annick is gone." They were both still for a moment. "A day, two at the most. Then I'll achieve my goal--'Last American Woman Reporter in Vietnam.' "

  "We should leave now. While there is time."

  "Martin is still promising the city will never go," she said. "There might be more time." The American ambassador had lost a son in the war, and the end would force him, too, to face things he didn't want to face. Better anything than that. "You distracted me," Helen said, jumping up and going through the room to her film bag. She fumbled inside it and held up a thick envelope. "Guess what this is?"

  "Then we're ready. Let's go now."

  Linh swung his legs to the floor and sat doubled over, hands gripping the bed frame.

  "Yes. Your 'Get Out of Vietnam Free' card. Now you have two letters, Gary's and the embassy's. Insurance. But I had to sit through a two-hour lunch listening to how the press are tools of Hanoi. No wonder we lost." She stood at the side of the bed, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, shaking her arms, trying to release tension.

  "And what did you reply?"

  "That photographs can't lie. I said, 'Make sure Nguyen Pran Linh gets to America, and as a bonus, I'll leave.' The country is going to disappear, be hidden behind a wall, and then the real stuff will start. All they want to talk about is identity cards, jumbled paperwork. How they have five different names on file for you."

  "We need to leave now," Linh repeated.

  "Not a moment past 'The temperature is 115 degrees and rising,' and the playing of 'White Christmas.' " This was the clumsy radio signal for the beginning of the evacuation. She ran her fingers over his forehead, trying to brush away furrows of fever.

  Linh smiled. "Does it strike you as an obvious signal? I predict the whole of the NVA Army is bent over radios waiting for it. A great cheer will go up."

  "Soon."

  "If you want to stay, we'll stay." He touched her hand. "You're shaking."

  "Tired."

  He understood that this was an untruth, that she was afraid and running, and if he made the wrong move he would lose her. "Lie down."

  "First things first." She readied the needle, gave him the injection.

  Reluctant, knowing she had hours of camera repair work, she stretched out against him, shivering despite the heat.

  After Linh had fallen into a drugged sleep, she got up and counted the ampoules of antibiotic and morphine left. A day's supply, bought at triple the normal going rate on the black market. But there was no more bargaining. By next week, there wouldn't be a black market for medicine at any cost.

  Two days ago at the French hospital, the doctors had cleaned out Linh's wound while he sat on a rough wood bench in the hallway, the rooms all filled to capacity, no drugs available. The doctor told Helen she was on her own finding penicillin and gave her a list of what would work in a pinch. The bullet had gone in at an angle and torn tissue on its way. The doctor left the young nurse with a needle and told her to suture him up. She was inexperienced, and the stitches were wide and irregular.

  "Take him home if you want him to recover. We have no medicine, no food. They are abandoning patients," she whispered.

  Helen nodded, hired a cyclo on the street while two orderlies dressed in rags helped Linh out the door and down the stairs. His arms were outstretched, one on the shoulder of each man at his side, cruciform.

  On a regular schedule, Helen swabbed out Linh's wound, relieved that it had finally stopped draining. The skin was swollen and red around the bullet entrance and exit wounds. It had taken her a full day of scouring the city to get untampered-with antibiotic in sealed bottles. From her days in the field, she had learned the signs that things were starting to go bad--the pallor of the skin, the sticking sweat that didn't dry. Linh was okay so far, although the fever troubled her. It was her fault he was wounded in the first place.

  They had driven to the outskirts of the city to photograph what President Thieu was officially denying: that three million people had taken to the roads, refugees flooding into Saigon, that the South Vietnamese army was blocking entrance, trying to quarantine the city like a ship at sea. Thieu was blaming everyone else for his decision to abandon the Highlands. The mob scenes up the coast in Danang--airports overrun, people hanging on to the outsides of planes, weighing them down so they could not take off, women and children trampled--made everyone paranoid about the same disaster happening in Saigon.

  From Martin down to her own contact at the embassy, the Americans were dazed by their impending loss and again forgot the Vietnamese. Negotiation was still considered an option, although the North Vietnamese made it clear they weren't interested. Helen had been trying to sell pictures about the plight of the demoralized SVA, but Gary had told her bluntly that after'73, when the American soldiers pulled out, Asian against Asian didn't make the front page. The world was bored by the long, brutal, stupid war. Until a few months ago, there had been only a skeleton press in the whole country, but now reporters flooded in, waiting for the handover so they could write up the finale and fly back out.

  Linh had been angry the last few months, angry at the government's ineptitude, and, Helen suspected, angry at America's coming betrayal. A fait accompli that the North had won, the least the government should do was facilitate a peaceful handover, avoid a panic where more of the population would be hurt. The government paid lip service to preserving peace and order even as the authorities scrambled like rats to abandon the city. Linh's usual gentle temper gone, he insisted on proving Thieu's lies. "Turning soldiers' guns against their own people."

  The cab had dropped Linh and Helen blocks from the barricades, and they slowly walked through the alleys to come up behind the SVA soldiers, the last vestiges of the government's power, armed and facing a sea of refugees. Men, women, and children dying from lack of food and water, and many, having nothing to lose, tried to break through the blockades of concertina wire and bullets.

  They had been warned that no one could help them if they got in trouble. Linh flaunted the danger, and Helen got caught up in his anger as well. She was taking pictures of the crowd when there was a surge of people to the left of them. A young soldier who looked no older than fifteen panicked and unloaded a clip from his automatic rifle into the crowd. The recoil shook him like a giant shaking him by the shoulders, and he turned sideways in his effort to hold on to the gun. A bullet ricocheted off the wall of a building.

  Linh kept walking, stumbled, walked on. This is the way one survived. The mind shuts down. He kept walking, swatting at the smudge of blood that was growing on his shirt, walking on as if he would die wa
lking.

  "Linh!" Helen cried. She saw the blood and pulled him down on the sidewalk, lifted his shirt. The wound was at the side of his abdomen. She pressed her finger against the hole and could feel metal as he grimaced. Relief that it hadn't gone in deep. Helen used his shirt to bandage it. She rubbed her bloodied hand against her pants. Ironic, given all the times they had gone on far more dangerous runs, but Helen, now as superstitious as the Vietnamese, knew there was only a certain quantity of luck in each person's life, and they had remained past theirs.

  _______

  Now Helen woke up on the apartment floor, her hand rubbing against her leg, shaken by yet another nightmare. She got to her feet, stiff, and walked to the map hanging on the wall. After all this time the idea of Vietnam was still as distant now as it had been to her as a young girl when her father studied maps of French Indochina. She barely recalled his face, confused if her memories were her own or pictures of him, but she did remember him letting her trace the outlines of countries with her fingertip, and from that gesture, she had felt the conqueror's feeling of possession. Now she had spent ten years in a country, South Vietnam, that had not existed on his maps, yet none of it was hers. Within a very short time--days, weeks, months?--it would disappear once more.

  She had not imagined herself outliving this war. The country deep inside her idea of who she was; she would tear out a part of herself in leaving it. Darrow had seen to that. He said she would never survive the way she had been, and she changed, gladly. The girl she had been lost in the Annamese Cordillera, the untamed mountains that rose up behind the Central Highlands and folded themselves all the way back into Laos.

  They had been out photographing a Special Forces reconnaissance mission when he woke her before dawn. The patrol was still out, and they watched the sun rise up out of the east and color the western mountains from a dull blackish purple to green. So many shades of green, Darrow said, that Vietnamese legend told that every shade of green in the world originated in this mountain range. The emerald backbone of the dragon from which the people of Vietnam sprang. Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.