by Ho Anh Thai
“The day you gave up working on the sea, the whole crew felt really sorry,” he said.
The two of us were standing in front of the wooden steering wheel. I gave it a spin. Like the wheel of time. Like the spinning wheel of karma.
“You know, everyone’s full of regrets,” I said. “It’s inevitable. But I ask myself over and over why should a person who is both decent and talented run into so many problems. Don’t be like me. A low-grade oil like myself always finds itself spilled into the mud.”
I told him that he could stay the night in my room; he didn’t have to worry about renting a place.
“It’s a deal. But let me go back and have one more go with that girl. I’ve gotta save up for the long days drifting at sea.”
After all of his ups and downs, he still talked easily, freely. His life debt had been paid and from now on everything he gained would be regarded as interest.
That night, the two of us sharing a room, he told me that once he’d suddenly thought of me, and that he’d asked everyone on his ship where I was and what I was doing, but nobody knew. That was the time his ship had gone through Lan Hải Bay. He’d seen a young mother and her son on a boat selling longans. The boy, about four years old, had looked up at their ship with longing in his large clear eyes. He’d seen that same look before, those same crystal clear eyes filled with the same kind of longing when he’d see me sitting in front of my easel on the ship.
The next morning, he left the hotel and returned to Hải Phòng. Nowadays it’s hard work to be a seaman. Making money had become meaningless to him; it had only had led to disaster at home—and, anyway, on land you could earn much more. Going to sea was no longer about filling his pockets. It had become instead a kind of inescapable karma. A drug he couldn’t quit. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he wanted to pull me back into it, get me hooked again on the narcotic of the sea. “If you come with me,” he said, “you’ll create beautiful paintings.”
In my heart of hearts, I knew he was right. But for now, I had to keep living. And my life lay in the hands of another.
The first thing I had to do was to get rid of the little poison pill. But where could I toss this kind of super-potent poison? Zoroastrians don’t dare bury their dead for fear of polluting the earth, don’t dare cremate them for fear of polluting the fire, and don’t dare dump them in a river for fear of polluting the water. It was the same with me and my pill. I couldn’t chuck it in a lake. I couldn’t bury it. Who knew if some dog or cat might come by and dig it up? I couldn’t throw it in the dump; there were always kids going through the refuse. I struggled with the question and finally decided that the best thing to do would be to throw it in the sewer. People are used to throwing disgusting and toxic objects into the sewer, even things that block the flow of the sewage system.
So I rid myself of the poison pill. But at the same time I needed to purge my guilty soul. From now on I wouldn’t allow myself any evil thoughts towards Mai Trừng. Anything evil that I might plan to do to her, even in my imagination, would fall back upon my own head.
I burned incense in repentance. I prayed that she would always meet with luck.
In the end I simply tracked her down using the address that Quốc Đài had given me. It was a colonial-era house that had been partitioned into tiny compartments in order to house who knows how many families. The decades-old wooden staircase had, over time, been the victim of various owners who only knew how to tread upon it, but never wanted to keep it up. Now it groaned and shook like an epileptic. The hallway at the top had been transformed into extra living space for the occupants of the cramped apartments. It contained oil-burning and coal-burning stoves and a basket of vegetables perched on a water dispenser.
I stopped in front of the door that some of the residents downstairs had pointed out, and knocked tentatively. The woman who greeted me was around forty years old, and wore thick eyeglasses, the exact model of an old-time schoolmarm. “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m looking for Mai Trừng.” Coming face to face with the schoolmarm, I’d instantly reverted to a schoolboy persona.
“She’s gone.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, what time will she return?”
“I’ve told you, she’s gone. For good. I have no idea if she’ll ever come back.”
“Please allow me to ask one more question, ma’am; do you happen to know where she’s gone?” My trembling, feverish voice startled her. Her blurred, pale pupils behind her glasses seemed to freeze. Then she lowered her eyes, avoiding mine.
“I’m very sorry, I don’t know,” she said.
The door closed again. I staggered back into the hallway. It was totally hopeless now. I would die. I would die an unjust death. Mai Trừng would never know that I’d tried to find her to repent, to ask forgiveness for myself and my three dead friends, for absolution for my previous plans to kill her with poison. I was almost unable to take another step. As soon as I came to the head of the stairs, my legs collapsed, and I sat down on the top step, right next to a basket of water spinach that someone had washed and then left on top of the water dispenser.
Maybe, I thought, Mai Trừng was actually in the apartment and just wanted to avoid seeing me. I was sure, from our frolicking in the waves at Bình Sơn Beach, that she knew my face. Besides, she had talked to me face to face in the Captain’s Studio. Maybe she’d caught a glimpse of me, figured that I’d searched her out to kill her, and then decided to strike first. No. I still wanted to live. My mind was totally clear, without a hint of venom in it.
I leaned my forehead against the wooden handrail, and then I stared up at the basket of water spinach sitting on the water dispenser. A single green vegetable worm was contorting itself as it slowly climbed up the stems of the spinach. That worm would contaminate that whole family’s bowl of broth. They would eat it all anyway, impassively, never knowing. All of life is full of these tiny poisons that build up, bit by bit. As soon as I had this thought, I was filled with revulsion. I lifted up the stem and flicked the worm off. It fell, squirming, onto one of the wooden steps.
“Young man.”
The schoolmarm had been standing behind me. She’d witnessed the scene of me plucking the stem of water spinach and flicking the worm off. I quickly dropped the stem back into the basket, and turned to look up at her. Maybe it was the pain and total hopelessness reflected in my face that made her tremble slightly.
“Why don’t you come inside, son? Come in for a bit.”
Limping slightly, she led me along the hallway and into her apartment. She poured me some tea. The yellow-green tea helped shake me back into a more composed state.
“So, what’s your relationship to her?”
“We’re friends, ma’am.”
“Friend” is a word we use when we want to delicately avoid using words like “lover” or “mistress.” The schoolmarm seemed to think that I was just being subtle; but that wasn’t what I was trying to express.
“And the two of you have had some kind of falling out? You just need to talk about it. It doesn’t help to clomp around sulking like this.”
Her words caught me off guard. Apparently I looked the part of a depressed and remorseful lover, and she felt the need to sympathize and offer me advice. I sat quietly, not daring to lie to her.
“I’ve noticed that she’s been different lately, and seems sad, but when I ask her what’s the matter, she just changes the subject and tells me that nothing’s wrong. I’d guessed that she’d had a row with her boyfriend. It’s a simple thing to deal with; you just need to find a way to compromise with each other. It’s not so bad that she should quit work and run off like this.”
As she spoke, her eyes had filled with tears. She took off her glasses and wiped the condensation off.
“Please, ma’am, where did she run off to? I’ll go find her and bring her back.”
“Yes. That’s it. If you really love each other, that’s what you have to do. She didn’t tell me where else she was going, but I know f
irst she’ll go to visit her aunt in the Central Region, around Cửa Lớn Beach.”
She dabbed the corner of her eye with tissue, then continued. “Actually, we’re not really related by blood. But I’ve raised her for all of her twenty-six years. And then one day she just started crying for my forgiveness and telling me that she had to leave.”
And so she began telling me the whole story. It was a story that began during her days along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She, Mai Trừng's mother, and the woman presently living near Cửa Lớn were three “sisters” living and working together in a three-person unit on what, in those days, was known as Station M8.
The three women had been assigned to keep watch over a storehouse of military supplies. The storehouse was actually a wide cave, but any stranger standing directly in front of it would have had a hard time discovering the entrance. The Northern army’s vehicles would regularly pass by this area, but the enemy’s scouts would also probe the region, so mines were scattered around the cave in case the foe broke through. Not that discovering the cave would be an easy matter. Having been on the battlefield for more than two years, the three women were highly experienced. Every regulation for maintaining their cover was observed very strictly. They “walked without a trail, cooked without smoke, and spoke without noise.” Many times groups of scouts had rustled by, working their way through the bush where the three were in hiding, and were totally convinced that this was pristine, primitive jungle, without a single Viet Cong around. The war was a great deception, the enemy fooled and diverted over and over, until they realized they’d lost everything.
Each night, in the evening chill, the three had huddled around the small fire telling humorous stories from their home villages. Miên was the oldest, twenty-six years old, from a village she called Plop Bridge. In the region where she’d grown up, people would sit on a bridge over the local pond as they “liberated” their bowels. As a result, the precocious fish below learned to wait patiently to take turns feeding. In that same village there was a story about the “buy nine, get one free” deal. A woman carried a basket of sweet potatoes down to wash in the pond. As she cleaned them, she chatted with a man purging his digestive tract over the edge of the nearby bridge. There had clearly been nine tubers when she’d lowered the basket down into the water, but when she scooped them back out there were now ten.
The two younger girls had fallen over with laughter at Miên’s story. Giềng and Hoa were both twenty years old. Giềng told stories from her hometown in central Vietnam: the land of the “grubs.” If someone years later ever made an effort to collect her humorous tales about the people in her region, he would be able to write a huge book. They were the kind of colorful stories that soldiers tell, the kind of stories that form the staple of soldiers’ psychological nourishment. They were stories by soldiers, for soldiers, and because of soldiers. Mixed up with these thousands of tales were counterfeits, added after the fact. They were stories that people of central Vietnam told themselves or that other people told about them. The one they liked best was about an old man in central Vietnam who’d asked a soldier, “What do you call your fathers4 up there in the North?”
“Huh?” The soldier lied and said, “We call them worms.”
“Well then, when you go home please convey this old grub’s compliments to your old worm!”
Hoa didn’t know many funny stories. She just recounted that her home village was famous for a special kind of steamed sticky rice cake artificially enhanced with earth. But she’d only heard people talk about it; she’d never seen it herself. Hoa was transfixed by the stories; it was as if she were a five-year-old child, as if she’d never lived at all. Living in a simple village, she’d joined the army and been sent straight off to war just before she’d turned seventeen. She hadn’t had the chance to see anything of the world around her. Her pitiful expressions of bewilderment made Miên and Giềng want to shield and coddle her even more.
That bewilderment and honesty had also touched the men. The young male signal corps soldiers and drivers passing by sent gifts and inquired after her whenever they had the chance.
One afternoon, a young soldier named Nguyễn Đức Hùng arrived at their hut just before he fainted. He was stricken with fever, but had forced himself on, forced himself to track down Station M8. To pass out alone in the middle of the jungle would have almost certainly meant death.
The three women ran out, grabbed him by his arms and legs, and half-carried, half-dragged the soldier, as big as a bear and as long as a python, into the hut. They applied a cold compress to his forehead to fight the fever. They lit a warming fire when he was seized by chills. Timely medicine and hot porridge brought him back to his senses. The next morning, Hùng was able to sit up, and he told them that he was from Thai Bình Province, the land of playboy-hobos5 with a pole in one hand and a sack in the other. Just one day later he was up and accompanying Hoa as she gathered bamboo shoots for making broth.
Right away, it was as if Hoa had suddenly turned into a totally different person. Gone was her bewildered appearance. In place of it was the animated and mischievous expression of young woman overflowing with happiness. She brought a bundle of wildflowers to the hut and put them in an ammunition canister. Then she begged and pleaded with Hùng to copy the song “The Music of Ta Lư Instrument”6 into her notebook. The two of them mingled their voices in song.
The three women made Hùng rest in the hut for a few more days, not feeling that he was healthy enough to leave yet. Another reason was that Miên didn’t want the young couple to part so quickly after coming together. She was uneasy about how Hoa would be when he finally did leave, but she didn’t have the heart to stop their love, so she left it to the heavens. But to this day Miên has regretted her decision. Maybe if she’d told Hùng to get back on the road then he wouldn’t have died. But that’s fate. And fate is preordained.
That day Hùng and Hoa had once again gone into the forest to gather vegetables. Around lunchtime Hoa came running back to the hut. She’d stumbled and collapsed, crawling and dragging herself madly until she reached the door. Her eyes were filled with insanity. She was almost totally dumb, only managing a few incoherent groans as Miên and Giềng shook her, trying to bring her back to her senses. “What happened, Hoa? Where’s Hùng?” Hearing Hùng’s name spoken aloud seemed to snap Hoa out of her trance. She sprang straight up, agitated as if she’d totally lost her mind. The two women had to hold her tightly as she babbled incoherently and pointed toward the forest, signaling for the two women to follow her. Miên turned to Giềng and told her to grab a gun and a grenade for each of them. Then the three of them carefully worked their way into the jungle, Hoa guiding them along the path.
That morning Hoa and Hùng had gone into the forest to gather vegetables and bamboo shoots like every other day. And, just like every other day, they’d used it as a pretext to make love in the wilderness. Every time Hùng would say, “It’ll be too hard on you if you have a child in a war zone, so let me . . . ,” but each time she’d keep him tight inside of her.
“I’m not worried at all,” she’d say. “The other women and I will raise our child until the day peace arrives, then I’ll bring him back to you.” The truth was that Hoa had already felt the presence of another heartbeat inside of her, a presence still unformed yet nonetheless stirring somewhere in her cells, in her veins, in her flesh.
They had lain together until they realized that they still had to collect vegetables. They were near a small stream, and Hùng remained hidden on the bank, keeping watch as Hoa took a dip to wash herself. Then it was Hoa’s turn to stand guard as Hùng bathed. He gave his snub-nosed rifle to Hoa to hold, climbed down to the edge of the stream, stripped off his clothes and piled them along the bank, and then dove into the water. From above, and from not too far away, Hoa could make out his powerful, symmetric body. The fact that men such as this were fighting in this war was something to be proud of and, at the same time, something to regret. At that moment, Hoa
suddenly knew how mothers must feel. She knew that she could bear any of the thousands of losses and tragedies that the war could pour down onto her, anything at all if only young men like this could be sent to the rear, sent to study in a foreign country. When the war was over, the nation would surely need such young men.
But what she saw next made her tremble. A squad of four enemy scouts suddenly appeared at the bank of the stream. They kicked at Hùng’s clothing until they saw his dagger. One of them picked it up and dragged the blade across his palm as if testing its edge. Then he gestured to Hùng to swim back to the bank.
Hùng was still half submerged in the stream, unarmed and totally naked. Hoa almost called out, almost started to open fire at the scouts so Hùng could run for it, but logic quickly prevailed. This area of the forest had been considered free of Viet Cong for a long time. There weren’t any documents or letters in Hùng’s clothes. He’d just be seen as a North Vietnamese soldier who had become separated from his unit.
Hùng threw himself into the water and started swimming downstream, away from Hoa’s hiding place. Spitting vulgarities, the scouts ran along the bank in pursuit. There were a few points at which the stream ran too shallow to swim, and Hùng had to run. The soldiers scrambled from rock to rock, clustering in the center of the stream, and surrounding Hùng. He ran into one of them, shoving him over, and smashing the scout’s head down into the water, so he lay motionless. But the others had regrouped and a moment later they were dragging Hùng’s writhing body up onto the shore, bruised and bleeding. As they questioned him, they rained kicks and punches down on him until he lost consciousness. When he came to, they started again. Hoa knew why they didn’t use their guns. They didn’t want the sound of a gunshot ringing out in the forest.
What happened in the end Hoa never could have foreseen. She’d assumed that the scouts would drag Hùng off to a POW camp to continue their interrogation. Instead, the scout with the long dagger slashed it deftly across Hùng’s stomach. A horrifying scream burst from his mouth. High above, Hoa ground her teeth, nearly passing out. Two of the scouts shoved their hands into Hùng’s abdomen and dug out his organs. They lit a fire, roasting and eating his innards right there. His testicles were split between two of them who were probably higher ranking.