by Bao Ninh
As the novel continued to unfold on the cluttered desk in his Hanoi room more stories came back to him. Flashes like film reels of events he had not thought about even once since they occurred.
Saigon, 30 April, V-Day. It poured with rain. Yes, on that momentous day of total victory, after that terribly hot noon, Saigon had been drenched in rain. After the downpour the sun came out from behind the clouds and the gunsmoke.
The last counter-attack by the ARVN commandos at Tan Son Nhat airport was beaten off and Kien’s troops moved in from the edge of the main runway. Kien dragged himself over to the airport lounge to find his regiment.
Of the entire scout platoon sent in to the airport only he had survived.
In the city five kilometres away the anti-aircraft guns were being fired noisily in celebration. But here it remained strangely quiet. The smoke continued to billow from oil fires but the air had been cooled and soothed by the rain, creating a sleepy atmosphere. All around the airport the victorious troops were enjoying their greatest prize: sleep.
Kien lurched tiredly past a row of ARVN bodies, commandos in uniforms still wet from the rain, and stepped onto the polished granite stairs of the terminal. Everywhere soldiers were lying deeply asleep. They lay sprawled on tables, on bars, on benches, on window ledges, and in armchairs. The chorus of snores made Kien sleepy, too. He sat himself down by the door to the Customs office and lit a cigarette. After a few minutes the cigarette dropped from his fingers and he slid to the ground into a deep sleep.
He was awakened a short time later by noises, the heat of a fire and the smell of food. Next to him a group of armoured-car soldiers were burning mattresses and polished wooden railings from the bar.
They were cooking something in a huge pot. It smelled delicious.
‘Smells good, don’t it?’ one of them said to Kien. ‘Have some. Down here they call them instant noodles.’
Another soldier interrupted: ‘Goddammit, be quick, so we can get looking. Fuck it, if we aren’t quick the bloody infantry’ll get all the good stuff. Oh, sorry mate,’ he said to Kien, ‘you’re infantry. Well, you’d probably know where the post-office storeroom is.’
‘I know where it is,’ Kien replied.
‘Excellent. After we’ve had the noodles, take us there. I’ve got an empty armoured car out there and I’ve not had any souvenirs for ages.’
Then he looked disdainfully at Kien. ‘Shit, don’t you know you’ve been sleeping next to a corpse? Couldn’t you smell her?’
Kien slowly turned his head to see where he’d been sleeping. A naked woman, her breasts firm and standing upright, her legs stretched out and open like scissors, her long hair covering her face, was stretched out near him, blocking the entry to the Customs office. She looked young. Her eyes were half-closed. No blood was visible.
‘I was so tired I didn’t notice her. I’ll drag her away,’ said Kien.
‘Leave her. Just don’t touch her. Now the war’s finished it’ll be bad luck for us to touch a corpse.’
‘I wonder why she’s naked,’ said Kien.
‘Beats me. We’d just shot those bastards over there and when we came in she was already lying there like that.’
‘Strange. The commandos are already stinking, yet she’s still fresh. Maybe women are cleaner, so their bodies don’t rot as quickly,’ said Kien.
‘Shut up! Gabbing on about stinking corpses while we’re trying to eat.’
Behind them they heard the Customs door swing open and a crashing noise. They turned to see a huge helmeted soldier tripping over the girl’s body and dropping a crate of Saigon 33 Beer. The bottles scattered and broke, spreading the amber fluid all over the floor. The armoured-car crew just laughed.
But the big man, embarrassed, got up and kicked at the body angrily, screaming at the dead girl. ‘You fucking prostitute, lying there showing it for everyone to see. Dare trip me over, damn your ancestors! To hell with you!’ he ranted.
Enraged, the big man grabbed the corpse by one leg and dragged her across the floor and down the stairs. Her skull thudded down the steps like a heavy ball. When he reached the concrete floor at the bottom of the stairs, he braced himself, lifted the dead girl and threw her out into the sunshine, next to another pile of dead southern commandos. The body bounced up, her arms spread wide and her mouth opened as if she was about to cry out. Her head dropped back with another thud on the concrete. The lout walked away jauntily, swinging his arms as if he were a hero.
The armoured-car crew had stopped eating, stiffened, and watched in silence. After the lout walked away they rose and went into the yard. The leader raised his AK and started to aim at the big man: ‘Damn you!’ he shrieked.
But Kien rushed over and pushed the barrel of the gun up. As he did so the soldier began firing, but the bullets went skyward and fell harmlessly to earth around them.
‘Just because of that you wanted to kill him?’ Kien asked the armoured-car commander.
They looked around them. The whole airport was full of officers and soldiers alike running as though they were in a market-place. They were looting, destroying, and firing rifles into the air at random. No one had paid any attention to the scene with the corpse. Even the lout hadn’t realised he’d come within a whisker of being shot.
The soldier wrenched his gun back from Kien, staring at Kien with loathing and hatred.
‘Maybe she was an important officer,’ Kien said to the soldier, as though the treatment of her body would be justified.
‘Shut up,’ the soldier replied.
‘What?’
‘Shut up. You’re talking garbage,’ he said, narrowing his eyes and spoiling for a fight.
The armoured-car commander’s men gathered around them. ‘Drop it, the pair of you. Forget it. Today’s V-Day, have you forgotten?’
The men took down curtains from the airport lounge and began to wrap the bodies up. They found some pretty clothes in a suitcase and dressed the dead girl, combing her hair into a bun and washing her face. They carried all the bodies out and laid them out in a row to wait for the body truck to take them away.
‘That’s it. Farewell to one regime,’ Kien shouted.
The armoured-car crew took off their caps and stood to attention.
The commander, calm by now, apologised to Kien. ‘Sorry for the outburst. It’s just that we’re fed up with corpses. We’ve had human flesh in the armoured-car tracks and we’ve had to drive through rivers to wash the bits off and wash away the stink. But I just couldn’t watch that arsehole treating a body like that, and a woman, too. If you hadn’t stopped me I’d have shot him and been nailed as a murderer, and that would have been senseless. We weren’t any better, sleeping and eating by the corpse.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Kien.
‘No. I mean it. That slob gave us a sort of warning: Don’t criticise others. Be sure of yourself first.’
Kien frowned, then walked away. ‘Be sure of yourself first, what a joke!’ Kien said to himself. He recalled Oanh’s death a month earlier, the morning his regiment attacked the Police Headquarters at Buon Me Thuot.
That day the southern government’s police force had defended themselves as staunchly as any regular soldiers in the southern armed forces. It took the NVA regulars more than an hour to fight their way into the main police building. They’d been ordered to kill all men wearing white shirts and release those wearing yellow. No one knew who’d given the order but it went down the ranks by word of mouth. The attackers fired non-stop yet the white shirts continued to pour out like bees.
In the leading force, Kien and Oanh had just taken out the machine-gunners who’d been firing on them from the third floor. They had rushed up the hallway throwing a grenade into each room they came to. The defenders were using pistols, machine-guns and grenades to fight back and refused to surrender.
Kien and Oanh got to a room at the end of the third-floor corridor. It had a plush brown door lined with leather. The door was flung open before they got to it
and three figures like white blurs flashed past them and rushed upstairs to the fourth floor.
‘They’re women! Don’t shoot,’ shouted Oanh.
But Kien’s AK had already sounded. Kien stopped shooting and shouted, ‘Surrender and you live. Resist, you’re dead!’
But he had already shot the three uniformed women and they fell back down the stairs onto the green corridor’s green carpet. Dark red blood spurted from two of them onto the carpet, while the third, just a girl really, slumped at the base of the stairs against a wall.
Kien and Oanh ran over to her. The air was full of gunsmoke and the smell of blood, yet the young girl’s perfume seemed stronger. She was cradling her face in her hands, her curled hair almost covering her hands. Between her hands they could see smeared lipstick and her lips twisted in pain. The whole building was in chaos and all around them were grenade explosions, gunshots, screams and footsteps.
Kien moved past the girl, heading upstairs, and Oanh said to the girl, ‘Go down into the yard with your hands up. No one will shoot you.’ Oanh picked up his knapsack of grenades and slung them over his shoulder as though they were avocados, and started after Kien.
Kien didn’t hear the shots that killed Oanh.
With all the machine-gun fire and other noises he didn’t even hear Oanh’s cry as the girl shot him. He didn’t realise that he had barely escaped death himself because her Walther PK 38 had run out of bullets.
She had shot Oanh in the back several times and Oanh was falling as Kien, completely unaware of her shots, turned to lean against the wall and wait for him. He was about to tell Oanh not to rush out onto the fourth floor, but to use a grenade to threaten them first.
As Oanh fell the girl lifted the pistol in both hands, bending slightly forward, and aimed at Kien. He was less than ten metres from her and knew he would be hit. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.
Kien shot her then, coming down the stairs past Oanh, shooting repeatedly, until he stood face to face and shot her again, in revenge. But although she had been blasted back by five rounds she still leaned on her arm on the floor, raising her head, as if she had decided to sit up. Kien fired the remainder of the magazine into her and the tiles under the girl’s white uniform reddened with blood. Kien squatted down near the four bodies, shaking and retching. In ten long years of fighting, since his first day at the front, he had never felt as bad.
That day at the airport he had recalled Oanh’s fate as he walked around reviling the armoured-car commander’s advice to treat the dead sympathetically. Oanh had been sympathetic, and look what had happened to him.
Kien began drinking. There was plenty of free booze at the airport. He wandered around watching the soldiers looting, and joined in the drinking and destruction. The entertainment seemed riotous, but it wasn’t the least bit amusing. They turned over furniture, smashed and ripped fittings and scattered them everywhere. Glasses, pots, cups, wine bottles, were all broken or shot up. They used machine-guns to shoot out the chandeliers and the ceiling lights. Everyone drank heavily and they all seemed to be drunk, half-laughing, half-crying. Some were yelling like madmen.
Peace had rushed in brutally, leaving them dazed and staggering in its wake. They were more amazed than happy with the peace.
Kien sat in the canteen of the Air France terminal, his legs up on a table, quietly drinking. One after another he downed the cups of brandy, the way a barbarian would, as if to insult life. Many of those around him had passed out, but he just kept on drinking.
A strange and horrible night.
At times the noise of machine-guns and the sight of the red, blue and violet signal flares fired into the air at random created a surreal atmosphere. It was like an apocalypse, then an earthquake. Kien shuddered, sensing the end of an era.
Some said they had been fighting for thirty years, if you included the Japanese and the French. He had been fighting for eleven years. War had been their whole world. So many lives, so many fates. The end of the fighting was like the deflation of an entire landscape, with fields, mountains and rivers collapsing in on themselves.
As dawn approached it grew noisier, then the racket died down.
Kien felt the sharp contrast between the loud, chaotic night and the peaceful morning. Suddenly, he felt terribly alone; he sensed he would be lonely forever.
In later years, when he heard stories of V-Day or watched the scenes of the Fall of Saigon on film, with cheering, flags, flowers, triumphant soldiers and joyful people, his heart would ache with sadness and envy. He and his mates had not felt that soaring, brilliant happiness he saw on film. True, in the days following 30 April he had experienced unforgettable joys after the victory. But on the night itself they’d had that suffocating feeling at the airport. And why not? They’d just stepped out of their trenches.
Yes, he had drunk his way through the night sitting in the Air France lounge. It wasn’t until morning that his brain started reeling. He began to have nightmares about the naked girl they’d dressed up. The floor beneath him felt as though it was heaving, a glass wall before him seemed to go up in smoke. The apparition of a naked girl appeared before him, her chest white, her hair messy, her dark eyes swarming with ants, and on her lips a terrible twisted smile. He looked steadily at her, feeling pity. This was a human being who had been killed and humiliated, someone even he had looked down on. Those who had died and those who lived on shared a common fate in this war.
He reached out unsteadily and tried to embrace the ghostly shadow of the girl. In his drunkenness he was blubbering, generating deep pity for her poor lost soul as he blethered on with words of consolation for her.
When he spoke of these events in later life others found it inconceivable he would waste his time becoming nostalgic over a girl at Tan Son Nhat airport who had not only been a corpse, but the corpse of someone Kien had never met! Yet the woman had, strangely, left a tragic and indelible imprint on his mind. She became the last of his enduring obsessions.
The manuscript pages were heaped in random order in the mute girl’s attic quarters. These flimsy pages represented Kien’s past; the lines told stories that were sometimes clear, but most were at best obscure and as vague and pale as twilight. They told stories from the precariously fine border dividing life from death, blurring the line itself and finally erasing it. Ages and times were mixed in confusion, as were peace and war.
The conflicts continued from the lines on pages into the real life of the author; the fighting refused to die.
The personalities, both alive and dead, breathed and spoke to the author in his special world where everyone he had known still lived and walked and smiled and ate and joked and dreamed and loved.
The mute girl might have said the author’s craziest pages came when he was most unhappy; it was then he wrote part-funereally, part-insanely because of his insistent passion for life. That’s what she might have said.
But she could not speak at all. That was the one last enigma bequeathed to us by the author. The mute girl had no way to express herself, for she neither read nor wrote properly, and of course could not speak.
She had opened a place in her heart and permanently reserved it for the author. When he had gone, the manuscript took his place in her heart. While she had his story she nurtured the hope of having him back.
She had moved into the apartments several years ago, during the war, when the roof was in disrepair.
Many years had elapsed since Kien’s father had died, leaving the attic empty. Because of his ghastly paintings, superstitious folk said that a ghost had moved in. Perhaps it was an excuse not to fix the roof. In any case, the girl moved in quietly one day and because she could not speak and because no one else wanted to go there, she remained apart from the others in the block of apartments.
Before getting close to Kien she had passed him several times on the narrow stairways. He had stretched his lips in artificial smiles that told her he was being polite and that he was drunk and he would never remember
her.
Kien himself wrote about her. That is how her story came to be among those pages that were found later. He wrote of her in the first person, then in the third. Passionately; dispassionately. This is what we pieced together:
She saw him as tall, broad in the shoulders, but thin and pale. His face was wrinkled, full of character, but he was often sad and tired.
When she first started to observe him she divined that the beautiful girl in the apartment next to his had been his lover, but was now shunning him.
She also knew that he was a writer. She would lip-read people saying it as he walked the streets. They called him ‘The Sorrowful One’ and nicknames like that, but there was pride in their name-calling.
By that special gift which people deprived of all normal senses develop, she also divined he was gradually becoming interested in her. She had no idea why; perhaps it was nothing but curiosity. Most people had a hidden curiosity about the handicapped. But not him, she decided. This was different.
Then, late one quiet, warm summer night, he knocked on her door. And knocked again, like the way a friend who expected to be answered would persist. From inside, she could smell alcohol. She hesitated. She was cautious, yet not afraid. In fact, she was a brave girl in many quiet ways. So she opened the door.
‘Arumm…’ he said. It wasn’t a greeting, nor was it an excuse for calling near midnight. She stepped back and opened the door wider and he stepped through as though he’d been expected.
He had been expected. For many weeks, she suddenly realised, she had been waiting for him. She smiled and signalled to him to sit down.
Kien staggered a little and brushed heavily against the cane chair she offered him, tipping it over. He waved the accident aside and flopped down on her bed. She righted the cane chair and placed it near her table, signalling him to move into it. ‘Doan be ’fraid,’ she lip-read him saying in slurred words.