The Sorrow of War

by Bao Ninh

  His face was distorted by the drink, but he was kind and friendly. She offered him some herbal tea, which he accepted and gulped down.

  The tea sobered him slightly. He stood up and slowly walked around the room. As he spoke she realised for the first time he had been in her room hundreds of times; this had been his father’s studio.

  To win his confidence, and to see his lips more clearly, she sat next to him. ‘People say there are ghosts here. That’s not true. It’s them, the ones from my father’s paintings. Before his death he released them from his canvases… a crazy and barbarous ceremony. No paintings left now…’

  She couldn’t quite understand, but as she looked over his shoulder she saw his shadow on the wall and imagined him to be his father sitting at an easel and painting obsessively.

  ‘And then you came,’ he said clearly. ‘You aren’t afraid. Who are you?’ But then he rambled off again. He grasped her hand tightly. ‘I’ve got you in my novel. Understand? You’ve helped me remember. Right now I need to remember. Everything. To remember this attic, everything.’

  She let him talk. Drunks needed to be free. She let him hold her hand tightly, twist it, until her own hand was hurting and a little swollen. He finally stopped talking and rested his head on the table. But still he held her hand. She was so tired, yet she did not try to free her hand from his.

  Weeks passed without her seeing him again, though every night she could see a light at his window.

  It was a light she looked for now. But was he there?

  Then one day she met him at the front gate to the apartments. He had the appearance of someone returning from a long journey. He looked thinner and older, and a little absent-minded. She was deeply hurt as he brushed past her, his eyes registering no recognition. Surely he had not forgotten her? Had he shuffled her aside because she was a mute?

  No. A few nights later he reappeared. He was both as friendly and as distant as he had been on the first night. And there were many more visits. He came when he was drunk; it became clear to her that he would drink himself into a certain state as he wrote, then decide he needed to see the attic, and to see her. He needed her to be there in the attic. They needed each other.

  Story after story would pour out; they were horrible and they were vivid. Even she could read that on his lips and hear the sharp ends of certain words, words reserved for killing and for agony.

  Then he would collapse, his head on the table. Asleep.

  It took some time for her to realise that what he had been doing in all those visits was repeating stories he had just written only hours earlier. She had become his sounding-board. He was greedily demanding of her that she listen to what he had written, even though he knew she could not hear him or understand fully what he related.

  It was then she wanted to scream at him in hatred for using her. Or scream in pain for the discomfort. Or punish him for his dictatorial use of her spirit; he had ignored her eyes, her lips, her smile, her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, her breasts, her soft hands, her long legs, her swaying walk, her very breath and her mute but happy smile. And worse, her natural perfume of love.

  Still, he became her passion. She admitted it now to herself. She needed those rare and wonderful evenings. She was like a vine, linked to his crises. She didn’t mind his drunkenness. She needed his hand to twist hers. She needed him to talk and talk. The more confused the stories the longer he stayed, the longer he charmed her, and loved her through the rhythm of his talk.

  Rumours began. Other apartment owners had seen him going to her. ‘What a strange love affair,’ they said. ‘He’s an author. She’s a mute. But you must admit, she is a pretty young thing.’ ‘How do they do it? I mean, how do they make arrangements? One’s dumb, the other’s crazy!’

  And so it went on. Until: ‘Will they marry?’

  Women whispered. Men chuckled. Both with envy.

  She would have loved to know what they were saying, but of course she had no idea. She would have forgiven them. Sadly, none of it was true.

  She knew she was nothing to Kien. He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Sue, then for Phuong, the girl next door. Then for the crippled Hien, on the train. Then, horridly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport, on 30 April 1975.

  He also mistook her for certain ghosts. At times he wasn’t aware she was even female, for he changed her name so often from masculine to feminine.

  Even so, he was irresistible. She had deliberately waited for him one night, somehow knowing he would be relatively sober. He had arrived, smiling, and swung himself into the seat, just a little tipsy. He was a bit shy, but he seemed at home. He seemed to be saying to her that this was the night that she should be talking. He even asked if she could speak to him. She shook her head ‘No!’ to him.

  He continued to speak, as though it had been a polite question he had not wanted answered.

  ‘This is the last of the novel,’ he had said clearly.

  ‘Now,’ he said, equally clearly, ‘I don’t know what to do with the mountain of papers.’ He meant his novel. Now that he had written it he had no use for it. Whatever devils he had needed to rid himself of had gone. The novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils.

  Kien had written for the sake of writing, not to publish.

  He had looked over the room. Then out of the window. She had watched his hands, then his eyes, then his lips as they softly formed poetry in tune with his magical glances as he described his latest story.

  She leaned over. Slowly, gently, she kissed him.

  Their first kiss.

  He seemed unaware. He changed the subject, telling a story of his father’s studio. This one, here. Now.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with all these papers,’ he said.

  This awakened her. She leaned over and kissed him again. This awakened him. He gently pushed her back on the bed. But his eyes were a little crazed and for a moment she expected a beating or some retribution.

  He lifted from her and left. She could hear his footsteps on the stairs, as he returned to his apartment.

  He did not return for some days. She waited for him with painful anxiety, but he did not come.

  One night she decided she would visit him. There was another blackout, which gave her the cover of darkness to move around. She tiptoed downstairs and peered through the partly opened door. It was never locked, anyway. She could see him by the light of a kerosene lamp. The smells of alcohol and kerosene mixed in the air.

  She thought she heard him groan as he wrote. He seemed obsessed and definitely didn’t feel her presence. She stood by the door like that for a long time. From then on during every blackout she came down and watched him. His hair grew longer, his face grew more haggard. He looked older. Surely the writing had to end; yet she did not want it to end, fearing the end would have other consequences for her.

  After some weeks, on another blackout night, she had returned later than usual and stopped to peer in on her way upstairs. Kien was kneeling by his stove shoving torn paper into it and lighting and relighting it.

  She silently closed the door behind her and softly walked over and kneeled beside him. She recalled the story of the frenzied destruction of his father’s paintings; she placed her hand over his, to stop him putting another page into the fire.

  At first he looked startled to see her there. But he stopped the burning, letting the fire go cold. He turned and took her in his arms, away from the stove. In the total silence he then possessed her as though nothing else in the world mattered. She gasped in desperation for him and for many hours they remained locked together. His loneliness pierced her like a knife, throbbing painfully.

  He had left while she was still asleep. Somehow she knew she would never see him again. This was his final departure.

  She understood he had left his apartment for her. He had left the door wide open and a chilling wind had blown through, disturbing the papers and carrying many of them into the hall and down the stairs. She gathered them all togethe
r, tidied his room, and took the manuscript to her own attic.

  None of the pages were numbered. There was no obvious order to them and she was able to understand only a very little of it. But she knew she had to keep them.

  Months went by. Then a year. The manuscript gathered dust; it looked like an elegant old parchment.

  Hanoi. Now Kien writes only at night because only then can he hope to write that which is truly his own. He drinks to stay awake, yet his recall is clear and he is more alert than ever. By night he is more creative, tapping his imagination, his poetic streak, and gathering in the plot of the story more easily.

  His street neighbours are now more accustomed to his eccentricities in burning the night lights, despite their ghost-like quality in the gloom.

  Professional burglars and prostitutes in the lake area soon get to know about him. The Ha Le lake was their circuit. So they nicknamed Kien’s room the Ha Le lighthouse. They would greet him: ‘How’s the Ha Le lighthouse-keeper these days? Get plenty of writing done last night?’

  He returns a smile to them when he opens his window in the morning to welcome the dawn breeze. A little further down the street a famous ‘pavement girl’ wolf-whistles up to greet him and make fun of him.

  At nights, when all around him grows dim, Kien feels closer to life. It seems that darkness truly reflects the darkness of his soul. Now, sleepless nights have become normal for him. Unless he is very drunk he never sleeps before early morning. The nights have become more precious and urgent to him. By day, he sleeps; an unnatural, dry and uncomfortable sleep. And if he does doze off at night it is only briefly, for Time jolts him out of his sleep with a fiery reminder to his soul.

  There are times when he feels that only death will give him a real rest. In his childhood he heard the saying: One’s life is only a handspan; he who sleeps too much shortens it by half. Kien realises his time is running out. He is not afraid of death; there is nothing about it that frightens him. But he is sorrowful, and heavy with regret for tasks unfinished.

  Once, in slumber around daybreak, he had the vivid impression he was leaving life. The images and the exalted feeling he experienced were so clear and deep that he wondered if he could ever feel the same when he really came to depart this earth. Kien felt he had died right then; however briefly, he had died. In that one-thousandth of a second something inside him that was normally so blurred, so unclear, froze and became sharp and cold and visible. He seemed to have inside him a deep slash, into which his life force was draining, pouring from him so slowly, silently, yet irrevocably. His vital force dropped from him as from a broken pot, and Kien fainted away.

  It was a little death. Kien knew it as his head dropped to his desk, as his pen fell from his hand and rolled on the floor. It was not like the times he had been shot, or when he had fallen victim to a fever and been unconscious. Nor was it anything mystical. It was a new experience which had overcome him. It was the truth of all truths, the rule of all rules, the very last point of life. It was death. He recognised it.

  He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river.

  Kien saw the Buoi school as it had been back then, in April 1965, just before the outbreak of war. It was a late spring afternoon. By then its shady row of trees had been chopped down, its yard criss-crossed with deep trenches, anticipating war. The headmaster, wearing a fireman’s helmet, boasted loudly that the Americans would be blown away in this war, but we wouldn’t. ‘The imperialist is a paper tiger,’ he screamed. ‘You will be the young angels of our revolution, you will rescue mankind!’

  He pointed to a pupil among the tenth-form boys who were holding wooden rifles, spears, spades and hoes, showing childish bravado. ‘Life is here, death is also here,’ the boy said and the others sang noisily. Someone yelled, ‘Kill the Invader!’ and everyone cheered.

  But Phuong and Kien were not at the school meeting held to preach the three golden rules of preparedness. They had escaped and had hidden behind the Octagon building on the shore of the West Lake. From where they sat, under a tree on the lake’s edge, they could see the Co Ngu road, tinted red by the setting sun, and the flame trees in brilliant bloom. Cicadas sang loudly, continuously.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Phuong had said smiling, delighted she had skipped classes with Kien and also dodged trench-digging duties. She had worn her skimpy swimsuit under her school uniform, right there in the school, as if for a dare. ‘Forget about the war and all the heroes, young and old heroes. Let’s swim over to the Water Palace, far enough out to be dangerous…’

  What a beautiful, warm and sweet April day it was. The delirious hugs together in the light green water. The fish brushing by them, the lilypads. Phuong’s beautiful face suffused with water, the bubbles from her underwater breathing, her hair waving, heavy with water, her shoulders, her lovely long legs. All was so intimate, so perfect, that it made him ache.

  The distant sound of a choir in the schoolyard reached them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Phuong had said as they listened. She kneeled behind a shrub and removed her blouse. When she had emerged she had on a lovely black swimsuit with plunging neckline. The clarity of her pale skin contrasted beautifully with the black suit.

  Kien, already nervous, was breathless. He hardly dared look at her lovely body.

  As they swam the sound of the choir again reached them, the twilight deepened and they got further and further from the bank. He recalled this had been the last peaceful stretch in the river of his life; ahead of him from that moment on there was a long, new stretch of river, full of fire.

  War.

  * * *

  His mind skipped from the lake to the Thanh Hoa station, which was burning fiercely after the bombing raids. Everything that could burn was burning. From the capsized train men, women and children rushed to the platform to escape. Clothes caught fire and burned on their bodies. Headless shadows stamped about. The roar of the planes continued unabated with bombs falling obliquely in the sunlight. For the first time in his life he saw people being killed, saw barbarity, saw blood flowing freely.

  From then on his whole generation threw itself into the war enthusiastically, fiercely, making its own blood flow, and causing the blood of others to flow in torrents. Rushing onward, engaging in fierce hand-to-hand combat at the foot of the Ngoc Bo Ray mountain, soldiers bayoneting each other, beating each other with rifle stocks. Human forms running helter-skelter, zig-zagging from machine-gun sights only to be sent flying into the air.

  Kien saw himself holding a rifle, shooting at someone’s head; the sub-machine-gun bullet, as powerful as a bomb, hit him right in the mouth and his face exploded taking his left eye, his cheekbone and his lower jaw. ‘Ahaaaahhaha,’ he had cried. The sound was like laughter, more likely a wail. How frenzied and aggressive this generation of his had become!

  The violent and dreadful years and months. The Tet Offensive, Second Tet, the 1972 dry season, the post-Paris Agreement battles. The parched lands, dazzling under the sunlight, writhing in pain. The immense Central Highlands, cruel with a rolling red dust clouding the sky. Yamo, Dac Dam, Sa Thay, Ngoc Rinh Rua, Ngoc Bo Bieng, Chu Co Tong, all places which conjured the most terrible, fierce memories replete with suffering. There had been also the laughing, the shouting, swearing, drinking, talking, and happy times. A lot of crying, too.

  Kien was again back in the jungle, at Cong Ho Rinh, an ancient, desolate village, now ruined, laid flat by fighting and now just a graveyard where human bones, broken weapons and other war materials lay around like garbage.

  It must have been as beautiful as little Dien Binh village which he saw before it got caught up in the firing. It had been part of a lovely pastoral scene along the Dac Po Xi river when Kien’s battalion first saw it. Now it was a heap of as
h and corpses and one imagined the spirits of the dead flying away in such numbers they’d make a fog-bank along the river.

  Shaking the curtain of dew and smoke from another memory he saw very clearly himself and ‘Elephant’ Tac both kneeling at a huge, captured M60 machine-gun and firing it non-stop at a stream of enemy stragglers from the ARVN 45th Regiment. They were running for their lives from Phuoc An, near Buon Me Thuot, being herded by tanks.

  The machine-gun eagerly ate up the cartridges and spat the copper shells aside, blazing deadly fire at the stream of insane men rushing on into their sights, making themselves targets of flesh. The gun trembled violently, swivelling on its base, steam rising from its cooling tank.

  Kien, in a firing frenzy, had not wanted to stop shooting but to continue would have been massacre, not fighting, for the corpses had by now piled higher than he’d ever seen before.

  The T54 tanks driving the enemy into his sights now appeared. ‘Stop,’ shouted Tac, dropping the cartridge belt and moving over to Kien. ‘Stop, cease fire,’ he shouted, shaking Kien’s shoulders.

  Kien stopped firing. Kien and Tac watched as the T54s approached through the enemy dead. Others were kneeling, holding both hands high in surrender. The killing had been obsessive, all-devouring. But now the gun was silent the scene turned to farce. Kien looked at Tac.

  Tac, the kindly ‘Elephant’, slowly bent down beside Kien, holding both hands to his chest as if embracing his heart. He looked at Kien with intense surprise, then his eyes turned dull and he fell forward, revealing the deadly bloom of red, flowering under his left shoulder.

  Kien recalled it all. Everything. Not a single detail was missing. His fighting life was being revived in flashbacks, or in slowly unfolding scenes as heart-rending as a funeral march.

  And now, in his room, Kien seemed to see the end of his stream of life. Journey’s end. He seemed to hear someone calling softly to him: It is time. He closed his eyes, wanting to let himself slip away.