The Sorrow of War

by Bao Ninh

  Over twenty years have passed since the evening on the lake. In that time almost everything around the lake has changed, yet the spirit of it lives on, unchanged. Immense, looming, leisurely romantic.

  Kien had never returned to the school. Nor had he been back to the lakeside pavilion, or along the little path at the back of the schoolyard. He had looked from afar, unwilling to retrace old tracks.

  The lake became a symbol of Phuong in her beautiful youth, symbol of the marvels and grief of youth, of love and lost opportunities. On many occasions he sat by the lake, lingering until the last trace of red had left the same sky where he and Phuong had been together twenty years ago.

  They had lain together under the star-scattered sky, unwilling to move despite the cold setting in. He seemed unwilling ever to leave their special place and she sensed this, saying softly, ‘The school gate’s closed. Stay here.’

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ he asked, hoarsely.

  ‘I’m…’ Phuong moved to embrace Kien, pulling him close to her. He trembled in the embrace, first uneasily, then as he relaxed he felt a powerful, uncontrollable urge burn within him and he began tightening his grasp. He closed his eyes and buried himself in her soft fragrant embraces and she responded passionately.

  As he kissed, a sudden sharp pang struck within him and he breathed in sharply, withdrawing. A sudden, darkly powerful sense of guilt had struck home; he responded prudishly, tearing himself from her arms. Astonished, Phuong reacted with fright, shame and confusion, rolling herself away and buttoning her blouse over the swimsuit.

  During a long silence neither of them moved. The lake waters lapped against the shore and far away they saw an anti-aircraft gun on a pontoon in the water. From even further away a gong sounded.

  ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ Phuong said, suddenly breaking the silence between them. ‘Me, too. But just realising it makes me more keen.’

  ‘I just think we shouldn’t,’ he blathered. ‘I’m going off to war. I’m going away,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Better not.’

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘But there’ll never be another time like now.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he said urgently.

  ‘When? A thousand years from now? You’ll be changed and so will I. Hanoi will be different. So will this West Lake.’

  ‘Our feelings won’t change, that’s the most important thing,’ he said.

  She remained silent for a moment then said, ‘I can see what’s going to happen. War, ruin, destruction.’

  ‘Maybe. But we’ll rebuild.’

  ‘You’re a simpleton; your father was different, he saw it coming,’ she said.

  ‘I’m different,’ he said defensively.

  ‘You didn’t love him, did you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t be angry at the question, just answer me.’

  Kien simply stared at her.

  ‘Did you ever really talk to him?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We talked about lots of things. What a question!’

  ‘So did he tell you why he destroyed all his paintings, why he lost the will to live?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he talked about other things. Why did he destroy them? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You knew nothing about it. But I did. He confided in me. We were closer to each other than to you. When he burned the paintings I could see the future through the flames. He was burning my life as well as his own,’ she said.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he shouted. ‘Are you mad!’

  Kien had no understanding of her emotions. Suddenly she was a stranger to him. The whole strange evening seemed to concern something in the distant future, nothing to do with his imminent departure to the battlefront, or their forced parting.

  When Phuong next began speaking she spoke so softly it was almost to herself. ‘Since your father’s death I’ve often wondered why I loved you so passionately. I’m a free spirit, a rebel out of step in these warring times. You’re perfectly suited to them. Despite these great differences we loved each other, regardless of everything else. You understand me, don’t you?’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said, fear in his voice. ‘We’re talking nonsense. What do you mean, you’re a rebel?’ But he knew she was right.

  Phuong continued softly, ‘Had your father been you I would have loved him even more than I love you.’

  ‘I see that now,’ she said, placing a finger on his lips to seal any response. ‘You had little in common with your father and as you grew you resembled him less and less. You didn’t love your father, nor your mother. You loved the idea of going to war; you were headstrong, you wanted to remain pure and loyal to your ideals. I don’t want to sound disdainful, but there’s nothing original in all that,’ she said.

  Kien grew uncomfortably sad. He was unable to understand everything she said, but as he listened to her, sounding like a medium telling incredible fortunes, he knew that although she sounded like someone high on magic mushrooms, he would long remember everything she had said.

  ‘Why speak of my father now?’ he asked. ‘I know you often talked to him. You must know he had such wrong-headed notions. He had no comprehension of our modern values and ideals; he clung to old-fashioned values.’

  ‘I speak now because there may be no other night like this, no time like the present. Because when you’ve gone your way, I’ll go my own way, too,’ she replied.

  In his naivety he had not quite understood her. ‘But where will you be going? You have university exams in three weeks. Then you’ll be going to university. And as for me, well, I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘You’re strange,’ she said, almost giving up on him. ‘War, peace, university, joining the army. What’s the difference? What’s good, what’s bad? To volunteer for the army at seventeen is nobler than going to university isn’t it? I won’t bother taking the entrance exams, if that’s so.’

  ‘Where would you go?’ he asked.

  ‘To the war. See what it’s like,’ she replied.

  ‘It might be horrible.’

  ‘And it might be death. A long, permanent sleep. Still, we’ve only one death, haven’t we. Just what makes you crave so much for that one death? It seems so attractive to you that I think I’ll go along too.’

  ‘What!’ He was astonished, incredulous.

  Phuong started laughing, pulling him down closer to her again, caressing his hair, pushing his face into her breasts. She said softly, ‘There’s no other night like this. You’re offering your life for a cause so I’ve decided to waste mine, too. This year we’re both seventeen. Let’s plan to meet each other again somewhere at some future point. See if we still love each other as much as we do now.’

  She gently lifted his face, softly kissing his eyelids, then his lips, then again buried his face into her breasts. ’I love you. I’ve loved you since we were children. I’ve loved your mother and your father, as I would have if I’d been your sister, or brother. From now on I’ll be your wife. I’ll go with you. I’ll see you to the gate of the battlefront, just to see what it’s like. I’ll stay until we’re forced to part. That moment will be with us very soon.

  ‘But for tonight, be with me. We’re here together, alone. It’s here your heroic journey to the front starts. Don’t be scared, of me or of anything else. From now on I’ll be a lover and a wife to you; I’ll never be angry at you and remember I’m not taking leave of my senses. Not yet.’

  Kien trembled. The fresh cool air chilled a film of sweat on his forehead and over his back. He was both frozen with fear and brimming with love for her. He took hold of her waist, but felt weak and confused.

  He couldn’t. He dared not.

  Phuong lay down before him gently, pulling him over to her. He placed his head inside her arm, as a little boy would. She sighed, not in anger, but in resignation. She comforted him with soft words about his father, about his paintings, about herself, and about them, words about anything and nothing, and he fell into a reverie, looking at the dark moon through a curtain of beauti
ful long hair which almost covered his face.

  As she talked on so softly he fell into a peaceful, warm dreamlike state, and he began unbuttoning her blouse, uncovering her beautiful pale breasts which rose between his eyes and the dark sky. He moved gently and began suckling her, softly at first, then with a strong passion, holding her breasts between both hands and tasting her, young and sweet.

  But he dared not accept her challenge to make love to her.

  The next day, they were back in class. Their last class. Then the tenth-formers, including Phuong, were allowed to go home early to prepare for their university entrance exams.

  All except Kien, who got orders to report immediately to the army recruiting office. His time had come.

  Kien remembers that distant night by the lake as though it were yesterday, despite the many intervening years. He needs only a little help from a dark moon and a balmy West Lake breeze and his imagination stirs. At the front, among the dead and surrounded by suffering, he often dreamed of and really felt her warm flesh again and tasted her virgin milk; in his dreams it was that which had given him the magical vitality to become the strongest, the luckiest, the greatest survivor of the war.

  The dreams that brought her back to him were all at night. By day, strangely, Kien actually thought little of Phuong and missed her hardly at all. Certainly not as much as he missed her in later years, after she had left him for the second time. His soldier’s self-defence mechanisms were working well for him in those days, especially when he was in the Central Highlands.

  Perhaps that’s why he developed such a fervent and disciplined attitude towards sleep. Once he was asleep, nothing could disturb him. In sleep you slept. In battle you fought. When planning you planned, thinking of what was behind as well as ahead of you, waiting at the next turn or on the other side of the pass.

  By day, for some, old memories did return and persist, but only for those who were wounded, or exhausted, or in a permanently wretched condition or starving, and it usually meant one was facing further decline. In normal situations, one could keep them at bay.

  Kien recalled just three occasions in ten years where he acutely missed Phuong during daylight hours, and he was haunted by those memories.

  The first time was when he had been struck down by malaria in a march across Laos. Fever had gripped him for weeks and he had thought of her in his feverish state, half-imagining she was there.

  The second time was when he lay wounded at Clinic 8, his regiment’s code name for a divisional hospital across the border in the safety of Cambodia. His wounds stank and he had flitted between dream and reality, awaiting death yet hanging on to his flickering life. Some features of his nurse resembled Phuong’s and every now and then when she passed he would fall to thinking of Phuong, the intensity of his emotions ebbing and flowing like a fever.

  The third time was when he was with his scout platoon on what was officially called ‘State Farm Number 3’, the regiment’s headquarters. The scout platoon was idle; they were on the perimeter of the Screaming Souls Jungle, playing cards and getting high by sipping tea made from rosa canina, when he heard news of the three jungle girls from his scouts, who had been the girls’ lovers.

  The three farm girls had disappeared on the other side of the mountain. He then dreamed of Phuong, every night, throughout this tragic episode. He had conveniently ignored the wild, romantic escapades of the three girls with their three lovers from his platoon because they reminded him of his romance with Phuong. Every night they had slipped out of their huts and into the jungle, secretly crossing streams and creeping along jungle paths to get to their girlfriends in their little house by the stream at the foot of the mountain. Kien lived their loves with them by proxy, using Phuong as his own jungle girl, conjuring up intense and passionately romantic dreams. Sadly, the dreams were often tinged with painful forebodings of disaster, as his romance with Phuong had been.

  When they had captured the three commandos who had murdered the three girls he had decided to deal with them severely, meting out terrible deaths. Just before their executions he had forced them to dig their own graves and look at the pit where their bodies would end life on this earth. But at the last moment, as he was about to press the trigger, with the gun aimed directly at them, he gave them a reprieve.

  It was not because of their pleading, nor because of prompting from his colleagues. No, it was because Phuong’s words had come to him like an inner voice: ‘So, you’ll kill lots of men? That’ll make you a hero, I suppose?’

  It was unbelievable. He had let them live. It was uncanny and uncharacteristic of him, but that’s how it had ended. Absurd.

  When he had been at Clinic 8, the second time he had thought of her, he had been seriously wounded. He had been delirious, thinking Phuong had actually come to him, not in a dream but in reality.

  It was at the start of the 1965 rainy season, after his Battalion 27 had been surrounded and almost totally wiped out by the Americans. Kien had crawled almost one day and a night, dragging himself through mud on the forest floor, his naked body badly cut up. Mates who had escaped from the massacre met up with him on the edge of the forest and carried him west, to the border. He came to at Clinic 8, safely close to the Cambodian border.

  Clinic 8 consisted of a dishevelled medical team, ragged and beaten to threads after months of treating the wounded, after incessant withdrawals by men who had been continually surrounded then bombed and shelled by artillery. Doctors, nurses and wounded soldiers, carrying one another on stretchers or on their backs, withdrew from the conflict under the protection of the bamboo canopies to the safety of their camp on the Cambodian border.

  Just exactly where Clinic 8 was and the general situation with the staff or even what they looked like, Kien never discovered. In the two months he had been there, before being transferred to Hospital 214, he had lain buried in a flat-roofed trench, from which water had gushed on both sides. He had a horrible wound between his legs and another on his shoulder. His rotting flesh stank so strongly that even the mosquitoes avoided it. He seemed permanently comatose and the few times he came to his senses only reconfirmed his certainty that he would surely die when he next lost consciousness.

  Whenever he awakened and opened his eyes he would see Phuong in the trench with him. He called her name softly, but she never did answer him. She simply smiled and bent over close to him, placing her lips on his wet forehead.

  His Phuong of the jungle hospital caressed him with her rugged, sometimes clumsy hands. Her caresses and her soft smile seemed in harmony with the rain on the trench roof and the lament of the jungle.

  Despite the stink from his rotting wounds he saw her brown eyes sparkle, even in the dark. ‘Phuong,’ he called weakly through clenched teeth.

  But the young girl just went on blithely changing his bandages, using tweezers to pull the leeches from his flesh and clean his wounds. Then she wrapped him in a torn blanket and dropped the mosquito net over him.

  He tried smiling his thanks to her but he had dropped off, back into his coma.

  In the following weeks Kien began to improve, coming to his senses for a little longer each time and losing consciousness for shorter periods. In the brighter, dry surroundings of Hospital 211, which was little more than a shed, Phuong did not visit him. When he recovered fully and had been given notice he would be transferred to a regrouping point he asked news of Phuong, from Clinic 8. But none of the soldiers who had been there knew anyone named Phuong.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said one soldier whose legs had both been amputated. ‘I was there when you were out to the wide, so I know. You kept calling her Phuong but she couldn’t correct you because she’s dumb. She can’t talk. She’s from Da Nang, struck dumb in some bad fighting there. Yes, a lovely, delicate, good-natured young brown-eyed girl. Shit, you were in terrible shape, mate! I can hardly believe you’d be able to remember anything.

  ‘But she’s probably dead. We don’t know for certain. We were transferred from there, you
and me, along with other seriously wounded, to this place. Two hours later B52s bombed the place, completely wiping them out. After the bombing the enemy raided the place, too.’

  ‘Do you know what her name was, the nurse?’ asked Kien.

  ‘Lien. Lien, or Lieu something. Never called her by name. Just “dear Sister”. What a pretty girl! Struck dumb she was. Dead now, most likely.’

  Kien, in later years, never told Phuong that story. They had avoided serious discussion of the ten war years. Yet when he looked at her without her being aware of it he would suddenly see a parade of war figures crossing his vision.

  It was that connection with the long-gone nurse and her likeness to Phuong that brought back events and images he wished to forget. Even when he knew it was Phuong, and not the nurse, just her words, her profile, were enough to trigger the same violent memories.

  Phuong had decided to break it off. She had left him, that early winter evening, brushing past him out of the door without even bothering to switch off the lights in her room next door.

  Seemingly without cause Phuong had decided to end the merriment they’d shared during the autumn. The noisy, festive atmosphere was swept aside by the early cold winds of winter.

  Her apartment, until recently a place of joy and laughter, was now silent and empty. The guests who so frequently bustled in had now stopped coming, as if by magic. Kien had guessed this was an annual occurrence with Phuong; she had indulged herself in all forms of partying and pleasures and then suddenly ceased, as though preparing to enter a convent.

  When she was in this mood Kien too became depressed. He would rather stand by night after night listening to her lovers’ noisy jokes than not have her there at all. As she wound herself down from her activities Kien noticed a decrease in the number of rather sad men knocking on her door, waiting patiently for her to unlock the door from the inside. Then they stopped coming altogether as she confined herself to her apartment.