by Yasuko Thanh
“Starved them, I guess. Over a period of weeks, maybe even months.” He wasn’t sure why she was so upset.
“How?”
“Make them angry. Then let them loose.”
“Time past, elephants always won.”
He doubted this.
“The royal family had declared them symbols of eminence.”
“Maybe they took out the tigers’ claws.”
“Elephants are beautiful. They should never lose. There’s something I never told you. What I dreamed. When I was pregnant.”
“Thing is. If you starve them. Beat them down, first—fight or be trampled, then—”
“Yes,” she said. “But there’s something I wanted to tell you. I dreamed about elephants.”
“Don’t tell me. White elephants.”
“As a matter of fact.”
Every child in Vietnam knew the story of white elephants. Sacred ones. The mother of the Buddha, when she was pregnant, dreamed of an elephant, white, giving her a lotus flower, white, which represented wisdom. To see a white elephant, it was said, brought the seer eternal luck. White elephants, it was said, cradled the souls of the dead. All a lord needed, so people said, was land, a harem, and an elephant. Preferably white.
Dong folded the paper in half. She held her breath. Then she folded the paper again with the effort of anyone doing origami. She ran her finger over the fold until her finger bled. The paper turned red. Georges-Minh took the paper away.
She reached for the baby, coddled it, spoke into his long, silky hair. “I dreamed of white elephants when I was pregnant with you. I dreamed of them not once or twice but many times. I dreamed of a white elephant the very night before your birth. And more than that, I know what this means. For us, and for this country.”
Georges-Minh’s gut knotted. She really had gone mad.
And moreover, Khieu had foreseen this sleepwalk. Sleepy elephants among an incursion of tigers. She sounded like the priests at the temple, like the Buddhist monks who recited blessings for alms, or even like the soothsayers who chanted over sick bodies to cure them. If his own wife collaborated in her weakness, how could his people rise up? They were a nation of sleepwalkers.
“My elephant baby,” she sang. “My baby elephant.” Dong continued to sing to the baby. Her song turned into a prayer. He closed his eyes and flopped onto the bed next to her. Of course, look what rebellion had got him. He’d fought back, and where was he now? He leaned onto his elbow and peered into Dong’s lap, at the boy’s face, and the boy gazed back at him. The boy. His flesh and blood. His blood and flesh. The nameless one. Like their group. He picked up the boy’s hand and the boy grasped his finger and squeezed. He burbled. Georges-Minh found himself making cooing noises at the boy.
“You know, the last Dalai Lama is said to have been born with fair skin,” Dong said. “And as an infant his head was shaped like a parasol. The last lama was born by a bitterly cold lake in southern Tibet near a tree that flowered out of season. They say he also was born with a headful of glossy black hair, just like our baby. Though my mother said that he had a single white strand, growing right out of the centre.”
“Doesn’t the Dalai Lama need to be dead before another one is born?”
She looked out the window and shrugged.
47
Earlier, from the southern tributary of the river, Thu and Mai had heard thunderous claps that shook the palm trees down the marsh edge for miles. They’d paddled on, listening to the claps until they grew in volume.
Thu shipped her oar. Cong put down the marionette he’d been playing with all morning and Mai hid it under the slats and covered it with an ox blanket next to the bag that contained, besides their supplies, a creased map with an X in the centre and the bamboo-handled knife. Thu had gotten into the habit of toying with the knife at night, fantasizing that one day she may yet plunge it into someone. After a while, when they felt safe again, Thu slipped the oar back into the water and Mai pulled the marionette back out from under the slats.
“What’s that sound?” Mai said now, hearing the thunder clap once more.
“You should keep that toy packed away. I keep telling you only city boys have puppets. We can’t travel undercover if you keep pulling that thing out.”
“Could that be guns? Or is it fireworks?”
Thu pointed at a man with a weapon on shore and held her breath. Then she saw the shack behind the man and another man with a rifle, and she fumbled with her Montagnard disguise, jerking the ragged cloak more securely around her.
Thu had decided they should wear disguises and row along the shoreline, hoping the mangroves would shadow their journey, so they could duck into the thick growth, if needed, and run for protection. From whom? To whom? Were those fireworks or fire-fight noises? The rebels were doing battle against the French—would they be caught in the crossfire? The intermittent smoke and blasts from shore disoriented them; in the smoke and fog everything was ablaze with confusion and the women hadn’t slept well in days. They had wanted to believe it was fireworks; the task of believing chased sleep away.
“Keep Cong quiet, and don’t say a word.”
Yet a hand grabbed their tow rope and they found themselves being pulled landward, toward a path Thu hadn’t seen until now. Her fear diminished when she saw it was only a little girl with her ragged father, as dishevelled as she was dirty.
“I have meat for sale,” the girl said, dragging Thu by the hand. “Buy some, support the cause.”
Both women were tired, too tired to argue, though Thu had the presence of mind to reach for the bamboo-handled knife.
“She’s poor, I guess,” Thu said.
“You’d better go,” Mai said. “She looks desperate. Maybe you could ask if they’ve seen anyone from Saigon in these parts.”
Thu looked up the river and scanned the southern tributary beyond the veil of heat and steam and dust and fixed her eye on the sheets of grey metal and knew it was a French gunboat making those noises, firing at the shore, and she guided the sampan to a makeshift dock where the girl was now leading her.
By then they were not alone. The girl and her father were joined by a man and then another flanked by two teenage boys, and they were moving toward a shack. The girl held tight to her hand and pulled her up the slope. Her hand was like hot gunmetal.
“We have thighs and legs, breast meat, too. Pay only for the cut you want. Follow me.”
And if I don’t want a cut, thought Thu, but she didn’t say these words.
By the time they had clambered up the path and reached the door, a few others had joined them, a handful of ragged others minding the outer flanks of the resistance with their tarnished rifles. More men in hats, maybe Cambodians. Thu was sure something about the situation felt wrong.
A man with a packsack entered the shack first, followed by the little girl. Thu went in next. All the other men joined after.
The little girl looked at Thu and giggled, holding her hand over her lips. A prisoner gibbeted like a marionette from the rafters, hanging by his wrists. Faraway rifle fire rolled through the door, and the sounds of a distant gunboat come to quell the uprising. The hanging man—could he be called a man with his toes missing, his ears, his nose, one eye gone, the muscles of one thigh carved away to the bone?—swung from the rope. His feet hung lazily in mid-air, drifting through the brown dirt-smoke, pointing east toward the open door, west toward the wall, then east again. His chin rested on his bloodied chest. She startled when she heard a whistling sound coming from the hole where his nose had been. One of the soldiers levelled his gun at her. Thu glanced at the door. She could never make it back to the sampan, much less row away to safety.
The girl giggled nervously again. “We have breast meat or you can have a leg or a thigh. What do you want?”
The soldier across the room thrust a butcher knife toward Thu.
“You get to choose,” the girl said. “Pick your cut.”
She understood at once that the prisoner
had collaborated with the French, and if she and Mai wanted to get out of Central Highland territory, continue down the Srepok River, she’d have to prove her loyalty to the nationalists, cut a piece of meat off the man, who was not really a man, she could see now, but a boy, a child of no more than sixteen or seventeen, hanging from the ceiling.
“We kill traitors,” the girl said. “Are you a traitor?”
“Of course not,” Thu answered. “I have my own knife.”
Thu’s head spun. Was she a traitor? Of course not. She loved Birago. She could do anything. She could be anyone. On a day like today she could start screaming and never stop. She was sure of it. Knew this nightmare would follow her long into her years. For this boy’s sake she must be willing to become someone else. A monster.
She approached him. Poked him with the point of her knife. The boy opened his eye.
“Do you want me to help you?”
“I want to go home,” he said.
He didn’t look away. He pierced her gaze with the same intensity the bird in the market had right before feral cats tore it apart. Neither one broke the stare until his head flopped forward.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“No talking,” a soldier warned.
“The heart,” she said, “is my favourite piece of meat.”
“Cut, cut,” the girl said.
Thu held up the knife. Ran it across his chest, the knife she and Mai had been given in the dusty room with paintings of the royal family on the wall. Velvet ones, weren’t they? Lavish, she remembered, because they didn’t match the poverty of the shack, the gaps in the wooden floorboards through which she could see half-eaten mangoes gnawed by rats. Dust everywhere. She plunged the knife in where she hoped his heart might be. He gasped once, then exhaled. His nose stopped whistling.
She leaned into him. He was kicking and she wished he would stop.
They could hear the fighting approach.
“Quickly, we have to go,” the little girl said.
A white-faced dog with its bowels spilling out shivered into the thatch-roofed shack and snapped at her before dying in the corner.
When they stepped outside the laughter had turned to screaming and she heard a man shout they’re shooting while he ran, another stumbled, men on the ground with their guns disassembled trying to fit loaded cylinders where they belonged. She ran back to the sampan and saw the oxen loose on the hill. They trampled down the fallen and she saw children shot and silenced mid-cry. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were red through the hoods of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly into the jungles of Dak Lak.
48
Khieu cooked, half-crouched. Waited out the daylight hours, reciting poetry. Smoked, in a pipe carved by a Cham craftsman, the marijuana given to him by elders who had wrinkled their brow over his departure. With the villagers as the only link he’d had to the outside world, the real world, he’d set up camp in a cave in a patch of woods that was so dense he doubted even the locals knew about it; even if they knew about it, they would probably lose themselves in it. Just until the Chams have had their battle. Then I’ll go back.
Khieu enlarged the cave, essentially just a mouth in a mountain about five kilometres from the Cham village, digging it deeper, ten feet underground, with a bone shovel of his own making. He wanted a hiding place unknown to everyone. He wanted to go farther away.
He dug it narrow as a coffin. He had to wiggle backward on his stomach over the bleak ground to reach the back. In the very rear, he’d hollowed out a space wide enough to huddle. And this is where he lived.
The mouth of the cave was barely visible above ground. The surrounding bamboo created an optical illusion, making the cave opening seem solid, even from a few feet away: trees, shadows, darkness, light.
A bitter wind blew from the back of the cave to the front, encircled him, took him in hand like a ghost’s arms.
He surfaced for provisions only when necessary. He always waited for the sun to set in case spies watched his location. The tunnel drew air from outside like a pipe and blew it back out, whistling. The fresh breeze lobbed about, and the movement was like a phantom, making him think about death. If he died in here, no one would find his bones. Or maybe he’d sink into the earth: that would be more appropriate, he thought, given his current situation. Feet then hands, head, until he was swallowed up, run over by bugs, millipedes and beetles, thrush and babblers laughing about his demise.
“Did you hear what happened to Tran Khieu? Let me tell you about this crazy son of a bitch from Saigon. Built himself a coffin of earth and died in it. Let the ground swallow him up, kee-kee-kee.”
For some reason no boars or bulls or wild cats had visited, but from one end of Vietnam to the other the babblers and thrush would talk. No animals of any kind, no tracks by the cave mouth, which he’d hidden with brush, not even to sniff around, no droppings, nothing, which was unusual. Maybe it had formerly been the home of a forest monster, a nguoi rung, and its scent had scared off every other kind of animal.
At first, afraid boars would attack him while he slept, he’d kept a fire going. Then, worried about soldiers, he’d put it out. Now, he wondered if the constant howling, eerie as a banshee, scared the predators for the same reason it scared him. He slept in a tomb, already a dead man. Maybe the wind wasn’t the wind but a spectre just like he’d thought in the first place. Maybe the place was haunted.
Hunted. He feared thinking about what decision had prompted him to seek shelter in the forest in the first place. Hadn’t he been better off with the Chams? Even if it meant going to war? What had all that talk been in Saigon if not about standing up for one’s beliefs? Rebellion? Revolution? What had any of it meant? He was too much the Maybe Man. The Why-Me Man. Maybe-Better-to-Stand-with-the-Montagnards-and-Fight Man. And why was he in this cave? He couldn’t remember. Was it his wife? His children? Some strange Stomach Ache and Feeling he had to Preserve Himself instead of Getting Shot for Some Ideal? Well, then, why hadn’t he stayed with her and been the husband he was supposed to be in the first place?
Sleeping was the hardest. Curled in a ball, no room to stretch his cramped legs. The earth writhed beneath his feet. Millipedes, beetles, ants, viewing him now as a rock and inanimate for his lack of movement, scurried over his bare toes. His shoes, shredded after all this time in the woods, the leather rotten from the damp of the highlands, offered no protection.
And not only that, he reeked. A yeasty combination of deteriorating clothes, falling-apart shoes, and unwashed hair. He flicked one foot and then the other, trying to get the bugs off. Half clung on tenaciously. The ants began to sting. The constant damp in the highlands had made his clothes cling to his body, and this accounted for the stench. Everything this high in the hills was always wet, slippery, coated with moss or a kind of algae. He ached with the fear that his oxygen would run out. What scared Khieu the most, worse yet, was that a French soldier would discover his hiding spot and trap him by pushing a boulder over the mouth of the cave. If there was any way he was most afraid to die it was that a French soldier would bury him alive and the last sound he’d hear was laughter.
He crouched behind a thicket of bamboo, knees shaking. The cave mouth breathed and yawned and sighed cool air. Khieu, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, dared not move. Nothing but drafts emerged from the cave. Still, he waited, biding his time. Motionless. Minutes passed. He crouched, still watching. The sun moved in the sky. Laughing thrush and babblers sang kee-kee-kee.
Between the insects, the stench, and the fear combusting, Khieu could idle in this purgatory no longer. Raising his fists like a boxer in front of his face, he rushed the cave entrance.
But sometimes, upon his return after a night of gathering food, the sun would roll back layers of fog in the sky the way his mother would roll back his blankets as a boy when waking him for school, and the cave did not seem dank. His feet hurt, and he was tired, and he looked forward to its soothing da
rkness, to the coolness and the whistle.
He welcomed rest, craved sleep. He should have feared the pull of the earth. Did it mean part of him was readying for death?
He wiggled into his tunnel, pushed himself against the soft earth on the palms of his hands. The whistle surrounded him. A high-pitched sound, similar to a baby crying alone in a room. The voice drifted down to him, as down a long hallway, saying leave, a final warning, as if foretelling danger, but in his bones he felt no fear. Something had shifted, and though he couldn’t see, there was a clarity, finally, in his mind’s eye. Yes. He wasn’t going blind, he could see. He would make new tools, and dig an even deeper section. Eventually, he would never have to leave.
From a distance he heard his mother’s voice: “Get up.”
“No,” he responded. “Leave me alone.”
Another voice chimed in, maybe Georges-Minh’s, telling him things he’d heard in French school, that it was better to live on his feet than die on his knees, and he tried to ignore it. He looked around. No trace of animals, just ancient bones. He swung a femur across his knee. Began thumping a tribal rhythm into his palm. He needed a plan.
At the back of the tunnel-like cave he began to dig. At first with the leg-bone shovel to test the earth. Then with his hands, when he saw how giving the earth had become. Digging was no problem now. In no time at all, he’d hollowed out a body shape. Then two. Then three. He lay down in the hole and dozed.
49
Flies settled in the empty bowl of turtle soup on the bureau in the hotel room on Le Loi Street. Dong, burning up with fever, refused to get out of bed, refused to let Georges-Minh out of her sight, or to take any of the medicine Chang brought back for her. Day turned to night and back to day again. They’d been in the hotel thirty-six hours now. Georges-Minh stroked her hair and considered what to do next. He told her stories by Victor Hugo, making up the parts he couldn’t remember. Chang said they should keep moving, try to cross the border into Laos. As she dozed, Georges-Minh looked out the window at families strolling, holding hands.