Czytaj książkę: «The Lotus Eaters»

ONE The Fall

April 28, 1975

The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber’s razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade’s metal grabbing the sun. Unable to resist, she leaned down to pick it up, afraid someone would split his foot open running across it. A crashing noise down the street distracted her—dogs overturning garbage cans—and she snatched blindly at the razor. Drawing her hand back, she saw a bright pinprick of blood swelling on her finger. She cursed at her stupidity and kicked the razor, strop and all, to the side of the road and hurried on.

The unnatural silence allowed Helen to hear the wailing of the girl. The child’s howl was high and breathless, defiant, rising, alone and forlorn against the buildings, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading its complaint. Helen crossed the alley and went around a corner to see a small child of three or four, hard to tell with the unrelenting malnourishment, standing against the padlocked doorway of a bar. Her face and hair were drenched with the effort of her crying. She wore a dirty yellow cotton shirt sizes too large, bottom bare, no shoes. Dirt circled between her toes.

The pitiful scene begged a photo. Helen hesitated, hoping an adult would come out of a doorway to rescue the child. She had only days or hours left in-country. Breathless, the girl staggered a few steps forward to the curb, eyes flooded in tears, when a man on a bicycle flew around the corner, pedaling at a furious speed, clipping the curb and almost running her down. Helen lurched forward without thinking, grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her back, speaking quickly in fluent Vietnamese: “Little girl, where is Mama?”

The child hardly looked at her, the small body wracked with sobs. Helen’s throat constricted. A mistake, stopping. A pact made to herself that at this late date she wouldn’t get involved. The street rolled away in each direction, empty. No woman approached them.

Tired, Helen knelt down so she was at eye level to the child. In a headlong lunge, the girl wrapped both arms around Helen’s neck. Her cries quieted to soft cooing.

“What’s your name, honey?”

No answer.

“Should I take you home? Home? To Mama? Where do you live?”

Rested, the girl began to sob again with more energy, fresh tears.

No good deed goes unpunished. The camera bag pulled, heavy and bulky. As she held the girl, walking up and down the street to flag attention, it knocked against her hip. She slipped the shoulder strap off and set it down on the ground, all the while talking under her breath to herself: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” The child was surprisingly heavy, although Helen could feel ribs and the sharp, pinionlike bones of shoulder blades. The legs that wrapped viselike around Helen’s waist were sticky, a strong scent of urine filling her nostrils.

A stab of impatience. “I’ve got to go, sweetie. Where is Mama?”

She bounced the girl to quiet her and paced back and forth. Her mind wasn’t clear; why was she losing her precious hours, involving herself now, when she had passed hundreds of desperate children before? But she had heard this one’s cries so clearly. A sign? A sign she was losing it was more like it, Linh would say.

A young woman hurried across the intersection, glanced at Helen and the child, then looked away.

The orphanage was overflowing. Should she take the girl home with her? Once they abandoned this corner, she would be Helen’s responsibility. Could she take her out of the country with Linh? What had she been thinking to stop? Was it a trap? By whom? Was it a test? By what?

Helen stroked the girl’s hair, irritated. She had a heart-shaped face, ears like perfect small shells. A bath and a nice dress would make her quite lovely.

Ten, fifteen minutes passed. The idea of this being a sign seemed more stupid by the minute. Not a soul came, nothing except the tinny, popping sound of guns far away. Helen toyed with the idea of putting the girl back down. Surely the family was close by, was searching for her. No harm done in keeping the girl company for a few minutes. Not her responsibility, after all. When she began to kneel to deposit her back on the ground, the girl’s arms tightened to a choke hold around her neck, and Helen, resigned, strained back up. All wrong; a terrible mistake. A proof that she was failing. Linh would be worrying by now, might even try to go out to find her.

Helen bent and fished for the strap of her camera bag, putting it on the other shoulder to balance the weight. Maybe it was a sign. Insane, but what else could she do but take the child with her?

Halfway down the street, a woman’s voice yelled from behind them. Helen turned to see a plain, moonfaced woman with thin, cracked lips stride toward them.

“Are you her mother?” Helen asked, guilt welling up. “I wasn’t trying to take her—”

The woman yanked the girl out of Helen’s arms, eyes pinched hard. The girl whimpered as the mother swatted her on the leg and scolded her.

“She couldn’t tell me where she lived,” Helen said.

But the mother had already turned without another glance and stalked away. The girl looked over the mother’s shoulder, dark eyes expressionless. In a few more steps, they disappeared around the corner.

For the briefest moment Helen felt wronged, missed the weight on her hip and the sticky legs, but then the feeling was gone. How had the mother been so neglectful anyway? It rankled that she had not been thanked or even acknowledged for her effort. But with the shedding of that temporary burden, the old excitement buoyed up in her again. The possibility of the girl disappeared into the past. She’d better pull herself together. She picked up her bag, checked her watch, and ran.

On a normal day the activity in the streets so filled her eye that she hardly knew where to turn, torn whether to focus her camera on the intricate tableaus of open-air barbers on the sidewalk cutting their customers’ hair, or tea vendors sweating over their fires and flame-blackened pots, or ink-haired boys selling everything from noodles to live chickens to cigarettes, or old men with whisk beards as peaceful as Buddhas playing their endless games of co tuong. And, too, there was the endless flotsam and jetsam of the war: beggars and amputees thronging everyplace where foreigners were likely to drop money.

But today streets were vacant, the broken windows and smashed doors like gouged-out features of a face once familiar. The people gone, or rather hidden, the streets deformed by their absence.

Helen’s Saigon had always been about selling—chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn’t matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn’t bear that soon she would have to leave.

Closer to the center of town, there was activity. Gangs of looters ranged through the city like gusts of wind, citizens and defeated soldiers who now in their despair became outlaws, breaking into stores they had walked past every day for years, stores whose goods they coveted.

Helen hurried, sucking on the drop of blood at her fingertip, but couldn’t help her excitement, stopping to look, framing the composition in her mind’s eye: teenage boys, some in jeans, some in rags, breaking a plate-glass window; a crowd inside a ransacked grocery, gorging themselves on crates of guava and jackfruit; a young girl with pink juice running down her face and onto her white blouse. It had always fascinated her—what happens when things break down, what are the basic units of life?

Hours late. Helen walked faster, touching the letters in the top of her bag, letters that she had wasted the whole morning begging for, that undid the last bit of her foolishness, her wanting to stay for the handover. She hoped that Linh would have taken his antibiotic and morphine in her absence but guessed he had not. His little rebellion against her. He had forgiven her and forgiven her again, but now he was drawing a line.

At the central market, unable to stop herself, she held up the camera to her eye, shooting off a quick series—a group of men arguing, then carrying away sacks of polished rice, bolts of cloth, electric fans, transistor radios, televisions, tape players, wristwatches, and carton after carton of French cognac and American cigarettes. She was so broke she could have used a few of the watches herself to resell stateside.

Wind blew from the east, a tired, rancid breath carrying across the city the smells of rotting garbage and unburied corpses. The rumbling to the north might have been the prelude to a rainstorm, but the Saigonese knew it was the thunder of artillery, rockets, and mortar rounds from the approaching Communist armies. Her brain hot and buzzing, all she could think was, What will happen next?

The looters, figuring they would probably be dead within hours, were careless. They fought over goods in the stores, then minutes later dropped them in the street outside as they decided to go elsewhere for better stuff. Even the want-stricken poor seemed to realize: What good is a gold watch on a corpse?

Helen walked through the torn streets unharmed as if she weren’t a foreigner, a woman; instead she moved through the city with the confidence of one who belonged. Ten years before, she had been dubbed Helen of Saigon by the men journalists. She had laughed, the only woman from home the men had seen in too long. But now she did belong to the ravaged city—her frame grown gaunt, her shoulders hunched from tiredness, the bone-sharp jawline that had lost the padded baby fat of pretty, her blue gaze dark and inward.

Ten years ago it had seemed the war would never end, and now all she could think was, More time, give us more time. She would continue till the end although she had lost faith in the power of pictures, because the work had become an end in itself, untethered to results or outcomes.

She stopped on Tu Do, the old Rue Catinat, shaken at the gaping hole of the French milliner’s store. The one place that had always seemed impregnable, a fortress against the disasters that regularly fell upon the city, Annick guarding the doorway with her flyswatter in hand. But the doorway was deserted, the plate-glass window shattered. Inside, crushed boxes, flung drawers, but not until she turned and saw the two rush-bottomed chairs, empty and overturned, did she believe the ruin in front of her.

When life in Saigon grew particularly hard, Helen would go to the store, enjoying the company of Annick, the Parisian owner, her perfectly coifed dark blond hair, her penciled eyebrows and powdered cheeks, the seams of the silk stockings she insisted on wearing despite the heat. She had been the only female friend Helen had all these years.

At first Helen had not understood the Frenchwoman’s talents, did not understand that the experiénce coloniale made her a breed apart. Annick was an old hand at Indochina, having thrived in Saigon for two decades, coming as a young bride. When her husband died she had confounded her family in France by staying on alone.

The two women would retire to the corner café and drink espressos. Helen sat and endured Annick’s scolding about neglecting her hair and skin when only hours before she had been out in the field, working under fire. Helen smiled as the Frenchwoman pressed on her jars of scented lotions, remedies so small and innocuous that they made Helen love her more. Had Annick finally gotten scared enough to leave everything behind and evacuate?

In the smashed display window, the red silk embroidered kimono Helen had been bargaining for was untouched, although the cheaper French handbags and shoes had been stolen. The Vietnamese always valued foreign goods over Asian ones. Helen hadn’t worked a paying project in a while; her bank account was empty. Her last batch of freelance pictures had been returned a month ago with an apology: Sad story, but same old story. But that would be changing soon. The silk slid heavy and smooth between her fingers.

She had worn down Annick on the price, but the kimono was still extravagant. This was the game they played—haggling over the price of a piece of clothing for months until finally Helen gave in and bought it. Annick refusing to sell the piece to anyone else. Feeling like a thief, Helen undraped it from the mannequin, making a mental note of the last price in piastres that they had negotiated; she would pay her when she saw her again. In Paris? New York? She couldn’t imagine because Annick did not belong in any other place but Saigon.

The whole city was on guard. Even the children who usually clamored for treats were quiet and stood with their backs against the walls of buildings. Even they seemed to understand the Americans had lost in the worst possible way. The smallest ones sucked their fingers while their eyes followed Helen down the street. When her back was to them, she heard the soft clatter of pebbles thrown after her, falling short.

Helen picked her way back home using the less traveled streets and alleys, avoiding the larger thoroughfares such as Nguyen Hue, where trouble was likely. When she first came to Saigon, full of the country’s history from books, it had struck her how little any of the Americans knew or cared about the country, how they traveled the same streets day after day—Nguyen Hue, Hai Ba Trung, Le Loi—with no idea that these were the names of Vietnamese war heroes who rose up against foreign invaders. That was the experience of Vietnam: things in plain view, their meaning visible only to the initiated.

The city had ballooned in size, overwhelmed by refugee slums, the small historical district with the charming colonial facades hiding miles and miles of tin sheds and cardboard shacks, threats of cholera and plague so frequent hotels swabbed the sidewalks in front with ammonia or burned incense, both remedies equally ineffectual. Garbage collection, always sporadic, had been done away with entirely the last few weeks. In some alleys Helen had to wade ankle-deep through a soupy refuse, banging a stick in front of her to scare away rats.

A dark scarf covered her hair so she would attract less attention, but now she also wore a black cotton smock over her T-shirt to hide her camera. Soldiers had beaten up a few reporters already. Paranoia running wild. A camera a magnet for anger. The South Vietnamese soldiers, especially, were bitter against the press, blaming the constant articles on corruption for stopping their gravy train of American money. Not an exhibitionist people, they didn’t want evidence of their looting, their faces splashed across world papers, ruining chances of promotion at home or immigration abroad. Helen pitied them as much as she feared them. They were mostly poor men who had been betrayed along with everyone else abandoned in Saigon. If one was rich or powerful, one was already gone. Only the losers of history remained.

At the alley that led to her building, Helen folded the kimono into her lap and bent down into the stall as she did most days. She lifted a camera and took a quick shot, already thinking in terms of mementos. “Chao ba. Ba manh khoe khong?” Hello, Grandmother Suong, how are you?

The old woman stirred her pot, barely looking up, poured a small cup of tea, and handed it to Helen. She felt deceived, tricked into loving this Westerner, this crazy one. People gossiped that she was a ma, a ghost, that that was why she was unable to go home. “Why waste film on such an ugly old woman?”

“Oh, I only take pictures of movie stars.” Grandmother smiled, and Helen sipped her tea. “Read the leaves for me.”

Grandmother studied the cup, shook her head, and threw the contents out. “Doesn’t matter. You don’t believe. These are old Vietnam beliefs.”

“But if I did, what does it say?”

Grandmother studied her, wondering if the truth would turn her heart. “It’s all blackness. No more luck.”

Helen nodded. “It’s good I don’t believe, then, huh?”

The old woman shook her head, her face grim. Gossips said they saw the Westerner walking through the streets alone, hair blowing in the wind, eyes blind, talking to herself. Heard of her taking the pipe.

“What’s wrong, Grandmother?” They had been friends since the time Helen was sick and too weak to come down for food. People walked over from other neighborhoods just to sit at these four low stools and eat pho, because Grandmother Suong’s had the reputation as the best in Cholon. During Helen’s illness, the old woman had closed her stall and climbed the long flight of stairs to bring her hot bowls of soup.

“The street says the soldiers will be here tomorrow. Whoever doesn’t hang a Communist or a Buddhist flag, the people in that house will be killed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard those rumors—”

Grandmother gave her a hard look. “I don’t have a flag.”

Helen sipped tea in silence, watching the leaves floating through the liquid, imagined them settling into her doomed pattern again and again against the curved bottom of the cup. The future made her weary.

“The way it works, from what I know of what happened in Hue and Nha Trang, is that the women scouts come in before the soldiers. They go through the streets and hand out the flags. Then you hang them. Welcome the victors and sell them soup.”

The old woman nodded, the furrows in her face relaxing as if an iron had passed over a piece of wrinkled cloth. “They season very differently in Hanoi than we do.” She rapped her knuckles lightly on the back of Helen’s hand. “Listen to my words. They are killing the Americans, even the ones without guns and uniforms. Their soldiers and our own. All the Americans leave, but you stay.”

Helen shook her head as if she could dislodge an annoying thought. “Linh is hungry.”

“I took him soup hours ago. You are too late. War is men’s disease.”

Helen finished her tea and set the cup on the crate that served as table. The old woman filled a large bowl with soup and handed it to her as she stood up. “You eat to stay strong.”

“Did you read for Linh?”

The old woman’s face spread into a smile. “Of course. He pretends he doesn’t believe. That he is too Western for such notions. For him there is only light and long life. Fate doesn’t care if he believes or not.”

Helen dropped lime and chilies in her soup.

“Da, cam on ba. Thank you. I’ll bring the bowl back in the morning.”

“Smash it. I won’t be open again after today.”

“Why, Mother?”

“Chao chi. Toi di. I’m going to the other side of town so maybe they forget who I am. Not only Americans but ones who worked for Americans are in danger. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup.”

Helen stood in the stairwell, a cold, tight weight in her chest making it hard to breathe. She was afraid. Not so afraid of death—that fear had been taken from her years ago—but of leaving, having failed. Time to go home, and the thing that had eluded her escaped. Always it had felt just around the corner, always tomorrow, but now there would be no more tomorrows. Grandmother’s words of doom had spooked her. More time, give us more time.

Her reputation had waxed and waned with the course of the war. Never a household name synonymous with Vietnam the way Bourke-White and Higgins were in their wars. Or the way Darrow had been. At thirty-two already middle-aged in a young man’s profession, but there was nothing else she was prepared for but war. Her ambition in the larger world had faded until there was only her and the camera and the war. She knew this war better than anyone—had been one of the few to live in-country continuously, out in the field, taking every risk. She wanted to stay for the end, cover the biggest story of her career, especially now since the news services and the embassy were insisting that all Americans leave. The holy grail, an exclusive that would fill both her depleted reputation and her bank account. But what if the promised bloodbath did happen? There was Linh. She would not endanger him.

Chuong, the boy who lived under the stairs, was again nowhere in sight. Helen paid him daily in food and piastres to guard the apartment and do errands. Mostly she paid him so the landlord would allow the boy to sleep in the stairwell, so Helen could be sure he ate. The small networks of connection falling apart. His absence was unusual, and Helen climbed the stairs, trying to ignore her sense of dread. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup. The old woman was usually accurate about the manic mood swings of the city. What if the city itself turned against her? Rumor swirled through the streets like burning ash, igniting whatever it settled on. She could still feel the bony rap of Grandmother’s knuckles on her skin.

Inside her apartment, Helen put the bowl on the floor, slipped out of her shoes at the door, and set them next to Linh’s. She threw off the smock, pulled the neckband of her camera over her head, and laid the equipment on a chair. The camera was caked in dust. She would have to spend most of the evening cleaning the lenses and the viewfinder. The shutter was capping exposures, so she’d have to take it apart. A long, tedious evening when already she was dead tired.

She pulled off her T-shirt and pants, the clothing stiff with sweat and dirt. The laundry woman had stopped coming a week ago, so she would have to use a precious bottle of Woolite from the PX and wash her undergarments herself in the small basin in her bathroom. She tugged off the black scarf and shook out her hair, standing naked in the dim room for a moment, enjoying the feeling of coolness, the air touching her skin. Outside, she had to protect herself, had to become invisible. No hair, bared throat, absolutely no hint of cleavage or breasts, no hips or buttocks or bared calves were permissible. When she had first gone into the field, a veteran female reporter, happy to be on her way out, advised her to use an elastic bandage wrapped over her bra to flatten the outline of her breasts. Even in the cities it was advisable to wear pants with a sturdy belt, the woman said, because it was harder to rape a woman in pants.

It had all come down to this. Losing the war and going home. Her heart beat hard and fast, a rounding thump of protest. Would she go home, missing what she had come for?

Helen picked up the kimono and quickly slipped it on. In the darkened mirror, she tried to see the effect of the robe without looking herself in the face. The war had made her old and ugly, much too late for any of Annick’s lotions to make a difference. She pulled a comb through her hair and started to take out the hoop earrings in her ears but decided against it.

“Is that you?” Linh called.

She heard both the petulance in his voice and his effort to conceal it. “I’m coming.” Tying the sash of her kimono, she went to a cabinet for a spoon and picked up the bowl of soup.

In the bedroom doorway, she stood with a grinning smile that felt false. Lying in bed, staring out the window, he did not turn his head. The soft purple dusk blurred the outline of the flamboyant tree that had just come into bloom. Impossible to capture on film the moment of dusk, the effect of shadow on shadow, the small moment before pure darkness came.

“I brought soup, but Grandmother said she already fed you.”

“I worried.”

She could tell despite his hidden face that his words were true, but what she didn’t know was that since he had become housebound, he spent the hours while she was away imagining her whereabouts, visualizing dire scenarios. Each time he heard her walk through the door, he said a quick prayer of gratitude, as if torturing himself in this way saved her. Too close to the end to take such risks, and yet he was helpless to stop her.

“I was trying to get home, but things kept catching my attention.”

She came forward in the dim room and sat on the edge of the bed to eat. She bent over him and kissed him gently on the lips. No matter that they had been together years, always a feeling of formality when they first saw each other again, even if the separation had been only hours. It had something to do with the attention Linh paid to her, the fact that he never took anyone’s return for granted. The feeling disappeared with his quick smile, the way he always reached out a hand to establish touch. He wore old pajama bottoms, stomach and chest swaddled in gauze that had a dull glow in the room.

He was unhappy, and she was the cause of his unhappiness, and yet she was perfectly willing to bull herself through the conversation as if the feelings underneath their words didn’t exist. Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

“I had many things to do today, my love.”

“The old crone read my fortune. Always the same—plenty of luck and a big family.” The remark made to sting.

When Linh turned to look at her, she noticed how sharp his cheekbones were, how his eyes were unfocused by pain. She caressed the half-moon scar on his cheek with her fingers. Whenever she asked how he got it, he changed the subject.

“You didn’t take your shots?” she said.

“Forgot.”

With his infection, unsafe even to be still in the country. When Linh reached out his hand, she saw a belt twisted around his wrist. “What happened?” She held his hand and unwound it, feeling the cold heaviness of the flesh underneath, the welts left behind. She rubbed briskly, willing the disappointment from her face.

“I was just bored, fooling around. Eat your soup.”

She looked at him. But this wasn’t the time to confront. Just shrug it off, move on. “I’ll change the dressings and give you a shot. Then I’ll front you a game of Oklahoma gin.” Linh was tall, slender, with the finely etched features of the warrior princes of Vietnamese legend, perfect until one’s eyes traveled to the scar that formed a half moon on his cheek and the ribboned skin on the wrist that he couldn’t leave alone, an ache. Both of them full of scars.

“Sit with me a minute. Tempting me with cards?” He fingered the sleeve of the kimono. “You couldn’t resist?” Equally appalled and in love with the fact that she could think of a kimono while their world was about to be lost.

She buried her face in his neck for a moment. Her only rest anymore when her eyes were closed, the images stopped. His skin felt hot and damp against her cheek. Fever. “Annick is gone.” They were both still for a moment. “A day, two at the most. Then I’ll achieve my goal—‘Last American Woman Reporter in Vietnam.’”

“We should leave now. While there is time.”

“Martin is still promising the city will never go,” she said. “There might be more time.” The American ambassador had lost a son in the war, and the end would force him, too, to face things he didn’t want to face. Better anything than that. “You distracted me,” Helen said, jumping up and going through the room to her film bag. She fumbled inside it and held up a thick envelope. “Guess what this is?”

“Then we’re ready. Let’s go now.”

Linh swung his legs to the floor and sat doubled over, hands gripping the bed frame.

“Yes. Your ‘Get Out of Vietnam Free’ card. Now you have two letters, Gary’s and the embassy’s. Insurance. But I had to sit through a two-hour lunch listening to how the press are tools of Hanoi. No wonder we lost.” She stood at the side of the bed, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, shaking her arms, trying to release tension.

“And what did you reply?”

“That photographs can’t lie. I said, ‘Make sure Nguyen Pran Linh gets to America, and as a bonus, I’ll leave.’ The country is going to disappear, be hidden behind a wall, and then the real stuff will start. All they want to talk about is identity cards, jumbled paperwork. How they have five different names on file for you.”