A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (49 page)

I look again at the face of this woman. The body of her husband was never found. I left him in the clearing and he was far from his comrades and he was far from my thoughts, even after I put his cigarettes in a place to keep them safe. Perhaps she has his name written on a shrine in her home and she lights incense to him and she prays for his spirit. She is the wife of a farmer. Perhaps there is some belief she has that is like the belief of my own wife. But she does not know if her husband is dead or he is not dead. It is difficult to pray in such a circumstance.

And am I myself sentimental now, like the American soldier? I am not. I have earned the right to these thoughts. For instance, there is already something I know of that is inside the cigarette pack. I understood it in a certain way even by the stream. I think on it now and I understand even more. When I shook the cigarette into my hand from the pack, the first one out was small, half-smoked, ragged at the end where he had brushed the burnt ash away to save the half cigarette, and I sensed then and I realize clearly now that this man was a poor man, like me. He could not finish his cigarette, but he did not throw it away. He saved it. There were many half-smoked cigarettes scattered in the jungles of Vietnam by Americans—it was one of the signs of them. American soldiers always had as many cigarettes as they wanted. But this man had the habit of wasting nothing. And I can understand this about him and I can sit and think on it and I can hesitate to give these signs of him away to my government without thinking myself sentimental. After all, this was a man I killed. No thought I have about him, no attachment, however odd, is sentimental if I have killed him. It is earned.

Objects can be very important. We have our flag, red for the revolution, a yellow star for the wholeness of our nation. We have the face of the father of our country, H
Chí Minh, his kindly beard, his steady eyes. And he himself smoked these cigarettes. I turn the pack of Salem over and there is something to understand here. The two bands of color, top and bottom, are color like I sometimes have seen on the South China Sea when the air is still and the water is calm. And the sea is parted here and held within is a band of pure white and this word
Salem,
and now at last I can see clearly—how thin the line is between ignorance and wisdom—I understand all at once that there is a secret space in the word, not Salem but
sa
and
lem
, Vietnamese words, the one meaning to fall and the other to blur, and this is the moment that comes to all of us and this is the moment that I brought to the man who that very morning looked into the face of his wife and smoked and then had to move on and he carefully brushed the burning ash away to save half his cigarette because this farm of his was not a rich farm, he was a poor man who loved his wife and was sent far away by his government, and I was sent by my own government to sit in a tree and watch him move beneath me, frightened, and I brought him to that moment of falling and blurring.

And I turn the pack of cigarettes over again and I take it into my hand and I gently pull open the cellophane and draw the picture out and she smiles at me now, waiting for some word. I turn the photo over and the back is blank. There is no name here, no words at all. I have nothing but a pack of cigarettes and this nameless face, and I think that they will be of no use anyway, I think that I am a fool of a very mysterious sort either way—to consider saving these things or to consider giving them up—and then I stop thinking altogether and I let my hands move on their own, even as they did on that morning in the clearing, and I shake out the half cigarette into my hand and I put it to my lips and I strike a match and I lift it to the end that he has prepared and I light the cigarette and I draw the smoke inside me. It chills me. I do not believe in ghosts. But I know at once that his wife will go to a place and she will look through many pictures and she will at last see her own face and then she will know what she must know. But I will keep the cigarettes. I will smoke another someday, when I know it is time.

MISSING

It was me you saw in that photo across a sugarcane field. I was smoking by the edge of the jungle and some French journalist, I think it was, took that photo with a long lens, and you couldn’t even see the cigarette in my hand but you could see my blond hair, even blonder now than when I leaned my rifle against a star apple tree with my unit on up the road in a terrible fight and I put my pack and steel pot beside it and I walked into the trees. My hair got blonder from the sun that even up here in the high-lands crouches on us like a mama-san with her feet flat and going nowhere. Though my hair should’ve gone black, by rights. It should have gone as black as the hair of my wife.

Somebody from the village went into Ðà Lat and came back with an American newspaper that found its way there from Saigon, probably, brought by some Aussie businessman or maybe even an American GI come back to figure out what it was he left over here in Vietnam. There are lots of them come these days, I’m told, the GIs, and it makes things hard for me, worrying about keeping out of their sight. I’ve got nothing to do with them, and that’s why the photo pissed me off. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was me. I knew the field. I knew my own head of hair. And because you can’t see the cigarette, my hand coming down from my face looks like some puny little wave, like I’m saying come help me. And that’s the last goddam thing I want.

I grew the tobacco myself. That’s what we do in my village. And up here we grow coffee, too. The first time I saw the girl who would be my wife she was by the side of a road spreading the coffee beans out to dry. Spreading them with her bare feet. And when her family finally let me marry her and we lay down at last in our little house—with wood walls and a wood ceiling in this place in Vietnam where there are hardwood trees and cool nights—she rubbed her hands through my hair, calling it sunlight, and I held her feet in my hands and kissed them and they tasted of coffee.

I’m not missing. I’m here. I know the smell of the wood fires and the incense my wife bums for the dead father and mother who gave her to me and the smell of my daughter’s hair washed from the big pot in our backyard to catch the rainwater, and instead, the “USA Today” has got me on the run, waving pitifully across a field at a photographer to put the word out to the world, but they don’t wonder why I’m apparently not smart enough to walk on across that field and say, Take me back to my mama and my papa and my brothers and my sisters who are living ruined lives in America because I’m missing in action. I don’t even have the sense to get close enough to the road so I can be identified, so I’m the lost child of every family in the country with someone whose body was never found.

But I walked away. I just walked away. And there were a thousand of them like me. Two thousand. More, I heard, a lot more. In the back alleys of Saigon, in the little villages in the highlands and along the sea, trying to keep out of the way of the killing just like these people who took us in and didn’t ask any questions.

Though I could see the questions all come back in the faces of my people when the newspaper showed up. We all went out to see it. It’s the way here. The village is small and our elder is Binh and he knew me from the first, he was the first man I saw when I walked in here in 1970 unarmed and bareheaded and I said in the little bit of Vietnamese I had that I was a friend, I wanted to lie down and sleep. He knew what I was doing.

It was yesterday that we sat on mats in front of Tiên’s house and she brought us tea and we looked at the paper.

“It’s you, I think,” Binh said, and he curved his lower lip upward, lifting the little wisp of a H
Chí Minh beard, a beard that he wore not from approval of the man but with a kind of irony.

Tri, who had brought the paper, put it before me again now, and the dozen faces around watched me for the final word. I nodded. Th
o, my wife, touched my shoulder. She could see it, too. “Yes,” I said.

“What does it say about you?” Binh asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “They don’t know who I am.”

Binh nodded and he did it slow enough that I knew he wanted me to say more. I waited, though, looking away beyond the circle, across the dirt street to the tobacco-drying racks, and some kids were there, two of Tiên’s boys squatting and looking back at me and Tri’s little girl, who stood staring at a dragon head set on a table in the sun. Tiên had been working on the head, repainting the green and red ridges in its face, getting it ready for T
t, the new year. When I looked away from Binh, I thought my daughter, Hoa, might be there, but she wasn’t. And I didn’t want to cast my gaze farther with Binh waiting for me to say more.

But I’d waited a little too long already. Binh asked, “Does it speak of some other man?”

“Not one particular man. No. It says some people in America have seen the photo and think it’s proof that Americans are still alive over here, men being held by the communists.”

“MIA,” Binh said, pronouncing each letter with a flat American inflection that he’d picked up from me long ago.

“Yes,” I said.

At this, Binh turned his face, in respect, away from Quang who sat next to him. Quang was almost as old as Binh, clean-shaven, with skin the color of this dirt street moments after a rain. But I glanced at him briefly, and there were others from our little circle who did, too. He was holding the newspaper spread tight in his two hands as if trying to stretch any wrinkles out of it. He was looking at my image there, and I think his mind now was on his own lost son. Most of the people of a certain age in my village have dead children from the war. But Quang’s boy is missing, still, after more than twenty years, and he worries about where the body might be, the spirit lost and hovering around it waiting for rites that would never come.

My village believes in spirits. Last night we all burned incense in our kitchens for the god of the hearth. Such a god lives in each of our houses, and seven days before T
t he goes up to heaven to report on the family. A family is very important in Vietnam. We work and we care for each other and we live under one roof and there is no ending for such a thing. My wife’s mother and father slept on straw mats in our house until the day that each of them died. I will sleep on a straw mat in the house of my daughter until I die. That is my wish.