A Southern Girl (61 page)

“To understand what happened here,” he says over the hum of the engine, “you must see the tunnels.”

My arm is resting out the window and the wind is flapping my short sleeve and though it is not yet ten in the morning the air rushing by is hot and clammy, a devil’s breath which, when augmented with the unobstructed sun, foretells a day of vengeful heat. Nascent beads of sweat form at my hairline and on my chest, trickling downward in erratic tendrils. Mr. Quan does not appear to feel the heat.

He glances at me. “Do you have fear of tight places?”

“Claustrophobia?”

“The fear of being confined?”

“Yes. No, I have none.”

“Good,” he says with satisfaction. “These tunnels are veddy narrow.”

An hour out of Saigon we enter Cu Chi. The main road is paved and along it are parked trucks laden with produce and livestock, all pointed in the direction from which we have come. Mr. Quan is scanning the signs, he says for directions.

“I have not been in the tunnels since I was a young man, just after the French left.”

We turn left onto a dirt road and proceed for about a mile. He slows, then stops, pulling a few feet off the road in an area worn to bare ground.

“I see nothing,” I say as I climb from the car.

“Ah,” he says. “By seeing nothing, you see everything.”

He leads us toward a wooded enclave some hundred yards from where he has parked. A small sign peaks from the shade of mangroves. As we approach, from the deep shadow of the grove appears a man, a peasant. He and Mr. Quan exchange rapid conversation, then money. The peasant turns toward the deeper shadows within and we fall in, trailing. Fifteen or twenty yards from where we have met he stops, reaches down, grabs an iron ring and pulls upward, thereby raising a wooden door approximately two feet square. At the apex of the door’s arc on its hinges he lets it go, and before the door strikes the ground, jettisoning dust from beneath, he has entered the hole revealed. He disappears momentarily, resurfaces with a lantern, and motions us into the earth.

A crude ladder descends. The peasant waits for us at the bottom, a dirt cell approximately eight by eight and too shallow to permit me to stand erect, although both shorter men do so with inches to spare. Three burrows branch off of this conjunction, so that I am immediately put in mind of the stark lobby at the orphanage with its three converging halls. This dirt lobby is ornate by comparison.

A phrase of Vietnamese. “We are to wait,” says Mr. Quan as our guide disappears into the blackened yawn of one tunnel. Moments later, light flickers, illuminating the tunnel walls in a ghastly mustard yellow. I drop to my hands and knees behind Mr. Quan, who enters the orifice in the same duck wattle employed by the guide. He rapidly extends his lead, so that he has rounded a bend by the time I reach the light source, a candle mounted in a sconce that appears to be little more than a jagged metal shard thrust into the dirt wall. Light lures ahead, and my sense of urgency propels me faster. Having claimed to be immune from claustrophobia, I am beginning to wonder.

I reach a second candle, then a third. Ahead, I hear voices and redouble my crawl. Although the air is very cool here, I am sweating from the exertion of quick movement in a confined place. One salient reality of the tunnels has been driven home: the two Vietnamese are built for this clandestine movement and I am not. I see two pairs of legs ahead and when I emerge, panting, it is into a large room where both men are talking leisurely. Between them is a table, on which rests two candles and a large map.

“This is a command center,” explains Mr. Quan as I straighten almost upright before encountering the ceiling. “The tunnels were built by the Viet Minh to defeat the French. Then, of course, they were employed against you … us.”

I hover over the map, clearly the scheme of the labyrinth overlaid on a contour plat of the surrounding area. The network is quite extensive.

“Two hundred miles underground,” says Mr. Quan, and although he must fully realize the role this complex played in the ultimate demise of his chosen government, he cannot suppress a certain pride in what we see here. “Only a direct hit by the most powerful bombs would destroy a section. They would rebuild it within hours.” He leans over the map and traces a sector with his finger. “Notice how three tunnels lead to this spot. This provides alternate routes in case of destruction. The Ho Chi Minh trail worked on the same principle, which your generals never fully appreciated.”

I survey the room. There is not much to see but much to marvel at, not the least of which is that this network would require me to spend months or years on my hands and knees to fully explore. Mr. Quan consults the guide, then explains air vents, ambush points, communications, logistics, and sleeping quarters. The guide injects something.

“He says he himself lived here for over two months without once coming above ground.” I nod but make no reply.

Mr. Quan leads our exit, the guide trailing to extinguish candles as we retrace our steps. Patches of sky above the trapdoor are blue and beautiful, and I find myself climbing the ladder with alacrity. Mr. Quan and the guide exchange words as the door is closed. We are returning to the car when I stop and look back. We are ten yards from the entrance and I cannot see any trace of the hole from which I just emerged. The iron ring has been covered with leaves and the guide has vanished without a sound into the shadows of the mangroves.

“I thought you should see that,” he says as we approach the car, baking in waves of corrugated heat rising from the roof and hood.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m glad we came.”

The road to Duc Lap stretches southwest towards the Parrot’s Beak of Cambodia, less than twenty miles away. We travel a mere five minutes when Mr. Quan steers onto the shoulder, stops and shuts off the engine.

“This area was once a great producer of rubber,” he says. “Few of the old plantations remain. For a time it was what the Americans called a free-bombing zone. No command approval was required to shell and strafe.” He turns his head from the windshield to me. “This is about half way,” he says gravely. “You have precise information?”

“No. Only that it occurred half way between Cu Chi and Duc Lap.”

“Then perhaps this will do.”

I nod and gaze around. Blue sky domes over us. Emphatically benign fields extend from irrigation ditches running parallel to the road’s edge on either side. In the distance, a phlegmatic ox labors. Tethered to an antique plow held by a cone-hatted farmer, it surges forward a few yards before lumbering to a crawl. Each step taken by the massive beast appears to signal collapse. The farmer manifests no impatience. On the shoulder of the road ahead, two young boys are walking toward us escorting a cow. The smaller boy brandishes a willowy branch, occasionally touching the animal’s flanks. There is much evidence of life here, and none of death, but then what did I expect?

Stepping from the car, I wipe my neck and face with a bandana and stretch down into the back seat floorboard for the Corona bottle propped upright in my satchel. A single rose purchased at the hotel this morning wades in two inches of water, its bud opening cautiously and attar drifting upward in defiance of the oppressive gravity of heat. I put on my hat, a white, narrow-brimmed affair I wear on the boat.

“I will remain here,” Mr. Quan says.

“Come with me. This won’t take long.”

“It is a private matter,” he insists. An awkward pause, while he trusts his hands in his pockets, avoiding me by looking purposefully around, as though waiting for a bus.

“Please,” I say. “It’ll only take a minute.”

He utters a barely discernible sigh of resignation. “Perhaps I can show us to shade,” he says, leading along a ditch in the direction of Duc Lap. We pass the boys and the cow without speaking. Some fifty yards from the car the bank drops more precipitously into the ditch and from the side some green ferns grow, shading a dark loam beneath.

Together, we sit down. I splay my legs on the sloping embankment and begin to dig listlessly between them, my hands acting as scoops and the dirt cool between my fingers.

“Careful,” says Mr. Quan. “Not all the mines have been found.” I cut my eyes at him to confirm he is joking. He is not.

Inside, I am also digging, not to create a hole but to fill one. On the plane coming over I picked up the airline’s in-flight magazine with its eclectic assortment of features designed to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of travelers, from one-armed horticulturists to dictators flying into exile. An article on solid waste disposal established a thousand years as the durability of a glass bottle in a landfill. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but it occurs to me here that the Corona bottle will “outlive” Philip by an astounding factor. This might not shock obstetricians or undertakers or others on speaking terms with the evanescence of organic things like people, but it gives me something to ponder. It reminds me that Philip will live on this earth only as a fragment of memory in those who knew him. In this landfill we call earth, over the span we call time, that amounts to little more than a vaporization.

Yet, in the years since his death, images of his face, his mannerisms, his slang, and a dozen other elements of his uniqueness have stayed with me, like light from a persistent star. Other memories, once equally valued, have long since begun their eclipse in that amorphous galaxy we call the past, each glittering event or relationship in its time a supernova but now, increasingly, a dead rock, a dulled, eroded particle on the verge of oblivion in the cold cosmos of longevity. Why is Philip’s star rising in the east as these others diminish?

Because, I half-mutter when the hole is deep enough to deposit the bottle, Philip’s memory echoes not the past but the present. Held at some precise angle or in a conspicuously revealing light, the neural lines and intersections of our time together comprise a map of sorts, a liminal path across a modern mine field. All I have to do is read it. I backfill around the bottle. The rose projects starkly from the earth.

“Doesn’t look like a likely place to die,” I say, glancing up to the fields before us. The ox has reached the end of its furrow and is turning our way.

“The South China Sea is also veddy peaceful … at times,” he says.

“Yes,” I agree. “After your account on the airplane, I’m reluctant to make too much of my loss.”

“Not at all. You came to honor a friend. All life is precious.”

I turn to his profile. “I’ll bet that farmer out there plowed that same ground before the war—”

“And his father while the French—”

“So what’s changed by Philip’s death? Answer me that. We—you and me and our side—lost the war, you lost your family, I lost my friend, and this poor soul plows like always.”

“My suggestion,” he says. “Perhaps you ask the wrong question. Buddha does not instruct us to find meaning in death but in life. Death is veddy random, as you and I know from our personal experience. But life is not so random. Some communists will die in their beds of old age but it will not atone for their crimes. Your friend led a good life?”

I drop my head to stare at the budding rose. “Yes, he did. He was a great guy, a great friend. He was a better man than I am.”

“That is a harsh judgment on yourself.”

“It’s true. The war came, he went where he was told. Did his job.”

“And you?”

“Me? I dodged. Very legally, quite acceptably, but a dodge just the same.” Odd, I think. I have never spoken these words to myself, let alone another.

“And now you feel guilt.”

“I think it’s been eating at me.”

Mr. Quan leans back upon his elbows, his face partly hidden by the brim of his hat and his shirt dappled by elongated blades of sunlight slicing through the ferns. Very slowly he says, “Suppose … you had made the arrangements for your family … you had assumed responsibility for their passage … and you had been wrong. Do you have trouble imagining the guilt?”

“No,” I say, almost whisper.

“Many times I have questioned my survival. I can find only one answer, and it is not perfect. It took courage for my wife and children to leave our home and climb aboard that boat. It took courage for your friend Philip to come here, to this place. But courage is also required of the one left behind, to face what they are now free of. If we face it well, we honor them in a way mourning and guilt cannot. I decided many years ago that too much grieving was a retreat into their deaths. What was demanded was courage in tribute to their lives. I have tried to live that way.”

The delicate outer petals of the rose, tissue thin, bend away from the ripening center, peeling gently to expose the penultimate layer of anxious petals. Among the hard smells of tilled, manured earth wafts its perfume.
My eyes rivet on the bud, my mind conscious of Mr. Quan gathering himself to rise. He claps his hand on my shoulder, a jarring, comradely thump.

“My suggestion,” he says. “Bury your friend. I will wait at the car.” He leaves me alone under the ferns.

A formal benediction over my makeshift monument seems melodramatic and unnecessary. Philip seems as far removed from this place as I am. Nothing in the landscape, the fields, the air, the heat, the laboring ox, the indolent cow, the scrabbling peasants suggests or evokes him. Perhaps that is the tragedy of it. He died between two hamlets with foreign names in a country void of anything remotely connected to him save some global political strategy rooted in implacable opposition to a monolithic communism.

Yet here we are. Perhaps we are no part of this strange land but it is undeniably part of us and we can no more distance ourselves from it than we can our eye color. It is as real as any coordinate on the map of our personal journeys, Philip’s ended, and mine? An area of the world that took Philip gave me Allie and, I think as I prepare to stand, possibly some insight as well.

I breathe deeply once more of the rose, then tamp the ground around the bottle. “Goodbye, old buddy,” I say, then rise and brush off the seat of my pants before returning to the car, against which Mr. Quan is leaning, gazing at the plodding ox in the distance.