Highways to a War (51 page)

Then I asked him if he ever prayed. I’d never asked such a thing before, but it seemed natural just then, and not embarrassing.

Now and then, he said. When I’m tired. I’m not quite sure who I’m praying to. But whoever it is, I imagine they’re marching with us. It helps.

Then I asked him did he ever think about home.

Sometimes. Mainly I think about the coolness, he said, and I saw a small longing come into his face. Just for a while I’d like to be back in our valley, he said. In the hop fields. It was always cool there.

I find I’m also thinking a lot about my childhood these last few days, I said. I think about our family home in Peking.

And I talked of the things I missed about our lost home, which I hadn’t thought of for years. I spoke these things aloud because it gave me a sort of peace. The past is a story, and we cannot get back into it, so our yearning for it is sweet and not too sharp. I wouldn’t let myself think about Lu Ying now, because she belonged to the present, and I found this too painful: I might be years in some camp, and I didn’t know whether she’d wait for me. Now I know she would have.

I told Mike about our family house, with its high walls and red lacquer gates and its many apartments that accommodated our large family. I told how my brothers and sisters and I would play among the stone lions in the courtyard, under a big magnolia tree. And I recalled especially the moon gate, which always looked to me then like the entrance to some magic country: a country in a story. It always seemed to be summer in this memory, when Peking was hot and dusty, and everything smelled dry like pepper. But the locust and plane trees in the streets would be in leaf: a light, tingling green. I recalled the dim, airy rooms in the old house, with the many ancient things passed down through the family, most of which were left behind when we fled: the painted scrolls and vases; the lacquer beds; the pearl blinds. Old China. And I talked of my mother, who died soon after we came to Hong Kong, who was small and neat and always indulgent of us children, and who would let us come into the big kitchen where she supervised everything. The kitchen was full of the smells of preserves and spices, and I recalled the rows of brown ceramic storage jars: for some reason those jars were good to think of, just now.

Mike was a good listener. He seemed truly interested, and I began to talk about my father, whom I’d told him of before. I’m glad he read us those old poets, I said. Tu Fu. Po Chü-I. Some of it still stays in my head, even though I was never a scholar.

That must be good to remember, Mike said. His voice sounded sad, I thought, and it was very low; we were both near sleep.

There seemed often to be barbarians in those poems, I told him, waiting beyond the Great Wall. This was during the War, and I imagined the barbarians to be like the arrogant Japanese officers we passed on the streets of Peking. I still half remember a poem about the Tartars, and the sound of their horns on the north wind, and moonlight on the Wall. And one about the Herd-boy star.

I looked across at Mike. He had gone to sleep.

 

 

The next two days were the worst of our march. They would pass in a blur of silver, because of the rain. The rain set in early, just as Doc had feared.

We were wakened in our hammocks in the morning by thunder and a cloudburst. It was brief, but we were immediately wet through. We struggled about in waving, solid sheets of water: ponchos over our heads, thin cotton uniforms plastered to us. The once-dry earth became a red quagmire; gleaming leaves and branches streamed; little waterfalls ran everywhere.

There was no breakfast; Captain Danh ordered us to take cold balls of cooked rice in our hands, and eat them as we walked. Our line began its march. For me, from the first hour, it was a march of pain.

The rain came back again in the afternoon, and this time it didn’t stop. Usually the monsoon downpours in Cambodia come only in the afternoon; but sometimes it will rain for two or three days without a break. This turned out to be one of those times.

The sore on the sole of my right foot was now an ulcer. Another ulcer had begun above the ankle, and the skin on both feet was beginning to flake off. Every time I put my foot down, pain shot through me. Doc did his best, applying more ointment and bandages; but as I marched through the mud the bandage would come off, and every step meant a knife-thrust of pain. After an hour of marching I felt I could not keep on: I could scarcely put my foot down. I stopped, and Dmitri came up beside me, panting. His bout of malaria had lifted a little this morning, but he was still deathly pale.

You are a goddamn cripple, he said. Put a hand on my shoulder.

No, I said, you’re too weak, Count.

We had to shout, the downpour was so loud. The Count looked at me fiercely, water dripping from the brim of his cotton bush hat. I’m better now, he shouted. Do what I goddamn tell you, Jim, or you will get left behind.

So I put my right hand on his shoulder as I went along, and took some of the weight off the foot. It was a big relief. Dmitri had always been a difficult man, but I had a great fondness for him, and knew now that this feeling would never be broken. As we stumbled forward, I heard him singing to himself: panting and singing at the same time. It was the Elvis Presley song he’d been so fond of years ago, when we were young in Saigon:

After a time, I saw that he was shivering again; he had stopped singing, and was very short of breath. I persuaded him to let me walk alone: I found a strong stick beside the track, and went on with that. He and I were last in the line except for Lenin, who came along at the rear of us: our guard. We walked slower and slower, through a landscape like a blurred painting, and Lenin began to shout at us to go faster, his voice becoming threatening.

How weary I grew of that phrase. I had never liked Lenin, and now I began to hate him. Up ahead, Mike had stopped and turned to see what we were doing; he waited for us to come up to him.

You blokes don’t look too bright, he said. Let me take some of the weight.

And while Lenin watched with a sort of sneer, he took my pack as well as Dmitri‘s, distributing most of their contents into his own. We protested, but he wouldn’t listen; he even took our tubes of rice. None of these things was very heavy in itself, but together they were, and when you have the pain and debility that Dmitri and I did, to be rid of any weight makes a great difference. Then, finding that Dmitri’s malaria was coming on again, Mike made the Count walk close behind him, holding on to his shirt. He was virtually dragging Dmitri along; and he would do this now hour after hour.

We slept that night in the huts of a way station, and at least were dry, and ate well: the soldiers there gave us fresh supplies. But the next day the rain went on, and seemed even heavier. I found that the skin on my feet was turning black and mushy, and coming away in lumps; and Mike and Dmitri also found their feet in this condition. There were more ulcers on my legs: one near the groin.

We stumbled on, chewing our cold rice, and there seemed to be a sort of urgency in the march now; we were being made to move faster, and going longer and longer periods without rest. Captain Danh told us that they’d learned on the field radio that B-52s were expected soon to concentrate on this region, and he wanted to get quickly to the border.

I was still using my stick; and Mike still carried the contents of my pack and Dmitri’s. Turning to look at Dmitri, who once again held on to Mike’s shirt, I experienced a shock. His malaria was worse: he staggered and wove, his eyes blind, his face a corpse’s. But soon I was beyond worrying about Dmitri. Griping pains went through my guts, and a wave of nausea came over me. I knew immediately why this was: I was getting dysentery.

I was soon struck with diarrhea, and had to crouch by the Trail over and over again, voiding myself until there was nothing left. The spasms in my guts becoming agonizing. But far worse was the nausea, which robbed me of my courage, and turned the world into a place from which I longed to escape. I wanted only to sink into the warm red mud and stay there.

The mud was now ankle-deep. Our trousers were rolled up to the knees, and every so often we had to stop and burn leeches off with our Zippos—which were hard to light. The red glue sucked at our sandals, making it impossible to keep them on; Mike and I carried ours in our hands, but Dmitri had lost his. I doubt that he was even aware of it. Each step in this red glue was a struggle; each was taking the last of my strength. We fought through rain so solid that we seemed to be walking under water, blinking it from our eyes, letting it run into our dry mouths. Sometimes I forgot I was Jim Feng, and became an animal, conscious only of pain in my foot and in my guts. I had no thoughts, but I kept myself going by reciting again and again some lines that came back to me from the poem about the Herd-boy star. It was my great comfort; I heard my father’s voice reciting it too.

That evening the rain stopped, and we camped in the open again.

I could eat nothing, and continued to be ill. I drifted into a sort of delirium, in my hammock, and floated in and out of bad dreams. I seemed to be begging for something from people with masks on their faces. Then I felt Mike gently shaking my foot, and found it was early dawn.

He always did this: he was always the first up, and I would open my eyes and find him smiling at me. I saw that we were camped in a clearing: a rather gloomy place. There was white mist on the ground, and a red dirt track ran off into a belt of trees: areca palms and some big tamarinds. Red streaks were in the sky above these trees, and the noise of the birds and monkeys had begun. It seemed very loud to me.

Wakey, wakey, Mike said. Rise and shine, Jim.

He always said this; but he didn’t do it in a jarring, stupid way. His voice was a half whisper, and it somehow soothed you. So did his jokes. They were silly jokes; I’ve forgotten most of them. Sometimes he just recalled crazy things he and Dmitri and I had done years ago, in Saigon or Singapore, and he would make a comedy out of these incidents. But it cheered us up, and we knew why he was doing it. It gave us hope: it made us believe for a moment that we would get out of this, and be who we were again, and not prisoners. Because most of the time we did not believe this would happen. We liked Captain Danh, but we knew that eventually he would deliver us to people very different from himself: people like the man who had first interrogated us. We could not really see a way out. We might never be our old selves again.

Trying to sit up, I could hear the nearby voices of the soldiers getting their gear together; and I heard it with dread. I could not march again, I thought. Every part of me ached, and I was too weak and nauseous to move. I just wanted to drift away. This sounds shameful, I know, but if you have had that kind of illness, you will perhaps know what I mean. Dysentery drains you of your will, your pride, in a way that other illnesses or hurts don’t. You want only to crawl away and die. And of course, in the situation we were in, you sometimes do die.

I told Mike I couldn’t go on; that they would have to leave me. But he just smiled.

Bullshit, mate, he said. I’ve seen you with shrapnel in you, and you went right on filming. So what’s a bit of gutache? Hit the deck or I’ll boot you out.

And he began to talk me into going on as though it was a game, his voice still a whisper. I have forgotten what he said, but I still see him there in the gray green light and the mist, in his shrunken-looking NVA uniform, like a pale-faced giant smiling down at me. And it seemed to me then (perhaps because I was light-headed) that there was something supernatural about him. Nothing seemed to break him or change him; but it was not just this. He was pretending to talk harshly to get me on my feet; yet his voice was like a gentle woman’s. And just then it seemed to me that his face was like a gentle woman’s too, looking down at me. This of course was a trick of the light, and of my illness; Mike doesn’t look like a woman. But—how can I put it?—his expression was tender, looking down. He was tender with me, and it somehow healed me, and brought back my courage. That is the truth. It made me struggle out of that hammock, and face going on.

I don’t know how I marched that morning, but I did. And after taking some of Doc’s tablets, and having my foot dressed, I felt a little better. But Dmitri’s malaria was still with him; he was shaking, weaker than I was, and barely able to keep up.

We trudged for five hours without a break, eating on the march, and in the afternoon the rain began again. Many of the soldiers were not much better now than Dmitri and I; they were staggering and faltering too, weak from lack of proper food. They were not supermen, any more than we were. Weary was almost unconscious again, and held on to Doc’s shirt as Dmitri hung on to Mike’s. I watched Captain Danh’s bobbing sun helmet at the head of the line, and I began to hate him for what he was doing to us. But of course, he was doing nothing but his duty.

Finally I stopped, my head swimming, feeling my legs buckle. The pain in my foot drummed also in my brain. We were skirting an empty paddy field that shone silver with water. Ahead, on the southeastern side, more forest began, ghostly in the rain.

And then, far off, I heard the bombs again:
whump-whump-whump.

I felt distant vibrations in the earth, and looked up into the white, raining sky—but nothing was visible. The soldiers had begun to shout, and Captain Danh waved us forward, shouting something I couldn’t hear above the rain. The line waded forward towards the forest, struggling to hurry. Soon Captain Danh and those in front were well ahead of us.