The House on Dream Street (17 page)

As the morning passed the rhythm of the walk began to lull me.
A Di Đà Phật!
Step. Step. Round a corner. Up a rock.
A Di Đà Phật!
Stop for breath. Step. Step.
A Di Đà Phật!

Going up the path in front of us was a one-legged man hiking with the aid of a pair of crutches. Middle-aged and dressed in formal military attire, he was moving steadily, only stopping occasionally to hand out alms to the beggars who appeared regularly
at the side of the path. Although the trail was steep and treacherous, he didn’t even look winded by the exertion it required. Asking Son to come with me, I hurried forward to catch up to him.

“
A Di Đà Phật!
” I said.

The veteran looked up and blinked at the sight of a foreigner pronouncing the Buddhist greeting. Up close, I now saw the strain the hike was taking on him. Sweat was beading the lines of his face.

“
A Di Đà Phật!
” he responded after a moment. Then he turned and continued walking.

We joined him. At first, he and Son discussed the weather, the crowds of pilgrims, the distances we’d all traveled to get here. Like us, he’d arrived this morning from Hanoi. His wife and daughters, he explained, were resting back at a refreshment stall, drinking tea.

Because I felt shy with my Vietnamese, I asked Son to translate my question. “Uncle,” Son asked, “where were you injured?”

The veteran didn’t pause in his walking, and his answer was casual, as if we’d just asked him his profession, or where he was born. “I was fighting during the American War,” he said. “Down in the Central Highlands. I had my leg shot off near Pleiku.”

After walking for a while in silence, the old man glanced over his shoulder toward me.

“Where do you come from, miss?” he asked.

“San Francisco,” I said.

The old man looked at Son. “Where’s that?”

“
Mỹ,
” Son said, giving the Vietnamese word for America. The old man stopped in his tracks, looked at me, and smiled broadly. “How interesting,” he exclaimed. “I want to go there.”

“Why?” I asked.

The vet chuckled. “For business,” he explained. “Everyone’s rich and business is good there. Do you think it would be difficult for me to go?”

I didn’t know what to say. It was as if I’d braced myself to watch a movie in which the hero dies of cancer and found myself at a comedy instead. “Well,” I finally answered, “the airplane ticket would be quite expensive.”

Everyone within earshot became involved in the discussion that followed, voicing strong opinions about the current state of the U.S. economy and whether or not it was worth the effort to travel there. By the time we reached a fork in the path, I was starting to think that you can’t make up with someone who doesn’t believe he’s still at war with you.

The old man was taking the path that led straight ahead to the top of the mountain. We were making a detour to a small shrine that sat on the hillside about halfway up. Everyone stopped and faced one another. The veteran smiled, revealing two large gold-capped teeth at the edges of his mouth. My mind went blank, unable to focus on anything except that I was standing before a Vietnamese man who had been permanently disfigured because of the war my country fought there. Suddenly I had to say it. Even if he didn’t want to hear it, I had to apologize. Slowly, I raised my hands in the gesture of supplication I’d seen Vietnamese make before altars to the Buddha. “
Xin lỗi, bác,
” I said. Uncle, I’m sorry.

The smile disappeared from the old man’s face and he looked away, scanning the line of trees that marched like soldiers down the mountain. “
Không sao,
” he shrugged. “
Không sao.
” It doesn’t matter, he said, and he waved his hand as though we were talking about a mistake I’d made years ago that he’d long since forgotten. Then, without looking at me again, he turned and continued up the trail.

I watched the veteran until he disappeared.

By the middle of the afternoon, we’d arrived at the top of the mountain. One hundred twenty stone steps led down into the great cavern of
chùa trong,
the Inner Pagoda. The cave was thick with people, their bright clothes against the gray stone of the cave like color footage superimposed on a backdrop of black and white. Scores of tea tables and ornament booths spread out in rows across the hard stone floors. Crowds of people swarmed the booths, while in corners and on empty tables, on the sides of the stairways and on the bare surfaces of rocks, the pilgrims prepared their offering platters as if each orange, each apple, and each red plastic pendant was soon to be touched by the Buddha himself.

Near the bottom of the stairs, the one-legged man stood waving at us.

I’d told Carolyn my story. Now she grabbed Son’s arm. “I need you to translate something for me, too,” she said.

Carolyn walked over to the old man and said, “
A Di Đà Phật!
” The old man grinned. Then Carolyn turned to Son and said, “Tell him not all Americans supported what our government did in Vietnam.”

The veteran lost his smile as Son translated Carolyn’s comments. He looked her in the eye and said, “I’m a poor man. I have five children to feed. That’s why I came here today. I’m praying for good fortune.” Then he said something else, mumbling it so quietly that I missed it.

“What did he say?” I asked Son.

Son looked at me. “He said, ‘Give me fifty thousand dong.’”

Now we were all embarrassed.

The veteran laughed, as if to break the tension, but it sounded too hearty, unreal. “Just joking!” he said. “That was just a joke.” We all laughed politely, but the embarrassment grew
worse. He bowed to us and turned away. Within a few seconds, he had disappeared into the crowd.

The unease he left behind him lingered. “Was he joking, really?” I had to know.

Son considered the question for a moment, shifting from an interpreter of language into an interpreter of meaning. “I suppose he was half joking, half serious. If you’d offered him the money, he would have taken it.”

Carolyn looked devastated. “Should we have given him the money?” she asked me. “It was only five dollars.”

“Maybe,” I said. I had no idea.

“But I can’t give money to everyone in Vietnam,” said Carolyn. “And that guy had gold caps on his teeth.”

“But what about his leg?” I asked. The two of us stood there debating every word and innuendo, trying to mine the motivations of the one-legged veteran. Crowds of pilgrims filed past, stopping, even, to stare at us. We ignored them. Beside us, Linh and Giang stood waiting quietly, but Son soon lost patience with the Americans’ angst. He had a schedule to follow. Finally, he interrupted us. “Don’t feel too bad about that man,” he said. “I’m sure he killed some American soldiers, too.”

In the pagoda, the air was thick with the smoke of incense, and I wiggled away from all of them, disappearing into the foggy darkness, into the maze of alcoves and crannies and altars filled with Buddhas. In front of every altar, people stood in prayer, their hands raised, their eyes closed, their faces tense with concentration. Exhausted, I sat down on the edge of a raised brick platform where several old women were squatting, carefully arranging their offering trays. They made me forget everything, except that I wanted to believe with a faith like they had. Here I was, a Jew, standing before a pagan altar. For the first time in my life, though, I felt that here in this dark and smoky cave, I might
actually make some meaningful contact with God. I looked around at the carefully constructed pyramids of fruit, at the urns full of burning incense, at the big, fat, dreamy-eyed Buddhas. And in that moment, it all became holy to me. It wasn’t a holiness that sprang directly from God, but one that emanated toward God, moving outward from the intense devotion of all these people praying. Maybe, I thought, God
is
love, or, more specifically, within each individual.

I sat there for a long time, letting the sensations of the past few hours wash over me—the liquid gray sunrise, the smoke of incense, gooey mud, the glint of gold-capped teeth. I put my hands over my face and rubbed my eyes, then I stood up, walked over to an altar, pulled some sticks of incense out of my backpack, lit them, and raised my hands in the gesture of prayer. “
A Di Đà Phật!
” I said softly.

I hadn’t moved when I felt a hand take mine. I looked up at Linh and she smiled at me. “I’m a Jesus Christ person, not a Buddha person,” she said, “but I like it here.” We stood there for a long time, watching the smoke of all the incense float like a great cloud of prayer out of the mouth of the cave and up toward the sky.

It was Son’s voice that finally pulled us back. “Dana, I need to discuss something with you,” he said. Beside me, Linh rubbed her eyes, as if she had just woken from a nap. “I can see that you and Carolyn display a keen historical interest in matters of the war. Am I correct?”

I nodded.

He looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to continue or not. Finally, he said, “Does the name John McCain sound familiar?”

“Of course,” I said. We all knew how Senator John McCain had been shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and had spent years as a POW at the famous “Hanoi Hilton.”

“You may not know that when John McCain’s plane was shot down, he parachuted into the Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi. He almost drowned.” Son looked at me severely, as if Americans would never have heard this side of the story.

I waited for him to continue.

“A Hanoi man rushed to the side of the lake and pulled him out. That man saved his life. Did you know about that?”

I shook my head.

“That man is an old man now,” Son said. “He’ll probably die soon. It’s important that America knows his side of the story. Would you like to meet him?”

“Of course,” I said.

6. War Stories

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP ON THE MORNING
of our appointment with the man who’d pulled John McCain out of Truc Bach Lake, I felt as though I’d gotten one of those lotus-seed candies stuck in the bottom of my throat. Three days earlier, we’d driven back from the Perfume Pagoda in the pouring rain. The weather hadn’t let up since, and I’d been out every day in it, slogging through the mud. The whole city was waterlogged and gloomy. Now I felt the same way. Carolyn had developed a head cold that had somehow migrated down to the muscles of her neck. She’d become so stiff that she couldn’t turn her head independently from the rest of her body.

But neither one of us wanted to miss this meeting. We managed to make it to Linh and Son’s house just a few minutes past our scheduled appointment time, at eight. Linh greeted us at the door with her baby in her arms. Giang sat on the floor watching a Chinese martial arts serial on television. All I could see was the back of his head, silhouetted by the light from the TV screen.

Linh and Son’s house was, in actual fact, a single room with
a concrete floor. It was less than half the size of my room over on Dream Street. The kitchen was in a shed in a weedy garden out back. Water came from a cold-water faucet in another shed by the front gate. The family urinated into the drain beneath this water spigot. Whenever they had to do anything more than pee, they squatted over a metal bucket, the contents of which they later dumped when the night-soil collector passed on the road. The only sign of wealth was the small Sony television. The only sign of decoration, aside from a few knickknacks and pieces of pottery, were several amateurish oil paintings. One was a nearly pornographic portrait of a buxom, Aryan Virgin Mary with a lecherous-faced baby Jesus suckling her breast. In a second, another well-endowed and scantily clad maiden lay in a green meadow with a wine cask at her side and deer and tiny chipmunks dancing around her. The artistic style was reminiscent of paint-by-number, but the subject matter must have relied, at least in part, on the artist’s imagination.

Linh had a sour look on her face that I suspected had something to do with Son. The day before, she and the baby and Carolyn had spent the morning in my room. Squatting over my electric cooker making rice porridge for the baby, she’d made up a song to describe her feelings. “I hate my husband, I hate my husband, I hate my husband,” she sang gently, as if these were the lyrics to a lullaby. According to Linh, Son was selfish and she couldn’t stand it any longer. Every day she had to ride her bicycle to work at the Metropole, which took forty-five minutes each way. Son had a motorbike, but he would never let her drive it, and he told her he didn’t have the time to give her a ride.

Now, instead of hello, Linh said, “Son makes me so pooped off.”

Carolyn rolled her eyes. She walked slowly over to the bed,
the only place to sit in the room, and, with a wince, lowered herself into a sitting position.

Linh put the baby down on a mat on the floor, then she looked up at us, her eyes suddenly glowing, and whispered, “But I’ll tell you something. Last night, Son make me very happy in my coont.”

Carolyn gasped. “Don’t say that word. Where did you learn that?”

Linh looked confused. “I learned it from my friend at my Metropole. Why I can’t say ‘coont?’”

“It’s ‘cunt,’ not ‘coont,’” Carolyn said. “It’s a terrible word.”

Linh’s lips started to tremble, as if she were being unfairly denied a new privilege. “But I like the slang word, Caro-leen. Why?”

Carolyn began to explain the difference between slang and obscenity, but Linh wasn’t listening. “Why?” she wailed. “Why?” The baby started to cry.

Carolyn grabbed Linh’s hand. “Get hold of yourself,” she said.

Son walked into the room from the back porch, and Linh picked up the baby and walked out.

“Good morning, Carolyn. Good morning, Dana. You are late,” Son said. His face was flat, expressionless.

“Son, I don’t feel well,” said Carolyn, trying to control the irritation in her voice.

“Oh,” he said. “Our friends are waiting for us at the hour of our appointment. We must hurry with great dispatch.”

Carolyn looked at me but said nothing. We got up and followed him out the door. He turned down a narrow lane lined with rows of ugly concrete houses. Son walked quickly, a few paces ahead of us, ducking under eaves to keep out of the rain. Beside me, Carolyn, who hadn’t bothered to put on her poncho, held it above her head. She looked upset. Personally, I was depressed
over the whole subject of marriage in Vietnam. I never heard about anything but problems. Linh’s admission that she was happy in her “coont” was the best thing any of the wives I knew had said about their husbands.