The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (22 page)

The next time Linh
saw her, she was sprung to life from the picture, pacing Darrow's hotel room. When she shook his hand, he knew she was blinded by Sam's rough treatment. Darrow was in the process of breaking her young heart, and Linh quickly escaped the carnage.

At the hotel bar he stood drinking a
citron presse
and asked Toan, the bartender, an old man who had relocated from Hue, about his oldest son just drafted into the Saigon army. Toan complained that the cost of bribes to get a safe desk job had doubled from the year before. During the whole conversation, Linh imagined Darrow and Helen upstairs, negotiating their way through their love. Although he had seen and suffered much, he did not find them frivolous; in fact, he found it more than optimistic that in the middle of war, people could still think about such things. Didn't that mean the world could still recover?

Although Linh took his time finishing his drink, still he was too early returning and witnessed Helen, like a
tien
, fairy, crying alone in the hallway. As a youth, he had made a great study of all the Vietnamese myths, and a
tien
was often an essential feature of each hero's story. When she saw him, she fled.

Months passed and neither
Sam nor Linh brought up the subject of Helen again, although now a new picture of her was framed on the table. In one of his favorite fairy tales, that was exactly what happened to the
tien:
She disappeared back into a picture. Probably Helen had returned to her country, the romance of the war quickly tarnished.

Linh and Darrow were both surprised by the pictures of the execution, and Darrow admitted he had been keeping track of her. The way he said it revealed even more.

"She has made an impression on you."

"I see her going through all the things I went through."

"Yes?"

"And I don't want her to do it.... I see each step where I could have stopped."

He had been with Darrow long enough to see that he was the best at his profession, and he cared passionately about it. There was the sadness, but he thought that had more to do with the personal. "I don't understand...."

"Gary has offered her a staff position with the magazine. I don't want her getting herself killed making some stupid mistake. Work with her."

"What if she doesn't accept?"

"She will."

From the tone of voice, Linh understood it was a lover's assurance. "I prefer to work with you."

"It would mean the world to me, my friend."

When Linh came to
her hotel room that night, she seemed embarrassed. She lit a cigarette, offered him one, then sat on the bed.

"We haven't gotten off to the greatest start," she said.

"Sorry?"

"Me making a fool of myself."

Linh shook his head as if shooing away a pest. These Americans still took getting used to, their bald honesty, their constant confessing of deficiencies. In Vietnam, etiquette prevented such things from being talked of. He had been married for six months, bringing Mai sheet music every week, but she never sang the new songs before having him sing them out loud first. When he got angry at her, she finally admitted she couldn't read; he thought she meant read music, but then it dawned on him she had also been memorizing his words.

Now he looked at Helen and was shocked by her naked admission. And yet it was disarming and made him feel protective of her as over a small child who was helpless and too trusting. "I saw you for the first time at the restaurant. You come in drenched from rain."

Helen made a face. "Another bad impression."

"No. A hungry woman, I thought." They laughed. Why had he omitted the true first time he saw her, getting out of the military jeep in front of the hotel, while he sat at the bar with Mr. Bao? Was it because he did not wish to be remembered in Mr. Bao's company? Or was it that he wanted to keep his first glimpse of her private? Or, worse, was it because the habit of deception had become so ingrained in him, he preferred lies to truth?

The next morning Linh
walked to her hotel and spent the whole day seeing the city again through her eyes. This happened each day, day after day; the realization dawned on him that now he was showing her his home.

Her first request was to learn enough Vietnamese so she could put the people she photographed at ease. No other American, not even Darrow, had made such a request. During the monsoon downpours, they would duck inside small tea stalls. She would hold a ceramic cup laced in her long fingers, listening to the drumming of the rain on the tin overhang of the roof while they practiced speech. Often children gathered at the sight of the foreign woman in their neighborhood, still a novelty, and giggled at her mispronunciation. They sat on the ground around the battered table, loose pieces of plastic wrapped around thin shoulders against the rain. Helen called over a food vendor and bought
banh da
, rice cakes with sesame seeds, for everyone. Linh was sure they, too, felt as if they were in the presence of a
tien
.

"How do you say 'Thank you'?"

"Cam on."

"Come on?"

"
Xin ba noi lai." Please say it again
.

" 'Com on'?"

"Better." Linh laughed
.

"How do you say 'Can she speak English?' "

"Chi ay biet noi tieng Anh khong?"

The words came in a flood, impossible to separate them, guttural stops and starts that she felt she would never understand. "Sorry I asked."

"We'll go slowly. Use the words every day. Listen to stories. That's how I learned English."

Helen poured more tea from a dented aluminum pot. "I know it's a letdown to go from working with Darrow to working with a beginner."

"What is 'letdown'?"

"A demotion. Step down."

Linh took his cup. Again, this stating of what should remain unspoken, and yet he flushed in embarrassment that she guessed his feelings. "When the words form on your tongue naturally, you enter the heart of the country, I think."

"But you've never been to America."

"Once upon a time. My favorite was Chicago."

But just as she started to question him, a group of children rushed in and swarmed them with questions.

After taking her back to the hotel that day, he walked along the river. How could he have made such an admission? Shameful. Yet he had been alone so long, had not talked from his soul to another person, that at the first sign of interest, his mouth flooded with words. No one should know about his years abroad.

His father had gotten caught up in politics at the university. He chafed under the unfair French restrictions for Vietnamese to advance to any real power. Studying the life of Uncle Ho, he was convinced of the importance of seeing the world. He spent a great deal of money and used many promises to get Linh a berth on a freighter going to the Middle East, and then on to Europe. Linh went one better in going on to America. Although those had been the happiest years of his life, there had never been a question of not returning, of not fulfilling his father's wishes that he be of service to his country.

He was still haunted by what he had seen. In Phan Rang, dockworkers drowned and floating like milk fruit in the port after being ordered to jump into the water to salvage ships. On shore, French officials laughed, jiggling bellies of fat. Linh became as lean as a dagger. In Dakar, he watched the same horrors of colonialism, watched as natives were ordered by the French to swim out to his ship in a storm. Helpless, Linh watched from the deck as they drowned like heavy, dumb animals in the water. Although he had been called Chinaman in America, the freedom had been heady. But then he had gone into the South. His experiences taught him the need of freedom at all costs.

Gary's first assignment for
Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the pagodas around Saigon. At Xa Loi, the bonzes orchestrated protests against the Ky government. Linh described the marches three years before against Diem, telling her of the chaos then. Monks and nuns using their bodies as tinder throughout South Vietnam, horrifying and alienating the West. In Linh's village, a nun described how she had daintily tucked her robes around herself in the town square, how a circle of bonzes formed a barrier against outside interference. "What could the military do? Shoot them?" The absurdity in Saigon of antisuicide squads equipped with fire extinguishers patrolling the streets.

Gary wanted Helen to get pictures of daily life in the pagodas. They took pictures of boys in brown robes receiving instruction and old bonzes reclining inside dark rooms, sipping tea and strategizing. Young men ran back and forth in their orange robes like waiters in a busy restaurant, pamphlets fluttering, directing traffic and arranging interviews with the head monks as if they were rock stars.

The noon heat and the thick smell of burning joss sticks drugged Helen, slowed her movements to those of a sleepwalker. When everyone retired for the noon break, she photographed a more peaceful mood--a single white-clad nun sweeping the grounds in front of the carved columns of the building, the shadow of a Buddha statue inside barely perceptible.

Under a banyan tree, Helen leaned back into a cradle of gnarled roots. Her shirt clung to her back. Linh motioned to a vendor who brought them coconuts filled with sweet, brackish juice. When he handed her a straw, she hesitated.

"Drink it."

She nodded, emptying it in one gulp. "I'm tired of being afraid."

"The VC are cunning, but they haven't yet trained the coconut trees to grow poison."

They watched women, young and old, enter the pagoda grounds carrying prepared dishes or baskets of fresh vegetables.

"Does the community supply food?"

"The community is the pagoda. They bring food or money, what ever they can, what ever is needed."

"But they don't have enough for themselves."

"One is like a brick in a wall, interdependent; one has no meaning outside one's relation to family and others."

Helen sat up and pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her back. "Do you know why I came here?"

Linh shook his head, wary of more confidences.

"I wanted to be famous. I had dreams of being the only American to get pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Stupid, huh?"

Linh smiled. "Darrow is very happy every time he gets a cover."

"Really?" Helen laughed.

"He sits in his room and drinks a glass of scotch and stares at the cover for a half hour. Then he puts the magazine in a drawer and doesn't look again." Linh shrugged. "But he's passed up shots that could have been his, too. And he mourns every death until it seems impossible that he can continue."

"That's why I love him," she said.

He couldn't stand hearing more. How could he go on day after day listening to this woman bare her soul to him? "I should go back to the office with the film."

"Where is your family? I mean, what you said earlier, bricks in a wall?"

"I don't want to insult. We are different from Americans. We only share important things with people who have earned our trust. Otherwise we dishonor our memories."

She flushed, chastised, and tried to brush it off. "I ask too many questions. Join me for dinner to night?"

"I'll meet you in front of the hotel early tomorrow."

She turned back to the pagoda to hide her hurt feelings.

_______

Linh walked down the
crowded street and stopped at an outdoor cafe. He motioned to a busboy and paid him to run the film over to the office, then ordered tea and nursed it. He felt guilty about his gruffness toward her, but he had changed since coming to Saigon, grown a second skin that insulated him from others. It would have been smarter to be kinder. After all, that is what he liked about the Americans--their innocence, their willingness to share their life story with a stranger. After fifteen minutes, he crossed the street and surveyed the pagoda grounds.

The area was still empty, but he spotted her in a deserted courtyard. She sat alone, crying. He felt discomfited, her face so naked, as if she stood before him unclothed, and he knew the right thing would be to leave unobserved, yet he stood rooted to the spot. He recognized such pain. The reason--Darrow had told of her losing a brother to the war--was it enough to cause her to put herself in danger's way? A place not fit for a man, much less a woman. He made a show of reentering the compound and stood in front of her. When she saw him, she showed no surprise, simply held her hand out to him.

"I'm sorry about prying. I hate when people ask about my father. Having to say that I hardly remember him. Or my brother."

He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. "I think telling a friend this story is a great honor."

She gave him a sly, crooked grin.
"Cam on."

Before he could react, she stood and hugged him. No one had held him in a very long time. His head felt light, blood rushed hot to his skin. He made an awkward, panicked escape.

"I will be gone for a few days. A week at most."

"But we have the story to cover."

"Can't be helped. You'll be fine."

Back at the cafe
, he ordered a whiskey. He was meeting with Mr. Bao the next day in Tra Vinh, and had to have his head clear. He would gather maps and stop by the American commissary and pick up Mr. Bao's new passions: two cartons of Marlboros and four loaves of Wonder Bread.

Linh allowed Mr. Bao to believe that they were having an effect on the American reporting of the war, although the reporters ended up being far more disillusioned by the truth than anything Linh could craft. "You just can't manage to stick to one side," Mr. Bao had said after finding him. Ironically, Linh's intelligence gathering now included Mr. Bao, too, and his new sideline of drug trafficking, using the military for protection. He was making millions. Besides his dabbling in small-time brothels. His corruption made him the ideal partner for Linh--a man always open to compromise.