The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (25 page)

Stealthy as a thief, Helen rolled off the straw mat and stood in the doorway, watching the night.

A golden moon hung over the outlying palms, casting a light so bright she could make out individual grains of dirt on the ground. A faint coolness to the air, more lovely because of the previous heat. The surrounding roofs of pale thatch gave Helen a feeling of calm and protection. Everything she had thought she wanted within her grasp, perfectly all right with her if time stopped at that very moment, but already something had changed. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. The scene in front of her not just itself, but a potential shot: the widest aperture, the slowest shutter speed. Allow in every drop of light. Shallow range of depth, focus on one thing. But were they the thing to focus on?

In the distance she watched an old woman come out of one of the huts and stretch her arms over her head in the moonlight. She walked to the well, pulled up a bucket, and drank heartily from the ladle. A frame. She pulled a pin from the bun at the back of her head and let her long silver hair spread over her shoulders. A frame. She made her way to the riverbank and onto the wooden dock, hooked her bare foot on the edge of a boat that had been knocking against its mooring. It wasn't until the noise stopped that Helen was aware of its earlier irritating thump. With expert, practiced movements, the woman bent down and wound the rope more tightly. She then walked back up past the well and disappeared between a clump of trees. With a slow enough shutter speed, the woman would have blurred to nothing, become a ghost.

From around the corner of the house, Ngan appeared. "I get you something?"

"No." The girl's sudden appearance annoyed her, breaking her reverie, but she tried not to show it. "Can't sleep."

Ngan folded up her leg and stretched it out, like the egrets Helen watched along the riverbanks. "Warm night."

"Who was the old woman down by the dock?"

"No one. Just old woman. You go back to sleep."

Helen watched Ngan disappear behind the house again until Darrow's voice broke the stillness, and she laughed, a great flood of happiness that she wasn't awake alone.

"Why're you up?" he asked.

"This place is like Grand Central. Promise we can stay here forever."

"Come sleep. All I promise is pineapple pancakes for breakfast. And a day of fishing."

She turned away from the dark mystery of the village.

_______

At dawn they rose
and, at Ho Tung's invitation, joined the villagers gathering to go out into the rice paddies. Helen asked Ngan to make coffee in the morning, but the girl only knew how to boil tea. When Darrow came back from a shower, he was balancing a pot of French roast and cups on a tray in his one good hand. He poured two cups as they watched the dawn color the tops of the palms.

"Where did you get that?" Helen asked.

"A good reporter never gives his sources," he said, bending, kissing her neck, her collarbone, her elbow.

Out on the road
, the women gossiped as they walked along the half-mile of dirt road. Children flitted back and forth like sparrows. Two girls told the story of a ghost in a tree who gave out money. Their mother boxed their ears for lying but admitted that she had saved the coins. When the girls saw Helen, they screamed and ran away. The men remained solemn, smoking cigarettes, their eyes on the sky, divining the day's weather. At the edge of the paddies, the women kicked off sandals and waded into the brackish water. They tied on hats under their chins to free their hands, began the movement of bending and swaying, back and forth through the rows of green rice stalks, weeding.

A miracle that the war had not touched this place. One could almost pretend that it was peacetime, but they owed that to the cleverness of the Hoa Hao.

Helen took pictures, listening to Darrow's advice on framing. She motioned three young girls to move closer together as they bent over their work, faces hidden under identical conical hats, only the differing patterns of their shirts separating them from each other. Behind them stretched the sunlit water of early morning. Small, bright green rice plants surrounded them like the subtle brushstrokes of a painting.

"Here you have time to move things around. In the field, you have to find an anchor for the picture--a soldier's face, a background, and you just start shooting. You can never go wrong zeroing in on a face. Shoot all day, you might get one good picture."

As the farmers moved
farther into the paddy, Helen and Darrow sat down under trees on the bank. High white clouds dissolved in the rising heat until the sky became hard white and as empty as an eggshell.

When no one was looking, Helen touched Darrow on the chest, the knee. His physical proximity made her feel content, and the great urgency she had felt when she first arrived began to fade.

"You stroke me like I'm your pet dog."

"When you were a boy, what was your favorite game?"

He watched her stretched out on the grass, her hair wrapped over her throat. "I don't remember being a boy."

Helen sat up, kissed his eyelids although the villagers would see. She didn't want to hear the sad details just then. "You are my pet dog. A golden retriever. Rover."

Darrow nipped at her fingertips. "Rover's hungry."

At noontime, Ngan appeared
with a basket of food. After she had set it out, she sat in the shade some distance away, ignoring their invitation to join them. One of the women started a singsong chant, a
ca dao
, and the other women joined in the refrain.

"They think we're useless," Darrow said. "If my arm were better, I'd join them."

"Really?"

"Yeah, sure. Why not?"

Helen stood up, took off her own sandals, and rolled up her pants.

"What're you doing? Come back."

She waded in. The women stopped working and, pointing, talked and laughed excitedly. Ngan hurried to the edge of the water, giggling and covering her hands over her face.

"I was joking," Darrow shouted, but Helen waved him off. He was filled with enviousness, recognizing his old impulsiveness in her. "Showboat!"

The water and the mud squished warm between her toes. She sank several inches into the muck, then midcalf-deep, and could feel things squirming underneath her feet. Each time she lifted a leg, a pull of mud on her ankles. The vision of Michael rose, unbidden, his struggle against the suck of mud, helpless, shooting, betrayal as the helicopter took off, the pain and panic as he realized he was dying, but she pushed this away quickly. She could not lose face and return to the bank; she waved and moved farther out. After she joined the line of women, one of them showed her how to weed the seedlings along a row. When Helen accidentally uprooted a clump of rice, a woman grabbed it away, chiding, and replanted it. This was serious business--the difference between eating and not. These were not bad people, she and other Americans were not bad, only the war had made them appear so.

From far away, the scene looked graceful, but up close the work was grueling. The heat tore at her. Women's faces wet with sweat, drops running down their noses and chins into the water.

After an hour, Helen's back ached from the constant strain of bending. She stood to ease the pain, jamming a fist into the small of her back. Her sunglasses kept slipping off, so she had to put them in her pocket. One of the women handed her a hat, but still the glare off the water blinded her so that she had to squint to see the bank and Darrow. She was surprised how he appeared from far away--shoulders hunched, head down, almost convalescent.

As their feet dredged the bottom, a sour mash smell filled the air, a green smell of algae mixed with the reek of waste used as fertilizer. The chanting of the women was the only thing that kept her going--casting a spell. She remembered as a young child going with her father to the base for drill instruction, the sound of cadence as she waited sleepily on the grassy track field.

After half a day's work, blisters formed on her hands. She returned the hat and trudged sheepishly back to the bank. Even in this limited way, she had a feeling for what Linh had described--a brick in the wall, invisible except as part of the whole. When she stood on dry ground again, Darrow was leaning against a tree, reading a book.

"Blisters," she said, holding out her hands, palms up.

He smiled and closed the book. "Why? Token suffering?"

She smiled and wiped her wet hands on his shirt. "I'll never eat rice the same way again."

At first Helen was
relieved to be away from combat, but as time passed, her thoughts returned to the soldiers she had met; what had happened to them; what it meant. The old curiosity gnawed, and she thought she wouldn't last, would need to make an excuse and rush back to Saigon. The seeming importance of events, and her desire to be there to record them. But with the passage of days, it grew difficult to remember the shape and taste of the fear that had enveloped her; she stopped believing in its power. Distance and the land worked on her. The lure of the war diminished, got quieter, lost its ravenous pull. The world shrank to the size of the village and then opened back up to the infinite in the same breath.

Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo's heavy footfalls. Their ears grew accustomed to the cocoon of Vietnamese, living like young children oblivious to meaning, only Ngan's painstaking, slow words requiring the effort of understanding; she, like a nurse, making every day comfortable. Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.

Monsoon showers came, and with it the percussion of water against the broad leaves of banana and rubber trees that lined the paths of the village. The heavy earth smell of rain. Drops pummeled against the thatched roof; rivulets curled down the inside corners of the walls.

In the afternoons they would lie in the darkness of their hut under the mosquito netting, wearing the thinnest of clothing, drenched in sweat. Darrow tracing a lazy finger along the damp of Helen's inner arm, her neck, down between her breasts, along the hollow of her stomach.

"I'm taking you to Switzerland."

"Really? Why Switzerland?" she whispered, reluctant to break the moment with her voice.

"To a small inn on the tallest mountain. Dufourspitze. So high there's snow in summer. We'll burrow under a thick featherbed in front of a roaring fire, and we won't be able to remember we were ever so hot."

"Let's go now." A revelation that they could be together somewhere else in the world, somewhere there was no war.

"Soon."

Helen shifted, aware she had gone too close to the edge, their tacit agreement not to discuss the future. Although she herself didn't exactly want to leave, his hesitation goaded her. "I'd miss Ngan's cooking. How she tucks us up in the mosquito netting at night. How she listens to us making love each night." She paused. "We shouldn't be here, should we?"

"What do you mean?"

"In this country."

"No."

"Then why do we stay?"

"We want to know the end of the story."

"How will our story end, you think?"

Darrow frowned. "I was in Eastern Europe, covering the Hungarians who were fleeing their country before the Communists took over.

"At night it was below freezing, and Russians with machine guns patrolled the borderland. It's flat farmland out there, no landmarks. People got lost crossing the fields in the dark, walking for hours in circles, getting caught or dying of exposure. So the Austrian farmers on the other side of the border started building these bonfires in their fields that could be seen for miles. Night after night, until they had to burn up their crops to keep it going. If people could get far enough to spot the fires, they had a chance.

"At the time building those fires seemed like the best thing you could be doing in the world. Shedding a little light. Being there I felt my life was bigger than it had been before."

_______

Evenings, Ho Tung would
invite Darrow to join the village men. They'd sit in the communal house in the center of the hamlet to drink beer.

Helen tried to read by lamplight, but she found it impossible to concentrate on the words of the page, so abstract and distant compared to the moonlight through the trees outside or the thick sweetness of grapefruit and frangipani blossoms. She closed her book, blew out the lamp, and gazed into the night sky. Words superfluous. She had reached a point of absolute stillness in her life, empty of wanting. Nothing could be added that would not unbalance the perfection of the present.

She fretted over Darrow's words because she halfway believed them. The picture of Captain Tong had created headlines. It had opened eyes, made the old man's death not in vain. In Darrow's words, it had made her feel her life was bigger, more important than before. But to repeat that, Helen would have to be willing to go out again and again on missions. She longed to be in that chalet in Switzerland, almost willing to turn her back on the Captain Tongs of the world for it. What was wrong with a small, selfish life?

Ngan came in on
the nights that Helen was alone, bringing a bowl of scented water and a towel, insisting on sponging her down. When Helen at first refused, Ngan sulked until she reluctantly agreed.

The girl, only twenty, was already a widow with a small boy of two. She had bright, clear eyes and a high forehead, and Helen thought her quite pretty.

"Ngan, why no boyfriend?"

She giggled, squeezed water out of the sponge, let it run along Helen's arm. "No one interested."

"That's not what I hear." The other women in the village gossiped that a certain middle-aged farmer had proposed and been refused.

"Minh?" Ngan shuddered. "I study in Saigon one year. I want to be teacher. I learn more English."