The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (43 page)

Now she was the one scared. "You'll be lucky, lucky, lucky."

The next morning a
fresh gallon of
nuoc mam
was opened with orders to swab down once more. They reached a supply road that showed signs of recent travel and set up an ambush. The renewed strength of the fish smell made her queasy; she couldn't get down her breakfast. She sought out Linh and together they curled behind a berm to wait. The lack of fear was a new experience, but she'd reached the point of being almost bored. After half an hour she decided to tie a handkerchief over her nose; she began to root around in her bag when a loud explosion went off to her left.

Her eyelids closed and behind them a bright flash exposed a pink-veined starfish shape. The vision had a floating calmness to it so that she did not want to immediately open her eyes.

The platoon around her rose to crouching positions, firing round after round into the surrounding jungle until the air was thick with the smell of fired weapons. The captain signaled for end fire, but it took another minute before the order was passed along, and another after that before the firing actually stopped. In the middle of the path they saw the body of a lone Viet Cong who had come up to the ambush and lobbed a single grenade.

"Put a hose in his mouth, he'd be one heck of a sprinkler, man," Kirby said.

Their cover blown, the captain radioed for an extraction. Helen, her ears still ringing, moved to get up when she felt a dull pain. She pushed up onto her knees and her head swayed hard to the left; a gush of warm liquid wet her lap. She reached down and gingerly touched her abdomen as the medic looked over.

"Oh," she said absentmindedly, as if she had misplaced something.

Compresses and bandages applied, she lay back in the dirt, aware of how quiet all the men were around her. She had felt so sure of her invincibility that day that it seemed a poor joke that she got injured. All the warnings she had heard over and over came into her head--the sight of a wounded woman demoralizing the men.

"I'm okay," she said to the medic. "Just a scratch. Cocktail time."

The morphine made its way through her limbs, cushioning and cottoning sensation. It frightened her to be so lucid about her surroundings and yet unable to care about the outcome. Her first time in-country she had been obsessed with getting hurt, but this time the possibility hadn't even occurred to her. In her grief she had felt immune. The hard jarring of the stretcher into the helicopter registered as pain, but too far away to have anything to do with her. The last thing she saw as they lifted off was Kirby's betrayed face. What kind of prophet couldn't predict her own demise?

Linh squeezed her hand, spooled back her attention like a kite that kept straining away. "You okay?"

"Bad luck," she said. "First time out."

"Just a scratch, I think," he said hopefully, but they both feared otherwise.

_______

The initial surgery in
the field hospital was a success, but that night she developed a fever, and by the next morning she was bleeding internally and was rushed back to surgery again, passing in and out of consciousness. All she remembered was waking up groggy in post-op, and the nurse shaking her head, saying it didn't need to happen like that, the surgeons were butchers who weren't used to operating on women. Later still, when she was more awake, the doctor came in and held her hand and said the hysterectomy had stopped the bleeding and saved her life; he wiped his face and said it had been a long night and then he left, and she was alone, listening to the clatter of incoming helicopters, the slow, labored breathing of the wounded in the beds around her.

When Linh came in, he bowed his head. "I'm sorry..." All the awkwardness between them since her return vanished.

"I survived." She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.

"It should have been me."

"Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it."

When she was strong enough to be moved, she transferred to the abdominal ward on the USS
Sanctuary
off the coast. The recovery took more than a month, the wound slow to heal. The doctors on the boat blamed the field hospital doctor, who cut too many muscles; the field doctor blamed the medic for not cleaning out the debris sooner. Linh visited every day. The smell of rotting flesh so pervasive in the ward that he took lemons aboard with him and cut them in half, holding them to his nose and squeezing juice on his hands before and after going in.

As soon as she was strong enough to leave, Gary and he took her home to the apartment in Cholon. It would have been easier to stay at the Continental, but she insisted on the quiet of those rooms.

"What you see in this dive, I don't know," Gary complained. "I'll have to have meals sent from the hotel."

Linh and Helen looked at each other and laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Everyone knows this is the center of the universe."

_______

Linh had a single
shelf of books given to him by Darrow. In her confinement, Helen pulled down a volume, the cover splayed, the pages swollen and wavy with humidity. She read at random, her concentration shaky, following Darrow's scribbling in the margins and his underlined passages. In Tacitus she found:

Fear and terror there certainly are, feeble bonds of attachment; remove them, and those who have ceased to fear will begin to hate. All the incentives to victory are on our side. The Romans have no wives to kindle their courage; no parents to taunt them with flight; many have either no country or one far away. Few in number, dismayed by their ignorance, looking around upon a sky, a sea, and forests which are all unfamiliar to them; hemmed in, as it were, and enmeshed, the Gods have delivered them into our hands.... In the very ranks of the enemy we shall find our own forces.

She closed the book quickly. This was the way she dealt with books now, plunging in and out of passages as if they were glacial rivers too cold to be endured long. She could not imagine reading a book from cover to cover, the idea of narrative old and quaint, like a tea cozy in this new fractured world.

This was not a book she would have chosen; to Darrow such a book had still seemed valid.

But something in the passage made her think not about the obvious analogy to the American soldiers, but instead about Linh; since her return she found herself wondering about him often, speculating. Wasn't Linh without wife or family, except for the brief, mysterious appearance of Thao? What had happened? He never spoke of them, although Helen left many opportunities when she told about her own family. Linh was in his own country, but he was not part of that brick wall. Where, she wondered, was his heart? How did one reconcile being on one side, then the other? What went through his head on patrol when American soldiers distrusted him? Or worse, when they tortured Vietnamese? Didn't he still have more in common with a fellow countryman, even if he was the enemy, than he did with them? What did he feel when he heard
gook
and
slant-eye
? Whose victory, finally, would constitute winning for Linh? Maybe the only real victory for any of them--peace.

When he walked through the door with dinner, she turned and moved away guiltily, dropping the book, as if she had been caught doing something private and self-indulgent.

Each day Linh brought
something to interest Helen. One day, a smelly durian like ripe cheese, the next a box of incense, then a lacquered river stone. She took a childish delight in the new, waited eagerly for it. He brought a record of classical Vietnamese music, which they listened to each evening. One night, they were playing cards, and Helen said she was tired.

"Would you like to sleep?"

"Tell me a story."

And so Linh began with all the fairy tales he had grown up with. When he ran out of those, he brought the epic poem
The Tale of Kieu
, and translated it to her a page at a time, explaining this was the most beloved of all Vietnamese tales. During these weeks, they began to understand each other in a way that had not been available to them before. Without telling her, one night Linh read aloud the play he had written for himself and Mai, the last one they performed together. When he finished, Helen held still for a moment.

"That was so beautiful--what was it called?"

"It's not well known."

"Who wrote it?"

He hesitated. "I did."

"I had no idea you could write."

"Before... I dreamed of being a playwright."

Helen nodded. "You would have been a fine one. You can still be."

"Those things are unimportant during war."

"Maybe that's when they're most important."

"Maybe."

"Do you have other stories?"

For the first time, Linh brought out the writings he had worked on, off and on, starting with the spiral notebook Darrow had given him in Angkor. Each night, they ate dinner, then Helen waited to hear more. Linh had not felt such intoxicating attention in a very long while. When the stack of pages grew thin, he began composing again. In this way, he came back to his real life.

After a month, she
had recovered sufficiently to stay alone. Linh went for longer periods to check assignments downtown. One day, although he left her with food--sweetened rice and fresh oranges and pomelo--she longed for a spicy, hot bowl of
pho
. At the hospital she had endured a diet consisting solely of bland starchy foods, Jell-O and mashed potatoes. As she lay in bed hour after hour, the thought of the clear, pungent broth obsessed, and she was convinced that one bowl of it would bring back her strength.

She did not want to admit that the real reason for her planned assault on the
pho
stand might be that she did not want to be alone with her thoughts. The injury and the hysterectomy had happened so quickly, and she had not dealt with the aftermath. She had hoped eventually to have children in the distant future. Now the option had been taken away. She avoided writing to her mother with the news, showing what she had done to their family's future. But that mourning seemed indulgent when so many lives were being lost all around her, so many children, so many mothers and fathers. Her own pain slight in the ocean of grief all around her.

Helen dressed carefully, the pain in her belly a stab each time she moved. Using a cane, she slowly climbed step-by-step down the two buckling flights of stairs. When she was halfway down, it was obvious the trip was a mistake, but sheer will pushed her to continue, like a soldier carrying out an order, the most important thing not to admit defeat. Sweat beaded her forehead, and her legs wobbled, threatening to go out from under her. She gripped the cane tighter, rested against the wall. Now she could get in real trouble, fall and break a leg and be stranded for hours. The painkillers had worn off, but she had resisted taking more, worried about dizziness until she returned from her journey. Her plan was to swallow a pill when she was back in bed with a stomach full of soup. Panting, she braced herself on each step until finally she reached the Buddha door at the bottom.

From the dim stairwell, she noticed for the first time that the wood at the back of the door was black with oxidation; one of the panels had a hairline split through which sunlight showed. From outside the door had appeared sound, unbroken, and it was only her unlimited time that allowed her to notice this.

On the street, the heat and sunlight stranded her again, but at least she could shuffle along the even ground. By the time she made her tortured way through the alley and onto the main thoroughfare where the soup stall was, her whole body was shaken by tremors of pain and fatigue.

The soup vendor recognized her, patted the empty stool, and made soup the way Helen liked, with plenty of chilies and soy sauce, but when she handed over the bowl, Helen hunched over, rocking, and could only shake her head.

The old woman studied her face for a moment, then barked out orders to her young nephew who worked for her. He took off at a run.

Half an hour later, the boy reappeared in a cab. Linh jumped out, leaving the back door hanging open, the driver unpaid, and ran behind the soup stall to where Helen was curled on a mat, under the shade of the vendor's umbrella. Kneeling down, he placed his hand on her forehead.

"Are you okay?"

"Dizzy. I shouldn't have gone down...."

"Can you sit up?"

Helen moved delicately, fearing she had ruptured something inside, the effort making her grind out her words as her forearms gave out, and she slipped back down, a black wave coming over her, threatening, then receding.

"Can you put your arms around my neck?"

Pulling herself up, she made the effort to concentrate on Linh's face. She nodded. Lifting her as if she were broken, he carried her down the alley. Helen laid her head on his shoulder, her hair winding around his wrist.

The body, he knew
, has a memory all its own. The shape of a baby in one's arms will be imprinted forever, the cup of a lover's chin. The weight of Helen in Linh's arms broke his heart open. He wished the journey back to the apartment was ten times, a hundred times as long, wished that he could walk with the weight of her in his arms all day and all night and still keep walking. To repeat the journey of that night until it ended with a different outcome. He would gladly die walking for that, and he knew this desire was wrong, but kept looking down at her face.

With the snap of
a grimy plastic sheet over the counter, the old woman declared her stall closed; she, the boy, and the cab driver, who shut off his car and took the keys, walked ahead, yelling at people to step aside. The boy was caught up in the drama; the old woman was scandalized; the cabdriver wanted to get paid. When they reached the building, the old woman opened the Buddha door and followed them up the two flights although her bad leg kept her from climbing any faster than Linh under his burden.

When he laid Helen down on the mint green bedspread, the old woman shooed him away and drew the curtain between the rooms, changing Helen's clothes and washing her face. Men had no place there, even if this was one of those loose Western women.