The Lotus Eaters

All around her voices were raised to the highest pitch—pleading, Vietnamese words falling on deaf ears, begging in pidgin English for rescue. People bargaining, trying to bribe at this too-late hour with jewelry and gold watches and dirty piastres pushed through the bars of the gate, valuables flung inside in this country where wealth was so scarce.

A man close to Helen held out a baby. “Not me. Take my baby. Save my son.” He would pay one million piastres, two million, and as he met silence on the other side of the gate, he cried and said five million, five million piastres, money that he had either amassed over decades or stolen in minutes. He opened a sack and shoved bundles of the bills through the gate to obligate his son’s protectors, unaware that to these Americans his money was worthless, less than Monopoly money, that these soldiers were scared of this dark-faced mob, unable to grant safety even to one baby, that all they wanted was to protect the people already inside and escape from this sad joke of a war themselves.

Helen’s arm jerked down as Linh collapsed behind her, his legs buckled, and she screamed in Vietnamese, forgetting, languages blurring, then realizing her mistake, screaming in English, “Let us in. I’m American press.”

The Marine’s head turned at the sound of her words. “Jesus, what’s happened to you?”

“Let us in.”

“Open the gate,” he said, motioning to the guards behind him.

As the gate opened, more Marines came to provide backup, aiming automatic rifles into the crowd.

The guard put a hand against Linh’s chest. “He can’t come.”

“He works for the American newswires. He’s got papers.”

“Too late for papers,” he said. “Half the people out here have papers.”

“Damn you,” Helen screamed. “This man was just wounded saving my life.”

“Can’t do it.”

“He’s my husband.”

“I suppose you have a marriage certificate?”

“He stays, I stay. And if I get killed by the NVA, the story of the embassy refusing us will be in every damned paper. Including your name.”

The guard’s face was covered in sweat, already too young and tired and irritable for his years. “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anymore. Get in.” He came out a few more steps, grabbed Linh, then Helen, and flung them inside like dolls. The man with the baby tried to grab Helen’s arm, but the Marine punched him back into the net of the crowd. As they passed through the gates, five or six Vietnamese used the chaos to rush in. They scattered into the crowd, invisible like birds in a forest, before the guards could catch them. Guns fired, and Helen hoped they had been fired into the air. No more blood on her hands this day. With a great metallic clang, the gate shut again.

The lost opportunity frenzied the crowd outside. Heads poked over while Marines stood atop the walls, rifle-butting bodies off.

Inside was crowded but calmer. Americans stood by the compound buildings while Vietnamese squatted on every available inch of grass.

They were searched and patted down. “Ma’am, you’ll have to turn that in.”

Helen looked at the guard bewildered until she realized they had found the forgotten gun in her smock. Not only that, but she had managed somehow to keep both film cases. The guard led her over to the compound swimming pool, where she tossed it in to join the fifty or sixty guns already lying along the bottom.

“I need a medic,” Helen said.

The guard nodded and went off. Helen grabbed Linh’s shoulders and supported his weight as he lowered himself and stretched out on the ground. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. Several minutes later an American in white shirtsleeves came over with a black kit. “You hurt, miss?”

“Not me. Linh was wounded a couple of days ago. He’s bleeding.”

The man helped unbutton Linh’s shirt and unwrapped the bandages. “I can clean him up, but he needs attention from doctors on ship.”

“How long before we go?” Helen said.

“They’ll call you.”

Helen nodded.

“How about I look at that bump on your head? Looks like you might need some stitches yourself. Don’t want a scar.”

Hours passed. Helen and Linh sat on the grass, propped against the film cases. Papers were being burned inside the compound buildings, the endless secrets of the war, smoke and ash drifting in the air, settling on the people, the ground, on top of the water in the pool like a gray snowfall. After the adrenaline wore off, Helen was bone-weary. She nibbled on a few uppers, then brought warm sodas and stale sandwiches from the makeshift food service operating out of the abandoned embassy restaurant.

“We made it,” she said. “Happy, happy.”

“Still in Saigon. We just managed to crawl into a new cage.” Linh held his side, his face drowsy with dull pain.

Helen leaned in close to him. “I pushed it too far, but it all worked out. No damage done.”

“No damage.”

“When I took the picture of that woman, I was angry that the shot might get ruined. And then I thought, What have I become?”

Linh shifted and grimaced at the pain. “Just be with me.”

“I want to.”

“You didn’t start this war, and you didn’t end it. Nothing that happened in between is your fault, either.”

Helen’s face was expressionless, tears running down it, without emotion.

“You don’t believe me.” He wiped her face dry, but already her attention was slipping away. “None of it had anything to do with us. We’re just bystanders to history.”

The sky darkened. Linh’s head rolled to one side as he fell into a deep, drugged sleep. People near Helen worried about the Marines being able to keep back the crowd outside. The Vietnamese going out were classified as dependents of the Americans, although for the last decade the Americans had depended on them to survive in this harsh country. Traitors by association. The number of people per flight was minuscule compared to those waiting, like taking water out of a bucket an eyedropperful at a time.

The noise from the helicopters was deafening, but in between Helen could hear the distant rumblings from Gia Dinh and Tan Son Nhut, a constant percussion that matched the throbbing in her head. The noise much closer than this morning; lifetimes seemed to have passed in the intervening hours. Linh trembled in his sleep.

An embassy employee walked by, and Helen stopped the man. “How much longer? This man needs medical attention.”

“Could be all night.” He looked at her sternly, tapping his pencil on his notepad for emphasis. “Americans are being boarded now. Especially women. Go inside. He’ll be taken care of later.”

In the convoluted language of the embassy, trouble. She woke Linh, tugging him onto his feet, harnessing the straps of the film cases around her neck. They joined the end of a long line going up the stairs to the roof. She flagged one of the Marines guarding the entrance. “I need to get this man on a helicopter.”

“Everyone takes their turn.”

She rubbed her forehead. “No. He’s been shot. He’s going to die without medical attention.”

“There are a lot of people anxious to get on the plane, ma’am. I don’t have any special orders concerning him.”

A rumpled-up man with a clipboard came up. He was in his twenties, with a beaten-up face that looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“I’m Helen Adams. Life staff photographer. This is Nguyen Pran Linh, who works for Life and the Times. He’s wounded and needs immediate evacuation.” Helen figured under the current circumstances no one would find out about her lies, the fact her magazine had pulled her credentials. Weren’t they trying to kick her out of the country, after all?

He scribbled something on his clipboard. “Absolutely.” He scratched his head and turned to the Marine. “Medical evac. Get someone to escort them to the front of the line. And get someone else to explain why to everyone they’re bumping in front of. Tell ’em he’s a defector or something.”

“You’re the first person today who’s actually done what he said,” Helen said.

“I’m a big fan of yours, Ms. Adams.”

“I didn’t know I had any.”

“You covered my older brother. He was a Marine in ’sixty-eight. Turner. Stationed in I Corps.”

“Did he—”

“Back home running a garage in Reno. Three kids. The picture you took of him and his buddies on the wall. He talked about meeting you. I’ve been following your work since.”

“Thank you for this. Good luck,” she said. “We’re going to need a whole lot more than luck.”

One Marine carried the film cases and another half-carried Linh up the jammed staircase. They went through a thick metal door and more stairs, waited, then climbed up a flimsy metal ladder staircase and were on the roof. The air filled with the smells of exhaust and things burning, a spooky campfire. To the north and west, Helen saw the reddish glow of hundreds of fires and the few streaks of friendly red tracers going out against the flood of blue enemy tracers coming in. The odds visibly against them. The throbbing of her head had become a constant buzz, but she didn’t want to take anything, wanted her mind to keep clear.

The helicopter jerked down onto the roof, landing like a thread through the eye of a needle, and her body went rigid. The beating rotors and the screaming of the engine so loud, the Marines shouting unintelligible boarding instructions that she didn’t have time to explain to Linh. His eyes fluttered half-closed. A young man from one of the wires stood next to them, going out on the same flight.

The Marines signaled their group to move out, and they crouched and ran under the hot rotor wind. At the helicopter door, Helen grabbed the young newsman’s arm.

“Get these to someone from Life on board the ship.”

“Sure. But why?”

“I’m going out on a later flight.” Until the words fell out of her mouth, she hadn’t accepted that she had made room for this possibility.

The Marine started heaving the film bags on, the tape coming loose and hanging off like party streamers. “Hurry up, people. Ma’am, get on.”

Helen backed away. Her stomach heaved, sick in soul.

“Look after him,” she yelled to the stranger. “His name is Nguyen Pran Linh. He works for Life. Get him a doctor immediately.”

Linh looked up confused, not comprehending Helen wasn’t boarding. When he did, he struggled back out of the helicopter. “You can’t—”

“Stop him!” Helen screamed, backing away, blood pounding in her ears, sick that she was capable of betraying again. The Marine and the young man forced Linh back inside and buckled him in. She watched as, weak as a child, he was strapped into the webbing, saw his head slump to the side, and was relieved he had passed out. She ran to the helicopter, crouched inside, begged a pen and scribbled a quick few lines on paper. She put his papers and the note inside a plastic bag, tied it with a string around his neck, the same way she had handled the personal effects of countless soldiers.

In front of the waiting men, Helen bent and put her lips to Linh’s forehead and closed her eyes. “Forgive me. Em ye’u anh. I love you.”

Back out on the landing pad, the wind whipped her hair and dug grit into her skin, but the pain came as a relief.

The Marine stood next to her. “Get on the next helicopter out. Everyone here is not going to leave.”

“What about them?” she said, shrugging her shoulder at the great filled lawn below.

“Better a live dog than a dead lion. And they eat dogs in ’Nam.”

The helicopter’s door closed, and the Marine crouched and guided Helen back to the doorway, and he shook his head as she made her way back down the stairs.

Helen stood on the lawn and watched the dark bulk of the machine hover in midair for a moment, the red lights on its side its only indicator. Because of the danger of being fired on, the pilots took off in the dark and used projector lights on the roof only for the last fifteen feet or so of the landings.

A mistake, she thought to herself, a mistake not to be on that helicopter. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Her insides tingling electric as if there were bubbles running through her blood.

As much as she had prepared herself for this moment, she was at a loss. What was she looking for? What did she think she could accomplish? If she had not found it yet, what were the chances that a few more days would change that? She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.

Blood had been shed by one side; blood had been shed by the other. What did it mean?

The helicopter swayed and the nose dipped, a bubble of shuddering metal and glass, and then it glided off across the nearby tops of buildings. Safe. Tiny and fragile as an insect in the night sky. Helen felt bereft, betraying Linh, and all she could hope for was the cushion of delirium before he realized what she had done.

The Vietnamese on the grounds of the compound grumbled about the length of the wait, complaining that the Americans were not telling them anything but “It’ll be okay. You’ll be taken care of.” When they protested their thirst, the Marines directed them to the pool. The sight of Helen standing outside on the grass reassured those close-by—obviously the evacuation wasn’t over until every American, especially a woman, was gone.

Helen dreaded a repeat of the mob scene outside, the potential for it to turn violent, and made her way to one of the outer concrete walls of the compound and lay down on the cool, dead grass under a tree. The roaring grew quieter and quieter, the calming outside conflating with her state inside, until she almost felt herself again. In the middle of chaos, she slipped into a deep sleep and woke up to rusty clouds of smoke passing the faint stars and moon.

She took her camera, attached a flash, and began taking pictures. The Vietnamese watching her grew visibly disgruntled. A journalist wasn’t a real American; everyone knew they were crazy.

In the early hours of the morning, when many of the evacuees had fallen into a disjointed sleep, Helen noted a thinning in the ranks of Marines on the grounds of the compound.

An hour before dawn, the last perimeter guards withdrew, and as Helen followed, taking pictures, the barricade slammed down and was bolted—a final rude barking of metal—locking her and everyone else out. The first to notice the lack of guards were the people still outside the embassy, who had never gone to sleep, who remained frantic and now tore at the gates. The people inside the compound heard the roar and rushed the building only to find tear gas and a steel wall between them and escape.

Canned dreams and cynical promises crushed underfoot like bits of paper.

The outside gates were scaled and burst open from the inside as the last helicopters loaded on the roof. People poured in, flooding the compound in a swell of rage. Helen took a picture of a Vietnamese soldier aiming his machine gun at the disappearing helicopters, pulling the trigger, tears running down his face. Bullets sprayed the night air now tinged by dawn to the east. Understanding that their chance was gone, the crowd destroyed and looted. Helen watched a small Vietnamese woman haul a huge desk chair upside down on her head out the compound driveway. A man left with a crate of bagged potato chips.

A shabbier conclusion than even Darrow had foretold.

Now she walked through the same gates unopposed, ignored, made her way home down the deserted streets as if in a dream. Too incredible that the whole thing was finally over. Rumors were that the NVA would arrest any Western journalists and shoot them on the spot, the “bloodbath” that the Americans warned of, but she figured the reality would fall something short of that.

She came alone to the moon-shaped entrance of the alley, puddled from rain, then entered the narrow, dark throat of the cobbled path. At her crooked building, she looked up and saw her window lit, the red glow of the lampshade, and her heart, not obeying, quickened. Their old signal when Darrow had come in from being in the field. Except that he had been dead seven years now. With Linh gone, time collapsed, and it felt strangely like the start of the story and not the end. Exhausted, Darrow would be sleeping in their bed, damp from a shower, and she would enter the apartment and go to him.

She reached the lacquered Buddha door and found the brittle wood crushed in at knee level as if someone had kicked it hard with a boot. After all this time to finally be broken now. No one bothered stealing from this building. She wondered if Chuong had done it in spite after they had left. She ran her fingers over the worn surface, now splintered, touching the peacocks and the lotus blossoms that signified prosperity and long life and wisdom. She looked at the various poses of the Buddha in his enlightenment. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.

This was the way one lost one’s homeland. The first things lost were the sights, then the smells. Touch disappeared, and, of course, taste was quick to follow. Even the sounds of one’s own language, in a foreign place, evoked only nostalgia. Linh had no memory of the final helicopter flight over Saigon. No feeling of this being the end of his war. When he tried to recall anything, he saw, or rather felt, the beating of the rotors overhead in slow motion, like the pulsing of the wings of a great bird. A heartbeat. Darkness, then blinding light, then darkness. A strong mechanical wind that drove small bits of stone and dirt into his skin as he was pushed into the belly of the bird. Her broken face.

There was the familiar lifting of the helicopter, stomach dropping into feet, but for the first time he didn’t feel his inside righting itself after gaining altitude. He feared he might be dying, afraid that in lifting off from the embassy roof, his soul had dropped away. The images of his family, mother and father, brothers and sisters, Mai, Darrow and all the countless others, all passed before his eyes. And Helen had slipped between his fingers at the last minute, lost. Idly he wondered as he flew through the night if it might not be better to die right then.

The American ship rose and fell with the waves, but despite his fever, Linh held on to the railing. After the doctors had bandaged him up, he slowly made his way on deck. The sick room reminded him of a coffin. The medication they had given him made him faint-headed, but he had to see the sky, breathe the air.

He squinted to see the last of the dim landmass like the humped back of a submerged dragon through the hazy air, but the ship had already begun the long journey to the Philippines. He could not tell if it was the shadowy form of land on the horizon or merely the false vapor of clouds.

Superstition held that if one traveled too far from one’s birthplace, one’s soul would fly out and return home, leaving one nothing more than a ghost, but if that were true the whole world would be filled with nothing more than wanderers, empty shades. Women’s superstition.

He felt an isolation that would grow to become a new part of him, an additional limb. Among the Americans on board, he was a Vietnamese, but even among the refugees, he had little in common. Most were happy to have escaped. Some had sacrificed everything, including families, to be on board. But he had never taken sides. His only allegiance was to Helen, and she had forsaken him.

A young man walked up to shake his hand, and Linh had a dim memory of his face aboard the helicopter. A full, childish face with skin too tender and unformed for a beard.

“Shouldn’t you be down below?” the young man said. He had been moping around for hours, sorry for himself that he had missed the war and thinking of how to make an interesting story of the little that he had seen. When he saw Linh, his eyes lit up with possibility.

“Do you know where Helen is?” Linh’s legs were shaky, and he gripped the railing to keep standing.

“Not to worry. I gave the cases to a reporter from your office. They’re being transferred as we speak. I had no idea who she was. Man, she’s a legend.”

“Is she on board?” Linh repeated, sterner, closing his eyes with the strain of thought in his addled brain.

“No, not on this ship at least, no. Isn’t she staying to cover the changeover?”

Linh said nothing, simply looked into the opaque blue surface of the water. He had suspected that she might try such a thing, but he never guessed that she would try it without him.

“I just arrived in Saigon two weeks ago.” He glanced at Linh hopefully.

Linh remained silent. Over the years, he had doubted her love, if that love could only exist in war, if she insisted on staying partly because their love was only possible in his own country. But now he knew that she did love him. Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.

“I mean, I hurried! Left the day I graduated college.” He laughed. “And I missed the whole damned war.”

How would Linh manage to get back to her?

“Maybe we can talk? Later? When you’re feeling yourself? Fill me in. What it was like? I found out who you are. You’ve worked with everyone.”

Linh made a sweeping gesture with his hand, letting go of the railing, his legs slipping out from under him.

The young man grabbed him as he was about to slide under the railing. “Watch it there, mister! You’re coming with me down to sick bay.” He took Linh’s arm. “That was close.”

“I’m fine,” Linh said, although it was obvious to them both he was too weak to stand alone.

“Sorry, but I’m responsible for you. Don’t worry about her. Rumor is she’s charmed. They’ll probably be kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours. She’s well-known. The Communists don’t want any bad publicity.”

Linh closed his eyes and saw sun-bleached fields of elephant grass, the individual blades prostrating themselves, bowing over and over in supplication. That was how one survived, and yet Helen had never learned to bow.

“What they don’t want are any witnesses to what happens next.”

TWO Angkor

1963

Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war. He stood outside his parents’ thatched hut in the early morning, the touch of his wife’s lips still on his, when he smelled a whiff of sulfur. The scent of war. This part of Binh Duong was supposed to be safe. He had heard no shots, but nothing remained secure for long in Vietnam.

Mai’s voice could be heard rising from inside the hut, defiant, rising, the song tender and lovely among the tree leaves, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading, then the flourish of the trill in the refrain that they had rehearsed over and over. An old widowed man, coming out from his hut on the other side of the river, stopped at the sound, which was like a bow gliding across a reed, recalling his own beloved wife’s face, a tight rosebud from forty years earlier.

For the river, we depend on the ferryboatFor the night, on the young woman innkeeperFor love, one suffers the fateOf the heart…I know that this is your village.

The war was a rival stealing her husband away. Mai peeked through the door and sang clearer. Wanting to lure him back into her arms. As if they were in their school days again, and she could seduce him to miss classes and go to the river for the day, listening to her songs. The war would end soon. If she could only keep him with her, he would be safe.