Читать книгу The Lotus Eaters - Tatjana Soli - Страница 7

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.

Ca, Linh’s youngest brother, appeared at the side of the hut and mimed Mai’s performance, putting his hand delicately to his cheek and holding his legs primly pressed together while throwing out his hip like the French chanteuse in Dalat they had made fun of. Linh and Mai burst out laughing.

Mai’s tears too painful, Linh had forbidden her to see him off, her belly large with their first child. A boy, the midwife had predicted, because of how high she carried the baby—tight under her heart.

The night before, the family had performed the play Linh had written, and the villagers had stomped the ground and hooted and gotten drunk in approval. Linh still felt a warm tingle of pleasure in his hands and face at the thought of its success, but Mai had not let him enjoy a minute of it. The roaring audience demanding she sing her solo four times had emboldened her, and she wanted to leave for Saigon that very day.

“How can I leave? A deserter? They shoot deserters.”

“They shoot soldiers, too.” Mai held her belly, a hand at each side, and took deep breaths with her eyes closed, a new habit that unnerved him. “They have no time with poor soldiers like you. In Saigon, we’ll use false names. After the baby is born, I’ll get a job singing.”

Linh didn’t know what to do; he wanted to be a simple man, but fate pulled like a weight on his shoulders. He steeled himself with the thought that he was going off to fight so there would be no war in his son’s future. Mai didn’t understand that the families of deserters also suffered. Nor did he tell her that her sister, Thao, was already on her way to Saigon, even though her voice was many shades rougher than Mai’s. If she had known, the earth would have broken open with her wails, and Linh couldn’t deal with women now.

This is how history unfolds: a doubt here mixed with certainty there. One never knew which choice was the right one…

He tested the air again to catch the reek of fired weapons, but the odor was gone. Had it been real or only his imagination?

At thirty years old, Linh had already been in the army for four years. He had joined the northern army, then escaped to the South only to be conscripted by the SVA. A lackluster soldier. Sick of the war, but an able-bodied man had no other choice if he wished to stay alive. The flowing robes of a poet suited him better than the constricting uniform of a soldier.

Mai thought he should become a singer, a kind of matinee idol, to make the women swoon. She did not acknowledge how the years of soldiering had changed him—the slight limp from a piece of shrapnel in his foot when he was tired; the look in his eye, a new uncertainty. He was like a man with a golden tongue who is suddenly asked to conduct business in an unknown language.

His father had been a scholar, a professor of literature in Hanoi, and in his youth, Linh had shown a passion for writing poetry and putting on plays. But the war squeezed out everything else. Every young man was forced to take sides, either the northern or the southern army. Sometimes, over the years, one ended up fighting for both sides at different times. A paradox, he would later discover, the Americans could not accept.

Wounded in the foot, for a time he gladly traded in his gun for an army clerical job near his family. The workload was light, his paperwork never collected, and pretty soon he no longer bothered with it but went back to plays. A romantic young man, always dreaming, he hoped he had somehow slipped between the cracks, been forgotten. He and Mai planned their escape to Saigon, but he couldn’t tell her he delayed because he was afraid. After almost a year, his father’s bribe money ran out, and his company had informed him it was time to pick up a gun again.

Linh posed in front of a mirror in his uniform, playing the part of soldier. Squaring his chin. He wanted to look brave but thought he looked more confused than anything else.

Mai’s fears were partly true. The last time he had left he had not seen his family or his new bride for two years. When he left now, there was no knowing when he would see them again. He lifted the large bag of rice cakes Mai had given him. Her instructions were to come back before the cakes were all eaten.

The Americans had started to join the SVA on missions as advisers. Giant, they towered above Linh and the other soldiers as they handed out sticks of gum and cigarettes. Linh learned to recognize the Americans because they smiled more than the French, and because of their perfect, straight, white teeth. Always impulsive, Linh immediately decided these new foreigners were an improvement over their old masters.

The advisers stood with their legs spread apart, feet planted in big boots, and hands on their hips, nodding and conferring with Linh’s captain, Dung, who everyone knew was a fool. He wore a long white silk scarf around his neck, copied from some old American movie, and the majority of his attention was spent in keeping it clean. Jaws snapping with chewing tobacco, the Americans stood over the felled bodies of two Viet Cong, their bodies as small and gray and lifeless as river birds, their tattered black shorts barely covering their thighs. Did it escape everyone’s notice that the South Vietnamese soldiers more resembled their enemies than their allies? After all his years in the army, Linh still could not bear to look at the dead, and he hurried off to check supplies.

The first American Linh met was Sam Darrow, a tall, birdlike man who didn’t smile like the others. Darrow, slouched over, still stood taller than the other Americans. Thin, he had sharp limbs that jutted out from his rolled-up sleeves, the skin stretched across large, bony wrists. His thick-framed glasses were a part of his face, head moving from side to side like a bird’s, as if trying to add angles to what he saw. Linh stared at the name, DARROW, and another name, LIFE, stenciled on his jacket. Cameras that Linh had only dreamed about owning hung from around his neck, one on an embroidered Hmong neckband, one on plain leather.

“Come on,” one of the advisers yelled. “Take some snaps of us.”

Dung checked his hair in a small gold mirror that he pulled from his pocket. He preened as Darrow sauntered over.

“I don’t think…” he said.

“Don’t worry about thinking,” the adviser said. “Take a picture.”

“You got it.”

Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. “That should do you,” he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.

“Does America train in war better than it trains in photography?” Linh said.

Darrow smiled. “A smart guy.”

“I’m Linh. Tran Bau Linh.”

“You, Linh, are a sly one. How about if I ask Dung over there to assign you to help me today? Keep our little secret?”

The company decided to make camp that night about half an hour from Linh’s village, planning to move out in the morning. They had not even gone to sleep when the first bombs went off nearby. The new advisers used their shiny new radios to call in for an air bombing of the surrounding area. Linh would never talk about the events of that night. The memory burrowed deep inside him and remained mute.

This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.

The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai’s rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai’s cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.

During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoeshine boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn’t blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war—to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.

In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor’s balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father’s lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh’s father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one’s masters.

The teacher needed the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using “Don’t,” she said, “Give it a miss.” “Don’t go down the street” became “The street, give it a miss.” Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.

In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is. The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are peaceful, they are the enemy. We kill; they die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.

On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh passed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life, handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face shiny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.

“You have a job?” Linh said. “I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow.”

Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. “I didn’t know Darrow had any friends.” Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.

Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. “Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp space. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn’t for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff.” Gary figured the young Vietnamese man’s reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had a new assistant.

Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rushing beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.

They drove the empty, hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.

“You’re right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride,” Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. “People talk too much anyway.” He was a man who didn’t let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn’t question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh’s silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.

By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment—cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.

Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. “Complainer. But not when there is a tip.”

Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn’t moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.

During a break, the workers collapsed into the shade. Samang gossiped among his coworkers that the Westerners would kill them by working through the heat of the day. Darrow bellowed out a laugh and with his long strides moved to greet the new arrivals. He was even taller and thinner than Linh had remembered, as if his figure had attenuated during the months that had passed. Or had Linh’s misfortune bent him? Made him smaller in the world? He recognized the American’s large bony wrists.

Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past assistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.

“You’re as red as a lobster!” Darrow said.

“The climate’s killing me. Look who I found!” Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. “Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?”

“Sure.” Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude. Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary’s jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He cocked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. “How are you, my old friend?”

“Why don’t you make foil shields for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?” Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.

Darrow let out a big laugh. “My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course.”

Linh smiled but said nothing.

“You really do know each other?” Gary asked.

“Why would you bring someone who I didn’t know?” Darrow said.

Gary looked back and forth between the two men. “You’re one funny guy. That’s what I love about you. He’s going in with you to the delta and Cu Chi. Lots of good stuff there. Cover stuff, you know? Another Congo. How can one man be so lucky? Chop, chop.”

“Got it.” A mixture of feeling angry and tired, and something else—a strange, gauzy sensation that Darrow recognized as fear. Did Gary sense that he was hiding out? Trying to forget about Henry? That he was waiting for something? A sign that things were safe again? Why didn’t Gary go hump through Cu Chi and risk getting his ass blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his assistant. Darrow’s business was faces, but he hadn’t recognized this one—Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in hell.

“So how much longer, you think?” Gary asked as they walked back toward the jeep.

“Till I get the picture.” He played Gary, pulled his chain, unfairly resenting the push. After all, it wasn’t his fault—this crisis of nerve. Henry broke the illusion that they were charmed because they carried cameras instead of guns. It would pass. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The accumulation of deaths and horrors and jitters that got him. The curse of curses was that he was good at war, loved the demands of the job. What was frightening was he had developed an appetite for it. Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appetite would win, and his shrewd boss counted on that.

Gary stopped in front of the jeep, and in a gesture of bravado slammed his hand down on the trunk. He barely kept himself from wincing and crying out in pain. “It’s going down now, man, and you should be the one getting it. This old pile of rocks will still be here when the war’s over.”

Darrow wagged his head. “Did you know that the French who discovered Angkor asked the peasants who was responsible for creating it? They answered, ‘It just grew here.’” More and more it seemed to him a possibility just to sit out the war where he was.

Gary wiped his face and shook his head. “That’s truly crazy.”

“You never know.”

“How’s that? Who cares about this tourist crap? Just hurry back home, okay?” Gary tapped the driver on the shoulder to start the motor. “And take it easy on this new guy. My hunch is that he bullshitted me to get the work. Let’s put it this way—there’s no waiting line for the job.”

“Sure you don’t want to spend the night? Hang out a couple of days?” The truth was he liked Gary’s callousness, his will to do anything to get the picture, because that was the way Darrow used to be. And he didn’t want to be alone another night, and didn’t have much faith in Linh as a drinking buddy.

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I want to do, hang in this godforsaken place—Angkor What?”

“The gods will strike you for that.”

“Add it to the list, baby. I don’t care how good the stuff is you’re smoking. Get me back to Saigon with air-conditioning and ice cubes. Headquarters is busting me about hiring women, you think you have problems?”

“I’m hurt. Thought you’d want to watch a genius in action.” Darrow slapped his palm against the jeep hood.

“Don’t take a week? Right?”

“Hurry, Gary. Get out of here before the sun goes down and the monsters come out.”

After the jeep had left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but the black weight that was the suck and pull of the war had arrived, and it pressed down on Darrow’s shoulders. He should tie himself down to one of the big stones to keep himself there, to avoid Gary’s siren call. He smiled into the shade where Linh was standing. Too bright; he couldn’t make out Linh’s expression. The day he met him had indeed been dipped in hell, Darrow assigned to cover the joint operations as American advisers walked the SVA through a basic search mission. When they were fired on, the advisers called down airpower, but it dropped short, falling on them and civilians. A free-for-all clusterfuck. The SVA panicked and started firing on their own people, on civilians instead of the enemy, who had probably long retreated. The next day as they reassembled, the man assigned as his assistant was AWOL, nowhere to be found. He had seemed an unenthusiastic soldier. Perhaps he had used the chaos as an excuse to slip away. Perfect, Darrow laughed out loud, finally the type of assistant he deserved.

For the next week, Linh lived in the jungle side by side with Darrow. They rose at dawn, ate a simple breakfast of rice, fish, vegetables, and the dark Arabic coffee Darrow had become addicted to in the Middle East, insisting on brewing it himself. They worked all through the day with a crew of a dozen men, including the two brothers who were his favorites, taking hundreds of exposures, spending hours to light a subject, sometimes to the point of sending Veasna shimmying up a tree to strip foliage that was blocking the sun. One day, Veasna spent five hours picking half a tree away, leaf by leaf. He came down dehydrated, and Linh fed him glass after glass of water while Darrow hurried to get the right late afternoon light.

Darrow figured at that rate, he could spend the rest of his natural life photographing the grounds and never have to see another dead soldier. Yet at night they could hear thunder on the horizon, the war’s pulse, beckoning.

The two men shared a small room like a monk’s cell, crowded by a mountain of photographic equipment Darrow insisted on cleaning and moving it into the room each night so none of it would be stolen. Veasna usually stayed behind to help clean, while Samang hurried to town to chase women.

“So, Boss,” Veasna said. “You get me good job?”

“I’ll certainly put in a word for you in Saigon,” Darrow said.

“No, Saigon. I stay number one in Cambodia.”

“But there’s nothing here. No war.”

“Less competition then.”

Often Darrow stumbled across Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on scraps of paper that he quickly put away when approached. He caught glimpses of words and was surprised they were in English. His little AWOL friend a never-ending mystery. Nights in the stone city, when the workers returned to the village, seemed haunted to Linh. Darrow worked away, oblivious to his surroundings, the obsession of his work keeping him from the luring obsession of the war, but Linh felt ill at ease in this mausoleum. In the stillness, the place swarmed with gliding shadows. He, Samang, and Veasna took their meals in the village. Veasna talked about how the Cambodian traditional life was being ruined by the royal family, how they needed to return to the roots of the village, the communal life of the family. He said Samang had gotten corrupted by spending time in Phnom Penh. Linh stayed to drink tea and talk with the other Vietnamese and Cambodians on the project. Many talked of broken families, hardships, and escaping across the border to avoid being conscripted into the army.

The first night Linh came back too early and saw a woman from the village leaving Darrow’s room. The lamplight outlined her figure as she stood outside, as full and rounded as the carved apsaras on the walls of the temples. Darrow came to the doorway and pulled on the cloth around her hips, reeling her back inside. After that, Linh made sure he did not come back till midnight.

“Where are you so late?” Darrow asked when Linh came in.

Linh did not like this man’s disingenuousness.

“Found a girlfriend?”

“I’m married.”

“Sorry. Of course not.” Darrow nodded. “Stay for dinner sometimes. I like conversation. And I cook.”

“You have friends.”

Darrow smiled. “Lovely, huh? My God, lovely. Naked, she’s the replica of the ancient statues here. Brought to life. As if no time had passed since this place was built.”

One hot afternoon, the air as heavy as stone, Linh sat alone on a terrace far away from where they worked. They had been up since before the sun to capture the light on the buildings at dawn. Sleepy, eyelids weighted, Linh heard only the stillness, broken by the occasional shrill cries of the monkeys who scampered across the warm stones in search of offerings of fruit. The monkeys were feared. They bit and sometimes were rabid, and the workers trapped them and roasted the healthy ones for meals.

He had knotted a piece of jute rope and slipped his hands through the circle, then proceeded to twist so that the rope bit a tighter and tighter figure eight around his wrists. At each tightening, he felt a burning and then relief, his mind filled only with the white-hot sting of his wrists instead of the deeper pain that was always there. So preoccupied by heat and pain, he did not notice Darrow passing by.

Darrow disappeared and then returned minutes later, drenched with sweat. “How about it?” he called to Linh from across a courtyard. Pretending ignorance, he climbed the stairs in his big, loping gait, carrying two beers. Linh was so dazed he did not notice Darrow’s heavy breathing, did not know that Darrow had run back to his room like a madman, torn open a cooler, grabbed two beers, then run back.

Bound, he nodded, too late to hide the fact of the rope.

Darrow leaned over with a knife and cut the twisted rope between the purpled wrists. Acting as if it all were the most normal thing in the world, he then pried the caps off the bottles and handed one over. He’d noted the freshness of the scars when Linh first arrived. Darrow knew the wreckage of war. “Let’s talk.”

Linh rubbed his hands against each other, felt the tug of his callused palm, blood slow like sand through his veins.

“You were Tran Bau Linh last we met. An SVA soldier.”

“That man is dead. Now I’m Nguyen Pran Linh.”

“Okay.”

“I shouldn’t have lied that I’d worked for you.”

Darrow rubbed his face. “A cursed day, the day we met.”

“Yes.”

“Does this”—Darrow waved his hand at the rope—“have to do with that night? You disappeared.”

Linh looked away. “I do good work for you?”

“Best assistant I’ve had.”

“Is that the price to keep my job? To tell you?”

Darrow took a long sip of his beer and looked across the nearby jungle. “You don’t trust me yet. That’s okay.”

“You’re happy here?” Linh asked.

“Like getting a chance to explore the pyramids. Gary’s a good guy, but he doesn’t get it. I’ve had enough war, you know? Hell, of course you know. Just can’t quite get around to quitting. So whatever your reasons for being here are, okay by me.”

Linh took a slow sip of his beer. “You think you are in a peaceful paradise here. But you’re hiding in a graveyard. Their violence is simply past, ours is happening now. Each stone laid in place here is laid on top of blood. Violence all around you, but you don’t recognize it. It’s easy for you—you don’t belong here.”

“I didn’t make the war. I was just a mediocre photographer, headed toward wedding shots. War made me famous.”

“What about duty?”

“Far as I can see, you don’t belong, either. Officially disappeared.” Dar-row stared at him. “So why not run?”

Linh bowed his head and was silent so long Darrow thought he would not answer.

“From what happened to me, there is no running. ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.’”

Darrow was speechless at his Milton-quoting, AWOL soldier-turned-assistant. What in the world more would he find out about this man?

On their day off, Linh woke to the usual smell of cardamom-scented coffee being brewed but then smelled something else—sweet like the French bakeries in Saigon. He found Darrow outside nursing a skillet over an open fire.

“Pancakes,” Darrow said, not turning. “My wife sent me a box of mix. It even has dried blueberries in it. And a bottle of Vermont syrup. Get a fork.”

“You’re married?”

“She thought it would make me homesick. You know how women are.”

“I’ll never get over my wife’s love.”

Darrow looked at him. “I’m sorry…”

Linh waved away the apology. He didn’t want to be one of those people who couldn’t stand another’s happiness. “She would make my favorite, banh cuon, rice cakes, each time I left.”

When breakfast was ready, Linh looked down at the golden cake on his plate, the brown puddle of syrup.

“Dig in!” Darrow said.

Linh took a bite and gagged. The texture and the sweetness and the flavor, all peculiar. He poked at the blue pools of fruit in the cake with the prongs of his fork and felt queasy.

Darrow ate a stack of five cakes, along with cup after cup of coffee. “This takes me home.”

When he turned away, Linh threw the pancake into the bushes behind him. When Darrow turned around again and saw the empty plate, he smiled and plopped another on it, despite Linh’s protests. “You’re turning more American by the minute.”

Later in the morning, Veasna had a question about drop dates, and Darrow was nowhere to be found. After searching for an hour, they finally tracked him down to where he stood in front of the carved stone face of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Motioning Veasna away, Linh watched Darrow study the sculpture—blank, unseeing eyes, serene smile of the lips, the chips and cracks and lichen, shadows that changed the expression as the sun crossed it—until nightfall. Linh could work with such a man.

At his usual late hour, Linh returned from the village and stretched out on his mat. Darrow, as always, wide-awake and reading. Glass of scotch at his side, he insisted Linh join him with a small glass. Linh wet his lips with the alcohol—he would have drunk it even if it was poison to please—then closed his eyes and felt the walls spin. When Darrow came across interesting parts in his book, he read them aloud, regardless of whether Linh, muddled with drink, had fallen asleep or not, so that Linh acquired his knowledge of Mouhot’s history of the ruins in dreamlike segments. He would never be sure if the stories were real or his imagination.

The king of Cambodia, along with an entourage that numbered into the thousands, went elephant hunting through the dense forests northeast of the great lake, Tonlé Sap, in the year 1550. In some places, passage was so restricted that his slaves had to cut away vegetation and trees in order to pass through. They came upon a particularly thick, overgrown place through which they could make no progress. Finally they realized these were solid stone walls beneath the dense foliage—the outer wall of Angkor, rediscovered by the Khmers after having been forgotten since the twelfth century.

One day when work had finished early, Darrow rounded the corner of a building and ran straight into Linh, who quickly stuffed a scrap of paper away into his pocket. “What are you writing all the time?”

“Nothing. Scribbled poems, stories.”

“Really?”

“I used to write plays.”

“Let me read them? You write in English, don’t you?”

Linh looked down, his skin flushed. “Sometime, yes, maybe.” His hand a firm no over his pocket. When he came to his room to go sleep that night, he found a new thick spiral notebook and a package of ballpoint pens on his mat.

Finally, the last picture taken, exposures packed away in their cans, Darrow could not prolong the inevitable any longer. Finally he would go. He would not starve himself any longer, but must gorge himself on war. On their last day, as the trucks were loaded, he walked among the workers, handing out small gifts. Veasna and Samang were nowhere to be found. Since Linh had taken the morning off, Darrow went into the village alone with only a translator. He hoped to catch a glimpse of the young woman who came nights, who fed him the soft-fleshed jackfruit and mangosteens, but knew he could not ask for her. He wanted to make the brothers a farewell gift of an old Rolleiflex that he had taught them to use. Unable to find anyone, Darrow had the translator question the villagers. Long minutes of back-and-forth, indecipherable, while Darrow sat on a rock, sweating and swatting at flies that he hadn’t noticed while he was under the spell of his work. A shaking of leaves, and the young woman appeared from behind a banyan tree. She leaned against the trunk and rubbed her hand against her thigh, a smile on her lips, and Darrow felt twice as bad about going. Finally a shrug from the translator.

“What?” Darrow said in a raised voice. His irritation, a breach of etiquette. The girl’s hand dropped from her thigh, and she hurried away. Screw the camera, more than anything else he had an overpowering urge to run after her for one last meeting.

“Samang die of snakebite two days ago. Veasna is in mourning.” The brother had been climbing the side of an overgrown wall of the ruins when a cobra lurched out and bit him in the thigh.

Darrow slapped at the air. “Why didn’t anyone tell us? We have anti-venom. A doctor is only a few hours away.”

“He die fast. Not want to bother you.”

Shaken, Darrow returned to the camp, slammed his belongings into bags, the spell of the place broken—the girl, the temples, the pancakes—all of it ridiculous and driving him crazy; he just wanted to get back to real work.

Linh walked in and considered him.

“You heard about Samang?” Darrow snapped.

“It is sad.”

“Not sad! Stupid. Ignorant. It didn’t need to happen. Forget this place.”

“Samang could have been working on other job when the snake found him.”

“But he wasn’t. He was on my job.”

Linh picked up his bags. “I’ll go check equipment on the trucks.” He turned away, then turned back. “He was very lucky, doing his duty, earning to support his family. You should give the camera to Veasna. If he does well, he can earn money. That is all that matters to Samang now.”

Darrow snorted and shook his head. He shoved a heavy case out the door with a hard push of his foot. “I hope I’m not as lucky as Samang.” He grabbed a towel and wiped off his face, put his glasses back on. “Damn unlucky in my book.”

“And then there is the young lady you entertained. Their sister-in-law. Widowed with two small children to feed. It would be thoughtful to give her some money so she could do something besides sell her body to foreigners.”

The Europeans, upon finding Angkor, refused to believe that the natives could have built the original temples. Briefly they entertained the thought that they had found Plato’s lost city of Atlantis.

The young woman dropping pieces of warm fruit into Darrow’s mouth had given him a false sense of understanding that was lost again, that did not transport to the modern world, where a syringe and a dying man were separated more by fatalism than actual distance. He felt like that ancient king hacking through the jungle, stone walls of his own treasure barring his way.

Before leaving Angkor, Linh dropped a sheath of torn-out notebook paper on Darrow’s lap.

During the reign of King Hung there lived two brothers, Tam and Lang, who were devoted to each other. They were orphaned at a young age and came to live with a kind master who had a beautiful daughter. As they grew up, both brothers came to secretly love the girl, but the master gave her hand in marriage to the older brother, Tam. The young man and woman were blissfully in love, so much so that Tam quite forgot about his younger brother, Lang.

Unable to stand his unhappiness anymore—the loss of the two most important people in the world to him, and his jealousy at their happiness—Lang ran away, and when he finally came to the sea and could go no farther, he fell on the ground and died of grief, and was changed into a white, chalky, limestone rock.

Tam, realizing his brother was gone, felt ashamed of his neglect and went in search of him. In despair of not finding him, he stopped when he reached the sea, sat down on a white, chalky, limestone rock, and wept until he died, changing into a tree with a straight trunk and green palm leaves, an Areca tree.

When the young woman realized that her husband was gone, she went in search of him. Worn out, she finally arrived at the sea, and sat down under the shade of an Areca palm, with her back against a large white chalky rock. She cried in despair at losing her husband until she died, and changed into the creeping betel vine, which twined itself around the trunk of the Areca palm.

“Yours?”

“A famous legend of Vietnam. As best as I can remember. So you begin to understand where you are.”

“It’s sad. Tragic.”

“These are our national symbols. We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even.”

When they returned to Saigon, Gary paced the office with a summons from ARVN headquarters demanding Linh’s immediate appearance. The identity papers he had submitted were all faked. “I knew it. I knew you were too good to be true. Who’s Tran Bau Linh? Huh? They think he’s a deserter from the SVA.”

“Hell if I know. Linh’s worked for me the last year.”

“How’s that since I introduced you a few weeks ago?”

“A year. I’ll go down and talk to ARVN. You know with a little grease, they won’t care.”

Linh followed Darrow outside. “How we met…”

“We’ve worked together for a year.”

“You are sure?”

“Want to go soldiering again?”

“No.”

“A little flattery and some pictures of the boss go a long way. I noticed how late you stayed out so you wouldn’t run into my friend.” Darrow squinted in the sunlight, breaking into a grin. “We make a good team. No one is exactly begging to work with me.”

When Linh became Darrow’s assistant, the war was small and new. A bush war, a civil war in a backwater country. The American presence was the only thing that led Darrow there, a reluctant last stop before retiring from the war business.

They sat in the gloom of rubber trees in Cu Chi, the Iron Triangle region, after a firefight. Linh had stood up to get the picture, before Darrow knocked him down, and small bits of shrapnel had nicked him in the face and neck. Even the Leica he had been shooting with had been damaged. Darrow bent over the medic, making sure he cleaned out the half-moon-shaped nick on his cheek. “Now you have a beauty mark. Women love scars.”

“I can fix the camera,” Linh said.

Darrow took a long drag on his cigarette. “Don’t see how.”

Linh picked up spent shell casings and a metal fork. Darrow watched him, amused.

“Where’d you learn that? SVA doesn’t teach that kind of stuff.”

Linh shrugged.

“You’re the onion man. Peel back a layer and get another mystery.”

“No mystery.”

“I’ve read the NVA train photographers to work under any field conditions,” Darrow said.

“I’ve read that also.”

Darrow laughed. “They pose shots. Making heroes. Unlike us. We’re showing the truth.”

The rest of the company was out of earshot, but still Linh spoke softly.

“Make believe that a man’s father, a professor at the university in Hanoi, fought the French to free our country. And the French became the Americans. And the Nationalists became the Communists. And pretend the son learned to fix a camera with casings and a fork for the North, but that he found their promises to be lies. He escaped but was made to fight for the SVA. And pretend that after all this time fighting, all he wanted was to flee the war. If this was true, would you take this assistant?”

“Why doesn’t he run away?”

“He is tied to his country.” Linh rubbed his hand over his wrist.

Darrow took another drag on his cigarette, handed one to Linh. “This man has suffered enough. I’d be proud to work alongside him.”

Linh turned away. He could not help feeling he had lost face by telling so much, and yet he knew the Americans expected this, needed this abasement to feel comfortable.

“Question?” Darrow said. “This imaginary man who worked in the North, did he ever see Uncle?”

“I imagine…yes.” The more one told, the less real the story seemed.

“Where?”

“Outside Hanoi. Visiting a friend who served as a guard. A tiny village, just a few huts strung along a canal. A small vegetable garden, and he was bent over the rows for hours, weeding. All alone. He was only in his fifties but was sick with TB and looked ancient. Just a glimpse. He was just an old man weeding his garden. Hidden because he was in plain sight.”

They went out with an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) unit on patrol into a guerilla-dominated province. Darrow favored these small, specialized units who went native because they allowed him to understand the nature of the particular place better than the larger units that turned everyplace into an American base. Special Forces had agreed to let Darrow go along on the condition that there would be no mention of the mission, no pictures. He knew from past experience it was worth it simply to get the lay of the land even though it drove Gary crazy.

For days they walked in silence in the dim claustrophobia of jungle, not coming across another human being. Day melted into night that melted back into day. They lost track of time, staking out spidery trails, unable to move or talk—the only sound rain slapping against leaves.

Linh thought of the blank stone faces at Angkor staring out at nothing. Centuries passing without a single human voice intruding. Relieved by the sheer physical exertion, at night he sank down to the earth, asleep; in the morning he woke to find his hands clenched around his wrists, the skin bruised and chafed. The effect of the patrol on Darrow was unexpected. Maybe it was the time away at Angkor, sharpening his eye. After all the wars he had covered, this place spoke to him. The quality of the light on young American faces in this ancient land that was by turns beautiful and horrific. He had found his war.

The patrol spent the night in a small clearing, a village of six huts along a small tributary river. The people were kind, even killing a chicken in their honor, while the soldiers shared their rations. The chief brought out a bottle of moonshine to sip on. Leaving at dawn, they stopped by again five days later to get out of the rain and came upon only smoldering ruins. A dozen villagers dead, stinking in a thick sea of mud. Since there would be no acknowledgment that Americans were even in the off-limits province, no report of the violence. The enemy had been watching and had taken vengeance. An enemy that ruthless commanded a certain awe. Darrow realized that Vietnam was going to be a very different thing from other wars he had covered. The surface of things was just the beginning. The surface of things was nothing. Linh had it right: things hidden because they were in plain view.

Four of the soldiers disappeared down a path toward the west in hopes of finding the trail of the departing enemy. They would meet back in six hours. Darrow, Linh, and the remaining soldier retraced their steps to the original landing zone.

They waited another full day in the long elephant grass, unable to talk or play music or even start a fire to heat food. The sun beat down on their backs, the air heavy, a wet sheet, buzzing with insect energy. Linh, hidden in the tall grass, dreamed of running away. But where would he go? Finally, as protocol demanded, the soldier radioed for an extraction, although it would give away their presence and endanger the others.

And then like three lean and hungry wolves in the far distance, the missing soldiers appeared, carrying the fourth. They were struggling, exhausted, each stumbling with a leg or an arm of the fourth, now unconscious, soldier.

As naturally as Darrow had picked up the camera at the first sign of movement, he now put it down and ran through the field to help carry the wounded man. A decision without hesitation because it had been made and acted on a thousand times before.

As instinctively as Darrow going out across the field, Linh forgot his dream of running and followed him. The lines and dirt on the soldiers’ faces, the dry, unblinking stare of their eyes, showed the war had already started, the suffering begun.

No one had time to notice that Linh took a picture of Darrow helping to carry the wounded soldier. He was the only one in the shot without a weapon, the only one without helmet or flak jacket. For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be too brave.

Returning to Saigon, Darrow was gloomy. “Pictures would have shown what’s going on. Now nothing. If it’s not photographed, it didn’t happen.”

“Those villagers don’t care if they were photographed or not.”

“You have time to get out of this, you know,” Darrow said. He still did not understand that the worst had already happened to Linh.

“So can you.”

But that was not true. Darrow knew they were both caught.