The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (10 page)

_______

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 trea sure 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."