The Sorrow of War (14 page)

Yes, he had drunk his way through the night sitting in the Air France lounge. It wasn't until morning that his brain started reeling. He began to have nightmares about the naked girl they'd dressed up. The floor beneath him felt as though it was heaving, a glass wall before him seemed to go up in smoke. The apparition of a naked girl appeared before him, her chest white, her hair messy, her dark eyes swarming with ants, and on her lips a terrible twisted smile. He looked steadily at her, feeling pity. This was a human being who had been killed and humiliated, someone even he had looked down on. Those who had died and those who lived on shared a common fate in this war.

He reached out unsteadily and tried to embrace the ghostly shadow of the girl. In his drunkenness he was blubbering, generating deep pity for her poor lost soul as he blethered on with words of consolation for her.

When he spoke of these events in later life, others found it inconceivable he would waste his time becoming nostalgic over a girl at Tan Son Nhat airport who had not only been a corpse but the corpse of someone Kien had never met! Yet the woman had, strangely, left a tragic and indelible imprint on his mind. She became the last of his enduring obsessions.

The manuscript pages were heaped in random order in the mute girl's attic quarters. These flimsy pages represented Kien's past; the lines told stories that were sometimes clear, but most were at best obscure and as vague and pale as twilight. They told stories from the precariously fine border dividing life from death, blurring the line itself and finally erasing it. Ages and times were mixed in confusion, as were peace and war.

The conflicts continued from the lines on pages into the real life of the author; the fighting refused to die.

The personalities, both alive and dead, breathed and spoke to the author in his special world where everyone he had known still lived and walked and smiled and ate and joked and dreamed and loved.

The mute girl might have said the author's craziest pages came when he was most unhappy; it was then he wrote part funereally, part insanely because of his insistent passion for life. That's what she might have said.

But she could not speak at all. That was the one last enigma bequeathed to us by the author. The mute girl had no way to express herself, for she neither read nor wrote properly and of course could not speak.

She had opened a place in her heart and permanently reserved it for the author. When he had gone, the manuscript took his place in her heart. While she had his story she nurtured the hope of having him back.

She had moved into the apartment block several years before, during the war, when the roof was in disrepair.

Many years had elapsed since Kien's father had died, leaving the attic empty. Because of his ghastly paintings, superstitious folk said that a ghost had moved in. Perhaps it was an excuse not to fix the roof. In any case, the girl moved in quietly one day, and because she could not speak and because no one else wanted to go there, she remained apart from the others in the block of apartments.

Before getting close to Kien she had passed him several times on the narrow stairways. He had stretched his lips in artificial smiles that told her he was being polite and that he was drunk and would never remember her.

Kien himself wrote about her. That is how her story came to be among those pages that were found later. He wrote of her in the first person, then in the third. Passionately; dispassionately. This is what we pieced together:

She saw him as tall, broad in the shoulders, but thin and pale. His face was wrinkled, full of character, but he was often sad and tired.

When she first started to observe him she divined that the beautiful girl in the apartment next to his had been his lover, but was now shunning him.

She also knew that he was a writer. She would lip-read people saying it as he walked the streets. They called him "The Sorrowful One" and nicknames like that, but there was pride in their name-calling.

By that special gift which people deprived of normal senses develop, she also divined he was gradually becoming interested in her. She had no idea why; perhaps it was nothing but curiosity. Most people had a hidden curiosity about the handicapped. But not him, she decided.This was different.

Then, late one quiet, warm summer night, he knocked on her door. And knocked again, the way a friend who expected to be answered would persist. From inside, she could smell alcohol. She hesitated. She was cautious, yet not afraid. In fact, she was a brave girl in many quiet ways. So she opened the door.

"Arumm . . ." he said. It wasn't a greeting, nor was it an excuse for calling near midnight. She stepped back and opened the door wider and he stepped through as though he'd been expected.

He had been expected. For many weeks, she suddenly realized, she had been waiting for him. She smiled and signaled to him to sit down.

Kien staggered a little and brushed heavily against the cane chair she offered him, tipping it over. He waved the accident aside and flopped down on her bed. She righted the cane chair and placed it near her table, signaling him to move into it. "Doan be 'fraid," she hp-read him saying in slurred words.

His face was distorted by the drink, but he was kind and friendly. She offered him some herbal tea, which he accepted and gulped down.

The tea sobered him slightly. He stood up and slowly walked around the room. As he spoke she realized for the first time he had been in her room hundreds of times; this had been his father's studio.

To win his confidence, and to see his lips more clearly, she sat next to him. "People say there are ghosts here.That's not true. It's them, the ones from my father's paintings. Before his death he released them from his canvases ... a crazy and barbarous ceremony. No paintings left now . . ."

She couldn't quite understand, but as she looked over his shoulder she saw his shadow on the wall and imagined him to be his father sitting at an easel and painting obsessively.

"And then you came," he said clearly. "You aren't afraid. Who are you?" But then he rambled off again. He grasped her hand tightly. "I've got you in my novel. Understand? You've helped me remember. Right now I need to remember. Every thing. To remember this attic, everything."

She let him talk. Drunks needed to be free. She let him hold her hand tightly, twist it, until her own hand was hurting and a little swollen. He finally stopped talking and rested his head on the table. But still he held her hand. She was so tired, yet she did not try to free her hand from his.

Weeks passed without her seeing him again, though every night she could see a light at his window.

It was a light she looked for now. But was he there?

Then one day she met him at the front gate to the apartments. He had the appearance of someone returning from a long journey. He looked thinner and older and a little absent-minded. She was deeply hurt as he brushed past her, his eyes registering no recognition. Surely he had not forgotten her? Had he shuffled her aside because she was a mute?

No. A few nights later he reappeared. He was both as friendly and as distant as he had been on the first night. And there were many more visits. He came when he was drunk; it became clear to her that he would drink himself into a certain state as he wrote, then decide he needed to see the attic and to see her. He needed her to be there in the attic. They needed each other.

Story after story would pour out; they were horrible and they were vivid. Even she could read that on his lips and hear the sharp ends of certain words, words reserved for killing and for agony.

Then he would collapse, his head on the table. Asleep.

It took some time for her to realize that what he had been doing in all those visits was repeating stories he had just written only hours earlier. She had become his sounding-board. He was greedily demanding of her that she listen to what he had written, even though he knew she could not understand fully what he related.

It was then she wanted to scream at him in hatred for using her. Or scream in pain for the discomfort. Or punish him for his dictatorial use of her spirit; he had ignored her eyes, her lips, her smile, her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, her breasts, her soft hands, her long legs, her swaying walk, her very breath and her mute but happy smile. And worse, her natural perfume of love.

Still, he became her passion. She admitted it now to herself. She needed those rare and wonderful evenings. She was like a vine, linked to his crises. She didn't mind his drunkenness. She needed his hand to twist hers. She needed him to talk and talk. The more confused the stories the longer he stayed, the longer he charmed her and loved her through the rhythm of his talk.

Rumors began. Other apartment-dwellers had seen him going to her. "What a strange love affair," they said. "He's an author. She's a mute. But you must admit, she is a pretty young thing." "How do they do it? I mean, how do they make arrangements? One's dumb, the other's crazy!"

And so it went on. Until: "Will they marry?"

Women whispered. Men chuckled. Both with envy.

She would have loved to know what they were saying, but of course she had no idea. She would have forgiven them. Sadly, none of it was true.

She knew she was nothing to Kien. He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Hoa, then for Phuong, the girl next door.Then for the invalid Hien on the train.Then, horribly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport on 30 April 1975.

He also mistook her for certain ghosts. At times he wasn't aware she was even female, for he changed her name often from masculine to feminine.

Even so, he was irresistible. She had deliberately waited for him one night, somehow knowing he would be relatively sober. He had arrived, smiling, and swung himself into the seat, just a little tipsy. He was a bit shy, but he seemed at home. He seemed to be saying to her that this was the night she should be talking. He even asked if she could speak to him. She shook her head "No!"

He continued to speak, as though it had been a polite question he had not wanted answered.

"This is the last of the novel," he said clearly.

"Now," he said, equally clearly, "I don't know what to do with the mountain of papers." He meant his novel. Now that he had written it he had no use for it. Whatever devils he had needed to rid himself of had gone.The novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils.

Kien had written for the sake of writing, not to publish.

He looked over the room, then out of the window. She watched his hands, then his eyes, then his lips as they softly formed poetry in tune with his magical glances as he described his latest story.

She leaned over. Slowly, gently, she kissed him.

Their first kiss.

He seemed unaware. He changed the subject, telling a story of his father's studio. This one, here. Now.

"I don't know what to do with all these papers," he said.

This awakened her. She leaned over and kissed him again. This awakened him. He gently pushed her back on the bed. But his eyes were a little crazed and for a moment she expected a beating or some retribution.

He lifted from her and left. She could hear his footsteps on the stairs as he returned to his apartment.

He did not return for some days. She waited for him with painful anxiety, but he did not come.

One night she decided she would visit him. There was another blackout, which gave her the cover of darkness to move around. She tiptoed downstairs and peered through the partly opened door; it was never locked, anyway. She could see him by the light of a kerosene lamp. The smells of alcohol and kerosene mixed in the air.

She thought she heard him groan as he wrote. He seemed obsessed and definitely didn't feel her presence. She stood by the door like that for a long time. From then on during every

blackout she came down and watched him. His hair grew longer, his face grew more haggard. He looked older. Surely the writing had to end; yet she did not want it to end, fearing the end would have other consequences for her.

After some weeks, on another blackout night, she had returned later than usual and stopped to peer in on her way upstairs. Kien was kneeling by his stove shoving torn paper into it and lighting and relighting it.

She silently closed the door behind her and softly walked over and kneeled beside him. She recalled the story of the frenzied destruction of his father's paintings; she placed her hand over his, to stop him putting another page into the fire.

At first he looked startled to see her there. But he stopped the burning, letting the fire go cold. He turned and took her in his arms, away from the stove. In the total silence he then possessed her as though nothing else in the world mattered. She gasped in desperation for him and for many hours they remained locked together. His loneliness pierced her like a knife, throbbing painfully.

He left while she was still asleep. Somehow she knew she would never see him again.This was his final departure.

She understood he had left his apartment for her. He had left the door wide open and a chilling wind had blown through, disturbing the papers and carrying many of them into the hall and down the stairs. She gathered them all together, tidied his room, and took the manuscript to her own attic.

None of the pages were numbered. There was no obvious order to them and she was able to understand only a very little of it. But she knew she had to keep them.