The Sorrow of War (28 page)

Fate waited to take them from the terrible present back to the happy days of the past.

Spreading before him are the past forty years. Memories, numerous memories wave to him and urge him to march forever along the road of the past. The past without end, a never-ending story of loyalty, friendship, brotherhood, comradeship, and humanity.

Forever he would ache with longing to follow that shining light from the horizons of his past, to return to those moments of the first sparks of war, the glimmerings of his first adventures and the light of love shining from deep in his childhood.

When the writer left his apartment, he told no one. Frankly, no one paid any attention because he often disappeared for a week, sometimes a month.This time maybe he would disappear for a year, or forever. It wouldn't be unusual, or cause problems either.

Those who know how to be totally free and make their own opportunities would realize that. They can change direction at will, like a gust of wind.

The day he departed, he left his door wide open. At dawn the wind blew through his curtained window, letting drizzle into the room, wetting his furniture. Ashes blew from the stove, papers from his table, from the bookcase, and from a heap of pages in the corner.

The mute woman had obviously stayed the night, and found herself alone in his bed. Silently, she tidied the messy room. She gathered all the sheets of paper and piled them on top of the manuscript, then carted the whole stack up into her attic quarters.

She had no idea why or how he had left or where he had gone. But as she couldn't speak she couldn't ask anyone. She could only ponder his departure, and her loneliness in not knowing weighed even more heavily than her handicap.

She had forgotten that he'd once decided to throw the lot into the fire. She had kept the pages, not burned them. People said of her that she was like a lost-property guardian, keeping all those messy papers.

As for me, I thought that her silent waiting for our neighborhood writer to reappear was something akin to the loyalty of a reader towards a beloved masterpiece. If this was so, then at least the writer's unpublished work had the wholehearted admiration of its only reader.

Later, by chance, I got the entire manuscript from her. I don't know why I should have believed her silent demand that I should patiently and carefully read everything, paragraph after paragraph. Certainly, I started.Just out of curiosity, you understand.

Who was that character everybody in the street had considered so strange and hard to figure out? A haunted soul, they said. A legacy of the past. An alcoholic drinking to repent, to bury his secrets and his sins. A man who had been loved and liked by women, but really a spiritual hermaphrodite. The last true bourgeois of the district, rebellious, extremist, but also timid and hesitant. So people said. But they were still not certain.

It was during this period that I was attracted by this eccentric character. That's why I tried reading his long stories, although it was difficult.

At first I tried to rearrange the manuscript pages into chronological order, to make the manuscript read like the sort of book I was familiar with. But it was useless. There was no chronological order at all. Any page seemed like the first, any page could have been the last. Even if the manuscript had been numbered, even if no pages had been burned, or moth-eaten, or withheld by the author, if by chance they were all there, this novel would still be a work created by turbulent, even manic inspiration.

One became immersed in each sequence, each page. Sometimes the descriptions were compelling. The long-forgotten name of a once-familiar battlefield moved me. The close-up fighting, the small details of the soldiers' lives. The images of former colleagues appearing for just a moment, yet so clearly. The flow of the story continually changed. From beginning to end the novel consisted of blocks of images. A certain cluster of events, then disruptions, some even wiped off the page as if it had fallen into a hole in time. Many would say this was a disruption of the plot, a disconnection, a loss of perspective. They'd say this style proved the writer's inherent weakness: his spirit was willing but his flesh wasn't.

The very same scout platoon who on one page killed with frightening efficiency and were so skilled in battle were, on the next page, the dullest, clumsiest deadbeats imaginable. The author even turned some of them into ghosts, sorrowfully making them appear here and there in the jungles, in dark corners, in dreams and nightmares. All of the scouts, one way or another, were killed. But then you read of them dragging themselves along the streets, living hand-to-mouth lives as city-dwellers in the postwar years.

And at the end of the day, just like the author, those ragged men became confident and happy, recalling their paradise years of long ago, remembering the smart, pretty girlfriends they'd had, recalling their naive and innocent confidence before the war. It was sad; although they had been excellent lovers, they were destined to be forever lonely.They had lost not only the capacity to live happily with others but also the capacity to be in love.The ghosts of the war haunted them and permeated their deteriorating lives.

As for the author, although he wrote "I," who
was
he in that scout platoon? Was he any of those ghosts, or of those remains dug up in the jungle?

Was he among those kids from decent families who in fighting a war lost touch with the sources of culture? Those free spirits who were now full of prejudice?

All I knew was that the author had written because he had to write, not because he had to publish. He had to think on paper. Then of all things, he delivered everything to a lonely, mute woman who could easily have destroyed his turbulent revelations.

Gradually, I permitted myself to read the story taking a more casual approach. I worked through the mountain of pages one after the other, regardless of whether it seemed to be in sequence, or whether it was just a letter from his diary or a draft of an article. Mixed among the pages I found musical scores, curriculum vitae, award certificates, a pack of cards, torn and worn and dirty, and certificates confirming that he had been wounded several times.

That relaxed reading greatly helped my understanding of him. Now before my eyes the abandoned novel by our writer took on another form, in harmony with the reality it described.

I've copied almost everything, all the pages I acquired by chance from the woman. I've removed only a few which were completely illegible and some other mischievous notes and letters which were incomprehensible to a third person. I simply played the role of the Rubik cube player, arranging the order.

But while copying the pages and rereading them I was astounded to recognize that inside his story were ideas and feelings and even situations of mine. It seemed that by some coincidence of words and plot my own life and the author's had unexpectedly become entwined, enmeshed in each other. Slowly I began to realize that my earlier suspicions were true: I had known him during the war.

Yes, he was terribly changed, but I still recognized him. He was tall and slim, but not good-looking. He was stern, with wild eyes. His skin was grey, covered with small scars, brown from the sun and the gunpowder burns. His lips were tight. On his left cheek there was a deep crease. We had met each other one day along the road to war. We'd dragged ourselves through the red dust, through the mud, carrying submachine guns on our shoulders or packs on

our backs. Barefoot, on occasions. And both he and I, like the other ordinary soldiers of the war, shared one fate. We had shared all the vicissitudes, the defeats and victories, the happiness and suffering, the losses and gains. But each of us had been crushed by the war in a different way.

Each of us carried in his heart a separate war which in many ways was totally different, despite our common cause. We had different memories of people we'd known and of the war itself, and we had different destinies in the postwar years.

Our only postwar similarities stemmed from the fact that everyone had experienced difficult, painful, and different fates.

But we also shared a common sorrow, the immense sorrow of war. It was a sublime sorrow, more sublime than happiness, and beyond suffering. It was thanks to our sorrow that we were able to escape the war, escape the continual killing and fighting, the terrible conditions of battle and the unhappiness of men in fierce and violent theaters of war.

It was also thanks to our mutual sorrow that we've been able to walk our respective roads again. Our lives may not be very happy, and they might well be sinful. But now we are living the most beautiful life we could ever have hoped for, because it is a life in peace. Surely this was what the real author of this novel intended to say?

However, the sorrows of war had been much heavier for this author than they had been for me. His sorrows prevented him from relaxing by continually enticing him back into his past.

Perhaps that was not completely true. It may have been just an impasse of pessimism. Then again, his life may have been devoid of spiritual hope. Even so, I believe he derived some happiness from looking back down the road of his past.

His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of the war. I envied inspiration, his optimism in focusing back on the painful but glorious days. They were caring days, when we knew what we were living and fighting for and why we needed to suffer and sacrifice.

Those were the days when all of us were young, very pure, and very sincere.

oOo

Bao Ninh
served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the Brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived. He lives in Hanoi.