Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

There was a deafening crash. Rabbit sat up. A tree branch was lying at her feet, a cloud of dust kicked up in the air. Son was standing by the dead limb. The trucks were gone, Duong Khiem utterly still. Rabbit rubbed her eyes. The stars were out in their entirety, Venus already starting to set.

Son stood toeing the branch with his foot. Rabbit didn’t understand. She had simply fallen asleep, the cinnamon like a soporific. Maybe Levka was tired too, maybe he had seen her sleeping there peacefully under the tree and decided not tonight. No, she said out loud. The moon was already halfway up the sky. She jumped up and ran through the gate.

At the top of the stairs she pushed open the door and entered the dormitory where the Russians slept. The corridor was dark. She could see a blue glow flickering from a room at the end of the hallway. Then she was running for it. Crying please, anyone, the corridor growing longer as if extending. She felt as if she would never reach it, the glow flickering like moonlight on the ocean.

In the room at the end of the hall an old samurai movie from Japan was playing on the TV — the men’s topknots blue-black and gleaming. There were a few sofas and chairs scattered around, a refrigerator humming in the corner, the room some kind of lounge area. The smell of cigarettes was etched in the upholstery, even in the dark the walls tobacco-stained. Giang was propped up on a small counter by a sink with her shirt still on as a man stood pumping between her legs, his body with the same sun lines as Levka’s, the same patches of light and dark.

The man didn’t stop even when Rabbit came running in. Giang kept panting, her eyes closed, grimacing as the man moved faster. The secret moments between people. The man moaning and Giang answering, his movements faster and faster, a sheen forming on his skin. Then the man shuddered. Rabbit could see the muscles go slack, the urgency melting away. Giang opened her empty eyes. She seemed to know she and the man weren’t alone, but she didn’t hurry. The man disengaged and turned around, lit a cigarette before pulling up his shorts. Just then another man walked into the room. He looked at Rabbit and then at Giang and then at Rabbit again and smiled.

They picked Rabbit up off the floor and carried her to a sofa. When she opened her eyes, there was a small group in the room. She didn’t remember collapsing. Giang was sitting on the arm of the couch squeezing her hand. There was a spot in Giang’s eyebrows. Rabbit realized it was lipstick. Someone must have kissed her lips and then smashed his stained mouth all over her face. Rabbit could hear two voices rising off Giang’s skin, the voices faint like a campfire in a vast canyon. Rabbit’s ears began to tickle, but then Giang pulled her hand away.

Most of the Russians didn’t even know anything was wrong. They were only hearing about it for the first time. The last truck had only just come back. The men in the earlier trucks were already sleeping. One man from the last truck sat smoking by the TV. On-screen a woman was singing in a white dress, in her wide sleeves her arms floating up and down like a moth’s. The man said they had sat waiting and waiting for Levka and the two others to come back from the trenches of Anne-Marie, but they never did. What do you think happened, someone asked. The man lifted his eyebrows and opened his face the way Rabbit noticed their people did when something was of little concern to them.

The man perceived Rabbit staring. His name was Anatole — daybreak — though the others called him Grischa. His hands flew as he spoke. The others understood the theatrics, the heavy sighs. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that many of them were soldiers. They had seen things, which they’d lived through and then put from their minds. In their time they had all known men who had cared too much. It was hard to explain, but when you cared too much about one thing, it made you careless elsewhere. Vietnam was a respite, the Hindu Kush still looming in their dreams. Vietnam with its white-sand beaches, the girls with waists you could put your hands all the way around until your fingers touched, who would lie with you for only a few rubles. Why come here to help these people extract the long dead from the earth and then die yourself? Maybe they had seen this coming. There were always men like Levka, Levka running into the arms of this child when his friend Mikhail was killed. As if he could find what he needed lying between her legs.

They didn’t come back from Anne-Marie, Grischa said. Levka and Andrei and Little Vadim. Anne-Marie was just north of Huguette at the end of the airstrip. We went out looking for them, but then the sun went down and it was too dangerous. Grischa lit another cigarette and closed his face. I remember Levka saying something or other about a deep pocket, he said. Proof of atrocities. Grischa raised his eyebrows again. I tell him why bother. Yes, there are probably bodies there. So what? There are fucking bodies everywhere. The other Russians nodded.

Возьми ее туда, Giang said. Some of the men jumped at the sound of her voice. You must take her there . Giang pointed at Rabbit. The men looked at the two women sitting on the sofa. On the TV a group of children were singing a patriotic song. Giang knew what the local people said about Rabbit and Qui, the people bringing them gifts and offerings in the hopes that the two of them might console the newly dead and ease their passing. If you want to know what happened, Giang repeated, take her.

Grischa lifted his eyebrows. What’s it to me, he said.

How do you prepare yourself when death is moving down the line? The man standing next to you and the man standing next to him and the man next to him all the way to the horizon. How you can see it coming but there’s nowhere to run. Trees falling in a ghastly forest. Blood mingling in the dirt .

THEY LEFT JUST AFTER SUNRISE. RABBIT GAVE QUI A SMALL wave. Qui was standing by the metal drum stoking the fire as the trucks started up. Her skin burned brighter than the flames themselves, her hair like snow. From a million miles away she probably looked like a star, Rabbit thought. A planet rising in the east of some long-distant world.

Son was sitting in the cinnamon tree watching the convoy drive away up Duong Khiem. The scratch on his face looked as if a drop of acid had rolled down his cheek and burned the skin. Rabbit felt something tighten in her chest. She thought of Levka somewhere sitting in the branches of a tree scanning the earth for her.

The trucks turned at the first intersection and rolled out of sight. Within minutes most of the men fell asleep. The air was dry, the first hint that summer was over. At the front of the truck up by the cab lay a pile of shovels and buckets. In one of the buckets something bloomed like a bouquet of flowers. The color was right, but the effect was wrong. Rabbit stared harder. They were orange flags with little black skulls and crossbones printed on both sides. The words were written in French. FAITES ATTENTION.

Overhead the metal ribs of the truck’s canvas roof shuddered with each turn. Rabbit tried to imagine Levka sitting in the very same spot where she herself was sitting, each morning the coldness of the metal floor seeping into his skin. Maybe each day on the drive out to the Nam Yum River he thought of her, their secret room in the moonlight, the taste of honey still in his mouth.

Giang had fallen asleep. She was still wearing her tiny yellow skirt and cheap plastic heels. Even in sleep there was something guarded in her face, as if somewhere in her dreams she were clutching her purse and closing herself off. Giang, Rabbit whispered. She wanted to know why her friend spoke Russian, but Giang didn’t stir. Somehow in her sleep she was moving herself even farther away.