Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“You understood my mother passed on?” “My friend Hao explained it. I’m very sad for you.” “Thank you.” “What was your mother’s age?” “Fifty-two.” “I came back from the North in 1964. After ten years in that place.

The march home was very hard. All the way I thought about my mother, and my love for her came to life again strongly. I remembered many things about her that I didn’t know I remembered. I was very sad to think she’d be an older person when I returned to her. I wanted my mother to be young again. But when I reached Ben Tre she was dead for six months. She lived to be almost sixty. Her name was Dao, which is a kind of blossom. Sa I cut the dao blossom for her monument.”

“Do you have a wife? Children?” “No. Nobody.” “And your father?” “He died when I was a small child. Killed by the French.” “Mine too. Killed by the Japanese.” “Any wife for you? Some children?” “Not yet.” “So it’s very hard. I see it. Very hard when the second one goes away.

How did your mother die?” “I’m not sure. Some surgery that went wrong. How about yours?” “An illness. My sister said it lasted for almost four months. Our

mother died while I myself was very sick and I had to stop along the way down from the North. A fever came over me. Not like malaria. Something different. I lay in a hammock for two weeks. Other sick comrades came and strung their hammocks in the same place and we lay there without anyone to help us. After a few days some of the hammocks held corpses. I survived my illness and waited to feel my mother’s arms around me again. I was very sad to find she’d died, but in those days I had strength, and my passion for the cause was much bigger than my sadness. I was sent to Cao Phuc, where one of my first orders was to assassinate your uncle. But I didn’t kill him. My explosive failed. Aren’t you glad?”

“Very glad.”

“If it had functioned, my friend Hao also would have died. But the cause meant more than Hao. I’d already lost many comrades. You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.”

“And you began to ask questions. Is that what brings you to us?”

“I had questions from the beginning. I didn’t have ears to hear them.”

“What changed for you, Trung?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps my mother’s death. For a man without children, that’s a big change. Then the time is ready for your own death. Any time it can come, even before your body is killed.”

“What exactly do you mean? I don’t think I understand.”

“Perhaps you don’t want to.”

During supper, when his lousy Vietnamese kept the talk to a minimum, Skip observed his environment anew—wondering what the visitor must see—fine old mahogany and rattan furniture, an imposing front door where normally in this region the home’s entire face would stand open to the air, protected at night by iron gatework; and plastered walls decorated with paintings on lacquered wood, brushstroke pastorals: studious, silent scenes with sawtoothed coconut palms in a world without a soul to be torn. Mrs. Diu served a beef-and-noodle soup, greens, steamed rice. This morning she’d placed small yet striking arrangements of blooms around the house. Skip realized she did it daily. He’d hardly noticed. She and Mr. Tho lived just upstream from the villa in a hooch surrounded by palm and frangipani trees with white blossoms… At one point the double covered his mouth with a hand and yawned.

“Are you sleepy?”

“Not yet. Where will I sleep?” “I have a room ready upstairs.” “Anywhere.” “It’s not elegant.” Trung then either asked for a pistol or declared he possessed one. “Excuse me?” He said it again, in French: “Do you have a pistol for me?” “No. Nothing like that.” The request called him back to the situation. He’d ceased thinking of

this man as anyone in particular. A guest, someone deserving of hospital

ity, nothing more. “For protection only.” “You won’t need protection. You’re safe here.” “All right. I believe you.” For dessert Mrs. Diu served a delicate egg custard. Trung and Skip

got out the dictionaries. “Sorry about my Vietnamese. I’ve studied, but I can hardly make out a word you say.”

“People tell me I picked up an accent from the North. But I didn’t pick up much else there. In the North we southerners stuck together. We have a style down here. It’s very different from up there.”

Skip said, “That’s true in our country too.” “What are the southerners like in your country?” “They’re known to be very gracious and slow of speech. Among their

families and friends they’re very open with their affection. Whereas in the North we’re thought to be more restrained, more cautious, we give less of ourselves. That’s how we’re known. But there are exceptions. A person’s birthplace can’t tell you everything. And you know, we had a civil war too. The North against the South.”

“Yes, we know your history. We study your history, your novels, your

poems.” “It’s true?” “Of course. Even before your military came to Vietnam, America was

important in the world. The world’s major capitalist nation. I like Edgar Allan Poe very much.”

Next they talked of the mistake of the war, without mentioning whose mistake it was. “In Vietnam,” Trung said, “we have the Confucian mode for times of stability—for wisdom, social conduct, and so on. We have the Buddhist mode for times of tragedy and war—for acceptance of the facts, and for keeping the mind single.”

“I can’t expect to see the end. I want to go to the United States.”

“We understand that. And it can be arranged.” He pictured this man standing on a corner in San Francisco, waiting for a sign that said WALK. Some of Skip’s childhood schoolmates had come from immigrant parents, Scandinavian, most of them. He’d visited their stuffy homes, felt his lungs clutched by alien odors, looked at unimaginable bric-a-brac and cloudy photographs of military men with feathers jutting up behind the brimless caps of their uniforms, and heard the parents fumble the grammar and drop small words, thick-spoken and sincere, everything about them an affront to their sons, who endured the fathers in silence and rushed past their mothers’ offerings: “Yes, Ma—okay, Ma—I gotta go, Ma.” Naturally at his age Skip had overlooked these grown-ups, heroes of dogged risk, ocean-crossers, exiles. With their little questions they touched the walls of their children. On the other side, this child for whose sake they’d wagered their lives rolled his sleeves up tightly above his biceps, plastered back his hair with Wildroot Cream-Oil, lied about girls, performed surgery on firecrackers, golf balls, dead cats, propelled loogies of snot at lampposts, laughed like an American, cursed without an accent. But his best friend in the seventh grade, the Lithuanian Ricky Sash—probably from Szasz, come to think of it—said “please” and “thank you” as much as “fuck you,” and tied his shoes with a big double knot. Nothing else gave him away. Asians wouldn’t have it so easy. “Certainly,” Skip said, “we’ve wondered about your motives.”

“Do you want a practical reason?” “Can you give me one?” “No.” “You understand: for us, it’s an important question.” “You need something simple. You need to hear me say I stole some

Communist Party funds or I’m in love with a forbidden woman and we must escape.”

“Something like that.”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“Can you tell me?” “With every gesture I make in betraying my comrades and my cause,