Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Sure.” Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude. Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary’s jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He cocked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. “How are you, my old friend?”

“Why don’t you make foil shields for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?” Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.

Darrow let out a big laugh. “My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course.”

Linh smiled but said nothing.

“You really do know each other?” Gary asked.

“Why would you bring someone who I didn’t know?” Darrow said.

Gary looked back and forth between the two men. “You’re one funny guy. That’s what I love about you. He’s going in with you to the delta and Cu Chi. Lots of good stuff there. Cover stuff, you know? Another Congo. How can one man be so lucky? Chop, chop.”

“Got it.” A mixture of feeling angry and tired, and something else-a strange, gauzy sensation that Darrow recognized as fear. Did Gary sense that he was hiding out? Trying to forget about Henry? That he was waiting for something? A sign that things were safe again? Why didn’t Gary go hump through Cu Chi and risk getting his ass blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his assistant. Darrow’s business was faces, but he hadn’t recognized this one-Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in hell.

“So how much longer, you think?” Gary asked as they walked back toward the jeep.

“Till I get the picture.” He played Gary, pulled his chain, unfairly resenting the push. After all, it wasn’t his fault-this crisis of nerve. Henry broke the illusion that they were charmed because they carried cameras instead of guns. It would pass. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The accumulation of deaths and horrors and jitters that got him. The curse of curses was that he was good at war, loved the demands of the job. What was frightening was he had developed an appetite for it. Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appetite would win, and his shrewd boss counted on that.

Gary stopped in front of the jeep, and in a gesture of bravado slammed his hand down on the trunk. He barely kept himself from wincing and crying out in pain. “It’s going down now, man, and you should be the one getting it. This old pile of rocks will still be here when the war’s over.”

Darrow wagged his head. “Did you know that the French who discovered Angkor asked the peasants who was responsible for creating it? They answered, ‘It just grew here.’ ” More and more it seemed to him a possibility just to sit out the war where he was.

Gary wiped his face and shook his head. “That’s truly crazy.”

“You never know.”

“How’s that? Who cares about this tourist crap? Just hurry back home, okay?” Gary tapped the driver on the shoulder to start the motor. “And take it easy on this new guy. My hunch is that he bullshitted me to get the work. Let’s put it this way-there’s no waiting line for the job.”

“Sure you don’t want to spend the night? Hang out a couple of days?” The truth was he liked Gary ’s callousness, his will to do anything to get the picture, because that was the way Darrow used to be. And he didn’t want to be alone another night, and didn’t have much faith in Linh as a drinking buddy.

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I want to do, hang in this godforsaken place- Angkor What?”

“The gods will strike you for that.”

“Add it to the list, baby. I don’t care how good the stuff is you’re smoking. Get me back to Saigon with air-conditioning and ice cubes. Headquarters is busting me about hiring women, you think you have problems?”

“I’m hurt. Thought you’d want to watch a genius in action.” Darrow slapped his palm against the jeep hood.

“Don’t take a week? Right?”

“Hurry, Gary. Get out of here before the sun goes down and the monsters come out.”

After the jeep had left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but the black weight that was the suck and pull of the war had arrived, and it pressed down on Darrow’s shoulders. He should tie himself down to one of the big stones to keep himself there, to avoid Gary ’s siren call. He smiled into the shade where Linh was standing. Too bright; he couldn’t make out Linh’s expression. The day he met him had indeed been dipped in hell, Darrow assigned to cover the joint operations as American advisers walked the SVA through a basic search mission. When they were fired on, the advisers called down airpower, but it dropped short, falling on them and civilians. A free-for-all clusterfuck. The SVA panicked and started firing on their own people, on civilians instead of the enemy, who had probably long retreated. The next day as they reassembled, the man assigned as his assistant was AWOL, nowhere to be found. He had seemed an unenthusiastic soldier. Perhaps he had used the chaos as an excuse to slip away. Perfect, Darrow laughed out loud, finally the type of assistant he deserved.

For the next week, Linh lived in the jungle side by side with Darrow. They rose at dawn, ate a simple breakfast of rice, fish, vegetables, and the dark Arabic coffee Darrow had become addicted to in the Middle East, insisting on brewing it himself. They worked all through the day with a crew of a dozen men, including the two brothers who were his favorites, taking hundreds of exposures, spending hours to light a subject, sometimes to the point of sending Veasna shimmying up a tree to strip foliage that was blocking the sun. One day, Veasna spent five hours picking half a tree away, leaf by leaf. He came down dehydrated, and Linh fed him glass after glass of water while Darrow hurried to get the right late afternoon light.

Darrow figured at that rate, he could spend the rest of his natural life photographing the grounds and never have to see another dead soldier. Yet at night they could hear thunder on the horizon, the war’s pulse, beckoning.

The two men shared a small room like a monk’s cell, crowded by a mountain of photographic equipment Darrow insisted on cleaning and moving it into the room each night so none of it would be stolen. Veasna usually stayed behind to help clean, while Samang hurried to town to chase women.

“So, Boss,” Veasna said. “You get me good job?”

“I’ll certainly put in a word for you in Saigon,” Darrow said.

“No, Saigon. I stay number one in Cambodia.”

“But there’s nothing here. No war.”

“Less competition then.”

Often Darrow stumbled across Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on scraps of paper that he quickly put away when approached. He caught glimpses of words and was surprised they were in English. His little AWOL friend a never-ending mystery. Nights in the stone city, when the workers returned to the village, seemed haunted to Linh. Darrow worked away, oblivious to his surroundings, the obsession of his work keeping him from the luring obsession of the war, but Linh felt ill at ease in this mausoleum. In the stillness, the place swarmed with gliding shadows. He, Samang, and Veasna took their meals in the village. Veasna talked about how the Cambodian traditional life was being ruined by the royal family, how they needed to return to the roots of the village, the communal life of the family. He said Samang had gotten corrupted by spending time in Phnom Penh. Linh stayed to drink tea and talk with the other Vietnamese and Cambodians on the project. Many talked of broken families, hardships, and escaping across the border to avoid being conscripted into the army.