Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

Helen moved off toward the books, wondering if there was any truth to the rumors about Robert feeding information to the CIA. Probably it was her hurt feelings over his waning interest in her. Which was fine. What he did was his own business, but she didn’t like his muddying what it meant to be a reporter. The table was piled high with weathered paperbacks in English. Many had pages stuck together, wavy with humidity. She opened a book, Pride and Prejudice, the pages brittle and yellowed. The incongruousness of reading Jane Austen in Vietnam made her smile. “Five cents,” the boy behind the table said. Helen nodded and took out the change.

After a few minutes, Robert returned, clearly pleased but offering no explanation of who the man was. He could have an informant. “I didn’t even know MacCrae was still around. He turned against the SVA. Against us. Forgot whose side he was on. Insisted on living, eating, sleeping right there with the tribal people.”

“Isn’t that what Special Forces is supposed to do?”

“Forget MacCrae,” Robert said. “He was an old crazy. Thought he knew better than we do how to win the war.”

“I trusted him,” Helen said, testing the words out and realizing they were true. “He’s what I came to find.”

A note at the hotel told her where to jump a ride to a hamlet for MacCrae’s funeral. Since he had been operating in an area officially off-limits to the United States, his death and funeral were being hushed. She would not invite Robert; it pained her, the new distance between them. His own secrets and now hers.

By the time the ceremony started, darkness had penetrated the hamlet. Rain poured down on the tin roof of the small, open-air school house. It needled the metal roof with a loud, continuous hiss that depressed Helen. In the threadbare, damp room, she waited on a rough bench, staring at the plain pine coffin surrounded by candles. The circle of flame extended only as far as the concrete floor, only as far as the glistening, bowing banana leaves that crowded to form a wall of the room. She had been asked to bring a copy of his last photo, and now she placed an eight-by-ten print of the newborn on a small table by the coffin. The hurt inside her was unreasonable, but that did not help stop it. MacCrae had been killed with enemy-stolen American weapons; his will stated that he wished to be buried in the hamlet he had lived in those last years, all his money and belongings divided up among the villagers.

Various men entered in ones and twos to pay respects. These were not the military she had met so far. Like MacCrae, most were older; like him also, many wore the tiger stripes and black berets of the elite divisions. She read the crest insignia on a Green Beret who came in-De Oppresso Liber… To Liberate the Oppressed. Most were accompanied by Vietnamese and spoke the native language freely. She heard names of hill towns and base camps. Lang Vei, A Luoi, Duc Pho, and Plei Mei. MACV-SOG, marker of clandestine activities, whispered behind her. When a man wearing a Ranger uniform spoke to her, it was hesitantly, the rusty English words forming themselves slowly on his lips. She thought of her father, how he would have felt right at home in this group.

A voice behind her made her turn. Darrow stood with Linh in the doorway, talking to a Special Forces lieutenant.

When Darrow saw her, he bowed his head briefly, then came forward. “Why are you here?” He had hoped to hear news of her departure, heading back to California. Her presence irked him. When she was gone, he would stop wanting her.

“You treat this like your personal war. Think I’m crashing a funeral?” All of her longing for him instantly turned to dislike. She regretted Linh moving off to give them privacy.

Darrow stared at the coffin, kneading the back of his neck. She had gotten further than he would have thought. He couldn’t imagine MacCrae befriending her, exactly the kind of amateur he loathed. “We were good friends.”

“Robert said-”

“Frank,” he said, “was part of the old guard. The men here are the last of it.”

She fingered the beaded sheath on her belt. “He left this for me.”

So Frank hadn’t quite dismissed her. Of course, he was human, too. A pretty face must have appealed to him. “He must have thought you needed protecting.”

“I left my camera for him.” She looked around. A lonely way to end. As if he read her thoughts, Darrow reached out his hand and laid it on top of hers. An impartial hand. She let it sit there for a moment, warming her skin, then pulled away before she got used to it. She would stay a little longer because Frank had taken her aspirations for real, not wanting to let his faith in her down.

With a shock Helen realized she had stayed till Christmas, a disreputable and wistful holiday in the tropics. A large dinner party was organized for all the journalists stranded in-country. A hot and rainy afternoon, but the evening held a touch of coolness, a token of it being the dry season. As Helen waited in the hotel lobby for Robert, it could not have felt less like Christmas Eve.

The party was being hosted in one of the rented old French villas near the embassy. When Robert and Helen walked in through the gates set deep in the high walls surrounding the compound, the courtyard was crowded with overgrown plants-heavy, succulent leaves, overblown blossoms beginning to wilt, heavy rotting mangos and papayas fallen on the ground from the overhead trees-all of it lit by thousands of small candles flickering throughout the grounds. White-coated Vietnamese menservants greeted them in the doorway with silver trays of champagne.

Everyone in the expat community was there. The few that had them brought family. The majority brought doll-like Vietnamese girlfriends who wore either garish Western dresses or demure ao dais. They giggled like children and wrinkled their noses at the taste of eggnog. Helen had invited Annick, and Robert had brought along a friend as her date. The four of them sat on sofas and drank rum-laced eggnog while Frank Sinatra played on the record player. A pine tree from Dalat had been helicoptered in, hung with items from the PX: packs of chewing gum and cigarettes, tubes of lipstick, decks of cards.

Dinner was served at two long tables with white linen tablecloths that resembled long galley ships. The tables seated twenty each, while the rest of the people went through a buffet service and balanced plates on their laps. The prime rib, mashed potatoes, and candied yams, all cargoed in from Hawaii, weighed down and crushed with nostalgia all in attendance.

Someone down the table asked where Darrow was.

“Oh,” Robert said, “probably in some foxhole below the DMZ, warming up C-rations with a match.” Laughter from the table. “During incoming fire.” More laughter. “In the rain.” Everyone laughed. Helen gave a tight smile. She had not seen him since the funeral. “Making us all look bad,” Robert continued. “Especially when he gets the cover of Life next week.”

After dessert, guests went back into the living room. A Santa-dressed reporter handed out gifts, mostly bottles of scotch and brandy. Helen had gotten up to get coffee when Darrow walked in. His clothes so caked in dirt that only the deep rumpled creases were clean. His forehead had a few long bloody scratches across it, and the beginning of a brownish purple bruise was swelling under one cheekbone. She almost laughed because it seemed an extension of Robert’s joke, and he saw her smirk and turned away with no acknowledgment.

“Where have you been, Darrow?” the host shouted.

“I have an announcement to make,” he said, pausing to cough into his fist. “Jack was killed to night. We were ambushed in a jeep patrol in Gia Dinh.”

The holiday mood destroyed, the host clapped a hand on his back and then poured him a drink. They went off to the kitchen.