Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Is that you?” Linh called.

She heard both the petulance in his voice and his effort to conceal it. “I’m coming.” Tying the sash of her kimono, she went to a cabinet for a spoon and picked up the bowl of soup.

In the bedroom doorway, she stood with a grinning smile that felt false. Lying in bed, staring out the window, he did not turn his head. The soft purple dusk blurred the outline of the flamboyant tree that had just come into bloom. Impossible to capture on film the moment of dusk, the effect of shadow on shadow, the small moment before pure darkness came.

“I brought soup, but Grandmother said she already fed you.”

“I worried.”

She could tell despite his hidden face that his words were true, but what she didn’t know was that since he had become house bound, he spent the hours while she was away imagining her whereabouts, visualizing dire scenarios. Each time he heard her walk through the door, he said a quick prayer of gratitude, as if torturing himself in this way saved her. Too close to the end to take such risks, and yet he was helpless to stop her.

“I was trying to get home, but things kept catching my attention.”

She came forward in the dim room and sat on the edge of the bed to eat. She bent over him and kissed him gently on the lips. No matter that they had been together years, always a feeling of formality when they first saw each other again, even if the separation had been only hours. It had something to do with the attention Linh paid to her, the fact that he never took anyone’s return for granted. The feeling disappeared with his quick smile, the way he always reached out a hand to establish touch. He wore old pajama bottoms, stomach and chest swaddled in gauze that had a dull glow in the room.

He was unhappy, and she was the cause of his unhappiness, and yet she was perfectly willing to bull herself through the conversation as if the feelings underneath their words didn’t exist. Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

“I had many things to do today, my love.”

“The old crone read my fortune. Always the same-plenty of luck and a big family.” The remark made to sting.

When Linh turned to look at her, she noticed how sharp his cheekbones were, how his eyes were unfocused by pain. She caressed the half-moon scar on his cheek with her fingers. Whenever she asked how he got it, he changed the subject.

“You didn’t take your shots?” she said.

“Forgot.”

With his infection, unsafe even to be still in the country. When Linh reached out his hand, she saw a belt twisted around his wrist. “What happened?” She held his hand and unwound it, feeling the cold heaviness of the flesh underneath, the welts left behind. She rubbed briskly, willing the disappointment from her face.

“I was just bored, fooling around. Eat your soup.”

She looked at him. But this wasn’t the time to confront. Just shrug it off, move on. “I’ll change the dressings and give you a shot. Then I’ll front you a game of Oklahoma gin.” Linh was tall, slender, with the finely etched features of the warrior princes of Vietnamese legend, perfect until one’s eyes traveled to the scar that formed a half moon on his cheek and the ribboned skin on the wrist that he couldn’t leave alone, an ache. Both of them full of scars.

“Sit with me a minute. Tempting me with cards?” He fingered the sleeve of the kimono. “You couldn’t resist?” Equally appalled and in love with the fact that she could think of a kimono while their world was about to be lost.

She buried her face in his neck for a moment. Her only rest anymore when her eyes were closed, the images stopped. His skin felt hot and damp against her cheek. Fever. “Annick is gone.” They were both still for a moment. “A day, two at the most. Then I’ll achieve my goal-‘Last American Woman Reporter in Vietnam.’ ”

“We should leave now. While there is time.”

“Martin is still promising the city will never go,” she said. “There might be more time.” The American ambassador had lost a son in the war, and the end would force him, too, to face things he didn’t want to face. Better anything than that. “You distracted me,” Helen said, jumping up and going through the room to her film bag. She fumbled inside it and held up a thick envelope. “Guess what this is?”

“Then we’re ready. Let’s go now.”

Linh swung his legs to the floor and sat doubled over, hands gripping the bed frame.

“Yes. Your ‘Get Out of Vietnam Free’ card. Now you have two letters, Gary ’s and the embassy’s. Insurance. But I had to sit through a two-hour lunch listening to how the press are tools of Hanoi. No wonder we lost.” She stood at the side of the bed, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, shaking her arms, trying to release tension.

“And what did you reply?”

“That photographs can’t lie. I said, ‘Make sure Nguyen Pran Linh gets to America, and as a bonus, I’ll leave.’ The country is going to disappear, be hidden behind a wall, and then the real stuff will start. All they want to talk about is identity cards, jumbled paperwork. How they have five different names on file for you.”

“We need to leave now,” Linh repeated.

“Not a moment past ‘The temperature is 115 degrees and rising,’ and the playing of ‘White Christmas.’ ” This was the clumsy radio signal for the beginning of the evacuation. She ran her fingers over his forehead, trying to brush away furrows of fever.

Linh smiled. “Does it strike you as an obvious signal? I predict the whole of the NVA Army is bent over radios waiting for it. A great cheer will go up.”

“Soon.”

“If you want to stay, we’ll stay.” He touched her hand. “You’re shaking.”

“Tired.”

He understood that this was an untruth, that she was afraid and running, and if he made the wrong move he would lose her. “Lie down.”

“First things first.” She readied the needle, gave him the injection.

Reluctant, knowing she had hours of camera repair work, she stretched out against him, shivering despite the heat.

After Linh had fallen into a drugged sleep, she got up and counted the ampoules of antibiotic and morphine left. A day’s supply, bought at triple the normal going rate on the black market. But there was no more bargaining. By next week, there wouldn’t be a black market for medicine at any cost.

Two days ago at the French hospital, the doctors had cleaned out Linh’s wound while he sat on a rough wood bench in the hallway, the rooms all filled to capacity, no drugs available. The doctor told Helen she was on her own finding penicillin and gave her a list of what would work in a pinch. The bullet had gone in at an angle and torn tissue on its way. The doctor left the young nurse with a needle and told her to suture him up. She was inexperienced, and the stitches were wide and irregular.

“Take him home if you want him to recover. We have no medicine, no food. They are abandoning patients,” she whispered.

Helen nodded, hired a cyclo on the street while two orderlies dressed in rags helped Linh out the door and down the stairs. His arms were outstretched, one on the shoulder of each man at his side, cruciform.

On a regular schedule, Helen swabbed out Linh’s wound, relieved that it had finally stopped draining. The skin was swollen and red around the bullet entrance and exit wounds. It had taken her a full day of scouring the city to get untampered-with antibiotic in sealed bottles. From her days in the field, she had learned the signs that things were starting to go bad-the pallor of the skin, the sticking sweat that didn’t dry. Linh was okay so far, although the fever troubled her. It was her fault he was wounded in the first place.