Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

Gary ’s first assignment for Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the pagodas around Saigon. At Xa Loi, the bonzes orchestrated protests against the Ky government. Linh described the marches three years before against Diem, telling her of the chaos then. Monks and nuns using their bodies as tinder throughout South Vietnam, horrifying and alienating the West. In Linh’s village, a nun described how she had daintily tucked her robes around herself in the town square, how a circle of bonzes formed a barrier against outside interference. “What could the military do? Shoot them?” The absurdity in Saigon of antisuicide squads equipped with fire extinguishers patrolling the streets.

Gary wanted Helen to get pictures of daily life in the pagodas. They took pictures of boys in brown robes receiving instruction and old bonzes reclining inside dark rooms, sipping tea and strategizing. Young men ran back and forth in their orange robes like waiters in a busy restaurant, pamphlets fluttering, directing traffic and arranging interviews with the head monks as if they were rock stars.

The noon heat and the thick smell of burning joss sticks drugged Helen, slowed her movements to those of a sleepwalker. When everyone retired for the noon break, she photographed a more peaceful mood-a single white-clad nun sweeping the grounds in front of the carved columns of the building, the shadow of a Buddha statue inside barely perceptible.

Under a banyan tree, Helen leaned back into a cradle of gnarled roots. Her shirt clung to her back. Linh motioned to a vendor who brought them coconuts filled with sweet, brackish juice. When he handed her a straw, she hesitated.

“Drink it.”

She nodded, emptying it in one gulp. “I’m tired of being afraid.”

“The VC are cunning, but they haven’t yet trained the coconut trees to grow poison.”

They watched women, young and old, enter the pagoda grounds carrying prepared dishes or baskets of fresh vegetables.

“Does the community supply food?”

“The community is the pagoda. They bring food or money, what ever they can, what ever is needed.”

“But they don’t have enough for themselves.”

“One is like a brick in a wall, interdependent; one has no meaning outside one’s relation to family and others.”

Helen sat up and pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her back. “Do you know why I came here?”

Linh shook his head, wary of more confidences.

“I wanted to be famous. I had dreams of being the only American to get pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Stupid, huh?”

Linh smiled. “Darrow is very happy every time he gets a cover.”

“Really?” Helen laughed.

“He sits in his room and drinks a glass of scotch and stares at the cover for a half hour. Then he puts the magazine in a drawer and doesn’t look again.” Linh shrugged. “But he’s passed up shots that could have been his, too. And he mourns every death until it seems impossible that he can continue.”

“That’s why I love him,” she said.

He couldn’t stand hearing more. How could he go on day after day listening to this woman bare her soul to him? “I should go back to the office with the film.”

“Where is your family? I mean, what you said earlier, bricks in a wall?”

“I don’t want to insult. We are different from Americans. We only share important things with people who have earned our trust. Otherwise we dishonor our memories.”

She flushed, chastised, and tried to brush it off. “I ask too many questions. Join me for dinner to night?”

“I’ll meet you in front of the hotel early tomorrow.”

She turned back to the pagoda to hide her hurt feelings.

Linh walked down the crowded street and stopped at an outdoor café. He motioned to a busboy and paid him to run the film over to the office, then ordered tea and nursed it. He felt guilty about his gruffness toward her, but he had changed since coming to Saigon, grown a second skin that insulated him from others. It would have been smarter to be kinder. After all, that is what he liked about the Americans-their innocence, their willingness to share their life story with a stranger. After fifteen minutes, he crossed the street and surveyed the pagoda grounds.

The area was still empty, but he spotted her in a deserted courtyard. She sat alone, crying. He felt discomfited, her face so naked, as if she stood before him unclothed, and he knew the right thing would be to leave unobserved, yet he stood rooted to the spot. He recognized such pain. The reason-Darrow had told of her losing a brother to the war-was it enough to cause her to put herself in danger’s way? A place not fit for a man, much less a woman. He made a show of reentering the compound and stood in front of her. When she saw him, she showed no surprise, simply held her hand out to him.

“I’m sorry about prying. I hate when people ask about my father. Having to say that I hardly remember him. Or my brother.”

He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “I think telling a friend this story is a great honor.”

She gave him a sly, crooked grin. “ Cam on.”

Before he could react, she stood and hugged him. No one had held him in a very long time. His head felt light, blood rushed hot to his skin. He made an awkward, panicked escape.

“I will be gone for a few days. A week at most.”

“But we have the story to cover.”

“Can’t be helped. You’ll be fine.”

Back at the café, he ordered a whiskey. He was meeting with Mr. Bao the next day in Tra Vinh, and had to have his head clear. He would gather maps and stop by the American commissary and pick up Mr. Bao’s new passions: two cartons of Marlboros and four loaves of Wonder Bread.

Linh allowed Mr. Bao to believe that they were having an effect on the American reporting of the war, although the reporters ended up being far more disillusioned by the truth than anything Linh could craft. “You just can’t manage to stick to one side,” Mr. Bao had said after finding him. Ironically, Linh’s intelligence gathering now included Mr. Bao, too, and his new sideline of drug trafficking, using the military for protection. He was making millions. Besides his dabbling in small-time brothels. His corruption made him the ideal partner for Linh-a man always open to compromise.

A week later, the helicopter dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early morning. The change in geography was startling: the sultry flatness of the Mekong, with its inland oceans of rice paddies and white-hot sky, all replaced by the thinner, cooler air of the Central Highlands with its burned gold of elephant grass, olive drab of bamboo and scrub, its ancient menace of mahogany and teak forests.

Inside the military compound, a mission was being patched together to rescue an earlier convoy headed for a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border. According to the last radio dispatches, only a few survivors were holding out.

Helen argued with the head sergeant, Medlock, a hound-faced man, and finally got permission to accompany the rescue. She felt jittery but swallowed the fear, already getting used to having Linh at her shoulder.

“You willing to share some of that?” Helen asked a first lieutenant, Reilly, sitting on an ammunition crate eating a chocolate bar.

“Sure.” He broke off a piece and handed it to her. “Need my energy for this baby.”

Helen nodded and put a piece of soft, melted chocolate on her tongue.

“You and I better keep our hats on.” He pointed to his own hair, the color of red-licked flame. “Our heads are like target practice.” He pulled out a beaten-up bush hat. “This here is my lucky one. Some shaman or something blessed it by pissing on it.”