Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

It struck Helen how differently Linh acted now, at ease and forthcoming to Darrow where he had been so strained with her.

Darrow sighed and pushed his plate aside. “I hear you two got a little trouble outside Pleiku?”

“Yes,” Linh said. “They sent in a suicide convoy. We waited till next morning and then we went in.”

Darrow turned to Helen. “Bad?”

Helen continued to eat. She burned with humiliation.

“It’s okay.”

When Linh was ready to leave, he stuck out his hand to her, but she moved around it and hugged him. A silent peace offering. “Come back soon. Let’s have a little fun together, the three of us, okay?”

He nodded but was already walking off down the dirt path. He loved them each separately, but he was ashamed he did not want to see them together.

“Where does he disappear to, do you think?” Helen asked.

“Maybe he has a beautiful little bar girl that he keeps. Or he’s a Viet Cong spy.”

She laughed. “What? Linh?”

“You’ve got to start seeing underneath things. Finding the real story.”

“You sound like MacCrae now.”

“Once when we were in Cu Chi, my camera got… smashed, and he constructed spare parts out of nothing. I worried about the film, and he said he would process it in a bunker if I wanted. Since it was dark, we did it by starlight. He traveled with two porcelain plates-one for the developer, one for the fixer. Tied a small stone at the end of the strip and dipped it into the stream to wash it. Only the NVA are taught that.”

Helen laughed. “You’re joking. Not Linh. That’s impossible.”

At dusk, Helen and Darrow sat inside the doorway of the hut. Ngan served them dinner-bowls of sticky rice and fried paddy crab and shrimp-and then bowed away. The USAID workers had sent over a cooler of beer, and Helen pressed an icy bottle against her neck.

There was an element of performance when Darrow was around others, but alone, he seemed tired, distracted. Although she was happy to be there, she had not had time to wind down from the mission. She traced the scar on his good arm; the warmth of his skin made her realize how happy she was to be with him again.

“At least I’ll know the cause of this new scar.”

“It’s a sign that something worse didn’t happen. It’s a sign that I survived.”

“Linh stopped me going on that convoy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“In Pleiku. I wanted to show off how ballsy I was. I thought he was a coward for not going.”

“It’s experience. But he’s a guardian angel.” “So who guards him?”

Darkness fell; the jungle suddenly quieted. The only sounds the faint pulse of flame in their kerosene lamp, the lapping of water against moored boats along the river’s bank. Small bats fluttered over the trees and river in loose rolls like drunks.

“I love… this country,” Darrow said. “My dream is to photograph the North and South in peace.”

“Why did you ask me to come down here? I mean, we could have met in Saigon.”

“This is the third time I’ve been in a helicopter that went down. One time we ran out of gas and crashed into a hillside. One time we were rocketed. My mind was always clear before, ready; this time all I thought of was you.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Helen took a long sip of beer. All his words were the right ones, but she wondered if they had just come too late for her to hear them. “What exactly did you think about me?”

“You’ve made me selfish,” he said. “You’ve made me greedy for life again.”

In the middle of the night, a rustling on the roof woke Helen. She grabbed a flashlight and poked it through the opening of the mosquito netting and onto the ceiling. In the corner, a greenish gold gecko turned to pose in the light, in his mouth the wiggling body of a scorpion.

Stealthy as a thief, Helen rolled off the straw mat and stood in the doorway, watching the night.

A golden moon hung over the outlying palms, casting a light so bright she could make out individual grains of dirt on the ground. A faint coolness to the air, more lovely because of the previous heat. The surrounding roofs of pale thatch gave Helen a feeling of calm and protection. Everything she had thought she wanted within her grasp, perfectly all right with her if time stopped at that very moment, but already something had changed. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. The scene in front of her not just itself, but a potential shot: the widest aperture, the slowest shutter speed. Allow in every drop of light. Shallow range of depth, focus on one thing. But were they the thing to focus on?

In the distance she watched an old woman come out of one of the huts and stretch her arms over her head in the moonlight. She walked to the well, pulled up a bucket, and drank heartily from the ladle. A frame. She pulled a pin from the bun at the back of her head and let her long silver hair spread over her shoulders. A frame. She made her way to the riverbank and onto the wooden dock, hooked her bare foot on the edge of a boat that had been knocking against its mooring. It wasn’t until the noise stopped that Helen was aware of its earlier irritating thump. With expert, practiced movements, the woman bent down and wound the rope more tightly. She then walked back up past the well and disappeared between a clump of trees. With a slow enough shutter speed, the woman would have blurred to nothing, become a ghost.

From around the corner of the house, Ngan appeared. “I get you something?”

“No.” The girl’s sudden appearance annoyed her, breaking her reverie, but she tried not to show it. “Can’t sleep.”

Ngan folded up her leg and stretched it out, like the egrets Helen watched along the riverbanks. “Warm night.”

“Who was the old woman down by the dock?”

“No one. Just old woman. You go back to sleep.”

Helen watched Ngan disappear behind the house again until Darrow’s voice broke the stillness, and she laughed, a great flood of happiness that she wasn’t awake alone.

“Why’re you up?” he asked.

“This place is like Grand Central. Promise we can stay here forever.”

“Come sleep. All I promise is pineapple pancakes for breakfast. And a day of fishing.”

She turned away from the dark mystery of the village.

At dawn they rose and, at Ho Tung’s invitation, joined the villagers gathering to go out into the rice paddies. Helen asked Ngan to make coffee in the morning, but the girl only knew how to boil tea. When Darrow came back from a shower, he was balancing a pot of French roast and cups on a tray in his one good hand. He poured two cups as they watched the dawn color the tops of the palms.

“Where did you get that?” Helen asked.

“A good reporter never gives his sources,” he said, bending, kissing her neck, her collarbone, her elbow.

Out on the road, the women gossiped as they walked along the half-mile of dirt road. Children flitted back and forth like sparrows. Two girls told the story of a ghost in a tree who gave out money. Their mother boxed their ears for lying but admitted that she had saved the coins. When the girls saw Helen, they screamed and ran away. The men remained solemn, smoking cigarettes, their eyes on the sky, divining the day’s weather. At the edge of the paddies, the women kicked off sandals and waded into the brackish water. They tied on hats under their chins to free their hands, began the movement of bending and swaying, back and forth through the rows of green rice stalks, weeding.

A miracle that the war had not touched this place. One could almost pretend that it was peacetime, but they owed that to the cleverness of the Hoa Hao.

Helen took pictures, listening to Darrow’s advice on framing. She motioned three young girls to move closer together as they bent over their work, faces hidden under identical conical hats, only the differing patterns of their shirts separating them from each other. Behind them stretched the sunlit water of early morning. Small, bright green rice plants surrounded them like the subtle brushstrokes of a painting.