Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“I bet.” Helen cut at her meat with a large saw of a steak knife.

Nichols squinted, his skin flushing a darker red. “You said she had a sharp tongue.”

“Actually,” said Darrow, “what I said was that she was too sharp for you.”

Nichols looked at him for a moment, weighing things, and then deciding to take it as a joke, broke into a barking laugh. “That’s it. That’s what you said, all right.” He puddled ketchup and A.1 on his plate.

The room fell silent. Sanders, his food untouched, cleared his throat. He had lost a lot of weight since Helen and Darrow arrived in the village. They guessed he had developed a pipe habit. “You must be dying to get back to the life in Saigon.”

“Not really,” Helen answered.

“I’m ready to test this arm,” Darrow said. “Send someone down as soon as a message comes from my assistant.”

“You contacted Linh?” She felt betrayed not only that Darrow had been plotting his return all along, but also at her own feelings of panic at the prospect of going back. Why had he chosen this public setting to announce his intentions?

Nichols smiled. “Oh, boy, did I cause trouble?”

“They’ve already replaced me on a couple of assignments,” Darrow said. “Pretty soon I’ll be taking pictures of supermarket openings in Amarillo.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be in Saigon,” Nichols said, swallowing a small bite of meat and daintily licking his lips.

“Looks like you’re doing fine here,” Darrow said, nodding his head in the direction the girl had gone. He intended the jab at Helen, his declaration at her possessiveness.

“Sanders gets the pipes, and I get the poon.” Nichols looked in the direction the girl had gone. “But there would be so many more goodies to choose from in Saigon.”

Helen excused herself and went down the hallway. She hated these men and hated Darrow when he was with them. This was her last visit. She applied her lipstick in the mirror, readying her excuse to leave.

When Khue came out of a room, she was startled, as if caught. Up close, the girl looked even younger. Pointing at the lipstick, she smiled, revealing a front tooth with a large chip. Helen motioned for her to try it. Self-consciously, Khue closed her lips and applied the color.

Why didn’t Nichols take her to get the tooth fixed? Infuriated, Helen decided to take the girl to a dentist herself. Khue studied the rose sheen on her lips with great seriousness; too sad and wise for such a young girl. Forget the dentist, the girl needed to be taken away from there, put into a school. How would Helen manage that?

Khue handed back the lipstick, but Helen patted the girl’s fingers around the tube. “For you.” When the two of them entered the living room, Nichols was sprawled out on a lounge, drunk. He took one look at Khue and yelled, “Come over here! Come now!”

A small, throbbing vein appeared along Khue’s temple, visible as she stepped forward.

“Leave her be-” Darrow said, noticing that Helen had not come to sit next to him but remained standing.

Nichols grabbed Khue by the hip and pulled her down on his lap, wiping her mouth with his sleeve. “You look like a whore, honey. No good. Look like a little whore with that stuff on.” He patted her cheek. “That’s my girl. My good, clean girl.”

Helen turned around and walked out.

“What’s wrong? I just don’t want you showing her bad ways,” Nichols yelled.

Outside on the dirt driveway, Darrow stumbled getting his shoes back on. “We walking home?”

Helen marched down the road without a word. The darkness and the warm air were a relief.

“You mad at me?”

“Not at you. No… Yes. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“If you’re choosy, you’re not going to have too many friends out here.”

“I’m never going back there.”

“Fine. But you’re punishing the girl, too.”

Helen slowed, shaking pebbles from her sandals. Darrow laughed and grabbed her arm. “What’s funny?” she asked.

“What a puritan you were, how self-righteous. How outraged. I had no idea.”

Helen said nothing.

“I lost that capacity some time back. But I admire it.”

“You’re ridiculing me. And you didn’t tell me your plans to go back to work.” As she said it she knew her outrage on Khue’s behalf had also been for herself.

“That’s the thing, I didn’t want it official,” Darrow said, suddenly serious. “All good things and all bad things come to an end.”

Preparations for the summer festival frenzied the village, and Helen and Darrow were invited to take part. Ho Tung knew their plans to leave but insisted they stay through the celebrations.

Helen had been thrown out of her stillness. All she could think was that she was losing something she wanted. But she couldn’t tell Darrow what it came down to-them or the war, no longer both. Apparent to her that she could no longer go through a village from the outside, as before. Impossible to cover the war with such conflicting loyalties. Was that what had happened to MacCrae, she wondered, too many angles of loyalty?

Pigs were butchered, the cries of slaughter haunting her till she escaped to the river. When she returned, the communal house had been hung with lanterns. They were seated in a place of honor next to the chief. He talked about how expensive it must be to send a letter from America, especially St. Louis, and Helen didn’t know what else to do but agree. “I know young girls get distracted,” Ho Tung said, “but how can she forget where she comes from?”

Women swayed under trays of food, delicacies such as glutinous rice, sweet boiled rice cakes, shredded pork with bamboo shoots. Toasts were drunk with fermented rice alcohol. Darrow spent long hours with a translator to figure out what they should contribute. Finally it was decided beer for the adults and ice cream for the children.

During the afternoon of the festival day, a decorated plow was taken to the communal rice paddy outside the village and a ceremonial furrow plowed. Later, the villagers gathered at the community house for the ritual enactment of the rice harvest, a fertility rite with four goddesses chosen from the village girls to represent Phap Van, the cloud; Phap Vu, the rain; Phap Loi, the thunder; and Phap Dien, the lightning.

Work was forgotten; paddies lay untended. The women wore their best clothing. Unmarried girls washed their hair in perfumed water and wore it long and dark down their backs. Platters of food were there for the taking; at almost any hour one could find a crowd of people busy at some game. Darrow’s arm healed well enough to get rid of the sling, and he and Helen photographed boat races, kite flying contests, rice cooking and rice cake competitions, stick fighting, wrestling, and traditional dances.

“I love this,” Darrow said. “We’ll travel the world, do cultural layouts. Wildlife shots in Africa. No more wars.”

“You promise?” she said, trying not to show how much she wanted the answer.

On the final night fireworks shimmered along the river, ribbons of light reflecting on the water as young couples escaped into the darkness. A leniency in behavior was allowed for the night, and Ho Tung laughed that many new marriages were celebrated shortly after the festival. He had urged Ngan to reconsider Minh’s proposal. Helen saw the two walking awkwardly together along the river, Ngan frowning. But the chief shook his head. “Ngan refuses to settle down. She has caught the strange, unhappy-making new ideas.”

The next morning at dawn, everything returned to its normal state-the women again hidden under their dark clothes and conical hats; the men bent under the weight of their plows. The paddies inhabited again, plaintive songs hanging in the air, the previous week as distant and separate as a dream. Helen dreamed of a third way for Darrow and her to exist other than Switzerland or the war-staying in the village for a full year until the next harvest.