Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

Helen laughed, and her mother’s face looked hopeful, but the laugh continued too long, became raucous and then bitter, and her mother’s face fell as she escaped from the room.

Beneath the pictures was the box of Darrow’s personal things from the Cholon apartment. Helen avoided the box for days, and then broke down one afternoon, tearing it open, savoring the faint, sweet-rotten smell of Saigon inside. As strange and unsanitary as a full-grown Cholon rat. She loved it now in direct proportion to how she hated it then. Helen sat by the box, transported back to her crooked apartment, the Buddha door, the creaky stairs, the faded lamp. She closed her eyes and dreamed she could hear the street noise outside, longing for that life in this silence and hum of air-conditioning.

The magazine had taken care of his official things in the hotel, but Darrow’s wife made a request for all his personal belongings. “Do what ever you want,” Gary said. Helen would have ignored the wife, but the idea of the boy made her pause. As a young girl, she had studied in detail everything that related to her father for some clue to herself.

She made her slow way through file after file of prints and negatives. Any combat photographer as far forward as Darrow ended up with huge numbers of unprintable photos-material so gruesome that no magazine would publish it. But the photographer had to take them, nonjudgmental until he returned to the darkroom. Looking through his whole oeuvre, she saw that he had gone from a mediocre photographer in his early days in the Congo and Middle East to what some called a genius. Something had come together for him by the time he arrived in Vietnam, and the place itself had spoken to him. An astonishing achievement bought at an astonishing price. Helen kept the gruesome photos back, selecting the ones surrounding his published spreads. He had been notorious for taking many rolls for each intended shot, and these showed his artistic method at work. A child should know that about his father.

She came across the photos done at Angkor, stunned by their loveliness. So unlike anything he had done before. A photo of Linh among a group of Cambodian workers. Although he was smiling, he looked too young for the pain in his eyes. Helen also kept out all the shots of herself. She included his cameras, his equipment, his fatigues, holding back only one shirt with his name on white tape above the breast pocket. The sum of his life fit in one box.

When family friends came over for a homecoming, Helen walked out wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, and only her crooked gait, unused to dress shoes, gave her away that she hadn’t just been off at a women’s college. When the conversation turned to the war, she changed the subject, told jokes, asked about neighbors’ children, vacations, anything to give the pretense that all was normal. She didn’t want to be treated like a quarantined animal.

A former tomboy, she cooked for the first time in her life. Whole days lost in the kitchen, poring over cookbooks, pages dusted in flour or glazed in sauce. She and her mother sat down to feasts and staggered away from the table. Her mother laughed, only the lines around her eyes giving away her worry. They had so much food they invited neighbors over, a family of Irish redheads; the mother, Gwen, owned a catering business. After she ate three pieces of Helen’s chocolate velvet cake, she sought Helen out in the kitchen, washing dishes. “This is so good. You should come work for me.”

“This is therapy for me.” The idea of the job so alien, so ridiculous to Helen, that she considered it.

But it was their teenage boy, Finn, who kept trying to get Helen’s attention, who kept her from pretending. The boy’s hair was a soft golden-red, his hands and feet puppyish, too big for his frame. Helen remembered that long-ago boy with the strawberry-blond hair, killed in that first ambush that Linh had saved her from.

“What was it like?”

Helen turned to him. “Don’t let them draft you. Go to Canada.”

“Well, I think service-” the father said.

“What kind of cocoa did you say you used?” Gwen interrupted.

Helen would not be deterred. “If you go, they will use you up like a piece of meat.”

The tightness in Gwen’s face revealed a conspiracy of women trying to keep the war away.

“Did you see real combat? Did you see anyone get killed?” the boy asked, tenacious.

So for Gwen and Gwen’s son, Helen opened the spout, ever so slightly. She talked, her voice low and flat, the words themselves enough, the words fire.

With a hollow drop of her heart, Charlotte noticed that it was the first time Helen seemed alive that day. After fifteen minutes, the room emptied except for the boy, listening rapt.

“They don’t learn,” Helen said, after he had left. “The pictures and the stories-we didn’t, either.”

Sometimes Charlotte entered a room she thought empty only to find Helen there, staring off into space, her face broken apart, her daughter the Picasso woman. Helen sat on the couch, legs curled up, tears rolling down her face, and all the mother could do was take her child in her arms, rock back and forth for hours, pretend her daughter was still a child and could be soothed, merely frightened of the dark.

Darrow’s wife requested Helen bring his belongings in person. Although Helen suspected some final score settling on the wife’s part, she had not yet decided what to do. The easiest thing was to give the box to Robert and have the magazine make arrangements, but still she held on to it.

At first the house and the small beach town that she had longed for while in Vietnam had seemed calcified, dead, as white and clean as bone. But slowly it came to life, or she came to life within it. But it wasn’t the life she wanted.

The sight of people going about their days, shopping in markets, eating in restaurants, playing with children in parks, laughing and drinking and talking, created a deep resentment inside her. Perfectly happy living their lives, Helen thought, which is all anyone should want, and yet how blind, how oblivious to the biggest story in the world. Didn’t they see that Vietnam was the center of the world at that moment? Seen from back home, her pride seemed monstrous. Vietnam monstrous and the acts committed there inconceivable. Her face burned at the thought of the risks she had taken for those photos, burned at the waste.

It was in the dead of night when she felt most herself. Come three or four o’clock, she would be wide-awake in her bed, pretending to herself that she had to get up for a mission, and she would try to remember details-the smell of the room, the temperature, her sleepiness-until they became so vivid she actually felt a fluttering of adrenaline inside of her. Sometimes she would carry it to the point of rising and going to the bathroom, washing her face, and looking into the mirror. Had she gone crazy?

A letter from Linh arrived. In it a picture of Linh and herself. When she unfolded the letter, a sheaf of gold rice stalks fell into her lap. The letter detailed his new activities as staff photographer. She didn’t know if it was his awkward use of written English, but the whole letter was disappointingly impersonal. Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the grass reappears. She studied the photo more closely. The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course. She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn’t be over for her until she saw that grass reappear on those scarred hills.

This is what happened when one left one’s home-pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn’t realized she missed.