Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

When Linh came in, he bowed his head. “I’m sorry…” All the awkwardness between them since her return vanished.

“I survived.” She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.

“It should have been me.”

“Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it.”

When she was strong enough to be moved, she transferred to the abdominal ward on the USS Sanctuary off the coast. The recovery took more than a month, the wound slow to heal. The doctors on the boat blamed the field hospital doctor, who cut too many muscles; the field doctor blamed the medic for not cleaning out the debris sooner. Linh visited every day. The smell of rotting flesh so pervasive in the ward that he took lemons aboard with him and cut them in half, holding them to his nose and squeezing juice on his hands before and after going in.

As soon as she was strong enough to leave, Gary and he took her home to the apartment in Cholon. It would have been easier to stay at the Continental, but she insisted on the quiet of those rooms.

“What you see in this dive, I don’t know,” Gary complained. “I’ll have to have meals sent from the hotel.”

Linh and Helen looked at each other and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Everyone knows this is the center of the universe.”

Linh had a single shelf of books given to him by Darrow. In her confinement, Helen pulled down a volume, the cover splayed, the pages swollen and wavy with humidity. She read at random, her concentration shaky, following Darrow’s scribbling in the margins and his underlined passages. In Tacitus she found:

Fear and terror there certainly are, feeble bonds of attachment; remove them, and those who have ceased to fear will begin to hate. All the incentives to victory are on our side. The Romans have no wives to kindle their courage; no parents to taunt them with flight; many have either no country or one far away. Few in number, dismayed by their ignorance, looking around upon a sky, a sea, and forests which are all unfamiliar to them; hemmed in, as it were, and enmeshed, the Gods have delivered them into our hands… In the very ranks of the enemy we shall find our own forces.

She closed the book quickly. This was the way she dealt with books now, plunging in and out of passages as if they were glacial rivers too cold to be endured long. She could not imagine reading a book from cover to cover, the idea of narrative old and quaint, like a tea cozy in this new fractured world.

This was not a book she would have chosen; to Darrow such a book had still seemed valid.

But something in the passage made her think not about the obvious analogy to the American soldiers, but instead about Linh; since her return she found herself wondering about him often, speculating. Wasn’t Linh without wife or family, except for the brief, mysterious appearance of Thao? What had happened? He never spoke of them, although Helen left many opportunities when she told about her own family. Linh was in his own country, but he was not part of that brick wall. Where, she wondered, was his heart? How did one reconcile being on one side, then the other? What went through his head on patrol when American soldiers distrusted him? Or worse, when they tortured Vietnamese? Didn’t he still have more in common with a fellow countryman, even if he was the enemy, than he did with them? What did he feel when he heard gook and slant-eye? Whose victory, finally, would constitute winning for Linh? Maybe the only real victory for any of them-peace.

When he walked through the door with dinner, she turned and moved away guiltily, dropping the book, as if she had been caught doing something private and self-indulgent.

Each day Linh brought something to interest Helen. One day, a smelly durian like ripe cheese, the next a box of incense, then a lacquered river stone. She took a childish delight in the new, waited eagerly for it. He brought a record of classical Vietnamese music, which they listened to each evening. One night, they were playing cards, and Helen said she was tired.

“Would you like to sleep?”

“Tell me a story.”

And so Linh began with all the fairy tales he had grown up with. When he ran out of those, he brought the epic poem The Tale of Kieu, and translated it to her a page at a time, explaining this was the most beloved of all Vietnamese tales. During these weeks, they began to understand each other in a way that had not been available to them before. Without telling her, one night Linh read aloud the play he had written for himself and Mai, the last one they performed together. When he finished, Helen held still for a moment.

“That was so beautiful-what was it called?”

“It’s not well known.”

“Who wrote it?”

He hesitated. “I did.”

“I had no idea you could write.”

“Before… I dreamed of being a playwright.”

Helen nodded. “You would have been a fine one. You can still be.”

“Those things are unimportant during war.”

“Maybe that’s when they’re most important.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you have other stories?”

For the first time, Linh brought out the writings he had worked on, off and on, starting with the spiral notebook Darrow had given him in Angkor. Each night, they ate dinner, then Helen waited to hear more. Linh had not felt such intoxicating attention in a very long while. When the stack of pages grew thin, he began composing again. In this way, he came back to his real life.

After a month, she had recovered sufficiently to stay alone. Linh went for longer periods to check assignments downtown. One day, although he left her with food-sweetened rice and fresh oranges and pomelo-she longed for a spicy, hot bowl of pho. At the hospital she had endured a diet consisting solely of bland starchy foods, Jell-O and mashed potatoes. As she lay in bed hour after hour, the thought of the clear, pungent broth obsessed, and she was convinced that one bowl of it would bring back her strength.

She did not want to admit that the real reason for her planned assault on the pho stand might be that she did not want to be alone with her thoughts. The injury and the hysterectomy had happened so quickly, and she had not dealt with the aftermath. She had hoped eventually to have children in the distant future. Now the option had been taken away. She avoided writing to her mother with the news, showing what she had done to their family’s future. But that mourning seemed indulgent when so many lives were being lost all around her, so many children, so many mothers and fathers. Her own pain slight in the ocean of grief all around her.

Helen dressed carefully, the pain in her belly a stab each time she moved. Using a cane, she slowly climbed step-by-step down the two buckling flights of stairs. When she was halfway down, it was obvious the trip was a mistake, but sheer will pushed her to continue, like a soldier carrying out an order, the most important thing not to admit defeat. Sweat beaded her forehead, and her legs wobbled, threatening to go out from under her. She gripped the cane tighter, rested against the wall. Now she could get in real trouble, fall and break a leg and be stranded for hours. The painkillers had worn off, but she had resisted taking more, worried about dizziness until she returned from her journey. Her plan was to swallow a pill when she was back in bed with a stomach full of soup. Panting, she braced herself on each step until finally she reached the Buddha door at the bottom.

From the dim stairwell, she noticed for the first time that the wood at the back of the door was black with oxidation; one of the panels had a hairline split through which sunlight showed. From outside the door had appeared sound, unbroken, and it was only her unlimited time that allowed her to notice this.