Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Don’t tell me you’re allergic to paper,” she said.

“Tell her to stop bringing them,” he said, his face grim. “Never mind, I’ll tell her myself.”

“Give me a hint what’s going on? What’s wrong with flowers?”

He stubbed out the last of the ashes. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a Vietnamese thing.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Ask me something else.”

Helen sat back in bed and thought. Her face lit up with a sly smile. “There are jokes about you working with Ho Chi Minh. That you are some kind of spy and that’s where you disappear to. That horrible man I’ve seen you with, Mr. Bao. Where do you go?”

“It’s complicated,” he finally answered.

“Make it simple.”

“Sometimes one’s past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don’t know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time.” Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the Americans, genuine and false. He had wanted her to leave and had lured her to come back. That division inside him the same as his father’s uneasy relationship with the French. How could she understand? Even through all her hardship, she still saw the world through privilege. How could she know how it felt to be on the outside? Especially in one’s own country? That the Americans, in their optimism, had backed the wrong side. A side that could not hold without them.

After Helen recovered enough to return to work, Gary assigned her to do another follow-up on Lan, who had been sent back to her family. She had avoided seeing the girl, but now bought bolts of cloth and cooking pots, the most valuable commodities other than food, for the family. She pushed away the thought that these were bribes. For Lan, she got a simple automatic camera with lots of film. The plan started to form in Helen’s mind of bringing the child to live in the crooked apartment in order to be close to medical services and schools. During the war, it was common for families to farm out children to those who could offer help.

Linh didn’t approve of her traveling in the countryside; he worried it would be too difficult physically. He argued with Gary about the assignment, and Gary looked at him in surprise but said nothing. He had not realized Linh was so far gone. “You’re not responsible for her anymore. It’s up to her to go or not. You or her, doesn’t matter to me who covers it. People made donations, they want follow-up.” When Helen was determined to go, Linh gave in.

He sulked on the plane ride. “You answer a question now. Why do you push to do this?”

Helen was tired of his interrogating her. “It gives me a reason to get up in the morning, are you satisfied? And yes, it has to be me. A woman sees war differently.”

They made their way to the family’s village in Quang Nam province, only to find it had been burned down. The military didn’t have records of the clearing. Linh discovered the village’s name only by accident, walking through the charred remains of houses when he stumbled upon a small wooden sign in Vietnamese staked into the ground-THIS IS WHERE QUANG BA VILLAGE WAS.

During the last year all Linh saw was his country being destroyed, faster and faster, in larger and larger bites. He couldn’t explain to Helen the sense of physical sickness it gave him, the sense of despair. The desperate idea that anything that stopped this destruction was better than its continuing. What she didn’t understand was that both sides were willing to destroy the country to gain their own ends. Whose side was he on? Whoever’s side saved men, women, animals, trees, grass, hillsides, and rice paddies. The side that saved villages and children. That got rid of the poisons that lay in the earth. But he did not know whose side that was.

When they contacted MACV in Danang, they were directed to a relocation center the villagers had been sent to. After another day’s jeep ride along rutted roads, Helen stood, dusty and aching, in front of a wired-in prison-villagers from different locations herded together, living on the open ground under a tarp after more than two months. Without work, they queued each day for food handouts from the military.

No record of Lan’s family, but after walking through the sections that had self-segregated into their original villages, Linh found a neighbor of the family. For a few dollars he whispered to Linh that they had fled early, not trusting the American military, and moved to the next province, Quang Ngai. “They were smarter than I was,” he said. “They said nothing is for free.”

Over a period of a week, Linh and Helen traveled from hamlet to hamlet, driving along bumpy roads, each day ending with no luck. At times, they heard wisps of the truth, at times lies-the family were Viet Cong and had disappeared into the north; the girl had magically grown a new leg; the girl had died; the mother had run off-each new rumor seeping into the last until their heads were as dusted with possibilities as with the dirt that blew across the valley and plain each afternoon.

“What is the difference?” Linh asked. “This is just one more girl.”

She didn’t answer that it was because the child had mattered to Darrow. But it was also something else. As the war grew larger, her sense of futility grew with it. Since coming back, she had been unable to focus her experience except by narrowing it down to one soldier at a time, one child, one village. This was how she could tell their story.

As the search prolonged, the rough travel and poor food weakened her. Gary, troubled at the delays, called them back to Saigon, telling them to give up, but she refused. She leaned on Linh’s knowledge of the country to unravel the truth. Tell me, her eyes pleaded, as one more villager began yet another story, what to believe in and what to ignore.

Linh worried what would happen if they didn’t find the girl; he also began to worry if they did.

At a roadside tea stand along Highway 1, he gossiped with a man about his punctured bicycle tire, only to find out he was a cousin of Lan’s mother. He told them to go to a village an hour south. It seemed there was a falling-out in the family over money. They drove to the village and after asking around, Linh discovered that the biggest, most lavish house belonged to Lan’s family. When they knocked on the door, a young girl holding a broom greeted them. Lan’s mother was out on business and the father was busy holding a meeting in the dining room. They were told to wait. As they sat on a bench in the courtyard, a dozen people came in and out on errands. After half an hour, the father strode out, a short, bowlegged man with the rough hands of a farmer, and shook Linh’s hand.

“We’d like to interview Lan,” Linh said.

“Fine, fine. But there will be… gift?”

“We have things to distribute.” Linh waved his hand across the house. “You are doing well.”

The father looked at the house, puffing his lips. An expensive gold watch hung loosely from his wrist. “Hard work. Very busy. The girl will take you to Lan.”

He left, and the girl with the broom came back, took the cloth and pots from Helen, then led them to a back room. Lan sat on the floor with a stack of dolls. Other girls sat around her, wearing plain clothing, but Lan sat in a shiny satin dress, a black patent leather shoe on her one good foot. Her prosthetic was nowhere in sight.

“Lan,” Helen said.

The girl looked up, puzzled. She had grown fat, and the satin of the dress stretched across her stomach

“Remember me? Helen?”

The girl nodded. “You never bring camera.”

“I did today.”

The girl’s face brightened. “Let’s see.”