Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

And then she said it once more. “Cover me.”

If he went to her, his life would change, and if he didn’t go, his life would change also, withering away. He had no choice but to go to her. He rose, the wrist of one hand braceleted by the fingers of the other. Five years since he had lost Mai. He walked into the pond, the water cool on his burning skin, and covered her shoulders in the wings of his shirt, holding her to his chest, tight under his heart.

He didn’t expect more than this moment, already more than he thought he would ever have again.

His hands trembled as his fingers traced the tender cliffs of her collarbone. She reached with her fingers under his chin, brought his eyes up to hers.

“It’s okay if you don’t love me,” she said.

He shook his head at the absurdity, it being so obvious that he had loved her from the moment he first saw her, the love only growing and deepening in time. Darrow’s greatest gift that he never mentioned the obvious infatuation so that Linh did not have to remove himself from their friendship.

Desire made them again strange to each other. They walked hand in hand to the house, Linh leading, and lay down on the mats. Urgent, after all this time, suddenly intolerant of another passing moment without knowledge of each other. A whole Braille of touch-tooth on lip, eyelash on nipple, pubic bone on swell of calf. He explored her body in the smallest of increments, the width of a finger, as if she were the unknown space on a map, and he knew it was her he desired, and not simply his desire for desire. She cradled his head in the hollow of her hip bones. He ran his tongue along the scar on her belly that sealed the future.

He heard the rough breaths that passed through her lungs, cries that no one else could hear, meant only for him. The frailty of her closed eyelids, the blue veins visible underneath the skin; he was protective of the long curve of her back, the soft indentation of the spine. He bandaged his fingers and then his wrists in the healing strands of her hair.

They woke each day in the tangle of each other’s limbs. Relieved and content simply to find the other within reach. Long hours spent in the shade of the palm trees, watching the movements of the villagers among the houses and down to the ocean and back. They didn’t speak for long periods of time, talk unnecessary. This new stage of intimacy simply the fruition of their prior ease in each other’s company. In the late afternoon, they went down the beach, away from curious eyes, walking separately until they found a deserted strand. Entering the water the temperature of blood, swimming easily in the warm salt liquid, tunneling toward each other like electric sea animals. Touches glancing: hand against hand, arm against chest, trunk against back.

Spent, they returned to the house, fell on mats, warm and heavy-limbed. Passion a narcotic. Linh rested his head on her lap, feeling the heat of her through the thin sheet, pressing his nose against the fabric to inhale the salty scent of her.

“What will we do after the war?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘after’? Wars don’t end anymore,” she said. She rolled away from him and laughed. “I think Mrs. Xuan is spying on us. She and her friends stand very close to the fence during the afternoon.”

This happiness would have to be paid for. Irrefutable evidence for Mr. Bao to use against him. Linh pulled her back to him and pressed his head into the softness of her thighs. Any price for this moment. “Gossiping old women.”

“Maybe they don’t like you here with an American.”

“Gossiping old hags.”

She stared at the ceiling and ran her fingers through his hair. “Tell me something about Linh. Something I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re lovers. Because it’s time. Who was Linh before Darrow?”

He shrugged and sat up. “I’ve told you about the NVA and the SVA.” He had caught the long sideways looks of Mrs. Xuan during the last week but had ignored her. Probably paid to spy by Mr. Bao. “If you don’t know me now, how will you find me in the past?”

“Tell me about your wife. How did you meet?”

Linh slumped back down to the floor. “My family were city people, demoted to living in the village after the partition, when we left for the South. So the customs were strange to us. In the village, the boys would go down to the river on a full-moon night and sing songs to the girls on the opposite shore.”

He remembered eating shrimp with hot red chilies no bigger than the tip of his finger, leaving his mouth burning; he and friends drinking beer his older brother, Ca, had bought for them. His stomach tightened at the memory of the colored lanterns hung along the river so they could see each other better, the reflection of the lanterns on the river. He squinted to see the faces of the girls, each bathed in a pool of pure color. But Mai’s face was perfectly clear, the blue lantern showing her features like moonlight against the night.

“And the girls would sing a song back in reply. Back and forth all night long. We were both fifteen when I saw her singing to me across the river.”

“She picked you.”

He bent his face into Helen’s lap. “She picked me.”

“That’s a beautiful story.” She caressed his shoulder and neck lightly with her fingers. “How did you and Darrow meet?”

“I went to Gary for a job. He needed an assistant for Darrow.”

“Amazing.”

“He flew me to Angkor the same day.”

“That’s when he fell in love with the place?”

“ Gary said no one else would work with him.”

Helen laughed. “I’m glad you stuck it out.”

Linh stood up and excused himself. Helen had almost fallen asleep when he came back in, dripping water.

“Did you go for a swim?”

He shook his head. “I met him once before.”

“Darrow?”

Linh nodded. “He came to photograph a joint movement with my SVA regiment and American advisers.”

“Oh.”

Pulling away, Linh told the story he had been unable to tell, the only story that mattered. Wide-awake now, Helen shivered, knees drawn up, face cupped in her folded arm. Without thought, Linh grabbed both her ankles as anchor, one in each hand, fingers tight around the sharp knobs of bone, grounding himself or her, he did not know which.

Danger that after the telling he would not be able to stand being with her any longer, the wound too deep to share, but her tears fed him. His anguish had grown skeletal in its solitude. He wished it didn’t have to be so, that one could ingest pain and keep it from others, but instead it seemed one could only lessen it by inflicting little cuts and bruises of it on another.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

A miracle how she appeared beneath him, how she unfolded and folded him into the wings of her arms and legs. He kissed the bony globe of her knee before descending.

Our company had been near the paddy fields settling in for the night when scouts ran into a camp of VC. Quickly, we pulled back toward my village while the American advisers stood alone in the field, yelling at us to stay put. But we abandoned our positions, and the Americans, cursing, called firepower in to target the adjoining forest. Planes came, bombs dropped that shook the earth many kilometers away, so powerful the villagers sent up prayers that the world would not end.

After a shaky perimeter guard had been set up, I slipped away to see my family and reassure them.

My mother and father were bundling belongings, ready to flee with Mai, my older sister, Nha, with her baby, and my brothers, Toan and Ca. My mother was more weary than frightened. She cried that she had been leaving one home after another since she was a young girl in the North. Tears ran down Mai’s face, and she held the sides of her belly as if it pained her. She shook like an animal sensing the approach of the hatchet. Begging me to take them away to someplace safe. To her sister, Thao’s, home. “Please, take us. Take me away.”