Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

At dawn, Helen woke before the men did and felt as rested as if she’d had eight hours in her own bed. She snuck over to the car and pulled out a clean shirt from Matt’s bag. An unlikely baby-blue with a peace symbol emblazoned on it. As she tugged her old one off, she brushed the scar on her belly. Linh had traced his fingers over it, the glossy raised skin as pale and iridescent as fish scale.

“No more bikinis for me.”

“This makes me love you more,” he had said.

“Why?”

“It proves that you will be brave in the future.”

But she no longer felt brave. Since she had first arrived in Vietnam, she had been obsessed with courage. Such an ancient quality in modern life, called for only in extreme circumstances. She had admired it in others, in Linh and Darrow, but found it only sporadically within herself. A combat journalist’s life mea sured in dog years. She felt old compared to these young savages like Matt. She was softening, but she pushed that thought away, too. As she turned, pulling the T-shirt over her head, she saw Matt watching her.

“That was beautiful,” he said.

She picked up his bag and threw it at him. “Pervert.”

Trading cigarettes for directions to isolated villagers working the fields, using their smattering of Cambodian and French, they reached Route 6 by midmorning. They let out whoops of joy. “Bangkok here we come,” Tanner yelled. “I’m getting me the prettiest hooker I can afford.” Helen thought of the images rocking in their cradles of film, gestating in emulsion. She would insist on doing her own darkroom work. The road ahead was empty, leaf strewn, unused. Depending on driving conditions, Tanner figured they were a day’s drive from Thailand.

When Helen couldn’t put off emptying her bladder another minute, they stopped in the middle of the road. She made the men turn away and peed behind the car, too dangerous to go in the bushes because of mines. As she squatted, she saw a few feet away a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Cambodian man’s, crushed.

They were half an hour away from Angkor when a loud explosion created a small hurricane as the back windows were blown out by automatic rifle fire. Splinters of glass flew through the car like steel filings, most absorbed by the equipment, enough reaching them to nick arms and faces.

The back window blocked, Helen couldn’t see behind, and she peered through the side-view mirror, but the car was bouncing too hard; she caught only a glimpse of a boy, then sky, the boy, earth. Tanner floored the accelerator; the station wagon lurched forward as another round of bullets swept through the car doors. The tires blew, and the car skidded into the ditch.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Matt moaned. One blue lens of his sunglasses was shattered, and he pulled off the glasses, revealing a gash around his eye.

“Shut up. Don’t look worried,” Tanner said. “Are you fucking kidding?” Matt said.

The car was surrounded by two dozen boy soldiers. Circling the car, they pounded on it with small, violent fists. They wore tattered uniforms with red-checked kramas, scarves, wrapped around their heads or necks to signify the Khmer Rouge. AK-47s hung off their small shoulders. The leader was barefoot but wore a bowler hat and orange-tinted aviator sunglasses that matched the fiery sky, a getup so strange it made him seem less dangerous. He banged the butt of his rifle on the hood of the car, leaving long, elliptical dents, while two other soldiers flung the driver’s-side door open, motioning with their hands for the three to get out.

First Tanner, then Matt, and then Helen wiggled awkwardly out with their hands folded up behind their heads. Using rifles, the soldiers pointed up the road. Helen hoped that they would simply take the car and let them go, all she could think of was the lost pictures, but when the three had walked about twenty yards, she could hear a barking of orders, and one of the soldiers ran up behind them and used his rifle like a baseball bat to hit Matt in the back of the knees.

The soldier, no older than ten or eleven, had a narrow face and large, crowded teeth, and when he yelled, his voice was high and girlishly shrill. He motioned for the other two to kneel in the middle of the road. When they did, he smiled broadly, pleased, and patted Matt on the back.

“You’re welcome, filthy little fuck,” Matt said.

Helen closed her eyes. The whole thing unreal, make-believe. She wanted to stand up and tear the gun away from the boy and slap him. So unlikely, it felt like at any minute someone should laugh and admit it was all a game.

At the sound of a groan from Matt, she opened her eyes to see the soldier miming for them to bring their hands down and take off their shoes. The boy soldiers were so inexperienced they had not even known to frisk them for weapons, but the gun Matt carried was safely back in the car. Not that they’d have a chance of shooting their way out. All three sat in the road and worked with numbed fingers at shoelaces, exchanging looks. Helen dipped her fingers in her pocket and slipped the small Buddha into her mouth, unseen. The saving bitterness of iron. Then, barefoot, they were ordered to kneel again and put their arms behind them, elbow to elbow. Other soldiers ran over and bound their arms with a crude rope made of twisted vines. Helen cursed herself for not bandaging her chest down as two of the boy soldiers stood in front of her, giggling and pointing. The smaller boy, with a spiky shock of hair, looked furtively back to the leader preoccupied with the car, then bent down and quickly tugged at her breast.

Matt made a lunge for him, and the other soldier aimed the butt of his rifle at Matt’s temple.

“Don’t,” Helen said. “Whatever happens, you can’t stop it. I need you alive.” Her knees trembled, and she tried to cave in her chest. Thoughts came in fragments, pulling themselves out slowly and with great effort. No use to announce they were press because that would be a death sentence. The color of their skin, the fact of their car, its contents-everything was against them. Her mouth filled with saliva, and before she could think, she pulled up to her full height and spat at the soldier who had touched her.

The boy looked startled and then burst out laughing. The others joined in.

Helen looked back and watched soldiers swarming over the station wagon. Such a terrible mistake to come. So unfair that one did not get a magic wish, that one could not undo at least one mistake a lifetime. Her biggest regret in dying in this way its effect on Linh. At the car, the soldiers pulled out all the equipment and lifted each camera over their heads and dashed them one by one against the pavement. One soldier flipped open the canisters, yanked the rolls of film from their dark cradles, screaming out in long, wet ribbons, exposed, the images flown off. And seeing that, Helen felt delivered, her job done, released as if from a spell. Endless destruction. War destroying objects, land, and people indiscriminately, with its appetite the only thing that was eternal. She watched, detached, as the soldiers piled up the rest of their belongings and threw a grenade on top of the stack, laughing at the explosion and scattering debris. Jumping up and down on the bags of food even though they probably had little to eat themselves. Smashing open the cans of C-rations. Next they poured gas inside the car and set it ablaze, but it only smoldered, releasing a heavy, black, oily smoke into the sky.

Then their vicious attention turned back to the three kneeling figures.

Helen looked up the road and tried to picture reaching the Thai border. She imagined it came to a dead stop at a river, although she couldn’t remember from the map if there was a river, but in her mind’s eye it was a clear and rushing one, and she knew she would have to swim across it if she wished to be saved, and the impossible price of that swim would be to leave everything that had happened during the war behind. She heard the words Darrow had recited their first night but that she had not understood till now: Let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind. She wanted to go home; she did not want to be left behind. She pictured a flimsy bamboo gate and Linh standing at it, waiting for her. It was his waiting that had always saved her.