Only the Heart (2 page)

PART ONE

DIAMONDS
AND TEARDROPS

1

SMOKE ON THE BREEZE

25 January 1977
Rach Gia, South Vietnam

TOAN'S STORY

Linh didn't cry; she just lay there with her face frozen by cold anger, and refused to make a sound when my aunt strapped her bare backside with a leather belt. I don't ever remember a time when I saw tears on her face. I think she had to be the toughest kid I ever knew.

Just about anyone would cry if they were strapped like that for no reason — if not for the pain, then for the frustration of it. But not Linh. She turned her head, and stared silently, straight into her mother's eyes, daring her to do it again.

It's not like Aunt Mai was a cruel mother, and Linh was used to being beaten. No one in my father's family was like that. Aunt Mai was just scared. All the adults were, and although we kids didn't know what we had done wrong, we had each received the same punishment in the little room at the top of my grandmother's house.

Phuong, who was older than the rest of us, approached her, head bowed, and waited for permission to speak. It was given with a small grunt and a nod of the head.

“It was only a game, Mother. We did not know …”

“You were told,” my aunt replied. “In these times, there are no second chances. We are your parents. Your family. Do we speak only to hear the sound of our own voices? Even the trees have ears, child, and those ears have mouths which tell our secrets.”

“But what did we say? We told no secrets.” As she spoke, I remember, Phuong wiped a tear from her cheek. The pain was subsiding a little, I suppose. As the eldest, she had received the punishment first.

From the corner I watched my aunt. I was not yet seven years old, youngest of all the boys, and she scared me — even without a leather strap in her hand. For a moment a trace of pity touched her face, but I could see her force it away, and her expression set hard.

“
V
ựỏ
t biên
,” she said. “Even from the top room, we could hear you calling it out to the street.
V
ựỏ
t biên
,
v
ựỏ
t biên
, over and over.”

“But it was just a game. It means nothing … it is just nonsense words …”

“Which could cause your parents to be locked away. There are so many things that you do not understand.”

“Then
explain
to us.” For once, Phuong showed a spark of resistance. But Aunt Mai rode right over it.

“It is not your place to know.” She looked at each of us in turn, holding Linh's defiant gaze a fraction longer than anyone else's. “Perhaps when you next feel tempted to speak these ‘nonsense' words to the world, this pain will remind you that there are things that you must take on trust. For the sake of your family's safety.”

There would be no further explanation. Aunt Mai turned to go.

“You will stay here until you are called.”

And then she left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

“
V
ựỏ
t biên
!” Linh spoke the words defiantly to the solid wood of the door, and I half-expected Aunt Mai to return and punish us all again. But the door remained closed, and we heard her footsteps moving slowly down the stairs.

Just a stupid piece of kid's play-nonsense. The words didn't even mean anything, and no one even knew where the game had grown up from. Except that it sounded like something we had overheard our parents saying, when they thought we were too far away to hear.

It was years before I understood why our game had scared them enough to punish us the way they had, though even at six years old I knew enough of fear to accept without question the seriousness behind my aunt's words.

One thing we learned early was fear …

*

17 July 1976
Rach Gia

TOAN

The boy sits quietly in the gutter, watching a line of ants filing to and fro as they work at emptying the flesh from the shell of a huge dead beetle. He is fascinated by their industry, by the way each individual knows its function, and serves it without hesitation.

He does not think of it in those terms, of course. Any more than he sees in their unquestioning industry a blueprint of what is being planned for his country, now that the war is over and the changes are upon them. He is five years old. Too young to be troubled by such thoughts, as his parents might be.

Too young to understand what his grandfather means when he says, as he sometimes does
, Communism … at a distance it appears as a diamond, but up close it is a tear-drop …

Suddenly, the sunlight behind the boy's head is blocked out as someone moves in to stand over him.

He turns to look up, and the ants are immediately forgotten. Two men stand looking down at him. Not quite strangers, for he has seen them both before from time to time, talking to people in the street and making notes in tiny notebooks.

Not quite strangers … But not from Rach Gia. They are Party officials, but at five years old, titles have no meaning for the boy. To his young eyes, they appear as farmers; countrymen dressed in badly-fitting suits, and not quite comfortable among the buildings of a large town like Rach Gia.

He remembers his uncle's joke about the Viet Cong when they first entered Saigon. VC would see the tall buildings, bend back his head to look up, and his helmet would fall off.

“It's hard to look all powerful and important when you're chasing after your hat,” he would say.

It was this kind of joke that had once made the adults laugh, but the kind that they could no longer tell aloud …

He stands to face the two men, and the younger of them smiles, trying to appear friendly — and failing.

“This is the house of Vo Van Minh?”

The boy stares for a moment, then nods. It is hard to find your voice before such men, and part of him is nervous.

“And he is home?”

“Yes …”

The single word sneaks out, and the boy watches the younger official's smile grow cold and set, as he turns and looks at the other man, indicating the house with an almost imperceptible movement of his head.

Then they move away and the boy is forgotten.

He watches them enter his grandfather's shop, which occupies the ground floor of the family's three-storey home. And the feeling grows within him that he has just done something unforgivable …

*

TOAN'S STORY

When they took my father away, I blamed my self for a long time. I felt as if it was me who had betrayed him. I should have lied to them. Told them that I didn't know who Vo Van Minh was.

It was stupid to feel that way, I realise that now. They knew about him already, about his role in the war. Which meant that he'd already been betrayed by someone. They would have found him in the end. Nothing was more certain.

Looking back, I think he was resigned to it. He'd made his choices more than a year before.

As an officer in South Vietnamese intelligence, he must have known that he would be a target when the fighting was over. I found out later that he almost escaped, that he'd had his chance and had chosen to stay.

On 30 April 1975, just before the capital fell, a ship left Saigon, full of personnel who had worked in “sensitive” positions. But not their families. Things were frantic and there was just no room. For most, it was the final desperate chance to escape the advancing Communists, and my father was on board with the others.

He told me later that he'd panicked. There is a fear inside each of us, he said, that blinds us to what is truly important. That when the others ran, he ran with them.

He could have escaped.

He had escaped.

In the chaos that was the capital in the final days of the war, it was hard to think straight, he said. He had joined the mad rush and crammed himself onto the old vessel with a thousand other frightened people, without a thought for the consequences.

But as he stood there, crammed against the railing of the ship, waiting for the engines to start and the ropes to be cast off, suddenly the panic disappeared.

“There are worse things than dying,” he told me, years later. “I stood there imagining what it would be like, if I was safe somewhere, alone, while my family was still here. And I looked at the others. Some of them were dead already, but they didn't even know it. What were the Communists going to do? Kill everyone who worked for the South — or for the Americans? Perhaps, but there are worse things than dying …”

Just before the ship pulled out, he ran off and returned home. He threw his gun in the river, and burned his uniform and any papers or photos that tied him to his job, then he sat down on the balcony, and just stared at my mother for a long time.

Sometimes, I fancy I remember that day. I was young, but I think I remember being confused. Knowing that something was wrong, that something had changed. Maybe even being a little scared.

But I can't be certain. Sometimes, we construct our memories from what we learn later.

My father tells me that he came into our bedroom that night and held his three sons for a long time. I should remember that. It isn't something he did very often. Perhaps he was saying goodbye. Just in case.

As it was, it took them a few months to track him down. Most of the paperwork had been shredded or burnt in the capital, and the interrogations and the betrayals were a slow process.

He'd had the chance to prepare himself for the day they knocked on his door.

For the inevitable.

He was ready, and it was no one's fault. Least of all mine.

But that's not the way it seems to a five-year-old when he watches his father being marched out of the house under guard.

While the whole street looks on in silence.

As they pushed him into the jeep, I remember he looked at me. The family were all standing on the street, outside the door of my grandfather's shop, unable to find the words to say, or the movements that might make the two officials change their minds. But my father didn't look at them. Not right away. He looked at me. And he smiled.

I think he must have known what I was feeling, because he spoke, just loudly enough for me to hear.

“
Không sao ààu con
,” he said.
Don't worry, son
…

There was no time for him to say anything else. The door slammed closed, and the older of the two officials put the jeep in gear. As it began to roll, I saw my father look back at my mother.

She was crying, but he just shook his head and smiled gently, as if it was all a big mistake, and he would be back for the evening meal.

It was six months before we saw him again.

*

27 October 1976
Long Xuyen Re-education Camp

MINH

Through the wire of the fence the view is depressing. Not because the scenery is bleak, but precisely because it is not.

Barely half a kilometre away, across a stretch of cleared land, the river curves gently around a wooded outcrop, and across the water the rice fields stretch into the distance, rising in tiers; a patchwork, covering the land, as far as the eye can follow.

Somehow, a bleak, empty landscape would be easier to take.

As he stands with his fingers entwined in the links of the inner fence, the peace of the scene fills him with a longing that drains the power from his anger and leaves him passionless.

“Minh?” Thanh's voice. Standing a few metres away, his friend speaks his name.

He turns slowly — because he recognises the voice, and because without the need for words its tone conveys the news that he has dreaded.

He nods his understanding sadly, and for a moment they stare at each other in silence.

“Did he wake at all?”

A slight shake of the head. “He was peaceful. He slipped away in his sleep, like … smoke on the breeze.”

Thanh, the poet. Thanh, who fills the dust of the exercise yard with images of peace and beauty, for the prisoners — and the guards — to read. Or trample under foot. Even Thanh struggles for a satisfying image to mark such a passing, such a useless death.

“He should never have been sent here. He was an old man. He could have done them no harm. They could have let him be …”

Suddenly he realises that he has been griping the wire of the fence so hard that his fingers are bleeding. The blood is warm and sticky on the skin of his palm.

Thanh is shaking his head.

“No. They couldn't. He was too high up. Too responsible — even if he never actually pulled a trigger or dropped a bomb. He knew that, but he stayed anyway. Maybe he felt responsible … Did you know, the Americans offered him a seat on the last plane out? He could have taken it, but I think he was just too tired.”

Minh shakes his head. The damaged skin of his fingers is beginning to sting. He licks the blood absently and stares at his friend.

“What harm could he possibly have done them, Thanh? He was an old man. The war is over.”

Thanh shakes his head again, like a teacher with a slow student.

“He was the enemy. And he was one of the losers. The winners decide who the ‘war-criminals' are, and the winners decide when the war is over. You should know that.”

For a moment longer Minh looks at his friend, but his arguments have evaporated. He sighs, then turns and looks out again. Beyond the fences.

The river gleams in the sun like liquid gold …

*

TOAN'S STORY

Years later my father told me about his superior, Nguyen Quang Vu, who died in the re-education camp at Long Xuyen. He was old, and their ranks had been very different, but they were friends, and as he had worked in intelligence during the war, he was considered “a danger” to the new order.