The Time in Between (12 page)

His third morning in Hanoi he bought a train ticket for Danang, and then he spent the remainder of the day wandering the old city. At a sidewalk restaurant he ate a soup with things he didn’t recognize floating in it, and the hawkers called out to him as he passed them by. Once, out of curiosity, he had his shoes shined and he found himself mesmerized by the quick hands and the dark head of the young boy working at his shoes. A girl wearing a gray felt hat rode by on her bicycle, in her basket a bundle of pink flowers. The light was dusty. The air was cool. He sat in a coffee shop and drank iced coffee. In his bag he had the novel. He took it out, and on one of the blank pages at the back he wrote down that day’s date and beneath it he wrote “Hanoi.” He looked up and saw a woman in a red
ao dai
hang laundry off her balcony. He wrote down what he saw, describing the woman’s fluid movements and the color of the sky. He wrote that the blank page was daunting and whatever he chose to write would seem unimportant. Later, he bought three postcards and sent them to his children, saying that never had he seen so much activity and that everyone, except for him, seemed to move hastily and with great purpose.

He left Hanoi by train and traveled through the night, riding second-class. At each stop, girls with platters of sticky rice and sweet treats passed through the car or called out from beneath the open windows. Candles were mounted on the platters and so the effect was sacred; the flames waved and beckoned and in some cases died, and then were instantly reborn.

He slept and when he wasn’t sleeping he watched his companions. Across from him there was a young couple with a newborn. The baby was silent and at one point Charles thought it might be dead. But the mother, a girl of shocking beauty, held a bottle against the baby’s mouth and it stirred and sucked and the girl raised her eyes, caught Charles watching, and looked away. The husband slept and woke occasionally, only to rise and stand by the open doors, at the back of the car, and smoke. When he returned, he ate an orange and then slept some more. He had a perfectly groomed mustache and he wore shoes of brown leather and dark slacks that were badly pressed.

It was a slow trip south with numerous stops. Charles dreamed on and off. They were surprising dreams, in that they were neither dark nor troubling. Laughter figured in some, and singing. In one dream he was young and marrying a girl with red hair and the girl was not Sara but she said his name, Charlie, as Sara had. They danced while a violin played a jig and at the end of the dance the girl turned to him and said his name again and she kissed his chest, just below the throat. Then the train stopped and he woke. The mother across from him was sleeping. She had placed the baby between herself and her husband and she had curled up her legs to stop the infant from rolling onto the floor. It was awkward and impossible, but still, she slept.

The couple with the baby left the train at a midmorning stop. They were replaced by a grandmother and a child of about twelve, who was carrying a bamboo cage with two birds. The child talked quickly and the grandma told her to shush. The child stuck a finger through the bamboo and the birds went wild and pecked at the girl and she laughed. Her black eyes sought out Charles and she said, “Hello, how are you?”

Charles said he was fine and asked, “How are you?”

“I am fine,” the girl announced, and she giggled.

Later, at the request of her grandma, she put a brightly colored cloth over the cage and the sound of the birds disappeared.

At the station in Hue, Charles bought an iced coffee from a boy passing through the train. It was in a glass, and the boy disappeared and then returned to retrieve the glass just before the train left. Coming down through the pass beyond Hue, Charles saw the mountains falling away into the ocean and he could not remember such magnificence. Sometimes, their train passed another passenger train going in the opposite direction, and through the windows he caught flashes of families and children and groups of men dressed in army uniforms and old women smoking homemade cigars. The girl across from him played a game with two sticks. She talked to herself as she played. At one stop Charles bought her a yellowish candy that looked like peanut brittle. She took it and turned to her grandma, who was sleeping. Then she nodded and sucked on the candy.

When they arrived in Danang, he took a room at the Binh Duong Hotel. It offered a view of the river and the harbor and at night he sometimes woke to the desolate call of a ship. When he couldn’t sleep, he stood by the open window of his fifth-floor room and he watched the city and listened to the noise of the traffic and he saw the lights of the boats far out at sea. He took his meals in small restaurants, usually eating dinner late and then walking back to the hotel. Sometimes he stopped close to the tennis courts on Quang Trung Street and smoked and watched the prostitutes. He wasn’t lonely, but he thought that if he ever was, he would come back and hire the girl in black stockings.

Then one day, he met an American couple, Jack and Elaine Gouds. They found him; talked to him in a restaurant one evening and invited him to join their table. He agreed. There was Jack and Elaine and their daughter, Jane, and their son, Sammy, who thumped his fists against the table and called for noodles. He was introduced to Vo Van Thanh, a translator who was sitting with them. Charles explained that he was visiting Danang because this was where he had been stationed during the war. “I’m one of those burdened ex-soldiers, I guess.” He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke to the ceiling, and shrugged. He held out the pack of cigarettes. Thanh waved a hand. Jack shook his head. Elaine looked at Charles, and then away, bending toward Sammy. She was brusque; when Jack asked her a question, she ignored him or answered curtly. She had a lovely neck, and when she looked up from Sammy’s furrowed brow, Charles saw the pulsing of a vein. Her daughter, Jane, was more like the father, softer.

Jack said that Thanh would be a good man to hire if Charles needed a guide. “He’s experienced. Knows the temperament of the West. Understands nuance. Isn’t that right, Thanh?”

Thanh deferred. He shook his head and said, “Not right.”

“See?” Jack laughed. Put a hand on Thanh’s shoulder.

Charles learned that the Goudses were in Danang because of Jack. He had taken a year off work as a salesman to live in Danang, where he said the average man had no idea who God was. He said that the Vietnamese authorities saw him as a teacher of English, but this was simply a way to obtain visas. “We have work to do,” he said, and as he spoke he looked down into his glass of beer and then he lifted his head and said, “I love this country. But it is aimless.”

Elaine said, “Jack has a mission.” She shook her head as if the four words she had just uttered were the engine that was pulling the family to some unforeseen and terrible doom. Jane was eating ice cream out of a small glass bowl. She was watching her father and mother. Her face was round and morose.

Thanh listened to the conversation without any expression. He drank slowly, and his eyes moved from Jack to Elaine to Charles. He had a high forehead and what hair he had left was dark. Charles wanted to ask him questions but didn’t.

When they left the restaurant, Elaine paused at the entrance and told Thanh to bring Charles over the next day. “Okay?” She said to Charles, “He’ll pick you up and show you where we live. Come by for a glass of wine or something to eat.” And then she left, as if she were used to giving orders and having them obeyed.

Thanh rode Charles back to his hotel. It was warm. The tail-lights of many motorcycles lit up the streets. Close to the hotel Thanh stopped at a kiosk and an old woman poured a whiskey bottle of gasoline into his tank. He stood beside his motorcycle, a small man wearing gray slacks and a white shirt with short sleeves. His shoes were worn and scuffed.

The next morning Thanh did as Elaine had asked. He took Charles to the Gouds’s house. They sat on the balcony and looked out over the smoke of a misty morning. After a while Jack stood up and said that he and Thanh had to run some errands. When they had gone, Elaine served Charles coffee. She drank juice and chased it with coffee. She was wearing a loose-fitting black dress of a light material that fell to just above her knees. She was barefoot, her legs were bare as well, the dress was sleeveless; her mouth went up on one side in a sort of half smile.

She said, “Jane and Sammy are out at the market with the nanny.”

Charles sat in a wicker chair with a soft cushion. He was surprised by the comfort and the amenities and he called the surroundings lavish. Elaine laughed and said that opulence was relative. There was a brief silence, not awkward, and then Elaine asked Charles why he was there and where he came from.

Charles talked about his children and about his life in Canada and as he spoke he saw how easily history could be related as both unblemished and inconsequential. He said, “Because I was a soldier here when I was young, I have memories and other things to settle. So, you see.”

And she did seem to see. She was not as harsh as he had initially believed. When he smoked, she touched his arm and asked for a cigarette, bending toward his proffered light almost clandestinely, explaining that Jack disliked her smoking, and of course, she didn’t want the kids to know.

There was something wistful about her. During his subsequent visits, he found himself drawn to her, to the oddity of her gestures and her habit of throwing her hands in the air as if she could not believe her circumstances. “Stupid country,” she said, and her hands went up. Or at dinner, after several glasses of wine and an argument with Jack, she turned to Charles and whispered, “Jack be nimble.” And her hands went up.

One Friday, late afternoon, he called on the family and she was alone; Jack had taken the children to the roller rink. She was on the balcony, sitting in her usual chair. Her bare legs, the half full glass of wine, the magazine in her lap—he noted and found pleasure in these things. She’d cut her hair. He mentioned this.

“Do you like it? Sort of flapper.”

It was. The bangs highlighted her green eyes. He nodded and sat. He said that he was lost.

THAT DAY, HE HAD RENTED A CAR AND DRIVER AND ARRANGED TO go with Thanh down the Number One Highway, south into Quang Ngai Province. About an hour out of Danang they had turned onto a side road and had driven toward the mountains until they came to a small village. They got out of the car. There were a few houses made of wood and corrugated tin. A crowd gathered. Dogs and women and old men and young children. The children pulled at Charles’s pants. Thanh pushed them away and spoke sharply, but no one listened to him. During the walk through the village the children kept pushing against Charles, and at one point a young boy wearing only shorts tried to put his hand in Charles’s pocket. Charles grabbed his shoulder and said, “No.”

He asked Thanh if this was it. Was he sure this was the village Charles had asked for.

Thanh addressed an old woman. He asked her a question and the woman looked around and said something. Thanh turned to Charles and said that this was the village.

Charles said, “Ask her if she was living here during the war.”

Thanh did this. The woman shook her head and spoke quickly.

Thanh said, “There is only one family left from the war. The mother is in Danang today with the grandfather. The son is at work. There is nobody else.”

They walked through the village and then turned and walked back toward the car. Charles looked for the road, the rice paddies, the ditch. Nothing was familiar. He pushed the children away and walked out toward the fields and then stood and looked back at the village. The children had followed him. He told them to go away. They laughed and one boy kicked dirt at Charles’s feet.

In the car, driving back, he asked Thanh how he had survived the war.

Thanh said that the story of his own life was insignificant and he went on to say, “It is just my life.”

Charles asked him again what he had done. How he had lived.

They were sitting in the back of the car. The driver was an older man who wore a chauffeur’s hat. Thanh placed a hand on Charles’s forearm and leaned into him and said that his story was meager, that it was one thing to survive the war but another to survive after the war. But if Charles insisted, he would tell him.

And so he told his story. In May 1975, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers who had fought for the South were ordered by the new government to register and attend reeducation camps. Each person was to appear with enough paper, pens, clothes, mosquito nets, personal effects, food or money to last ten days. Thanh, who had served with the South Vietnamese Army in Danang as an airtraffic controller, did not trust the promises of the new government, and so he left his wife and three young boys and ran into the hills and hid. He survived on roots and manioc and the occasional bowl of rice from a farmer. In March 1976, he was turned in by one of these same farmers, and he was placed in a reeducation camp.

He was in the camps for two years. There was constant hunger, he had to work six days a week, autobiographical essays were written in which he confessed to atrocities that he had not committed, he was beaten, his fellow prisoners were beaten. They were given one cup of water per day, and with this one had to quench his thirst, bathe, and wash clothes.

But it was the hunger that consumed the prisoners. Thanh said that when he slept, he dreamed of food. He would wake, and all around him in the dark was the sound of chewing and he realized that the prisoners were chewing in their sleep and that everyone, like him, was dreaming of food. He killed mice and slipped them into his trouser pockets. He ate them at night, his knees curled up to his chest. He ate the head first and then the feet and tail, and finally the body. He chewed slowly, and when he was finished he was even more hungry than before. All prisoners caught both mice and lizards, but eventually these disappeared and then the prey became centipedes and worms and spiders. Early one morning, Trinh Bao, a doctor who would die within the week from an infection, roasted a lizard over a fire and slowly ate it while the other prisoners squatted, coveting his feast.