The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach
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lamp. Nobody looked at each other, except him and the girl. They locked eyes and kept them locked, as though through doing so they might somehow stay more focused and right thinking. Already, he felt himself begin to settle. Despite the shelling, which continued. Despite the sound of air attacks charging north. He tried to get out his notebook and pen, but his hands were shaking too much. He couldn’t write. He dropped the notebook and let it rest by his boot, by her boot. His pen, too, lay between them.
Outside the air was one large fist of sound. It was a constant pummeling, endless, almost rhythmic. The noise seemed to go inside him; he could feel it in his bones and teeth, straight down his spine. He had, of course, been through such things before. This was not his first war. But that didn’t matter now. The only thing that had any weight, any significance at all, was this isolated moment, then the one that followed. He felt his legs begin to shake, the adrenaline coursing through him. He felt a low weight in his stomach. The girl across from him began to cry silently, her face frozen in an internal agony he understood, understood completely. His throat was dry, his mouth gritty with sand. His arms didn’t seem to have any strength in them. He felt weighted and immobile, a statue of himself, buried in the ground. It seemed to take all his strength to raise his hand, fingers trembling, and touch the girl’s face. He looked at her, breathing purposely in and out, trying to calm herself. He put the back of his hand on her cheek, on the soft skin beneath her jaw. He wanted to offer her something. It seemed the least he could do, sitting so close to her, and through all these minutes.
She reached forward and hooked his knee with her arm, leaning toward him. It helped. He couldn’t say why. The explosions continued, stretching out so that they seemed to follow on, each from each, in one long, continual crashing song. Occasionally, he moved his hand across the girl’s face, and over the top of her forehead, as though soothing a fever. She gripped his knee and he felt her fingers gratefully, needing her touch. The lamp went out, the darkness so sudden it made him almost sick with fear, and then the sergeant wearily, hesitantly, relit the wick. He saw now that the sergeant was frightened, even him, and he felt sorry for him, sorry for them all.
It felt as though they had been tricked. That there had been some terrible swindle and as a result they would now die. He had always thought he would recognize the moment of his death—through some sixth sense or a moment of dread that informs. Now he decided the opposite was true. It would come like fire when it came. It would revolve everything, crush his guesswork, all of his imaginings.
The girl sobbed silently, her shoulders shaking, and he held her until she stopped. The siege lasted twenty minutes or more, and when he and the girl finally, tentatively, pulled themselves apart and climbed, one by one, out of that hole he felt connected to her, as though he’d known her for ever, known her through the very end of the world and now, its new beginning. He held her arm as she climbed up, stood close to her as they crawled up on to the flat, featureless scrub, this place of unending battle, destined always to be so, now and until the end of the war. At some point they moved forward in a column, each man a few meters apart. He watched her walk ahead of him, then run. A jeep was backing up at the foot of the hill, getting ready to go back up the road to Cam Lo and she moved like a bullet towards it. He steadied his eyes on her as she ran, arms flailing, cameras whipping against her back, a notebook clutched in one hand, the other holding her helmet, heading for the jeep. The jeep was full already, no room at all, but she ran and kept running until it slowed to turn and the men inside lifted her aboard among the bodies. They did so effortlessly, as though plucking a flower from the ground. She balanced herself on the rim of the thick bed and he thought he could see her moment of revulsion at having to travel with the dead. Don’t look at their faces, he wanted to tell her, and when you get to the other side go straight for the bar. You had to be careful what you focused on in the war, he thought, and he watched until he could see nothing of the girl or the jeep, just the dust rising in columns.
He didn’t know who she was, hadn’t seen her before. She turned up just like that and he fixed on her in a manner he could not shake.
She learned about taking cover, the things you needed to look for, how quickly you needed to drop. From the pages of the Handbook she read, Look for a tree stump, a wall, a rock. Holes are good, buildings are good. Bunkers are good if you don’t get killed trying to reach them. She learned, too, that diving to the ground under fire is almost an instinctive act, although there are many new to the field who will stand, listening to bullets whiz by them, behaving as though they are nothing more than annoying insects swarming overhead. The Handbook had something to say about that. It said, What you hear are not bees. What you hear are bullets at the end of their range and they are probably too slow now to kill you, but it would make sense to avoid them anyway.
She had intended to avoid them; she had intended never to come under fire at all, but as the weeks dropped away she became less certain that any kind of safety could be ensured even within Saigon, let alone if she went to crazy places like Con Thien. That had been a mistake; that had been chancing it.
But even on supposedly safer ground there were no guarantees. She’d been a block away when a small bomb blew up a diplomat’s car. The next day a bar frequented by Americans took a grenade, injuring dozens and killing two soldiers and three of the bar girls who drank overpriced “tea.” Even so, Saigon itself did not frighten her. The assaults she suffered were not by artillery but by the prostitutes on Tu Do Street who called her names as she passed. Or when she walked, trying to stay beneath the thin shade of the plane trees, and soldiers sidled up to her asking where she was from, what was her name, where was she going. The hotel was one street down from the flower market and sometimes the air around it was so fragrant that if she shut her eyes she could make herself believe she was in the lushest garden in all of Southeast Asia. At night, the smell of flowers disappeared and the rats arrived, traveling up from the rivers, feasting on garbage. Beneath streetlamps the air clouded with insects. There were candy shops that sold Belgian chocolates and marzipan flown in from Spain, restaurants that brought in fresh lobster so that you could choose your own dinner from a tank. In the cosy heat of early evening, sitting on the terraces of the better restaurants, she would look up at the colorful sky, its reds and oranges set like a painting above her, unable to imagine anything more beautiful.
But there was contrast at every corner. People slept outdoors in the shaded entrances to shops, or flat out on benches, or sometimes curled on the steps of the cathedral until moved on. Market stalls sold goods quite obviously wrangled from the military post exchange or off the bodies of dead soldiers: combat fatigues, helmets, boots, even guns if you followed the vendor to the back room where they were kept. Old women sold tea, Marlboros and marijuana. Some sold only marijuana. Children sold pictures of naked girls, and the older ones sold the girls themselves. They stole the pens from your pockets, wrangled spare change from your hand. She lost a camera the first week and had to buy a new one. That is, purchase someone else’s camera, also stolen, but now displayed on a cardboard box propped up in a makeshift stall.
She was settling in, getting to know the places to meet, who to speak to, where to go, but also she registered an unease that (she would learn later) never truly lifted from a visitor to Saigon. The city surprised her in a million ways. There were mysterious chirpings and whistles that arrived with dawn, along with the onslaught of traffic, a ceaseless commotion that exhausted her as much as the temperature that she measured not in degrees but by how many times each day she had to immerse herself in water.
There were other sounds, too, that required attention. One night, shortly after her arrival, she heard something like thunder that confused her senses, making her imagine a storm when the night was clear. But the storm was not the reason for the noise; it was bombing to the west of the city, which from the street she could not see, but thought she could feel, detecting a kind of vibration in the air. The sound of the bombers was heard not only as thunder, but in a sudden heightened awareness of people around her, who appeared to step up their pace, or crowd themselves at doorways, or create even more knots of traffic in the swarming streets. The war registered itself in the way the window glass rattled, how the strings of lights upon railings flickered and were still. Closet hangers danced, making their tinny sound; dogs that roamed freely began to shout into the night.
In Susan’s own small room the pendant lamp above her bed was set in motion, barely noticeable,