Lotusland Page 8

  "Of course you don't. And I don't want to be American."

  "There's nothing wrong with that. Lots of Vietnamese who left after the war have come back. They did well for themselves overseas and now they're helping Vietnam do better."

  "My country has many problems."

  "Every country does."

  A hot wind gusted, pushing dry leaves across the ground. Le picked one up and ran a finger over an area chewed by insects. She folded it in half repeatedly, the crisp leaf cracking with every fold, until dozens of tiny pieces lay in her palm. Then she wrapped her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder, and the soft pink hair on his cheek was warm from the sun and redolent with a perfume that never seemed to leave her.

  No one was around them. The only sign of other people was the miscellany of narrow, tile-roofed houses between the jungle and river. But even down there no people were visible. The rolling heat meant it was the hour of siesta. He imagined entire families sleeping on the floors of their homes, their brown limbs overlapping.

  With his fingertips he pulled at her chin so that her lips nearly touched his. She turned away.

  "Not here."

  Nathan gazed back over the valley. If he refused to acknowledge her rejection then he could believe it never happened. But it wasn't easy to forget.

  Despite the help he'd given her with her visa, and despite the Newsweek and Asian Arts articles he helped her translate for later study, she still hadn't reciprocated in a way consistent with their arrangement. He didn't believe she was using him. He only considered her shy, inexperienced, afraid to take things further. He'd known women like this before, who found affection a safe dwelling but passion a feeling that left them unprotected. Most had come around. There was no pleasure thinking she owed him intimacy, and he was content to delay the gratification of his longing until her confidence increased enough to make coming together inevitable.

  But when he looked at her face, something told him that an effort to give back wasn't forthcoming. Resentment coursed inside him. "How do you really feel about me?" he said.

  She started pulling at the long grass beneath her. He could see her fumbling for something to say.

  "Are we simply two people helping each other? Or are we more? I need to know what you think about me. What you feel when we're together like this."

  "I'm happy. I wouldn't be here with you if I weren't."

  "That's all?"

  "Isn't it enough to feel happy?"

  "Of course not," he said, unwilling to concede her this point. "Do you like me, Le?"

  "Sometimes."

  He abruptly got to his feet. As his vantage changed, the Bodhisattva shot back into view and startled him.

  "What does ‘sometimes' mean?"

  The vagueness of her replies passed into her expression. Her face revealed no hint of thought or feeling. "I mean when I don't let myself think about the future."

  What was she talking about? Everything she did was meant to get her that much closer to America, including being with him. She always thought about the future, so when she said ‘sometimes' was she really telling him ‘never'?

  "I have a plan," she went on. "If it doesn't work out I'll have to gamble more on my future."

  They were each a gamble for the other, he thought. Of course, in Vietnam the risk was greater for a Vietnamese than an American, particularly when the former was a woman and the latter a man, which was nearly always the case. She'd be branded a whore by her own people and a gold-digger by foreigners, and if their relationship didn't end in marriage she'd have to move forward in life as one who'd taken a chance and lost. They both knew that foreign men were afforded any number of chances with women. He was expected to roam, and his passport meant he could always start over elsewhere.

  "I know you have a plan," he said. "It just seems there might be a place for me in all your big, faraway dreams."

  "You already have a place." She reached behind them to her bag. "Aren't you hungry?"

  "I'm starving," he said, granting her the change of subject.

  She removed a rolled-up mat and spread it between them. Then she shook out a plastic bag and scattered its contents on the mat: baguettes filled with vegetables and seasoned pâté; hard boiled eggs and steamed buns; and two custard apples, their bumpy green rinds blackening from the heat.

  As they ate, Nathan shared with her what the priest had told him about Tan Trieu. "I forgot to ask him what Tan Trieu means."

  "It's Chinese," she said, passing a water bottle to him. "It means New Dynasty."

  He paused to recall which dynasty the name referred to, but drew a blank. "There was a kingdom here?"

  "No. But it was once home to exiled kings. Since we're so close, I'd like to visit."

  "What's your interest in it?"

  Handing him a hardboiled egg she said: "The idea of exile."

  As he peeled the eggshell his mind turned over what she said. He shouldn't be surprised she knew Tan Trieu as a place of exile, but her interest seemed to show she identified with it. He still couldn't take seriously the idea that she'd soon leave. At times like this she seemed to let her dreams take over and run rampant.

  Still, what she said made him wonder what it meant to be exiled. To live away from one's native country, of course, for whatever reasons. But how difficult was the journey, and where did it end? What did exile do to a person, and what sort of person would choose to exile herself from the place her identity had been formed? What was he, and what had contributed to his becoming this way? Most people he grew up with had rarely left Ohio, much less American shores, and yet here he was, halfway around the world, in a country that had defeated America in war, where his skin, hair, and eyes compelled people to treat him reverently one moment and as subhuman the next, and where his view of the world was so different from everyone else's.

  If he was an exile, he'd become one by choice. There would come a time when returning to America would no longer be possible. He knew this and thought about it often.

  He looked at Le, chewing quietly on her food, and tried to imagine what she envisioned of the years ahead. No matter how hard he tried he couldn't come up with a convincing answer.

  "I've decided something," she said as if voicing the conclusion to a problem that had been lodged in her mind. She reached over and squeezed his hand. "If my visa application gets rejected, I want you to stay in Saigon. I don't want you leaving me behind."

  Strangely, her words seemed to embarrass her. She stared at the ground, not even brushing away her hair when it slipped from behind her ears and swept her eyes. Her downward gaze and shrouded face gave the impression that her hair was blushing.

  And then he realized that she could mean anything by what she'd said. She could be admitting that she loved him just as she could be suggesting that she viewed him as her ticket out. This sort of muddle was why he always moved cautiously with Vietnamese women.

  "Do you want to go to Tan Trieu?" she said.

  There was excitement in her voice — he turned toward the sound, like it was a bell faintly chiming from an unexpected direction — and he interpreted it as the feeling she had being with him. Still, her enigmatic statement left him hesitant.

  "I'm willing if you are."

  They climbed down the mountain's steps, avoiding the outstretched cups of several crouching, deformed beggars. From the road he looked up at the Bodhisattva.

  Le waited in the street while he retrieved his motorbike. As he came up to her he asked if she knew the way to Tan Trieu.

  "No," she said. "But we can ask for directions at a roadside stand."

  "They'll want us to buy something."

  "Then I'll buy something, you cheapskate."

  He had a hard time starting his motorbike, but finally managed to and pulled onto the dusty road. The air was hot, fragrant with citrus, and makeshift pomelo
stands dotted both shoulders. What looked like old fishing nets hung from them, weighted with the green, gumdrop-shaped fruit. They approached a stand, purchased a pomelo, and got directions.

  The sky was a marbled blue now; the sun daubed silvery-white the canopies of phoenix trees along the road. Gated mansions — weekend getaways of Saigon's newly rich — were set 100 feet down driveways that had been hacked through the surrounding canebrake.

  A long dirt road wound between two enormous houses; above it hung a placard that read: Dang's Pomelo Orchard and Riverside Café. Nathan slowed down at Le's insistence.

  "What about here?" she said.

  They drove through the bamboo gate. Halfway down the road he recalled what she'd said at Buu Long and questioned again her meaning. If he were willing to stay in Saigon for her, what more was he willing to do? And if he went to Hanoi, what then? He'd have the upper hand if her visa application were rejected. But this was only to his advantage if she loved him.

  Sunlight pierced the treetops. Driving through alternating sun and shade, what lay before them unfurled in a series of blinding flashes. At the bottom of a scrubby slope stretched a narrow brown river. Several thatch huts strewed the near bank.

  He parked under a grove of trees, then followed Le into the largest hut.

  Inside, a woman in a threadbare yellow shirt and grey pants lay in a hammock with a newspaper over her face. Hearing them enter she got to her feet and brought them a laminated drinks list. They sat at a table and ordered tea. Nathan looked out the window.

  At one end of the river four evenly-spaced bamboo poles jutted from the water. Attached to each was the corner of a net, the large middle of which was submerged. Two boatmen were raising the net with a hand-crank.

  A crane in the treetops spread its wings and launched toward the river's edge. Three more followed from the jungle's green shade. The birds eyed the fishermen as they reeled in the net and picked their catch.

  Nathan leaned forward, mesmerized by the scene, when an earthen vase on the sill caught his attention. He was taken by the antiquated pottery, which held a spray of star-shaped flowers. Despite the increasing number of upscale antique shops around Saigon, the vase was unlike anything he'd seen. There was something impressive about the pocked clay sides and serpentine etchings, something authentic and rare. He was surprised to come across a vase like this in the middle of Dong Nai. He took it in his hands to examine it.

  "Careful with that . . ."

  Nathan turned to see the tea-seller hurrying over.

  "It's several hundred years old."

  Nathan's grip tightened around the vase. Shocked at the casualness with which he'd been handling it, he let her take it from him. "What did you say?"

  "These flowers have seen better days." She grabbed them and tossed them out the window. As she leaned over the sill Nathan heard water splash on the ground. The woman dried the vase with the bottom of her shirt and offered to let Nathan inspect it again.

  He took it carefully. "Why are you using this if it's so old?"

  "What would I do with it if I didn't use it?"

  "But where did you get it?" he said. "And how do you know it's old?"

  Le clicked her tongue as if his questions were impolite.

  "We were digging a well by our house," the woman said, pointing to another thatch dwelling downriver. Next to it was a meter-high circle of cement with a slatted board across the top. Beside the well was a plastic bucket attached to a rope. "We had to dig a long time to reach water. Around the third meter we came upon ten pieces like this."

  Turning it in his hands Nathan felt moved by this evidence that not everything connected to the past had been destroyed but was preserved deep in the guts of the land, as if the earth itself knew the value of these objects and didn't trust humans to care for them. The thought that other pieces would remain undiscovered for hundreds, maybe thousands of years longer also reassured him.

  "They must be Khmer," he said.

  The woman smiled, evidently pleased that he knew something of the local history. In fact he knew little, only that this region of Vietnam had once been Khmer, part of what was now Cambodia, and that in the 14th and 15th centuries the Vietnamese forced the Khmer south and west beyond the Mekong River. The brutal Khmer Rouge incursions of 1978 had been inspired by this ancient land grab.

  "There were enough pieces for everyone digging the well," the woman said.

  Le leaned forward with newfound interest and fingered the whorls ringing the mouth of the vase. "If you found these just digging a well, there must be more buried."

  When the woman didn't respond, Nathan asked if she had dug anywhere else.

  "But there's no need. Besides, who has the time or energy to dig for what might not even be there?"

  All three of them looked toward the woman's home. A little boy stood naked on the porch, crying for his mother. The woman rose and walked into the sunshine, calling out to see what he wanted.

  Nathan glanced at Le as she continued inspecting the vase. "Don't you find it strange there's not more interest in these artifacts?"

  "Why is it strange for something time has protected this long to stay protected? Why must the past be dug up?"

  "You don't think it's worth learning what's down there?"

  "I only think it's lovely," she said. "It reminds me of Song Be pottery. Besides, who am I to say what's worth learning?"

  Nathan couldn't get the Khmer pottery out of his mind. By what process had it been buried? And if such a perfect specimen could be dug up, what else was down there? Why was there no greater attempt to excavate these artifacts and learn about the past? What made people so complacent about history?

  This land had originally been Khmer, not Vietnamese, and artifacts like this dated Tan Trieu far beyond first churches and exiled kings. Perhaps it was enough to have this vase, and to know that the past wasn't dead, only buried. Or maybe the woman made the past alive again simply by placing flowers in it every day.

  He was reminded of a Saigonese man who'd told him about being imprisoned after the war. Despite having served in the southern regime as a doctor, he was sentenced to five years hard labor when the new government took over. One day, while digging trenches near a former American barracks, he unearthed a heap of books. When the Americans fled, he explained, they abandoned military equipment and personal effects. Discovering old American magazines, comic books, or novels was no surprise. They were probably tossed outside by ransacking North Vietnamese soldiers and pushed into the soil by rain. The surprise was that he'd found one book in perfect condition, as if it had been placed there just before he unearthed it. The book was a leather-bound Bible. When the day ended he tucked it in his pants and brought it to his cell. Every night, at the risk of being caught and punished, he and a prisoner named Lam studied the Bible by moonlight. "That was a difficult time in my life," he said, "but that book saved me. It was all I had. I was a Christian — and still am — but the communists wouldn't let us practice our beliefs. They said that Christianity was an imperialist religion and whomever they suspected of being a follower was forced to renounce his faith. The greatest gift I ever received was that Bible. I felt like God had buried it in the midst of our privation and wanted me to dig it out." He rolled up his sleeve, exposing a faded tattoo: For the Lord heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners. "Shortly after my release Lam died. On his first death anniversary I got drunk and made my younger brother tattoo me."

  The woman had gone to fetch the boy a towel. On her way back she chased her chickens from a flat basket on which cashews dried in the sun.

  When she entered the hut and sat on her hammock, Nathan asked if anyone in her family had fought with the Americans during the war.

  "My father and two of my older brothers. My other brother was too young to fight, but he died, anyway, after 1975."

  Nathan was silent a moment. "H
ave you lived here all your life?"

  She picked up her newspaper and started fanning herself with it. "My husband and I lived in Saigon until the war ended. He was just a translator, but still they put him in a re-education camp. That's him by all those rubber trees, bleeding them for sap."

  Nathan was reminded of "the law of three-generations" — the former official policy of punishing "supporters of the imperial aggressors." Running a café out of a thatched hut on the outskirts of Bien Hoa was probably the only business this family had been allowed to engage in.

  The sawing of the man's blade became audible only after the woman pointed it out. Nathan watched the man cut diagonally at the bark with a scythe. He was shirtless and thin, his brown skin almost black in the tree-shade.

  The woman offered to call her husband over.

  "That's okay," Nathan said. "I was just trying to understand this place better."

  The man was far enough away that when he stopped cutting, the sound continued another second.

  "Why did you ask her so many questions?" Le said to him in English.

  "She's an exile, too."

  She shook her head, apparently annoyed by his way of looking at things. In Vietnamese she quietly said, "She's not an exile. For all you know, her ancestors are from here."

  "What does that matter? Politics can be localized within one's own family."

  "I don't care if your Vietnamese is perfect, Nathan: you'll never understand family politics in Vietnam. But if you insist on defining exile so broadly, go ahead. Call it exile if you want."

  He couldn't understand her tone. If she disagreed with him that was fine, but the anger behind her words — her remonstrance, with a subtext of cultural conceit — took him aback. This was a land of exile. Not only had Vietnamese kings been made to live here after dethronement but the remnants of an ancient Khmer civilization, forced to stay unearthed, would never rejoin their homeland.

  The more he considered this, the more he thought there was something to it. After all, here he was, an exile by choice — an expatriate — and here she was, soon to be an exile as well. Perhaps this was at the heart of her disagreeableness.