The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach
She does not tell them that it was on an RAF base, that she grew up eating Raisin Bran and peanut butter as often as Weetabix and marmalade, that she has lived in the US for almost the whole of her adult life. She does not say that the clearest memory she has of Buckinghamshire is an awful boarding school in which girls were not allowed blue jeans or tampons, the use of which was tantamount to declaring oneself a slut. The Vietcong soldiers confer for a moment. Then they say, But you look like an American! All white people look alike, she replies. The small one laughs. He is missing a front tooth; she can see a centimeter of curled pink tongue in the gap of the cage of his teeth, a snail in a shell. The missing tooth makes him look even younger. They’ve been captured by evil children, she thinks.
Because they have no idea what to do with her, or what to ask her, it seems, they move to questions about how people get engaged in America, and other odd questions about sex and marriage. American brides are not virgins, they say. Doesn’t the husband feel cheated? No. They don’t believe it. And perhaps because they don’t believe it, they go back to their original questions: Are you working for Americans? No. Do you help the American military? No. Do American girls sleep with several men before they get married?
They can’t speak English; their French is awful, a tangle of words beneath a heavy accent that itself would make communication difficult. They must think her French is terrible, too, because they wince and shake their heads and ask her to repeat everything. Moi no compris pas toi parler, they say, which means me not understood you to speak and is unlike any French she has heard. It appears no more refined language is possible between them unless Son acts as a translator, which at the moment he appears reluctant to do.
Finally, the one with the long hair says, “What does your father do for a job?”
“He’s dead,” she tells them. It is true. He died of an aneurism last year. She thinks, with some regret, that he’d never have approved of her working in a war zone, that he’d have done everything possible to prevent her from going.
“Dead?” He studies her carefully “In the war?”
“No. He was too old for this war. He was sixty—” This is too much information. She doubts these soldiers know how old they themselves are, what day they were born, let alone how old their fathers are. She repeats, “Mort. Il est mort long-time.”
They nod, satisfied. Their fathers are probably dead, too, she concludes.
Apparently, the green wire that held her wrists during their meal is necessary also for this period of interrogation. Afterwards, they free her and ask her to take photographs of them with Son’s camera. They want her to take the pictures but only when the barrel is pointed her way, and only as they appear to be taking aim. She asks to stop—again, her imagination is too fertile for this game—for what if they thought it would be amusing to have her take a photograph as they pulled the trigger? She tells herself to stop thinking so much and tries to take comfort in the fact that it is only through the frame of her camera that she sees them training their rifles on her. She comes to this realization—that they’ve relaxed their guard, that they don’t seem the least interested in killing—and it serves as a tonic to calm her. Even so, she asks them to please allow her to put the camera down. She does not want to take any more pictures, she explains. She’d like to give back the camera now.
They appear mildly disappointed. The thin one spits, then turns away abruptly. The one with the long hair gives orders for them to carry on marching. Their new manner is to carry their weapons with the absent constancy with which small children carry their favorite teddies. The guns are there, are always there, but they have all grown accustomed to the guns, herself included, so that they seem almost as though they aren’t real, or are never fired, or contain no bullets.
“That’s an interesting sword,” she tells the soldier with the sword. He holds it up, smiling at it as though it were something he has made himself. It’s an ugly sickle with a crude handle, but he presents it now to her as though it is a work of art birthed from his own genius.
“This is from an automobile spring,” he tells her, running his finger along the air above the blade. “And see this handle? From a howitzer.”
She nods, amazed. So he did make it. Seeing it as a composite of its many parts, she has to admit there is genius involved.
A soldier’s relationship to his weapon is complicated. She recalls the time a platoon she was with fired continuously in a “mad minute” because they heard a branch snap among the trees. The noise came from every direction, even from the ground, rising up through her feet, her legs. It passed through her and she felt her body as a thin veil, a kind of skin through which sound pulsed. There was no real reason for the explosion of fire. It was only that they’d been carrying so much ammunition; they were tired of hauling it all. Afterwards, she could not hear properly. She sat on a stack of ration boxes and wrote messages on a steno pad to Marc, who was with her. Smoking, listening to that single sound eeeeeeeee e spinning in her mind like an insect, her writing pad out, her water bottle almost empty, she felt suddenly exhausted, running only on nervous energy. She might have curled up next to Marc but it was too hot for that and, anyway, she would never have shown him any affection in front of the soldiers.
I keep thinking that somebody is just there, or there, she wrote, then indicated the treeline, watching us and deciding exactly when to shoot and which one of us to shoot first.
Marc sat with his legs folded, knees bent, his shirt loose around his neck. His utilities had a tear in the pocket from overstuffing them with TV batteries and cables. Through the hole, she could see the white skin of his thigh, a strong contrast to the brown of his arms, his hands. He shook his head, dismissing her fear.
It’s like a movie in my head, she wrote. How do I make it stop?
He got her to play a game in which he wrote a line from a song and she had to guess the song. Then another game in which you filled up boxes on a hand-sketched grid. He drew her away from her thoughts. He wrote, You’re beautiful.
They played hangman and he wrote out PEACE.
She thinks how far away he seems now, belonging to another time. She recalls his face, his dark hair with a crown in front so that if he cuts it too short it sticks straight up. The war had produced a few early gray hairs that clustered by his temples, some new lines by his eyes from squinting in the sun. She has known him six months and in six months he has become far too important to her. She blames the tide of her affections on the war, too. It seemed to transform everything to extremes.
“Here, look! Look, you!” It is the soldier with the sword. He is frustrated because her thoughts have drifted. He commands her attention again as a pesky younger brother might. A younger armed brother, she reminds herself, and nods quickly at the soldier and his sword, indicating she is paying attention. “This is very sharp,” he says, and holds the dark sharp edge near her palm. He wants her to admire the blade, which he has honed to a thin, lethal plane; the handle which allows a strong grip. She looks down at it, but will not touch it. It is how Marc would behave, unimpressed, a little bored. Along with the sprinkling of gray hair, Marc has also acquired here in Vietnam a bold, incautious wit that she is able to assume at times, as though having been with him so much she has assimilated this part of him.
“What you think?” says the soldier. He looks proudly at the sword, holding it up in front of him.
“I think you could use it to shave,” she says. “That is, if you ever needed to.”
The soldier nods, unsure of her meaning.
In Saigon she had become accustomed to sudden violence, expected but nonetheless surprising. People speculated; there wouldn’t be anything today, or this week, or until such-and-such a time. She walked the streets with reporters in tiger suits—their canteens and cameras and tape recorders strapped on to them, some holstering pistols—and just in front of them would be civilian women on their way to a tennis game, looking sporty and white, like women in country clubs all over America. The expats ate lavishly, whatever else was going on; the best restaurants were run by Corsicans,