"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

FIVE. Chieu Hoi

Open Arms

Her bags remained packed in a neat pile in the middle of her hotel room, but the days passed by, one after another, and still Helen didn’t leave.

She could not face returning home a failure. A mode of being so ingrained she did not even recognize it. Her mother had remarried a year after their father’s death, a close family friend who had become widowed. As like their father as could be. When Helen cried before the wedding, in jealousy, in fear, in betrayal, her mother sat her down and gave her “the speech.” The speech would start with the particulars of the situation and then boil up to the universal truism that failure was not an option. Ever. “This man will be a good husband and a good father to you two. End of subject.”

When Michael and Helen were teenagers, they would hide on the beach and smoke pot and drink alcohol with friends and caricature their mother, her grim pragmatism, how she buried the second husband ten years later and declared that she was done with men. “ ‘Failure not an option,’ she probably told him in bed,” Helen said, thrilled by her rebellion.

A friend of hers, Reba, curly red hair spilling down her back, who had a crush on Michael, laughed so hard at the impersonation of their mother that liquid poured from her nose.

“She sounds like a monster.”

“No,” Helen answered. “She’s just that way.” It never occurred to her that there was anything wrong with such demands.

____________________

In her effort to prove that she could survive in Saigon and function without Darrow’s help, she befriended other journalists in town, went to official briefings, took the rickety blue-and-white Renault taxis out to Tan Son Nhut to photograph American and Vietnamese soldiers back from operations. She and Robert joined official army junkets that flew journalists out in transport C-130s to write and take pictures of scarred land and dead soldiers hours after the action ended. Robert was content doing his job, writing up his stories, but she found the whole process frustrating. Her pictures were no different from those of a dozen other freelancers selling photos to the wire services for fifteen dollars a picture.

The journalists were in a questionable fraternity while out in the field, squabbling and arguing among themselves, each sensing the unease of the situation. No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic: “I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker.” Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other.

In terms of the present moment, they were despicable to the soldiers, to the victims, to even themselves. In the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. In their worst moments, each of them feared being a kind of macabre Hollywood, and it was only in terms of the future that they regained their dignity, became dubious heroes. The moment ended, about to be lost, but the one who captured it on film gave both subject and photographer a kind of disposable immortality.

The wires sent her to cover human-interest stories-hospitals, charities, orphans, widows-but when she opened the paper and saw combat shots by Darrow as well as others, she knew that she was being sidelined. Of course, the truth of the war existed everywhere-battle and combat only a part of the whole-but her truth pulled at her from out on the battlefields. With her failure out in the field part of the public record, she didn’t know how to start again.

Another month passed; she grew more restless. Only skimming the surface of the land and the war, returning to her safe bed every night. The reporters that were satisfied at this level were like archaeologists piecing together fragments and guessing at the truth of something long since disappeared. She felt like a fake. She kept going on the after-battle junkets with Robert, embarrassed for them both, needing the drinks at the Continental bar each night.

At dinner with Robert, she tried to explain her dissatisfaction. Ever since the night she left with Darrow, Robert remained aloof, as if there were some irony that he alone was privy to. She understood he needed to save face. She had acted badly, and there was probably no fixing it. Outwardly they still joked and flirted, but they both understood that things had changed between them.

“Is it enough?” she said. “These pictures don’t feel like enough.”

Robert shrugged, bored and disappointed. A cruel thought ran through his mind that at least nurses didn’t bring their work with them. “You’re too earnest now.”

“Sorry,” she said, realizing her mistake confiding in him. She changed the subject by ordering another drink, but he wasn’t fooled.

“The only way to get the picture you’re talking about is to get so close you become part of it.”

But instead of deflecting her, his words gave her an idea. Now she went hunting at the air bases for stories. To go around official channels, see what was really going on, she copped rides alone on transport helicopters dropping rations and ammunition at distant firebases. Since there was no ostensible story, no combat, there was no restriction on her movements, either. Whenever possible, she tried to visit Special Forces camps in the hope of running into someone who had known her brother. There were men at the outposts half-naked in the heat, bodies coated by the inescapable dust and dirt that caused small boils on the skin, eyes wild from the isolation and the threat of danger. A few refused to talk with her, simply watched from the edges of the camp like feral dogs, but most were glad for the company. She sat and shared cigarettes, took their pictures, and talked while the chopper unloaded. In between the most banal questions-What’s your name? Where’re you from? How long you here for?-she caught glimpses of what she wanted.

At one landing base high in the foothills, the pilot decided to put up for the night. Pleased, she didn’t bother mentioning that it was against regulations for her, a woman, to spend the night out in the field. Inside the small sandbag-and-wood structure with the unmistakable barn smell of marijuana, Helen was introduced to a former Special Forces officer, Frank MacCrae, wearing an apron and cooking a vat of chili over a makeshift fire pit. At forty-five, he was considerably older than the other men, and unlike them he was at home there. He had lived in Vietnam more than seven years, spoke the language fluently, lived out in the villages.

When they sat down to dinner-a dozen soldiers, the pilot, and Helen-Frank was quiet at first, drinking down beer after beer in a few gulps, appraising her. The chili had a bright layer of orange oil on top, and the native hot pepper made her lips burn and then go numb. When Helen complimented him and asked for seconds, he flushed with plea sure and brought out a bottle of wine he had been saving. “I was keeping it for when we have a boar to roast, but what the hell.” He eyed her cameras. “Nice. I used to have a good Nikon but banged it up… Miss my picture-taking days. So now they’re sending girl reporters?”

“Not willingly,” she said. “They didn’t send me. I snuck out here on my own.”

“How long you been in-country?”

“Two months.”

“Two months. Oh, baby.” He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, his white T-shirt freckled with reddish chili spots. “You came too late.”

“How’s that?” The heat of the chili beaded her forehead with sweat, and she wiped it with a napkin. That was her fear, that she had missed the biggest part of the war already. Her stomach started to churn.

“The good ol’ days are gone.”

“Oh, not this again,” one of the soldiers said.

“See… we were just learning how to do business here, but they screwed it all up. It’s easier to send soldiers, easier to throw money at corrupt leaders who’ll play ball with us. Easier for us to just take the damn thing over.”

“Did you know my brother, Michael Adams? He was here two years ago; died last year. Plain of Reeds area.” A deep burble rose from her stomach, and she regretted taking the second bowl of chili.

“Not familiar with. Who was his captain?”

“Wagner, I think? Project Delta?”

“It’s a small world up here. Didn’t get to meet him. A damn shame.” Frank smiled as Helen’s eyes watered, a belch escaped. “Not used to good home cookin’?”

The pilot, bored, got up and signaled the others to go over to another table for a game of poker.

Helen felt as if she would explode. “The report was just the generic ‘Died a Hero’ stuff.”

Frank examined the ceiling and blew smoke rings. “Our government is creating a show. All that shit years ago about Diem being the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia. Did the English riot in the streets against Churchill? Did he imprison or kill his opposition? That was all a PR campaign courtesy of Life magazine.”

“Maybe Diem tricked us.”

Frank shook his head, gently at first and then harder. “No! No, no, no. Everyone knew he was a crook from the get-go. That’s why they chose him.”

“So why?” She stood, clinching her bowels. She’d have to make a run for the out house in the dark.

“Now you’re going!” He banged down all four feet of the chair on the floor and clapped his hands. “Start thinking like a reporter about your own side, too. Why aren’t you satisfied with the pabulum they fed you about your brother? Friends of mine started poking around-it was not appreciated. Got stonewalled, their stories weren’t considered credible, they were reassigned back to the States. Visas and military passes revoked. I’m impressed if nothing else by the single-mindedness of the enemy. I can’t take their hate personally.”

“You aren’t one of those conspiracy-theory crazies?”

“Just remember,” he yelled as she ran outside, “where there’s smoke, there’s usually a bale of marijuana close-by.”

She groped her way in the darkness, and she didn’t know which was worse-her stomach or the fear of sniper fire. When she came back, they talked several more hours into the night, Frank so full of information that Helen wished she had a recorder on because she simply couldn’t absorb it all. Finally he stood and stretched. “Bye, sweetheart. I’m out tomorrow for a five-day patrol.”

“Take me with you,” she said.

“No way, baby girl.” He leaned down close to Helen’s ear, and she smelled chili and beer on his breath. “They want you to be part of their movie, don’t ever forget it.”

“Please let me go with you.” She blushed. After all, she was the girl with The Quiet American under her bed.

He went off to a corner of the room and came back with a small stitched bracelet. He motioned her to stick out her wrist. “Here. It’s from the Yards. Good people. Now you’re one of us.”

“That means no.”

“Can I ask you a favor?” Frank asked. “A smell of your hair?”

She nodded, and felt a scratch of whispers and a peck on her cheekbone.

“I want to know what’s really going on.”

He inhaled with a deep gulp. “I’m a sucker for beautiful hair.” He sighed. “I’ll never admit I told you this. My little present for you, so you can sleep better to night. Didn’t know your brother, but I knew Wagner’s unit went in to assassinate some local chieftain along the Laos border. They were dropped into this mud hole, didn’t know that the dry area on the map became a lake at the wrong time of the year, heavy and thick like quicksand, and they were stuck; when the bullets started flying they realized they had been ambushed; sitting ducks, the whole unit wiped out minutes off the plane. Crying shame. Shit like that doesn’t happen to us.”

“Take me tomorrow,” she said.

“I’ll sleep on it. Be up at five.”

But when she woke up at five the next morning, MacCrae had already left camp.

“So what’s he involved in?” she asked, trying not to show her disappointment.

“What isn’t he involved in is a better question,” a soldier answered with a laugh. “Frank and The Cause.”

She handed the soldier one of her Leicas. “Tell him he owes me. Tell him to use it and bring me back pictures.”

Frank was right in one way: The knowledge about Michael’s death released her as knowing the worst can. Although it was as horrific as anything she imagined, she no longer had to imagine. But she was just as unwilling to leave as before; the mystery of what drew men like MacCrae to risk everything was bigger than Michael’s death.

She rode out with the helicopter pilots high over the land of the delta south of Saigon, trailing over the endless paddy fields that reflected up at them like broken pieces of a mirror. The dull green of choking jungle and sinewy-limbed mangrove swamp contrasting with the light green of the new rice; the land only rarely broken by signs of human habitation-small clusters of thatched roofs or an occasional one of red tile. From above, the land appeared empty and peaceful, only farmers bent in the paddies or orchards. She sat like a tourist, enthralled by the dirty green and reddish brown rivers, slow and thick-moving like veins pumping life into the land.

It felt safe looking down from high in the air, protected by the metal of the machine and the speed of its movement. The confidence of the pilots infected her. Many of them were her own age, some as young as her brother.

She went out on dozens of runs, routine and without contact. A fact of war that in both combat and photography there were great stretches of nothing, boredom, and the only thing left to contemplate was the land itself that had brought them there. For a time she was content to commune with the mystery of it. But once she relaxed to the fact of nonevent, of safety, curiosity began gnawing at her again.

On each assignment, she would question soldiers about what they had seen of Vietnam. Their answers were strangely resistant.

Mostly, their worlds were sealed by perimeter wire and bunkers, bounded by the luxuries of C-rations, sodas, cigarettes. They lived in a universe limited to their weaponry and machinery, their chain of command, and so in the most fundamental sense it did not matter in which country they fought. They were immune except to the most basic facts of topography and weather. Vietnam was not mysterious to them, not the history or the land or the yellow faces. Uncovering the secret of place was considered nonessential. The mystery that held them was their own survival, the beauty and inscrutability of battle, the shining failure of death. To them, Vietnam was nothing more or less than what they purchased during R amp;R in the bars and the streets of Saigon and Danang. It was generally concluded a secret not worth knowing. Helen concluded that coming to Vietnam was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

The first time she rode in a gunship, sitting behind the gunner in the open door of the fuselage, the wind howling like a hurricane through the interior as they dropped through the air in a combat-landing spiral, she grabbed the webbed walls for support, but all the fearlessness she had gained from the transport flights vanished. She made bargains: If she survived this one flight, she was done and would go home. Or at least stay in Saigon and cover vaccine drives.

The gunner pointed his big gloved hand down, and she saw an enemy fighter appear from out of the tree line. He bent down on one knee and aimed his BAR rifle at their plane. It would be a miracle if he could down a chopper with it. Helen couldn’t hear the high scream of bullets, but quarter-sized holes appeared in the sides of the plane, splinters of sunlight like angry eyes. He had managed to hit them.

After months of hearing about the elusiveness of the enemy, this man in his dark pajamas seemed anticlimactic. Even though he was trying to kill them, Helen felt more afraid for him, fear rolling in her gut at the unevenness of the battle, the lone man crouched in the tall, burning grass, the spreading shadow of the gunship passing over him.

Helen got the photograph of him aiming at them as the gunner let loose a round. They were almost on top of the man, so that the force of the first spray of bullets made him fly up and backward like a wind. Helen kept taking pictures until the film ran out. While she sat down on the floor to reload, hands shaking so badly that she had trouble opening the camera, he blew into parts in the spray of bullets.

When she climbed out of the plane back at the airport, ears ringing from the deafening thunder of the engines, the pilot gave her a thumbs-up and invited her for a beer. He had soft, moist eyes, and said that the beauty of the country made the violence especially awful, like slashing a pretty woman’s face. She sat in the officers’ club, stiff with sweat and fear, and listened to him talk about a girlfriend back home, the hope of a job in the airlines after his service was up. Neither spoke of being fired on or of the killed enemy, except to write it up in the military report. Helen didn’t yet understand that conjuring up the future was the duty of the living, what they owed to the dead.

She lied to herself, broke her promises to go home or at least to stay in Saigon after that flight because the whole event had been so surreal, so un-weighted, so anticlimactic, because the pictures were too far away from the man and showed the horror in miniature, which carried meaning only when the events were explained. Pictures could not be accessories to the story-evidence-they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.

Her arsenal of supplies became her protection. She would triple-check each item because she believed that without any one thing she might anger what ever god was keeping her safe. She carried two Leica bodies on crossed neck straps, bandolier style, one under each arm, with three lenses, a 28, 35, and 90mm, all purchased on the black market, as well as her tailor-made fatigues and canvas para boots. Annick had taken her shopping and then to lunch as if it were the most natural thing in the world to go on a shopping spree for war. Ridiculous and comforting. She carried a film case on the helicopter, but in the field she fastened the film rolls to her camera straps. She counted the weight down to the ounce, wouldn’t consider carrying the added weight of a weapon. Her only concession to vanity was always wearing her pearl earrings.

Only a couple of weeks after meeting MacCrae, word reached her that he had been killed. She felt a grief all out of proportion to the brief time she had known him. Maybe it was his age, but he reminded her of the generation of her father. So clear that they had had unfinished business with each other. The pilot who introduced her to him handed her a bag MacCrae had left for her, and in it was her camera and a KA-BAR knife in a beaded Montagnard sheath. She took the camera to Gary, asked if he would help her expose the film. One shot, the rest of the roll empty-a newborn, still smeared with blood and mucus, umbilical cord stanched, in large white hands. Behind, unfocused, a woman lay on the ground. The mother? She seemed peaceful, seemed asleep, but it was a worrying picture. Whose hands? Why outside?

“Let me buy it,” Gary said.

“It’s not mine to sell.”

She walked with Robert through the bookstalls in Saigon as she told him about MacCrae’s death, and he frowned. A young American civilian passed them and greeted Robert.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said. The two men stood aside and talked quietly, heads bent.

Helen moved off toward the books, wondering if there was any truth to the rumors about Robert feeding information to the CIA. Probably it was her hurt feelings over his waning interest in her. Which was fine. What he did was his own business, but she didn’t like his muddying what it meant to be a reporter. The table was piled high with weathered paperbacks in English. Many had pages stuck together, wavy with humidity. She opened a book, Pride and Prejudice, the pages brittle and yellowed. The incongruousness of reading Jane Austen in Vietnam made her smile. “Five cents,” the boy behind the table said. Helen nodded and took out the change.

After a few minutes, Robert returned, clearly pleased but offering no explanation of who the man was. He could have an informant. “I didn’t even know MacCrae was still around. He turned against the SVA. Against us. Forgot whose side he was on. Insisted on living, eating, sleeping right there with the tribal people.”

“Isn’t that what Special Forces is supposed to do?”

“Forget MacCrae,” Robert said. “He was an old crazy. Thought he knew better than we do how to win the war.”

“I trusted him,” Helen said, testing the words out and realizing they were true. “He’s what I came to find.”

A note at the hotel told her where to jump a ride to a hamlet for MacCrae’s funeral. Since he had been operating in an area officially off-limits to the United States, his death and funeral were being hushed. She would not invite Robert; it pained her, the new distance between them. His own secrets and now hers.

By the time the ceremony started, darkness had penetrated the hamlet. Rain poured down on the tin roof of the small, open-air school house. It needled the metal roof with a loud, continuous hiss that depressed Helen. In the threadbare, damp room, she waited on a rough bench, staring at the plain pine coffin surrounded by candles. The circle of flame extended only as far as the concrete floor, only as far as the glistening, bowing banana leaves that crowded to form a wall of the room. She had been asked to bring a copy of his last photo, and now she placed an eight-by-ten print of the newborn on a small table by the coffin. The hurt inside her was unreasonable, but that did not help stop it. MacCrae had been killed with enemy-stolen American weapons; his will stated that he wished to be buried in the hamlet he had lived in those last years, all his money and belongings divided up among the villagers.

Various men entered in ones and twos to pay respects. These were not the military she had met so far. Like MacCrae, most were older; like him also, many wore the tiger stripes and black berets of the elite divisions. She read the crest insignia on a Green Beret who came in-De Oppresso Liber… To Liberate the Oppressed. Most were accompanied by Vietnamese and spoke the native language freely. She heard names of hill towns and base camps. Lang Vei, A Luoi, Duc Pho, and Plei Mei. MACV-SOG, marker of clandestine activities, whispered behind her. When a man wearing a Ranger uniform spoke to her, it was hesitantly, the rusty English words forming themselves slowly on his lips. She thought of her father, how he would have felt right at home in this group.

A voice behind her made her turn. Darrow stood with Linh in the doorway, talking to a Special Forces lieutenant.

When Darrow saw her, he bowed his head briefly, then came forward. “Why are you here?” He had hoped to hear news of her departure, heading back to California. Her presence irked him. When she was gone, he would stop wanting her.

“You treat this like your personal war. Think I’m crashing a funeral?” All of her longing for him instantly turned to dislike. She regretted Linh moving off to give them privacy.

Darrow stared at the coffin, kneading the back of his neck. She had gotten further than he would have thought. He couldn’t imagine MacCrae befriending her, exactly the kind of amateur he loathed. “We were good friends.”

“Robert said-”

“Frank,” he said, “was part of the old guard. The men here are the last of it.”

She fingered the beaded sheath on her belt. “He left this for me.”

So Frank hadn’t quite dismissed her. Of course, he was human, too. A pretty face must have appealed to him. “He must have thought you needed protecting.”

“I left my camera for him.” She looked around. A lonely way to end. As if he read her thoughts, Darrow reached out his hand and laid it on top of hers. An impartial hand. She let it sit there for a moment, warming her skin, then pulled away before she got used to it. She would stay a little longer because Frank had taken her aspirations for real, not wanting to let his faith in her down.

With a shock Helen realized she had stayed till Christmas, a disreputable and wistful holiday in the tropics. A large dinner party was organized for all the journalists stranded in-country. A hot and rainy afternoon, but the evening held a touch of coolness, a token of it being the dry season. As Helen waited in the hotel lobby for Robert, it could not have felt less like Christmas Eve.

The party was being hosted in one of the rented old French villas near the embassy. When Robert and Helen walked in through the gates set deep in the high walls surrounding the compound, the courtyard was crowded with overgrown plants-heavy, succulent leaves, overblown blossoms beginning to wilt, heavy rotting mangos and papayas fallen on the ground from the overhead trees-all of it lit by thousands of small candles flickering throughout the grounds. White-coated Vietnamese menservants greeted them in the doorway with silver trays of champagne.

Everyone in the expat community was there. The few that had them brought family. The majority brought doll-like Vietnamese girlfriends who wore either garish Western dresses or demure ao dais. They giggled like children and wrinkled their noses at the taste of eggnog. Helen had invited Annick, and Robert had brought along a friend as her date. The four of them sat on sofas and drank rum-laced eggnog while Frank Sinatra played on the record player. A pine tree from Dalat had been helicoptered in, hung with items from the PX: packs of chewing gum and cigarettes, tubes of lipstick, decks of cards.

Dinner was served at two long tables with white linen tablecloths that resembled long galley ships. The tables seated twenty each, while the rest of the people went through a buffet service and balanced plates on their laps. The prime rib, mashed potatoes, and candied yams, all cargoed in from Hawaii, weighed down and crushed with nostalgia all in attendance.

Someone down the table asked where Darrow was.

“Oh,” Robert said, “probably in some foxhole below the DMZ, warming up C-rations with a match.” Laughter from the table. “During incoming fire.” More laughter. “In the rain.” Everyone laughed. Helen gave a tight smile. She had not seen him since the funeral. “Making us all look bad,” Robert continued. “Especially when he gets the cover of Life next week.”

After dessert, guests went back into the living room. A Santa-dressed reporter handed out gifts, mostly bottles of scotch and brandy. Helen had gotten up to get coffee when Darrow walked in. His clothes so caked in dirt that only the deep rumpled creases were clean. His forehead had a few long bloody scratches across it, and the beginning of a brownish purple bruise was swelling under one cheekbone. She almost laughed because it seemed an extension of Robert’s joke, and he saw her smirk and turned away with no acknowledgment.

“Where have you been, Darrow?” the host shouted.

“I have an announcement to make,” he said, pausing to cough into his fist. “Jack was killed to night. We were ambushed in a jeep patrol in Gia Dinh.”

The holiday mood destroyed, the host clapped a hand on his back and then poured him a drink. They went off to the kitchen.

“The war doesn’t stop for long,” Robert said.

“It’s been that way forever,” Annick said, and finished a full brandy in one gulp. “A land of continuous siege.”

“Jack knew that. He said it didn’t matter who we backed, that the people didn’t care. So why do we?” Helen said. She herself felt trapped, too scared to go out in the field, too scared to give it up and leave. “I mean… we have a choice. Why don’t we leave?”

Nobody spoke.

“I’ll be back.” Robert went to the kitchen.

Annick leaned over. “Is that him?”

Helen nodded.

Annick shook her head. “Poor Helen.”

Lights were turned off in the living room, and small white candles were passed out. “ ‘Silent Night.’ In memory of Jack.”

Helen looked at the faces around the room, at the makeshift decorations, and felt closer to the people in that room than to people she had known all her life back home. It had only just begun for her-people disappearing from her life. Not only people she loved, but people she knew only casually, people whom she knew only by sight. The familiar world chipped away each day.

After dessert, guests made excuses to hurry away. No one could rebound from the news. Robert came and said they should get back to the hotel before curfew. Helen nodded, hoping that Darrow would come out, would take her away again to the crooked apartment, but, of course, that was all over.

In her hotel room, Helen kept the lights off. With difficulty, she banged open the rusted window to let in fresh air. In Vietnam everyone wanted windows shut to keep things-heat, humidity, bugs, bullets-out. After midnight, the only noise the swish of a police jeep blading down the wet streets. The male reporters were still enjoying themselves inside bars or in the brothels that locked their doors till dawn.

She took off her clothing and, with the deliberateness that came from drinking too much, hung each piece on its hanger. In the morning, she’d go out to Ben Cat and tag along on a sweep made by combined forces. She would eat Christmas Day rations with the soldiers. The thought of the greenish half-gloom under the trees depressed her. Already sick of the war. The overhead fan creaked as she paced the room, smoking and drinking bottled water to stop the spinning in her head.

She had gotten used to water at room temperature. Annick could spot Americans across a room because of their insistence on having ice. Ice tinkling in glasses. Anything to deny the crazies-inducing temperature. The military had contracted out the manufacture of ice-making plants to keep up with the insatiable American demand for ice cubes, ice cream, anything frozen, and now the Vietnamese were beginning to have an appetite for it. Helen had taken picture upon picture of Vietnamese children eating ice cream, and those were the ones always printed-they made readers happy, an example of America ’s civilizing process.

She longed for the refuge of Darrow’s room, but she denied herself its Spartan comforts. It was true-the soft beds and rich food and even the ice cubes, all of it a kind of game, keeping her from feeling things. The beginning of some kind of understanding had come as she sat in the tin-roofed school house at MacCrae’s funeral, but it had been too ephemeral, had disappeared before she could get her mind around it.

A soft knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She stood still, fingering her necklace, her mind flooding with horrors.

More knocking, more insistent.

Her heart jumped against her ribs. If it was the police, no one would be able to help her till morning. There were always rumors of arrests, people disappearing.

“It’s me. Please open,” Darrow said.

She grabbed a robe and pulled it over herself as she unlocked the door. Down the hall, her room boy with the long eyelashes was lying on his mat. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at them, a smile showing crooked, gleaming white teeth.

Darrow pushed her inside and shut the door.

“What is it?” she asked, but his hands gripped her shoulders, his mouth hard on hers. He had come straight from the party, clothes unchanged, skin still smudged with dirt and sweat, chin unshaven.

He pulled off her robe and pushed her back on the bed, his mouth on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

They made love urgently, without tenderness or words.

Afterward he buried his head in her neck, his arms so tightly around her that it hurt to breathe. A shaking in his shoulders. He wept, his head on her stomach, face turned away from hers in the darkness. Their first intimacy nothing, the usual war time coupling of people escaping fear, but now they entered a place of their own, invisible and not describable. Words like adultery small and meaningless against where they now were. When she woke at dawn, her room was empty.

It became their ritual-his arrival in her room at night. Sometimes to make love, sometimes simply to sleep.

No promises. When she did not see or hear from him for weeks, it no longer upset her. She understood; the war consumed. Her bags were finally unpacked by her room boy, who carried the empty suitcases away for storage.

Something shifted, infinitesimal, frail as a hair root reaching down through soil, anchoring the plant; no longer were there thoughts of leaving.