The Lotus Eaters. Tatjana Soli
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Название: The Lotus Eaters
Автор: Tatjana Soli
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9780007364220
isbn:
The patrol spent the night in a small clearing, a village of six huts along a small tributary river. The people were kind, even killing a chicken in their honor, while the soldiers shared their rations. The chief brought out a bottle of moonshine to sip on. Leaving at dawn, they stopped by again five days later to get out of the rain and came upon only smoldering ruins. A dozen villagers dead, stinking in a thick sea of mud. Since there would be no acknowledgment that Americans were even in the off-limits province, no report of the violence. The enemy had been watching and had taken vengeance. An enemy that ruthless commanded a certain awe. Darrow realized that Vietnam was going to be a very different thing from other wars he had covered. The surface of things was just the beginning. The surface of things was nothing. Linh had it right: things hidden because they were in plain view.
Four of the soldiers disappeared down a path toward the west in hopes of finding the trail of the departing enemy. They would meet back in six hours. Darrow, Linh, and the remaining soldier retraced their steps to the original landing zone.
They waited another full day in the long elephant grass, unable to talk or play music or even start a fire to heat food. The sun beat down on their backs, the air heavy, a wet sheet, buzzing with insect energy. Linh, hidden in the tall grass, dreamed of running away. But where would he go? Finally, as protocol demanded, the soldier radioed for an extraction, although it would give away their presence and endanger the others.
And then like three lean and hungry wolves in the far distance, the missing soldiers appeared, carrying the fourth. They were struggling, exhausted, each stumbling with a leg or an arm of the fourth, now unconscious, soldier.
As naturally as Darrow had picked up the camera at the first sign of movement, he now put it down and ran through the field to help carry the wounded man. A decision without hesitation because it had been made and acted on a thousand times before.
As instinctively as Darrow going out across the field, Linh forgot his dream of running and followed him. The lines and dirt on the soldiers’ faces, the dry, unblinking stare of their eyes, showed the war had already started, the suffering begun.
No one had time to notice that Linh took a picture of Darrow helping to carry the wounded soldier. He was the only one in the shot without a weapon, the only one without helmet or flak jacket. For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be too brave.
Returning to Saigon, Darrow was gloomy. “Pictures would have shown what’s going on. Now nothing. If it’s not photographed, it didn’t happen.”
“Those villagers don’t care if they were photographed or not.”
“You have time to get out of this, you know,” Darrow said. He still did not understand that the worst had already happened to Linh.
“So can you.”
But that was not true. Darrow knew they were both caught.
Saigon, November 1965
The late-afternoon sun cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them—either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.
The dusty military jeep came to a rubber-burning stop in front of the Continental Hotel, scattering pedestrians and cyclos like shot, and a barrel-chested officer jumped out of the back to hand Helen down from the passenger seat.
“What service,” she said, laughing. “How much of a tip should I give?”
“Just promise you’ll have drinks with us.”
“Promise.”
“We’re only stationed here a few more days.”
“I will,” she said, and started up the steps of the hotel.
“Remember we know where you live, Helen of Saigon,” the soldiers shouted, laughing, peeling away from the curb with a blaring of the jeep’s horn that caused pedestrians to flinch, to stop and turn. The Americans at the terrace tables closest to the sidewalk grinned and shook their heads, but the Vietnamese out on the street simply stared, expressions impossible to read.
Linh shared a table with Mr. Bao. They both watched the scene unfolding on the street in silence, saw the tall blond woman in high spirits dusting her hands off on her pants, patting her hair back into its ponytail, the crowd parting as she moved up the sidewalk, skipping up the stairs of the hotel.
Mr. Bao shook his head, turned and spat a reddish brown puddle on the floor to the chagrin of the busboy, who hurried for a rag. “They think this is their playground.”
Already tired of the meeting with Mr. Bao, how the old man spoke right into his face, warm puffs of breath assaulting him, stale as day-old fish, Linh signaled for another bottle of mineral water. “Another whiskey, too,” Bao said. For a professed proletarian, Mr. Bao certainly seemed comfortable using the Continental as his personal lounge.
“Add a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my shopping list.”
Linh had been working for Darrow for a year, had finally moved into his own apartment in Saigon and begun to have some normalcy in his life, when Mr. Bao showed up one night at the café he frequented. Although he didn’t make clear which department he worked in, what was clear was that he had an offer from the North impossible to refuse. “Tran Bau Linh, we almost didn’t recognize you. It does us good to see how you’ve prospered in the world since your untimely departure from the party,” he said. He had the square, blunt face of a peasant. As well, he had the unthinking allegiance to the party line. Linh was surprised that they hadn’t already killed him.
“We have big plans for you,” he said. “You will do your fatherland proud after all.”
The job was fairly innocuous. A couple times a month, he would report to Bao on where Darrow and he had been. Any frequent newspaper and magazine reader would know as much. The idea was to know the enemy. Linh made sure to bore Mr. Bao in minutiae to the point that he buried anything that could be of value. Most of their meals were spent talking of the food. If Linh chose not to cooperate, Mr. Bao made it clear that he would never hear the bullet that killed him. “You are lucky that you have a use, otherwise you would not still be here talking with me.”
The sky had turned a darker gold by the time the woman came back down into the lobby wearing a blue silk dress the color of the ocean at dusk. Her heels made a delicate clicking sound on the floor as she crossed to the СКАЧАТЬ