The Lotus Eaters. Tatjana Soli

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СКАЧАТЬ he said, getting up.

      

      The bar was packed, standing room only, almost all men, but Helen spotted Robert in the corner.

      “I’m sorry,” she said. “My ride back from the hospital didn’t come through. I had to bum a ride from some army officers passing by.”

      Robert turned with his drink and looked at her. “You clean up pretty well. I’ve got the prettiest girl in Saigon. That’s worth the wait right there.” Robert was on staff at one of the wires and had been wasting time in the front office when she came in looking for freelance work. Sensing that she was entirely overwhelmed, he quickly made himself indispensable.

      He had a squat build, beefed shoulders, and a muscular chest that caused him to move with a thick, heavy grace, like an ex-athlete. Too, like an ex-athlete, there was the sense that his best days were behind him. A little too neat in dress, a little too Southern and patriotic in politics, he didn’t fit in with the younger journalist crowd beginning to filter into the city. Helen was the kind of girl he dreamed about showing off back home, but coming across her in Saigon seemed on the edge of a miracle. The coup he was devising that afternoon was sweeping her off her feet, romancing her until his assignment was up, returning home with her on his arm, a salve and a cover to an unspectacular foreign career.

      She grinned. Back home, she had been considered on the plain side, but here the attention of being a rarity was unlike anything she was used to.

      “Have a sip of rum for the road.” He gave her his glass, a heavy, square one with a solid crystal bottom that made her hand dip from its surprising weight.

      “Hmmm,” she said. “I needed that.”

      “You should come home to New Orleans with me. Plenty of the good stuff down there. I’ll put you in one of those big ol’ houses in the Garden District, and we can fill it with kids.”

      “Robert, honey,” she said, batting her eyes and using a phony, thick Southern accent, “I came to Saigon to escape all that.”

      “Let’s go. Everyone’s already left for the restaurant.”

      They stood on the sidewalk while Robert haggled over the fare to Cholon with two cyclo drivers. Dark, lead-colored clouds had moved in and now begged against the tops of buildings, the humidity and heat so intense Helen felt as if she were walking fully clothed into a sauna. A shimmer in the air. She pushed past Robert and the drivers, ducking under the umbrella covering of one of the cyclos just as a sheet of rain crashed down. The city changed from gold sepia hues to shades of silver; the air, rinsed of its smells, recalled the closeness of the namesake river. Water beaded on the bunched flowers standing in buckets along the side of the road.

      “Pay the fare, Robert,” she shouted, laughing, as he climbed in the second cyclo behind her, dripping wet.

      The suddenness of the rains still seemed magical to her. Not like back home, where a few drops gave warning and then slowly increased. With the blink of an eye, a sudden Niagara. The monsoon had the tug of the ocean as if it were trying to reclaim the land.

      Especially in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, the shower didn’t slow the heavy pace of business. People simply covered themselves with an umbrella, a piece of plastic, whatever was on hand, and continued on. Both of the drivers were soon drenched but didn’t bother with rain gear, their shirts and shorts soaked and clinging to their stringy frames, water squelching out from their rubber sandals, as they serenely pedaled on. When they stopped in traffic, Helen turned to see her driver close his eyes and lift his face to the sky. When the other cyclo pulled next to her, she leaned across and whispered to Robert, “He doesn’t seem to mind the wet.”

      “Probably the only bath he gets every day,” Robert said. He had been stationed in more than five countries since he started reporting, and he took pride in the fact that he remained immune and separate from each of them. He looked forward to the time when all the thrill of the exotic drained away for Helen, too.

      “Don’t talk so loud.”

      “He can’t understand me, honey.”

      “I don’t care. It’s not nice.”

      “You’re right. He’s probably a cyclo driver by day, a VC operative by night. Unless he’s a homeless refugee whose village we destroyed. By all means, I want to be nice for Helen.”

      She glared at him. “Maybe he’s just a cyclo driver trying to make a living.” She reached over and pinched Robert’s arm.

      “Ouch! That hurt!”

      She giggled, not as naive as Robert thought she was but playing the part. “Stop making fun of me.” The truth was Saigon was dirty and sad and tawdry, and the catastrophic poverty of the people made her weak with homesickness. She found the Vietnamese people’s acceptance and struggle to survive terrifying, and she wondered again what the United States wanted with such a backward country.

      “Helen, nothing is ever simple here.” He guessed she was shrewder than she played, but he appreciated her tact. He was tired of the hard-eyed local women who tallied their company by the half hour.

      

      A few blocks away from the restaurant, the traffic bottled to a stop. A snarl of cars, trucks, carts, motorcycles, and bicycles. Standing still, the air turned an exhaust-tinted blue around them. The delay caused by an overturned cart ahead. Its load of fowl—ducks, geese, swallows—spread across the street in various stages of agony. Loose, downy feathers floated into the puddles until, waterlogged, they sank underneath, creating a cloudy soup. A group of Chinese men argued in loud voices. The birds inside the bamboo cages had toppled into the street. They quacked and honked in fright. Many of the birds had been trussed and hung upside down on the sides of the cart, left alive for freshness. Now many of these were half-crushed but still alive, flapping broken wings or struggling with snapped legs and backs. The owner of the cart pulled out a half-moon hatchet and began to lop their heads off. Dirty, orange-beaked heads were thrown into a burlap sack. A thin ribbon of bright red joined the muddy river of water running down the middle of the street. The cyclo drivers looked on, no intention of moving till the road was cleared.

      “I can’t watch this,” Helen said. Since she arrived a few weeks ago she had made an effort to avoid the ugliness in the city and now it was unavoidable, blocking her path.

      “Okay, we can make a run for it. The restaurant is only a street away.”

      The rain lightened to a heavy drizzle, and Helen stood in the road looking at the mess of wet feathers and blood, shivering, waiting as Robert paid the fare. A dog watched from an alley and made a sudden run past Helen, swooping down and grabbing a duck. Helen saw the white underside of its belly in his mouth as the dog sped past with his prize, an old man in pursuit with a broom. Splashing up water and mud, the dog paid with one wallop to his rear end before he disappeared around the corner with his prize. The man who caused the cart to overturn agreed to buy all the birds, and the final detail of the price was being negotiated. The uninjured ducks in the cages quacked madly as the owner made a grab for them, dashed their heads on the ground, and used the hatchet, tossing the bodies into a box.

      Helen ran over and motioned with her hand not to kill them. She pulled dollars out of her purse and handed them to the old man, who grinned at her and bobbed his head.

      Robert came up to her. “What’re you doing?”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ