Behind the Moon (22 page)

Linh climbed right up to the rooftop of her father’s house at night, and she saw that the horizon was bright with fire. She clutched her crucifix and prayed to Bucky’s god to protect him if he were out there somewhere. She did not dare to ask for his safe return to her; she asked only that he should survive. In the morning, newspaper headlines declared grimly that the South Vietnamese government did not have enough food or ammunition to fight on. Where, they demanded angrily, were the Americans now? Where was the help they had promised?

Many children did not return after the holidays. Those who attended school were too distracted to learn. One afternoon, the government suddenly announced over the radio that curfew hours had been extended. Panicking people thronged the streets and the children cried out in fear and confusion. They clung to Linh’s hands and wept into her skirt. She huddled with them at the top of the short flight of steps just outside the front door of the school, waiting for parents, older brothers and sisters to ride down the streets on their motorcycles and pick up the children.

She looked down on faces pale with fear, eyes filled with bewilderment and growing resentment. Men and women shoved desperately through the crowded street. Others stood where they were, jostled and cursed by passers-by, their heads swivelling from side to side, their eyes wide with alarm as they searched frantically for the lost.

Among the swarm of people, she thought she spied a dark, curly-haired American soldier in army fatigues. He turned his face away and she could only see the back of his swarthy caramel neck.

‘Bucky!’ she shouted, for she was sure it had to be him. She tried to disentangle herself from the arms and legs of the children, swatting away their clinging limbs. ‘Bucky! It is Linh! I am here!’

She tried to drag herself away, but the children wailed and she hesitated and looked back.

‘Just wait here. Your parents will come for you soon,’ she pleaded. But she looked at their faces and could not resist their terror. She thought of how she would feel if it were Tien standing there. Slowly, she remounted the steps and crouched down beside them, folding them in her arms. ‘It is all right. Everything will be all right.’

Later, she wandered through the deserted streets of Saigon, stopped only by the occasional ARVN soldier— frightened young boys nervously fingering their rifles—at sandbagged posts. He was gone by that time, of course, the American soldier. If he was Bucky. He was. He had to be. She could not accept that Bucky was dead. She refused to consider that he might have abandoned her. She knew the man he was; she knew the man she loved. She walked up Tu-Do and stopped in front of the boarded-up entrance of Maison Catinat. She climbed the steps. She sat down on the top step and, nursing fierce love and desperate faith in her heart, she waited for Bucky to come.

In the days after Saigon fell to the communists, the tops of buildings fluttered with bright yellow and red propaganda banners, giving the city a rather festive look at odds with the new atmosphere of apprehension and sobriety. Bars, brothels and nightclubs were closed down. Many restaurants went out of business. Tu-Do was renamed Dong Khoi— ‘general uprising’. Loudspeakers were installed in the streets, crackling harshly into life at dawn to urge citizens to awake and perform their physical exercises in public squares.

Life for the Hos did not change much at first. Duong and Duc continued to work downstairs in their father’s publishing house. Instead of Vietnamese classics, they now churned out thousands of communist pamphlets. They typeset and printed the entire works of Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Marx, Engels and Lenin. They were kept busy. All school textbooks had to be rewritten to cull out reactionary rubbish. In the meantime, the schools closed down and Linh found herself out of a job once again. She bundled Madame Catinat’s cast-off clothing into two large pannier baskets and went out to sell it in the streets.

Up on the third floor of the Ho house, the women— Ai-Van, Phi-Phuong and Mrs Ho—thought of ways to make a few extra piastres since all the banks were closed and no-one could get any money out. They made sweet dumplings and sewed clothes for Linh to sell, then they prepared meals for the men and looked after the children. There were six cousins now: Duc’s two sons, Duong’s three daughters, and Tien. Mr Ho escaped this excess of femininity by shuffling downstairs to the second floor and, together with Mr Thieu, he read Karl Marx for the first time.

‘He writes quite beautifully,’ Mr Ho said, turning a page of the book he held on his lap. ‘Listen to this, Mr Professor: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” Quite inspiring in its passion, isn’t it? No wonder my own son Duyen was enthralled by the poetry of what he heard.’

‘That may be true,’ Mr Thieu replied, peering over his glasses. ‘Still, one may read Nguyen Du’s
Tale of
Kieu
and appreciate the beauty of the story, the artistry of the language, without in any way desiring to live the life of Kieu.’

‘You know about these things, of course, Mr Professor. Yet can’t we cull lessons from the life of Kieu? Shouldn’t literature inform our lives, enlighten our actions?’

‘And what do we learn from Kieu?’ Mr Thieu wondered. He sipped his coffee, leaned back in his fraying chair and quoted: ‘Heaven appoints each human to a place. If doomed to roll in dust, we’ll roll in dust.’

‘True, very true,’ Mr Ho said warmly. Whether communists or capitalists ruled, his world remained unshaken as long as he could indulge in these literary discussions with Mr Professor. ‘Yet “let’s stop decrying heaven’s whims and quirks. Inside ourselves there lies the root of good: the heart outweighs all talents on this earth”.’

‘And that is why,’ Mr Thieu replied, ‘Linh waits for her American to return, your Duyen believed in Ho Chi Minh and went to die for utopia, while my poor sons died for a corrupt leader they did not believe in.’

‘They had good hearts, our sons. They knew
hieu
thao
, and although they went their separate ways, still they followed the righteous path
—dao duc
and
le nghia
.’

‘All we can hope for is to protect those who are left to us now. It is the only thing left for you to do as a father.’

A few months later, police and hired thugs exploded through the door of the publishing house and began smashing printing presses, overturning tables, toppling stocks of paper, sweeping books off wooden shelves and display cabinets. The old men heard the commotion from the second floor and hurried downstairs. Mr Ho cried out in dismay when he saw cudgels swirling, machinery smashed, ink spilt, glass shattered, pages ripped and ground into the concrete floor.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded as he flung himself into the fray, hunching protectively over a printing press. ‘We are a good communist press.’

‘We know what you published before Liberation. We are destroying the enslaving, reactionary culture of the enemy,’ the young man said. He lifted his staff and brought it down heavily on the old man’s back, then he kicked the white-haired head and blood bloomed like a red camellia on the fragile skin.

‘
Cha
—Father!’ Duong rushed over to the broken body.

‘Have you no respect for the elderly?’ Mr Thieu demanded angrily. ‘Have you no respect for the culture you are destroying? Who gives you permission to do this?’

‘The government. We are stamping out the corruption of reactionary dissidents.’

‘But we publish Marx and Mao and Ho Chi Minh,’ Duc protested.

‘This publishing house carries a list of prohibited books. Look at these authors.’ With his staff he poked at some battered books. ‘Nguyen Tuong Tam. Khai Hung. Forbidden. All forbidden. This house is an indecent den of decadent propaganda.’ He signalled to his men to proceed to the upper storeys of the house to search for more prohibited reading material.

A week later, they received a summons to attend political meetings after work. There were several such meetings each week, lasting up to four hours. The roll was called at the beginning and the end. On one occasion, a meeting was held at midnight to welcome a political leader from the north who told them that they needed to be reeducated, but this could not be done in the corrupting atmosphere of the city. Intellectuals like themselves could only be transformed into new people, desirable citizens, if they went out to the country to dig irrigation canals. By working to revitalise Vietnam’s agriculture, they would redeem themselves.

It was, therefore, no surprise to them when, less than a year after Liberation, the younger members of the Ho family—Duong, Duc, Ai-Van, Phi-Phuong and Linh— were sent to a New Economic Zone. They left the children in Cholon with Mr and Mrs Ho and boarded a rickety green bus that still sported the sign SAIGON–VUNG TAU. Hours later, the bus stopped on a red dirt road in the middle of nowhere. They disembarked and an official came around to collect the bus fare. ‘It’s over there,’ he directed, jerking his chin to point the group of thirty-five young men and women towards a stone-strewn path that disappeared into the long grass stretching out for miles to the distant hills.

‘There is nothing there,’ a young man grumbled.

‘It is the New Economic Zone,’ the official insisted. He boarded the bus and it rattled away.

They faced three pressing problems upon arrival. First of all, there was nowhere for them to stay. Secondly, none of them had ever farmed before. And then they had only brought along a couple of pots, pans and bowls, chopsticks, a paring knife and a meat cleaver. It took them two months to erect a hut. They had to use the cleaver to hew down bamboo trees to build some sort of dwelling. Most of this construction work was done by the women. Almost immediately, Duong and Duc, despite their maimed hands and missing index fingers, were drafted by the community leader to cut down trees and clear the land to plant rice.

Every morning, the two brothers woke at five o’clock and went out to work without breakfast, for there was nothing to eat. Together with their team, they felled trees, cleared weeds, collected pebbles and other rubbish, drained swamps and caught scorpions, millipedes, crabs and snakes in the drying mud. They learned to work in synchronised rhythm, one slashing at the long grass and reeds, the other raking up the material into huge heaps which would then be burnt as fuel. They dug canals and built up dykes, packing down the solid earthen walls with brown palms that seeped blood where dry skin cracked over the bone. They planted rice seedlings in shin-deep water and harvested it when the months drifted and the fields drained and rippled with gold. They dried their crop in the sun, then took it to the rice-treading yard.

Under the bright moonlight, they took turns leading two lean buffaloes round and round the dry mud yard until the heavy weight of cloven hoofs crushed the rice grains from the husks. One of the brothers led the animals while the other kept a watchful eye for the betraying twitch of the buffaloes’ taut tails, rushing forward with a wooden scoop to collect the dung before it fell onto the grain. The rice was then hauled to a mill made of timber and clay to be ground by hand. It was left out in the sun on tarpaulins for the wind to winnow the chaff from the grain. After all that effort, they hauled the rice to the communal warehouse and the leader doled out their meagre ration. It was not enough to feed the five of them.

The women planted tomatoes and corn, but they were city-bred. They had never had to grow their own food before and they did not know how to tend the young plants properly. In the end, they cut down more bamboo, peeled away the woody outer layer and boiled the remains to supplement their meals. They were all emaciated, their bones protruding through their green-tinged skin. But the men fared worse because of their back-breaking physical work during the day. Each night they could hardly sleep for the hunger that stung them like a scorpion’s tail. They crawled on the mud floor, scrabbling for scraps of the evening’s meal, and when they could find nothing, they curled up painfully like cooked shrimps.

‘We must get out,’ Linh said as she gave her own small portion of rice to her brothers, ‘or Duong and Duc will surely die.’

The following night, they stayed awake until one o’clock, then they crept out of the bamboo hut and stumbled through the jungle. In the darkness, lithe branches of saplings slashed their skins and grazed their faces. Time ceased, night was eternal. They focused only on one thing: heading towards the moon. Then, in the pearl grey light of dawn, they reached the edge of the jungle and found themselves on the verge of a sealed road that the Americans had constructed many years ago. With considerable trepidation, they stopped the next truck that passed and were lucky enough to hitch a lift back towards Saigon.

‘The thing that grieved me most,’ Mr Ho said to his children when he saw them again, ‘was that I could not even organise a fitting funeral for your poor mother. Her soul flits restlessly because she was not sent off properly. I could not invite the neighbours around to perform the ceremonies because these are now forbidden. Everything that we used to do, our rituals, our culture, our harmony with those who are gone—all is forbidden. Marx was right. All that is solid melts into air.’

‘Did Ma leave us any instructions?’ Linh asked. She had been waiting for an upsurge of sorrow since she first heard that her mother had died while they were in the New Economic Zone, but grief refused to come. There was only numbness and a weary recognition that she had failed her mother in old age and death. She was a failure as a mother, for she had killed her first baby, Thi-Lan. Now she had failed as a daughter because she had not been there to tend to her mother. The debts that she could never repay were mounting sky-high. She hugged Tien in her arms and guilt oozed osmotically from mother to daughter.

‘Before she died, she told us to go,’ Mr Ho said.

‘She understood,’ Duong said. A filial son who had looked after his stepmother to the best of his ability while she was still alive, his heart was untroubled by selfreproach and the tears ran freely down his face. ‘She knew we could no longer stay here. And,
Cha
, she is right. We have no money. The printing presses are smashed. How can we start up any sort of business? We can’t get jobs for we have no papers. And if we are caught, we will be sent to prison, or back to the New Economic Zone. We must leave Vietnam.’