Love Like Hate (11 page)

The first week after the Fall of Saigon, Kim Lan stayed inside. She and Cun ate instant noodles and ignored whatever was happening outside. The usual sounds did not filter in—radio music, kids playing, the wooden clappers of soup-delivery boys. She took out old magazines and read them cover to cover, knowing the society depicted in them no longer existed. She stared at photos of famous singers—Hung Cuong, Thanh Thuy, Che Linh—and wondered if they were still inside the country. She read an article about Vo Van Bay, a tennis star who had won twenty Davis Cup matches before he retired. She read about an African king who returned to Saigon to look for a daughter he had fathered in 1953 while serving in the French Army. He found her working in a cement factory and took her to his kingdom of the Central African Republic. A photo showed a grim man, crowned, robed and holding a scepter, sitting on a huge throne in the shape of an eagle, its wings spreading, but there was no image of the fortunate daughter. Her real name was Martine, but she had to change it to Mai to blend in at the cement factory. Kim Lan had seen this factory many times, going to Bien Hoa, and never suspected an African princess was wasting away behind its gray cement walls. It was a colossal thing on the left just after you crossed the Newport Bridge, before you hit the National Cemetery. Everyone knew this cement factory. Lost in a particularly fascinating article, Kim Lan sometimes forgot, if only for a few seconds, that her world had been irrevocably changed. She often
slowed the pace of her reading, as if by doing that, she was slowing the pace of time itself, making the night, her last refuge, last a little longer. But there would be no king or father to deliver her from her situation. She oscillated between apocalyptic foreboding and willful optimism. Each night, she stood at the altar to pray to the Goddess of Mercy to protect her missing husband. She was nearly certain he was dead, but somehow this prospect did not sadden or alarm her—she simply felt numb. Whatever his faults, Hoang Long had given her years of relative calm and happiness. As his wife, she had matured, and for that she was grateful. Lying in bed, she squeezed Cun tightly to her bosom, their bodies welded together, inseparable, and felt strangely secure, as if no danger could detect or devour them as long as they remained on the darkened bed, as if the glare of morning would never come. In the stillness of the night, the world felt safe and eternal and nothing seemed changed.

On May 8, she finally ventured out. Having not been outside for a week, she thought the familiar street looked extra bright, with everything—houses, pavement and trees—seemingly lit up from inside and saturated with colors. She felt exposed and nervous, yet strangely relieved. Maybe free was a better word.
But free of what?
She wondered.
I’m walking freely through this air. No one is stopping me. No one is waiting for me. I’m not bound by anything but air
. Her train of thoughts was interrupted by the sight of two North Vietnamese soldiers guarding a house several doors away. She had never seen the enemy up close before, only on TV or in the newspapers, and only when they were tied up, blindfolded, or dead.

The house belonged to Mr. Loc, a prominent critic of Nguyen Van Thieu. A Social Democrat, Mr. Loc was considered left-wing and accused by some of being a Communist sympathizer. An intellectual with an athlete’s body, he was serious yet cheerful, with a distinctive booming laugh. He had translated the US Constitution, which he self-published in a pamphlet. He gave Kim Lan a copy several times, but she always threw it away as soon as he turned his
head.
Why is he giving me political propaganda?
she wondered. He also had the annoying habit of leaving pamphlets all over her tables. For writing articles attacking corruption in Thieu’s government, he was imprisoned five or six times, but each time he came out he was more aggressive than ever—he could not be cowed. He came to Kim Lan’s café just about every morning for two cups of coffee with condensed milk. If he didn’t show up for more than a week, she knew he was in jail. Mr. Loc only smoked American cigarettes, either Camels or Lucky Strikes. “You must go to the source,” he explained to her once, smiling. In the evening he liked to kick a soccer ball against a wall with the neighborhood children. Everyone but Hoang Long seemed to like Mr. Loc, though the two hardly knew each other.

“I fight for real, defending the country, while that draft dodger fights I don’t know what with his tongue!” Hoang Long would say.

“But Mr. Loc is not a draft dodger. He’s nearsighted!” Kim Lan would reply.

“Nearsighted?! Everyone is nearsighted. What’s nearsighted? If you’re not blind, you should be fighting!”

Walking past the young soldiers that day, Kim Lan could only assume that they were keeping Mr. Loc under house arrest. They looked no more than seventeen. They were short, sturdy and dark, not unlike her husband, but in ill-fitting, faded uniforms, and yellow canvas instead of black leather shoes. One wore a pith helmet, the other a boonie hat. Their AK-47s, slung across their bodies, tilted downward.
We just lost to these people
, she thought, feeling oddly excited. She did not dare to engage them in conversation but quickly went back home.

When she went out the next day, the two soldiers were gone. Through the open gate of Mr. Loc’s house, she saw three uniformed men talking to Mrs. Loc. Mrs. Loc seemed tiny that morning, her face drained of all color. Kim Lan would only find out later that what she was witnessing was the seizure of Mrs. Loc’s home. Only
one story out of four, the highest, was allotted to her and her four children. The rest became state property. Mr. Loc had already been taken to Chi Hoa Prison. He would return four years later, a sullen and broken man.

As Kim Lan walked around the neighborhood, people she knew greeted her as usual, but they seemed tense and unwilling to talk. There were many strange faces. Some shops were open. Hung Far Low, a Chinese restaurant on the corner, was actually filled with noisy customers, many of them North Vietnamese soldiers. Across the street was a propaganda billboard from the old regime with Thieu’s famous admonition:
DO NOT LISTEN TO THE COMMUNISTS BUT WATCH WHAT THEY DO
. What the Communists were doing that day was eating fried rice and chow mien. Some of them were standing on the sidewalks, looking lost. Kim Lan remembered 1968, when there were so many reports out of Hue about civilians being shot by North Vietnamese troops or buried alive in mass graves.

That night, lying in bed next to her son, Kim Lan felt that she had made a serious mistake in not leaving with Sen. There were only a few decisions in life that really mattered and she had certainly blown this one. Now she understood why Sen had always been so courteous and pleasant to her, why he had always smiled so brightly. With him loitering in the café each day, she had actually spent more time with Sen than with her own husband. Sen was always within her sight and often literally within her reach. To make such an arrangement permanent would not be unpleasant. Sen was a kind man who would probably make a good father. Unlike Hoang Long, who seemed strangely indifferent to his own son, Sen often joked around with Cun and gave him sweets. Kim Lan had never felt more lonely in her life. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Cun, she would have broken out in sobs.

11
IS THAT YOU?

A
fter failing to persuade Kim Lan to go with him, Sen drove south, heading for Vinh Chau. He was afraid the highway would be clogged with fleeing refugees, but it wasn’t. There was a large crowd at Bac My Thuan and it took him three hours just to get on a ferry. On the dock, vendors were pushing the usual sugarcane cubes, pineapple chunks, mango and Coca-Colas, everything but lottery tickets. Regime change or no, poor people still had to make money that day. The man with the withered legs draped around his neck like a pretzel was also out begging. Sen had to pay a ridiculous price for the ferry, ten times the usual rate. Crossing the river, he noticed that the South Vietnamese flag had already been removed from the pilot boat.

He slept that night in Soc Trang and continued early the next morning. All in all, things were going swimmingly until he reached the last ferry crossing, about forty miles from his destination. The ferry was not there for some reason. There were boats and boatmen willing to take him across, but how would he cover the last forty miles without his car? If only his sisters were waiting on the other side to carry him piggyback, tag-team fashion, the last forty miles, but no, they weren’t available just when they were most needed.

He sat in a little shack of a café at the river’s edge and pondered his options. With the electric fan broken, the heat was insufferable. On a plywood wall, a dozen long-legged calendar babes, baring belly buttons, surrounded a piglike Buddha. Hungry, he ordered rice
with pork chops, but the meat turned out to be so old and dry, he flung it in the direction of a mangy, three-legged dog. Two flies suddenly collided in midair and landed in his fresh-brewed tea.
Were they making love?
he wondered. He had seen pigeons, snakes, monkeys, of course, and crocodiles doing the nasty, but never flies. He watched the flies drown before dumping the tea and pouring himself another cup. He noticed that all of the locals—five idling hoodlums and the hag owner of the café—were staring at him as if he were a man from Mars. He suddenly realized that there was no government left to prevent them from killing him and stealing his car.
Which side were they on during the war anyway? Probably neither. Some of them probably didn’t even know there was a war. It was because of stupid hicks like these that I had to escape to Saigon in the first place
.

By sunset, the ferry still hadn’t turned up, so there was nothing for Sen to do but climb into his car and try to sleep. Tossing and turning all night in the backseat, he woke up at dawn groggy, thirsty and dreading what the café had on its breakfast menu. There was no ferry and there wouldn’t be a ferry. Sen approached a hick and bought a rusty bicycle from him—at a monstrous price. These hicks weren’t so stupid after all. Then he asked another hick to take him across the river. Not needing his car anymore, he didn’t have to hire anyone to look after it. Sitting on the sampan, he looked back at his black 1965 Citroën le Dandy with annoyance and sadness. He also thought of Kim Lan, of how he had almost managed to snatch her from fate.

The ride home on the pebbly dirt road with multiplying potholes, their stagnant rainwater reflecting clouds and sky, so beautiful, required all the stamina Sen had and he nearly fell off his bike several times. He only reached the outlying fields of Vinh Chau at sunset. Serenaded and mocked by the monotonous heavy metal riffs of a million cicadas, his eyes blurred by rivulets of sweat, his muscles breaking down, it was pitch-dark when he nearly crashed into the gate of his old house. His father’s villa boasted the only wrought
iron gate in the village. There were cacti outside the high walls, which were topped with colorful shards of glass, and German shepherds inside them. He didn’t hear the dogs barking that day for some reason. He draped himself against the gate and thought he would die soon if no one came out to carry him inside immediately. Seeing light shining through the wooden slats of the second-floor windows, Sen shouted for his three sisters. “First sister! Second sister! Third sister!” It took forever, but someone finally came out. At first Sen thought that it was a new servant, but no, too well dressed to be a servant, she was actually the lady of the house. “What do you want?!” she snapped at him in a thick northern accent.

Understanding everything immediately, Sen mumbled, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I must have the wrong house.” He quickly got on his cheap bike and blundered away.

Not everything was lost; there was a second house Sen could go to. He willed his bike another mile to reach his wife’s house. Yes, Sen was married. Back in 1948, during the feast to celebrate his birth, that month-long bacchanal of grilled meat and wine, his father’s best friend promised his next daughter to Sen when the boy grew up. Flushed with wine and gratitude, Sen’s father readily accepted the offer. “We are best friends! So our children should also be best friends when we’re gone!” With three wives, the other man had no problems turning out daughters. At seventeen, Sen was married to fulfill his father’s pledge. The couple lived together as polite strangers for a year before Sen disappeared to Saigon for good. They tried to have sex a few times and found the experience absurd and humiliating, but the outcome was a son. Now, having come full circle, dumped by destiny in front of his old roost, his rejected wife and forgotten son just on the other side of a broken-down, warped door, Sen shouted, “Open up! It’s me!”

“Who is that?”

“It’s me!”

“Is that really you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

She opened the door a crack and saw that it was really her husband. His face hadn’t changed after six years, unlike hers. “What are you doing with that bicycle?”

“I just bought it. Open up so I can come in!”

“It’s been so long.” Mrs. Sen suddenly started to sob. “How come you never returned from that trip to Saigon?”