The Deep Green Sea (3 page)

So I rose up from that bed and left Mr. Bao and after that I have not touched a man. I have been free to do so. But I have chosen not to. I have taken my place in the state, working for Saigontourist to show the truth of how we live to those from other countries that come here. And until this moment, this is how I live. When I do not work, I have some girlfriends and we go to a movie or to a park or to a restaurant or to karaoke or to the show at the theater that was once the French Opera House and was then the national assembly building of the puppet government of the divided Vietnam. Or I sit alone in this room and I read a book or I listen on the radio to the clas­sic Vietnam opera or I say prayers and light incense for the soul of my father.

These prayers I say every night. I am a modern girl of a great socialist state but I am not a communist. Not so very many Vietnamese are communists. I can still pray for the spirits of the dead like my mother and my grand­mother taught me. I pray for my grandmother, too, but the ancestor shrine that sits against the wall next to the window has one careful purpose and that is to receive the prayers for the soul of my father, a soul that I have always understood to be suffering terribly in the next life and in great need of these things I offer him.

And when I lie down in my bed and it is night, there is still the smell in the air of the incense I have burned for him. I lie in my bed and sometimes I wear a silk robe and sometimes I am naked. I lie in my bed for all these years that I have been in this room as a woman, and I always lie alone until this night when Ben touches me for the first
time. But it was not clear to me how alone this was until Ben came to me. I did not feel how painful all the nights without him have been until he was here. This is a strange thing to me. As Ben kisses me and I feel he is here with me and I feel that no one has ever been here until this moment, I think that perhaps my father has always pro­tected me from that pain. Perhaps what I gave to my fa­ther's soul, the company of my prayers, he always gave back to me. This is what I think as Ben kisses me. And I may seem shy still, as I think too much of Mr. Bao and Elizabeth Taylor and my friends who go with me to restaurants and fill the air with empty words, and I do not concentrate on the feeling of his lips on mine. But it is not shyness. There is at this moment the smell of incense in my room. His lips are upon me and I smell the smoke of my father's soul.

My first time in this room, she asked me if I could wait for a few minutes. She said it was her custom to pray at a certain moment of the day, as soon as she came home, and she felt that the soul who was in her care knew that. “He is waiting,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. I didn't mention it at the time hut I was just happy to be here with her in a private place at last. She could do what she wanted, if she'd just let me hang around her.

There wasn't much furniture. It would have been a natural thing for me to sit on the bed to wait, but I didn't. I sat on a straw mat instead, before a low, black lacquer table with inlaid white cranes.

We'd just spent the day together. The previous afternoon I'd waited in front of the noodle shop to catch sight of her again, and the Saigontourist car finally arrived. She got out, dressed in the same white blouse with a big bow at the throat and tight skirt cut down to her knees that she'd worn the day before. She was clearly a guide of some sort. I'd been waiting a long time and I was caught off guard now. She was going to dash across the sidewalk and disappear before I could even rise to my feet. But she saw me and hesitated. She looked over her shoulder—I think to see if the car was gone, and it was. Then she came toward me. I stood up.

“I've been staying away from the dogs,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “But you came back here.”

“Yes.”

“Is this place in the guidebooks now? I have thought it is a place where only a Vietnamese would eat.”

“Oh, it's very good,” I said. I tried to read her tone. Did she know I was waiting for her and she was flattered and was flirting with me? But I couldn't catch that in her voice. It almost sounded as if she was really trying to get a fix on this noodle shop.

Then she asked, “Was it a coincidence that you are here when I am coming home from work?” She was still deadpan. I was very conscious of her being a young woman working for a communist government. But her eyes were bright and they seemed happy to stay fixed on me.

“Did I look surprised to see you?”

She wrinkled her brow at this, trying to remember. “I should have noticed that. I might figure you out without even asking.”

I said, “I don't think I looked surprised.”

She nodded and her eyes didn't leave me. “Is there some other sign I should be seeing?”

“I've been here about three hours. But that wouldn't show.”

She looked past me to the little table where I'd been sitting. There were half a dozen empty bottles. Three beers, three Cokes. I'd started with the beer, but I didn't want a buzz on when I saw her again. I wanted to have a clear head for her.

“Yes. Maybe it shows,” she said.

I wanted to explain about the beers, but I just felt my­self grinning at her like a fool. It was clear to me now that, deadpan though she was, she was playing with me,
and I wanted to keep that going. But all I could think of was something sincere. I said, “I wanted to see you again.”

This made her eyes break with me. She looked down, her face dipped, and I thought I'd made a bad mistake. But she came back to me. Only a moment later she came back. Her eyes were on mine again and she said, “Why is that? There are many girls in Ho Chi Minh City for you to look at.”

I had no answer for that question. She was right, of course. But it had never really been like that for me in my
life, always flashing on some woman or other, instantly, though if you believed most of the guys I've been around,
that's the way the world works. And there was something there between this woman and me, even as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the noodle shop talking
around it. There was something right away, and somehow our eyes knew it while our brains didn't. Finally I said, “No one else cared about saving me from the dogs.”

She smiled that sweet half-smile from the day before and she said, “It was my civic duty.”

“Have you warned many men about the dogs of Saigon?”

This stopped her. It seemed to me that she was having the same trouble I'd just had in answering. After a moment she said, simply, “No.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “There are many men in Saigon who could be in peril.”

“No one else calls to the dogs like they are worth loving.”

“So there were reasons for both of us.”

“Yes.”

I was stuck now. I shuffled around and tried to think of something to suggest. “I'd like to take you somewhere. For noodles, maybe. I know a great place.” I gestured at the shop behind me.

She laughed briefly, softly, at this, but then her face went suddenly serious. She said, “It is not so easy.”

“Because you don't know my name. I'm Benjamin Cole. The short name is Ben.”

“I am Le Thi Tien. My given name is Tien.” She held out her hand and I took it and she had a firm grip and we shook and let our hands go and I thought we both were happy to have touched in this clear and strong way. Then she said, “But that does not fix the difficult thing. My work for Saigontourist means I should not fraternize in public with someone who looks like a guest of our country.”

“Then let me hire you.” These words were out of my mouth before I could think about them.

He looked very concerned suddenly and I was sure it was because of the words he spoke, though I had not heard them at first in the way he feared. And that was an interesting thing. In the next moment, when I thought of him liking me and then hiring me and I finally saw what he was feeling bad about, I still was not hurt. I was not my mother. He was not a GI. Though he was American. Obviously so. And I had my own concern now. I wanted to do this in the way he had first imagined. I wanted to sit in a noodle shop with him in my softest silk dress, with my throat naked and my knees bared, I wanted to speak with him and watch his gentleness reach out to the ragged dogs that went by. This desire surprised me, and it seemed an impossible thing.

But there was this offer. I said, “I could take you on a tour of the city tomorrow.”

“Good,” he said. “Yes.”

And that is what we did. With my driver Mr. Thu we went to the Giac Lam Pagoda, the oldest in Ho Chi Minh City, built in 1744, and to the Reunification Hall, which had been the evil Nguyen Van Thieu's palace and where our triumphant revolutionary forces first unfurled our flag, and to the Ben Thanh Market, where it is clear how
plentiful consumer goods are in our country, and I spoke like a person who had never worn a silk dress in her life and had never shown her knees, and Ben was mostly quiet and he was very respectful of me and our position in public, even when Mr. Thu was waiting in the car and Ben and I were alone walking in the close and steamy aisles of the market full of jackfruit and alligator pears and bitter melons and squash and green peppers and bins of rice and stacks of dried fish and cages of ducks and chickens, or when we were alone in a cloud of incense with the Lady Buddha nearby, a dozen faces piled on her head and a thousand hands surrounding her, each with an eye in its palm, or when we stood on the balcony where our revolutionary flag first flew and no one was there but the two of us. Even in those moments, Ben was quiet and I filled the air with words I knew by heart but suddenly could barely recognize.

Then we were standing before the War Crimes Mu­seum. It is in an old French colonial compound beneath beautiful tamarind trees and Mr. Thu was once again in the car and Ben and I were standing on the sidewalk. Ben had not spoken in a long time. He waited for me to show him to the ticket kiosk, which was before us, and beyond was the courtyard where American tanks and armored vehicles sat and also a French guillotine, and inside the building were rooms filled with photos of dead women and children, and already my head was swarming with words. I did not listen to them. I could not move.

Finally he said, very softly, very near my ear, I thought, though I did not turn to see, “I don't think this is having the same effect as a meal in a noodle shop.”

“No,” I said. “I have not spoken a word of my own all day.” Now I turned to him. He had pulled back from me and was peering ahead, into the courtyard. I said, “Do you understand that?”

He looked at me. “Understand?”

“Do you understand that all these words have not been mine?”

“That was my point about the noodles.”

“But I cannot be myself in a restaurant, either. I would worry about the thoughts of those around us.”

His shoulders lifted and fell, only slightly, quite slowly. He had sighed. I had not heard it, but I knew. A strange alertness had come upon me with him and it was not a pleasant thing, really. But I knew that was because of this public sidewalk and the bow at my throat and the impossibility of my reaching out now and taking his hand.

With the sigh still lingering in his voice, he said, “What are we going to do, Tien? Should I just go back to my hotel and never bother you again?”

“No,” I said, and the word came out sharp and quick, and I thought that finally on this day I had said a word of my own. I said it again. “No.” And then I said, “I am glad we have met. I will arrange something.”

Then I lied to Mr. Thu, telling him that Ben was thinking of moving to the Metropole. Mr. Thu is a young man with a wife and children of his own, not from the generation who suffered so very much in the war, and I thought perhaps he would understand anyway. But for this day I left it with a lie, and he dropped Ben and me at the Metropole, which is the hotel just across the street from my apartment, and I told him the American would arrange the transfer of his lodging on his own and I would go home for the day, for it was late afternoon.