Catfish and Mandala Page 2

  The gloom obscured his friend’s face, but Thong could pick out the hollow cheeks and the wild vacant eyes. Before Vietnam fell, Tuan was a handsome young officer with all the promise of a good military career. He was only twenty-eight. He was married to his high school sweetheart and they had a son. On nights when it was very cold and the prisoners huddled together for warmth, he would speak of her, the way she moved and intimate things. Things not meant for the ears of others, but in this place it was all he had. All that kept him going.

  Tuan’s quivering voice was rife with self-reproach. “I shouldn’t have confessed that I was a pilot. I was scared. When they said the penalty for lying on the confession essay was execution, I lost my mind. I wrote down everything. I confessed everything. Everything I could remember.”

  Thong didn’t.

  “Thanh said I was honest. That’s why she loves me. I shouldn’t have written about my service in the air force.”

  He wanted to tell Tuan they wouldn’t call tonight, wouldn’t come for him, wouldn’t punish him. But he didn’t. It would have been a lie. He wanted to hear Tuan’s voice because it might be the last time they talked. A dying man had the right to talk, Thong said, and they were all dying. If the executioner didn’t kill them tonight, jungle diseases would kill them soon enough. Then there were the minefields, the hundreds of land mines they were forced to unearth and defuse with shovels. Death always came round, one way or another.

  “You’ll be all right,” Tuan said, reassuring his friend even through his fear. “You’re just a teacher. They don’t punish teachers.”

  Tuan didn’t know his secret. No one in the prison did.

  “They’ll let you go soon. You only violated martial law.”

  Tuan murmured himself to silence. There were nervous movements in the hut. Someone in the far corner retched. The loudspeakers crackled and screeched to life, whipping a charge of adrenaline through the room.

  “Bastards!” someone hissed in the dark. “Why at night? Why do they only call at night?”

  Silence answered him.

  “If they are going to kill me, I want to die in the sun,” the man said, his voice rising on a false note of courage. “Why do they only come at night?”

  A voice replied from across the darkness. “They are afraid of what they do. It is easier to kill in the dark.”

  Someone else said, “No laws, no reasons, no mercy.”

  “It is the way of the Viet Cong. I know them,” an old voice said. It was Khuong, the fisherman. He was in his sixties. He had given fifteen years to the Nationalist Army.

  The first man shouted out the window, “Cowards!”

  “Shut up!” a new voice trilled.

  “Yes, shut up. It’ll go hard for us if you don’t.”

  The murmurs of consent angered the first speaker. His voice, tinged with fear, became a shout. “You’re all cowards. You wait like chickens—they kill you like chickens. When they kill me, I’m not going to kneel. No shooting in the back of the head. I’ll look at the eyes of the man who pulls the trigger.”

  Khuong replied, “You won’t. It is dark. The night hides everything.”

  The loudspeakers blared. “Stand outside your hut when your name is called.” Without preamble it rattled off names like a shopping list. “Nguyen Van Tung, Do Nhan Anh, Tran Truc Dang …”

  A wail pierced the hut. A man across the room convulsed on the ground. The loudspeakers boomed, “Vo Ba Sang.” Oh, God. Not the auto mechanic.

  “Le Tin Khuong.” The village fisherman. “Dinh Yen Than.” The pig farmer. “Vu Tan Khai.” The town storekeeper. They were killing all the locals linked to the Nationalists. People were turning in their own neighbors.

  Thong stared at his friend. Tuan’s family had lived in this province for generations. They both heard it: “Phuoc Tri Tuan.”

  Then it was over: thirteen names, six from their hut. Tuan retched on his mat and curled up in it shaking. Thong held him. Sang, the mechanic, took his place at the door, seemingly at peace with his lot.

  The guards came in with oil lamps. Thong saw the fear, the ugly fear of the spared, and knew his face mirrored it. He saw the terror of the condemned and the way the tallowy light danced wicked shadows on their twisted features. The VC took the fisherman, the farmer, the storekeeper, and another man.

  They dragged Tuan away by his ankles. He did not resist and he did not speak. Tuan gave Thong no final look and no parting words. It was so quick and simple how the VC had taken him and plunged them back into darkness.

  Thong sat on his mat in a vile mixture of grief and relief. He had learned to block out the VC’s “trials” broadcast over the loudspeakers. They invariably followed the same script: an account of offenses against the country, a conviction, and a death sentence—never a defense or a last rite. Occasionally, a few men were not tried. Tuan was the fourth one tried and his crimes were the same as those before and after him.

  A long, long silence followed. Then eleven sharp pistol reports, distance-softened. It was over. They never knew what happened to the remaining two men.

  Thong woke three hours before dawn. He heard some other early risers moving in the dark and hurried to be the first out of the hut. The smart ones woke early to use the latrine before the morning rush. Not all could go before the guards came to take them out to work.

  The bloat-bellied moon sagged low on the horizon and silhouetted the guard tower just beyond the barbed-wire fence. The night sounds of the jungle hummed and the earth was cold and rough beneath his bare feet. Outside the compound, the sentries shadowed the perimeter on their watch, ignoring him.

  The latrine was a wooden structure overhanging the edge of a shallow pond inside the prison fence. He snagged handfuls of grass and climbed up the five-stepped ladder. The latrine reminded him of a hangman’s platform, the kind in the American Western movies his wife was so fond of. Only this one did not have a hanging post and in place of the trap door was a circular hole situated over the water. The surface beneath the latrine began to churn, roiling with catfish. He squatted over the opening and proceeded. The catfish fought wildly for their meal, leaping out of the water. He shifted to avoid the splashes. And so it went—the fish leaping and him shifting—until the business was concluded and the soiled grass discarded.

  As he made his way back to the hut, others strayed out one by one to the pond. The clouds had swallowed the stars on the horizon. He crawled back to his bed and, before he remembered, he moved to huddle against Tuan for warmth. Tuan’s straw mat was still there, reeking of the sourness of vomit and the cloying sweetness of urine.

  Thong curled up and wound himself tightly in his blanket and Tuan’s. The wind snaked through the thatched wall and ran cold tendrils over his scalp. He rolled onto his other side and bumped against Danh, a prison mate who lay perfectly still. Danh could have been dead. Thong could not tell and he did not wake him. If Danh were dead or dying, there was nothing Thong could do and nothing the VC would do besides tossing Danh into the mass grave in the woods and covering him with a thin layer of dirt.

  Thong often daydreamed of the time before his world became undone. His Saigon in April of 1975 was another life. A good life that he didn’t think could end even in the final days. He was a teacher, three years retired from the military. His wife, Anh, was a tailor in her own shop with three workers. They had made their fortune before the Americans pulled out in 1972 and they had to shut down their business. Comfortably well-off, they continued to work because it was in their nature. They lived in a three-story house and had five children, one girl, four boys. A shining member of Vietnam’s tiny middle class.

  It had been very different at the beginning. His family were impoverished refugees, fleeing south in 1946 when the Viet Minh took over North Vietnam. Hers were Southerners scratching out a living amid civil unrest. They married without the blessings of either family. Under a leaky roof, they scraped, worked hard, and saved prodigiously. Somehow, they got by on love and rice. Then came th
e thing—the thing that catapulted them out of poverty—that which he would forever keep behind doors closed to his children.

  When the army drafted him, they gave him an officer’s commission because he was a college graduate at a time when South Vietnam’s annual crop of college graduates was fifty. His fluency in French and English yielded a translator post. In 1967, his education landed him the office of Assistant Chief of Phan Thiet Province, a coastal city-state of central Vietnam. It was a paramilitary post that dealt in psychological warfare. He was only a lieutenant, but under his proctorship were two thousand men. They wrote literature, broadcast Nationalist ideology, pro-American sentiments, and anti—Viet Cong messages. They accused, ridiculed, blamed, and generally vilified the Viet Cong, their actions, their theories, and everything they stood for. His men patrolled the countryside and played Good Samaritans, lending the peasants a hand to win their favor, their loyalty.

  They swayed the peasants who did not care which side won the war because they were so hungry and poor. It was difficult for simple farmers and fisherfolk to understand how one regime could be worse than another. They paid the poor to spy on the VC movement in the countryside. They kept many from openly joining the VC. They found men to replenish the South Army.

  The VC hated propagandists more than they hated the American GIs. They hated propagandists more than they hated the Nationalist Army. More than the Nationalist Air Force. And Thong was the director.

  “Get up!” cried the guard from the doorway. It was Hong, the local hoodlum turned VC. He was seventeen, mean as a fighting cock, taut as a bamboo switch. He leaned on the door frame and sucked a cigarette, the tip flaring an evil eye in the half light. “Fuck! Fuckin’ lout!” He kicked the closest man, who was old enough to be his father.

  They filed out of the hut into the ashen dawn, and marched across the compound, going down the row of barracks, five corrugated steel buildings wallowing in mud and overgrown grass, the sidings riddled with bullet holes and bleeding rust, the glass windows cracked and furred with dust. They slowed as they came upon the VC mess hall, where the air was fat with aromas of coffee and fried eggs. They marched out of the garrison and onto the dirt road that cut through the rice paddies to the jungle beyond. They left the road at the edge of the jungle and began to work beside it, clearing undergrowth and cutting down trees to prepare the land for farming. The trees and grass were burned in a great bonfire. Black smoke curled skyward. The sky turned a steel-gray and the sun baked the air through the clouds.

  Midmorning, rain came down heavily. Warm tears slapped the broad green leaves of the jungle canopy and killed the bonfire. They pounded Thong’s back and they pounded the brown earth on the road. The water gushed down, steady and thick, from a gray sky. The dirt road that bandaged the jungle to the rice paddies—but parted both—was reduced to an endless series of large gray-brown puddles: grayed by the sky, browned by the rich soil. There was no wind, no peals of thunder, no ruptured flashes of lightning, no crackling gunshots in the distance, no muffled booms of artillery fire from the horizon. It was just another rain like those of his youth.

  He looked to the road where the rice paddies met the forest. A boy in faded black shorts stood, feet apart, in a fighting stance, ankle-deep in a puddle. Tanned skin a shade lighter than the soil molded around his slim muscles, defining the thinness of his body. One raised arm held a long bamboo stick like a javelin with the sharpened end canted at an angle to the ground. Water plastered straight black hair against his sharp face, young but all edges without a hint of softness. Slanted black eyes riveted on the ground blinking away the water streaming down his face. He stood frozen. At his feet, the rain pockmarked the puddle like pebbles.

  A flash of motion, the bamboo stick speared into the water. He thrust his face at the torrential sky and barked a cry of victory. An impaled frog jerked its death throes on the spear tip. He taunted the sky with his prize before stashing it in the burlap pouch at his waist. Thong felt a brief rush of joy, a touch of pride at the boy’s success, remembering the simple pleasures of his youth, remembering his first son.

  The boy looked at Thong looking at him, then turned away and left the road in long, limber, barefoot strides, heading toward the rice paddies. The curtain of rain closed over the boy and all was silent save sky-water drumming the earth and old men hacking the jungle.

  A revolution—everything shifted and nothing changed. Thong flailed at the weeds, a boy speared frogs barefoot in the rain.

  When the rain stopped, they ate lunch, two fists of rice in a tin of vegetable broth. Because the cut trees were drenched and would not burn, they were marched back to the garrison to clear land mines.

  The prison had been a Nationalist garrison during the war, a country outpost far behind the fighting front. It was deep in South Vietnam, but it was viciously fortified. A hundred yards of no-man’s-land ringed the garrison, thoroughly infested with land mines, studded with claymore mine posts, laced with miles of barbed wire, and scarred with concentric trenches, all cloaked in thick grass, vines, and small brush.

  Given shovels which they dared not use, the prisoners began from the sandbagged walls and worked their way outward. They had already cleared the mines and trimmed the vegetation of the first twenty yards, but everyone still treaded lightly to the outer markers. The VC waited behind the walls with their guns trained on the prison crew. No one spoke save the VC, who wagered on the outcome of today’s session.

  Thong was to clear a straight path for the log team. He hunched down low and began parting the grass one cluster at a time, searching for the black trigger rods of the canister and ball mines. He probed the ground with his fingers, praying to the gods he didn’t believe existed that there were no pan mines in his path. These were completely buried and nearly impossible to find without metal detectors. The soft earth played tricks on his mind, giving under his knees.

  He found two canister mines and marked two parallel paths, fifteen yards apart, with ropes. It was the loggers’ turn. Everyone else took cover.

  Six men pulled on two ropes tied to opposite ends of a log. The team divided and walked on the parallel paths, dragging the log on the ground between them. Eyes quivering on the edge of hysteria, the loggers trembled, looking like overworked nags strung out by the scent of slaughterhouse blood. One young man in his early twenties cried as he put his back to the task.

  Thong lay flat on the ground, shielding his head, listening. The log rustled the grass. Loggers traded nervous words. An explosion rent the air.

  Screams. A man clutched a raw gash in his thigh. Blood spewed out, reminding Thong of a butchered pig—making him hungry. Dirt and wood splinters filtered down. A bitter piquancy of gunpowder. Another man sat on the ground, childlike surprise on his face, holding his red squirting wrist, hand blown off.

  The VC replaced them with two others and a new log. The work went on until sunset.

  Back in the compound, the murky pond captured the clouds fleeing from a crimson waning of light. Prisoners bathed and washed their clothes at the far end of the shimmering water, across from the latrine.

  Dinner was rice and catfish soup. They fed the catfish at dawn and ate them at dusk. Then the indigo light fell and silence crept in.

  The loudspeakers crackled to life. A smothering stillness glassed them off from the world.

  “Stand outside your hut when your name is called. Pham Van Thong …”

  They came with their oil lamps and dragged Thong out into the dark.

  The next day, Thong climbed off the back of an army truck at an unmarked crossroads. The truck spat blue exhaust at him and rumbled back on the dirt track. He stood barefoot and penniless under the blazing sky, looking down the forked roads before him.

  3

  Fallen – Leaves

  Winter of 1961 in Phan Thiet, Vietnam, came in wet and cold, a damp cloth over the fisherfolk’s heads, mildew in their lungs. Along that scraped-up seacoast, ill winds scoured villages like bold ravens, reaching throug
h thatched walls and clawing around crevices with impunity, pilfering the souls of the weak and the unsuspecting.

  Thong and Anh lived in a one-room shack, nailed together in a back alley of the fishing town. They were young, in love, and strong, but their hands were like old people’s, seasonally water-crinkled from mopping the concrete floor and tending the leaky roof. A baby girl, their first child, slept peacefully in her crib—a cardboard box on their bed. They were cheerful about their meager lot, joking that the heavens were so generous to their rainwater cisterns, they hadn’t had to visit the village well in a month.

  They were vulnerable, though they did not know it. Their happiness was an unshielded beacon. Those who eloped did not have the protection of their dead ancestors.

  One gray day, an ill wind slipped through their curtain-door and wrapped its wings around their first child. The baby girl took sick and became as red as chili-pickled cabbage, then as pale as ivory. She was feverish, then cold. They rubbed her with heat-oil, but the heat did not come back into her tiny chest, which was hardly bigger than a loaf of bread. No money for medicine. No silver coin to scrape the ill wind from their baby girl. They fretted and they summoned the midwife, but she could do little. No money for Western doctor, Western medicine. The baby coughed. She cried, would not suckle her milk. Another morning, she was cold. Died during the night, not yet a year old.

  4

  Clan-Rift

  Four months ago, I emerged from Mexico and returned to the Bay Area, jobless and homeless. I did something unthinkable in America: I moved home to my parents. It was the perfect Vietnamese thing to do, fall back into the folds of the clan. Free food, free shelter while you lick your wounds and plot your resurrection. My non-Asian friends pitied me. My Vietnamese-American friends wondered why I hadn’t lived at home in the first place; a good son doesn’t leave home until he is married.