A Good Scent from a Strange Moutain Part 11

The next night I left my light on to watch for H's arrival, but I dozed off and he had to wake me. He was sitting in a chair that he'd brought from across the room. He said to me, "o. Wake up, my old friend."

I must have awakened when he pulled the chair near to me, for I heard each of these words. "I am awake," I said. "I was thinking of the poor men who had to swim out to our s.h.i.+p."

"They are already among those I have served," H said. "Before I forgot." And he raised his hands and they were still covered with sugar.

I said, "Wasn't it a marble slab?" I had a memory, strangely clear after these many years, as strange as my memory of H's Paris business card.

"A marble slab," H repeated, puzzled.

"That you poured the heated sugar on."

"Yes." H's sweet-smelling hands came forward but they did not quite touch me. I thought to reach out from beneath the covers and take them in my own hands, but Ho leaped up and paced about the room. "The marble slab, moderately oiled. Of course. I am to let the sugar half cool and then use the spatula to move it about in all directions, every bit of it, so that it doesn't harden and form lumps."

I asked, "Have you seen my wife?"

H had wandered to the far side of the room, but he turned and crossed back to me at this. "I'm sorry, my friend. I never knew her."

I must have shown some disappointment in my face, for H sat down and brought his own face near mine. "I'm sorry," he said. "There are many other people that I must find here."

"Are you very disappointed in me?" I asked. "For not having traveled the road with you?"

"It's very complicated," H said softly. "You felt that you'd taken action. I am no longer in a position to question another soul's choice."

"Are you at peace, where you are?" I asked this knowing of his worry over the recipe for the glaze, but I hoped that this was only a minor difficulty in the afterlife, like the natural antic.i.p.ation of the good cook expecting guests when everything always turns out fine in the end.

But H said, "I am not at peace."

"Is Monsieur Escoffier over there?"

"I have not seen him. This has nothing to do with him, directly."

"What is it about?"

"I don't know."

"You won the country. You know that, don't you?"

H shrugged. "There are no countries here."

I should have remembered H's shrug when I began to see things in the faces of my son-in-law and grandson this morning. But something quickened in me, a suspicion. I kept my eyes shut and laid my head to the side, as if I was fast asleep, encouraging them to talk more.

My daughter said, "This is not the place to speak."

But the men did not regard her. "How?" L'i asked his father, referring to the missing murder weapon.

"It's best not to know too much," THng said.

Then there was a silence. For all the quickness I'd felt at the first suspicion, I was very slow now. In fact, I did think of H from that second night. Not his shrug. He had fallen silent for a long time and I had closed my eyes, for the light seemed very bright. I listened to his silence just as I listened to the silence of these two conspirators before me.

And then H said, "They were fools, but I can't bring myself to grow angry anymore."

I opened my eyes in the bedroom and the light was off. H had turned it off, knowing that it was bothering me. "Who were fools?" I asked.

"We had fought together to throw out the j.a.panese. I had very good friends among them. I smoked their lovely Salem cigarettes. They had been repressed by colonialists themselves. Did they not know their own history?"

"Do you mean the Americans?"

"There are a million souls here with me, the young men of our country, and they are all dressed in black suits and bowler hats. In the mirrors they are made ten million, a hundred million."

"I chose my path, my dear friend Quc, so that there might be harmony."

And even with that yearning for harmony I could not overlook what my mind made of what my ears had heard this morning. Thng was telling L'i that the murder weapon had been disposed of. Thng and L'i both knew the killers, were in sympathy with them, perhaps were part of the killing. The father and son had been airborne rangers and I had several times heard them talk bitterly of the exile of our people. We were fools for trusting the Americans all along, they said. We should have taken matters forward and disposed of the infinitely corrupt Thiu and done what needed to be done. Whenever they spoke like this in front of me, there was soon a quick exhange of sideways glances at me and then a turn and an apology. "We're sorry, Grandfather. Old times often bring old anger. We are happy our family is living a new life."

I would wave my hand at this, glad to have the peace of the family restored. Glad to turn my face and smell the dogwood tree or even smell the coffee plant across the highway. These things had come to be the new smells of our family. But then a weakness often came upon me. The others would drift away, the men, and perhaps one of my daughters would come to me and stroke my head and not say a word and none of them ever would ask why I was weeping. I would smell the rich blood smells of the afterbirth and I would hold our first son, still slippery in my arms, and there was the smell of dust from the square and the smell of the South China Sea just over the rise of the hill and there was the smell of the blood and of the inner flesh from my wife as my son's own private sea flowed from this woman that I loved, flowed and carried him into the life that would disappear from him so soon. In the afterlife would he stand before me on unsteady child's legs? Would I have to bend low to greet him or would he be a man now?

My grandson said, after the silence had nearly carried me into real sleep, troubled sleep, my grandson L'i said to his father, "I would be a coward not to know."

Thng laughed and said, "You have proved yourself no coward." And I wished then to sleep, I wished to fall asleep and let go of life somewhere in my dreams and seek my village square. I have lived too long, I thought. My daughter was saying, "Are you both mad?" And then she changed her voice, making the words very precise. "Let Grandfather sleep."

So when H came tonight for the third time, I wanted to ask his advice. His hands were still covered with sugar and his mind was, as it had been for the past two nights, very much distracted. "There's something still wrong with the glaze," he said to me in the dark, and I pulled back the covers and swung my legs around to get up. He did not try to stop me, but he did draw back quietly into the shadows.

"I want to pace the room with you," I said. "As we did in Paris, those tiny rooms of ours. We would talk about Marx and about Buddha and I must pace with you now."

"Very well," he said. "Perhaps it will help me remember."

I slipped on my sandals and I stood up and H's shadow moved past me, through the spill of streetlight and into the dark near the door. I followed him, smelling the sugar on his hands, first before me and then moving past me as I went on into the darkness he'd just left. I stopped as I turned and I could see H outlined before the window and I said, "I believe my son-in-law and grandson are involved in the killing of a man. A political killing."

H stayed where he was, a dark shape against the light, and he said nothing and I could not smell his hands from across the room and I smelled only the sourness of L'i as he laid his head on my shoulder. He was a baby and my daughter Lam retreated to our balcony window after handing him to me and the boy turned his head and I turned mine to him and I could smell his mother's milk, sour on his breath, he had a sour smell and there was incense burning in the room, jasmine, the smoke of souls, and the boy sighed on my shoulder, and I turned my face away from the smell of him. Thng was across the room and his eyes were quick to find his wife and he was waiting for her to take the child from me.

"You have never done the political thing," H said.

"Is this true?"

"Of course."

I asked, "Are there politics where you are now, my friend?" I did not see him moving toward me, but the smell of the sugar on his hands grew stronger, very strong, and I felt H Chi Minh very close to me, though I could not see him. He was very close and the smell was strong and sweet and it was filling my lungs as if from the inside, as if H was pa.s.sing through my very body, and I heard the door open behind me and then close softly shut.

I moved across the room to the bed. I turned to sit down but I was facing the window, the scattering of a streetlamp on the window like a nova in some far part of the universe. I stepped to the window and touched the reflected light there, wondering if there was a great smell when a star explodes, a great burning smell of gas and dust. Then I closed the shade and slipped into bed, quite gracefully, I felt, I was quite wonderfully graceful, and I lie here now waiting for sleep. H is right, of course. I will never say a word about my grandson. And perhaps I will be as restless as H when I join him. But that will be all right. He and I will be together again and perhaps we can help each other. I know now what it is that he has forgotten. He has used confectioners' sugar for his glaze fondant and he should be using granulated sugar. I was only a washer of dishes but I did listen carefully when Monsieur Escoffier spoke. I wanted to understand everything. His kitchen was full of such smells that you knew you had to understand everything or you would be incomplete forever.

SALEM.

I have always been obedient to these true leaders of my country, even for their sake curling myself against a banyan root and holding my head and quaking like a child, letting my manhood go as we all did sooner or later beneath the bellow of fire from the B-52s. I said yes to my leaders and I went into the jungle and gave them even my manhood, but I sit now with a twenty-four-year-old pack of Salem cigarettes before me and a small photo trimmed unevenly with scissors and I whisper softly no. I whisper and I raise my eyes at once, to see if anyone has heard. No one has. I am alone. I look through my window and there is a deep-rutted road, bright now with sunlight, leading into the jungle and we are at peace in Vietnam, hard stuck with the same blunt plows and surly water buffaloes but it is our own poverty now, one country, and I turn my face from the closing of trees a hundred meters down the path. I know too much of myself from there, and I look at the objects before me on the table.

He was alone and I don't know why, this particular American, and I killed him with a grenade I'd made from a Coca-Cola can. Some powder, a hemp fuse and a blasting cap, some sc.r.a.ps of iron and this soda can that I stole from the trash of the village: I was in a tree and I killed him. I could have shot him but I had made this thing and I saw him in the clearing, coming in slow but noisy, and he was very nervous, he was separated and lost and I had plenty of time and I lobbed the can and it landed softly at his feet and he looked down and stared at it as if it was a gift from his American G.o.ds, as if he was thinking to pick up this Coca-Cola and drink and refresh himself.

I had killed many men by that time and would kill many more before I came out of the jungle. This one was no different. There was a sharp pop and he went down and there was, in this case, as there often was, a sound that followed, a sound that we would all make sooner or later in such a circ.u.mstance as that. But the sound from this particular American did not last long. He was soon gone and I waited to see if there would be more Americans. But I was right about him. I'd known he was separated from his comrades from just the way he'd picked up one foot and put it ahead of the other, the way he'd moved his face to look around the clearing, saying to himself, Oh no, no one is here either. Not that I imagined these words going through his head when I first saw him-it is only this morning that I've gone that far. At the time, I just looked at him and knew he was lost and after the grenade I'd made with my own hands had killed him, I waited, from the caution that I'd learned, but I knew already that I'd been right about him. And I was. No one appeared.

And then I came down from the tree and moved to this dead body and I could see the wounds but they did not affect me. I'd seen many wounds by then and though I thought often of the betrayal of my manhood beneath the bombs of the B-52s, I could still be in the midst of blood and broken bodies and not lose my nerve. I went to this dead body and there were many jagged places and there was much blood and I dug into each of the pockets of the pants, the s.h.i.+rt, and I hoped for doc.u.ments, for something to take back to my leaders, and all that I found was a pack of Salem cigarettes.

I do not remember if the irony of this struck me at the time. I was a young man and ardent and at turns full of fury and of shame and these are not the conditions for irony. But we all knew, even at that time, that one of the favorite pleasures of the dear father of Vietnam, H Chi Minh, was to smoke a Salem cigarette. A captain in our popular forces had a personal note from father H that thanked him for capturing and sending north a case of Salem cigarettes. This was all common knowledge. But I, too, liked American cigarettes, encouraged in this by the example of our leader, and I think that when I took this pack of Salem from the body, I was thinking only of myself.

Like now. I am, it seems, a selfish man. H Chi Minh died that same year and we all went through six more years of fighting before our country was united and I owe my obedience to those who have brought us through to our great victory, but they have asked something now that makes me sit and hesitate and wait and think in ways that surprise me, after all this time, after all that I have been through with my country. The word has come down to everyone that we are to find any objects that belong to dead American soldiers and bring them forth so that the American government can name its remaining unnamed dead and then our two countries can become friends. It's like my wife's old beliefs and her mother's. These two women live in my home and they love me and they care for me but they do not change what they deeply believe, in spite of what I've been through for them, and they would understand this in their Buddhist way. It is as if we had all died and now we were being reborn in strange new bodies, destined to atone in this particular new incarnation for the errors of our past. The young VC and U.S. soldier reborn as middle-aged friends doing business together, creating soda cans and cigarettes.

Is it this that makes me hesitate to obey? I only have to ask the question to know that it is not. In the clearing, I put the pack of Salem cigarettes in my pocket and then I slipped back into the jungle and I smoked one cigarette later in the afternoon, shaking it out of the pack with my mind elsewhere as I sat beside a stream, a little ways apart from my own comrades. I did not wish to share these cigarettes with them and when I lit one and drew the smoke into my body, there was that familiar letting go from a desire both created and fulfilled by this thing I did, and I looked down the stream away from the others and in a few hundred meters the jungle closed in, black in the twilight, and I blew the smoke out and my nostrils flared from an odd coolness. I had never before smoked this favorite cigarette of H Chi Minh and for a moment I thought this soft chill in my head was somehow a sign of him. Such a thought-the vague mysticism of it-came easily to me and I never questioned it, though I think H himself would have been disappointed in me because of it. This was not the impulse of a mature communist, and much later, when I learned that there was a thing called menthol in some American cigarettes, I remembered my thoughts by the stream and I felt ashamed.

But at the time, I let this notion linger, that the spirit of H was inside me, and I took the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and now I looked at it more carefully: the blue-tinted green bands of color at the top and bottom, the American words, long and meaningless to my eyes except for the large SALEM in a central band of white-this name I'd known to recognize. And there was a clear cellophane wrapper around the pack, which I ruffled a little with my thumb and almost stripped off, but I stopped myself. This was protection from the dampness. Then I turned the pack over and there was a leaping inside me as if a twig had just snapped in the jungle nearby. A face smiled up at me from my hand, a woman's face, and I stopped my breath so that she would not hear me. I suppose that this reflex ran on even into my hands where I was ready to draw my weapon and kill her.

And she is before me now. The pack of Salem is in the center of the oak table that I made with my own hands, breaking down a French cabinet from an old provincial office building to make a surface of my own. The cigarette pack lies in the center of this table and the photo looks up from behind the cellophane, just where he put it, the man from the clearing. I have never taken the photo out of its place and I have never smoked another cigarette from the pack and these are things that I knew right away to do, even before my hands calmed and the beating of my heart slowed again beside the stream, and I did not ask myself why, I just knew to look once more at the woman-she had an almond-shaped face and colorless hair and a vast smile with many teeth-and then to put the cigarette pack into my deepest pocket with the amber Buddha pendant my wife had slipped into my hand when I went away from her.

I expect her soon, my wife. I look through my window and down the path and she and her mother will come walking from out of the closing of the trees and she will be bearing water and her sudden appearance there along this jungle path will make my hands go soft and I am wrong to say that the hair of this woman in the picture has no color, there are times of the day when the sunlight falls with this color on our village and her hair has no color only against the jungle shadow of my wife's hair.

I wish I had the reflexes of the days when I was a freedom fighter. Instantly I could decide to kill or to run or to curl down and quake or to rob a dead man's pockets or I could even make such a strange and complicated decision as to put this pack of cigarettes into my pocket with the secret resolve-secret even from myself-to preserve it for decades. Now I sit and sit and I can decide nothing. Something tells me that my leaders will betray all that they have ever believed in and fought for, that they will make us into j.a.panese. But even shaping that thought, I do not have a reflex, my hands do not go hard, they just lie without moving on the tabletop before the smile of an American woman, and perhaps what began beneath the bombs of the B-52s is now complete. Perhaps I am no longer a man.

Still, I will not act in haste about this. That is the way of a twenty-year-old boy. I am no longer a boy, either. And even the boy knew to put this thing away and not to touch it. Why? I bend near and I wait and I watch as if I am hidden in a tree and watching the face of the jungle across a clearing. The photo has three sharp, even edges, top and bottom and down the left side, but the right side is very slightly crooked, angling in as it comes down through a pale blue sky and a dark field and past the woman's shoulder, and then it seems as if this angle will touch her at the elbow, cut into her, and the edge veers off, conscious of this, leaving the arm intact. I speak of the edge as if it created itself. It is of course the man who made the cut, who was careful not to lose even the thinnest slice of the image of this woman he clearly loved. He trimmed the photo to fit in the cellophane around a pack of cigarettes and I understand things with a rush: he placed her there so that every time his unit stopped and sat sweating and afraid by a jungle stream and he took out his cigarettes to smoke, she would be there to smile at him.

Is this not a surprising thing? A sentimental gesture like that from an American soldier who has come across an ocean to do the imperialist work of his country? Perhaps that is why I kept the pack of cigarettes. I am baffled by such an act from this man. Even my wife has such ways. We still have an ancestor shrine in our house. A little altar table with an incense holder and an alcohol pot and a teakwood tabernacle that has been in her family for many years and there is a table of names there, written on rice paper, with the names of four generations, and she believes that the souls of the dead need the prayers of the living or they will never rest and I tell her that this is not clear thinking in a world that has thrown off the tyrannies of the past, but she turns her face away and I know that I hurt her. This altar and the prayers for the dead do not even fit her Buddhism, they are from the Confucianism of the Chinese who oppressed us for centuries. But she does not hear me. It is something that lives apart from any religion or any politics. It is something that comes from our weakness, our fearful hopes for a life beyond the one that we can see and touch, and it is this that allows governments to oppress the poor and create the very evils I helped fight against.

But as I look more closely at these objects and think more clearly, I realize I should not have been surprised at the sentimentality of this American soldier. I am confused in my thinking. His wife was alive. This was the picture of a living person, not a dead ancestor. And whatever excess of sentiment there was in his wanting to see his wife in the jungle each time he stopped to smoke a cigarette, his government had bred such a thing in him-it was their power over him-and I look beyond this smiling woman and there is a sward of blue-green nearby but then the land goes dark and I bend nearer, straining to see, and the darkness becomes earth turned for planting, plowed into even furrows, and I know his family is a family of farmers, his wife smiles at him and her hair is the color of the sunlight that falls on farmers in the early haze of morning and he must have taken as much pleasure from that color as I take from the long drape of night-shadow that my wife combs down for me and the earth must smell strong and sweet, turned like that to grow whatever it is that Americans eat, wheat I think instead of rice, corn perhaps. I am short of breath now and I place my hand on this cigarette pack, covering the woman's face, and I think the right thing to do is to give these objects over to my government. I have no need for them. And thinking this, I know that I am trying to lie to myself, and I withdraw my hand but I do not look at the face of the wife of the man I killed. I sit back instead and look out my window and I wait.

Perhaps I am waiting for my wife: her approach down the jungle path will make it necessary to put these things away and not consider them again and then I will have no choice but to take them into the authorities in a Nng when I go, as I do four times a year to report on the continued education of my village. If my wife were to appear right now, even as a pale blue cloud-shadow pa.s.ses over the path and a dragonfly hovers in the window, if she were to appear in this moment, it would be done, for I have never spoken to my wife about what happened in those years in the jungle and she is a good wife and has never asked me and I would not tempt her by letting her see these objects. But she does not appear. Not in the moment of the blue shadow and the dragonfly and not in the moment afterward as the sunlight returns and the dragonfly rises and hesitates and then dashes away. And I know I am not waiting for my wife, after all. It is something else.

I look again at the face of this woman. The body of her husband was never found. I left him in the clearing and he was far from his comrades and he was far from my thoughts, even after I put his cigarettes in a place to keep them safe. Perhaps she has his name written on a shrine in her home and she lights incense to him and she prays for his spirit. She is the wife of a farmer. Perhaps there is some belief she has that is like the belief of my own wife. But she does not know if her husband is dead or he is not dead. It is difficult to pray in such a circ.u.mstance.

And am I myself sentimental now, like the American soldier? I am not. I have earned the right to these thoughts. For instance, there is already something I know of that is inside the cigarette pack. I understood it in a certain way even by the stream. I think on it now and I understand even more. When I shook the cigarette into my hand from the pack, the first one out was small, half-smoked, ragged at the end where he had brushed the burnt ash away to save the half cigarette, and I sensed then and I realize clearly now that this man was a poor man, like me. He could not finish his cigarette, but he did not throw it away. He saved it. There were many half-smoked cigarettes scattered in the jungles of Vietnam by Americans-it was one of the signs of them. American soldiers always had as many cigarettes as they wanted. But this man had the habit of wasting nothing. And I can understand this about him and I can sit and think on it and I can hesitate to give these signs of him away to my government without thinking myself sentimental. After all, this was a man I killed. No thought I have about him, no attachment, however odd, is sentimental if I have killed him. It is earned.

Objects can be very important. We have our flag, red for the revolution, a yellow star for the wholeness of our nation. We have the face of the father of our country, H Chi Minh, his kindly beard, his steady eyes. And he himself smoked these cigarettes. I turn the pack of Salem over and there is something to understand here. The two bands of color, top and bottom, are color like I sometimes have seen on the South China Sea when the air is still and the water is calm. And the sea is parted here and held within is a band of pure white and this word Salem, and now at last I can see clearly-how thin the line is between ignorance and wisdom-I understand all at once that there is a secret s.p.a.ce in the word, not Salem but sa and lem, Vietnamese words, the one meaning to fall and the other to blur, and this is the moment that comes to all of us and this is the moment that I brought to the man who that very morning looked into the face of his wife and smoked and then had to move on and he carefully brushed the burning ash away to save half his cigarette because this farm of his was not a rich farm, he was a poor man who loved his wife and was sent far away by his government, and I was sent by my own government to sit in a tree and watch him move beneath me, frightened, and I brought him to that moment of falling and blurring.

And I turn the pack of cigarettes over again and I take it into my hand and I gently pull open the cellophane and draw the picture out and she smiles at me now, waiting for some word. I turn the photo over and the back is blank. There is no name here, no words at all. I have nothing but a pack of cigarettes and this nameless face, and I think that they will be of no use anyway, I think that I am a fool of a very mysterious sort either way-to consider saving these things or to consider giving them up-and then I stop thinking altogether and I let my hands move on their own, even as they did on that morning in the clearing, and I shake out the half cigarette into my hand and I put it to my lips and I strike a match and I lift it to the end that he has prepared and I light the cigarette and I draw the smoke inside me. It chills me. I do not believe in ghosts. But I know at once that his wife will go to a place and she will look through many pictures and she will at last see her own face and then she will know what she must know. But I will keep the cigarettes. I will smoke another someday, when I know it is time.

MISSING.

It was me you saw in that photo across a sugarcane field. I was smoking by the edge of the jungle and some French journalist, I think it was, took that photo with a long lens, and you couldn't even see the cigarette in my hand but you could see my blond hair, even blonder now than when I leaned my rifle against a star apple tree with my unit on up the road in a terrible fight and I put my pack and steel pot beside it and I walked into the trees. My hair got blonder from the sun that even up here in the high-lands crouches on us like a mama-san with her feet flat and going nowhere. Though my hair should've gone black, by rights. It should have gone as black as the hair of my wife.

Somebody from the village went into a Lat and came back with an American newspaper that found its way there from Saigon, probably, brought by some Aussie businessman or maybe even an American GI come back to figure out what it was he left over here in Vietnam. There are lots of them come these days, I'm told, the GIs, and it makes things hard for me, worrying about keeping out of their sight. I've got nothing to do with them, and that's why the photo p.i.s.sed me off. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was me. I knew the field. I knew my own head of hair. And because you can't see the cigarette, my hand coming down from my face looks like some puny little wave, like I'm saying come help me. And that's the last G.o.ddam thing I want.

I grew the tobacco myself. That's what we do in my village. And up here we grow coffee, too. The first time I saw the girl who would be my wife she was by the side of a road spreading the coffee beans out to dry. Spreading them with her bare feet. And when her family finally let me marry her and we lay down at last in our little house-with wood walls and a wood ceiling in this place in Vietnam where there are hardwood trees and cool nights-she rubbed her hands through my hair, calling it sunlight, and I held her feet in my hands and kissed them and they tasted of coffee.

I'm not missing. I'm here. I know the smell of the wood fires and the incense my wife b.u.ms for the dead father and mother who gave her to me and the smell of my daughter's hair washed from the big pot in our backyard to catch the rainwater, and instead, the "USA Today" has got me on the run, waving pitifully across a field at a photographer to put the word out to the world, but they don't wonder why I'm apparently not smart enough to walk on across that field and say, Take me back to my mama and my papa and my brothers and my sisters who are living ruined lives in America because I'm missing in action. I don't even have the sense to get close enough to the road so I can be identified, so I'm the lost child of every family in the country with someone whose body was never found.

But I walked away. I just walked away. And there were a thousand of them like me. Two thousand. More, I heard, a lot more. In the back alleys of Saigon, in the little villages in the highlands and along the sea, trying to keep out of the way of the killing just like these people who took us in and didn't ask any questions.

Though I could see the questions all come back in the faces of my people when the newspaper showed up. We all went out to see it. It's the way here. The village is small and our elder is Binh and he knew me from the first, he was the first man I saw when I walked in here in 1970 unarmed and bareheaded and I said in the little bit of Vietnamese I had that I was a friend, I wanted to lie down and sleep. He knew what I was doing.

It was yesterday that we sat on mats in front of Tien's house and she brought us tea and we looked at the paper.

"It's you, I think," Binh said, and he curved his lower lip upward, lifting the little wisp of a H Chi Minh beard, a beard that he wore not from approval of the man but with a kind of irony.

Tri, who had brought the paper, put it before me again now, and the dozen faces around watched me for the final word. I nodded. Tho, my wife, touched my shoulder. She could see it, too. "Yes," I said.

"What does it say about you?" Binh asked.

"Nothing," I said. "They don't know who I am."

Binh nodded and he did it slow enough that I knew he wanted me to say more. I waited, though, looking away beyond the circle, across the dirt street to the tobacco-drying racks, and some kids were there, two of Tien's boys squatting and looking back at me and Tri's little girl, who stood staring at a dragon head set on a table in the sun. Tien had been working on the head, repainting the green and red ridges in its face, getting it ready for Tt, the new year. When I looked away from Binh, I thought my daughter, Hoa, might be there, but she wasn't. And I didn't want to cast my gaze farther with Binh waiting for me to say more.

But I'd waited a little too long already. Binh asked, "Does it speak of some other man?"

"Not one particular man. No. It says some people in America have seen the photo and think it's proof that Americans are still alive over here, men being held by the communists."

"MIA," Binh said, p.r.o.nouncing each letter with a flat American inflection that he'd picked up from me long ago.

"Yes," I said.

At this, Binh turned his face, in respect, away from Quang who sat next to him. Quang was almost as old as Binh, clean-shaven, with skin the color of this dirt street moments after a rain. But I glanced at him briefly, and there were others from our little circle who did, too. He was holding the newspaper spread tight in his two hands as if trying to stretch any wrinkles out of it. He was looking at my image there, and I think his mind now was on his own lost son. Most of the people of a certain age in my village have dead children from the war. But Quang's boy is missing, still, after more than twenty years, and he worries about where the body might be, the spirit lost and hovering around it waiting for rites that would never come.

My village believes in spirits. Last night we all burned incense in our kitchens for the G.o.d of the hearth. Such a G.o.d lives in each of our houses, and seven days before Tt he goes up to heaven to report on the family. A family is very important in Vietnam. We work and we care for each other and we live under one roof and there is no ending for such a thing. My wife's mother and father slept on straw mats in our house until the day that each of them died. I will sleep on a straw mat in the house of my daughter until I die. That is my wish.

Perhaps that's why I'm so frightened now to see this image of myself in an American newspaper. Why I looked again across to where the children were, more of them now, gathering to watch us and wonder, and I looked for my daughter and I wanted to see her in that moment, a brief glance even. We are meant to protect our families in all their linked parts like we protect our bodies. And the G.o.d of the hearth takes special note in his report of how careful we are about that. And how we respect the spirits, the spirits of our family gone to the afterlife before us and the spirits of all the others in the air around us. And we must respect the G.o.ds, as well. The minds and wills that animate the universe. Look where they have brought me.

And Hoa appeared. My daughter is tall now, her body changing from a girl to a woman, and her hair is the brown of the dried tobacco, not black but the color of what we grow and prepare here, and I don't know why I was caught by her hair at that moment but it is long and it has this color that belongs to no one else here, not my wife, not me. And she stepped behind Tri's daughter and she looked to me, briefly, and then at the little girl staring at the dragon.

Binh still had something on his mind. "Do you think some people in America will look at this picture and remember?"

"There will be many who do that," I said, and my eyes moved to Quang, and I was thinking of the grief he was drawing from the paper in his hands even then, and Binh knew what I was saying. But I also understood him. He meant: Do you have other people in that past life of yours who will recognize this son or husband or brother of theirs and suffer from this?

I felt my wife stir beside me. She heard this beneath Binh's words as well, and grew angry at him, I think. It made her fear another woman. I should speak, I knew. But I looked again at Hoa and she was bending to the table and she picked up the dragon head and turned to face Tris daughter and I could see Hoa's face for a moment there, caught full in the sunlight, and in this light the parts of her body that she had because of me seemed very clear, the highness of her brow, the half-expressed roundness of the lids of her eyes, the length of her nose, the wideness of her mouth, her hair neither dark nor light. And I had a twist of sadness for her, as if she had gotten from me imperfect cells that had made a club foot or an open spine or a weak heart.

She lifted the dragon high with both hands and raised it over her, and she slowly brought it down: her hair, her brow disappeared into the dragon, her eyes and her nose and her mouth, my daughter's face disappeared into great bright eyes, flared nostrils, cheeks of blood red and a brow of green. And Tri's daughter clapped her hands and laughed and the dragon head angled down and opened its mouth to her as if to cry out.

I looked at Binh and he was waiting for me to speak and I looked at the others and then at Tho, Her face was slightly turned to me but her eyes were lowered. I thought, It's been nearly twenty years since I first lay down with you and touched those places on your body that were smooth and soft and that are coa.r.s.er now, and I love them still, I love them more for their very coa.r.s.eness. I do not wish to open the past either, my wife. But this is my village and I was seen across a field by millions and the eyes of that other country turn this way.

I let a little of the past back into me then, and I did not know what to say. A house with a wraparound porch and maple trees and a gra.s.s yard cut close and edged each week in a perfect line along a sidewalk: things unknown in this place. Things that I could see without pain only when they sat unpeopled in my head. Things of a family that were worth keeping only from a summer day when the maple leaves did not stir and when no one from inside this house was visible, no sounds could be heard from inside. How to say that for these Vietnamese who sensed-always-even the dead spirits of a family? Who in this circle could imagine that only this was good in that past life of mine: a maple tree and the smell of fresh paint on the porch, just dried into a Victorian green and smelling like something new, and the creak of a chain on a swing there, my feet touching and pus.h.i.+ng, lifting me as if I was flying away.