(a novel)
ONE
I wake in a sweat from a dream of search and rescue, hunter and prey. Already the memory is fading, but I know it had something to do with what Ray said about the years he spent in hiding in that Hong Kong cellar. He never minded the rats, he told me. Those he could drive away. What he couldn't endure were the millions of six-legged creatures; the things that lay their eggs beneath the skin.
Kim (that is what we will call him) first drew breath under a bombed-out army truck in a ditch near Saigon in the chaotic month of April 1975. His father had died a week before, trying to defend his two cattle from the advancing North Vietnamese army. At least so the child's mother told her fellow refugees before she died of dysentery four years later, last month on the South China Sea.
Having seen her husband and all the rest of her family murdered, she fled her ruined village for the supposed safety of the capital.
En route, her labour overtook her. No one stopped to help. Villagers she begged for food and water beat her away from their doors, afraid she would bring destruction down on them. When her child was born, a month premature, the mother didn't dare rest. Next day she resumed her flight on foot, her baby wrapped in a sling against her chest. Finally, approaching Saigon, she encountered masses of terrified people fleeing the other way, back to the countryside. The clear sky thundered with the sound of distant artillery. She returned to her home village, but by then it had been torched, along with the whole surrounding countryside.
I remember the newscasts of those days like a recurring nightmare. The colour photos in the news magazines: napalm victims running, no idea where; prisoners shot in the head without ceremony; toddlers playing in minefields amid the wreckage of trucks; helicopters lifting off from the U.S. embassy with desperate Vietnamese collaborators hanging from the landing gear. I remember our confused emotions in the NDP campaign office when we tried to put a wrap on the story. We should have felt jubilant, I suppose, the war finally ending the way we always said it must, vindicated at the sight of helicopters dumped from overloaded aircraft carriers. But the dominant mood was a kind of weary relief. A little heartsick, we couldn't forget those images that had haunted our youth. The blistered stumps of legs and arms, the faces wide open in a long wail of pain. We had little reason to rejoice. The forests and rice paddies were still mined, waiting for more victims. The wreckage of tanks and helicopters still smoked in ditches where, without my suspecting it, my son was being born.
Homeless and alone, Kim's mother took to the relative safety of the swamps, where at least she could fish to stay alive. Eventually she made her way to the sea and somehow gained passage on a boat whose captain promised to take her to safety. That is as much as she told the women who befriended her on the overcrowded boat where she died. They dumped her body overboard a few days out of Hong Kong. How she survived as long as she did only to end that way is a part of this story that will never be told. Her life is beyond my power to imagine.
If May ever did live in the happy family she dreams of, she has lost the memory of it, perhaps in some terraced brick Hong Kong street. From the time she was four years old and her family left its village in China until she began her high school years in suburban Calgary, her life was upset. Sometimes she remembers brief fragments of that lost life. The scent of lotus root simmering stirs something more than hunger in her. Light glinting through grassy shadows at a certain angle ambushes her with a vivid memory of the long journey on foot across the Chinese frontier.
A peacock starting up out of the bushes near her one misty morning. The great bird's fierce squawk and offended squeal; its massive display of feathers. That is her clearest memory of China, but she no longer knows for certain whether it is a real memory or one she has willed into being.
Her father must have carried her on his back most of the way, for that is the way she remembers him. Not his face, nor even his voice, but his back and shoulders, his straining breath. After the family reached Hong Kong, she remembers only a terraced alleyway, a large pot of duck eggs packed in straw sitting on the top step, a tiled courtyard where she had no one to play hopscotch with .... Nothing more.
An old wooden chest, a foot locker my father must have used in the army, inhabited the back of the closet in my parents' room in the house where I grew up. On loose-ended afternoons, home from school before they arrived from work, I used to explore my mother's dressing table and jewel box, the darkest reaches of their closet. In the foot locker, shadowed by the fragrant skirts of my mother's slips and dresses, I found my father's khaki uniform, his war album filled with photographs, news clippings, cartoons from his regimental newspaper, a poem he wrote to his parents on their wedding anniversary. The last black page of the album held a glossy four-by-six photo with "December 1945" written under it in a large shaky hand. At least a thousand soldiers on the deck of a commandeered ocean liner: his regiment somewhere in the North Atlantic on the way home. They stand leaning against the railing, or sit with legs hanging over the gangway, or cling to ledges waving at the camera, rows of men disappearing off the edge of the picture. Not even my father could pick himself out in it.
"We were a day out of Halifax when they took this," I heard him tell a friend once. "We all had diarrhoea, and the excitement of getting home was almost unbearable. You felt like diving into the water like some Tahitian."
A generation later, I boarded a jetliner one night in the foothills of the Rockies, watched the lights of Calgary drop away beneath me, ate a reheated dinner, then caught a few winks while the Atlantic rolled away below, palely reflecting the moon and stars above.
My flight over the Pacific (was it yesterday?) felt the same. I didn't really cross either ocean; I dozed over them, dreaming.
from SEVEN
They are all in uniform, my father and his two younger brothers, lined up opposite white-gowned bridesmaids in the photos of the wedding party. Doug -- in rough khaki, trousers gathered at the ankle, beret buttoned under his epaulet -- stands rigid, heels together, his bride on his arm. Ruth has pushed back her white veil to display a smile. But the shutter has caught them squinting into the hot June sun. Their eyes have in them the excitement of children being chased by a bull.
It is one week after D-day, and Doug has only three days' leave before his regiment ships out for England. His brother and best man, John, after two months' ground training, can't wait to fly. Walt, the youngest, six-foot-three and still growing, is too long-legged for his cadet uniform. Ray should be here too, should be best man, if not bridegroom. But he is somewhere in Asia, dead or in a prison camp.
In another part of the churchyard, the parents of the groom pose uncomfortably in front of the camera. My grandmother appears embarrassed at having to put a brave front on her terror. Her husband, though, pulls no false faces. He begs no favours of posterity; rather, he demands. The wedding is at his insistence. The young couple have simply had to put their doubts aside.
"Marry the girl," Dean Stanley had ordered his son. "Give yourself something to come home to. And for her there's the wife's allowance. She won't have to keep working in that bank."
The patriarch challenges the camera, his look stern, strong as the grip he gave his son's hand at Union Station a few days later. "See you stay out of trouble, son," he said.
So you slog through the blood and shit of a European war. You stare through the fog at the ghostly cliffs of Dieppe and swear at the universe. Ride in tin-can troop carriers being bombed by the Luftwaffe and RAF. Scrub your mess tin out with sand and learn to live with diarrhoea. Learn to kill for a living with gun, grenade or bayonet; no commission.
One day you are pinned down by sniper fire, hit once. Your buddies on either side of you die before your eyes. You go into shock and wake up on a stretcher. Through a night of pain your only comfort is the darkness. A tin can drags you through the ruts and ditches of Normandy to a field hospital under canvas. Drinking water. Sleep.
By morning, two letters have caught up to you. One from your bride. ("I'm fine, your mother's fine, we're all fine.") The other from your father. ("Dear son, I hope you are not wasting your time.")
Shit. You can't hold yours, can't get up to void, and do it all over yourself and the bedding. Everyone on the ward hates you, none more than yourself -- but less for the stink than the crime of surviving. You are the only one who knows if it was your blunder that wiped out your patrol or the other guy's -- maybe your only friend in the world -- the guy who lies stiffening under a blanket now.
Wasting time? Shit. You decide you will stay in bed all day. Doctor's orders anyway. You think you may just stay in bed from now on. As long as you don't have to rely on anyone and no one has to rely on you.
On return to active duty, Doug asked for and received a transfer. His new unit was called intelligence, which meant he spent the night behind enemy lines with face blackened, his mission to scout out enemy positions and strongholds. If he came upon a lone enemy he was to disarm and subdue him if he could without raising an alarm, then bring his prisoner back to base for questioning. Torture was more like it, sometimes. Most German soldiers had little enough to tell; most parted with their knowledge readily. But sometimes, when the sergeant thought his prisoners needed encouragement, a little aide-mmoire, he gave it to them in the form of a long cold blade. Doug swore he would never surrender.
He hated the big shells, but the ones you heard weren't the ones that would get you. He hated the machine guns equipped with infrared sensors that could see in the dark. Most of all he hated the blade. The knife he carried kept him alive a time or two out there in the dark, where a shot would call down fire on him. Or mortar shells, or flame-throwers, or flares that tinted the night sky the colour of hell. He had killed with the blade. If he hadn't he would be dead. But he hated it, and he hated the fatal contradiction of hating the thing that saved him. Sometimes he actually hated his life and thought he wouldn't care if he lost it.
After one all-night mission he lay in a foxhole and wrote a short note to his mother, then a longer one to his wife. Both letters began alike: "I can't tell you what I have been doing since it is classified, but I must believe it is all for the best. In good health. Have decent food. Lonely but not afraid, at least not all the time." Writing to Ruth he lingered with his pen over the page for a long time, but wrote little more. "I am thinking about you now with the same love as when we used to meet in the park. I can't put it into words but I think you know what I mean."