Free The Lotus Eaters: A Novel by Tatjana Soli

look at the dead, and he hurried off to check supplies.
    The first American Linh met was Sam Darrow, a tall, birdlike man who didn't smile like the others. Darrow, slouched over, still stood taller than the other Americans. Thin, he had sharp limbs that jutted out from his rolled-up sleeves, the skin stretched across large, bony wrists. His thick-framed glasses were a part of his face, head moving from side to side like a bird's, as if trying to add angles to what he saw. Linh stared at the name, DARROW
    , and another name, LIFE
    , stenciled on his jacket. Cameras that Linh had only dreamed about owning hung from around his neck, one on an embroidered Hmong neckband, one on plain leather.
    "Come on," one of the advisers yelled. "Take some snaps of us."
    Dung checked his hair in a small gold mirror that he pulled from his pocket. He preened as Darrow sauntered over.
    "I don't think..." he said.
    "Don't worry about thinking," the adviser said. "Take a picture."
    "You got it."
    Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. "That should do you," he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.
    "Does America train in war better than it trains in photography?" Linh said.
    Darrow smiled. "A smart guy."
    "I'm Linh. Tran Bau Linh."
    "You, Linh, are a sly one. How about if I ask Dung over there to assign you to help me today? Keep our little secret?"
    The company decided to make camp that night about half an hour from Linh's village, planning to move out in the morning. They had not even gone to sleep when the first bombs went off nearby. The new advisers used their shiny new radios to call in for an air bombing of the surrounding area. Linh would never talk about the events of that night. The memory burrowed deep inside him and remained mute.
    This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.
    The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai's rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai's cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.
    During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoeshine boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn't blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war--to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.
    In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor's balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father's lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh's father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one's masters.
    The teacher needed