Free Finding the Dragon Lady by Monique Brinson Demery Page B

was forced out of her home, she put on a coat, a wool redingote, a bit like a coatdress that fastened narrowly at the waist with darts and tucks. It had been fashioned in Europe, an unimaginable luxury during the last years of war and privation. It was the warmest piece of clothing she owned. Tropical conditions ruled her corner of Southeast Asia ten months out of the year, but December in central Vietnam was predictably damp and cool—conditions that would only get worse the farther she got from home.
    She was herded out of the city under a gunmetal sky, part of a human stream pouring down the road, heading inland away from Hue. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly. Baskets bobbed along like flotsam, carried across the shoulders of women using the traditional dong ganh, long poles balancing a basket on either end. Much was made of the fact that their shape resembled the long andnarrow contours of the country itself. The full baskets on either end represented the fertile deltas, the Red River of Tonkin to the north and the Mekong of Cochinchina in the south. The area in the middle, the long hard yoke that rubbed the skin off the back of the novice, was the rocky and relatively infertile region in the center of the country, the area that the refugees now tramped through.
    The roads cut like a red gash through flooded fields. They were awash with clay and scented with manure from the water buffalo in the fields. The road itself got too dangerous as soon as the concrete towers came into sight. The French army had constructed these watchtowers along the country roads to keep watch for Viet Minh troop movements, so the captives cut through the rice paddies instead. They were corralled single file on narrow dikes. To avoid soaking the only pair of shoes she had with her, Madame Nhu had to measure each step minutely. It was exhausting work, carrying her daughter in one arm and the baby’s things in the other. She tried to keep pace with her sister-in-law and her niece; her mother-in-law, a tiny, fragile thing, was carried on the gardener’s back and hung back a little farther. Around them, the rice grasses rippled like waves. The vast sea of emerald was broken by white marble gravestones—ancestral burial plots that served as a constant reminder that death could lurk nearby.
    Where the paddy ended, the procession of women and their guards had to return to the road. They were approaching a bridge when a loud blast shattered the air. “Nm xung!” Get down! The guards crouched at the edge of the road. Pebbles scattered as the quickest women scurried down an embankment. Others followed, heads tucked low, elbows around their ears, their baskets abandoned on the road. The road to the bridge was suddenly deserted except for Madame Nhu and the baby she clutched in her arms.
    Madame Nhu knew that decomposing bodies would have washed up against the pilings and abutments. She had been close to bridges like this one before and had heard others graphically describe the scene. From where she stood, she thought she could smell the putrefaction. Whether killed by the Viet Minh or caught in some crossfire, what did it matter? They were the bodies of fallen fighters too poor or too far from home for a proper burial. The swollen corpses of those anonymousunfortunates were rotting and leaking their fluids into the very same shallows where she was being told to take cover.
    Madame Nhu simply couldn’t go. It was too awful. It had begun raining, but she planted her feet in the center of the red-clay road and held on even tighter to the baby. She would not take refuge like the other women among the dead; she’d rather join them as a corpse herself. It was the first time Madame Nhu had seen, at first hand, the grim reality that had gripped her country for the last few years, the same years that she had spent as a newlywed, then a young wife and new mother, far removed from political intrigues. She’d moved