For Robert, as well, this silence is a waking silence. The past courses through him as spontaneously as if it were the dream imagery of incipient sleep.
Lien stands in a bower of blooming flame trees on the bank of the Perfume River, waiting for him. It’s June, a rare cloudless day, fiercely hot. On Le Loi Street along the river, Operation Recovery has expunged the rubble of razed buildings and the bodies of the dead. The trees are splashed with flowers the color of arterial blood.
She vanished with the Tet Offensive. Word of mass graves of civilians was spreading through the city and it was understood what sort of people were slaughtered by the North in Hue: government officials, freethinking university teachers and students, those who could identify the embedded Viet Cong, those who had worked with and those who had lain with the enemy Americans. Bargirls. Girlfriends. Robert feared Lien was dead.
When restrictions eased and he could leave the MACV compound, he went at once to the site of the tailor shop. The building survived but the shop was closed and boarded up. When the sampan community near the central market reassembled, he walked its banks over and over, searching for Lien’s uncle, trying to remember the man’s face, hoping he would himself be recognized by the man.
And then, one afternoon, an old woman stopped him outside the MACV compound and said Lien’s name to him and told him a day and a time and this place, and he approaches her now.
She wears a white ao dai, the tight-bodiced Vietnamese silk dress with its skirt split up the sides from feet to waist, revealing black pantaloons beneath, a dress she has, on special nights, worn privately for him without the pantaloons, naked beneath it from waist to feet.
He holds a brown paper parcel tied in hemp cord.
She turns her face at the sound of his approach, comes forward. She makes no move to touch him but explains this with her first words. “I do not touch you like I wish from people that see us.”
“I understand,” he says.
Her dark eyes focus on his, but dartingly: his right, his left, back and forth, as if she does not believe the one and seeks something in the other, then seeks it in the first again, hoping what she saw a moment ago has changed. Or has not changed. Her eyes seem anxious. Only that. Their lids are rounded some by French blood. He longs to ask her to close her eyes for him to kiss her there. Surely she can read in him the feelings that produce this longing. But he senses already he will never kiss her again.
“I was afraid they killed you,” he says.
“I hide,” she says. “I have one place to hide and then I run away.”
“When did you return?”
“Few days before now,” she says. She seems to begin to say more — a taking of a breath, a lift of her chest — but she lets it go, does not speak.
He does not dare to ask the questions flaring in his head. Will she stay? Can they be together? Instead he feels the weight in his hand.
“I brought your father’s pistol,” he says.
She takes the parcel from him, saying, “I was afraid also they killed Robert.”
She looks again into his eyes. She studies him closely but with her own eyes steady now.
In the center of his chest he trembles. Standing before her gaze, given that he feared for months that she was dead, he is slow to fully understand the trembling. He takes it simply for passion.
“He did help you?” she asks.
Robert does not understand.
She sees this.
“My father,” she says, lifting the parcel a little.
“He saved my life,” Robert says, wishing he could believe it was as simple as that.
She nods. Her eyes are growing bright from nascent tears.
He aches to lift a hand. To touch her face. But he knows what’s next. It was always to come to this. Surely it was. But they’ve lost so many nights already. And those nights still before him in this country — eighty-seven more, the count on the calendar on the wall beside his bed — now that she is safe, now that she is here, at least some of those nights could be made to feel as if he were never going to leave her. As if she could somehow go with him.
But he already understands there will be no more nights.
“I am glad,” she says. “My father can like you.”
“Could have liked,” he says. The man is dead. The correction is a wistful reflex. She has always asked that he correct her English. She has always wanted to be perfect in her English for him.
“My father could have liked you,” she says.
They wait.
He feels something shift in her.
“You understand,” she says. You must. You should. You will. You can’t.
“That you must go?” he says.
She smiles. She has heard herself leap in her words in a way that he should not have been able to follow. But he has. They have always understood each other. And so her smile quickly fades. And the tears begin to fall.
She does not wipe them away. She does not avert her gaze.
“I understand,” he says. And he feels his own eyes growing warm.
“I cannot see this,” she says. Very gently. He knows she means his tears.
He looks away to the river to hide them. The seemingly incessant clouds of Hue keep the water the color of cheap jade. Today, beneath an empty sky, the Perfume River flows blue.
He says, “You’ll leave Hue?”
“Yes,” she says.
He thinks he is in control of himself now. He looks back to her.
“I love you beaucoup much forever,” she says.
Before they can laugh at her irony — she has used the catchphrase of the bargirls — she touches his hand, a fleeting wisp of a touch, and she turns and walks quickly away.
Watching her go, he understands his earlier trembling. It was not entirely passion. The trembling would also have had him speak to Lien about the man he killed. She was the one person who might have been able to absolve him.
But it’s too late. And as he watches the white flutter of her ao dai, the long drape of her black hair as she leaves him, his trembling returns. Now, though, it is indeed passion. The last feeling he will ever have while his eyes are actually upon her is this ache to take her in his arms and hold her as close as he can.
In the following months, his active passion for Lien slowly faded. She was gone forever, irretrievable, this woman he’d loved. Whatever was uniquely left of her within him, he could not, would not consider. Dared not.
That was in another country. A country at war. He worked hard to see Lien as a Vietnamese woman. He focused on the otherness of Vietnamese women, on the seemingly universal kinesthetics of them — the feeling in his chest and arms and loins for their smallness, for their softness of parts and hardness of will, for the glide of them. And so all of those qualities faded from him once he returned to the States and to the women who had shaped his desire from boyhood. These Americans were the women — in their diversity, in the scale of them — who were imprinted on him. Then, in a coffee shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he felt his physical desire embed itself in a long-shared culture, in a shared cast of mind, in another woman’s uniqueness, an American woman. He was ready for Darla.
And now, in this dark room, on the night his father fell and began to hasten toward death, his remembrance of lost passion flows on in him like a river of cerulean blue and enters the sea: Darla, earlier this evening, as she emerges from her study. He stands at her door, as is their way. Whoever of them first notices that it has passed a certain hour will go to the other and wait at the door. And she emerges as she always does, with a faintly startled look as she returns to him from the realm of her mind, and she gives him a soft sigh, as if yes, the workday is through and there you are and I am glad. And he feels, as he sometimes does at this, a swell of tenderness. He felt it when he stood in her office door this evening and he feels it again now, in this moment, in this bed, and Robert wishes to take Darla into his arms and hold her as close as he can.