In the southern sector of the Central Highlands his units in Division 10 were making a rapid march from the Ngoan Muc pass, crossing Don Duong and Duc Trong, along Road 20 to Di Linh.
For the first time in his life he felt truly at home in the country. His heart surged with desire to quit the violence, killing and destruction and settle in the peaceful surrounds of that corner of the Highlands under a calm, peaceful sky. From that point in time he used that pastoral scene both as a measuring-stick for other rural areas, and as a symbol of what could have been.
One afternoon, Kien and his scout team were taking a jeep along Road 20 when they decided to turn off and look at a coffee plantation. There was a neatly kept gravel road running between densely planted crops leading to a nicely built house on stilts set well back from the road. They drove up carefully to the front of the pretty plantation house and parked the jeep, which had a machine-gun mounted just behind the driver and looked threatening. They politely climbed out and walked up the steps, preparing to ask for water and a place to rest.
The house was built entirely of timber and had the tall pointed roof favoured by the local hill tribes. The plantation owner greeted them courteously, taking them around the comfortable house, showing them his plough, his irrigation system and his power generator, which ran almost silently, in keeping with the peaceful scene.
Flowers were in bloom in gardens encircling the lovely house, and at the back there was a herb and vegetable patch for the kitchen.
The owner had come from the north with his wife and they now had a seven-year-old son. When Kien’s team entered they came fully armed, wearing dirty, sweaty uniforms and it was clear the family were both embarrassed and nervous, although they tried not to show it.
They invited the soldiers to take a meal with them, but when they refused the couple did not press them. The owner spoke to them of plantation life while his wife went to the kitchen to brew coffee. He was surprisingly well educated, honest and very polite.
‘We’ve not seen any guerrillas, let alone northern army regulars like yourselves. We just live a simple life, growing coffee, sugar cane and flowers,’ he began. ‘Thanks to Heaven, thanks to the land and the trees and Nature, and thanks to our own hands and energy and the money from our labour, we are self-sufficient. We don’t need help from any government. If the President loses the fight, then let him be, even though you are Communists, on the other side. You’re human too. You want peace and a calm life, families of your own, isn’t that right, gentlemen?’
No one disputed what he said, although such honesty of expression was dangerous in those times. Fortunately none of them felt like handing out indoctrination lessons, so all day long the talk was of farming, labour, family happiness. The war was hardly mentioned again.
They drank excellent coffee, which added to the intimacy and warmth of the atmosphere. The wife looked on them with soft and friendly eyes, rarely speaking but feeling part of the group. The husband spoke in his frank way and treated the soldiers like friendly guests. They were soon feeling very much at home; even the occasional harsh knock of grenade or gun on the backs of their chairs as they moved positions did not break the peaceful spell. The scent of pine wood from newly hewn logs and fresh coffee brewing seemed to cast a spell over them, and they experienced a feeling of malaise, then sweet sorrow.
Inside the house they felt part of a small family circle. Outside the house was a broad circle of war.
Driving away from the plantation in the late afternoon, no one spoke for some minutes. Finally, Van, a University graduate in Economics and Planning, started to speak: ‘There, you see. That’s the way to live! What a peaceful, happy oasis. My lecturers with all their Marxist theories will pour in and ruin all this if we win. I’m horrified to think of what will happen to that couple, they’d soon learn what the new political order means.’
Another replied, ‘Damn right they’ll be unhappy. If we do win and return after the war I wonder if they’ll still treat us kindly?’
‘Not unless you come back as chairman of the new co-operative!’ laughed Van.
But the thought had appalled them, and when Van spoke again he was sombre: ‘That will be sad, really. I wonder if my own district will ever develop such lovely farms. Our landscape at Moc Chau is similar to this, yet we’re always so poor.’
Kien didn’t contribute anything to the conversation, but every word of it was etched in his memory and he recalled the visit several times in later years when down south. He had made half-hearted plans to go back and visit the plantation, but never seemed to have the time.
As for Van, Thanh, Tu and all the others who had been at the plantation with him on that special afternoon, they were long dead.
Of all the visitors, only he was alive to remember that visit. It had been little more than a wayside stop along the long road of conflict, yet it remained to this day a special memory, taking on increasing warmth and significance as the years went by.
He can’t sleep. He thinks of Phuong, then of her apartment. No more than a room, really, identical to his. Both twenty square metres with red and white square tiles like a chess board, a stove in the corner inlaid with blue tiles, a window looking out into the street, through branches and fronds of a sheoak.
The furniture was almost identical, too. The other common characteristic was the atmosphere of loneliness, poverty, and loss. When he had first revisited Phuong’s room after a ten-year absence he noticed the piano was missing. It had been her mother’s precious property and had stood for many years against the window. ‘I sold it,’ she said simply, when he asked about it. ‘It took up too much space. Anyway, I’ve not got the class to own something as lovely as a piano.’
It had been handed down from her father, a pianist who had died before the liberation of Hanoi from the French after the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Phuong’s mother had been a music teacher. She had retired when Phuong was sixteen, intending to concentrate on teaching her daughter classical music and the piano. She was totally different from her daughter. She was quietly spoken, thin and small. ‘I’m afraid her guitar-playing and singing at all those parties and festivals are doing her no good at all, Kien. Please help me get her out of those habits,’ she would say.
Phuong played the piano very well. She was a natural. But as she grew older she became lazier and lazier. ‘The piano is too big, too solemn, too pretentious for these chaotic times. These days we’ve got to travel light,’ she said.
Kien agreed. He preferred her singing, for she had such a sweet voice.
But her mother persisted, complaining to Kien, ‘She’s just like her father, a perfectionist. She’s like a saint, or a fairy, she has their sort of perfection. But that is a delicate trait, and she must be protected. Her fine soul will be warped by the coarse style of life that’s overtaking us; she will be destroyed unless she’s given preferential treatment for her artistry. Yet she takes no notice of me whatsoever! She’d rather listen to your father. It frightens me that she is attracted by his frightful paintings and his disrespectful opinions. You understand, don’t you?’
How could he understand, at sixteen? He hardly understood the words, let alone the sense of her mother’s complaints. Yet many years later he recalled that Phuong’s mother had predicted a few of the character changes in Phuong accurately. The girl’s soul would become warped and twisted when she played in the mainstream of life, she had said. But then the war had come soon afterwards and there was little that could be said or done anyway.
He recalled Phuong’s playing, when she was just fifteen. ‘That’s lovely, Phuong,’ her mother had said one day. ‘Now play a piece from Mozart, or the Moonlight Sonata.’