Unsteadily, Kien helped Phuong to stand, surprising himself with his remaining strength. He slung her onto his back and began clumping away from the heat of the burning ruins. He put her down and they leaned on each other to grope their way through more thick smoke near what remained of the station building. There were cries for help from various directions but at first they saw only corpses.
The bodies lay scattered all round. Then some people emerged, running mindlessly, falling into more debris. Kien began stepping through the bodies as though it were an everyday event for him. This was his new-found strength, to stay cool under fire. No one really knew: they could suspect, but would never really know until they faced the real test. Scores of bodies lay in all imaginable twisted positions; there was nothing to scream or take fright about. To him, in his hardened state, it seemed perfectly normal.
He was about to put Phuong down for a rest when he spotted a bicycle lying by the roadside. As he picked it up he noticed it was an old but top-quality Phoenix, in remarkably good condition. Astonishingly, it had good tyres, chain, pedals, even brakes and a bell. A black sack, nearly full, hung from the handlebars. Kien guessed the bike’s owner was one of the corpses lying nearby on his back or his belly, burnt and stripped naked by napalm.
Kien got on and tried the bell. A light refined tinkling sounded, the only elegant noise in the air now crackling with frying flesh and little obscene popping noises. Then he rode it slowly for a test. Phuong, almost catatonic the whole time, uttered not a word. When he stopped beside her she offered no resistance, slipping onto the bike’s rear carrier seat as skilfully as she’d done in her schooldays when they’d ridden to school together.
Kien zig-zagged through burning houses and wrecked buildings, fallen trees and power lines. There were bomb craters right down the middle of the road so every now and then he had to stop and walk the bike through. Phuong sat silently on the back all through the strange journey.
As the station receded the settled, steady pedalling action suddenly reminded him that only twelve hours earlier he’d been giving Phuong a ride in a stolen cyclo pedicab. Surely that had been one of the most dramatic entrances imaginable into the theatre of war.
There was another raid, more screams from American jets, but this time far away, down the valley.
He heard distant sirens echoing, but they were safe now, well away from the railway station and the road was clearer. Kien stopped by an A-shaped air-raid shelter along the side of the road. The earth began to rumble again and instantly the anti-aircraft guns in Ham Rong opened up.
Kien laid the bicycle down on the ground, then helped Phuong to the shelter. All round him people were stoically going about their everyday lives. Few bothered with the shelters, public or individual. The bombs were too far away. The people paid no attention to possible threats up in the bright sunny sky, or to Kien and Phuong. These were the new times. Two young people, bruised and bleeding, filthy from smoke and coal, their clothes ripped and in disarray, attracted no special attention.
An old man with a walking-stick came along. He carried a small bag made from braided bulrush leaves, and held his hand out begging for rice. Kien shook his head in disbelief that anyone would approach him looking as he did. The old man was not deterred. He prattled on, saying he had been living in a house near a station but that was now destroyed. His relatives and his friends were dead. Everything was burnt. He had no house, no food, no relatives. Why heaven had allowed him to live he would never understand. He wondered aloud if he could walk all the way to a distant relative’s place. He said everyone was now certain to die. Kien just listened to him silently, as did Phuong. The old man, having spoken his piece, moved on, starting another identical speech, this time to an unseen audience.
Kien and Phuong sat in the shelter, motionless. They had no words, for they had no thoughts. They paid no attention to the distant aircraft, or to those evacuating the hamlet around them, carrying children and belongings, and their wounded. Miserable, pitiful scenes surrounded them.
They seemed determined not to speak to each other, nor even look at each other. They maintained their silent rage; not even their terrible thirst or their hunger intruded.
In later years Kien experienced several similar identical moments, long periods of withdrawal. Like the dead, one felt no fear, no enthusiasm, no joy, no sadness, no feelings for anything. No concerns and no hopes. One was totally devoid of feeling, and had no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly, commanders or privates, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing.
A little later something else quite extraordinary occurred. A small, middle-aged man with a very thin face, carrying a fat woman on his back, stopped in front of them. The woman, whose legs were bandaged, was asleep.
Kien’s bicycle had attracted the man’s attention. He grew excited, asking repeatedly if they wanted to sell the bike. Phuong and Kien, both still in shock, failed to reply. All three of them were staring at the bike, as the woman on the man’s back slept blissfully on.
The man’s foot went out and deftly, using his toes, he lifted the bike up and carefully transferred the sleeping woman onto the back carrier seat. As the man took the wobbling bicycle to lean it against a shelter the woman moaned and held on to him.
He freed himself and returned, lifted the sack from the bicycle and placed it beside Phuong, then began searching for money in his pockets. When he found some banknotes he fished them out, counted a certain amount, then placed them on the top of the sack.
He muttered a few words in the local dialect, swung onto the seat of the bike, and rode off with the fat woman still asleep. This astonishing, simple exchange had all taken less than a minute, yet the macabre humour of it all endured for years in Kien’s memories of war.
So, the man had bought the bicycle, whose real owner was a napalmed corpse near the station. Bombs were still dropping, aircraft were still roaring in the distant sky and A-A fire cracked loudly on this hot, almost suffocatingly hot day. And amid all this one of the strangest transactions had taken place. It snapped them from their silence.
Kien absently pocketed the banknotes, then picked up the sack and opened it. It contained dry rations called BA70, a torch, a water canister, a hammock and a K59 pistol. Phuong quickly looked at it from under thick lashes. Kien said, ‘Let’s eat something. We’ve got water, too.’
‘Eat, maybe,’ she said listlessly.
Kien opened the canister, took a sip, then passed it to her. The bag of dry food also contained green tea and sugar and some yellow-coloured cake, which had a delicious taste.
Phuong sat quietly, eating casually as though nothing had happened. Kien would like to have seen her eating with more appreciation. After all, the food had been snatched from the jaws of blood and death.
Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to have such a vivid imagination, to be concerned at the source of the food and the entire circumstances they found themselves in. Kien supposed nothing was terribly wrong with eating and drinking normally to help recover after such a catastrophe. But on the other hand, watching how easily she ate and drank, he recognised that there was in Phuong, besides hunger and thirst, an unusual reserve of strength and resilience.
He ate almost nothing himself, studying her as she ate. Then he began to realise just how badly injured she was. His own clothes were dirty and torn but Phuong’s clothes were almost in shreds. Through the tatters her normally white skin was bruised, scratched and bleeding. Her face was black with smoke, her lips were swollen and her eyes were flat and sullen. A small trickle of blood continued to run down the inside of one leg, though the bleeding was greatly reduced. When she uncrossed her legs to change position and stretch her legs on the grass he noticed more blood on a knee. This reminded him: this wasn’t blood from a wound. It came from those tumultuous hours in the railcars.