A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (48 page)

Like now. I am, it seems, a selfish man. H
Chí Minh died that same year and we all went through six more years of fighting before our country was united and I owe my obedience to those who have brought us through to our great victory, but they have asked something now that makes me sit and hesitate and wait and think in ways that surprise me, after all this time, after all that I have been through with my country. The word has come down to everyone that we are to find any objects that belong to dead American soldiers and bring them forth so that the American government can name its remaining unnamed dead and then our two countries can become friends. It’s like my wife’s old beliefs and her mother’s. These two women live in my home and they love me and they care for me but they do not change what they deeply believe, in spite of what I’ve been through for them, and they would understand this in their Buddhist way. It is as if we had all died and now we were being reborn in strange new bodies, destined to atone in this particular new incarnation for the errors of our past. The young VC and U.S. soldier reborn as middle-aged friends doing business together, creating soda cans and cigarettes.

Is it this that makes me hesitate to obey? I only have to ask the question to know that it is not. In the clearing, I put the pack of Salem cigarettes in my pocket and then I slipped back into the jungle and I smoked one cigarette later in the afternoon, shaking it out of the pack with my mind elsewhere as I sat beside a stream, a little ways apart from my own comrades. I did not wish to share these cigarettes with them and when I lit one and drew the smoke into my body, there was that familiar letting go from a desire both created and fulfilled by this thing I did, and I looked down the stream away from the others and in a few hundred meters the jungle closed in, black in the twilight, and I blew the smoke out and my nostrils flared from an odd coolness. I had never before smoked this favorite cigarette of H
Chí Minh and for a moment I thought this soft chill in my head was somehow a sign of him. Such a thought—the vague mysticism of it—came easily to me and I never questioned it, though I think H
himself would have been disappointed in me because of it. This was not the impulse of a mature communist, and much later, when I learned that there was a thing called menthol in some American cigarettes, I remembered my thoughts by the stream and I felt ashamed.

But at the time, I let this notion linger, that the spirit of H
was inside me, and I took the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and now I looked at it more carefully: the blue-tinted green bands of color at the top and bottom, the American words, long and meaningless to my eyes except for the large SALEM in a central band of white—this name I’d known to recognize. And there was a clear cellophane wrapper around the pack, which I ruffled a little with my thumb and almost stripped off, but I stopped myself. This was protection from the dampness. Then I turned the pack over and there was a leaping inside me as if a twig had just snapped in the jungle nearby. A face smiled up at me from my hand, a woman’s face, and I stopped my breath so that she would not hear me. I suppose that this reflex ran on even into my hands where I was ready to draw my weapon and kill her.

And she is before me now. The pack of Salem is in the center of the oak table that I made with my own hands, breaking down a French cabinet from an old provincial office building to make a surface of my own. The cigarette pack lies in the center of this table and the photo looks up from behind the cellophane, just where he put it, the man from the clearing. I have never taken the photo out of its place and I have never smoked another cigarette from the pack and these are things that I knew right away to do, even before my hands calmed and the beating of my heart slowed again beside the stream, and I did not ask myself why, I just knew to look once more at the woman—she had an almond-shaped face and colorless hair and a vast smile with many teeth—and then to put the cigarette pack into my deepest pocket with the amber Buddha pendant my wife had slipped into my hand when I went away from her.

I expect her soon, my wife. I look through my window and down the path and she and her mother will come walking from out of the closing of the trees and she will be bearing water and her sudden appearance there along this jungle path will make my hands go soft and I am wrong to say that the hair of this woman in the picture has no color, there are times of the day when the sunlight falls with this color on our village and her hair has no color only against the jungle shadow of my wife’s hair.

I wish I had the reflexes of the days when I was a freedom fighter. Instantly I could decide to kill or to run or to curl down and quake or to rob a dead man’s pockets or I could even make such a strange and complicated decision as to put this pack of cigarettes into my pocket with the secret resolve—secret even from myself—to preserve it for decades. Now I sit and sit and I can decide nothing. Something tells me that my leaders will betray all that they have ever believed in and fought for, that they will make us into Japanese. But even shaping that thought, I do not have a reflex, my hands do not go hard, they just lie without moving on the tabletop before the smile of an American woman, and perhaps what began beneath the bombs of the B-52s is now complete. Perhaps I am no longer a man.

Still, I will not act in haste about this. That is the way of a twenty-year-old boy. I am no longer a boy, either. And even the boy knew to put this thing away and not to touch it. Why? I bend near and I wait and I watch as if I am hidden in a tree and watching the face of the jungle across a clearing. The photo has three sharp, even edges, top and bottom and down the left side, but the right side is very slightly crooked, angling in as it comes down through a pale blue sky and a dark field and past the woman’s shoulder, and then it seems as if this angle will touch her at the elbow, cut into her, and the edge veers off, conscious of this, leaving the arm intact. I speak of the edge as if it created itself. It is of course the man who made the cut, who was careful not to lose even the thinnest slice of the image of this woman he clearly loved. He trimmed the photo to fit in the cellophane around a pack of cigarettes and I understand things with a rush: he placed her there so that every time his unit stopped and sat sweating and afraid by a jungle stream and he took out his cigarettes to smoke, she would be there to smile at him.

Is this not a surprising thing? A sentimental gesture like that from an American soldier who has come across an ocean to do the imperialist work of his country? Perhaps that is why I kept the pack of cigarettes. I am baffled by such an act from this man. Even my wife has such ways. We still have an ancestor shrine in our house. A little altar table with an incense holder and an alcohol pot and a teakwood tabernacle that has been in her family for many years and there is a table of names there, written on rice paper, with the names of four generations, and she believes that the souls of the dead need the prayers of the living or they will never rest and I tell her that this is not clear thinking in a world that has thrown off the tyrannies of the past, but she turns her face away and I know that I hurt her. This altar and the prayers for the dead do not even fit her Buddhism, they are from the Confucianism of the Chinese who oppressed us for centuries. But she does not hear me. It is something that lives apart from any religion or any politics. It is something that comes from our weakness, our fearful hopes for a life beyond the one that we can see and touch, and it is this that allows governments to oppress the poor and create the very evils I helped fight against.

But as I look more closely at these objects and think more clearly, I realize I should not have been surprised at the sentimentality of this American soldier. I am confused in my thinking. His wife was alive. This was the picture of a living person, not a dead ancestor. And whatever excess of sentiment there was in his wanting to see his wife in the jungle each time he stopped to smoke a cigarette, his government had bred such a thing in him—it was their power over him—and I look beyond this smiling woman and there is a sward of blue-green nearby but then the land goes dark and I bend nearer, straining to see, and the darkness becomes earth turned for planting, plowed into even furrows, and I know his family is a family of farmers, his wife smiles at him and her hair is the color of the sunlight that falls on farmers in the early haze of morning and he must have taken as much pleasure from that color as I take from the long drape of night-shadow that my wife combs down for me and the earth must smell strong and sweet, turned like that to grow whatever it is that Americans eat, wheat I think instead of rice, corn perhaps. I am short of breath now and I place my hand on this cigarette pack, covering the woman’s face, and I think the right thing to do is to give these objects over to my government. I have no need for them. And thinking this, I know that I am trying to lie to myself, and I withdraw my hand but I do not look at the face of the wife of the man I killed. I sit back instead and look out my window and I wait.

Perhaps I am waiting for my wife: her approach down the jungle path will make it necessary to put these things away and not consider them again and then I will have no choice but to take them into the authorities in Ðà N
ng when I go, as I do four times a year to report on the continued education of my village. If my wife were to appear right now, even as a pale blue cloud-shadow passes over the path and a dragonfly hovers in the window, if she were to appear in this moment, it would be done, for I have never spoken to my wife about what happened in those years in the jungle and she is a good wife and has never asked me and I would not tempt her by letting her see these objects. But she does not appear. Not in the moment of the blue shadow and the dragonfly and not in the moment afterward as the sunlight returns and the dragonfly rises and hesitates and then dashes away. And I know I am not waiting for my wife, after all. It is something else.