Love Like Hate (16 page)

There were not enough pallets inside the guesthouse, so many people had to double up that night. Many slept on woven mats on the floor. Without blankets, Cun and Kim Lan had to clutch each other all night to keep from freezing. Kim Lan couldn’t sleep anyway. Her mind was filled with tender thoughts for Hoang Long. Sen seemed very far away, nearly unimaginable. Knowing that she would see Hoang Long’s face the very next morning made her think back to their happiest moments together. Most of these preceded their wedding. She also thought of the wedding reception, when everything was still perfect, before everything had been ruined.

In the morning, the prisoners’ relatives stood outside the guesthouse to await the arrival of the men. Everyone tried to remain stoic as thirteen ragged figures approached from afar, accompanied by nine guards. The prisoners’ daily ration was two small bowls of rice with bits of vegetables and a cup of water, less for those who had
committed infractions. Scraps of meat were reserved for special occasions such as Uncle Ho’s birthday. The prisoners craved protein so much, some of them even swallowed cockroaches, when a cockroach could be found. Bliss was snagging a rare frog or a field rat, which they butchered with the improvised knives everyone had learned how to fashion. Harassed night and day by this vicious hunger, they grew to hate their own stomachs. If only a man could exist without a belly, and experience life with just his eyes, existence would be so much less of an ordeal. Maybe that’s what heaven would be like. You lying under that warm blanket—yes, you, my friend—may you get to sample cockroaches and field rats someday. The constant thirst was just as bad as the relentless hunger. Only when it rained did they get extra water to drink and wash. Instead of toilet paper, they used torn-up banana leaves. Smooth and cool, they weren’t a bad substitution. They also used whiskers from cornstalks. At night, lying in comfortless rows, sexless, cursing, bantering or singing half-remembered songs, they became food for centipedes and whistling, won’t-quit mosquitoes. Whoever died from overwork, beating or suicide was buried at the edge of the forest wrapped in a burlap sack, without his family having been notified. Seeing her son, an old lady suddenly started to wail. “My son! My son! It’s your mother!” A little girl then ran toward her father, screaming, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” Hoang Long was so dark and haggard, half his hair turned white, that Kim Lan only recognized him when he waved and called out her name. By the time they had gone inside to sit down, she and Cun were sobbing convulsively. Hoang Long was not crying at all. None of the prisoners were crying. Hoang Long held his wife’s and son’s hands across the table and sternly said, “Stop crying. We only have fifteen minutes to talk.”

As soon as he opened his mouth, they could see that he had no front teeth left. They had either been knocked out or had rotted off. His remaining teeth were surely rotting because wafts of decay were issuing from his black hole of a mouth, with red sores gashing
the corners. His skin was cracked and barklike to the touch. Confronting this, Cun felt pity and sadness initially—the shock of seeing his old man a wretched prisoner was overwhelming—but these emotions were quickly supplanted by fear and resentment. His father’s survival status and residual strength, as embodied by his steady gaze and oddly arrogant speech, rebuked and challenged him. There were defiance and admonition even in the old man’s bad breath and in the wiry strands of black and white hair jutting from his nostrils. For his part, Hoang Long had been disgusted by Cun’s sobbing jag. He noted that his son either listed to one side or slumped forward. All his bones seemed made of rubber. His eyes were unfocused, cloudy, as if recycled from the cheapest plastic, and his thin neck was like a dry stem under a dead sunflower, swaying in the breeze.
Give this kid a rifle and he’d shoot his own foot
, Hoang Long thought. By the age of seventeen, his son’s age, Hoang Long was already a soldier. Embarrassed by Cun, Hoang Long felt redeemed, on the other hand, by Kim Lan. His wife had lost none of her beauty, but had only become more elegant with age. Now his captors, the guards, could finally see what sort of a man
he
was. The three of them tried to squeeze fourteen years into fifteen minutes. Kim Lan said that the café had reopened and business was excellent. Cun lied that he was still in school and doing well with his studies.

“Do you know when you might be released?” Kim Lan asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I talked to some women on the train. They told me that, as a captain, you should be out already.”

“Well, I’m still here, am I not? They can keep you as long as they like.”

She had noticed his bare neck, but it took her a moment before she realized what was wrong with it. “Do you still have your amulet?”

“My what?!”

“The Cambodian amulet.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “That cobra’s fang I got you to keep you from harm?”

“If it had worked,” he raised his voice testily, “I wouldn’t be rotting in prison, would I?” He then added under his breath, “It’s gone, in any case. They’ve taken it.”

“You should always cooperate with them, dear, so they’ll let you out sooner.”

He cringed. “What do you mean by cooperate? And since when have you become an expert on the ins and outs of life in prison?!”

“I know you. I know how stubborn you can be. It kills me to see you in prison like this. I just want you to be released soon.”

Hoang Long thought it odd that his wife did not say, “I want to see you
home
soon,” only, “I just want you to be released soon.” He stared hard into her eyes and said, “Have you met someone else?”

“No! No! Of course not!”

Hoang Long turned to Cun. “Is your mom telling the truth?”

“No! I mean yes! Of course she’s telling the truth! And I mean no! She hasn’t met anyone!”

Hoang Long looked at Kim Lan, his eyes cold. “What’s wrong with this kid? Can’t he talk?”

“He’s telling the truth, and I’m telling the truth. I have no one in this life but you.”

As Kim Lan was trying to think of what else to say, a guard announced that the visiting period was over. Hoang Long stood up and leaned awkwardly across the table to give Kim Lan a kiss. It was the first time he had ever kissed her on the lips.

20
INESCAPABLE ASS KISSING

A
fter his wife and son had left, Hoang Long opened the two bags and found each of the forty-four items he had asked for. Nothing was missing. He put on a sweater and the knit cap, then sniffed the coffee, tea and bar of soap. As he held the jar of pork stew in his hands, his eyes brimmed with tears. He hadn’t eaten pork stew, his favorite comfort food, in fourteen years. He also noticed something he hadn’t asked for: a jar of fermented shrimp paste. Fermented shrimp paste is used as a dip for boiled pork. Purplish gray, it tastes great—once you get the hang of it—but it smells like garbage. Fermented seafood is inevitable in a tropical country with a long coastline. The ability to eat fermented seafood separates real Vietnamese from fake Vietnamese. In Vietnamese restaurants overseas, fermented seafood is often left off the menu. Vietnamese traveling overseas are routinely warned against bringing fermented seafood aboard an airplane, lest a leaky jar give the whole country a bad name. Hoang Long loved all types of fermented seafood, but he was willing to sacrifice this jar. Without hesitation, he went to the head warden to give it to him as a gift.

“What the hell is this?”

“Fermented shrimp paste from Chau Doc, sir. My wife told me she wants you to try it!”

It pained Hoang Long to have to call this asshole sir, but the guy was in charge of the whole stinking joint and could determine when a prisoner would go home. It had taken Hoang Long forever
to learn how to kiss ass in prison. He hated everything about his captors, from their hard, humorless faces to their catchphrases and jargon—their vocabulary, in general—to their heavy northern accent, the way they turned l’s into n’s, which he had even hated when it came from the mouths of his own soldiers during the war. During his first few years inside, he’d talked back to the wardens, provoking savage beatings and long stints in solitary confinement. He jeered at other prisoners for being submissive and spat on the ground as he walked by them. His contempt was visceral and vindictive and many inmates despised him in return. Others stayed away from the angry man because he was a liability. Their shared hardship, frustration, danger and uncertainty were not alleviated by much comradeship, as in wartime, since in prison they were encouraged daily to turn on each other. As a final condition of release, a prisoner was always asked to snitch on his peers—to finger those he considered not yet reformed. On the cusp of freedom, with home and wife only a train ride away, many inmates had not hesitated to single out Hoang Long. This was one reason he was still a prisoner after all these years, when many ARVN officers of higher rank had already been released.

At first, Hoang Long only understood the cruel irony of being in prison: Your enemies are finally out in the open, but you’re not allowed to shoot them. All of the wardens were sadistic assholes, he soon found out; even the cook was an asshole, so he felt justified in having spent so much of his life trying to kill them.
These men exist primarily as dispensers of pain
, he thought.
They may give some meager bits of pleasure to their wives and children, but I seriously doubt it. Each time I killed one of them, I lowered the pain quotient in the world. And if, occasionally, a stray bullet struck a child or a peasant, so what? You can’t go through life without breaking a bottle or two, no use crying over spilled soya. The bottom line: For every innocent I killed, I must have improved this earth immeasurably by getting rid of bad guys while also helping to control its runaway population. Who needs five billion people anyway? It’s not how many
souls there are, stupid, it’s the quality of life they enjoy. Just think of all the gasoline consumed and gastrointestinal gas emitted each and every second by each individual asshole, eating away the ozone layer and the quality of life for the rest of us
. But as the wardens continued to beat him senseless, Hoang Long finally began to see prison as a reprieve—an act of mercy bestowed by a deadly enemy.

The objective, then as now, as ever, was not just to survive, but to outlast your enemies
and
your comrades, to witness death, to mourn, even, at least a little, with true feeling, before you yourself went under.

The head warden was a pissy guy with an enormous dried prune for a head. His grinning charges were always bringing him gifts, all sorts of foodstuffs, packs of cigarettes, articles of clothing, even an original poem once or twice, but no one had ever presented him with a jar of fermented shrimp paste. Rotating it in his right hand, the warden remembered the odd gleam in Hoang Long’s eyes and thought:
This maggot is fucking with me. He’s giving me a stinky jar of fermented shrimp paste as a way of saying, You stink! Well, if I stink this bad, I’ll make sure he rots in prison
.

That evening, the warden’s wife discovered the money hidden inside the fermented shrimp paste. She smoothed out the creases and counted it twice. From every bill, of every denomination, Uncle Ho’s face smiled back at her approvingly.
A nice round sum
, she sighed, her face suddenly angelic. Instead of showing it to her husband, she kept it for herself. There were so many things she needed to buy and he never gave her enough money.

Respecting her husband’s job, the warden’s wife understood that the puppet troops needed to be reeducated to function in a socialist society, but she still worried about some of the things he did to them. To atone for his sins, she had decided to become a vegetarian, abstaining even from milk and eggs. To make up for these deprivations, however, she bought handbags and clothes compulsively. It is not easy being a warden’s wife.

21
GOING HOME

T
he head warden called Hoang Long to his office. “I have a surprise for you, Hoang Long. You’re released.”

Hoang Long stared at the dried prune for signs of a practical joke but saw nothing. The man was apparently serious. Not wanting to risk changing the head warden’s mind, he asked no questions, but mumbled in his most humble voice, “I thank you, sir.”