She Weeps Each Time You're Born (22 page)

The trucks began to return at the usual hour. Qui had already left for home, her body floating down the street as if the moon were walking the earth. Son was sitting in the highest bough of the cinnamon tree. The bats were beginning to appear, overhead Venus turning on in the twilight. Rabbit was sitting with her back against the tree, the scent of cinnamon filling her head. The first truck was off-loading. She didn't pay it any notice. Levka was always in the last truck. Any minute now the last truck would come barreling up the street, loose grit swirling through the air. He would leap off and sneak up on her, running his finger over her freckles. She was thinking of the way she had taken him in her mouth for the first time the night before, the intimacy of his cries as she hummed. She played the moment over and over in her head, the secret moments between two people. Just the moon in the window and all over the walls.

There was a deafening crash. Rabbit sat up. A tree branch was lying at her feet, a cloud of dust kicked up in the air. Son was standing by the dead limb. The trucks were gone, Duong Khiem utterly still. Rabbit rubbed her eyes. The stars were out in their entirety, Venus already starting to set.

Son stood toeing the branch with his foot. Rabbit didn't understand. She had simply fallen asleep, the cinnamon like a soporific. Maybe Levka was tired too, maybe he had seen her sleeping there peacefully under the tree and decided not tonight.
No, she said out loud. The moon was already halfway up the sky. She jumped up and ran through the gate.

At the top of the stairs she pushed open the door and entered the dormitory where the Russians slept. The corridor was dark. She could see a blue glow flickering from a room at the end of the hallway. Then she was running for it. Crying please, anyone, the corridor growing longer as if extending. She felt as if she would never reach it, the glow flickering like moonlight on the ocean.

In the room at the end of the hall an old samurai movie from Japan was playing on the TV—the men's topknots blue-black and gleaming. There were a few sofas and chairs scattered around, a refrigerator humming in the corner, the room some kind of lounge area. The smell of cigarettes was etched in the upholstery, even in the dark the walls tobacco-stained. Giang was propped up on a small counter by a sink with her shirt still on as a man stood pumping between her legs, his body with the same sun lines as Levka's, the same patches of light and dark.

The man didn't stop even when Rabbit came running in. Giang kept panting, her eyes closed, grimacing as the man moved faster. The secret moments between people. The man moaning and Giang answering, his movements faster and faster, a sheen forming on his skin. Then the man shuddered. Rabbit could see the muscles go slack, the urgency melting away. Giang opened her empty eyes. She seemed to know she and the man weren't alone, but she didn't hurry. The man disengaged and turned around, lit a cigarette before pulling up his shorts. Just then another man walked into the room. He looked at Rabbit and then at Giang and then at Rabbit again and smiled.

They picked Rabbit up off the floor and carried her to a sofa. When she opened her eyes, there was a small group in the room. She didn't remember collapsing. Giang was sitting on the arm
of the couch squeezing her hand. There was a spot in Giang's eyebrows. Rabbit realized it was lipstick. Someone must have kissed her lips and then smashed his stained mouth all over her face. Rabbit could hear two voices rising off Giang's skin, the voices faint like a campfire in a vast canyon. Rabbit's ears began to tickle, but then Giang pulled her hand away.

Most of the Russians didn't even know anything was wrong. They were only hearing about it for the first time. The last truck had only just come back. The men in the earlier trucks were already sleeping. One man from the last truck sat smoking by the TV. On-screen a woman was singing in a white dress, in her wide sleeves her arms floating up and down like a moth's. The man said they had sat waiting and waiting for Levka and the two others to come back from the trenches of Anne-Marie, but they never did. What do you think happened, someone asked. The man lifted his eyebrows and opened his face the way Rabbit noticed their people did when something was of little concern to them.

The man perceived Rabbit staring. His name was Anatole—daybreak—though the others called him Grischa. His hands flew as he spoke. The others understood the theatrics, the heavy sighs. It wasn't that he didn't care. It was that many of them were soldiers. They had seen things, which they'd lived through and then put from their minds. In their time they had all known men who had cared too much. It was hard to explain, but when you cared too much about one thing, it made you careless elsewhere. Vietnam was a respite, the Hindu Kush still looming in their dreams. Vietnam with its white-sand beaches, the girls with waists you could put your hands all the way around until your fingers touched, who would lie with you for only a few rubles. Why come here to help these people extract the long dead from the earth and then die yourself? Maybe they had seen this coming. There were always men like Levka, Levka running into the
arms of this child when his friend Mikhail was killed. As if he could find what he needed lying between her legs.

They didn't come back from Anne-Marie, Grischa said. Levka and Andrei and Little Vadim. Anne-Marie was just north of Huguette at the end of the airstrip. We went out looking for them, but then the sun went down and it was too dangerous. Grischa lit another cigarette and closed his face. I remember Levka saying something or other about a deep pocket, he said. Proof of atrocities. Grischa raised his eyebrows again. I tell him why bother. Yes, there are probably bodies there. So what? There are fucking bodies everywhere. The other Russians nodded.

Возьми ее туда, Giang said. Some of the men jumped at the sound of her voice.
You must take her there
. Giang pointed at Rabbit. The men looked at the two women sitting on the sofa. On the TV a group of children were singing a patriotic song. Giang knew what the local people said about Rabbit and Qui, the people bringing them gifts and offerings in the hopes that the two of them might console the newly dead and ease their passing. If you want to know what happened, Giang repeated, take her.

Grischa lifted his eyebrows. What's it to me, he said.

T
HEY LEFT JUST AFTER SUNRISE. RABBIT GAVE QUI A SMALL
wave. Qui was standing by the metal drum stoking the fire as the trucks started up. Her skin burned brighter than the flames themselves, her hair like snow. From a million miles away she probably looked like a star, Rabbit thought. A planet rising in the east of some long-distant world.

Son was sitting in the cinnamon tree watching the convoy drive away up Duong Khiem. The scratch on his face looked as if a drop of acid had rolled down his cheek and burned the skin. Rabbit felt something tighten in her chest. She thought of Levka somewhere sitting in the branches of a tree scanning the earth for her.

The trucks turned at the first intersection and rolled out of sight. Within minutes most of the men fell asleep. The air was dry, the first hint that summer was over. At the front of the truck up by the cab lay a pile of shovels and buckets. In one of the buckets something bloomed like a bouquet of flowers. The color was right, but the effect was wrong. Rabbit stared harder. They were orange flags with little black skulls and crossbones printed on both sides. The words were written in French.
FAITES ATTENTION
.

Overhead the metal ribs of the truck's canvas roof shuddered with each turn. Rabbit tried to imagine Levka sitting in the very same spot where she herself was sitting, each morning the coldness of the metal floor seeping into his skin. Maybe each day on the drive out to the Nam Yum River he thought of her, their secret room in the moonlight, the taste of honey still in his mouth.

Giang had fallen asleep. She was still wearing her tiny yellow skirt and cheap plastic heels. Even in sleep there was something guarded in her face, as if somewhere in her dreams she were clutching her purse and closing herself off. Giang, Rabbit whispered.
She wanted to know why her friend spoke Russian, but Giang didn't stir. Somehow in her sleep she was moving herself even farther away.

On the other side of the truck Grischa was awake. He looked at Rabbit and nodded. She could feel his eyes on her as if he were trying to connect the freckles on her face and find a pattern. She wondered if he were worried about how they would sneak her out into the fields. Before they had even boarded the trucks, he had explained the situation to Giang. The Commandant has a house in the Russian quarter in Hoa Thien, Grischa said. He raised his eyebrows and held his hands up palms to the sky as if testing the air for rain. None of us have seen him in weeks. Giang looked at him, but Grischa simply nodded. I know I know, he said. Why go out there every day if no one is watching us? He lowered his hands and shrugged. We Russians and our suffering, he said.

Then Rabbit could feel them rising, the sound of the trucks switching gears. Out of the back she could see people walking downhill into town. She closed her eyes and imagined a young woman riding a bicycle, her long black hair streaming in the wind, the woman's conical hat blowing off as she raced past a group of water buffalo. A young man standing in a ditch by the side of the road, watching the woman, the small red diamond staining his face, his heart flooding.

When Rabbit opened her eyes again, they were there. Two men helped her and Giang out of the truck. The sun was just over the hills, but overhead there was a three-quarters moon in the pale blue sky. In the daytime it was just a ghost of itself.

The Russians from the other trucks were already organizing themselves for the day. One man stood with headphones draped around his neck and a large metal machine by his side. She saw four other men with headsets, each one connected to the same
kind of machine, each instrument long and cylindrical like the vacuum cleaners she'd seen once in a window in Hanoi.

The dogs looked anxious. Their handlers stood a few feet away poring over a map. The dogs kept their eyes on the men. One of the smaller dogs passed too closely to another. The bigger dog let out a deep growl and bared its teeth. The smaller dog quickly moved out of the way, its tail between its legs. Rabbit could see a scar on the smaller dog's muzzle, a spot where the fur no longer grew. Something about it reminded her of Son. She looked around but didn't see him anywhere.

For all the climbing the trucks had done out on Highway 19, the land was surprisingly flat, as if they were standing in the bottom of a bowl. In the distance the mountains and rolling hills looked like turrets. She wondered why anyone had ever chosen to fight there. Whoever had the highlands would hold the advantage. If you were down in the bottomlands, it would only be a matter of time. Even she could tell that.

After a while the various groups began to move off. Each man had his task. There were close to a hundred of them in all. Some carried shovels and buckets, some with metal detectors, which they carried on their shoulders, some straining to hold the dogs back. At the front of each group a man walked holding only a map, the responsibility evident in the slowness of his movements.

Grischa came over and spoke with Giang. He had one of the dogs with him. Rabbit offered it her hand, but the dog growled and flattened its ears. Laika, barked Grischa, tugging the leash. Giang looked at Rabbit. You ready, she said. Rabbit nodded. With her hands Giang twisted her loose hair up into a knot. Rabbit could see a small mark on Giang's neck, the mark as if someone had bitten her. Grischa says stay single file, Giang said. No matter what, stay in line. Rabbit pushed her hat back out of her eyes and took a deep breath.

It was a thirty-minute walk to the trenches of Anne-Marie. They walked on the airstrip, the asphalt long decayed and overgrown by shoulder-tall plants with small green berries gleaming in clusters. Grischa yelled something over his shoulder. Coffee beans, Giang said. To the east the land was dotted with orange flags. The Russians had been working different areas for the last year, looking for the French dead. The Vietnamese government was eager to normalize relations with their former colonizer, bodies offered up as a sign of goodwill. Repatriation was one step in a long process.

Their group was small, just six of them plus the dog. One man carried the metal detector. Two other soldiers were toting shovels. They looked like boys, barely teenagers, their skin ruddy and somewhat blemished. A few orange flags poked out of their pockets. Grischa was still holding the leash, Laika trotting by his side. Rabbit could see something rolled up tight and tucked under Grischa's other arm, the thing shiny and black. In her mind a memory floated up of a black bag lying on the ground under a sugar-apple tree, beside it a hole growing in the earth. There was a body zipped up in the bag. She knew there was a body inside the body.

As they walked Grischa explained procedures to Giang, who translated intermittently. In each sector they would first sweep the land for unexploded ordnance. Afterward they would detonate the larger bombs, only defusing things when it was absolutely necessary. There was so much left in the ground that they would mark the smaller incidents with flags and leave them be. Once an area had been marked, they would come through with the dogs. If the dogs scented something, then they would begin digging.

The two women walked along, everywhere cicadas buzzing
like invisible engines in the grass. At one point Giang stopped to tip a pebble out of one of her shoes. Rabbit stood waiting for her to begin moving again. Why do you speak Russian, she said.

For a moment Giang stood studying her heel. I grew up in Russia, she said. I was born in Stalingrad. Rabbit waited for her to say more, but she put her shoe back on and started walking again.