Only the Heart Read Free

meaning for the boy. To his young eyes, they appear as farmers; countrymen dressed in badly-fitting suits, and not quite comfortable among the buildings of a large town like Rach Gia.
    He remembers his uncle’s joke about the Viet Cong when they first entered Saigon. VC would see the tall buildings, bend back his head to look up, and his helmet would fall off.
    â€œIt’s hard to look all powerful and important when you’re chasing after your hat,” he would say.
    It was this kind of joke that had once made the adults laugh, but the kind that they could no longer tell aloud …
    He stands to face the two men, and the younger of them smiles, trying to appear friendly — and failing.
    â€œThis is the house of Vo Van Minh?”
    The boy stares for a moment, then nods. It is hard to find your voice before such men, and part of him is nervous.
    â€œAnd he is home?”
    â€œYes …”
    The single word sneaks out, and the boy watches the younger official’s smile grow cold and set, as he turns and looks at the other man, indicating the house with an almost imperceptible movement of his head.
    Then they move away and the boy is forgotten.
    He watches them enter his grandfather’s shop, which occupies the ground floor of the family’s three-storey home. And the feeling grows within him that he has just done something unforgivable …
    *
    TOAN’S STORY
    When they took my father away, I blamed my self for a long time. I felt as if it was me who had betrayed him. I should have lied to them. Told them that I didn’t know who Vo Van Minh was.
    It was stupid to feel that way, I realise that now. They knew about him already, about his role in the war. Which meant that he’d already been betrayed by someone. They would have found him in the end. Nothing was more certain.
    Looking back, I think he was resigned to it. He’d made his choices more than a year before.
    As an officer in South Vietnamese intelligence, he must have known that he would be a target when the fighting was over. I found out later that he almost escaped, that he’d had his chance and had chosen to stay.
    On 30 April 1975, just before the capital fell, a ship left Saigon, full of personnel who had worked in “sensitive” positions. But not their families. Things were frantic and there was just no room. For most, it was the final desperate chance to escape the advancing Communists, and my father was on board with the others.
    He told me later that he’d panicked. There is a fear inside each of us, he said, that blinds us to what is truly important. That when the others ran, he ran with them.
    He could have escaped.
    He had escaped.
    In the chaos that was the capital in the final days of the war, it was hard to think straight, he said. He had joined the mad rush and crammed himself onto the old vessel with a thousand other frightened people, without a thought for the consequences.
    But as he stood there, crammed against the railing of the ship, waiting for the engines to start and the ropes to be cast off, suddenly the panic disappeared.
    â€œThere are worse things than dying,” he told me, years later. “I stood there imagining what it would be like, if I was safe somewhere, alone, while my family was still here. And I looked at the others. Some of them were dead already, but they didn’t even know it. What were the Communists going to do? Kill everyone who worked for the South — or for the Americans? Perhaps, but there are worse things than dying …”
    Just before the ship pulled out, he ran off and returned home. He threw his gun in the river, and burned his uniform and any papers or photos that tied him to his job, then he sat down on the balcony, and just stared at my mother for a long time.
    Sometimes, I fancy I remember that day. I was young, but I think I remember being confused. Knowing that something was wrong, that something had changed. Maybe even being