Only the Heart Read Free Page B

could he possibly have done them, Thanh? He was an old man. The war is over.”
    Thanh shakes his head again, like a teacher with a slow student.
    â€œHe was the enemy. And he was one of the losers. The winners decide who the ‘war-criminals’ are, and the winners decide when the war is over. You should know that.”
    For a moment longer Minh looks at his friend, but his arguments have evaporated. He sighs, then turns and looks out again. Beyond the fences.
    The river gleams in the sun like liquid gold …
    *
    TOAN’S STORY
    Years later my father told me about his superior, Nguyen Quang Vu, who died in the re-education camp at Long Xuyen. He was old, and their ranks had been very different, but they were friends, and as he had worked in intelligence during the war, he was considered “a danger” to the new order.
    His family were all dead, so there was no one to pay the bribes, and … well, I guess he just ran out of reasons to keep living.
    My father was luckier than most.
    Our family was not particularly wealthy, but we were in business, and we were … comfortable, and even before the war ended we had already converted most of our wealth into gold, so we had enough to pay the bribes to all the officials, from the local Party bureaucrats to the head guard at the re-education camp itself. It took six months, but finally my father was freed.
    Thanh Tran spent over ten years being “re-educated”, partly because he was an “intellectual”, but mainly because of his rank. My father would gladly have paid the bribes, if that was what it took, but the higher you had been in the system, the harder it got to buy your way out. And Thanh had been a colonel.
    So Tran Van Thanh, intellectual, “war-criminal” and threat to the new order, watched the rice fields and the river through a chain-mesh fence for ten long years, listened to the re-education propaganda and wrote his famous first collection of poems.
    And when he came out, we were long gone.

2
    GHOST STORIES
    LINH’S STORY
    Some of my earliest memories are of the visits we made to Saigon. The war was still on, and the capital was … chaotic, I guess. With the American soldiers on leave and the business that they represented to the shops, the bars, the sidewalk food-vendors—and the girls—the streets were even more crammed and disorganised than they had been before the French left and the war escalated out of control.
    Of course, I was only five or six at the time, so I don’t remember the city before the war, but you pick up on what your parents say, and it becomes a part of your memory, almost as real as your own recollections.
    â€œThat was Huyen’s house,” you say, like a parrot, though Huyen died years before you were born.
    I do remember the visits, though: the long bus-ride from Rach Gia, where we lived; eight hours to travel about three hundred kilometres, waiting at the river-crossings for the barges to carry us across, while children my own age bargained with my parents over fruit and sweets and the delicious-smelling bánh bao . And then arriving at the centre of Saigon, drained from the travel-sickness, but excited all the same.
    There was a life there that was different from the easy-paced existence of the coastal town I had spent my whole life becoming familiar with: the packed streets, the noise, the hundreds of bicycles and the tinny motor-scooters that wove in and out of each other’s way, like strange buzzing insects. But almost no cars.
    When everyone you know and everything you need is within walking distance, there is really no need to own a car, and that was always how it was. Very few people had ever ridden in a car, let alone owned one, even before the war.
    The war had just made transport more difficult still. Apart from the few ancient buses and taxis, about the only vehicles with more than two wheels were the military ones: jeeps, trucks, the occasional