Excerpts from
I Have Seen the World Begin
By Carsten Jensen
"I was a victim of the war," said Tam one evening. "And what did I get out of the years after the war? Loneliness." She looked down at her lovely, slender hands. Khieu regarded her wordlessly with her fierce, dark eyes. "I seduced them all. Iīve changed address as other girls change their clothes."
"But why?" I asked. "Why does it have to be like that?" The resignation in her voice shocked me.
"Do you know what a black biography is?"
I shook my head.
"I grew up on the Cam Ranh Naval Base outside of Nha Trang. My father was an officer in the South Vietnamese army. My parents were Catholics. Later on they got divorced ..." She faltered for a moment, as if considering her next words. "... I took a teacher training course. I used to teach Vietnamese. Then, two years ago, I lost my job. It happened during one of those purges that are carried out every now and again. I was branded by my past. Oh, you canīt imagine what theyīre like, those humiliating interrogations where they twist everything thatīs ever happened in your past." She clenched her fists. "My past wasnīt revolutionary enough. Daughter of an officer who had fought on the wrong side. Catholic.
That is a black biography."
She gave a bitter, stagey laugh. "And then it runs out that my father isnīt even my father. Isnīt that just the funniest part of the whole thing? My mother had been unfaithful to my father. My real father was a Filipino naval officer stationed at Cam Ranh. I never knew him; well, obviously I knew nothing about it. Then in 1972, when I was seven years old, my mother told my father the truth. Not long afterwards they split up. I never saw him again. But I have forgiven her. She was lonely and unhappy. It was wartime. She seldom saw my father and never knew where he was. Anything could have happened. He could have been killed. All she wanted was a bit of comfort. And I was the result."
She paused for a moment. Then out it came, uttered with such vehemence, as she clenched her fists in her lap yet again: "Iīve forgiven her. But I cannot love her!"
"Why not?"
"Because she is selfish. She thinks of no-one but herself. When the North Vietnamese came we were evacuated to Vung Tau. Everyone was trying to get on to the last planes out of there. We had made it as far as one of the helicopters, my mother carrying me in her arms. This black soldier reached out for me. People were screaming, going crazy. We could barely make him out. "Just you, honey - thereīs only room for you! Youīre the last one. Come on! Welcome to America!" As soon as my mother realized what he was saying she lowered her arms. I was swallowed up by the crowd and the next instant we had been elbowed aside by a mass of frantic people all struggling to get at the helicopter. Then the door slammed shut and the helicopter began to lift off. There were people clinging to the undercarriage, and others hanging onto them. We watched the helicopter fly out over the sea with a whole bunch of people dangling from it. Then they began to drop off, one by one, like ripe grapes. But I could have gone with it. I could have been on that helicopter. I could have had a life in the United States. But she would not let me to have it."
"Donīt you think it was just that she loved you and couldnīt bear to be separated from you? I mean, she had no way of knowing whether she would ever see you again."
"Yes, but a mother should always put the welfare of her child first. I would have had a better life in the United States. She wanted to get out herself. That was all she thought about. My life was of absolutely no concern to her. She didnīt even like me. That was quite obvious to me. If you only knew how she carried on. But then I didnīt like her either. Not after the business with my father. She took my father away from me and didnīt even give me a new one. I couldnīt forgive her at the time. I can now, because Iīm grown-up and a grown woman is capable of understanding certain things which a child cannot understand. But I can never forgive her for that moment, face to face with the American soldier, when she lowered her arms and condemned me to a life of misery here in Vietnam."
She broke off for a second or two and sipped some green tea from a tiny china cup. Khieu leaned towards her and brushed her heavy hair back from her face, as if encouraging her to continue. An oil lamp burned with a clear flame in the sultry evening air and at the foot of the white porcelain Buddha two joss sticks glowed in the half-light with a scent as sweet and stupefying as that of an over-perfumed body.
"When I was seventeen I tried to get out of Vietnam. Along with my aunt. But we didnīt make it. We were tricked. We were taken out on a little boat and put ashore on an island where we were asked to wait. But the contact boat that was supposed to carry us out into international waters never turned up. Well, and then ..." She spread her hand in a gesture of regret. "... then I became a schoolteacher and got married, both around the same time. A few years later I discovered that my husband was making arrangements to marry another woman. I could have charged him with bigamy. Instead I decided to give him back his freedom. Luckily we never had children ..." She stared into space, the light of the oil lamp reflected in her eyes. Then, suddenly, she squeezed them tight shut and her whole face contracted. She put her hand to her mouth and a huge sigh worked its way up from her breast. "I canīt have children," she whispered through her fingers. Her shoulders heaved and the tears began to run down her cheeks. Khieu put her arms around her and Tam buried her face in the hollow of her friendīs throat, shaking uncontrollably.
After a while she looked up, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and smiled shyly. "Do you remember the piece about the stars that I read you?" she asked. "Thatīs the worst thing about not being able to have children. You canīt pass on the eyes of the one you love to posterity. Like the stars they will be put out, instead of living on in a new face. Eyes are jewels. They should be allowed to last every bit as long."
It was Tam who suggested that we should hire a car and visit the island of the Coconut Monk. Driving through the Mekong delta I noticed how the dense vegetation that surrounded the road on all sides never reached a height of any more than two to three metres. Iīm no botanist, and have no idea whether this fact was due to the type of plant life growing there, but I fancied that this stretch of countryside, which had been one of the most heavily bombed in Vietnam, had been replanted after the war and that the height of the trees and bushes acted, in exactly the same way as does a childīs height, as an accurate measure of the length of a new life: the number of years for which peace had reigned and for which a new, a resurrected, land had been in existence. Were you to fell one of these trees, their green leaves glinting in the sunlight, its growth rings would lead back to the year zero, to the doomsday of Agent Orange, napalm and the bombs. And now, here was a war-torn, devastated nation fighting back with the only thing it had, the indomitable luxuriance of a ravaged Our car sped down the long, straight roads at a good steady pace and only rarely did another vehicle heave in sight, driving in the opposite direction. To me it seemed the only sound to be heard was the rush of the tyres over the asphalt as if, with its engine off, the car was being propelled forward by some weird form of inertia. It was high noon and there was not a soul to be seen. The driver sat still as a statue, staring straight ahead. All the car windows had been wound down, but so overpowering was the heat that not even our speed seemed capable of generating a breeze. Khieu had fallen asleep on the front seat. Her hand hung half out of the window in such a way that she looked as if she were holding an invisible cigarette between her fingers. Tam slept with her head in my lap. Her long, white dress with its pattern of great red and green flower petals covered the whole seat. With her face hidden by her unbound hair she resembled a flower that has crumpled up, stupefied by the heat. I was struck by a powerful but quiet and utterly physical sense of peace, as if a noise that had been sounding in my ears throughout my life had all at once been stilled, and for the first time ever I heard true silence; not only heard it but felt it in every part of my body, as though muscles that had been tensed for an eternity had suddenly relaxed.
Careful not to wake her, I stroked Tamīs hair, an action that embodied a gratitude I myself could not fathom. It would be a long time before I grasped what my hand had known at that moment: that it was her I had to thank for that unwonted sense of peace. She had laid her head in my lap and fallen asleep. I can conceive of no more trusting act. She presented me with her faith, her vulnerability, her defencelessness. She presented me with my return to Earth, the first true landing of my journey.
Events have their own geography. It is known as history. But what do you call it when you travel around the world with no thought for geography and with neither history nor its events as a guide, only people? Is there some invisible history of encounters quite unrelated to the dictates of topography or the long shadows cast by violent occurrences? I am thinking not of Saigon. I am thinking of Tam. I am thinking not of the Mekong delta and the road to the island of the Coconut Monk. I am thinking of that moment with her head cradled in my lap. Within the map of the world there is a map of the world.
I never told her what that moment meant to me. At the time I did not feel that it had anything to do with her, that it was a very private moment, elicited by the peace of the afternoon. I was far too preoccupied with myself and the interpreting of my own feelings to see that she, too, was bound up in it. But it is the gentle weight of her head in my lap that sticks in my memory.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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