time.
"Stay. Live peacefully, my sweet. Try not to be sad, and try not to think poorly of me."
Lan leaned forward, caressing his shoulders and his greying hair.
"Forget me.Your life is an open road, go out and enjoy it. I'll find a foster-child and we'll live together peacefully. I wish I could have had your child, Kien, but it's impossible. That doesn't depress me. Just for a moment let's imagine that we've both come back from the past, while our loved ones were still alive.
"I ask you to remember one small favor for me. If you come to the end of your wandering and seem to have nowhere left to go and no one to turn to, remember you have a place here with me, always. A home, a woman, a friend. Doi Mo hamlet was where you started this war. You can make it your point of return, if you want to."
Kien hugged Lan, pressing her to his chest. She said in a muffled voice, "Please go now. I'll never forget you. Please, don't forget me completely, my unexpected lover."
He left, bending his head into the summer morning sunlight which spread across the grassy roadside. When he turned he saw his long shadow reaching back, pointing to Lan in the distance. She had not moved.
She watched as he slowly walked away, and was still watching as he turned out of sight over a distant hill.
Some years after that meeting, also on a summer afternoon, Kien and some journalist colleagues, riding a jeep back from the border, again passed through the same valley.The sight of the hills and streams, the smell of the earth brought to him
on a pleasant wind, brought back powerful memories. Only he and the driver were still awake. Kien reminisced in silence, with a tinge of regret. It was here, this very place, where Lan had promised him a final refuge. "There is always one place and one woman here for you," she had said.
The sad, doomed meeting echoed back to him, reminding him of that final act of kindness.
Some of his loved ones he had not bothered to stay in contact with. Others had vanished. He had left yet others in his wake. He had lived selfishly these last years without looking back. Time and his work had taken over his life. He had sought neither opportunities nor responsibilities. His memories that afternoon reawakened in him the sense of sacred duty. He felt he must press on to fulfill his obligations, his duty as a writer.
It was necessary to write about the war, to touch readers' hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, feel they were there, in the past, with the author.
Why choose war? Why must he write of the war? His life and that of so many others was so horrible it could hardly be called a life. How can one find artistic recognition in that kind of life? They gossip about me, the author who wishes to write of the war. They say of me that the war author cannot even bear to enter a cinema where people may be shooting each other on the screen.
Is this the author who avoids reading anything about any war, the Vietnam war or any other great war? The one who is frightened by war stories? Yet who himself cannot stop writing war stories, stories of rifles firing, bombs dropping, enemies and comrades, wet and dry seasons in batde. In fact, the one who can't write about anything else.
The author who will later have to give all credit for his unique writing style and storytelling fame to those war stories.
When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering Team, those about-to-be-demobilized soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.
But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.
He could have written about the macabre or about cruel brutality without writing about
"Stay. Live peacefully, my sweet. Try not to be sad, and try not to think poorly of me."
Lan leaned forward, caressing his shoulders and his greying hair.
"Forget me.Your life is an open road, go out and enjoy it. I'll find a foster-child and we'll live together peacefully. I wish I could have had your child, Kien, but it's impossible. That doesn't depress me. Just for a moment let's imagine that we've both come back from the past, while our loved ones were still alive.
"I ask you to remember one small favor for me. If you come to the end of your wandering and seem to have nowhere left to go and no one to turn to, remember you have a place here with me, always. A home, a woman, a friend. Doi Mo hamlet was where you started this war. You can make it your point of return, if you want to."
Kien hugged Lan, pressing her to his chest. She said in a muffled voice, "Please go now. I'll never forget you. Please, don't forget me completely, my unexpected lover."
He left, bending his head into the summer morning sunlight which spread across the grassy roadside. When he turned he saw his long shadow reaching back, pointing to Lan in the distance. She had not moved.
She watched as he slowly walked away, and was still watching as he turned out of sight over a distant hill.
Some years after that meeting, also on a summer afternoon, Kien and some journalist colleagues, riding a jeep back from the border, again passed through the same valley.The sight of the hills and streams, the smell of the earth brought to him
on a pleasant wind, brought back powerful memories. Only he and the driver were still awake. Kien reminisced in silence, with a tinge of regret. It was here, this very place, where Lan had promised him a final refuge. "There is always one place and one woman here for you," she had said.
The sad, doomed meeting echoed back to him, reminding him of that final act of kindness.
Some of his loved ones he had not bothered to stay in contact with. Others had vanished. He had left yet others in his wake. He had lived selfishly these last years without looking back. Time and his work had taken over his life. He had sought neither opportunities nor responsibilities. His memories that afternoon reawakened in him the sense of sacred duty. He felt he must press on to fulfill his obligations, his duty as a writer.
It was necessary to write about the war, to touch readers' hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, feel they were there, in the past, with the author.
Why choose war? Why must he write of the war? His life and that of so many others was so horrible it could hardly be called a life. How can one find artistic recognition in that kind of life? They gossip about me, the author who wishes to write of the war. They say of me that the war author cannot even bear to enter a cinema where people may be shooting each other on the screen.
Is this the author who avoids reading anything about any war, the Vietnam war or any other great war? The one who is frightened by war stories? Yet who himself cannot stop writing war stories, stories of rifles firing, bombs dropping, enemies and comrades, wet and dry seasons in batde. In fact, the one who can't write about anything else.
The author who will later have to give all credit for his unique writing style and storytelling fame to those war stories.
When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering Team, those about-to-be-demobilized soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.
But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.
He could have written about the macabre or about cruel brutality without writing about
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