Only The Heart

D.P.A.C.

PROLOGUE

WAITING

The future is a country

on the far side of despair.

— Chinese proverb

27 February 1986

Kingsford-Smith Airport,

Sydney, Australia

TOAN’S STORY

Every time the door slid open, the crowd would shift forward slightly, the adults craning their necks, and the younger children risking a harsh word from airport security, as they sneaked under the flimsy railings and looked inside. Into the forbidden area.

You couldn’t really blame them. The kids, I mean.

It was forbidden, so it drew them like … like anything forbidden draws kids. Besides, they were infected by the adults’ agitation.

The sliding doors were the last barrier that separated the crowd from Customs and the passengers still to be processed. Every new arrival who pushed a trolley of suitcases and duty-free goods through the doorway was greeted with a tiny scream of excitement from one small section of the waiting crowd, and with impatient disappointment from the rest.

Except for the teenagers. Like Linh and me.

We stood in a small group, away from our parents. Away from the embarrassment of the nervous relatives, who insisted on speaking to each other loudly in Vietnamese.

Cool, we were. Removed. Looking pointedly towards the automatic exit doors and the parking lot beyond, and talking about school and clothes and the weekend and what we would be doing if we didn’t have to waste our time waiting for aeroplanes.

But secretly, I don’t think any of us would have missed it. It’s one thing to act cool and to want to speak Australian in public. It’s another thing to see your grandmother again for the first time in almost ten years. One of your links to the past. To the old life that you can hardly remember, except as vivid flashes, like images on a ten-year-old video-clip.

Not that any of us would admit it out loud, of course.

But then it was our turn.

It’s them! My mother. She wasn’t normally the type to state the obvious at the top of her voice in a public place, so I guess the excitement had even infected her.

Aunt Loan, my father’s youngest sister, came through first. She’s maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, and it seems strange to think of her as the daughter of someone as old as my grandmother.

Grandma turns seventy next year. In fact, Aunt Loan looks more like my big sister than my aunt. She’s seventeen years younger than my father — what you might call a ‘1ate-life baby". And that makes her both unfortunate and pretty lucky.

Unfortunate, because as the youngest girl she copped the job of caring for Grandma when my grandfather died and all the surviving children got married and left the house — or the country. It’s a duty which traditionally means putting your own life on hold.

Lucky, because she was the only one apart from Grandma herself that the law allowed us to sponsor to come and live with us. If she had been married, it would have made her ineligible.

She pushed a loaded trolley through the doorway and paused for a moment to get her bearings, but before we had a chance to react, my grandmother came through, and the family did the compulsory scream.

All except my father. He stood silent and unmoving, with his eyes fixed on the man who was supporting her arm.

When he did speak, I don’t think anyone else even heard him. I’d moved across from the doorway, and I was standing right next to him. Even so, I only just caught the whisper.

Thanh!

As if he had heard, the man looked up, caught my father’s gaze and smiled. Then he left the old woman to the mercy of her surging family, and walked over to stand a few centimetres away. The two of them stood face to face, and for a moment neither one moved. Then this man I had never seen before reached out and hugged my father.

Hello, Minh. He spoke in Vietnamese, his voice soft and gentle. It’s been a long time.

I’m trying to remember the last time I saw my father cry. He doesn’t do it often.

Yesterday, at the airport, he did …

Long Xuyen, 1976

by Tran Van Thanh

Only the river knows

How it feels to flow,

How it feels

To roll and boil and tumble over falls.

And go

Where no man tells you

Where to walk,

Where to stand,

How to feel.

Only the river knows these things …

And only the prisoner knows

The dream of freedom on his tongue.

Sweet foretaste of the summer wind,

That blows

Across the waving green of the young rice,

Across the unchained current of the distant stream,

Between the singing strands

Of taut-stretched barrier-wire,

To speak the future freely

In guarded whispers.

Only the prisoner knows these things …

But only the heart knows

The song that has no words

To limit harmony.

The song that scorns despair, and blends for melodies

The crash of rolling breakers dying,

And the silence of sap,

Rising in the trunks of ancient trees,

And the laughter of the children,

And the crying,

And the savour/fear of unexploded dreams.

Only the heart knows these things.

Only the heart sings …

Thanh Tran is my father’s friend. He’s also the only poet I’ve ever actually met. I’d heard about him, of course, but yesterday at the airport was the first time I was actually close enough to shake his hand.

He didn’t shake hands like a poet.

So, anyway, this morning, before anyone else got up, I dug a book of his poems out of my father’s bookshelf. Some were written in the seventies, while he was in the re-education camp where the two of them first met. The rest came later, after they released him.

I’m not sure when they were translated into English. This book isn’t that old, so I guess it was probably in the last couple of years.

I don’t suppose that many people around here would have read them anyway. No interest. Who reads poetry? Besides, most people I know don’t understand what it means to go through what Thanh Tran and my father went through.

What we all went through.

And I suppose that’s a good thing. No, I know it is.

You see, if they don’t understand, it’s because they live in a country that’s never been torn apart by a war that no one could possibly win.

And because such a lucky country existed, it also meant that there was a place to come to, when one side finally did win … what little was left to win.

When leaving everything you knew and running away suddenly hurt a whole lot less than staying.

Of course, at the time, I was too young to understand very much of what was going on. All I understood was that it was easy to get in big trouble, without knowing why …

PART ONE

DIAMONDS

AND TEARDROPS

1

SMOKE ON THE BREEZE

25 January 1977

Rach Gia, South Vietnam

TOAN’S STORY

Linh didn’t cry; she just lay there with her face frozen by cold anger, and refused to make a sound when my aunt strapped her bare backside with a leather belt. I don’t ever remember a time when I saw tears on her face. I think she had to be the toughest kid I ever knew.

Just about anyone would cry if they were strapped like that for no reason — if not for the pain, then for the frustration of it. But not Linh. She turned her head, and stared silently, straight into her mother’s eyes, daring her to do it again.

It’s not like Aunt Mai was a cruel mother, and Linh was used to being beaten. No one in my father’s family was like that. Aunt Mai was just scared. All the adults were, and although we kids didn’t know what we had done wrong, we had each received the same punishment in the little room at the top of my grandmother’s house.

Phuong, who was older than the rest of us, approached her, head bowed, and waited for permission to speak. It was given with a small grunt and a nod of the head.

It was only a game, Mother. We did not know …

You were told, my aunt replied. In these times, there are no second chances. We are your parents. Your family. Do we speak only to hear the sound of our own voices? Even the trees have ears, child, and those ears have mouths which tell our secrets.

But what did we say? We told no secrets. As she spoke, I remember, Phuong wiped a tear from her cheek. The pain was subsiding a little, I suppose. As the eldest, she had received the punishment first.

From the corner I watched my aunt. I was not yet seven years old, youngest of all the boys, and she scared me — even without a leather strap in her hand. For a moment a trace of pity touched her face, but I could see her force it away, and her expression set hard.

"Vựỏt biên, she said. Even from the top room, we could hear you calling it out to the street. Vựỏt biên, vựỏt biên, over and over."

But it was just a game. It means nothing … it is just nonsense words …

Which could cause your parents to be locked away. There are so many things that you do not understand.

Then explain to us. For once, Phuong showed a spark of resistance. But Aunt Mai rode right over it.

It is not your place to know. She looked at each of us in turn, holding Linh’s defiant gaze a fraction longer than anyone else’s. Perhaps when you next feel tempted to speak these ‘nonsense’ words to the world, this pain will remind you that there are things that you must take on trust. For the sake of your family’s safety.

There would be no further explanation. Aunt Mai turned to go.

You will stay here until you are called.

And then she left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

"Vựỏt biên!" Linh spoke the words defiantly to the solid wood of the door, and I half-expected Aunt Mai to return and punish us all again. But the door remained closed, and we heard her footsteps moving slowly down the stairs.

Just a stupid piece of kid’s play-nonsense. The words didn’t even mean anything, and no one even knew where the game had grown up from. Except that it sounded like something we had overheard our parents saying, when they thought we were too far away to hear.

It was years before I understood why our game had scared them enough to punish us the way they had, though even at six years old I knew enough of fear to accept without question the seriousness behind my aunt’s words.

One thing we learned early was fear …

*

17 July 1976

Rach Gia

TOAN

The boy sits quietly in the gutter, watching a line of ants filing to and fro as they work at emptying the flesh from the shell of a huge dead beetle. He is fascinated by their industry, by the way each individual knows its function, and serves it without hesitation.

He does not think of it in those terms, of course. Any more than he sees in their unquestioning industry a blueprint of what is being planned for his country, now that the war is over and the changes are upon them. He is five years old. Too young to be troubled by such thoughts, as his parents might be.

Too young to understand what his grandfather means when he says, as he sometimes does, Communism … at a distance it appears as a diamond, but up close it is a tear-drop …

Suddenly, the sunlight behind the boy’s head is blocked out as someone moves in to stand over him.

He turns to look up, and the ants are immediately forgotten. Two men stand looking down at him. Not quite strangers, for he has seen them both before from time to time, talking to people in the street and making notes in tiny notebooks.

Not quite strangers … But not from Rach Gia. They are Party officials, but at five years old, titles have no 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.

It’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.

This 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.

And he is home?

Yes …

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.

There 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 a little scared.

But I can’t be certain. Sometimes, we construct our memories from what we learn later.

My father tells me that he came into our bedroom that night and held his three sons for a long time. I should remember that. It isn’t something he did very often. Perhaps he was saying goodbye. Just in case.

As it was, it took them a few months to track him down. Most of the paperwork had been shredded or burnt in the capital, and the interrogations and the betrayals were a slow process.

He’d had the chance to prepare himself for the day they knocked on his door.

For the inevitable.

He was ready, and it was no one’s fault. Least of all mine.

But that’s not the way it seems to a five-year-old when he watches his father being marched out of the house under guard.

While the whole street looks on in silence.

As they pushed him into the jeep, I remember he looked at me. The family were all standing on the street, outside the door of my grandfather’s shop,