The Sympathizer

And we never did.

The next day we buried Linh and Duc. Their cold bodies had lain in a naval morgue overnight, cause of death now official: a single slug, type unknown. The bullet would forever spin in Bon’s mind on a perpetual axis, taunting and haunting him with the even chance of coming from friend or foe. He wore a white scarf of mourning around his head, ripped from his bedsheet. After we had lowered Duc’s small coffin on top of his mother’s, both to share the one home for eternity, Bon threw himself into their open grave. Why? he howled, cheek against the wooden crate. Why them? Why not me? Why, God? Weeping myself, I climbed in the grave to calm him down. After I helped him out, we heaped the earth onto the coffins while the General, the Madame, and the exhausted priest watched silently. They were innocents, these two, especially my godson, who was probably the closest I would get to having a real son. With every strike of the iron shovel against the small mound of loamy earth, waiting to be poured back into the cavity from which it had been extracted, I tried believing that those two bodies were not truly dead but simply rags, shed by emigrants journeying to a land beyond human cartography where angels dwelled. Thus my sacerdotal father believed; but thus I could not.

Over the next few days, we wept and we waited. Sometimes, for variety, we waited and we wept. Just when the self-flagellation was beginning to wear me down, we were picked up and shuttled on to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, this time via an airliner where I sat in a real seat with a real window. Awaiting us was another refugee camp, its higher grade of amenities evidence that we were already profiting from the upward mobility of the American Dream. Whereas on Guam most of the refugees had lived under tents hastily erected by the marines, in Camp Pendleton we all had barracks, a boot camp to gird us for the rigors of learning Americana. It was here, during the summer of ’75, that I wrote the first of my letters to Man’s aunt in Paris. Of course, as I composed my letters, I was writing to Man. If I started a letter with a few tropes we had agreed on—the weather, my health, the aunt’s health, French politics—then he would know that written in between the lines was another message in invisible ink. If such a trope was absent, then what he saw was all there was to see. But that first year in America, there was not much need for steganography, the exiled soldiers hardly in any condition to foment a counterstrike. This was useful intelligence, but not one needing secrecy.