[Short Story] The Survivor of the Laughing Forest
Hu+o+ng Va(n)
By VO THI HAO
Under the canopy of the forest in the Truong Son mountain range,
four girls had taken shelter.
They were very young, but water from the dark green stream had
steadily thinned their hair until almost nothing was left. When
Thao, the fifth of the group manning an army warehouse, returned
that day, her shining, full length hair made them immensely
happy. They fussed over her and decided they would never let the
forest take away that hair. It was not just Thao’s, it belonged
to all of them.
But the forest was more powerful. Two months later, despite all
the fragrant herbs fetched by her mates to wash her hair, Thao’s
head resembled theirs.
The four girls cried bitter tears, hugging each other, but Thao
laughed it away: "What’s the use of crying? I’ve got a man to
love anyway. He loves me and is faithful to me, you know. My
hair is now like this, but even if I became bald, he would still
love me."
And the girls stopped crying, listening to Thao with wide open
eyes as she told them about her love affair with a student of
the Hanoi Faculty of Letters. That boy’s image, refracted
through innumerable layers of dust and smoke, emerged through
the illusory, shimmering pall of mist lying deep in Thao’s
memory as a faithful, chivalrous prince.
The four girls entertained tender affection and love for that
young man, but they did that not for themselves, but for Thao.
Love on other people’s behalf cannot be explained in peace time,
but those who have experienced the war, the loneliness, the
fighting, and travelled between hell and earth, they would
understand.
The women had been there for three morose rainy seasons and now
were in the middle of the fourth hot, dry season. The military
supply warehouse lay silent in the spooky arms of the jungle.
Occasionally, a unit of the liberation army stopped in to get
some supplies and then marched on. These soldiers brought along
their bawdy jokes, taking liberties in telling them to women who
had lived here for so long they were in danger of going wild.
Sometimes there would be one who would silently contemplate the
girls as though they were queens, raising a glimmer of hope in
their hearts, then he disappeared, leaving behind even more
profound loneliness.
The battle front was drawing nearer to the warehouse. The forest
carpeted the ground with leaves, oblivious of the growing
anxiety of the five girls. The carpet of red-coloured, dead
leaves reflected the bright sky, colouring their nights red as
well.
Three soldiers arrived at noon to get some supplies. The echo of
wild laughter a short distance from the warehouse stopped them.
Having waited for a moment, they walked on, suddenly recalling
an incredible story about the feast of the witches in the
jungle.
As they approached the warehouse, there was a rustling and
plumping sound as if a white gibbon had just jumped from the
watch tower and hidden itself in the bush. The soldiers
dispersed, one of them hiding himself in the bush to track down
the gibbon. As he looked this way and that, a couple of hands
suddenly grabbled his neck from behind, and the back of his head
echoed with that wild laughter. He tried to free himself while
turning his head back, and was greatly surprised to see that the
gibbon with its arms tightly wound around him was a girl,
completely naked, her hair loose, her face worn out. The soldier
mumbled, unable to speak out.
"Hien! Hien!" A tall soldier ran towards him. The sight of his
friend, helpless in the arms of a naked girl scared him, but he
could not help laughing. He had been told about the disease
girls could get in these conditions. He stepped forward,
signalling his friend not to try to disentangle from the girl’s
hands, but be gentle and console her. He made reassuring motions
to show his friend that the girl would come to herself in a
moment. Then he jumped three steps to the watch tower.
On the rugged floor, three other girls were both laughing and
crying, their hands tearing at their hair and clothes. Another
younger girl was running to and fro, clutching her head in
despair. She had not yet caught the disease, but this way,
sooner or later she would not be able to escape the same fate.
Battle-hardened though he was. Hien trembled, facing the naked
girls so full of life. Knowledge that had overslept inside him
struggled to wake up. For a moment, Hien wanted to let it go and
forget all. It took a little bit longer before he could compose
himself. He remembered vaguely being told about the way to treat
this condition when he was still a little boy.
Hien locked the safety pin of his gun and rushed forward. He
knocked hard at the door of the tower, craning his neck,
shouting: "Eh, you VCs (Viet Cong, the name given to Vietnamese
communists by US G.I.s) Where is the warehouse? Tell us
immediately or we’ll blow your brains out!"
It seemed like a miracle. The laughing girls suddenly became
dead silent and leaped for their guns, swivelling and turning
them on Hien. Fortunately his friend jumped out from a nearby
bush, shouting: "Stop! Our comrades-in-arms!"
The girls recognised the star badge on the soldier’s hat and his
uniform. They slowly dropped their guns, and suddenly saw each
other without a shred of clothing in front of three strange men.
They fled and hid themselves in the forest, crying silently.
Even Thao, the only one who had not contracted the laughing
disease, ran away. She felt great pity for her friends. It was
only when night fell that the five girls dared to walk back to
the tower, carefully looking around.
The three soldiers had gone, leaving a note hastily torn from a
small notebook: "Dear comrades! We will get the supplies from
other stations and send a doctor. Our dear comrades-in-arms!
This is war. Please, forget and forgive! Farewell."
A few days later, a nurse came with some white pills. They had
recovered even without the medicine, but became more quiet, as
if they had aged another 20 years.
The forest had since taken the name "Laughing Forest." The
warehouse too was no longer called by its usual code name. The
soldiers often said: "Today I’m going to the Laughing Forest for
supplies."
A few months later, the Laughing Forest warehouse was ordered to
be moved. The sounds of the battle got closer and closer. No
sooner than the warehouse was moved the enemy sent one company
to occupy the tower. At that time Thao had a high, delirious
fever, the first attack of malaria for the newcomer to the
forest. Her friends hid her in the forest and returned to the
warehouse to get their guns.
The legendary story of the battlefield did not happen here. The
four girls had no chance against the enemy, so they reserved
their last bullets for themselves rather than be captured. Their
names should have been front-paged in bold type as heroines, but
there was nothing strange in their anonymity either. They lay in
silence in plain graves built by the small weak hands of Thao
after she had recovered consciousness at the foot of a tree,
after the enemy troops had withdrawn.
Thao’s head seemed to explode. She could not let out her cries.
The night before the battle, the five girls had spoken of their
hunch that something extraordinary was about to happen. The
night was sultry and muggy. They had talked aimlessly for some
time and then asked Thao to tell them about her boy-friend. And
it was the same as usual. Thao mixed truth and legend in drawing
up her prince. Three of the four girls had listened attentively,
drinking in every word, eyes bright.
Tham, the head of the team, before getting into the mosquito
net, had ruffled Thao’s hair, saying: "Listen, Thao! I do not
know if you love him head over heels, but for no reason, I am
suddenly very afraid for you. You’re the only person in our team
enjoying some happiness. So in the future, when you return home,
whatever the situation, do not let the man show his pity towards
you, okay?"
Thao had then felt a little resentful towards Tham. Now, Tham
and her other three comrades-in-arms lay dead in different
positions. A bayonet had been plunged through Tham’chest. Every
time they had bathed together in the stream, Thao had looked
stealthily at Tham’s breasts, thinking: "Only the breasts of
Venus could be as beautiful." She had wished she could have such
breasts.
Thao rolled the bodies down into a hole, covered them with a
thick layer of dead leaves and filled each grave up with earth.
Then she planted four small bang lang trees on the graves and
poured the last drops from her canteen to water them. The soil
was so dry that it made a crackling sound, belching smoke that
wound itself around her legs.
Later, when she was convalescing at a military sanatorium, Thao
was told that Hien - the sodier who had saved the girls from
their laughing disease - had died in battle.
The senior command of his unit had cited his brave death as a
bright example, and while the necessary papers were being
prepared to be sent to the North to posthumously award him the
title of Hero, the political commissar read these lines from his
crumpled diary book discovered at the bottom of his rucksack:
"I’ll never forget what had happened in the Laughing Forest. It
would have been much more pleasant to see killing than that
scene! Oh, God! Nine years of war, and finally I have witnessed
its distorted, wild laughter. That the war has dragged these
women into action is really terrible. I would rather die two
times for them so that they would never have landed in that
situation. I shiver when I think that my girl-friend, my sister,
could be laughing those hoarse laughs in the jungle."
These lines led to the conclusion that Hien was ideologically
unstable and his mind was filled with petty bourgeois ideas (he
used to be a student). His heroic action must have been
coincidental and sudden. "It’s quite fortunate that he has not
been criticised" was the verdict of the political commissar.
Two years later, Thao - the sole survivor of the Laughing forest
- began her first year in the department of literature. Her eyes
were like those of a person in a long dream. Malaria had left
her complexion pale. Her face was lively only when she smiled,
and these smiles was very rare. She usually hunched her bony
shoulders, hid herself in the corner of her bed and wrote in her
diary. In conversations she was usually absent-minded.
Thao had two recurring dreams. One was the dream of her
childhood - she was so lucky she found a three-lobed hairpin, or
better still, a duck egg on the path. In the other, she could
see her hair shedding fully on to Tham’s chest which was
completely crushed by stabs, and from this tousled mass of hair
she could pick two drops of transparent tears, hard as crystal.
She always woke up crying out loud, clasping the chilly
bed-railing tightly.
In the night, Thao looked at the ten girls sleeping in the
dormitory. They were also dreaming, but with untroubled smiling
lips and rosy faces. They looked so lovely. Their dreams were a
far cry from the dreams of her comrades-in-arms. Thao heaved a
deep sigh, feeling very stupid, finding it difficult to deep
abreast of the times.
Thanh - Thao’s prince and beloved of all the five girls of the
Laughing Forest - was now a final year student in the same
school. They took a walk every Saturday night on a road lined
with pine-trees and flooded with moonlight. Thanh did keep his
oath of love that year. He had taken good, solicitous care of
Thao. But they did not talk much about love. They usually
counted their steps in silence, so even the chirping sounds of
the night birds flapping their small wings in fear back to their
nests were loud and clear.
Every Saturday, Thanh waited for Thao to take a walk and
returned home at nine o’clock. But each time they met, they both
felt shy as if they were guilty about each other, as if they did
not have anything to talk about.
Every Saturday, Thao was both expectant and afraid. She could no
longer see the gleaming, suddenly shining glints that appeared
when Thanh met her in the old days.
Thao usually made a wry face each time she remembered the first
day when they met again after some years of separation. When
Thao got off the train with the knapsack on her shoulders, Thanh
was so surprised when he saw her that he could not say a word.
His eyes ran quickly over her thin body in a strange uniform,
over her pale lips, sparsely thin hair, and then he cried: "Oh,
dear!"
Then Thao had felt a sudden wave of biting cold flow over her
chest. Her eyes ware full of tears of annoyance and humiliation.
Thanh was startled, and seemed to be overly cordial, as though
he wanted to atone for his sins. This hurt Thao even more.
She looked deep into Thanh's eyes: "You didn't think that I
could have become like this, did you?"
"I don't care about form. All I need is you back home".
"Not true. I know myself. Today you sincerely welcome me home,
but tomorrow you'll find that loving such a person as me is
quite a great sacrifice."
"Don't say such a thing. I've been waiting for you all these years!"
"That's right, but now I want to free you from your faithfulness."
"Don't speak with such a bitter tongue, my little girl! It's
still too early for us to kick up a row. Are these the first
words you want to speak to me after these long years of waiting?"
Thanh smiled, taking Thao's hands. Her heart grew softer. "It is
possible I have become hardened by the years in the battlefield"
she thought.
Half a year had passed in the twinkling of the eye with the
Saturday night trysts continuing like a machine.
One day, Thao had to meet Thanh in between his classes for
something or other. While talking with Thao in the corridor,
Thanh suddenly stopped, his face turning pale and then rosy.
Surprised, Thao turned back and found a young girl with juicy
lips and fair skin coming towards them. She looked at Thanh
through Thao's shoulders with passionate, admiring eyes, as
unaffected as little girl. She was studying in the same class as
Thanh.
As soon as she had gone into the class, Thanh continued talking.
But his beautiful hands on the rail were trembling. Angry with
his weakness, he punched lightly at the rail. His eyes looked
stealthily at Thao as if he wanted to say sorry. Thao suddenly
understood that. She quickly finished the conversation and went
away.
Thao felt pity for herself and for Thanh. It was clear that
those two were having a secret love affair. They were a fair
couple, and were close to each other, so how could they not love
each other? Thao was an obstacle. Thanh stayed with her because
of loyalty rather than love. She had time and again told him to
love other girls, but he did not have the heart to do that.
If they married each other, life would become dull very soon.
Thao suddenly remembered Tham's words on the night before she
was killed.
After the term holiday, Thao returned from her home village. She
told Thanh that she wanted to talk seriously with him. She said
they were not seeing eye to eye with each other, that she had
another boyfriend, so she hope he doesn't think about her
anymore. Thanh listened to Thao with indifference. He knew she
was lying.
Then Thao began to get the letters.
Every Saturday afternoon, Thao received a thick envelope with a
carefully written line outside: "To my dear Mac Thi Thao."
Thanh gradually came to believe it was true. He was upset with
her for being unfaithful, but relieved at the same time. A month
later, he proposed to his classmate and two months later, they
were married during the summer vacation before their graduation.
The first night of Thanh's marriage, Thao burned the kerosene
lamp on her small bed. She did not switch on the electric light
because she was afraid that her room mates would not be able to
sleep. When Thao started receiving the letters, her friends had
gradually shunned her. They regarded Thao a traitor.
Thao meticulously counted the letters. Sixteen letters all told.
They had not been opened yet. Four months had passed.
During these four months she had been criticised and belittled
by the department for her unfaithfulness. But who had she
betrayed? How could she have the heart to betray such a handsome
and faithful boy?
She thought about Thanh. Thanh's heart should now be peaceful
and full of happiness, making passionate love to his bride. She
felt an irresistible longing for that day in the Laughing
Forest. One of the brightest sparks had inspired her to get out
of the wild life in the jungle. That day!
Thao found the lamp gradually dancing and dying before her eyes
with a ripening red tomato in the form of a heart. She held out
her hands to get it, and it seemed that the tomato broke, and
thin reddish blood oozed out and ran along her arms down to her
chest. She did not know why she felt as if someone was tickling
her armpit, so she burst out in laughter.
Unconscious of what she was doing, Thao waved her hands and the
sixteen letters scattered all over the bed.
Still sleeping, the girl lying next to Thao suddenly dreamt
about a laughing ghost. She woke up suddenly, tearing her hair.
She still heard the laughing and saw the dancing lamp on the
wall. She was greatly frightened, springing up and finding that
Thao was laughing and crying. The others woke up quickly. They
thought Thao was going mad.
"Ecstasy I think", a girl said.
The girls took Thao to the school's emergency medical station.
Thao did not want to go. She resisted them, crying: "No, I am
not mad." The girls were even more frightened.
Some tried to pin down Thao's legs, other her arms, and then
some boys next door lent a helping hand. They carried her to the
medical station where she was forced to take some medicine. The
whole hostel was in great commotion until Thao dozed off.
The girls returned to her room, intending to take some small
articles for Thao to the medical station.
They found the envelopes littered on the bed. One letter was
opened. It had only a few lines: "From now on I will write to
myself every Thursday night and cycle in the morning to the post
office in Nga Tu So. If I mail it then, I can receive it on
Saturday afternoon. I am such a devious girl! But without doing
this, Thanh will not leave me. Oh, Tham! I am the last person
left from the Laughing Forest, but there is no happiness left
inside me! Tham and my comrades in arms! Do rest in peace in the
Laughing Forest! I will not spoil your spirit and be shameful. I
will also make Thanh forever our generous prince."
The girls in the Literature Department were very sensitive, and
realised what had happened. They cried, remembering the past few
months when they had avoided and badly humiliated Thao. It was
still early when they ran up the attic where the newly wed Thanh
was living.
An annoyed Thanh opened the door. The girls did not say
anything, but led him by the hand to the bed where the sixteen
letters were littered. Thanh read the open letter and opened the
others. They were mostly blank papers.
Shocked, Thanh quickly ran down to the medical station, but Thao
had already left. The bed still had the hollow of the small body
forced to swallow white sedative tablets because everybody
believed that she had gone mad.
Thanh walked down the corridor to the road. Cold winds blew in
gusts. The yellow leaves of bang lang trees were falling,
flitting like butterflies in storm. He walked, seeing the girl
who had been deprived of everything, who night after night sat
writing letters to herself before the red kerosene lamp. He
suddenly remembered a legendary story about birds called yen
huyet (blood salangane) which let their blood drop from their
beaks while weaving pink nests. When they were exhausted, the
tiny birds flew skywards, then broke their chests against sharp
cliffs.
Thanh's feet took him to the familiar boat landing. There, many
times, he had bought Thao deep red plums full of sour and bitter
juice with his meagre scholarship. Yet Thao ate them with
apparent relish in order to appease him trying not to make
faces. He woke up the seller who was dozing off with her face in
her palms. "Did you see the girl who usually wears an old
soldier uniform going by here?"
The startled plum seller pinched her nose to wake up. "No, but
ah, yes. The girl who used to pass by here to buy plums with
you, right? She took the train home already!"
Thanh also took the train. He looked for Thao in her home
village, and all other places he could think of in vain. He
returned to live with his new wife and later that year got a job
in Hanoi. Life went on as usual. But in his mind, the two wings
of the blood salangane still flapped.
Five years later, an alumni festival was organised at the Hanoi
University. Old students from all over the country came back to
school. During the party of the alumni of the Literature
Department, Thanh chose to sit in a corner beside a window,
ignoring the cold.
Who could tell, there could be a miracle, and his Thao would
suddenly appear. If there was a miracle, in what form would she
appear before his eyes? With a tattered, worn out body sleep
walker's eyes and branch of willow in her hands? Or would she be
in a nun's drab brown attire, her hand clasped before her chest,
chanting "Amitabha!"? Or was she a sumptuous lady with her
wrists be decked with bracelets and rings? Or was she a talented
reporter just flown in from Saigon?
The party was in great form. Gusts of cold wind blew to and fro.
Thanh looked intently at the school's gate. "The Laughing
Forest! You've had your fill of blood and tears, still you have
robbed me of that tiny salangane.
Translated by MANH CHUONG
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
