Only the Heart Read Online Free

car — every one with a uniformed driver.
    It was a city in a country at war, tuned to the needs of the soldier.
    People lived and breathed and did their shopping and went about their occupations as they had probably always done, but woven into everything was the war, and the business of war.
    I remember, I was fascinated by the strange faces of the American soldiers. Especially the black ones …
    *
    14 July 1974
Saigon, South Vietnam
    LINH
    Sweating inside his uniform, the young GI sneaks a look at the clock on the building across the street.
    Two more hours.
    The passing crowd is a blur, and he blinks the sweat away from his eyes. If he could stand apart and look at himself, he would see the sheen on his dark skin, and the beads of perspiration marking the lines of his cheekbones and the ridges beneath his eyes.
    But Corporal Travis Sloan cannot stand apart. He cannot stand anywhere but exactly where he has been ordered to stand. For two more hours. Guarding one of the buildings inside which his superiors sit planning how to make the best of a lost war.
    Vaguely he hears music from one of the bars down the street. Jim Morrison and the Doors.
    Come on Baby, light my fire …
    He smiles ironically and continues to sweat.
    And he notices, through the jostling crowd, a young Vietnamese girl, maybe five or six, standing quietly beside her mother, who carries on an animated conversation with another woman. The girl is staring straight at him. No embarrassment, no fear. Studying him. He feels like some strange specimen under a microscope. She stands, she stares, her almond eyes unblinking.
    He has seen it before. The fascination of children with his size and the colour of his skin. But always, when he stares back, they look away, or hide behind the nearest adult.
    Not this one. She holds his gaze, her face expressionless, taking in everything. For a few seconds he stares back, feeling the power of her self-possession like a physical force. Then he smiles, and winks at her across the crowded street.
    She winks back, then pokes out her tongue. Just as a convoy of trucks moves past, blocking her from view.
    Try to set the night on fire …
    When the view is clear again, she is gone. He looks both ways along the street, but She has disappeared.
    And he will never see her again.
    Three weeks later, near a bombed-out village whose name he will never be told, he will lose his left leg below the knee to the shattering pain of a sniper’s bullet. He will almost die from shock and infection, and it will earn him a medal and a free trip back Stateside.
    But through days of pain, in the half-world between agony and the morphine dream, with death beckoning, and the long tunnel stretching before him, through some trick of the mind, the memory of that tiny face, those almond eyes and that short encounter will stay with him, holding him back. Delaying the journey long enough for the doctors to claim their victory.
    And years later, when his own child is born, though her skin will be dark like her father’s, she will have the same eyes. Almond eyes. Eyes like her mother’s.
    Like those of a tiny girl he glimpsed once across a crowded street, in a doomed city, near the end of a useless, brutal war …
    *
    LINH’S STORY
    In Saigon we got to sleep upstairs. It was a kind of attic room, and they rolled out thin straw mats for us kids to lie on. Two to a mat — top and tail.
    But we had to wait of course. The men used the room for gambling — cards mainly; blackjack and Chinese poker. Sometimes it went on late into the night, and we had to hang around downstairs until they were finished and we could go up to bed.
    There were compensations. Usually the winner would celebrate by sending Phuong or one of my cousins out to one of the street-vendors to buy bánh ú or some other treat for supper. There was usually change which he would give to the messenger. If it was Phuong, she would often share it with me.
    I