The Time in Between (29 page)

The following day, after breakfast, they took a taxi up to the beach a few miles outside town. Ada swam far out toward the waves that broke against the reef. Vu stood in jeans and shirt at the edge of the water and waited for her. When she returned, walking wet and tired out of the ocean, he said that the sea was dangerous.

They lay in the sand, side by side, and they shared a bottle of water and ate papaya that Vu cut with a knife he had borrowed. Vu fed Ada small pieces and the knife seemed an extension of his hand. The seeds from the papaya were black and they lay in the sand like beautiful and strange pearls.

When they got back to the hotel, they went up to her room and sat for the last time on the balcony and Ada said that, soon, she had to leave. There were things to be done in Danang and then she would be gone forever. “I know,” she said, “I am being sentimental. At least that is what you think. But, that is me, that is how I am.” She paused and then said she had realized the other day that he knew nothing about her. Not really. He did not know that she was a good cook, and that she could shoot a gun with accuracy, or that she had raised her brother and sister, or that her father’s darkness had come to settle in some small way on her own heart. She stopped talking.

After a while, Vu said that he didn’t need to know the facts of her childhood or the details of her life. The evidence of the goodness of Ada Boatman was standing before him. “I am not blind,” he said. “I can see. And so, to talk too much about Ada would reduce Ada. This is what I think.” He smiled. “And it is different than what you think.”

She shook her head. She said that life had been real once, and it would be real again. This in between time, the voyage out and back, all of that was a dream. It was like when she had been sick with fever, lying on her bed in the bright room of the hotel, and the world had passed by in clear quick images that, when pieced together, had appeared to mean something but she had not been able to decipher the meaning. She said that there would come a day, back in Canada, when she would be married with children and she would think back to this time. “Perhaps then I will understand.”

Vu lit a cigarette. He did not speak.

They drank warm beer and watched the sun set. It went down orange and then red. Beyond the palm trees in the courtyard, down the lane, Ada saw a woman riding a bicycle, her back straight, one arm steady at her side. Vu said that it was important to live without hate and bitterness and fear. “This is possible,” he said. In the dusk, a butterfly passed.

Later, he slept on her bed and at some point she went down to the front desk and negotiated the price of a driver and car to take her back to Danang. “As soon as possible,” she said.

The desk clerk called up half an hour later to say that the car was ready.

“So soon?” she asked, and then she said that she would be down right away.

She did not wake Vu. She stood in the doorway looking back at him and then she picked up her pack and walked down the wide staircase to the lobby where she collected her passport and paid her bill. It had begun to rain, a light warm shower that raised a smell of barely sprinkled dust. She got in the backseat of the car. As they pulled out onto the street she did not look up toward the thirdfloor balcony of the room where Vu still slept. The rain fell harder and by the time they reached the main road it was falling so heavily all she could see from her window were the vague shapes of houses and cyclists and a boy herding goats and once, in the doorway of a welder’s shop, an arc of light offered a father cradling a baby.

THE NEXT MORNING IN DANANG, THE BOY FOUND HER SITTING IN a café. She was drinking coffee and eating dry bread, looking out at the rain as it fell.

“Miss Ada,” he said.

She looked at him and then looked away.

“You don’t want me here?” he asked. He sat, cleared a place on the table, and put his elbows down.

She shook her head, said it was fine.

“I have the perfect tour for you,” Yen said. “We’ll go up to Hoi An and walk through the museum and then take a boat cruise on the river. You will love it.”

She said that she didn’t have time. She was going home the following morning.

Yen was surprised. He said that her visa could be extended, she just had to ask the right people.

“And I guess you know the right people?” she teased.

He was hurt. “Of course,” he said.

“I have Hoang Vu’s bike. He doesn’t want it back,” she said. “Would you like it?”

“Is this payment for something?” he asked. He took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. His hands brushed at his shirt and over his head. He said that he could not take payment from her because he had not done anything for her. She had not allowed him.

She was all of a sudden tired. She said that he could do what he wanted. She wasn’t going to beg him to take the bike.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take it.” He leaned forward as if to inspect her face and said, “Your heart is broken.”

She laughed.

“See. I am right. The artist has broken your heart.”

She shook her head. She told him that her personal life was none of his business and that if he persisted in talking about it, he should leave. “Perhaps you should leave anyway,” she said. She made a shooing gesture with her hand.

He said, “I would have loved you better than that artist.”

She laughed again. Said, “You’re fourteen, Yen. What are you talking about?”

“Sixteen,” he said. He looked mournful. “You don’t take me seriously.”

“Of course I don’t. Not when you talk nonsense.”

He said that he too could draw. In fact, if she liked, he would do her portrait. It was a simple thing that required only a blank piece of paper and some ink. He had learned this from his father. “He is gifted. I have watched him. I have watched many men. And some are better at seduction.”

“Oh, Yen. Poor boy. You should be in school.”

“Do not pity me,” Yen said. He said that he might be only sixteen, or fourteen, but he was able to recognize pity.

Ada said that she did not mean to show pity and she was sorry if she had. She picked up her bag and said she had to go and she didn’t know if she would see him again.

“I’ll be available,” Yen said. He stood and took Ada’s hand and shook it. “Good-bye, Miss Ada.”

That evening she walked down to a restaurant on the harbor front for a beer. Two old men sat at a corner table playing a game that looked like checkers. She watched them and heard the click of the pieces and an occasional exclamation. She ordered another beer. Earlier she had gone to Thanh’s house and said good-bye. He had given her a book of Russian poetry in English translation. Had apologized for the binding but claimed that the words inside would make up for it. He asked her in for a cup of tea, stepping sideways and gesturing at the house, but she said that she was preparing to leave. She had to pack and see to things.

He said that he felt he had failed her.

“No, no,” she cried. “You haven’t.”

He’d taken off his glasses and cleaned them briskly, shaking his head. He said he hated farewells.

After her second beer, she walked back to her hotel and slowly climbed the stairs to her room. Her door was open and she pushed at it and looked inside. The light was on. Yen was standing by the bed. He was holding something and talking. She looked around to see if anyone else was there but he was alone. He was holding her underwear and whispering to himself.

“What are you doing?” she said.

He turned and put the underwear onto the bed. “Hello, Ada,” he said as he stepped away from the bed.

She repeated her question and moved toward him. Then she thought again, and moved back, wondering if he was dangerous. She looked around for an object to hold, something to protect herself. There was nothing.

“Don’t worry,” Yen said. “I am harmless. I came here to talk to you about your bicycle but you were gone and the door was open and so I stepped in and then you came home.” He smiled and bowed his head and then looked right at her.

“Get out,” she said.

He held up his hands and moved sideways. “You don’t understand, Miss Ada. You don’t understand my sadness.”

Ada was breathless. After, she would think how she had leaped at Yen and she would wonder why. But this is what she did. She took two long steps, and reaching him, she struck his head with an open hand. He ducked and because he ducked and seemed so helpless, she struck him again. This time with her fist and she felt the softness at the side of his face. “Go,” she cried. “Go. Go.” She beat at him with both hands until he ran from the room. She heard his footsteps and the sound of her own breathing, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed.

Later, after she had checked her bags and clothes and found nothing missing, after she had showered and changed into jeans and a shirt because she was not ready for sleep, she went downstairs to the lobby, past the night clerk, and out into the street. She took the bicycle and walked it down the sloping road toward the ferry. There was little traffic. At one point she called Yen’s name and then realized how foolish this was. She stopped at the ferry landing and looked out past the dark gates to the boats. No one was there. Again, she called Yen’s name.

For an hour she walked the streets. Once, she passed three boys and she said Yen’s name but they did not look at her and she saw that Yen was not one of them. She went to the Chess Hotel and knocked on the service door. No one came, and so she left the bicycle and pushed the door open and entered. There was a dim light on at the end of the hallway. She called Yen’s name. He was not there. She called for Yen’s uncle Minh and when he did not come she turned and went back outside and stood in the darkness. She recalled Yen saying that his sister worked the street near the Empire Hotel. She walked there, still wheeling the bicycle. There were two women standing on the sidewalk, one wore yellow, the other black. Ada approached and said her name. She said that she knew a boy called Yen and the boy was her friend. Did they know the boy? The women looked at Ada. They talked together and then one repeated Yen’s name.

“Yes,” Ada said. “Are you his sister?”

The woman laughed. “Sister?” She shook her head. “No sister.”

“He has no sister?”

She shook her head. “No sister.”

Ada said that they didn’t understand. Yen was a small boy, about fourteen, and she wanted to give him the bicycle. She moved it toward the woman in black, who stepped back and said, “No.”

She crisscrossed the streets in the rain calling his name. After a while, she stopped calling out and at some point she found herself back down by the ferry landing. She leaned the bicycle up against the blue shuttered door of the ticket booth. Then she stood, looking out at the boats anchored throughout the harbor. The first time she had come here it had been raining as well. Back then she had carried an umbrella and the wind had been warm. It had been early evening, just after dusk, and the lights of the approaching ferry had appeared as many small beacons to carry a traveler home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While living in Vietnam, I encountered the generosity and kindness of complete strangers, strangers who then became genuine friends. Thank you to Tran Cau and Hoang Dang, who, through their conversations and late night company, guided me deeper into the heart of their country. Thank you as well to Vinh Quyen, Nguyen Van Muoi, and Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien. And thank you to Kathryn Munnell, who turned a small light onto the life of the historian Nguyen Khac Vien, and who opened her home to my family.

Bao Ninh’s novel
The Sorrow of War
had a significant influence on the writing of my own novel, as did, to a smaller measure,
The
General Retires
by Nguyen Huy Thiep.

Thanks to Denise Bukowski, who pushed me to write this story.

Finally, a special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Stephanie Higgs, and Daniel Menaker.

THE TIME IN BETWEEN

David Bergen

A Reader’s Guide

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

FOR DISCUSSION

David Bergen’s writing style is distinctive—so plain as to seem “styleless,” yet capable of great eloquence. Choose some sentences or paragraphs that strike you as particularly successful, and analyze what gives them their power.

On the surface, this could be described as a sad book. Yet the main characters—Charles, Ada, and Jon—make emotional or spiritual journeys during the course of the novel, in addition to geographical ones. Describe the inner journeys of these characters. In what ways are they ultimately redemptive?

The Bible talks about the sins of the father being visited on his children. Jon tells his sister Ada, “His [Charles’s] love for you is like a weight that you have to carry” [p. 60]. In what ways does Charles’s “sin,” as well as his love, weigh on his children? Describe the different ways Ada, Jon, and their sister, Del, deal with their father and his love.