Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I was reading a novel called The Sorrow of War, by a Vietnamese, Bao Ninh, who'd been a soldier. The book's setting was a district called the Jungle of the Screaming Souls, near Kontum, a bit northeast of where Phuong was headed. The novel was a love story, but it was also about battle, the ten survivors (Bao Ninh had been one himself) of a massacred brigade of five hundred, not long before the fall of Saigon in 1974. In other words, a battle that had taken place soon after I had last been here.

Phuong woke up and yawned and saw me reading. She said she didn't know the book. She added, as though as a reason, that she did not feel well as a result of her pregnancy, which was also why she was going home.

"My family will take care of me."

"What sort of work do you do in Saigon?"

"I am an inspector in a factory," she said. "We make leather shoes for women."

I drew a picture of a fancy stiletto-heeled shoe on a page in my notebook. She looked at it and smiled. She said, "Yes!" They were exported to Europe and the United States.

With the sort of bluntness that characterizes a traveler in such a country—I would never have hazarded these questions of an American—I asked her how much money she made and the details of her work. She said that she and her fellow workers earned $400 a month. Could that be true? Her husband earned $700 a month. These figures were much higher than the salaries of comparable workers I'd met in Romania and Turkey.

After dark, at Cam Ranh—where I'd also been before, a beleaguered place then—two middle-aged men entered the compartment and took the upper berths. They were laborers; both carried hard hats. They stayed in their berths until dinner was served by the conductor in the blue uniform: each of us got a plastic tray, a box of rice, and containers of pickled vegetables.

"You drink?" one of the men said. He offered me his bottle of banana wine. It was brownish, the color of weak tea. I sniffed it and out of politeness had a small swig that tasted like formaldehyde.

Nha Trang, no less beleaguered in my memory, was the next stop.

"This is a tourist city," Phuong said.

The rain was heavy here, the typhoon whirling overhead, rain slapping the sides of nearby sheds. Phuong ran into the rain and hurried back to the compartment with two fat ears of steamed corn, one of which she held upright on her lap in her pale hand. She smiled and prepared it for me, peeling its shucks with delicate fingers.

"What do you call this?"

"Popcorn," she said.

I read more of The Sorrow of War, then dozed, waking when the train arrived at Qui Nhon around midnight, and Phuong shook my hand and got off. A big wheezy man entered the compartment and immediately took her berth. He sat drinking beer and staring at me with muddied eyes. I worried about losing my briefcase, so I tucked it under my pillow and slept until dawn.

The choppy sea, whipped by the storm, was only forty feet from the railway line, which skirted the shore; the remnants of the typhoon were soaking the whole coast. I had woken at Danang, where I'd also been before, another besieged city then, where a defiant railway man had taken me on an engine in the opposite direction to prove a point. In a smiling and slightly crazy way he'd said that there were possibly mines on the tracks, but even so, "the Vietcong can't stop us." I had found that very scary, unerasable in my mind because of my fear; and now the opposite, a soporific almost, as we rolled past the palm groves, and instead of gun emplacements on the mutilated shore there were beach resorts.

Dripping banana trees, gray sodden dunes, slender sampans drawn up above the tide line, the windows of the compartment streaming with rain. The beer drinker had vanished at Danang. The conductor brought the remaining three of us bowls of noodles. I broke out the tangerines I'd bought at Saigon Station and shared them with the two men—the construction workers—who were now sitting opposite me.

Though they spoke basic English, we didn't say much at first. Oanh, the smaller, more wiry of the two, finished his noodles and drank his banana wine by the capful. His friend, Thanh, then surprised and slightly alarmed me by kneeling and locking the compartment door.

"Why are you locking it?" I asked.

Thanh smiled, touching one finger to his cheek in an I-know-what-I'm-doing gesture, and pulled a plastic bag from his pants pocket. He sat and opened it, and I caught a whiff of the nutty aroma of dampened marijuana.

Thanh rolled a piece of newspaper, forming a stiff narrow tube about eight inches long. He poked it full of ganja, creating a classic doobie, then fired it up, sucked on it a little, inhaled, and wheezed with bubbling lungs, his eyes crossing. Then Oanh took a hit, and gurgled happily. And then it was my turn—a blazing jay at seven in the morning.

When we had finished this dawn ritual, Thanh scattered the evidence out the window and unlocked the door.

"What is that stuff?" I asked, slurring my speech.