“How do you say ‘Thank you’?”

“ Cam on.”

“Come on?”

“Xin ba noi lai.” Please say it again.

“ ‘Com on’?”

“Better.” Linh laughed.

“How do you say ‘Can she speak English?’ ”

“Chi ay biet noi tieng Anh khong?”

The words came in a flood, impossible to separate them, guttural stops and starts that she felt she would never understand. “Sorry I asked.”

“We’ll go slowly. Use the words every day. Listen to stories. That’s how I learned English.”

Helen poured more tea from a dented aluminum pot. “I know it’s a letdown to go from working with Darrow to working with a beginner.”

“What is ‘letdown’?”

“A demotion. Step down.”

Linh took his cup. Again, this stating of what should remain unspoken, and yet he flushed in embarrassment that she guessed his feelings. “When the words form on your tongue naturally, you enter the heart of the country, I think.”

“But you’ve never been to America.”

“Once upon a time. My favorite was Chicago.”

But just as she started to question him, a group of children rushed in and swarmed them with questions.

After taking her back to the hotel that day, he walked along the river. How could he have made such an admission? Shameful. Yet he had been alone so long, had not talked from his soul to another person, that at the first sign of interest, his mouth flooded with words. No one should know about his years abroad.

His father had gotten caught up in politics at the university. He chafed under the unfair French restrictions for Vietnamese to advance to any real power. Studying the life of Uncle Ho, he was convinced of the importance of seeing the world. He spent a great deal of money and used many promises to get Linh a berth on a freighter going to the Middle East, and then on to Europe. Linh went one better in going on to America. Although those had been the happiest years of his life, there had never been a question of not returning, of not fulfilling his father’s wishes that he be of service to his country.

He was still haunted by what he had seen. In Phan Rang, dockworkers drowned and floating like milk fruit in the port after being ordered to jump into the water to salvage ships. On shore, French officials laughed, jiggling bellies of fat. Linh became as lean as a dagger. In Dakar, he watched the same horrors of colonialism, watched as natives were ordered by the French to swim out to his ship in a storm. Helpless, Linh watched from the deck as they drowned like heavy, dumb animals in the water. Although he had been called Chinaman in America, the freedom had been heady. But then he had gone into the South. His experiences taught him the need of freedom at all costs.

Gary ’s first assignment for Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the pagodas around Saigon. At Xa Loi, the bonzes orchestrated protests against the Ky government. Linh described the marches three years before against Diem, telling her of the chaos then. Monks and nuns using their bodies as tinder throughout South Vietnam, horrifying and alienating the West. In Linh’s village, a nun described how she had daintily tucked her robes around herself in the town square, how a circle of bonzes formed a barrier against outside interference. “What could the military do? Shoot them?” The absurdity in Saigon of antisuicide squads equipped with fire extinguishers patrolling the streets.

Gary wanted Helen to get pictures of daily life in the pagodas. They took pictures of boys in brown robes receiving instruction and old bonzes reclining inside dark rooms, sipping tea and strategizing. Young men ran back and forth in their orange robes like waiters in a busy restaurant, pamphlets fluttering, directing traffic and arranging interviews with the head monks as if they were rock stars.

The noon heat and the thick smell of burning joss sticks drugged Helen, slowed her movements to those of a sleepwalker. When everyone retired for the noon break, she photographed a more peaceful mood-a single white-clad nun sweeping the grounds in front of the carved columns of the building, the shadow of a Buddha statue inside barely perceptible.

Under a banyan tree, Helen leaned back into a cradle of gnarled roots. Her shirt clung to her back. Linh motioned to a vendor who brought them coconuts filled with sweet, brackish juice. When he handed her a straw, she hesitated.

“Drink it.”

She nodded, emptying it in one gulp. “I’m tired of being afraid.”

“The VC are cunning, but they haven’t yet trained the coconut trees to grow poison.”

They watched women, young and old, enter the pagoda grounds carrying prepared dishes or baskets of fresh vegetables.

“Does the community supply food?”

“The community is the pagoda. They bring food or money, what ever they can, what ever is needed.”

“But they don’t have enough for themselves.”

“One is like a brick in a wall, interdependent; one has no meaning outside one’s relation to family and others.”

Helen sat up and pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her back. “Do you know why I came here?”

Linh shook his head, wary of more confidences.

“I wanted to be famous. I had dreams of being the only American to get pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Stupid, huh?”

Linh smiled. “Darrow is very happy every time he gets a cover.”

“Really?” Helen laughed.

“He sits in his room and drinks a glass of scotch and stares at the cover for a half hour. Then he puts the magazine in a drawer and doesn’t look again.” Linh shrugged. “But he’s passed up shots that could have been his, too. And he mourns every death until it seems impossible that he can continue.”

“That’s why I love him,” she said.

He couldn’t stand hearing more. How could he go on day after day listening to this woman bare her soul to him? “I should go back to the office with the film.”

“Where is your family? I mean, what you said earlier, bricks in a wall?”

“I don’t want to insult. We are different from Americans. We only share important things with people who have earned our trust. Otherwise we dishonor our memories.”

She flushed, chastised, and tried to brush it off. “I ask too many questions. Join me for dinner to night?”

“I’ll meet you in front of the hotel early tomorrow.”

She turned back to the pagoda to hide her hurt feelings.

Linh walked down the crowded street and stopped at an outdoor café. He motioned to a busboy and paid him to run the film over to the office, then ordered tea and nursed it. He felt guilty about his gruffness toward her, but he had changed since coming to Saigon, grown a second skin that insulated him from others. It would have been smarter to be kinder. After all, that is what he liked about the Americans-their innocence, their willingness to share their life story with a stranger. After fifteen minutes, he crossed the street and surveyed the pagoda grounds.

The area was still empty, but he spotted her in a deserted courtyard. She sat alone, crying. He felt discomfited, her face so naked, as if she stood before him unclothed, and he knew the right thing would be to leave unobserved, yet he stood rooted to the spot. He recognized such pain. The reason-Darrow had told of her losing a brother to the war-was it enough to cause her to put herself in danger’s way? A place not fit for a man, much less a woman. He made a show of reentering the compound and stood in front of her. When she saw him, she showed no surprise, simply held her hand out to him.

“I’m sorry about prying. I hate when people ask about my father. Having to say that I hardly remember him. Or my brother.”

He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “I think telling a friend this story is a great honor.”

She gave him a sly, crooked grin. “ Cam on.”