Tree of Smoke Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearby still stood upright and now served as a barracks.
    The youngsters had grouped out back of the structure to bury one of their comrades. A two-week bout of malaria, they explained, had ended in his extinction. They’d stripped him of his clothes. They sprinkled grains of rice into his open mouth, lowered the naked youth into a grave about four feet deep without any kind of casket, and covered him with damp, yellowish clots of earth.
    Trung stood by watching, waving the flies away from his face. The boys gathered around the mound in silence for about a minute. Finally one spoke up. “It’s bad,” he said. “There goes one more.”
    They were all young, many still in their teens. Their group had never been part of the Vietminh. They were ignorant mountain people from Ba Den who didn’t know how to bury their dead.
    When they’d finished he stood with them out back of their barracks to address them, but he could only repeat what others had already said.
    “We can get you medicine against malaria. It’s possible we can relocate you north, to a collective farm we call a kolkhoz, where you’ll live in peace and order. But if you want to go on fighting, we can put you to better use.
    “We are centralized. We have an iron structure. We are closed into a single fist that disappears up a sleeve when it has to. Our will is unshakable. Our will is our weapon. The greatest colonialist armies can’t stand against it. We drove out the French, and we’ll drive out the Americans, and we’ll slaughter and bury their puppets. Do they claim victories? Let them. The invaders are fighting the ocean. No matter how many waves they beat down, the ocean of our resolve is always there.
    “Do you want to be free? Personal liberation is national liberation. The men who led you in the beginning understood this, they learned it with the Hoa-hao, and they took you this far. Now you must come with us and go through to the end—which is the beginning we have all hoped for, the first day of our national freedom.”
    It had been long enough since he’d stopped attending classes that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying.
    Trung had been sent here because of the time he’d spent serving at the New Star Temple in the nearby village. It was assumed he probably knew these people. A slight mix-up. As little children, orphan boys, they’d been recruited—kidnapped—far upriver by Hoa-hao guerrillas, originally from the Mekong Delta, who’d been driven into the hills by the Vietminh. The boys’ leaders had abandoned the young recruits, or been killed. Meanwhile the village of their ancestors had vanished, dispersed by the fighting. Over a period of years the boys had worked their way farther and farther down the Van Co Dong, finding no welcome anywhere and finally stopping along this stretch well-known in the region for its particularly virulent strain of malaria, called “piss-blood.” Nobody bothered them while one by one they died.
    Trung explained that his own people came from Ben Tre, but he’d spent years and years in the North. Right now, until reunification, the heart of Vietnam lay in the North. “After reunification, all of Vietnam will be our home. Millions of square kilometers of Vietnam with no partition, no relocation, no disruption of the national fabric. We will lie down at night in peace and wake up to another day of peace. And those of us who die on the way, like your friend, will find peace in the grave.”
    Look at you, he thought, from your births to your deaths only exile, wandering, war.
    “What will it be like on the kolkhoz farm?”
    “Do you want work? There you’ll have work and freedom.”
    “But we’ve been on our own a long time. We’re already free.”
    “On the farm it’s a different kind of freedom.”
    Yes, yes, yes, nothing but crap, what a monstrosity, he cursed himself for participating. Die here, die there, he wanted to say. Just stay away from the kolkhoz. “It’s time to take you to