The pilot and Tâm did not recognize each other. But their eyes met. His attraction to her was so strong that he dared to walk away from his discussion with the men in ties in order to join her. He went to see her at the orphanage that night, and the next day, and the next.
He persuaded her to stay in Saigon, to wait for him in Saigon, to love him in Saigon. He set her up in an apartment in the heart of the city, near the Bến Thành central market, near the presidential palace, near the hotels, far from the battlefields, far from him. The pilot and the young girl knew three days and three nights of love.
The first night, the pilot untied Tâm’s hair and caressed her left ear. He saw the missing lobe, which resembled the one, half torn off, that had dropped into his hand as he leaned the girl back on the side of the heli copter. He spent the night asking forgiveness, and she, loving him. When his gaze fell into hers, the conflict within him, between the man and the soldier, disappeared. He finally admitted that he’d been right to defy human folly and to manage to preserve what was left of innocence. On the third day, the pilot had to return to his base. He would come back. Tâm waited for him for three hours, three days, three years. She went on waiting for him but no longer counted the weeks, the months, the decades. Because those three days with him had been eternities, her eternities.
Tâm was soon taken on by one of the thousand nightclubs that had sprung up like mushrooms in the city. Outside her apartment, the clink of key rings between fingers moving off down the hallway, the silence of air currents in the corridor, and the repeated threats of eviction all forced her to consent to nourishing the starving with her flesh. She hoped to hear again the timbre of the pilot’s voice among the soldiers demanding from her acts of love. Every coupling stabbed her heart. She clung to life and kept waiting for him even as the pilot’s death had already been communicated to his wife and daughter, somewhere on the other side of the Pacific, in San Diego. No one told her that the pilot had been accidentally crushed by the wheel of a plane. The weight of the aircraft had flattened his heart, too dazed from love to take basic precautions. He died just as he was recovering, for the first time since My Lai, the desire to breathe deeply into his lungs.