IT WAS THE WOMEN who were the strongest. Yet the one who never proved her strength haunts me beyond the others, even now, after thirty-five years.

The first waves of bombs came the summer I was nine, two years after my father was buried in effigy, since they never found his body, so I had only known death as an old person falling asleep, or a baby whose eye never opened. It was during the Feast of Mercy, while we were praying for the dead, that the fury fell from the sky, and three entire families were killed. The enemy must have thought there were soldiers hiding in the area, someone said, must have decided our village was a refuge... and that bitter old man with a face like an ancient coconut replied, “And we must have thought there were ancestors in the area. You see how well they protected us.” Many people refused to speak to him for weeks after that, but he didn’t mind; soon enough they relented, recalling he had once been very devout, until he lost his wife in childbirth, and later all three sons.

We felt a bit safer after we dug the tunnels for shelter. Besides, one of the elders argued, they wouldn’t attack unarmed peasants working in the fields, and everyone agreed. But they were all wrong, and you couldn’t always reach the tunnels in time, even though the person in charge of beating the gong they had made from the remains of a bomb was very alert. The planes would come too fast, appear with no warning. Nothing, only a clear sky, and then all at once, a pair of them swooping down, followed by another pair, releasing their lethal cargo, erasing farmers, children, buffalos, pigs, the tree bending over the village pond. So we began to work the fields only at night.

Over the next few years, nearly everything was destroyed: the school, the hospital that served five villages, all but those two huts hidden in that last small grove left standing. Only the temple remained unscathed, which in the end made even Old Coconut admit there might be something in it after all.

There were other gleams amid that darkness. One neighbor who had been very handsome was burned by a phosphorous bomb, his face horribly disfigured, eyes no longer flashing like fish in a clear stream. And people felt particularly sorry for Mr. Canh, because he was soon to be married, and now that would be impossible. But when his fiancée saw him, she was very brave, and turned to his mother saying, “I loved him before. Nothing has changed that.” After she left, my sister saw her crying—but she never uttered a word of despair. They were to have three children, and she was thankful that only one of them was deformed.

She was not the only one like that. One man who had never been particularly attractive returned from the South with only a stump of one leg—the other was gone entirely, and three fingers of one hand were missing. Yet one of the girls who came to tend him found herself caring for him, then somehow fell in love. No one ever asked why. She never mentioned anything, except to remark once, casually, that he was so grateful.

And he was right: for what little we had, for all we lost, the dead were left with less. We had to bury them without coffins. There was no wood to spare, and even beams were removed from houses to patch the bridge over the river, before they destroyed it entirely. After that, there was a withered old woman who for a long time would ferry everything between our village and the one across the river: occasionally soldiers or weapons, but mostly people like us, peasant farmers headed for the meager market on the other shore, where we would exchange what little food there was. They called her Angel, and she was without fear, but not reckless, only crossing at night or early in the morning before the mist had lifted from the river. By then we had all grown cautious, and no one cooked during the day because the enemy could see the smoke. So for a time we cooked only after dark, in the forest, but they detected the fires and launched a night attack, dropping fifty or sixty bombs within minutes. That’s when Angel vanished, while bringing a villager with a few bananas from the other shore. The same night, the hut across from ours was obliterated. The family either didn’t have time to reach the tunnels, or perhaps thought the planes were headed elsewhere. They simply evaporated: we never found a single piece of them, not a finger, not a bone. That was when the militia told us not to make fires at night any more. “What are we to do,” my mother retorted, “not cook at all?” Without the least hint of a smile he said, “That would be preferable, of course.” Then suddenly, despite the sorrow, or perhaps because of it, they both burst out laughing.

That was how we began living in the tunnels most of the time, even cooking underground, which for us children was almost an adventure, until the rains came: since there was no pump, we would have to drain them with cups, buckets, hats. Even then, of course, the mud would remain for many days, and no matter how carefully the women cooked, you would have to pluck out specks of it from the manioc or sweet potato, because by then we rarely ate rice: what little we grew was sent to the soldiers. We planted manioc in the forest for them, too, so that when they passed, they would have something. “Soldiers are always hungry,” my mother said, as she firmly tamped down the soil. Many times we would never even see them, but we would know they had come through, because the plants would be gone; yet we had to avoid trampling the place, for where they dug one up, they would always plant another, so that in a few months there would be more for whoever might come.

We were fortunate, my mother said, that enemy soldiers never came through, for their bombs were more merciful, bringing swift death, impersonal disfigurement. I did not believe her until Mr. Pham returned from the South half blind, and instead of obeying her I eavesdropped while he confirmed what had already reached us in countless rumors. His unit had retaken a village where they found only one living soul in the clinic whose three doctors had been killed, along with every wounded soldier. There were no other remains of men, the survivor explained, because the enemy had thrown their bodies into the river after executing them.

But he saw many bodies of women strewn in the mud with which their white blouses were spattered, their heads shorn almost to the scalp, mouths stuffed with rags. Beneath black skirts crumpled about their loins, their splayed legs lay exposed to the rain. Some of them had only dark crusts of blood in place of ears, others looked like sacrificial victims with two hearts plucked out, flies feeding where their breasts had been. And later I had nightmares about which had come first—the mutilation or the violation, ultimately one and the same?

No wonder that for a long time we thought the enemy were devils. Only gradually have I begun to see it differently.

We have heard that the enemy has been at war almost constantly since they left our country: one invasion after another, always explained as a defense against threat. Only now I can begin to feel sorry for them, because they could have learned from what they did here, suffered and inflicted here. I often remember the enemy pilot whose plane plunged out of the sky. Who knows how it was hit, because the old artillery piece we had was splintered in a raid several weeks before. We saw the plane diving, twisting, tracing a trail of ugly black smoke in which suddenly a tiny drop of spume appeared, unfurling into a small white blossom against the silk of blue sky ripped by the dark streak.

Three of the villagers ran to the place where the parachute collapsed near the seared clearing of what had been a banana grove and, as we had been ordered, tied the pilot to a tree until the militia could arrive. Then they led him—or rather, one of the women did—back to the village until he could be taken to a prison camp. It was a strange and thrilling sight to see that small woman, whose young husband had been fatally tortured in the South, leading that gangly man who, even with his head hanging, was more than a span taller than she, whose step was firm and lively compared to the defeated airman. Two militia members brought up the rear, having ceded to the young widow the honor of heading the procession. They were there, after all, to protect the pilot, having ordered us long before not to harm any prisoner, for there had been cases where people in devastated villages had beaten to death the enemy they held responsible for the loss of all they loved.

I don’t think any of us would have attacked the man, however. There was not even any grumbling, no sign of anyone suppressing their seething rage as he was led along the mud of the causeway between the paddies. Rather, I think they were amazed not so much at his size as at the realization that he was only a man, after all; later, one of the old men even commented that with his head lowered like that he looked like a child caught in some shameful act of mischief. For three days we kept him there, under guard, and he would stare into space, never smiling, eating somewhat mechanically the manioc we fed him, as though he lacked either the strength to appreciate the fact that he was alive, or the will to let himself die.

A few weeks after the truck came to take him away, my aunt Velvet received the letter. There was no communication with the South—a soldier’s letter had to be carried by hand, by many hands, through jungle and swamp, through ambush and battle—and a person was lucky to receive it even six months after it was written. The letter Auntie received from her husband finally arrived two years after the date he carefully penned at the top of the rippled paper. The letter had been through stifling heat, mud, monsoon. Except for the date and the faded greeting to his precious Velvet, there was nothing left but neatly aligned smears: the actual words gone—yes, like ghosts. My mother and I looked at one another as Auntie’s eyes scanned the vestigial blurs for some sign of legible syllables, expecting her to cry. But she only kissed the letter before folding it to fit in the small red lacquer box that her father had given her on her wedding day. I saw no tears even when my mother’s arm encircled her, her leathery hand stroking Auntie’s shoulder as she uttered her name, like a balm gently applied to a wound: “Dear sister, precious Nhung...”

When she slept, she cradled the box, hiding it during the day, a practice she did not abandon even after learning several months later that well before that spectral letter had arrived, Uncle had been killed, having been dragged by a tank attached to a rope around his neck before his head was severed.

One evening I was very thoughtless. After seeing her closing the lacquer box, her fingers resting a moment along the single gold line at the lid’s edge, I waited a few hours to ask her if she might ever remarry. It was the only time I ever saw her frown, and when she disappeared for an hour or so, I wanted to apologize, knowing what she must have gone away to feel in secret. But when she returned, casually rubbing the back of my head, her smile had only a hint of sorrow, and I kept silent, thinking the peace she had gathered was too fragile for any words I might have found.

While I felt a share of her sadness, I was unable to taste her pain myself until the worst bombing came, four years after Mau Than, which many had insisted would always remain the most horrible. Late that December, people in the capital were shocked as well as devastated by the attack; assuming the enemy would not bomb during their own holiest season, they had returned in large numbers. At least now, Old Coconut spat, you can say they are fair: their own sacred days are as worthless to them as ours. It was only later that we learned the massive attack was carried out because the two sides were engaging in peace talks, and staging the attack was a means to give the enemy superior strength in negotiating. This was the only time in my life that my mother could not explain something to me. I thought at first she had not heard me, but on repeating the question I saw her stiffen as she transferred the bit of sweet potato to my cracked bowl. Not wishing to shame her, I did not ask again.

But that assault did not remain remote. It soon came to us. As the village on the other side of the river was a bit larger than ours, they suffered even greater shortages of food. My father’s cousin lived there, an ancient old man with no other family. On several occasions, my mother tried to convince him to come live with us, but he said he had never left the house he was born in, and would remain there until he died. A few fellow villagers helped him, but he never had enough to eat, and was too proud to accept any gifts from us. So my mother and I would sometimes cross the river on the market days, so she would trade some of our sweet potatoes for coconuts, since they never grew well on our side. Always reserving a few sweet potatoes, she would wait until twilight to take them to Cousin Xuan, in whose hut the same debate would occur.

“No, please,” the skeletal palm outstretched, nearly fleshless but without the slightest tremor. “I can’t accept charity from anyone, I refuse to be a burden, even to family.”

“You’ll be doing me a favor,” Mother would insist, her voice as firm as the wizened hand already reaching out to examine the emaciated tubers. “No one wanted these, and they’re too heavy to drag back home, yet not enough to bother doing so.”

He looked skeptically at me, as if thinking that he should probably insist that a boy my age should be eager to carry a sack for his mother, but he refrained, realizing this would take the game too far, give substance to his protests. Then he would grumble a few words about not being an invalid, as she withdrew to a neighbor’s tunnel to prepare the food.

One day, I lingered in the market while she went to him, and that was when I saw the girl: I told Mother about her that night, crossing the lapping darkness in the cramped ferry that was now manned by a blind man named Huy, who always joked about how it must have been his destiny to have that name, as his father had been a terrible sinner, and for such a man to confer the quality of brightness on a son was as much as to ask the gods to allow that mine to explode near his face, so that he would always dwell in the dark. And then he would chuckle, saying, “But I’m the one who sees the way, who knows the night.”

That evening, though, dusk had never come, nor had the clouds stifled the moonlight. For me, there loomed above it all that lovely ripe face streaked by the light that fell through the one coconut tree in the market.

“I know the girl I will marry,” I told Mother. And her laugh merged with the water against the prow, as she asked what her name was.

I didn’t know, of course, I knew only that dizzying glance emerging from the tree’s shade. Yet I had already named her. “Kim,” I whispered, for she was golden. When my mother’s laugh welled up with the swirling current, she was not mocking me. And later, in the light of the typhoon lamp against the tunnel wall as she bent over me, her glance beneath her affectionate goodnight harbored a wistful trace of farewell, which was also a blessing that welcomed the man I was to become.

I never found out if Kim was strong, or anything else about her, beyond her secret name. Only one other time did I see her, perhaps a week before the planes came, billowing a cloud of fine yellow mist that we could see hovering and settling beyond the far bank. And even though the wind that followed was blowing in the opposite direction, we were surprised to catch faint wafts of a sweet smell, for we assumed it would have borne the stench of sulfur.

Within three days, twelve people from that village died, and it didn’t matter whether they were strong or weak: four were members of the militia, and five were children playing in the groves at the time. A couple of weeks later, the broom-maker who always sat next to Mother in the market told her it had been very eerie to see the bodies, as there was not a single wound: yet the flesh—even that of the men—though completely intact, had been left unnaturally smooth, unpleasantly soft, like a vegetable rotting from the inside.

I felt ashamed once she told me. I had lain awake amid the silence and slumbering breaths of the tunnel, imagining how soft and smooth that skin must be, but could never have associated it with death, with putrefaction, with the curling lip my mother imitated when quoting the broom-maker’s description of that flesh.

And I try never to think of it, now; only to be grateful I did not see her that way. Sometimes, lying in the unbroken silence beside the woman who became my wife, I still see, without any effort, the golden one. It is not because I wish to turn from the mother of my children, from whom I could not desire more beauty, greater tenderness. Only because the secret one is always there in the shade of my memory, just as the tunnels to which I will never return often hover and hedge me in, their dank walls a counterpoint to the fresh face on which that slash of light seemed not to fall but to emanate from the eyes glinting with faint mischief. I never see her superimposed upon my wife’s face, eclipsing the living woman like some preferable remote paradise; only sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, her face shimmers up the way a shaft of afternoon reveals a smooth bright stone in the depths of the river. And there, smiling before turning away, she pauses under that palm that is also gone, the sharp leaves sifting the sun to a slit that crosses her brow and one eye, giving her the secret name I did not really choose but only heard.

And oddly enough, her bright face as it pivots often merges with the head of that pilot, his cropped blond hair gleaming with sweat in the sunlight that seems to engrave on his face that look of shame and defeat. Even though the two events were not connected—except to the degree that everything which happened in those long terrible years forms a single vast memory, an indivisible sorrow—they are often together, gathered in the darkness, one phantom face upon the other. In this way, they are different from Mother, from Auntie, from the old Angel of the river, for their shadows return during the day, and we speak of them openly, in warm, enfolding voices.

But I do not mention aloud the one whose given name I never learned, nor the pilot whose name I probably would not have been able to pronounce. Though she is gone forever, I often wonder, when their faces mingle, if he is alive still; and since the schoolteacher can make the letters of the language that once sounded so brutal, I imagine writing to the pilot, living quietly somewhere in his enormous country. Of course, I have no way of finding him. But if I did so, I would tell him that if ever he wished to return, and came to Hanoi or Hai Phong, I should journey all that way to meet with him, so we could sit and talk for as little or as long as we liked, without interruption or danger, until the sorrow of my face and the shame of his own might look deep into each other, until they became something else.

Such things are possible. We have rebuilt the village, erected a new dinh from which the smoke of incense rises to reach the spirits, and once more we have enough rice and meat to wrap in leaves, so we can again offer up chung cakes at the ancestral altar. Craters left by the bombs have been converted into ponds for fish. The flesh, however, is less forgiving: for children born without limbs or genitals, there is no conversion, only a sort of desperate mercy, with which we cannot encompass their mute surrender, indistinguishable from a cry of anguish.

I would not condemn the tall pilot for the pain that lingers, so long after the deafening blasts of bombs and the sweet scent of the yellow fog have vanished, now that he is nearly an old man. But I would ask him one question: the whole world endlessly repeats how much it hates war, how fervently it yearns for peace; has he, perhaps, after all these years, learned the secret of how such a lie can endure, while one generation after another continues to perish?