The Time in Between by David Bergen Page A

school courtyard where a beauty contest was taking place. Kiet and the blind boy stood back from the crowd and listened to the girls recite poetry and sing. Kiet described the movements of the girls and the color of their ao dais. He said that the most beautiful girl was perhaps the oldest; when she moved it reminded him of water flowing over a smooth rock. He said that her neck was long, her back was straight, and her breasts were barely visible.
    A week later they slept close to the bank of a fast-flowing river and in the middle of the night were set upon by a lone crazed soldier who waved his pistol in the air and demanded they feed him. They had not eaten in three days, not since a farmer and his wife had offered them manioc and a few grains of rice. Kiet told the madman that they had nothing. Nothing to eat. Nothing to offer.
    He did not believe them. He had them strip. He went through their rags and, finding nothing, circled them. He waved his gun before the blind boy’s eyes and elicited no response. He repeated the gesture. He turned to Kiet and asked if he was a soldier.
    Kiet said he wasn’t. He was aware of the blind boy’s thinness and of his own nakedness.
    “And this one?” the soldier asked.
    The blind boy answered that he had been a soldier with a North Vietnamese battalion fighting near Saigon, but that he had been discharged because he had been injured. He said that a blind man could not shoot a gun.
    The soldier leaned toward the boy as if to sniff him. He touched his scars and pushed a finger against one of the milky eyes. Then he said that a blind man could shoot a gun, he just had to practice. He took the boy’s hand and put the gun into it and raised it so that it was pointed at Kiet. He said, “Shoot.”
    Kiet did not move or speak. He saw the barrel of the gun and the blind boy’s finger on the trigger. He felt nothing. A few days ago—or had it been even longer?—he had decided that death might be preferable to wandering the countryside, being pushed about by the whims of man and nature. His hunger had left him weak. He no longer had a conscience; he was a rat tunneling his way from one disaster to another.
    The blind boy did not shoot.
    The soldier became impatient and told the boy, once again, to shoot. He had stepped back and was midway between the boy and Kiet. The boy’s hand, the one that held the gun, began to shake. He said that he did not know where his friend was and he did not want to hit someone by accident.
    The soldier laughed and said that there would be no accident.
    Kiet spoke then. Very calmly, he told the boy to shoot the soldier. He told him to aim at the voice. “Aim lower than the voice,” he said.
    The soldier laughed, thinking this impossible, and the boy, hearing the laughter, pointed the gun at the sound and pulled the trigger. He shot six times. The first bullet hit the soldier in the chest and the rest of the bullets missed because the soldier had fallen immediately with the first shot, which had killed him.
    They buried the soldier in a shallow grave near the fastflowing river. He wore boots, possibly stolen from some poor victim. These they shared, switching left for right and so on as they walked. Two days later, the blind boy announced that he could not walk further. Kiet said that he would carry him. He sat down, pulled the boot off the blind boy’s left foot, and put it on his own. Then, he stood and picked up the boy. It was like hefting a sack of chaff. There was no weight. As Kiet walked he talked to the blind boy. He said that soon they would find someone to feed them. They would eat and drink and they would sleep under a roof and when they had regained their strength they would carry on. He told the blind boy that he knew a girl in Hanoi and that he loved the girl very much and that he had promised her he would return.
    The blind boy answered that there were many men who had promised the same thing but they were dead and would not return.
    Kiet said