BORN OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS

BORN OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS

Sometimes the roots of a family tree go deeper than you think.

The rising sun, casting rainbows through beveled glass prisms, speckled Mai with dancing light as she opened her eyes to the new morning. This will be a special day, she thought, remembering what her husband, Robert, had said the night before. “Tomorrow, for our anniversary, I can finally give you your heart’s desire.”  Still puzzling over his statement, she rolled over to find him watching her from the doorway, looking as if he’d read her mind. “Get up, my flower!” he called. “We race the sun today. That’s the only gold I can afford… that and this…” he finished seriously, offering her an envelope.

“For me?” she giggled, eagerly tearing it open. Inside she discovered one sheet of golden paper. On it was a set of handwritten coordinates, longitude and latitude. “What is this?” she asked.

“Here!” Tossing her his smart phone, he chuckled, “Look it up. There’s an app for that!”

“You know I don’t know how use that thing! Tell me!”

“I warned you you‘d need to know how someday! Now aren’t you sorry? You’ll just have to be surprised! Now hurry! Dress for travel! Everything’s ready.”

She stood perplexed as he loaded luggage into the taxi, and even more so when her handsome son, Binh, escorted her out of it at the airport. “Get out your phone!” she ordered, shoving the golden paper into her son’s hands. His puzzled expression mirrored hers after zooming into the coordinates on Google maps. “My God,” she gasped as the image became clearer. “The cliff.”

From that moment until their plane touched down at the Hanoi Airport in North Viet Nam, Mai was steeped in images she had thought faded into the backwash of her life. As their guide shepherded them through the falling rain to a waiting car, Mai recalled the war-torn country she had left behind so very long ago. Two hours later they entered the Phong Nha area, just kilometers from her childhood home of Vinh Moc, where she and her brothers spent carefree days exploring the river and jungles that led up to the Cam Mountains rising up before them. Memories flooded her mind as she pictured the boys chasing her through the mountain’s caves and passageways she came to know like the back of her hand. When the car halted at a ferry stop on the banks of the Son River, Mai looked incredulously at Robert. They locked eyes remembering the last time they’d traveled this route together.

Located just above the 17^th parallel, the Son River bisects the country, but most of it is actually underground. The few exposed miles they now floated upon were key to the Viet Nam War effort, because here it ran alongside the most critical supply route in the country, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Mai had been just seventeen when the heaviest bombings began raining down upon her village. She flinched remembering the thousands of pounds of munitions dropped daily on this tiny waterway in the American effort to stop the movement of the North Vietnamese Army. Robert squeezed her hand knowingly. “You wanted our son to know where he came from,” he reminded her. Binh, who’d stayed silent most of the way, now looked puzzled.

“I came from this jungle? But I’m an American.”

“You were conceived there,” his mother replied, pointing upward. 

They floated on, until before them yawned the mouth of an enormous cave not visible from anywhere but the surface of the waterway. They glided silently through the opening. Here, the mountain peaks concealed miles of underground caverns and passages that had served the NVA as an impenetrable top secret fortress which was accessible only by boat, and accessed only by night, when American soldiers were afraid to move about the jungle.

“I was just a girl when our army took me from my ruined village to help in the war. Inside here, you can see it is almost like an underground castle with the capacity to hide many tons of explosives. I cooked and fetched water for the soldiers and prisoners hidden here. One day, your father was dragged in… unconscious and bleeding.”

“You were a P.O.W.?” Binh asked incredulously. “Why was I never told?”

“It’s a hard thing to speak of,” Robert murmured.

“Looking upon your father, I thought… he is just a boy…  like our own boys… what is there to hate in this boy? …Just then he opened his eyes and they were as green and honest as my beautiful jungle.”

“I awoke to this lovely face…my beautiful flower…” Robert began, stroking her aging cheek. “She splinted my broken bones, smuggled medicines and food in-between…” he trailed off, grimacing at memories of his abuse. “Each time I was tortured, she healed me… for two years she nursed me, teaching me her words… we spoke of cherry blossoms… “‘Mai’ means ‘Cherry Blossom’ in Vietnamese…  then one day I understood… her army had no use for me anymore.”

“They were going to kill you!” his son exclaimed.

“I couldn’t let him die. I stole a boat. We made our way to a secret tunnel I’d discovered as a child in these underground waterways. The army knew nothing of its existence. It led upward to a hidden cliff overlooking the valley. We cowered there for weeks, watching from above as they hunted us, waiting for a chance to escape. Finally it came.”

They’d reached the secret tunnel and began to ascend on foot. Soon the three were standing on the cliff looking down at jungle slashed by rippling water. “This is where you hid?” Binh asked?”

“And where you were conceived,” his mother answered softly. “Only love erases the horror of war.”

“On the day Mai received political asylum, I promised to fulfill her heart’s desire to see her homeland again someday.”

“You and Binh are my heart’s desire, love,” Mai whispered, as three hearts beat as one.

“Does my name have meaning in Vietnamese, Mother?” Binh asked.

“It means ‘peace,’ my son.”

-taree Belardes

8/21/11

NYC Flash Fiction Contest 2011
1,000 words
Genre; Drama
object; A smart phone