Once We Had a Country

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IN THE JUNGLE, Gordon tends a fire beside Yia Pao, the young potter whose soul he hopes to save. It is 1972, the rainy season in Laos, and the two of them shouldn’t be here. Nobody should. Although they are barely a mile from the refugee camp, without knowing it they have crossed into a free-strike zone. The lines keep shifting because the Communists keep gaining ground, but the Royal Lao and American generals don’t bother making announcements when the boundaries are redrawn. Instead, they simply order their warplanes to treat anybody on the ground as the enemy. Everyone becomes a target.

Nestled in the fire are three figures, each less than a foot high and made of clay, each one smiling. Gordon tells Yia Pao about the saints the little statues are meant to resemble, how this one was pierced by arrows, that one blinded with a rod. Through the heat and smoke, the little bodies glow red, seeming to be possessed of an inner light. Eventually Yia Pao shifts them with a branch to let them cool and says he hopes Gordon will be satisfied. The potter did his best to make the statues like the holy people his new friend has described, but Yia Pao has never seen a saint himself, and this method of firing them is more primitive than he’d like. In his village, before the bombing, he had a proper kiln. It’s another of the things he mourns.

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