nly from death? The commandant appeared genuinely wounded, his finger resting on the last words of my confession. In his other hand was a blue pencil, the color chosen because Stalin had also used a blue pencil, or so he told me. Like Stalin, the commandant was a diligent editor, always ready to note my many errata and digressions and always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add. Implying that life in my camp is worse than death is a little histrionic, don’t you think? The commandant seemed eminently reasonable as he sat in his bamboo chair, and for a moment, sitting in my bamboo chair, I, too, felt that he was eminently reasonable. But then I remembered that only an hour earlier I had been sitting in the windowless, redbrick isolation cell where I had spent the last year since the ambush, rewriting the many versions of my confession, the latest of which the commandant now possessed. Perhaps your perspective differs from mine, Comrade Commandant, I said, trying to get used to the sound of my own voice. I had not spoken to anyone in a week. I’m a prisoner, I went on, and you’re the one in charge. It may be hard for you to sympathize with me, and vice versa.

The commandant sighed and laid the final sheet of my confession on top of the 294 other pages that preceded it, stacked on a table by his chair. How many times must I tell you? You’re not a prisoner! Those men are prisoners, he said, pointing out the window to the barracks that housed a thousand inmates, including my fellow survivors, the Lao farmer, the Hmong scout, the philosophical medic, the darkest marine, the dark marine, and Bon. You are a special case. He lit a cigarette. You are a guest of myself and the commissar.

Guests can leave, Comrade Commandant. I paused to observe his reaction. I wanted one of his cigarettes, which I would not get if I angered him. Today, however, he was in a rare good mood and did not frown. He had the high cheekbones and delicate features of an opera singer, and even ten years of warfare fought from a cave in Laos had not ruined his classically good looks. What rendered him unattractive at times was his moroseness, a perpetual, damp affliction he shared with everyone else in the camp, including myself. This was the sadness felt by homesick soldiers and prisoners, a sweating that never ceased, absorbed into a perpetually damp clothing that could never be dried, just as I was not dry sitting in my bamboo chair. The commandant at least had the benefit of an electric fan blowing on him, one of only two in the camp. According to my baby-faced guard, the other fan was in the commissar’s quarters.

Perhaps a better term than “guest” is “patient,” the commandant said, editing once more. You have traveled to strange lands and been exposed to some dangerous ideas. It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them. Think of the people, insulated for so long from foreign ideas. Exposure could lead to a real catastrophe for minds that aren’t ready for them. If you saw the situation from our point of view, you would see that it was necessary to quarantine you until we could cure you, even if it hurts us to see a revolutionary like yourself kept in such conditions.

I could see his point of view, albeit with some difficulty. There were reasons to be suspicious of someone like me, who had endured suspicion all his life. But still, it was hard for me not to feel that a year in an isolation cell from which I was allowed to emerge only an hour a day for exercise, blinking and white, was unwarranted, as I had informed him at each of these weekly sessions where he criticized my confession and I, in turn, criticized myself. These reminders I had given him must also have been on his mind, because when I opened my mouth to speak again, he said, I know what you’re going to say. As I told you all along, when your confession reaches a satisfactory state, based on our reading of it and on my reports of these self-criticism sessions to the commissar, you will move on to the next and, we hope, last stage of your reeducation. In short, the commissar believes you ready to be cured.

He does? I had yet to even meet the faceless man, otherwise known as the commissar. None of the prisoners had. They saw him only during his weekly lectures, sitting behind a table on the dais of the meeting hall where all the prisoners gathered for political lectures. I had not even seen him there, for these lectures, according to the commandant, amounted only to an elementary school education designed for pure reactionaries, puppets brainwashed by decades of ideological saturation. The faceless man had decreed me exempt from these simple lessons. Instead, I was privileged by having no burdens except to write and to reflect. My only glimpses of the commissar had come on those rare moments when I looked up from my exercise pen and saw him on the balcony of his bamboo quarters, atop the larger of the two hills overlooking the camp. At the base of the hills clustered the kitchen, mess hall, armory, latrines, and warehouses of the guards, along with the solitary rooms for special cases like me. Barbed-wire fencing separated this interior camp of the guards from the exterior camp where the inmates slowly eroded, the former soldiers, security officers, or bureaucrats of the defeated regime. Next to one of the gates in this fencing, on the interior side, was a pavilion for family visits. The prisoners had become emotional cacti in order to survive, but their wives and children inevitably wept at the sight of their husbands and fathers, whom they saw, at most, a couple of times a year, the trek from even the nearest city an arduous one involving train, bus, and motorbike. Beyond the pavilion, the exterior camp itself was fenced off from the wasteland of barren plains surrounding us, the fence demarcated with watchtowers where pith-helmeted guards with binoculars could observe female visitors and, according to the prisoners, entertain themselves. From the elevated height of the commandant’s patio, one could see not only these voyeurs but also the cratered plains and denuded trees surrounding the camp, a forest of toothpicks over which gusts of crows and torrents of bats soared in ominous black formations. I always paused on the patio before entering his quarters, savoring for a moment the view denied to me in my isolation cell, where, if I had not yet been cured, I had certainly been baked by the tropical sun.

You have complained often about the duration of your visit, the commandant said. But your confession is the necessary prelude to the cure. It is not my fault that it took you a year to write this confession, one that is not, in my opinion, even very good. Everyone except you has confessed to being a puppet soldier, an imperialist lackey, a brainwashed stooge, a colonized comprador, or a treacherous henchman. Regardless of what you think of my intellectual capacities, I know they’re just telling me what I want to hear. You, on the other hand, won’t tell me what I want to hear. Does that make you very smart or very stupid?

I was still somewhat dazed, the bamboo floor wobbling under my bamboo seat. It always took me at least an hour to become readjusted to light and space after my cell’s cramped darkness. Well, I said, gathering the tattered coat of my wits about me, I believe the unexamined life is not worth living. So thank you, Comrade Commandant, for giving me the opportunity to examine my life. He nodded approvingly. No one else has the luxury I have of simply writing and living the life of the mind, I said. My orphaned voice, which had detached itself in my cell and spoken to me from a cobwebbed corner, had returned. I am smart in some ways, stupid in others. For example, I am smart enough to take your criticism and editorial suggestions seriously, but I am too stupid to understand how my confession has not met your high standards, despite my many drafts.

The commandant regarded me through glasses that magnified his eyes to twice their size, his poor eyesight a condition of having lived in cavernous darkness for ten years. If your confession was even just satisfactory, the commissar would let you proceed with what he calls your oral examination, he said. But my opinion of what he calls your written examination is that it hardly seems like a genuine confession to me.

Haven’t I confessed to many things, Commandant?

In content, perhaps, but not in style. Confessions are as much about style as content, as the Red Guards have shown us. All we ask for is a certain way with words. Cigarette?

I hid my relief and merely nodded casually. The commandant inserted the dart of a cigarette between my cracked lips, then lit it for me with my own lighter, which he had appropriated. I inhaled the oxygen of smoke, its infusion into the folds of my lungs calming the trembling in my hands. Even in this latest revision, you quote Uncle Ho only once. This is but one symptom, among many in your confession, that you prefer foreign intellectuals and culture over our native traditions. Why is that?

I’m contaminated by the West?

Exactly. That wasn’t so hard to admit, was it? Funny, then, how you can’t put it into writing. Of course, I can understand why you didn’t quote How the Steel Was Tempered or Tracks in the Snowy Forest. You wouldn’t have had access to them, even though everyone of my generation from the north has read them. But not to mention To Huu, our greatest revolutionary poet? And to cite, instead, the yellow music of Pham Duy and the Beatles? The commissar actually has a collection of yellow music that he keeps for what he calls research purposes. He’s offered to let me listen to them, but no thanks. Why would I want to be contaminated by that decadence? Contrast the songs you discuss with To Huu’s “Since Then,” which I read in high school. He talks about how “The sun of truth shone on my heart,” which was exactly how I felt about the revolution’s effect on me. I carried a book of his with me to China for infantry training, and it helped sustain me. My hope is that the sun of truth will shine on you as well. But I also think of another poem of his about a rich child and a servant child. Closing his eyes, the commandant recited a stanza:

A child lives in a life of plenty

With abundant toys made in the West

While the other child is an onlooker

Watching silently from far away

He opened his eyes. Worth a mention, don’t you think?

If you would give me that book, I’d read it, I said, not having read anything for a year besides my own words. The commandant shook his head. You won’t have any time to read anything in the next phase. But implying you only needed a book in order to be better read is hardly a good defense. Not quoting Uncle Ho or revolutionary poetry is one thing, but not even a folk saying or a proverb? Now you may be from the south—

I was born in the north and lived nine years there, sir.

You chose the southern side. Regardless, you share a common culture with me, a northerner. Yet you will not quote from that culture, not even this:

The good deeds of Father are as great as Mount Thai Son

The virtue of Mother is as bountiful as springwater gushing from its source

Wholeheartedly is Mother to be revered and Father respected

So that the child’s way may be accomplished.

Did you not learn something as basic as this in school?

My mother did teach it to me, I said. But my confession does show my reverence for my mother and why my father is not to be respected.

The relations between your mother and father are indeed unfortunate. You may think that I’m heartless, but I am not. I look at your situation and feel great sympathy for you, given your curse. How can a child be accomplished if his source is tainted? Yet I can’t help but feel that our own culture, and not Western culture, tells us something about your difficult situation. “Talent and destiny are apt to feud.” Don’t you think Nguyen Du’s words apply to you? Your destiny is being a bastard, while your talent, as you say, is seeing from two sides. You would be better off if you only saw things from one side. The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.

You’re right, Comrade Commandant, I said, and perhaps he was. But the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do, I went on, is to actually do the right thing.

I agree. What puzzles me is that you are perfectly reasonable in person, but on the page you are recalcitrant. The commandant poured himself a shot of unfiltered rice wine from a recycled soda bottle. Any urges? I shook my head, even though my priapic desire for a drink bumped against the back of my throat. Tea, please, I said, voice cracking. The commandant poured me a cup of lukewarm tinted water. It was quite sad watching you in those first few weeks. You were a raving lunatic. Isolation did you good. Now you’re purified, at least in body.

If spirits are so bad for me, then why do you drink, Commandant?

I don’t drink to excess, unlike you. I disciplined myself during the war. You rethink your entire life living in a cave. Even things like what to do with one’s waste. Ever thought of that?

Once in a while.

I sense sarcasm. Still not satisfied with the camp’s amenities and your chamber? This is nothing compared to what I went through in Laos. That’s why I’m also puzzled by the unhappiness of some of our guests. You think I’m feigning perplexity, but no, I’m genuinely surprised. We haven’t stuck them in a box underground. We haven’t shackled them until their legs waste away. We haven’t poured lime on their heads and beaten them bloody. Instead, we let them farm their own food, build their own homes, breathe fresh air, see sunlight, and work to transform this countryside. Compare that to how their American allies poisoned this place. No trees. Nothing grows. Unexploded mines and bombs killing and maiming innocents. This used to be beautiful countryside. Now it’s just a wasteland. I try to bring these comparisons up with our guests and I can see the disbelief in their eyes even as they agree with me. You, at least, are honest with me, even though, to be honest with you, that may not be the healthiest strategy.

I’ve lived my life underground for the revolution, Commandant. The least the revolution can grant me is the right to live above ground and be absolutely honest about what I have done, at least before you put me below ground again.

There you go again, defiant for no reason. Don’t you see we live in a sensitive time? It will take decades for the revolution to rebuild our country. Absolute honesty isn’t always appreciated at moments like this. But that’s why I keep this here. He pointed at the jar on the bamboo cabinet, covered with a jute cloth. He had already shown the jar to me more than once, though once was more than enough. Nevertheless, he leaned over and slipped the cloth off the jar, and there was nothing to do but turn my gaze onto the exhibit that should, if there were any justice in the world, be exhibited in the Louvre and other great museums devoted to Western accomplishments. Floating in formaldehyde was a greenish monstrosity that appeared to have originated from outer space or the deepest, weirdest depths of the ocean. A chemical defoliant invented by an American Frankenstein had led to this naked, pickled baby with one body but two heads, four eyes shut but two mouths agape in permanent, mongoloid yawns. Two faces pointed in different directions, two hands curled up against the chest, and two legs spread to reveal the boiled peanut of the masculine sex.

Imagine what the mother felt. The commandant tapped his finger on the glass. Or the father. Imagine the shrieks. What is that thing? He shook his head and drank his rice wine, its color that of thin milk. I licked my lips, and while the scratching of my dessicated tongue on my brittle lips was loud in my ears, the commandant did not notice. We could have just shot all these prisoners, he said. Your friend Bon, for example. A Phoenix Program assassin deserves the firing squad. Protecting him and excusing him as you do reflects poorly on your character and judgment. But the commissar is merciful and believes anyone can be rehabilitated, even when they and their American masters killed anyone they wanted. In contrast to the Americans and their puppets, our revolution has shown generosity by giving them this chance for redemption through labor. Many of these so-called leaders never worked a day on a farm. How do you lead an agricultural society into the future with no idea of the peasant’s life? Without bothering to drape the cloth over the jar again, he poured himself another drink. Lack of understanding is the only way to characterize how some prisoners think they’re being poorly fed. Of course I know they suffer. But we all suffered. We all must suffer still. The country is healing, and that takes longer than the war itself. But these prisoners focus only on their own suffering. They ignore what our side went through. I can’t get them to understand that they get more calories per day than the revolutionary soldier during the war, more than the peasants forced into refugee camps. They believe they are being victimized here, instead of being reeducated. This obstinacy shows how much reeducation they still need. As recalcitrant as you are, you are still far ahead of them. Here I agree with the commissar about the state of your reeducation. I was just talking about you with him the other day. He’s remarkably tolerant of you. He didn’t even object to being called the faceless man. No, I understand, you are not mocking him, merely describing the obvious, but he’s quite sensitive about his... condition. Wouldn’t you be? He wants to meet you this evening. That’s quite an honor. No prisoner has ever met him personally, not that you are a prisoner. He wants to clarify a few issues with you.

What issues? I said. We both looked at my manuscript, its leaves neatly stacked on his bamboo table and pinned down by a small rock, all 295 pages written by the light of a wick floating in a cup of oil. The commandant tapped my pages with a middle finger, its tip cut off. What issues? he said. Where to begin? Ah, dinner. A guard was at the door with a bamboo tray, a boy, his skin a sickly shade of yellow. Whether they were guards or prisoners, most men in the camp were this shade of yellow, or else a sickly, rotten shade of green, or a sickly, deathly shade of gray, a color palette resulting from tropical illnesses and a calamitous diet. What is it? said the commandant. Wood pigeon, manioc soup, stir-fried cabbage, and rice, sir. The wood pigeon’s roasted haunches and breast made me salivate, as my usual ration was boiled manioc. Even when starving, I had to force the manioc down my gullet, where it cemented itself against the walls of my stomach, laughing at my attempts to digest it. Subsisting on a diet of manioc not only was culinarily unpleasant, it was also no fun from a gastroenterological perspective, resulting in either a painfully solid brick or its highly explosive liquid opposite. As a consequence, the inflamed piranha of one’s anus was always gnawing at one’s posterior. I tried desperately to time my bowel movements, knowing a guard would fetch the ammo box reserved for that purpose at 0800 hours, but the snarled firehose of my bowels erupted at will, oftentimes right after the guard returned with the emptied can. Liquids and solids then fermented for most of the night and day, a vile mixture rusting through the ammo box. But I had no right to complain, as my baby-faced guard told me. No one’s picking up my shit every day, he said, peering at me through the slot in my iron door. But you’re being waited on hand and foot, short of someone wiping your ass. What do you say to that?

Thank you, sir. I could not call the guards “comrade,” the commandant demanding that I keep my history a secret, lest it be leaked. The commissar orders this for your own protection, the commandant had told me. The inmates will kill you if they know your secret. The only men who knew my secret were the commissar and the commandant, for whom I had developed feline feelings of both dependency and resentment. He was the one making me rewrite my confession with repeated strokes of his blue pencil. But what was I confessing to? I had done nothing wrong, except for being Westernized. Nevertheless, the commandant was right. I was recalcitrant, for I could have shortened my unwanted stay by writing what he wanted me to write. Long live the Party and the State. Follow Ho Chi Minh’s glorious example. Let’s build a beautiful and perfect society! I believed in these slogans, but I could not bring myself to write them. I could say that I was contaminated by the West, but I could not inscribe that on paper. It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man, an act I had acknowledged rather than confessed, for killing Sonny and the crapulent major were not crimes in the commandant’s eyes. But having nevertheless acknowledged what some might see as crimes, I could not then compound those deeds through my description of them.

My resistance to the appropriate confessional style irritated the commandant, as he resumed telling me over dinner. You southerners had it too good for too long, he said. You took beefsteak for granted, while we northerners lived on starvation rations. We’ve been purged of fat and bourgeois inclinations, but you, no matter how many times you’ve rewritten your confession, cannot eradicate those inclinations. Your confession is full of moral weaknesses, individual selfishness, and Christian superstition. You exhibit no sense of collectivity, no belief in the science of history. You show no need to sacrifice yourself in the cause of rescuing the nation and serving the people. Another of To Huu’s verses is appropriate here:

I’m a son of tens of thousands of families

A younger brother of tens of thousands of withered lives

A big brother to tens of thousands of little children

Who are homeless and live in constant hunger

Compared to To Huu, you are a communist only in name. In practice, you are a bourgeois intellectual. I’m not blaming you. It’s difficult to escape one’s class and one’s birth, and you are corrupted in both respects. You must remake yourself, as Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao both said bourgeois intellectuals should do. The good news is that you show glimmers of collective revolutionary consciousness. The bad news is that your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!

You speak truthfully, sir, I said. The wood pigeon and manioc soup had begun dissolving in my stomach, their nutrients energizing my brain. I just wonder what you would say about Karl Marx, Comrade Commandant. Das Kapital isn’t exactly written for the people.

Marx did not write for the people? Suddenly I could see the darkness of the commandant’s cave through his magnified irises. Get out! See how bourgeois you are? A revolutionary humbles himself before Marx. Only a bourgeois compares himself to Marx. But rest assured, he will treat you for your elitism and Western inclinations. He has built a state-of-the-art examination room where he will personally supervise the final phase of your reeducation, when you are transformed from an American into a Vietnamese once more.

I’m not an American, sir, I said. If my confession reveals anything, isn’t it that I’m an anti-American? I must have said something outrageously humorous, for he actually laughed. The anti-American already includes the American, he said. Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer define ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese. You must try to be as well.

Respectfully speaking, sir, most of our countrymen do not think I am one of them.

All the more reason for you to work harder to prove that you are one of us. Obviously you think of yourself as one of us, at least sometimes, so you are making progress. I see you’ve finished eating. What did you think of the wood pigeon? I admitted that it was delicious. What if I told you that “wood pigeon” is only a euphemism? He watched me carefully as I looked again at the pile of little bones on my plate, sucked clean of every bit of meat and tendon. Regardless of what it was, I still longed for another serving. Some call this rat, but I prefer “field mouse,” he said. But it hardly matters, does it? Meat is meat, and we eat what we must. Do you know I once saw a dog eating the brains of our battalion doctor? Ugh. I don’t blame the dog. He was only eating the brains because the man’s intestines had already been eaten by his fellow dog. These are the kinds of things you see on the battlefield. But losing all those men was worth it. All the bombs dropped on us by those air pirates were not dropped on our homeland. Not to mention that we liberated the Laotians. That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.

Yes, Comrade Commandant.

Enough serious talk. He threw the jute cover back over the pickled baby. I just wanted to give you my personal congratulations on having finished the written phase of your reeducation, no matter how barely, in my opinion. You should be pleased with how far you’ve come, even if you should be critical yourself for the limitations so evident in your confession. As good a student as you are, you may yet become the dialectical materialist that the revolution needs you to be. Now, let us go meet the commissar. The commandant checked the time on his wristwatch, which also happened to have been my wristwatch. He is expecting us.

We descended from the commandant’s quarters and walked past the guard barracks to the stretch of flatland separating the two hills. My isolation cell was located here, one of a dozen brick ovens where we basted in our own juices and where the prisoners tapped messages on the walls with tin cups. They had developed a simple code for communicating, and it was not long before they taught it to me. Part of what they conveyed to me was how they held me in high regard. Much of my heroic reputation came from Bon, who often greeted me through my neighbors. He and they believed I was singled out for extended isolation because of my ardent republicanism and my Special Branch credentials. They blamed the commissar for my fate, for he was really the one in charge of the camp, as everyone, including the commandant, knew. My neighbors had seen the commissar up close during his weekly political lectures, and the sight was truly horrific. Some cursed him, taking delight in his suffering. But the facelessness compelled respect among others, the mark of his dedication and sacrifice, even if for a cause that the prisoners despised. The guards, too, spoke of the faceless commissar with mixed tones of horror, fear, and respect, but never mockery. A commissar must never be mocked, even among one’s peers, for one never knew when one of those peers might report such antirevolutionary thinking.

I understood the need for my temporary detention and marginal conditions, for the revolution must be vigilant, but what I could not understand, and what I hoped the commissar would explain, was why the guards feared him, and, more generally, why revolutionaries feared one another. Aren’t we all comrades? I asked the commandant at an earlier session. Yes, he said, but not all comrades have the same level of ideological consciousness. Although I am not thrilled at having to seek the commissar’s approval on certain matters, I also admit that he knows Marxist-Leninist theory and Ho Chi Minh Thought much better than I ever will. I’m not a scholar, but he is. Men like him are guiding us toward a truly classless society. But we haven’t eradicated all elements of antirevolutionary thinking, and we must not forgive antirevolutionary faults. We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. This is the lesson you must absorb by heart, which is why we give you so much time to achieve it.

Ascending the hill toward the commissar’s quarters, it seemed to me that I had already spent too much time learning that lesson. We stopped at the stairs leading up to his balcony, where the baby-faced guard and three other guards awaited. The commissar’s in charge of you now, the commandant said, inspecting me from head to toe with a frown. I’ll be frank. He sees much more potential in you than I do. You are addicted to the social evils of alcohol, prostitution, and yellow music. You write in an unacceptable, counterrevolutionary manner. You are responsible for the deaths of the Bru comrade and the Watchman. You failed even in undermining this movie that misrepresents and insults us. If it were only up to me, I’d send you to the fields for your final cure. And if things do not work out with the commissar, I still can. Remember that.

I will, I said. And, knowing that I had not yet escaped his power, I also said, Thank you, Comrade Commandant, for all you have done for me. I know I’ve seemed reactionary to you because of my confession, but please believe me when I say that I have learned much under your tutelage and criticism. (This, after all, was the truth.)

My show of gratitude mollified the commandant. Let me give you some advice, he said. The prisoners tell me what they think I want to hear, but they don’t understand that what I want to hear is sincerity. Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear? Keep that in mind. With that, the commandant turned and began his descent down the hill, a man of admirably erect posture.

The commissar’s waiting, the baby-faced guard said. Let’s go.

I gathered what remained of myself. I was three-quarters of the man I used to be, according to the commandant’s scale, manufactured in the USA and appropriated from a southern hospital. The commandant was obsessed with his weight and enamored with the scale’s statistical precision. Through a rigorous longitudinal study of bowel movements, sampled from both guards and prisoners, including myself, the commandant had calculated that the camp’s collective bowels issued about six hundred kilos of waste per day. The prisoners collected and hand-carried this waste to the fields, where it served as fertilizer. Fecal precision was thus necessary for the scientific management of agricultural production. Even now, climbing the stairs ahead of the guards and knocking on the commissar’s door, I felt the factory of my innards fashioning the wood pigeon into a solid brick that would be used tomorrow to help build the revolution.

Come in, said the commissar. That voice...

His quarters consisted entirely of one big, rectangular room as austere as the commandant’s, with bamboo walls, bamboo floors, bamboo furniture, and bamboo rafters holding up a thatched roof. I had entered the sitting area, furnished with some low-slung bamboo chairs, a bamboo coffee table, and an altar on which sat Ho Chi Minh’s gold-painted bust. Above his head hung a red banner imprinted with those golden words NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM. In the middle of the room was a long table stacked with books and papers, surrounded by chairs. Leaning against one of the chairs was a guitar with familiar curvaceous hips, and at one end of the long table was a record player that looked like the one I had left behind at the General’s villa... At the far end of the room was a platform bed, draped in a cloud of mosquito netting behind which a shadow stirred. The bamboo floor was cool under my bare feet, and the breeze whispering through the open windows caused the netting to tremble. A hand parted the netting, its skin burned red, and he emerged from the bed’s recesses, a visage of fearful asymmetry. I looked away. Come now, the commissar said. Am I really so horrible that you do not recognize me, my friend? I looked back to see lips scorched away to reveal perfect teeth, eyes bulging from withered sockets, nostrils reduced to holes without a nose, the hairless, earless skull one massive keloid scar, leaving the head to resemble one of those dried, decapitated trophies swung on a string by an ebullient headhunter. He coughed, and a marble rattled in his throat.

Didn’t I tell you, Man said, not to return?