The whole world slowed down in the time it took them to turn the corner. Cars and trucks immediately all but disappeared, giving way to bicycles, motorbikes, cyclos, and square carts filled with bricks or wood pulled along the road by sweating, bare-chested men on foot. Just off the curbs dozens of cyclo drivers sat idly in their vehicles, baking in the sun and watching with careful eyes as they passed. Tiny shops lined the sidewalks, little businesses with houses overhead that offered bicycle repairs, meals of rice or the staple soups chao and pho, spare parts salvaged from dead vehicles and appliances, rolls of fabric for making clothes at home.

Along one stretch a small market had gathered, offering food that would not have made the quality cut at better places such as the Ben Thanh market in District One. Dozens of women squatted in the road behind open baskets of rice, piles of dragonfruit, mangoes, durians, and custard apples, clumps of tiny overripe bananas, small wire cages containing dazed-looking puppies and bird-size chickens, metal trays piled high with crab and other shellfish, rows of fresh fish laid along the pavement, a dozen white ducks huddled in a circle around a water bowl. The road was potholed and rough, wet with spilled juices. Flies swarmed from the raw fish up to their faces. The stench was overwhelming.

“That’s rather picturesque,” said Muir bravely, swatting away flies and swallowing back his revulsion at the odor. “I should have brought my camera.”

Condley turned back to Dzung, speaking again in Vietnamese. “A smaller road.”

Dzung turned, into what appeared to be an alley. The world changed again, growing instantly more remote. The two-story buildings closed off the sun, pressing toward them from both sides like weeds on a jungle trail. Groups of older men sat next to the street on their plastic chairs underneath small umbrellas that announced their definition of a sidewalk café. They drank their tea or beer, smoked their cigarettes, and stared with surprise as the two Americans passed them.

Condley relaxed into it, overwhelmed by memories. This was his Viet Nam, as real as the villages in the countryside, and free of the hustling, false-faced striving of District One. Sad, whining music rode the stagnant air from a half dozen different windows, competing for their melancholy embrace. The odors of cook-pot steam and cigarette smoke, the brack of old food and human waste, the sweet perfume of joss sticks burning at someone’s family altar, all mixed together with the smell of his own sweat until he was inside it, carried away by it, a part of it.