He had shrugged, now standing close to her. “For the money I would pedal a waterbull all the way to hell.”

“They don’t have any money.”

“Then why are we here?” Now they both had laughed. Dzung touched her hand and folded down the seat pad in his cyclo. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you give me a mango, I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Her name was Tu. She was eleven years younger than Dzung and had seen the war only through a child’s eyes. Slowly, with a delicacy that made him ache, she sliced the mango for him. And then she climbed into the seat. He drove her away on his cyclo, devouring the mango as he pedaled, pointing to this old building and that former hotel as they passed through the haunted, quiet streets of the dark days. He took her to the Ben Thanh market near the old abandoned railroad station and showed her how to sell her fruit. And by the time he left her at the crowded bus stop for her trip back to Bien Hoa, Dzung knew he would always love her.

She came into Sai Gon twice a week. From then on he would meet her at the bus station, taking her to the Ben Thanh market, hovering over her like a protective hawk while she sold off her father’s fruit. Then they would spend hours as he pedaled her along the city streets, talking and laughing, sometimes even daring to trust each other and speak about the past.

Within a month he had traveled with her to the small village near Bien Hoa to meet her family. He brought her father a small dog in a wire cage and gave her mother a silk scarf a Cuban woman had dropped and abandoned on Dong Khoi Street one afternoon during a violent rainstorm. Then he apologized to them for coming by himself when tradition required that he bring his own family with him, assuring them he meant no disrespect but that all of his family was dead or missing from the war. Her father understood and judged Dzung to be an honest and industrious man. And in another two weeks they were married.

That was fourteen years ago. Now, five children later, she lay exhausted next to him, starting to stir from the wails of their newest child. Their nine-year-old daughter, Thuc, had crawled sleepily from another bed and picked up the baby. Still half asleep, Thuc was holding him in the dank darkness of the shack, rocking him back and forth, her toes digging into the mud of last night’s rain as the baby sucked hungrily at her bare shoulder.