The Frogs and My Magical Mandolin

The rainy season came to Vietnam shortly after I arrived and it didn’t seem like it was ever going to end. The reason that Lin said every Vietnamese song was about the rain was that it never truly went away. There was the season when it rained all day and all night and then there was the season where it got hot as hell every day and only rained around four in the afternoon to cool things off. I never minded being caught in that rain because it felt so good and I knew that a half-hour after it stopped I would be completely dry.

The period right after I arrived in Vietnam just seemed to a very damp and monotonous time. The only sounds permeating through the bleak, gray sky was the alternating whirring and whacking of huey rotor blades and the constant slamming of raindrops onto the metal roofs of the barracks.

On one of those rainy days Tony and I rode a bus into Saigon to take some pictures, play around with the tea girls on Tu Do Street, and just do our Hemingway thing, which boiled down to getting away from the structure of Long Binh and into the helter skelter of the city with absolutely no rules—or a lot of rules that everyone seemed intent on breaking. The object was to interact as much as possible with the locals so as to feel that the war, and our year in it, didn’t become just an exercise in keeping our noses clean. When we went to Saigon we were looking for trouble—not big trouble with a capital T but maybe mischief with a small m.

The thing about a city like Saigon is you don’t have to go looking for anything. Everything comes to you. Girls with heavy makeup wearing clothes like they imagine the girls back home are wearing approach you, even stalk you, except that GI’s don’t generally think of women as stalkers. Then there are the cyclo and pedi-cab drivers looking to take your money and drive you anywhere you wanted to go—even if it was just to the next corner.  And, of course, there is no way to escape the beggars, buyers, sellers, and pushers—and always the MP’s, constantly watching to see just which one of these groups you eventually fall in with.

On this particular day a man on the sidewalk approached me with a ridiculous offer. He held in his hand a gourd with a stick coming out of it and a plastic string attached to it. He frantically ran alongside us, tugging at my sleeve, until he was finally able to position himself in front of me and begin his sales pitch, plucking at the string as if it were a real musical instrument, all the while screaming that for 200-dong this musical monstrosity could be mine. 

It was not an uncommon experience to have some useless object offered to you on the streets of Saigon and it was easy enough to wave the seller off and just keep moving, but—well, I don’t know. Maybe he was just a very good salesman or maybe I just thought this would be a good time in my life to break down and buy a one-string mandolin. Anyway, I pulled 200-dong out of my pocket, an amount that to this day I have no idea what it is really worth, but I gave it to him and accepted the stringed gourd and accompanying bow that he put in my hand.

Later that day, back in the barracks I fiddled around with my new toy only to discover that I had probably paid 200-dong too much for it. It was useless in the sense that I could only pluck one sound—I hesitate to call it a note. Even using the bow, I quickly learned that I could create only one ear-piercing, shrieking, god-awful squeal. I was between a pile of gravel and a soft place in the sense that even though the instrument was useless, I had paid practically nothing for it.

Around this time I realized that there was a third sound in addition to the constant spinning of the rotor blades and the rain hitting the metal roof that I had somehow completely overlooked. It was the sound of frogs. It sounded like a million, maybe two—it could have been less, I suppose, or it could have easily been more, but every night the croaking of the frogs would fill the night air making it hard to talk, sleep or think—or anything else except maybe drink. This was a rainy season sound that obviously had been going on for quite some time but somehow, I had missed it.

Could anything, short of a change in the climate or the morning sun, shut the frogs up, I wondered—and then it came to me. Even as a young boy I knew that there were whistles that could only be heard by dogs. What if, I wondered, this new instrument of mine that made a sound that caused humans to cringe—what would the frogs think of it? Would the sound somehow make them forget whatever it was that they were raging at and cause them to flop down on their flubby stomachs and relax? I stepped out of the barracks into a clearing and drew the bow across my single string mandolin—and continued to do so over and over again, back and forth.

Screeeech. Screeeech. Screeeech.

It was excruciating, unbearably painful and unthinkably irritating and yet—and yet, for some unfathomable reason the frogs seemed to like it. Like it—they loved it, or so I imagined, because I suddenly had an audience of a million frogs who dropped what they were doing, cleared whatever it was in their throats that was driving them crazy and turned their attentive little frog ears to the melodious music I was offering them. And they did all this in utter silence.

They were putty in my hands for when I stopped, they started up and when I played they shut down and we, the frogs and I, did our little dance on that rainy night, until, at last and not surprisingly, the string on my bow broke, the music stopped and the croaking resumed.

I eventually went to sleep that night, as I did every night, to the sound of a million frogs but now also with the knowledge that for a short time, a very short time, indeed, I had possessed the most elusive of all musical instruments, something that might only be found in fairy tales—a magical one-string mandolin. 

   

This story appeared in the web magazine Short Fiction on May 27, 2011 under the title, The Frogs and My One-String Mandolin.