by Karin Tanabe
Our marriage commitments when we first made them had felt rushed—genuine, but perhaps devoid of deeper thought. On that day, when Victor sat at my feet—though I still had to keep certain realities from him—it felt as if we were finally truly married, love and sacrifice bonding us to each other.
He put his hand over my ring, and together, we swore never to speak of Switzerland again.
EIGHT
Marcelle
September 12, 1933
“We already know about the kind of man Victor Lesage is,” Khoi had said when we’d read the shocking news about his impending arrival in the colony. “But let’s wait and see about his wife. Let’s find out what we can about her now, but when they arrive, let’s get to know her before jumping to conclusions. After all,” he had said, “think about how little you know about Arnaud’s work. About his decisions. You don’t play a role in any of his professional ones and very few of the personal. Let’s imagine the same is true for her.” I agreed. Arnaud lived a very separate life from me; the same could be true of Jessie and Victor Lesage. I hired the investigator in Paris, but I did nothing further. Since we’d met, I had valued everything that Nguyen Van Khoi said.
His words, his actions, his presence in my life—they had transformed me. He had made me a person who wanted not just to taste the world, but devour it. Perhaps I had shown hints of this person when I was a child in Lille, a rebellious girl who grew up too quickly, but Khoi brought her out fully. Then he kept pulling and saved me from the petit bourgeois, narcissistic existence I was destined to have as Arnaud’s wife.
My connection to Khoi was stronger than anything I’d ever felt with Arnaud. And I knew it from the day we met.
It was October 23, 1926, the kind of autumn day that was meant to be etched in one’s memory. The leaves weren’t browning yet, just flaming at the edges with oranges and reds, and the air was crisp and clean, as if there wasn’t one car humming around us, one fire burning. It smelled like the countryside even though we were in the heart of Paris.
I was twenty-one years old, recently engaged, and, because of the promise of my future life, feeling very grown up and sure of myself.
I was running an errand for Arnaud, who had been having trouble tracking down a book he needed, written by an obscure economist. He thought perhaps bookstores on the Right Bank would have it but didn’t have time to look himself. Arnaud was thirty-two and a rising star not only in business but also as an adviser to the government, and was full of confidence for our country as it flourished along with many others during those years.
With more time on my hands now that I no longer had to seek out a suitable husband—a pursuit my mother had forced me into as if it were a profession—I volunteered to look for the book. I was still working as a fashion model, but Arnaud wanted me to put an end to that when we were married, so I was already slowing down, saying no even to pictures for Vogue magazine.
If Arnaud had known what would happen that day, he would have let me say yes to Vogue.
Perhaps I’ll look near the Sorbonne, I thought, in one of the bookstores frequented by students. Of course, most of them did not follow Arnaud’s line of thinking about France—he was a man who embraced economic liberalization, not socialism—but bookstores in the Latin Quarter always had so many titles in stock, since students were the most voracious readers in Paris, I’d been told, even reading things they didn’t agree with so they could grow stauncher in their positions.
I walked down boulevard Saint-Michel, with a particular store in mind, and passed small groups of students in animated conversation, their clothes a bit worn and purposefully oversized. I was certainly dressed more nicely than they were, thanks to my work and, of late, to Arnaud, but I felt a tinge of jealousy as I passed them, especially the women. I would have loved to have been one of those students, but that was never an option for me. To marry well, that was the only thing that would enable me to overcome my lower-class start in life.
As I turned onto the rue Serpente, I spotted a rather charming café and decided that if I found the book, I would treat myself to lunch there. Arnaud wouldn’t mind. Even though we were only engaged, I was already drawing an allowance from him. It was generous, but not too generous—he was an economist, after all.
I never found the book. I didn’t even make it to the store. But I did make it to the café.
I was just a few paces past it, still on the rue Serpente, when I saw him. He was a student, I thought, since he was carrying an armload of books, but nothing else about him blended in with the surroundings. Not his clothes, not the way he wore his hair. For others, the fact that he was the only homme Asiatique on the street might have made him stand out, but not for me. It was his carriage, the way he walked, even the way he held so many books with ease. Everything about him was elegant and effortless. I stopped to look at him, holding him too long in my gaze, and when he looked back at me, I didn’t turn away. Perhaps because of my boldness, he walked up to me and asked whether I was lost. Whether I needed help. And in that moment, I felt as if I was lost; I did need help—just not the kind he thought I did. What I needed was to be saved from the life I was about to make for myself.
As soon as he spoke that first sentence, I knew everything was going to change for me. I knew it the way I had known I was not going to spend my life in the wrong corner in Lille, and the way I had known Arnaud was going to ask me to marry him. I was just sure.
Because of that, I did the oddest thing. I started to laugh.
He looked at me oddly, then started to laugh, too.
“I know why you’re laughing at me,” he said, without any hurt in his voice.
“You know?” I repeated, suddenly worried that he could hear my inner thoughts.
“Yes. Because I am a foreigner, while you, I am assuming, are French, and here I am offering you help,” he explained. “You think that’s quite strange.”
“That is why I’m laughing,” I said, though it wasn’t. “But I don’t think you’re strange. I think it’s very kind of you.”
“The secret is,” said Khoi more softly, his French as pointed and perfect as a Parisian’s, “that you should always ask foreigners for directions. We had to learn the city, not just have its compass automatically built into our French souls. So, I’ll repeat my question. May I help you find something, mademoiselle?”
“I was searching for a book,” I said, staring at the stack in his hand. “But then, to be honest, I glimpsed this little café a few steps back, and I stopped thinking about the book and started thinking about how lovely the place looked and how much I would like to have lunch there. And then I saw you, and I suppose I started thinking about something different altogether.”
“Café du Soleil, yes? With the red-and-white-striped awning? I’ve eaten there several times and it is quite good.”
He hugged the books closer to his chest and added: “I’m Nguyen Khoi. Or Khoi Nguyen, as the French prefer to say it. As you might have guessed, I’m a student here.”
“I did, but only because of the books,” I said. “Nothing else about you says student.”
“No?” he asked. “And I’ve been trying so hard to look like one. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve been in Paris for years. I went to the Lycée Condorcet before coming here, but I’m still trying to conquer the student look. I even scuffed up these old shoes to get the right effect. How is it you all describe it? The shabby intellectual.”
I looked down at his wing-tip oxfords, which were immaculate except for a small scuff on the side of the left one, and laughed. “Are you trying to look poor, Nguyen Khoi?” I said, trying to pronounce his name the way he just had. “Because I don’t think you know how to. And from what I’ve learned in Paris, poor boys certainly don’t attend Condorcet.”
“I think I’m just trying to get these to blend in,” he said, waving at his clothes, “because this never will,” with a gesture toward his face. “Not that I mind,” he clarified.
“Neithe
r do I,” I answered, my eyes locking on his dark ones for several seconds.
He looked at me differently after that. We went to the Café du Soleil and stayed for four hours. By the time we left, I was quite sure I was in love with him.
Our affair started a week later. I wanted desperately to call off my engagement to Arnaud as soon as I tumbled into bed with Khoi, but Khoi advised against doing anything irrational. He pointed out that I wasn’t due to be married for a year or more, and that perhaps there would be other ways to handle our love by then. That’s how he said it: “handle our love.”
What I didn’t know then, and what would take me months to figure out, was that Khoi could never marry a Western woman. He was from a very prominent Annamite family. His marriage would be an arranged one, with a girl as close to him in social stature as possible, and if he resisted his parents’ wishes, he would lose everything he stood to inherit. They were in the silk business, he said, and had managed to hold on to everything despite the rapid French colonization that began nearly forty years before. Not many Annamite families had been able to hold on to their land, their factories, or increase their wealth; perhaps five or ten thousand in a country of nearly twenty-three million had managed. I quickly got the impression that the silk Nguyens were in the upper echelon of those families, although that, losing that stature, he said, wasn’t what weighed on him. What he didn’t want to lose was his family.
But until he went back to Indochine, we could pretend that the world wasn’t against us.
We made the most of our time. We made the most of being in love. And almost as impactful for me as being in bed with Khoi, as breathing in, trying to absorb such a fascinating person, was the shift out of Arnaud’s moneyed but incredibly boring world into Khoi’s passionate, academic life full of people as wonderful and as curious as him. And because Arnaud was far more focused on work than he was on me, he didn’t even notice my dramatic turn away from him.
I would not have found myself in Indochine years later if it hadn’t been for the little community Khoi had built in Paris. Khoi shifted my world, but his friends were the ones who managed to spin it in circles.
A month after Khoi and I met, he woke me up abruptly at four o’clock in the morning. I wanted to chastise him, but he was grinning and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but laugh.
“You want that, this early?” I said. “I should send you to Pigalle instead.”
“An innocent foreigner like me? A docile Asiatique? I don’t even know where that is,” he replied, lowering his body on top of mine.
“And I do want that, I always want that with you,” he said, and I could feel just how much he did. “But that’s not why I woke you up. I thought it was time you get to know a bit more about me. And the best way to do so is to meet the misfits I’ve been keeping up with in Paris.”
“You? Misfits?” I said, trying to imagine Khoi fraternizing with anyone who wasn’t the height of sophistication, as he was. “But what would Nguyen Van Thanh think of that?” I said, referencing his father, whom he had only recently told me about.
“My father would swim here with a pistol tied to his hand if he knew, but that’s why I keep my letters home mostly about my studies and the weather. My parents think it rains every day here. I’ve told them that it helps me stay studious.”
“Studious indeed,” I said, my hand moving down his naked body.
“This first,” he said, moving it all the way between his legs, “and then I will show you why I woke you at this cruel hour.”
We made love as quietly as two people who have just started making love could, and while still breathless from having climaxed, Khoi pulled me out of bed and helped me put on my dress from the night before, as it was conveniently on the floor. I pulled on my coat and a hat and watched as Khoi wrapped a scarf around his neck.
“What are we venturing out to do exactly? Ski?”
“No. We’re off to Pigalle,” he said, straight-faced.
“Khoi. You can’t be serious.”
“I’m very serious,” he said, grinning and pulling his hat on, too. “Well, not Pigalle exactly, but to the Eighteenth. We have a party to attend.”
“At this hour?” I asked as we walked outside, the Seine at our feet and the ornate cedar spire of Sainte-Chapelle shooting toward the sky behind us. Khoi hailed an old black taxi, and we jumped inside. “Who has a party that starts at four thirty in the morning?”
“Who said the party began at four thirty?” he countered, giving the driver the address. “It started yesterday evening. But you and I were … a bit busy,” he said, running his hand between my legs. “So I thought we’d sleep a little and catch the tail end. Or probably the middle. These parties sometimes go on for a week and only fizzle out because someone has to go to the hospital.”
“Whose party is it?” I asked as the taxi slowed down as we turned onto the rue Frochot. “Bacchus’s?”
“That’s not a terrible comparison, actually. But no. It’s Cao Van Sinh’s party. He is my brother here, as close as my real brothers. You can call him Sinh. Or brother Sinh. He’s Annamite as well, though I suppose you guessed that,” he said, grinning. “Our names haven’t really caught on en métropole.”
“No? Well, I plan on naming my firstborn Khoi.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he said, taking my hand. “As for Sinh, I didn’t know him before I came to France. We met two years ago, when he moved here for university. His family is very well-off, but he managed to stay at home for his early schooling. Boys like him who live near Quoc Hoc in Hue—that’s in the protectorate of Annam, where the emperor lives—get to do that. It’s a very elite school. But he came here for university, his parents insisted. Sadly, he’s not studying economics with me. He’s learning law. Or how to break laws, if we’re being quite honest.”
“He sounds charming,” I said, trying to picture Hue on the map of Indochine that Khoi had drawn for me during an early encounter. “Why have you kept him hidden away?”
“It’s you I’ve been keeping hidden. The last thing I need is for Sinh to fall in love with you. And how could he not?” he said, squeezing my hand. “But I ran into him yesterday and he told me that he was mad for a French girl named Anne-Marie de la Chaume. A fellow student and a bit of a rabble-rouser, from how he described her. He asked me to stop over tonight to help convince her to fall in love with him.”
“Maybe you should have drunk less last night, then,” I said as we exited the taxi.
“No, I’m fine. And he will be, too. You’ll see. It’s actually very hard not to fall in love with Sinh. But please don’t. My heart couldn’t take it.”
“You do know I’m due to marry next year,” I said, instantly regretting having brought it up.
“I know,” said Khoi. “But you don’t love Arnaud. And I won’t love my wife either. This,” he said, touching my heart, “will always exist for us.”
Hand in hand, we walked inside the building and took the little elevator to the top floor. We could hear the noise from the party growing louder as we climbed higher.
“Don’t the neighbors complain about the noise?” I asked, the music playing from the phonograph perfectly audible before we even knocked on the door.
“The neighbors? I’m sure they’re all here, and intoxicated,” he said, not bothering to knock.
I hesitated to walk inside the large apartment, something I had done very few times in my life. But I had never seen a party quite like the one that was suddenly playing out in front of me.
“Where is Sinh?” I asked after a moment. Khoi pointed to the couch.
I looked and saw a slim Annamite man folded around the body of a girl, in passionate embrace.
“Anne-Marie?” I asked, smiling.
“Who knows!” said Khoi, laughing. “But let’s find out.”
A Frenchman in a smart suit was standing next to me. It took me a moment to realize that the pants were three inches too high on his ankles, and there was a small mon
key, wearing a purple sweater and matching knit hat, perched on his shoulder. I inched away, moved through the group of bodies, trying to attach myself to Khoi. When we reached Sinh, Khoi slapped him on the back with gusto.
“You’re here, you filthy bastard,” Sinh said after pulling his friend onto the sofa. “And at just the wrong time, as always.”
I was intrigued by Sinh, but I was transfixed by the woman he had just stopped kissing. She had stretched out on the couch and had her hands behind her head as if she were in a hammock. Her brown hair was very short and slicked over to the right in a deep part. She was petite, very slight, and wearing a man’s tuxedo, though the crisp white shirt was barely buttoned above her naval.
“Hello,” she said, registering that I was staring at her. “I’m Anne-Marie de la Chaume.”
“Marcelle Martin. A friend of Khoi’s,” I said, returning her smile.
“Oh, a friend, are you?” she said, batting her lashes over green eyes. “How lovely. Well then, I suppose I’m a friend of Sinh’s. He and I only met formally, and by formally, I mean physically, this evening, but he’s been following me around like a lost dog for months. I don’t think he thought I noticed, but I certainly did. How can you not with someone like him?”
I didn’t think anyone could be more appealing than Nguyen Khoi, but I could see that Sinh was strong competition.
“So, you’re why I haven’t seen this utter fool for a month,” said Sinh, standing and kissing my hand. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Khoi, who was a bit over six feet, but he had broad shoulders and was wearing a three-piece suit that fit him exceptionally well. “I see why he’s kept you hidden.”
“You are very pretty,” said Anne-Marie, rearranging her shirt to show even more of her flat chest, “and perhaps, pretty as you are, very married?”
