A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  I peered at Khoi, who had clearly told his friends about me, unfortunate details and all. He glanced my way and gave an innocent shrug.

  “I’m not. Yet,” I said, not feeling the need to lie to them.

  “How delicious,” she said, stretching her body out even more on the small sofa. “I simply adore an affair. ‘Lover’ really is a far more charming term than ‘husband.’” It was then that I noticed that her feet were bare and that she had several gold rings on her toes, one of them in the shape of a snake. Behind us, someone had changed the music to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and it was playing so loudly that it felt like the clarinet was lodged inside my ear as it embarked on its glissando.

  “Why don’t you two head to the bar, which I think is now set up in the bathtub, and fix yourselves a cocktail,” Sinh said, winking. “I have a bit more kissing to do before I can have a conversation. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not,” said Khoi, standing. “I think if I don’t leave, you’ll drive a stake into my heart. Come, Marcelle, to the bathtub.”

  The bar was, in fact, set up in the washroom, which was packed with a mix of mostly French and international students, predominantly Annamites, many of whom lived in something called the House of Indochine at the Cité Internationale Universitaire.

  “It looks like something plucked from the countryside of Tonkin,” said Khoi, explaining it to me. “It was built by the school, or the government perhaps, to make the Annamite students feel more at home. A lovely but absurd idea. As if we can only exist inside a pagoda. Our minds work perfectly well inside stone walls with gray zinc rooftops, too.”

  “Take me to see it?” I said as I drank down a concoction that tasted 100 proof.

  “Of course. But Sinh should take you. He used to live there, so he’d make a superior tour guide. That is if they let him in. He was asked to leave his lodgings last year.”

  “Too many parties?” I asked, looking around the washroom, which we still hadn’t left. “Too many livers gave out?”

  “No, I don’t think they minded that. What they didn’t tolerate is that he’s a communist. Actually, he became a communist while living there. And a vocal one at that.”

  “Is he?” I said, unable to hide my surprise. “I didn’t think the Annamites as rich as you all were communists.”

  “I’m not a communist,” said Khoi. “I was very much a collaborationist until a few years ago, basking in my French education, loyal to the civilizing mission that France has embarked on in the colonies. But befriending Sinh changed all that.”

  “So now you’re an almost communist?” I asked, smiling. The man with the monkey perched on his shoulder had entered, and the animal was dangerously close to jumping into the bathtub and ingesting a gin rickey.

  “I suppose I’m still finding my way,” said Khoi. “But I think the rhetoric that some of the nationalist parties espouse makes sense. There are intellectuals in Hanoi associated with the movement who are first and foremost calling for freedom of the press, an end to the colonial government’s oppressive censorship. But it’s still a small movement, and from what I’ve read, they’re a bit disorganized. All these more moderate parties may have to fly the flag of the communist party eventually. I think their ideology will spread quickly now that the French are profiting so much from the colony and other Western countries pay handsomely for our rice, our rubber. We shall see. But the communists already have a very vocal brother in Sinh.”

  “Do you think Anne-Marie knows he’s a communist?” I asked as Khoi refilled my drink.

  “Anne-Marie?” Khoi said, laughing. “She’s practically a Bolshevik, according to Sinh.”

  “Is she?” I asked, shocked that a girl wearing gold rings on her toes was ready to paint the town red. “Well, I think she’s wonderful. Both of them. All of this,” I said, gesturing to the people packed in with us. On the other side of the bathroom, sitting on a small child-sized chair wedged against the sink, was a very blond Frenchman wearing sunglasses. His feet were propped up on a Victorian-era top hat, and he was playing a ukulele left-handed. “Even when I socialized with photographers and other artistic types when modeling for Vogue, I never saw all of this,” I said, zeroing in on a man whose shirt seemed to have gone missing. He had a very muscular torso, and no one seemed to mind.

  “Maybe it’s time for you to become a student of life then,” Khoi said, leaning in and kissing me.

  “Thank you for finding me,” I replied as we exited the tiny space.

  “There had to be some reason for me to be in France,” he whispered back. “Turns out you’re it.”

  Khoi and I spent the rest of 1926 tied up with each other, and very often in the company of Sinh and Anne-Marie, who had fallen completely in love with each other by the time I finished that terrible drink mixed for me in the washroom. But it wasn’t until the early spring of 1928, when I was about to turn twenty-three and Khoi had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, that the loose knots joining us together were pulled tight for good.

  It wasn’t apparent at first that Anne-Marie was rich. She did a very good job hiding it the first year that I knew her. She seemed very intelligent. Certainly well-read and well-bred. She had a little top-floor apartment, a former maid’s room, near the Palais Royal, and we spent many nights there with Khoi and Sinh on her tiny balcony, drinking wine and feeling like we were dancing on top of the world together. I was quite convinced that Anne-Marie had grown up without much, like I had, but had shed her past faster than I’d managed to, thanks to her curious nature and the luck of getting to attend university. Perhaps her family cared about the education of their girls, I thought, unlike mine. But in March of ’28 I spotted her on the street near the Arc de Triomphe. She was with a woman whom I assumed was her mother, as she was the right age, and they had the same small straight nose with a perfect swoop at the end and a comfortable intimacy between them. Anne-Marie was not dressed in men’s clothing that day. She was dressed very smartly, in a cherry-red crepe de chine dress. I barely registered what her mother was wearing, too distracted by the flash of the candy-sized diamond earrings she had on. Out of instinct, I opened my mouth to greet Anne-Marie, but closed it as soon as she looked at me with a panicked expression. When I walked past her, she winked at me quickly, but didn’t utter a word.

  The following day, she visited my apartment, a small but comfortable place in the Eighth that Arnaud was renting for me. She had a bottle of wine in hand and an explanation at the ready.

  “My parents don’t know,” she said before the wine was even open. “They don’t know that I dress the way that I do when I’m out late at night, that I cavort with foreign students, and that I refuse to act like a repressed French woman. I will not be like the past generation, like my mother. And they certainly don’t know that I joined the French Communist Party, that I write for L’Humanité under a nom de plume, and that I’ve participated in rallies and protests with the Annamite students. And most of all, they do not know that I’m sleeping with Sinh. Or that I’m in love with him.”

  I looked at her curled up on my couch, her thin body draped in a suit that I noticed must be custom-made, and suddenly she looked like a rich little girl, more scared than she had ever let on, instead of the confident, intelligent woman I had come to adore. “Who are you?” I said finally. “Whoever you are, I’m absolutely in love with you, we all are. But we might as well know all of you if we’re going to keep on this way.”

  “I’m Anne-Marie de la Chaume, and one day my parents are going to have me beheaded for all this,” she said, relaxing a bit. “But I don’t really mind. I mind enough to lie for now, to still keep things cordial with my parents, to pretend I’m just another girl at university. But that’s all I can muster. When they’re not looking, I can’t live the life they want me to.”

  “Is it that bad?” I asked, thinking that all most parents wanted for their daughters, mine included, was a rich husband, healthy children, and stability.

 
; “It is that bad. I won’t live like that. I would probably not be going on with this charade—it can be rather exhausting—if my circumstances were different, but my father is a senator, and I love him enough to not want to ruin his career. He’s worked very hard for what he has.”

  “Is he?” I asked incredulously, thinking about how at the last party we’d all attended, Anne-Marie had asked an art student to paint the night sky on her bare back and then, after two cocktails, had added that the sun should be rising on her breasts. “Your father is representing Paris?”

  “Doubs. In Franche-Comté.”

  “And your mother?” I asked, trying to remember the face of the polished woman I had seen.

  “Oh, my mother,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “My mother is his loyal servant. Isn’t that what all our mothers are? No work outside the home, no free thought, just bowing at their husband’s feet all their lives, letting them ravage their bodies and souls with baby after baby in their youth and then drinking the days away to try to forget it all later on.”

  “What will you be then? Because I quite like the you that I know. I wish that you would just be that version of yourself instead of that one I saw yesterday. The little girl in the starched pinafore.”

  “I’m not quite that, I hope,” she said, looking down at her clothes. “But I suppose being financially beholden to my parents is part of the problem. I don’t need much, but I do need to eat and pay for school. I enjoy school. I’d like to remain a student as long as I can.”

  “Your mother looks like she could provide that to you by sneezing.”

  “Oh, no, ma chère, she would never do anything as unladylike as sneeze,” said Anne-Marie, wrinkling her nose. “But it is my mother that provides for us, you are correct. She’s the wealthy one.”

  “Royalty?” I asked, reaching for a puff from Anne-Marie’s cigarette.

  “Sadly, not,” she said, waving at me to keep it. “Maybe then they’d just laugh off my behavior as eccentric. Too much intermarriage and all that, so my brain didn’t come out quite right.”

  “Well, you’re also just too pretty to be a royal,” I said, grabbing the bottle of wine from my small dining table. It was almost empty.

  “How rich coming from the fashion model,” she countered. “My father ran as part of the Bloc national on an anti-communist platform. Me being a communist is worse than me being a murderer.”

  “How did you become a communist anyway?” I asked, sipping the last few drops of Pinot Noir.

  “How does anyone? You educate yourself about the world. You realize that while you have privilege and opportunity, a possibility to create a life that is better than what you were born into, most of the world does not. And then at university, I’ve met many communists. What they say makes sense, they are pro-labor and anti-colonialism. And as you know, I met foreign students, most from countries we have colonized, chopped up as we wish to scrape them apart for our economic gain while we starve and impoverish generations of people, who we don’t really see as human anyways, because they are a bit darker or a bit yellower than we are.”

  “I don’t think we are chopping them up,” I said, raising what was left of my eyebrows at her.

  “Trust me, in some places, like plantations, coal mines, we are killing people—sometimes we don’t even bother to chop them up because that might cost more.”

  “And here I thought that all girls did at university was read Molière and meet their husbands,” I said, smiling.

  “Perhaps I have done that,” she said, grinning.

  “So, your father is on the far right. And your mother?” I asked.

  “My mother, too, of course. She is whatever my father is. But she’s also richer than he is. She’s a Michelin, of Michelin et Cie, the tire company, on her father’s side. That’s one of the main reasons I care so much about the colonies. About laborers being treated worse than farm animals. Because I am distantly attached to the whole thing. I am an oppressor through blood.”

  “I see,” I said, remembering the colorful advertisements the company had all over Paris. “These Michelins are not communists, I take it,” I asked, running my finger across the top of my now empty glass.

  “Far from it. Do you read L’Humanité? What we are doing over there, as in my family,” she said, pointing to her chest, “is slavery under the guise of patriotism. And the men managing the headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand, these third and fourth cousins of mine, they’ve been on the right for a long time—all these industrialists are. I remember my father talking about them when he explained the Dreyfus affair to me. He and the Michelins were all anti-Dreyfusards, mais bien sûr. They’ve already forbidden me from ever dating a Jew, can you imagine what they’d do if they knew I was bedding an Annamite?”

  “You fascinate me,” I said, pointing at her bare feet, her toes still adorned like they were her hands, “and now how you became you fascinates me. After seventeen months, you’re still surprising me.”

  “Like I said,” she continued, closing her eyes for a moment, “I met students who had defied their families and inched over to the left. Some to the very far left. One of those students was another named Nguyen, no relation to yours. A very intelligent boy from a small town in northern Annam. He was the one who really changed everything for me.” She leaned into me, her cheeks flushed from the wine. “You need to educate yourself about the colonies, Marcelle,” she said. “Especially Indochine, since one of the best and the brightest it ever produced is in your bed every night.”

  “We speak of the colony, sometimes,” I said. “He’s told me about the growth of the industries, the opium. Silk, of course.”

  “‘Growth’?” she spat out. “France is profiting off peasants, Marcelle. We are taxing the masses at such an obscene rate that they lose their homes, their lands, and become tenant farmers enslaved to their French masters, forced to give them at least half their output. As for opium, yes, it’s a growing industry, because we’re drugging them, too. The French have actively tried to turn the peasants into opium addicts because the tax on it is exorbitant. Opium, alcohol, and a pinch of salt here and there provide half of the colony’s revenues. It’s what got the colony out of the red thirty years ago. And while our government does all that, they also force them to practice Catholicism, then to abandon their language, their way of governing, all while we strip away their livelihoods and dignities. It started with religion, why we put our toes on that land in the 1600s, and now it’s all about money. It always is.”

  “Have you been to Indochine?” I asked.

  “No,” Anne-Marie said defensively, curling her bare feet underneath her. “But I don’t need to. I read everything I can about it. And in Paris, conveniently, Indochine has come to me.”

  “I suppose I don’t know much about it,” I said. “I’m embarrassed, but most of what you’re saying is new to me.”

  “You and Khoi need to educate yourselves further,” she reiterated. “I think most days Sinh and I speak of almost nothing else but colonialism. Unless we’re discussing sex. Or food. Or if we should put another bottle of gin in the bathtub,” she said, smiling. “To which the answer is always yes.”

  “Of course,” I said, laughing. “Just try to keep the circus animals away from it.”

  Anne-Marie looked at me and grabbed my hand. “You’re very important to me, Marcelle. This last year and a half, the four of us practically living together, it’s been a dream. But you’re too smart to just have a life built around only love and joy. You need to know what is happening in the world. And to be involved. I also think it’s high time Khoi descend from his throne and realize that men like him, the collaborationists, are a large part of the problem.”

  “I don’t think he’s that anymore,” I said. “But we will start talking about it more. Reading about it like you and Sinh do. I promise.”

  I kept that promise.

  In the haze of my new life, and rather enjoying my unofficial college education, I married Arnaud at
the end of 1928, having pushed off the wedding as long as he would let me. In December, I formally moved in with him, making my trysts with Khoi, and my nights out with Sinh and Anne-Marie, much more difficult, but I still found a way. And the universe seemed to bless my illicit union by cooperating.

  At the beginning of 1929, Arnaud had to travel to Burma for a year at the behest of the government, and I refused to go with him. There were no French women for me there, I reminded him, and I was scared of going somewhere so far-flung. Surprisingly, he believed me and sailed alone, while I sailed right back into Khoi’s apartment, and into his bed, with its view of the gray skies and the lazy river. On my first night without Arnaud, we mixed drinks in his bathroom, him fully clothed in the tub, while I sat on a small chair and tried to play the ukulele.

  In the company of Khoi and his friends, I had started to become someone different from who I was when I was a single girl working in Paris, or newly engaged to Arnaud. I was someone I liked much better. I was less inhibited, more curious, wittier, and very much sexually alive. That was it. I finally felt fully alive.

  We all were. There was a shared electricity between the four of us as long as we were together. And with Arnaud in Burma, Anne-Marie only in her second year at university, and Khoi and Sinh considering extending their studies to spend a few more years in France, it felt like we had time on our side.

  I was feeling wrapped up in luck one cold day in March of ’29 as I walked home from the market on the Left Bank when I heard someone call my name. I turned around to see Sinh waving at me in his wool overcoat.

  I hooked my bag of meat and vegetables onto my shoulder and rushed to him.

  “Khoi told me you’d be here,” he said, greeting me. “I was looking for you.”

  “Were you?” I said happily. I had, over the two and a half years I had known Sinh, spent most of my time with him in the company of others, so I felt a certain rush of delight to hear he’d been looking for me alone.