by Karin Tanabe
She turned back to the receiver and spoke very quickly before covering it with her hand.
“They said before that there was no space for a boarding student available. But now they just said that there is.”
“What a pleasant surprise,” I replied. I left Diep on the phone and walked upstairs. I opened Victor’s top dresser drawer and pulled out half of the pile of piastres that he had left for me in case anything should arise where I needed more than my standard allowance.
When I came back downstairs, Diep had finished speaking but was still gripping the receiver.
“They can take her then?” I asked, just to be sure.
“They can,” she said, an incredulous expression on her face. “They said she could come today. That she could sleep there tonight.”
“Good,” I said. “And how much are they asking for tuition?”
“It is four hundred piastres for the year,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Quite a sum. Perhaps I should have asked before saying that we would bring her today.”
It was far less than what I was holding.
“Take this,” I said, pressing it into her hands. “Enroll her for the rest of her schooldays, then. We will settle the rest of the bill later.”
Diep looked down at the money, then back at me, but did not move.
“Go enroll her,” I said firmly.
“But Madame Lesage, are you sure?” Diep said, gripping the money tightly, as if she was worried that it would fly away.
“Yes, of course,” I said, not meeting her stare.
“But you must want something to eat first? Isn’t that why you ventured into the kitchen? Let me make something for you before I go.”
“I’ll just prepare myself a sandwich,” I said, starting to walk away from her.
“Madame Lesage,” she said, causing me to turn around. “Lanh will be so surprised. So thankful. He will—”
“You may say the money is from me,” I said, interrupting her. “I don’t want him to think that you robbed the Banque de l’Indochine, but I’d rather not discuss it with him. Please ask that he doesn’t mention it or thank me in any way. I think that might make the time that we are in the car together a bit uncomfortable. For both of us.”
“Of course, madame,” she said. “Rest assured that he will never mention it to you or Monsieur Lesage.”
We walked back to the kitchen together, Diep insisting that I let the little girl thank me. She stood up as soon as the door opened. Diep spoke to her in Annamese, her words coming quickly. The girl stared at me, this time square in the face instead of at my midsection.
“Merci, Madame Lesage,” she said softly.
“You’re most welcome,” I replied. I was not going to let the capable mind of another penniless girl go to waste. Indigenous or not.
I went back into the living room, thinking of the nature of women. Of mothers and the motherless. Of young girls navigating the path from infant to mothers themselves. I had walked a very broken path to get to our beautiful house in Indochine. When I was very young, my life was about survival, though I didn’t fully understand it. Now I saw that surviving in the same house as my parents, with so little money, was a feat in itself. When I turned seven or eight, my attention shifted to the survival of others. There were four of us by then, and my parents were certainly losing interest in tending to babies. My mother delivered them and soon went back to trying to feed the mouths instead of kissing the mouths. She was constantly fighting, my mother. Fighting with her husband, fighting with her children, and fighting with herself. And along with this fighting nature came the push to try to fend off the anger and depression that so often comes with poverty. Almost every day, she lost the fight.
When I was a teenager, then the oldest of eight, my childhood was gone. All I focused on was how to keep my siblings alive, how to bring them some joy, and how to get myself out of Virginia so that I could eventually pluck them out, too. I realized that the only thing that made me the least bit special was that I could speak two languages. I took my ability to speak French, the one gift my mother had given me, and did everything I could with it. I became a teacher. I became a working woman with my own humble means. But I wasn’t making enough money to support my siblings—not one had managed to attend college besides me—and as a teacher I never would. I needed more. I needed something outside of the country, the social system I had always known. When I finally got to Paris, I became a woman with only two goals: to stay there indefinitely and to marry a man who could provide very well for me. I found that in Victor, and almost as soon as I did, he provided Lucie, too.
I went back upstairs and thought about the girl in the kitchen. I had hopefully just changed her life for the better. Alone in my bedroom, I looked in the mirror and managed to smile. Maybe I didn’t look that much like my mother, despite my dirty hair. Perhaps I didn’t look that bad at all.
TEN
Marcelle
September 20, 1933
“To the Nguyen home?” my driver asked me as I rolled up my window. When I first arrived in 1930, I always drove myself to Khoi’s house, but with the amount we drank, it proved to be a problem when one night I drove my little red car right into a lamppost. Luckily, the damage was minimal, and Khoi had the car repaired for me before Arnaud even noticed, but he insisted that if we were to drink, I had to use a chauffeur. He said he really preferred my body with my head attached.
“Yes, to Mr. Khoi’s, please,” I told Tuan, trying to sound nonchalant. I slipped him enough money in addition to his salary to know that he would always be discreet and wouldn’t spread the news of my affair all over Hanoi, but I still couldn’t shake my discomfort. Arnaud still liked to remind me that before the French colonized Indochine, local women accused of adultery were given a death sentence. And not just a simple bullet to the head. These temptresses were trampled to death by elephants for their sins. When Arnaud thought I was being too flagrant with my affair with Khoi, he would make an elephant noise and wave his arm like a trunk. At least he had not lost his sense of humor in Indochine.
As we rode out of the city, I watched as the buildings started to thin out, the grass growing greener and the trees taller beyond the city limits. Very few of the French lived so far out. This part of the city, the area to the west of the Grand Lac, was reserved for the old world, the moneyed Chinese and Tonkinois.
When we were in Paris, we never bothered to leave the city. We barely left Khoi’s apartment on the Île de la Cité, or Sinh’s or Anne-Marie’s apartments, always aiming for discretion, especially for Anne-Marie, so that her double life would stay hidden. But when Khoi and I finally found ourselves in Indochine together, it was like a whole new world was waiting for us. One lived outdoors. I discovered a side of Khoi that I hadn’t known before, like that he was an exceptional swimmer who could practically breathe underwater. He also knew the names of all the flowers that bloomed around his house, and didn’t mind sitting in the blazing sun for hours. The only times he really came inside were when I visited, and then it was usually right up to the bedroom. After seven years, that part of our relationship hadn’t cooled in the least.
But now, with Jessie and Victor in the colony, we had far less time for days spent in the bedroom. We had much more work to do.
Since Khoi and I had been reunited, we’d been trying to fulfill our promise to Anne-Marie to find out what really happened to Sinh, which had proved, so far, to be an impossible task. We knew Paul Adrien, the man who had killed him, was in France. To avenge our friend’s death, we turned our energies to spreading the message of communism through the growing cells embedded on the plantations, all while bringing major instability to the Michelin machine.
For several years, we’d known that a large communist uprising could be enough to push Michelin out of the colony, to sell their massive holdings. The strike in 1930 involving 1,300 men at Phu Rieng during Tet had nearly caused Michelin to leave. They had viewed it as a communist uprising, when really it
had just been their employees asking for basic rights.
Anne-Marie confirmed through company documents she was able to obtain that Michelin management were seriously considering leaving despite the millions they’d poured into their holdings. Even the French newspapers I’d read said the rubber men in Clermont-Ferrand were terrified. That was when we realized that a mass strike, undeniably fueled by communist sentiment, could scare the Michelins out of the colony, the best revenge of all.
Their plantations would take on other ownership, yes, but they would surely bring more humane labor practices. The other plantations in Cochinchina had a retention rate of nearly 90 percent of workers. On Michelin plantations, only 30 percent signed another contract, and those who did so simply couldn’t afford the train journey home. Laborers were better off anywhere but Phu Rieng and Dau Tieng.
After Anne-Marie found the reports, Khoi started to give more money to a communist party member who made frequent trips from Hanoi to the plantations. He also increased the payments to a man he’d hired, Tran Van Sang, to be his eyes and ears on the plantations. We needed a repeat of the Phu Rieng strike, but this time, it needed to occur on both plantations.
But with Victor’s shocking move to the colony, things had changed again. It was imperative that Michelin be turned upside down, and that Victor be viewed as the one who let the communists light the match. For Victor was nearly as complicit in Sinh’s death as André Michelin.
In 1930, Anne-Marie had discovered that Victor had actually transmitted every correspondence between Michelin and the secret police. He had even sealed the envelope that held the death warrant for Sinh. The men in power at Michelin had decided to execute him, but Victor had been the messenger. Now, he was in Indochine to bring peace and prosperity to the plantations and then be rewarded when he returned to France. I was hell-bent on making sure that it never happened. Victor needed to be seen as the family failure, and soon.
Tuan opened the car door for me when we pulled up to Khoi’s home, then drove off to idle elsewhere, as he knew we preferred. I had sent Anne-Marie a photograph of Khoi’s house when I’d first arrived a few months after the 1930 strike—I wanted so badly to feel like we were still tied together, still as close as we’d been in Paris—but she’d never acknowledged it. A different world had started absorbing her by then.
Before I could ring the bell, the imposing front door was opened by Khoi’s head housekeeper, Kim Ly.
“Monsieur Khoi is finishing his morning swim,” she said as she opened the door wider, expressionless as always.
She walked me through the three sitting rooms, even though I could have found my way in the dark, and opened the large glass door that led to the backyard. Unlike in central Hanoi, where Arnaud and I lived, with little space for gardens, Khoi had several acres.
Kim Ly left me silently, and I propped myself against a chair, still in the shadow of the house’s deep roof. I looked out to the pool and watched Khoi’s body move fluidly as he did his laps. Khoi was the only Annamite in all five regions to have a private swimming pool, another detail that made him legendary. He swam another hundred meters before he noticed me, then stopped in the middle of the pool and did a few quick strokes to the edge. He braced his muscular arms on the side and pulled himself out in one smooth motion, then stood up and shook out his thick black hair, which seemed much longer when it wasn’t combed back with pomade. A boy rushed over with a folded white towel and Khoi’s metal-rimmed sunglasses. He put them on, quickly used the towel, and walked up to me in his bathing trunks.
“Hello, darling,” he said in his deep voice, pulling me against him and laughing as I squirmed at his wet touch. “You’re early, yes?”
“I’m late,” I countered.
“Are you? How unlike you,” he said, smiling. “Would you like to swim? The water feels perfect on a day like this. Scorching, isn’t it?”
I looked at his broad, dark shoulders, glistening with beads of water that he had missed with the towel. They trickled down his firm back like tiny pieces of glass.
“Scorching,” I replied.
After seven years, I still had trouble taking my eyes off Khoi. Every inch of him still mesmerized me just as it had the first time we had been naked together. It had been in Khoi’s apartment, in the middle of the day, and when he asked if I wanted to draw the blinds, I’d said no. I hadn’t considered how it would make me sound. My carnal instincts were winning over my modesty, and I’d very much wanted to see him, all of him, in full daylight. As flooded with light as it was in Indochine, it was still how we preferred to make love. That hadn’t changed, but so much had. Our relationship felt far bigger than just us now.
“Let’s head upstairs,” he said, putting his cold lips against my neck. “You can help me get dressed, and I can help you get undressed.”
After we had made love for nearly an hour, we pulled apart on his bed, and one of Khoi’s servants rolled us cigarettes. As soon as he had finished, he lit mine and then Khoi’s.
“I’ll light the rest of Madame de Fabry’s cigarettes,” said Khoi. “Thank you.” He dismissed him with a nod.
“Apologies,” he said, propping himself up higher. “He’s new.”
When I started coming to his home—or La Maison Lua, the silk house, as the outsiders called it—I had been shocked by how many servants he had. None of us had had any in Paris, which had just added to our sense of wildness and freedom. But that was gone here. In Khoi’s house, I soon learned that even when he dismissed them, they stayed right outside the room, waiting in case he called for them. This meant that we wanted for nothing, but they could hear us making love. It was a very strange adjustment after the anonymous student life we’d lived together in France, but Khoi said they were his father’s servants, as was the house, so everything had to remain as it had been.
I fell in love with the silk house immediately. But I found it strange that Khoi lived in it alone while the rest of his family lived in the city.
“My father wants me to live here, and live this way,” Khoi had explained. “In many ways, he is a collaborator just like Sinh’s father. Perhaps not to that extreme, but just one step beneath. As I am his eldest son, he insists that I live like a little French nobleman. He thinks it’s important for me, as the most Western of us all, to entertain the government officials, show off my perfect French, quote their great writers, eat their food in front of them so they think of me as one of the good ones. So that they consider me a friend—inferior, of course, but still a friend. That way, if the colonists succeed in producing silk, like they did rubber, perhaps they’ll let us keep a finger in it. It’s a business decision, and he expects me to play along.”
“But you don’t mind,” I’d said, looking around the house. “Admit it.”
“I used to,” he’d replied. “After Paris, where I embraced a far simpler lifestyle, I minded very much. But now that you’re here, I mind less. Besides, if I say yes to everything my father asks, he tends to ignore my personal life. And right now, we really need him to ignore our extracurricular activities.”
I turned around in bed and looked at the wall to the right of us. On it was a framed picture of Anne-Marie and Sinh. She was in her usual tuxedo, and he was carrying her in his arms like she was a new bride. They were barefoot, and he was walking down stone steps right into the Seine. I remembered the moment so vividly. It had been a few minutes past dawn, and I was just outside the frame as Khoi shot the photo. At first, the two were simply dancing around by the banks, and by the end of it, they were swimming in the river. When we’d heard a police whistle from a nearby bridge, all four of us had run, Khoi dropping the camera but going back for it. It was as if he knew that the film inside would one day be precious to us.
Since leaving Anne-Marie in Paris in 1930, we had had long periods where we’d lost contact with her. She had at first remained in her parents’ home, finishing her university years and adhering to her parents’ demands while still secretly writing for L’Humanité. Bu
t in 1932, her parents had discovered that she was still involved with the paper, that she was continuing to spread a communist message in direct opposition to her father’s political beliefs, and this time from right under their roof. Furious, they’d shut her out of their home. With no family, and Paul Adrien still unfindable, there was nothing left for her in Paris. The last we had heard, she was in Rome, having joined an Italian underground political group fighting against Mussolini and fascism.
In the last letter that I received from her, sent from Rome, she had written, “I do dream about coming to Indochine one day, despite my banishment from the colony. I feel perhaps my body would be revived if I went there, if I saw Sinh’s world, met his parents, if they would even meet me. But the truth is, I know my soul wouldn’t make it. You wouldn’t recognize me, Marcelle. I’m a shred of myself.”
“We will just have to be the ones to carry on then,” Khoi had said after we hadn’t heard from her for four months. “We must succeed in pushing the Michelins off their thrones.”
The whole country needed to be taken out of French hands—it became our ultimate goal, because it had been Sinh’s dream. To put the country back in the hands of its sons and daughters. There were over twenty million Annamites in the colony and less than thirty thousand French, and yet they, we, controlled it all. That had to change.
“I want to talk about Victor Lesage,” Khoi said, turning back to me, his body wrapped up in the silk sheets. I nodded. I had thought of little besides the Lesages since they’d arrived.
“That night at the Officers’ Club, he said—”
“He said, according to Arnaud, that he’s determined to make the plantations more profitable than they are. ‘Increase our profit margins, by any means necessary, even in a time of economic crisis.’ He’s also panicked by labor unrest, about the negative newspaper stories that come with it. He deemed all that to be as pressing as their margins. And then he beat them all flat at billiards.”
