by Karin Tanabe
A few men in light traveling suits boarded, hanging their hats on the hooks near every window. I watched for other female passengers, but there was only one in the car, and she seemed to be accompanying her husband. I kept my head in my book, Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which I’d brought with me from France.
As the steam engine hissed and the train started to move, the wheels chugging beneath us, I turned to watch the house of a hundred suns slowly disappearing, and then the city of Hanoi receding, too, as the train made its way to the mile-long Paul Doumer Bridge. In the distance I could see a tennis club, home to a game that was as popular in Indochine as it was at home. The train pushed past it quickly, and the houses and buildings thinned out even more as we started the bridge crossing. Below us flowed the Red River, palm trees leaning from its banks. The water, which looked murky during the day, especially from a distance, looked bright and dusted in yellow sunlight as we rode over it.
Beyond the river, the view gave way to rice paddies, the earth tamed into squares, the people working the land bent over, shielded by their conical hats while their feet sank in the mud. The rice paddies were almost an iridescent green, the plants pointing straight up into the sunny sky.
I didn’t close my eyes on the four-hour journey, as the sight of the countryside proved to be very calming. But eventually open space gave way to the sights of a city and the nerves crept my way again. When we stopped, I rushed off the train, the first to disembark. I reached for my bag, ignoring the porters trying to help me, and hurried across the station lobby’s marble-tiled floor.
I still had three hours before I had to meet the recruiter, but I quickly hailed one of the waiting rickshaws, climbed in with the driver’s help, and turned to look back at the facade of the small station. This particular sun ray was bright yellow.
After a quick ride through the city, which felt tiny after Hanoi, I checked into the hotel, the Hôtel du Commerce, an ornate white building that resembled a grand hotel in Venice.
After a long nap, made possible with the help of a very large whiskey, I changed into fresh clothes, a pair of white trousers, wide in the leg, and a dark blue blouse, perfect to set off the hat, which I wanted to keep. Trieu was right; it was something a confident woman would wear.
At five p.m., with the money tucked into my bag, I headed off in another rickshaw. I knew that somewhere behind me was the grand opera house Trieu had mentioned, and beautiful homes painted with yellow and orange ochre, like ours, but I wasn’t going anywhere near them. Victor had told me that the address I was headed to housed another café. The Café Mat Troi—it had the same name as the one where the communist had been thrown in Hanoi. He apologized but said that all cafés in Indochine seemed to have the same name.
“I suppose it’s high time we import our creativity, too,” he’d said, giving me a kiss on the head.
I sat at a glass table outside the café and ordered a Pernod and soda, not allowing myself anything stronger, as I knew it might push me from feeling bold to feeling sick.
“Madame Lesage,” said a Frenchman approaching me. He was tall and handsome and dressed more like Victor than someone who spent time with coolies in a port town. “Welcome back to Haiphong. I take it your journey was a pleasant one.”
“It was,” I said, his presence putting me at ease. His movements suggested that he’d been in Indochine for many years. He sat and ordered a fine à l’eau.
“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I’m sure you have better things to do than spend time by the dock, but this is the paper your husband requested. It’s very important,” he said quietly. “Though I suppose he knows that since he sent you.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking it from him and placing it in my bag. As I did, I reached for the money and handed it over quickly, relieved to have it out of my possession. “May I ask what exactly it is? This paper?” I said, realizing Victor had never told me. Now I felt rather embarrassed that I didn’t know what I was collecting.
“It’s a list of names,” he said. “Men that already work for you, but that are perhaps up to something untoward. Men that shouldn’t be trusted. They should, if possible, be sent back north, away from the plantations, away from you,” he said, smiling. “Men like that are capable of starting an uprising. Or worse.”
I reached back into my bag, unfolded the paper, and looked at it.
“All of these?” I asked glancing up at him. There were ten on the page. “Are you sure?”
“All,” he responded firmly. “That is what the recruiters who work farther north, on the rice farms, said. They get their information directly from men who were on the plantations but have come back home.”
“I suppose I’m glad we have such capable people working up north, then.”
“We have to,” he said. “It’s 1933. The northern corners of the country are about to ignite.”
“Well, it is I who won’t keep you,” I said. “Will you be traveling today?” I asked as I stood. “Or do you live in Haiphong?”
“I live here,” he confirmed. “I know most of us live in the bigger cities, but I’ve always liked Tonkin. The climate is much better here, and the pretty women all eventually make their way through,” he said, smiling at me. “On their way into the colony, or on their way out. Less malaria, too.”
“A winning combination,” I said.
“I think so,” he said pleasantly. “Will you be all right walking alone? Can I accompany you to your hotel or somewhere else? Or fetch you a taxi?”
“That’s kind of you, but I’ll be fine,” I said, feeling relief. I’d had nothing to worry about. There seemed to be no corpses ready to land at my feet.
“Well, then,” he said, reaching for my hand, “I hope our paths cross again soon.”
I walked slowly back toward the center of town and then, on a small side street near the opera, stopped to sit on a sunny bench and fully exhale. What had I been so nervous about?
I left the city after that, in a taxi with all the windows open, my hair flying everywhere, and spent the rest of the day in the countryside, wanting to see more of what I’d passed on the train. I was a helpful woman. A good wife.
SIXTEEN
Marcelle
October 4, 1933
“How do I look in this hat?” asked Khoi, picking up a straw boater from an end table and setting it squarely on his head.
“You look like a very handsome naked man wearing a straw hat,” I said, grinning at him.
He had been able to get Sang on a boat to Japan, and we were celebrating his freedom and our own. This meant giving all of his staff the day off, except his chauffeur. We then proceeded to take off all our clothes and swim naked, Khoi lapping me again and again. We stayed unclothed and roamed wherever we pleased. It almost felt like life in Paris.
“Let’s scream like animals while we make love again.” He’d pushed me against the door as soon as he’d closed it. An hour later, we were reclining in the living room, idly drinking lemonade spiked with gin.
“You should empty the house more often,” I said, stretching my legs onto his lap. “I like being able to do this.” I waved my hand above my head, indicating all the space that was temporarily ours.
“But how will we eat?” he asked, laughing.
“We’ll just have to cook. We do know how to cook. Or at least I do. We should be forced to do it every now and again, so we don’t forget.”
“I cooked for us in Paris,” said Khoi. “Is that already forgotten? I made you shark fin soup.”
“I’m pretty sure that was a diseased minnow that you and Sinh fished out of the Seine,” I said. “But no. That is not forgotten. I will never forget anything about those days.” I inched my legs higher on his lap. “Ever.”
“Do you think Anne-Marie is still in Italy?” Khoi asked. “Or maybe Spain? I wish I knew. I wonder if she’s even aware that Victor Lesage is here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just hope that wherever s
he is in the world, she’s found some happiness.”
“What about you?” he said, pouring me another drink. “Are you happy?”
“Me?” I said, smiling. “You and I are alone. Whenever that happens, I’m happy.”
“Good,” he said. “Because while everything we are doing is extremely important, this,” he said, gesturing to me and then to himself, “is the most important.”
“Of course. There is nothing more important to me. And there’s no greater love in Indochine than this one,” I said, “though I can see that Jessie Lesage is convinced that what she and Victor have is the most passionate love affair ever written. But I’m trying to change that slowly. She met Red at the club the other day, and he clearly had an impact on her. As soon as I can, I’ll get them both on your boat.”
“Good,” he said, eyeing me. “And your impression of her is still the same?”
“Khoi, that woman is calculating. I can see it. Every move of hers is considered. That guise of docility that she puts on, like she’s some rule-follower tiptoeing through her new country. I don’t believe any of it.”
“Maybe,” said Khoi, looking at the smoke he was exhaling instead of me.
“‘Maybe’? Please. How did that woman convince Victor Lesage to marry her? She’s pretty, yes, and has that female softness that men so often mistake for a gentle maternal quality, but that can’t have been enough. She comes from nothing. She surely relied on the age-old art of conceiving out of wedlock. He loves her now, that’s quite obvious, but I am sure he didn’t from the start.”
Khoi puffed on his expertly rolled cigarette and remained silent.
“What?” I said, annoyed.
“It’s just that when you told me about your time together at the Officers’ Club, it sounded as if you’d enjoyed yourself. As if you welcomed her company.”
“I do not enjoy Jessie Lesage’s company,” I spat, although I recognized as soon as I said it how unconvincing I sounded. “I’m telling you, she’s calculating. I’m sure she got pregnant on purpose. She probably hid half naked in Victor’s bushes and then threw herself on him when he was two bottles of wine in.”
“Oh, yes, with all those bushes in Paris,” said Khoi, laughing.
“You have too much sympathy for the devil sometimes. She sold her soul long ago. Are you forgetting the family she married into?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “Of course not.”
He kissed me on the cheek and walked upstairs to get dressed. I watched him disappear, his presence still lingering below. Sometimes I was quite sure that I loved Nguyen Khoi too much.
SEVENTEEN
Marcelle
October 4, 1933
I stretched my hands out wide on Khoi’s dining room table, enjoying the smoothness of the blood-red lacquer under my fingertips. Khoi told me that actual human blood was mixed in with the paint to make it such a color, a claim I liked to believe, even though it probably wasn’t true. It gave the piece even more history. Khoi had gone into the city to tend to some paperwork regarding the family’s factory in Nam Dinh. “The timing isn’t ideal,” he’d said after he’d received a phone call, “but we will do this again. And more often. It’s time our life in Hanoi resembled our life in Paris a bit more closely.”
Sitting at Khoi’s beautiful dining table made me think about something I’d been trying to push out of my head since arriving in Indochine, because I knew how unrealistic it was. Still, I couldn’t help but fantasize: What would it be like to eat a meal as Khoi’s wife instead of his lover? I would never know. It was the one thing I simply couldn’t will into being.
In the early 1920s a French woman married an Annamite man—the only such intermarriage in the colony, the newspapers had reported at the time. The French government intervened to stop the wedding. They succeeded the first time, but the lovebirds tried again, this time with the bride’s father declaring in writing that his daughter was of sound mind. It still remained true that while Frenchmen were allowed to impregnate any indigène woman who so much as sneezed in their direction, we French women weren’t allowed to marry their countrymen. We could only marry men like Arnaud and follow them to the colonies, provide a stable home for them, and help them be model colonists who wouldn’t grow lonely and seek local girls at night. That was our role.
But I had never been good at filling the roles assigned to me.
I heard a faint knock at the door and jumped. No one ever knocked at Khoi’s house. The door was always opened by an attentive servant before the visitor’s knuckles hit the wood. I rushed to answer it, suddenly aware that I was still wearing my dress sans undergarments. I flung the door open anyway and stared at the man in front of me, someone I never thought I’d see on Khoi’s doorstep.
“Madame Lesage boarded the morning train to Haiphong,” he said before I could bark at him.
The man’s name was Pham Van Dat, and he was the manager of the Hanoi train station. For the past two years, Khoi and I had been paying a small but regular amount for him to keep an eye on who came and went from the train station. He knew what the policeman who had killed Sinh, Paul Adrien, looked like, and he knew that if he was ever spotted, there would be a significant payout. Last month I had added two names to his watch list: Victor and Jessie Lesage. I had given him the formal portrait that had run in the newspaper when it was announced they would be coming to live in the colony. The reproduction was grainy, but Jessie was unmistakable.
“Are you certain?” I asked, after ushering him inside.
“Of course,” he replied. “And before you ask me why I appeared on Mr. Khoi’s doorstep, his valet was in the station today with his mother, helping her board a train for the coast. I heard him mention that all Nguyen Khoi’s servants had a day’s holiday.”
“But how did you know I was here?” I pressed.
“I assumed someone would be here if the servants were not,” he said. “You or Mr. Khoi.”
“So it was Jessie Lesage? You’re one hundred percent certain?” I said.
“Madame de Fabry,” he said patiently. “Please. Would I travel all the way out to Nguyen Khoi’s palace if I had any doubt? It was her. A man who was half blind would recognize her. And she was wearing a big red hat, as if she wanted to call even more attention to herself.”
“Wait,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “Did you say the morning train? Then she left hours ago.”
“Yes,” Monsieur Dat confirmed. “The nine o’clock train. It left exactly seven minutes late. No fault of mine. There was a child who refused to step away from the door. A French child.”
“But why are you telling me this just now?” I asked angrily.
“You do not pay me enough to allow me to abandon my post and risk being fired. I just finished my work. As soon as I did, I came here. By bus. There was a chicken on it. It wasn’t pleasant.”
We paid him plenty, but I couldn’t argue now.
“When is the next train to Haiphong?” I asked.
“Tonight,” he said, adjusting his tie. I was very happy he had thought to change out of his uniform. “It’s a night train. Very slow, with a long stop in Hai Duong. You won’t arrive in Haiphong until morning.”
“I’ll be on it,” I said, then thanked him. “Wait here,” I added. I ran upstairs and took a handful of piastres out of the bag of notes Khoi kept in his dresser.
“Thank you,” I said, pressing them into his hands. “And next time, just leave your post.”
EIGHTEEN
Marcelle
October 5, 1933
I was groggy when the train pulled into Haiphong shortly after seven in the morning. After leaving Khoi’s, I’d had just enough time to rush home and change my dress. I’d left Khoi a note saying that I was spending the night on the coast, but didn’t elaborate. I knew he would think I was acting too hastily, that Jessie was probably just taking a train to explore her new country. But I knew it was more than that. She was not the type to sightsee in Haiphong, nor was she of
the character to travel alone for no reason. She was going to Haiphong to do something for Michelin.
I had been to Haiphong many times over the last couple of years. The city, just east of Hanoi, was where all large ships traveling to the north of the country docked. It was also where Sinh had been killed, and where most people accused of communist activity were detained upon entry to Indochine. The poorest areas around Nam Dinh and Nghe An, also in the north, were still considered the largest red threats, but the party, even though they’d been forced to go underground, was spreading throughout Indochine, all the way to the edge of the sea. The party’s leaders in the north and elsewhere were educated men and women from the upper middle class, their members urban petit bourgeois and rural peasants. And an increasing number of those peasants had worked on plantations. The north was certainly prime recruiting ground for Michelin. In the 1920s, the truth of what life was really like on the plantations, the horrors, didn’t make it up north very fast, as the plantation recruiters had been able to sign hundreds of illiterate men to three-year agreements, which had no out clauses at all, except by escape or suicide. But when the first group of men arrived home at the end of the 1920s—a much smaller group than had left due to the high number of deaths—they brought the truth of life on a Michelin plantation with them. If they hadn’t interacted with underground communist cells when they were on the plantations, they were waiting for them when they got home.
I was the first passenger off the train at 7:20. I grabbed my small bag from the porter and hurried out of the yellow-painted station. With its palm trees in front and white stucco details, it looked as if it should be in Nice. Of course, I knew that I, too, looked as if I should be in Nice.
