A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  Soon, the beautiful yellow house was out of sight. I was sure I would return, as Victor didn’t intend to sell it, so we could use it when we were ready to visit Hanoi, but I was happy to leave for a while. We were all moving to Saigon. Lucie would enter a new school there, one of the only ones in the country that hired native teachers as well as European to teach the French children. Her day would be longer, they told us, but it was for the best. I would be busy opening real schools on the Michelin plantations, for the children, and for the coolies to learn French, a project Victor had promised me I could undertake when we had been in bed one night after I’d left the hospital. Trieu had once told me that less than one-fifth of native boys went to school. And that for girls the numbers were far less. She’d said it during one of her false odes to the French way of life, but I’d remembered the abysmal statistics. On our plantations, every child would attend school, and the laborers would be given time to study, too. Victor would see that they were given more time off to do so, for no one on a Michelin plantation should leave illiterate. Though still deeply committed to maximum efficiency and profit for the plantations, he’d sold the idea to his family by guaranteeing it would improve worker retention rates. I prayed that he would be able to keep his word.

  When I’d shared my idea with Lanh, he’d suggested that education was not just needed for the natives. That if the Europeans on the plantation were to learn Annamese, that perhaps the historically tense relationship between workers and managers might change. He suggested that it would be a good way to build loyalty to the company and to show Michelin’s investment in the colony. Victor, after looking at the relatively low financial cost of it all, had agreed.

  “Lucky for Victor to have a clever wife,” he’d whispered in my ear, recalling our first night in Indochine, and Marcelle’s declaration.

  I let his praise ring out in my mind, but I couldn’t let it sit without finally telling him the truth.

  When it was just the two of us alone, and I was at last feeling stronger in body and mind, I told him about Eleanor. I explained the way she’d died, those few seconds where I had chosen to act with myself in mind instead of her. It had led to crushing guilt that I knew would never leave me. Victor wrapped his arms around me as I cried. Then, at last, I told him about my parents. They were not dead. My father was in prison, and while my mother was free, she had lost her sanity long ago. I told him about my brother Peter, about how much of my allowance was sent off to him and my other siblings every month. I admitted that it was my intense fear of his finding me out, my fear of my daughter then being taken away from me, of a repeat of Switzerland, that had caused me to keep lying. And I told him about Dorothy—it was not because I was a clever wife that we had come to Indochine. It was because my growing pile of lies had finally caught up with me. They were the noose around my neck.

  I expected anger and a feeling of betrayal, but Victor was steady and calm. He finally spoke at length about his own father. About his mental demise and how he’d let his fear of his father’s state guide too many of his decisions. We realized, together, that we did not have to shoulder our burdens alone.

  But there was still the burden of what I’d seen. Of what Victor had orchestrated. The ten names on the list. The dead communists.

  “They were inciting rebellion,” Victor said wearily, without conviction. “It was the right thing to do. It was the police that suggested it.”

  “But they died, Victor,” I said. “They were someone’s children, too.”

  “They were no longer children,” he shot back.

  “There must be another way,” I’d pressed.

  “Yes, there is,” he’d said confidently. “We will weed out those men before they ever get that far with such plans. They’ll go to prison, and not ones of our making,” he’d assured me. “We can’t just let them roam free—our success has to come first. For Michelin, and the colony,” he’d added.

  Maybe someone like Marcelle wouldn’t have been able to stomach such a bargain, where self-interest was clearly still king, but I could.

  My family came first. Always. Even if I had to make difficult decisions for the right outcome.

  “Did you see this?” Victor said to me as our car rumbled over the bridge out of Hanoi. I looked at the newspaper in his hand.

  “Khoi is to be married. It was even in the French paper. A girl from an indigo-producing family. They own many plantations. See, there are natives who own plantations, too. We don’t have a monopoly on everything,” Victor said.

  I raised my eyebrows and took the paper from him. There was no picture of her, but I didn’t have to see her to know she was not as beautiful as Marcelle. And that Khoi would never love her. I also knew that this marriage would be as much of a sham as Marcelle and Arnaud’s, and that one day, despite my best efforts, Khoi would find a way back to her. They were impossible to tear apart.

  I looked over the bridge at the water below. Marcelle was looking at water, too. And in a few days, her view would be of the Seine. She had said many times how at home she was in Indochine. But it was my turn. It was my time to make it home.

  I finished reading the article.

  The Nguyen family had started to expand their silk empire, the writer detailed. They were building a large factory in the north thanks to their recent acquisition of the Compagnie Générale des Soies in Lyon, a company that was previously seen as a rival. It had had large textile holdings in Nam Dinh, and had the potential to compete with native companies, with Nguyen silk, if the colonial government backed it. Instead, the Compagnie Générale des Soies had just sold its holdings to the Nguyens.

  Hanoi was a very small town. Marcelle and Trieu I had managed to exile, but Khoi remained on top. The Nguyens could have their silk, but the natives could never have our rubber.

  That train ride with my family was much more enjoyable than any moment I’d spent traveling alone. And when we reached the hotel in Tourane, Victor suggested that I sleep in the same bed as Lucie. She cuddled next to me, falling asleep under my armpit with the light next to us still on. It was the first night since we’d arrived that we hadn’t needed a fan, so I just listened to her breathe, reaching down and touching her perfect face. Lucie Eleanor Michelin Lesage.

  I kissed Lucie again, then rose out of bed and found Lanh’s gift, which Lucie had placed on my suitcase, a new one with an intact handle.

  I undid the ribbon that was tied around the gift and smiled as I realized it was one of Lucie’s white hair ribbons. It was silk, likely Nguyen silk. I laid it flat on the suitcase and unwrapped the box. Inside was a large, thick sheet of paper that was rolled up tight. I slowly unfurled it, my smile growing as I did. It was the train timetable from the Hanoi rail station.

  I looked at the first line. The train to Haiphong left Hanoi twice a day, once at nine a.m., then again at six p.m. I ran my fingers gently over the schedule from left to right, then up and down. At the very top of it, Lucie had drawn a large, yellow sun.

  Epilogue

  Lucie Lesage

  Paris, France

  September 24, 1956

  “Shall I try to drop you closer to the entrance, madame?” the taxi driver asked as we pulled up to the Gare Saint-Lazare, the classical façade darkened by heavy rains. “Do you have an umbrella? I can escort you in if not, though short of forging a tunnel to the entrance, we will not stay dry. Look,” he said, gesturing outside. “This weather reminds me of the early hours of la crue de la Seine, the great flood of 1910,” he went on, his eyes darting up to the rearview mirror to see me. “I was just a boy then, but I remember it so well. Saint-Lazare, it was like a castle floating on the sea—”

  “I do have an umbrella, yes, thank you,” I said, interrupting him and reaching down to pick it up from the damp taxi floor.

  “Good,” he said, eyes back on the road. “It will help. A little,” he added, trying to maneuver the black Citroën taxi between the rows of cars all trying to inch closer to the station. I looked at the Citro�
�n’s familiar dashboard as he stepped quickly on the gas to squeeze between two more taxis that had just turned in opposite directions. My family’s company, Michelin, had become the majority shareholder of Citroën at the end of 1934. That celebratory day in December was the first time I’d ever tasted champagne. My parents had consumed at least a dozen glasses between them and were not the least bit bothered when I simply picked up a bottle and gulped straight from it.

  After the driver slowed to a stop near the main entrance, I reached in my bag and paid the fare. In front of us, men and women ran quickly, holding all sorts of things over their heads to fend off the rain—umbrellas, newspapers, small traveling bags, heavy suitcases, a towel, even a leafy branch that was doing nothing to keep the inventive young man’s head dry.

  “You weren’t alive in 1910,” the driver continued, “but you must have seen photographs of that day. The heavy rainfall. The aftermath. We Parisians are used to a drizzle, but nothing like that. Or this.”

  I nodded and pulled the belt of my beige raincoat a little tighter. “I’ve experienced rain like the day of the great flood,” I said, placing a silk scarf over my head and tying it tightly around my neck. “But it wasn’t in Paris. It was in Indochine. Many years ago, in Indochine.”

  He turned around in his seat. “Now we say le Viet Nam. L’Indochine, c’est fini.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged, “I know.” Two years ago, Indochine finally became le Viet Nam, after nearly a decade of war with France. It was still divided between the communist north and anticommunist south, but it was its own now, no longer a French colony. “When I was there,” I said firmly, “it was Indochine.”

  I opened the door and ran to the station, feeling like a well-outfitted duck. Inside, I joined hundreds of others who also looked like they’d arrived via bathtub. All around me coats were being removed and shaken out, hair patted dry, laments muttered about ruined shoes and delayed trains.

  I took off my own coat and scarf and then joined the line at the ticket counter, requesting a first-class seat for the three p.m. train to Deauville.

  “The train is delayed one hour,” the seller said. “And then, it will only leave if the rain lets up. It doesn’t look like it will, but take a chance if you’d like.”

  “I will,” I said, handing him the fare. “And you may be surprised. Sometimes the heaviest rains are the shortest.”

  He nodded politely and motioned to the man behind me to step forward.

  I took my bag and walked to the restaurants near the shopping arcade. The smell of damp clothes permeated the air along with a feeling of agitation, of having to travel with wet stockings. I entered the first café I saw, sat under a large advertisement for Rouyer cognac, and ordered a coffee. In the corner, Charles Aznavour’s “Sur Ma Vie” was playing on a record player, a song that was being hummed in every corner of France. I sipped the coffee and smiled at the waiter. “Do you have anything else?” I asked.

  “Besides coffee?”

  “No, besides this song,” I said, nodding toward the corner.

  “Of course, madame. If you think you’re tired of hearing it, imagine how I feel.” He let the song finish and then changed the record. A few seconds later Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” an American hit from a few years before, filled the room and I nodded in appreciation.

  I ordered a croissant, ate it slowly, and had started to signal to the waiter for another coffee when I glimpsed something through the café’s glass door that made my heart catch. I stood up immediately, nearly knocking over the table with my knees.

  “Are you all right, madame?” the waiter asked as he approached.

  “I’m fine. I’m sorry,” I said, reaching into my bag. “I must go.” I dropped coins on the table, too many coins, and pushed the chair back in a hurry.

  “You saw a ghost?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, without looking at him. “I saw a color.”

  I rushed back into the humming crowds. Among the dark pantlegs and damp skirts, I was sure I’d seen a flash of green silk covering a woman’s legs. But not any green. Nguyen green. A dress in the most beautiful hue caught between the practical grays and lifeless blues of the other travelers.

  I walked out to the Salle des Pas Perdus, the waiting hall, tempted to crouch onto the floor to have a better look. I was quite sure that there was only one woman in the world who would wear green silk of that particular shade in a rainstorm. Marcelle de Fabry.

  I darted from corner to corner as quickly as I could despite my traveling bag starting to feel like a sack of cement hanging on my arm. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t see Marcelle, or any woman in green silk.

  I had lived in the same city as Marcelle de Fabry for seventeen years, that much I knew, and I had never seen her. Looking for her had become a habit, especially when I was in the Fourth Arrondissement, as I’d heard she lived on the Quai de Bethune, yet until today I hadn’t even glimpsed her shadow.

  Marcelle de Fabry. The woman my mother hated. The woman who had tried to poison her, or kill her, depending on who was telling the story. My father leaned toward kill. My mother had settled on poison. Maybe it was because of these stories, or through my understanding of Indochine as I grew up, of the growing number of people, French and Vietnamese, who believed what Marcelle did, but she had become mythical to me.

  I had only met her once, but that moment had sewn itself into my memory. We had spoken in Hanoi shortly after my family arrived on a day when my mother was ill. Marcelle had come into our yellow house, conversed with my mother’s servant Trieu for quite some time, and then talked to me in a way that made me feel very grown up. She’d been wearing green silk that day. A color that I eventually learned was known in Indochine as Nguyen green.

  Perhaps I hadn’t seen what I thought I had. Perhaps it was just speaking about Indochine with the taxi driver that made my imagination conjure Marcelle, the old memories flooding me like the rain outside. I’d only spent six years in Indochine, but they were formative years. I arrived at age seven, and when we left in July 1939, just two months before France declared war on Germany, I was thirteen, and a very different child. I suppose I wasn’t a child at all.

  My parents didn’t want to leave, even with the war looming, and neither did I, but my father’s family, my grandmother in particular, insisted. The world was descending into madness, she’d said. It was safer for us to be home at such a time. Especially since my mother had just had a baby, my brother Charles.

  I had told my mother then that we were already home and she’d nodded and said, “I know. We will come back when the dust settles.” We had never returned. Since 1939, we’d all lived in Paris. Never—much to my parents’ grave disappointment—in Clermont-Ferrand.

  The extended Michelin family had made promises to my father, that much I was aware of. I knew that going to Clermont, the fulfillment of those promises, was contingent on peace and prosperity on our plantations. We had prosperity while my father was at the helm, good schools and a nicer orphanage thanks to my mother’s efforts, but we never had peace. He hadn’t been able to get the plantations to settle, as he used to call it. Even when he started spending weeks at a time at Dau Tieng and Phu Rieng when we moved to Saigon, the unrest never stopped. The family in Clermont-Ferrand was disappointed by the ongoing turmoil, the dismal mortality rates, the continued rise in communist activity. They were particularly sensitive to the unrest because from 1936 on, Clermont was no longer immune from it. In June of that year there were twelve thousand strikes in France and Michelin was included. Thousands of workers at our factories hoisted up a red flag and screamed their support for France’s largest labor union. In 1937 it was again my father’s turn to deal with uprisings, a massive strike at Dau Tieng. We sent many men to prison after military intervention, and as my father said, “It didn’t make Michelin look good.”

  But since Michelin was still financially prosperous, there were no plans to sell the land. We had held on during the Second World War a
nd during the French Indochina War, even though parts of our plantations had been destroyed and European overseers killed. “Michelin rubber will always come from Indochine,” my father declared.

  But Victor Lesage was no longer the one to guarantee that. After we returned, he was placed in charge of the Michelin guides in Paris, which had ceased being printed during the war. But in 1944 the guide was requested by the Allied forces and my father took charge of reprinting our 1939 edition. Within weeks, they were in the hands of all the American soldiers, the maps of utmost importance, and even had translations done by my mother added to the back.

  My parents had money and the right name, they’d contributed to the war effort, but they were never let inside the machine at Clermont, even when so many of the Michelins died fighting, a reality that only made the company seem more French, more important, more patriotic. That a decade later they were still making books instead of tires had taken a terrible beating on their pride. They carried that burden, but they carried it together. Through everything, my parents had held on to each other.

  Soon after we’d moved back to Paris, I found a picture in the back of an old Michelin guide, made when the covers were blue. The photograph was taken on a beautiful boat in Ha Long Bay and Marcelle and my mother were next to each other, all smiles and lightness, along with the most attractive set of people I’d ever seen. My father was not there.

  I loved that my mother looked happy, as it was taken during a period during which I remembered her as anything but. I now understood why. After Indochine, my mother was very frank with me. The early days in Hanoi had been a difficult time in her marriage, but not the hardest time in her life. That had been her childhood. I knew about Eleanor, my namesake. I’d still never been to America and my mother had only returned once, to attend the funeral of her brother Peter, who had hanged himself from an oak tree. She’d explained why he had, and said that if I ever wanted to travel to America, she’d allow it. Even to Virginia. I told her that I had no desire to. Where I wanted to go was back to Indochine. “When the dust settles,” she repeated. We both knew that it was a place where the dust had a lot of trouble settling.