The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  “He promised us,” Anh insisted. “He promised to take us with him. There was supposed to be a car. This morning, he said.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sister Anh. The doctor told me to tell you that he tried, but couldn’t negotiate to take anyone else besides his own family. He’s very sorry he couldn’t help you.”

  Anh turned to me. “He promised us.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder and led her out. The nurse stopped us at the door and handed us a small box sealed with tape—our gold deposit.

  AFTER taking Anh home, I was going over to my father’s house when I saw a helicopter lifting off the MACV headquarters. The once-busy compound was empty, the main doors closed. The steel gates were shut, the familiar U.S. MPs gone. Anyone who was going to be saved was already inside the main building. On the rooftop, helicopters were evacuating American personnel and some lucky Vietnamese who worked for them. Watching them rising away effortlessly, I thought I could smell the stink of death seeping into the city. It was truly over. The Americans weren’t just leaving, they were running, flying, bolting out as fast as possible.

  Father was in the living room drinking tea with a neighbor. He said Hung had gone over to my home to tell me that there were ferries taking evacuees out to sea at Ben Bach Dang. Hong was already there, and Hoang had just left. Hien was still at the police academy in Thu Duc. Father had decided that my stepmother, three sisters, and youngest brother would stay in Vietnam with him. Escape was too dangerous for them. I rushed back home, missing Hung by minutes.

  “We have to go to the ferries now!” I said to Anh.

  “We don’t have a car,” she said.

  “Get the kids ready. Tell your brother, sister, and mother that if they want to come with us, they must be ready in ten minutes.”

  “You go first and find us a place on the ferry. I’ll get a car and follow you. We’ll meet you there.”

  “I’ll wait for you by the pier, at the lamppost next to the banana vendor.”

  THE eight-mile drive to Ben Bach Dang took twice as long as usual. Traffic was crazy. I saw half a dozen crashes. Throngs of people were fleeing to the pier. The military vehicles and cars that I had seen early this morning were now parked haphazardly by the riverside. The dock was littered with abandoned cars, bicycles, motorbikes, and luggage. No one even bothered to pick them up. I arrived just in time to see the last ferry cast off its moorings. The ship was dangerously overloaded, every inch of its deck packed. People hung onto the railing, calling to friends and relatives who didn’t make it aboard. Some jumped into the churning water and swam after the ship. I pushed my way to the edge of the dock. Hoang was on the ferry. I yelled and waved at him, but he didn’t see me. I didn’t see Hung anywhere. If Hoang was on this last ferry, there was little chance Hung was on it as well. After telling Hoang about the ferries, Hung had wasted more time crossing the city to look for me. My heart pounded violently in my chest. What if Hung had gotten into an accident on the way back here? I screamed out his name, my voice lost in the cacophony. Hung had taken an immense risk trying to help his brothers escape. In this desperate panic when everyone was solely focused on his own survival, my dear brother Hung did not think of himself, but instead jeopardized his last chance of escape to save me. I felt nauseous. My single wish then was to see Hung standing on that ferry. But it was getting farther and farther from me. I kept looking at it until distance fused the passengers into a single mass, between us, a stretch of brackish water as dark and forbidding as an abyss.

  I was drowning on the dock. Another chance to escape had slipped through my fingers. If only I hadn’t counted on Dr. Tam’s help. If only he had sent word to us when he knew he couldn’t keep his promise. If only I had trusted my instincts this morning and followed those cars. If, if, if…

  I CAME to see Tat. His house was locked. No one was home. His neighbor told me that Tat and his brother Han, our Ministry of Transportation insider, had known about the evacuation and left early this morning with his huge family and relatives—more than forty people. They had boarded one of the first ferries. Tat’s house was three blocks from mine. We had seen each other several times a day for the past month. My best friend had left without taking a moment to share the information that would have made a world of difference for me. I would have had plenty of time to save not only my own family, but also my brothers and in-laws. This was someone whom I had tutored and guided throughout high school and college. I had seen Tat through the death of his father, performing many of the duties as though I was a member of his family. When he had been summoned to the draft center, I held his full-time teaching position to keep the school from replacing him. After bribing himself another exemption, Tat returned, and I gave him back his job and the entire month’s salary that I had earned teaching his classes. He was like a brother.

  It broke my heart. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my wife the news.

  ALL through the darkest night, the most quiet and peaceful night Saigon ever had, I wrestled with fate. Dawn revealed a ghost town. I looked out from my second-story window at the vacant street. I couldn’t eat and hadn’t slept in two days. I felt detached, drunk with fatigue.

  Mid-morning, a convoy of camouflaged trucks roared through the street, heading to the city center. The North Vietnam Army was entering Saigon without resistance or a single gunshot. It was chilling. The air had somehow gone bad.

  The victors entered Saigon in the late morning on a medley of vehicles: American Jeeps, army trucks, civilian pickups, and sedans. They were the South Vietnam Communist troops, the PAFL, paramilitary units, and Saigon’s own underground Communists. They brandished weapons and wore mismatched uniforms, black pajamas, T-shirts, and even jeans. Pickup trucks with loudspeakers declared the surrender of the South Vietnam government, announcing that we were now “liberated” from tyranny and capitalism. Cheering packs of Saigon youths followed the convoy with their mopeds and bicycles. People stepped outside timidly. They stood drowsily in front their homes as if they were just waking up from a long sleep.

  Late in the afternoon, my father came riding his creaky bicycle, dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a white shirt. Bent over the handlebars, he looked ghastly thin—as vulnerable as a pauper. I hadn’t seen him pedaling his bike for years. I was afraid he was going to fall over. He came to make sure I didn’t do something crazy like commit suicide or hike to the Cambodian border. Father knew that sooner or later, the Communist’s ax would fall on my neck and he wanted to be there with me when bad things began. He had always said that our family had been extremely blessed compared to all those around us, the countless others who had suffered heartbreaking losses. He believed it was karma. He came to remind me that we had lived with good intentions. He wanted to give me hope.

  We climbed to the fourth-story rooftop together. He said he believed Hung had escaped on the ferries along with my cousin Tan and my brothers Hong and Hoang. Father sighed and admitted that his trusted friend and confidant, Mr. Tri, who had advised everyone to stay, had fled without a word of good-bye or warning. I could tell the betrayal wounded him deeply. I felt very sorry for Father. I wanted to comfort him, but it wasn’t our way to show weakness or emotion. I was forty years old. Father was an old man entering the last stage of his life. This was the most serene silence we shared, standing shoulder to shoulder in the fading light.

  The sun simmered on the skyline. The day was closing, and with it an era. I could feel the city, my city, kneeling down. The vast orange heaven, pillars of smoke, the ragged cityscape. It was a beautiful sight. It was like standing at the helm of a ship. The whole city was sinking.

  Father turned and stared at me. The unforgiving years had carved themselves into his gaunt face, deep scars of a life I had known but never dared study. I saw it then, the immense sorrow brimming in his eyes. It was staggering. I could tell he wanted to say it, but didn’t know how. All at once, our barriers fell, and I saw through the blurred seasons of our history, our pains, his disappointments, my c
hildhood fear of this distant man. For the first time in my life, I felt the fullness of my father’s love. It was crushing, the lateness of the hour.

  THE NORTH

  1949–1953

  31. THE WIDOWER

  I had always thought that some of Father’s best years were in the second phase of his adult life when he became a man at the very ripe age of thirty-two. Broke and widowed, he was forced to confront not only the responsibilities of being a parent, but also, for the first time in his life, the hardships of earning a living. His playboy days, for the time being, were over.

  Father returned to Hanoi with four children and two servants in tow. The first six months were difficult. He had an extravagant home, but barely enough money for food, certainly none for the luxuries he had once enjoyed and now missed. He had servants, but no means to pay them. Slowly, he sold his antique porcelain, gold wristwatch, gemstone cufflinks, and the various little vanities he had collected during the highlights of his life.

  On the verge of bankruptcy, Father at last swallowed his pride and turned to his relatives, most of whom had fled to Hanoi early with their fortunes intact. He had no reason to think that they wouldn’t reciprocate the generosity he had shown them when he was wealthy, so it came as a bitter disappointment when none extended him even a small loan to start a business. It was suggested that he sell his villa and live modestly off the proceeds. Their polite spurns and distant silence wounded him as deeply as betrayals. Once I heard him say to a friend that being born rich was a privilege, and that he had no idea how important money was until he didn’t have it.

  Looking at Hanoi, he saw that the city had been rejuvenated. People breathed easier—even the villagers who migrated here to escape the fighting. He knew that wartime was also boom-time for those not caught in the cross fire. In fact, Hanoi was in bloom. Its population had doubled. There was no sign of war. There were no gunshots. City life was rather pleasant. In Hanoi one didn’t get anxious about French patrols randomly arresting people or mortars suddenly dropping out of the sky. There were no Communist cadres to make everyone attend the dull and repetitive nightly meetings. Furthermore, foods and goods were plentiful in Hanoi. The streets were awash with merchandise; shops stocked wines, spirits, butter, cheeses, sausages, chocolates, and exotic European foods. Throbbing with the bustle of business, Hanoi’s population swelled with Vietnamese peasants displaced by the war and foreigners, both civilians and soldiers, including a large number of French administrators, businessmen, and expatriates. Hanoi was also a vacation city and a portal for the hundreds of thousands of French troops, Algerians, Moroccans, and African legionnaires brought into the country to crush the Viet Minh.

  Mother’s closest cousin, Uncle Toa, who was a former senator, came to Father’s aid with a loan to convert our villa into an inn. At that time in Hanoi, there were two types of hotels: the large, expensive establishments catering to rich businessmen and diplomats, and the modest inns serving French expatriates, merchants, and soldiers on leave. Ours fell into the second category. It suited Father for three reasons. First, it was a business where he did not have to work every day. Second, his villa was situated on a major thoroughfare suitable for this industry. Third, Father was fluent in French and had two French-speaking workers handy, namely Tan and me.

  We renovated the servants’ bungalow at the rear of the property and moved into it, leaving our four posh bedrooms to rent out as deluxe suites. Father put in eight smaller rooms, bringing the total to an even dozen. The living room was remodeled into a lounge equipped with a hardwood bar with polished brass trims in the same French style as the house. The patio had iron bistro tables and chairs to take advantage of the rose garden and the shade trees. Father upgraded the kitchen and hired a cook to serve simple French fare. Two maids and a handyman were added to the staff, and Hao Inn was opened nine months after our return to Hanoi.

  Our place was at the junction of two major avenues. The area was once a fashionable French neighborhood, now quickly becoming a commercial area catering to foreigners replete with shops, bars, restaurants, and opium lounges. Big trees lined the wide sidewalks on both sides of the street. A vendor sold beverages and fresh and pickled fruits from a kiosk erected on the pavement outside our villa. Within a week of our opening, the pimps and their girls congregated at the kiosk every evening to attract French soldiers staying at our inn. They made such a commotion that Father had to hire a burly guard and posted him at the gate to keep them from coming inside uninvited.

  At the middle and the end of each month when the French soldiers and legionnaires got their pay, our street corner deteriorated into a wild all-hours party. They drank, laughed, screamed, sang, danced right in the street, and collapsed intoxicated on the sidewalk, doing their best to squander months of wages in a few days and with only two things on their mind: sex and alcohol. Fights broke out regularly between soldiers for the same girl, between drunkards from different units, between French regulars and legionnaires, and between two girls over one generous drunk. Sometimes, the chaos lasted through the night.

  It was a rougher business than Father had imagined. Once the inn was established, he left the entire operation to Tan and me, and branched out, through his contacts, into government contracts, which, though sporadic, were very lucrative and required little work on his part. Within a year of coming back to Hanoi, Father constructed a comfortable new life. He bought a French bicycle and a motorcycle, neither of which he rode more than twice. He also owned a sleek Peugeot sedan. The handyman washed and polished it twice a week and parked it in the driveway in front of the cottage where Father could admire it from his room.

  He took Hong, Hung, Tan, and me to soccer games, boxing matches, French cinemas, and restaurants. Father introduced us to life at the higher stratum, where he was most comfortable. He was as much a man of the city as his brother had been a man of the country. Where people had feared his brother, they were drawn to Father’s amiability. Father’s earlier reputation as a generous host was revived as his fortune rose. New as well as old friends, including those who had spurned him only a year earlier, started coming round for dinner parties that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.

  Father soon succumbed to the grip of opium, the intoxicant of choice among the Vietnamese elites. Though outlawed in France, it was a vice legalized and encouraged by the colonial French, some said to calm the natives. At first he smoked with small groups of acquaintances at the opium lounges, then at home. As he grew more inactive, Father began inviting friends, many of them scholars and high-ranking officials, who could bring him news of the war and the outside world. Gradually, most of his days and evenings were spent lying beside his opium tray with closest friends. Between their lucid dreams, they talked about life, women, the war, politics, French colonialism, and the past World Wars. They discussed and debated everything, but they did nothing. The irony of opium was that it robbed an addict of his energy, wasted his body, hollowed out his heart, sapped his will until nothing remained, and yet it left his intellect intact.

  MS. NGUYET was one of Father’s old girlfriends from his rowdier days. She was a retired co dau—a sort of courtesan—a night blossom whose beauty and charm were renowned in the best clubs and opium lounges of Hanoi. Although she was in her early thirties, well past the sixteen-to twenty-five-year-old prime of a hostess, Ms. Nguyet had kept her stunning good looks and elegance. She had a thrilling laugh. She knew how to intrigue a man, how to read his mood, and how to talk to and treat him accordingly. She could have snared any wealthy merchant for marriage if it weren’t for her opium addiction, a common occupational hazard of her trade. So, she set her sights on my father, an eligible widower with children in need of a mother.

  From the first day she came to one of Father’s parties wearing a burgundy ao dai that accented her slim curves, Tan and I liked her instantly. She was nearly as tall as Father and had an oval Chinese face with porcelain skin. She complimented Tan on his developing musculature, since he was beginning
to lift weights at the gym. She talked to me about school and my education plans. It was a part of her charm. I knew that Father could easily be seduced by Ms. Nguyet, a compatriot in his addiction from his bachelor days, who could satisfy both his sexual and companionship needs.

  NANNY Vien knew immediately that Ms. Nguyet threatened her own ambition of being Father’s next wife. Since Vien came to live with us in Hanoi, Father treated her as a member of the family. He instructed us boys to call her Auntie Vien and afford her proper respect. Unlike other staff members, she ate with us both at home and at nice restaurants. Father paid her a generous wage because a milk-nurse was a rare find. He also allowed her to make most of the household decisions simply because he was too lazy and consumed with work, then later with opium. His passiveness led to Vien’s natural assumption of a supervisory position over the other servants. Little by little, she assumed all the responsibilities and prerogatives of a wife except for sharing Father’s bed—but it wasn’t for lack of trying on her part.

  Although she was capable of surges of gaiety, Vien had a down-turned mouth averse to smiling. You instinctively wanted to cheer her up. She had a round, attractive face and the healthy, tanned complexion of an active woman in her mid-twenties. Endowed with ample bosoms, she usually wore her blouse with the top buttons open. When she did household chores, she liked to wear the peasant yem top, which exposed her entire back and left her breasts to move sensually beneath the thin fabric. Sometimes she would find ways to feed Huong near wherever Father was sitting, and then leave her breast exposed. Throughout the day, she brought Father refreshments and devised little errands into his room, making herself available at every opportunity.