The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  The lawyer, dressed in a slim gray suit with a slim black tie, did not smile at me. I would soon learn not to take this personally, as she was so humorless that even perfunctory smiling was beyond her. She was very handsome, however, her face and short-cropped hair composed almost completely of straight lines, so that in the absence of a smile, the only curves on her face came from her eyes and eyebrows. Like me and my aunt, she existed somewhere along the East-West spectrum and most likely was of Vietnamese descent, given her decent command of our mother tongue.

  Cambodia? Not the easiest place to visit, I suppose.

  The handsome and humorless lawyer said, It wasn’t for tourism.

  No, I suppose not. So what was it for?

  My aunt and the lawyer glanced at each other, and my aunt nodded. I was visiting Pol Pot, the lawyer said.

  I played it cool. He must not be an easy man to visit.

  He’s a very difficult man to visit. The Vietnamese army isn’t interested in letting anyone go through Cambodia to meet him, so I had to go through Thailand. He’s staying in a mountain camp near the border.

  I’m sure the Vietnamese want to capture him and put him on trial.

  They already put him on trial. In absentia. Guess the outcome.

  Guilty?

  Do you know why they found him guilty?

  Because he was guilty?

  Because trials in absentia always end in a guilty verdict. The handsome and humorless lawyer, incapable of smiling at my naïveté, snorted. Has anyone ever been found innocent in absentia? Those trials aren’t about justice. They’re morality shows.

  It seems just to convict someone responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people.

  How do you know he was responsible for these deaths?

  I admit to being flustered. I was used to being the most cynical person in the room, even if I hid my cynicism fairly well behind masks of genial bonhomie, tasteful servitude, or intellectual superiority, depending on my interlocutor’s position. I was also unsettled by this very serious topic at such a pleasant event, especially as I was under the hypnosis of hashish.

  How do you know? the lawyer repeated, as if I were a witness on the stand.

  I thought about Madeleine weeping in the kitchen of Heaven and said, From the newspapers. And Cambodian friends.

  Of course I’m not disputing that hundreds of thousands died. What I’m interested in is real justice, not the easy or fake justice most people want. He is a scapegoat. A demon whom we can point to and say, He did it.

  But he did do it—

  He says he didn’t. He never saw those people dying. He says his Organization told him a different story.

  And you believe him? And even if you do, that makes him innocent?

  He deserves a real trial. The court of public opinion is not a real court. Take those protesters outside. They’re challenging public opinion. In this case it’s the reverse of Pol Pot. Everyone thinks Ho Chi Minh is a saint, except for the relatives of the people he killed, of whom I’ve met a few. I’m an anarchist, and I will tell you that Ho Chi Minh became a saint by murdering all his enemies to the left and to the right of him, including the anarchists.

  I looked at my aunt. You have a picture of him.

  She looked pained. I don’t know if this is proven, either—

  He wiped out all his Vietnamese competitors before he wiped out the French.

  I tried to remember the occasional comments I had heard about Uncle Ho’s political maneuverings. Purge, I said. He purged his competition.

  Purged, the lawyer said. Like with a laxative. To purify oneself and the struggle of the anarchists like me, as well as the nationalists, the royalists, the Trotskyites, the insufficiently ideological anticolonialists. You know why? Too many sides. He needed to have only two sides, so that the people would understand—you were for or against the French. And those against had better agree that the only way was the communist way. None of the communists or socialists or leftists here will acknowledge that. They’re interested in self-serving justice, like most people. They all romanticize the Vietnamese communists. They sanitize Ho Chi Minh so that they, too, will be clean. They talk about revolutionary justice, but that’s not real justice. If you want real justice, you need real lawyers.

  She’s a really good lawyer, my aunt said admiringly. As an editor, she had very high standards about prose and ideas, which she conflated with her judgments of people. There aren’t too many lawyers willing to defend Pol Pot.

  Nor you, my ghost chorus said.

  How do you bring yourself to defend someone like him? I said, my voice shrill. Even if you are an anarchist? And how can you be an anarchist lawyer, anyway?

  She shrugged, doubtlessly having heard the question before. How do you defend what most people consider indefensible? she asked. It’s actually quite easy. What the French did in Indochina, or in Algeria, was indefensible, but the French defend it all the time. Or simply forget about it. Same thing, based on the principle that what our enemies do is beyond comprehension, while what we do is totally justified. Defending what some people call the indefensible forces me to consider a question all lawyers and judges should think about—

  How do you forgive the unforgivable? my aunt said.

  And can you even forgive the unforgivable? the lawyer said, and the look she aimed at my aunt was so hot, and vice versa, that I got a little flushed. Nothing was sexier than sharing the same convictions in a world where few people did.

  At that moment, BFD, the man with very flexible convictions, slid up. I stiffened, reminded that he knew my secret and only moderately reassured that he was unlikely to speak to Bon, whom he did not know. He irradiated us all with a smile, then said to the lawyer—in French—I’ve been reading about your newest client, my dear. The Cambodian!

  Pol Pot.

  He’s giving the Vietnamese quite a problem, isn’t he? BFD nodded in agreement with himself and put his finger on his chin as if he were being photographed for an author portrait in the pose I most detested. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The Vietnamese stuck fighting a guerrilla war. Cambodia has become Vietnam’s Vietnam, wouldn’t you say?

  I finally saw a waiter with a tray of Champagne and snatched a flute, which allowed me to sip rather than say something offensive, which is to say, truthful. Which was worse, my country reduced to a war or my country turned into a cliché?

  You do like to court notoriety, BFD continued.

  I do nothing of the sort. I simply enjoy a good trial.

  And interesting defendants. BFD looked at me. You’ve heard about—

  I’ve heard.

  Did you also hear about her previous most notorious client? The Palestinian terrorist? Quite dashing in her keffiyeh!

  Freedom fighter, the humorless and handsome lawyer said. States are the real terrorists. Who kills more people, a freedom fighter or a nation-state?

  I stand corrected. There is something glamorous about hijacking an airplane.

  Stay on my good side. You might need a lawyer yourself someday.

  For someone so opposed to the state, it’s odd that you believe so much in the law.

  The law is only a means for justice. An imperfect means for an imperfect world.

  So the repartee went on. I wrapped the bandanna of a meaningless smile on my face, which I hoped was as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, which I had finally seen in person at the Louvre and from which I had wandered away bemused. That’s it? How could one not be underwhelmed once confronted with the Western world’s most famous painting? I studied it for as long as I could with the crowds jostling me. A very good painting. But a portrait any better than a dozen others in the Louvre, some of which featured faces that seemed just as enigmatic? Or was enigmatic just the European equivalent of the Asiatic inscrutable? I was flummoxed by my inability to understand the fuss. Was I just
uncouth? I could accept that. I focused on my uncouthness and readied myself for the end of the conversation, and when BFD at last began drifting away, I stepped next to him as he surveyed the crowd. He glanced at me, his meaningless smile also disguising his face, and I said, Have you heard of this place called Heaven?

  His meaningless smile did not become any more meaningful as I summarized Heaven for him in English, sotto voce. I imagined myself as he saw me, and in order to do so, I had to imagine BFD, building him from details gleaned from my aunt and the newspapers. Someone in his family had participated in all the great historical events of the republic, always on the right side, which is to say the left, from storming the Bastille to manning the barricades with the communards. His grandfather had stood with Zola and staunchly defended Dreyfus. His father, a leader of the Communist Party, had criticized the colonization of Indochina and resisted the Nazis. BFD was ideologically diluted, a rosé socialist to his father’s cabernet communism. He was less revolutionary than the Maoist PhD or the anarchist lawyer, but he had hurled cobblestones and been tear-gassed in May 1968, even though he was well past his college days at the Sorbonne. He had also chanted Ho Chi Minh’s name and waved both the flag of the National Liberation Front and Mao’s Little Red Book. In the 1970s, his revolutionary enthusiasm had aged into a pragmatic electoral leftism, his act cleaned up by marrying a young woman from a wealthy liberal family who had made its fortune in soap. He had it all, and what else could he see in me besides someone committed to the wrong side of history?

  I was a little person who spoke an immigrant version of his language, the language of a country that basked in the best of both worlds: to have once been an imperial power that had mugged weaker countries at gunpoint, while no longer being an imperial power and having to deal with pesky things like mosquitoes and malaria or resentment and revolutions. My one advantage was that I spoke English, or more accurately, Americanese. Yippee! Yahoo! Yankees! Americanese was still an imperial language, and although BFD wholeheartedly opposed American imperialism, he was secretly nostalgic for French imperialism, as almost all the French were in their heart of hearts, their soul of souls, their Louvre of Louvres. While the best situation for an anti-imperialist was to live in an imperial country where one could benefit from imperialism while righteously opposed to it, as happened quite often in the United States, the French had the second-best situation: being anti-imperialist in a formerly imperialist country. Thus, for BFD, to hear me speak Americanese was to hear both the language of American imperialism and the dying echo of a lost French imperialism. He disliked me, but I was doing exactly what he expected of a nobody like me: appealing to his basest nature by luring him to Heaven. I had already been clued into what kind of man he was when my aunt had told me how he made passes at all her attractive friends. That’s terrible, I had said, and she had replied, indifferently, He’s a Frenchman. For all of my faults, I had never cheated on a lover or attempted to seduce her friends. I believed in commitment, even if the commitment never lasted more than a night. Commitment was a principle, and BFD had no such principle.

  Interesting, he murmured as the crowd swirled around us at the party. Heaven, you say. Perhaps we’ll take a drive sometime and visit this . . . interesting place.

  Then he was gone, but the hook had been set and the Ronin was right. BFD would never buy the goods from me directly, but his taste for another kind of goods drew him to the hot novelty of a beautiful stranger’s nude youth. It was another kind of high, even if it didn’t last as long, which meant that the taste for it could be indulged even more frequently. I confess to still being interested in such things myself, but not all of myself agreed with me. I told myself that it was hard to concentrate, what with the chorus of the dead whispering in my ear and the face of the communist agent staring over my shoulder when I looked in the mirror. The only solution was not to look.

  That night, after we returned to my aunt’s apartment, I lay on her sofa, disturbed by the sounds emanating from my aunt’s bedroom. Even at two in the morning, my aunt and the lawyer made quite a bit of noise as I lay there in the dark, still wearing my pants and shirt. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and thought about Bon killing Man and me making love to Lana, all while listening with mild terror to the noises from behind my aunt’s door. I had heard sounds coming from behind that door before, with BFD or the Maoist PhD, but those were muted and familiar. Mostly the sonic disturbance came from my aunt’s bed groaning, a chorus that varied depending on the guest. BFD sprinted or galloped, getting to his destination as quickly as possible; the Maoist PhD was a flaneur, occasionally brisk but generally meandering. BFD finished with a guttural grunt, an exclamation point marking the end of History! The Maoist PhD concluded with a drawn-out, meditational sigh, an ellipsis indicating the unknown future yet to come . . . As for my aunt, she rarely made noise, except for some muted moaning and panting. Based on the audible evidence, she seemed to be a spectator at a sporting event, cheering occasionally at a good play. She must have been watching football, because once or twice I heard her cry out, GOOAAAAALLLLLL! or something to that effect. At first the sounds she and the men made bothered me, but soon it was her silences that captured me. Once I even timed the gap between one noise she made and the next—four minutes thirty-two seconds, with her finally murmuring on the thirty-third. Why so quiet? What was she thinking? Or feeling? In those fertile absences of sound, a disturbing vine grew in my mind, its sinews suggesting that perhaps over my many encounters with women, there were silences that I had not heard . . . because all I could hear was myself.

  Reluctantly listening to my aunt respond spontaneously to the humorless and handsome lawyer, I suddenly felt that nothing could be trusted anymore. Did the women really mean it when they said I was the best, that what had occurred was the best, or even simply that they enjoyed it? What was it that Lana had told me in our postcoital minute? That was utterly amazing. Had she been lying? Was I more akin to BFD and the Maoist PhD than I realized? I had thought that my aunt was one of those people who simply did not verbally express herself when making love. But no! Whatever was happening was drawing forth an onomatopoeia of pleasure from my aunt that made me deeply uncomfortable. Why was I not aroused? It was a terrific performance, the handsome and humorless lawyer playing my aunt expertly. I should be excited!

  Even after the scoring had subsided and no more cries could be heard, a different set of noises continued. What mysterious activity was this? Could it be . . . talking? Although I could not hear what they said, the most amazing thing was that they talked at all. I could not recall more than a handful of times, postcoitus, when I had talked to the lovely beside me. Of course I had said a few polite words, some compliments for a job well done, but conversations? On what? What could two women be talking about so endlessly? For all that I strained to hear, I could not figure out this mystery. Unable to eavesdrop or sleep, I switched on the light and picked up the only available reading, The Evil Empire’s Oriental Origins. I calculated, correctly, that the book would divert me from the disturbing conversation I could not hear. First, the table of contents, with chapter titles like “America: A Force for Good,” and “Fist of Power, Hand of Friendship,” and “Freedom Will Not Abide Walls,” and “Islam: A Committed Ally against Communism.” Hedd’s English accent resounded in my head from the one time we had met, the General dragging me along to meet Hedd in the hopes of enlisting him in the General’s effort to take back our homeland. Hedd, great pundit. Hedd, international columnist. Hedd, friend of world leaders. Hedd, big fish in the scummy waters of a Washington think tank. Even Hedd the knight! For there was his title in his author’s biography—Sir Richard Hedd!

  I returned to the last page, for I liked to know how thrillers ended before I began, and his book was clearly of that much-maligned genre. The gripping story was the great conflict between communism and democracy, which was simply a code word for capitalism. Like many thrillers, it had no true suspense, since the good guys c
ould never lose, even if a few got killed along the way. Then my eyes fell on the book’s last words, and that concluding sentence struck my forehead with the force of a boomerang:

  While life is valuable to the Oriental, life is invaluable to the Westerner.

  Those were my words! I had spoken them to Hedd, along with a dozen witnesses, from the General to the Congressman and a clan of white men bedecked in suits and lies. How had these words ended up here? The fault lay, as it so often did, with cheap champagne, which was not even Champagne, as it came from California. Hedd had handed me a coupe of the déclassé American stuff and said, I hope you do not mind, young man, if I use your memorable turn of phrase in my next book. Nothing could make me happier, I said. Of course I was lying, as many things could make me happier, but I was being either inscrutably Asian or simply polite. But regardless of what I was being, I had agreed on the assumption that if my words were to be used, they would be attributed to me. Instead, here they were, passed off as Sir Richard Hedd’s own words, with myself erased. I was helpless with fury, which was my only excuse for turning once more to the remedy, which, if it did not make me feel much better, let me feel nothing at all.

  I woke up with the sun backlighting the drapes and the meaty taste of an existential crisis in my mouth, salted with a liberal dose of panic. The moment I stepped foot onto the rug and tried to rise, I became one disoriented Asiatic, dizzy with vertigo. In the kitchen, the civet coffee was almost ready, while Françoise Hardy sang the wildly inappropriate “Tous les garçons et les filles” from my aunt’s stereo (Hardy is, I admit, a clear sign of French civilization). While the lawyer was graced with the honorary robe granted to all my aunt’s lovers, my aunt wore a turban and a silk dressing gown, lending her the appearance of a Persian courtesan as she lounged on the sofa, waiting for the lawyer to finish brewing coffee as black as the emptiness inside me.