by Norman Lewis
I congratulated him warmly, but for me this map had not changed. I waited for him to say, ‘We have them on the run,’ and he did.
‘I can’t tell you how much I resent being chained to this desk,’ Fournière said, ‘at such a time, when you writing fellows go round having all the fun. How about your taking over here for a week or two and I’ll do your job? Well maybe it’s less exciting than I think. Still, you had a few nice trips. I remember that Dalat run when they got the Chef de Convoie.’
‘I missed that one,’ I told him.
‘Yes, of course you did. You missed all the bad ones. They should have taken you along as a mascot. Still, we’ve put the bad times behind us now … So what can I do for you? Would you like to go somewhere? I suspect that’s what you’ve come to see me about.’
‘If at all possible I’d like to go to the North.’
‘You mean Laos, say Luang Prabang? But didn’t I send you there before?’
‘It was Hanoi I had in mind,’ I told him, and I saw his eyebrows go up. ‘But why? Why Hanoi?’ he said. ‘Where does the interest lie?’
‘For a writer it’s interesting because not much gets written about it.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose that’s true, but I have to be frank with you. This is an awkward time.’
‘The last thing I want to do is be an embarrassment.’
‘There is no question of that. I must explain that until now all our energies have been concentrated in the South. A policy, I may add, that’s been crowned with success. Hanoi has been left to wither on the vine. One thing at a time. Now perhaps there are signs we are turning our attention to the North.’
He followed my eyes as I turned again to the map. Up in the north there were no bold, black arrows, and rivers spread from Hanoi like the legs of a spider across an empty landscape to the sea. Scattered to the south of the town were small zones cross-hatched in red. ‘There is no established resistance,’ Fournière said. ‘What you see are areas of temporary intrusion. Is this really interesting to you? Do you still want to go?’
‘If possible, yes.’
‘There are no convoys. You cannot get through by road.’
‘And by air?’
‘One plane a week. It is usually monopolised by the army. There is a plane in two days’ time.’
‘Any hope?’ I asked.
‘I will do my best for you, as I have always done. An even chance, I suspect. Come and tell me all about it when you get back,’ he said.
Next day was the first of the Tet, involving the many foreigners in Saigon in a crisis of the kind I’d been through before. It could be summed up in the fact that all the Vietnamese who looked after their bodily and spiritual needs had deserted them. Although the hotel had done its best with all manner of inducements to enlist a temporary staff, the innumerable maids, the bell-boys, the floor-cleaners, the waiters, the kitchen staff and the cooks had simply packed up and gone home. There, dressed for the most part in plain white garments, they would spend much of the day on their knees, burning incense before the shrines set up for the spirits of their ancestors, and praying for a year that would be at the very least an improvement on the last.
The hotel had given little advance notice of this dislocation, but late on the previous night, as panic struck, little agonised notices had been pushed under bedroom doors warning that only tea and biscuits would be available for breakfast, and that beds might not be made the next day, and supplying the addresses of restaurants likely to be open, although these were mostly in Cholon, two miles away, to which, in the probable absence of pedicabs, guests would be required to walk.
I was awakened by the room-boys running up and down the corridors beating small gongs. This was followed by silence. I got up, dressed, went down to the dining-room to swallow two cups of tea, and then went out into the street. This, normally one of the busiest on earth, was now not only transformed but unrecognisable in its emptiness, in which the clatter of sandals of the hotel’s head porter and his wife hastening homeward was audible fifty yards away.
I had arranged a meeting in the morning with Chu Ti, the victim of a common predicament in Saigon at this time, having been orphaned by the war and left with no home to which to return. She had been born in a village near Vinh Long, believed to have been an early stronghold of the Viet-Minh, and one morning while out digging clams the village had been attacked by a single plane which had dropped a single bomb on its centre. The legend was that the French had been trying out a bomb fitted with liquid air possessing many times the destructive power of conventional high explosives. Rushing back at the sound of the fearful blast, Chu Ti found that little was left of the village but heaps of rubble, one of them entombing her parents. It was a loss that had left the first day of the Tet with little meaning for her. Nevertheless the emerging new religion of the Cao-Dai had adapted itself to such situations with sympathy and protection. After a spiritualist seance with Victor Hugo whose opinion the Pope Ho-Phap always consulted, followers like the bereft Chu Ti were told that they might pray for their ancestors in the temples of any religion.
I found Chu Ti in the garden of the house in the Rue Catinat. ‘So how have you decided to spend the day?’ I asked.
‘First of all I shall burn incense in the Cantonese Pagoda,’ she said.
‘And am I allowed to come with you?’
‘I was hoping you would.’
Remembering Lagrange’s description of this celebrated place of worship I was delighted by her choice. We walked the two miles to Cholon and found the pagoda in a mean street with seriously ill people left by its doors to die in peace. ‘They’re nervous about women,’ Chu Ti said. ‘But if you buy enough incense they’ll let me stay.’ The pagoda was dark and full of the cold reek of antiquity. All the shapes it contained were seen through smoke, which had a strange, heady smell, and people were standing in rows in the misted depths of the building, swaying with their eyes closed. Whispering, Chu Ti explained they were seeing visions. I listened to the bass grumble of monks in prayer somewhere out of sight. A sound came and went like the rattling of shaken bones, but underlying all these was the incessant purr of some great gong, like the breath of a sleeping tiger. ‘You’ll find it very strange,’ Chu Ti said. ‘If you want to we can leave.’ A monk had followed us from the door and we greeted each other, hands clasped together. He smiled continuously showing black-enamelled teeth in the surface of which tiny patterns had been cut to reveal the white bone beneath. The monk lit two spirals for us, then stood back holding the long tongs with which he would snuff out the burning end of the spiral when the amount paid for had been used. Another monk was there to hold out a plate with our horoscopes: illegible splashes of ink on fragments of crumpled silk. Of these practices Lagrange, a willing target of superstition beneath the sceptical façade, had said, ‘It’s only an amusing old con but so well done you almost fall for it. There’s no charge for the horoscopes, and they’re always favourable, which is rather pleasant. As for the visions, my guess is they sneak some drug into the incense. I managed to have one once, but it was the usual highly idealised female, and even then only lasted a few seconds.’
Chu Ti’s eyes were tightly closed, and she was swaying with the rest. ‘Any visions?’ I whispered. ‘I’m trying hard,’ she whispered back, ‘but nothing so far.’
Having satisfied the ancestors, Chu Ti wanted to go down to the river, where we found that despite the restraints of the first day of Tet this part of the town was coming to life again. It was said that nearly half the population of Saigon had transformed themselves into boat people, thus forming over a century or so an aquatic society, equally complex if certainly more mobile than the old. Standing on a small hillock, we looked down on many hundreds of sampans, moored in disciplined rows, occupied usually by large families who could only move along their boat like trained soldiers on manoeuvres. Further out the bigger boats began; the nearest of the junks belonging to the aristocracy of the river were anchored in deep water
a hundred yards away. The owners kept chickens, ducks and piglets, had pot plants, and washed themselves comfortably on deck instead of jumping into the river. There was a bluish tinge in the light here that was more restful than the brazen yellowness of the town, and the air was several degrees cooler. For this reason it was the custom of many of those who could spare the time to take an hour or so off work in the heat of the day and go down to recuperate near or among the boats. It was both restful and instructive for people who had lost all notion of how to relax to study the lives of the boat people who could. Through openings in the sampans’ sides you could watch every conceivable incident of the domestic routine, most of them conducted with exceptional calm.
People were sprawled about under the canopies of the sampans, playing cards, dicing, chatting, being visited by doctors who did little more than study the whites of their eyes. A fishing rod poked over the side of every boat, but I never saw anyone catch a fish. Round about midday members of a society of pig-admirers came ashore and exercised their pigs on leads. Chu Ti took me to a waterside café where people dropped in for a snack of semi-hatched eggs with small apertures cut in their sides to allow choice in the degree of incubation, but I refused to experiment.
Chu Ti was not here for the river-front scene but because most of the town’s Cao-Dai supporters had gathered down by the river for an extraordinary event that was to take place. Opposition from the established religions had been successful in preventing the Cao-Daists from setting up a pagoda in Saigon itself, so now they proposed to bring a large and splendidly equipped junk round from their headquarters at Tra Vinh, and establish it as a floating pagoda in the river. The news was that the junk had sailed from Mytho on the previous day and was due to arrive at any time. For Chu Ti there was no doubt that this would happen. She fished in her bag and pulled out the horoscopes. As in the case of such transactions the world over, the future as presented was comforting but vague. Chu Ti was to experience a marked change for the better. It seemed likely that I had been summed up as a visitor who would not be staying long, and the horoscope assured me that the journey upon which I was about to embark would be successful.
In the late afternoon the Cao-Dai junk nosed its way through a jostling encirclement of sampans. Even at a distance it stood out in the extreme maritime diversity of its surroundings, for it had been painted white with a somewhat ghostly effect. As it came closer to the shore, unusual features were discerned: the masts, for example, were sheathed in gilt decoration, imitating the foliage of parasitic plants, into which—I noted through my binoculars—plaster monkeys were scrambling. A profusely ornamented background had been erected on the deck, in front of which assembled, as if for a group photograph, the visiting delegation of Cao-Dai notables. They had been assembled in rows, with the most important on a stand at the back. The top row included legislators, inspectors, bishops and an archbishop. At the top of this flattened human pyramid the tiny, wizened figure of a cardinal, swaddled in silks and sprouting wings, was enthroned under a large portrait of Victor Hugo. The great writer, now principal saint charged with transmitting the ordinances of Heaven in verse form, had been orientalised by the artist with the addition of a few straggling white hairs at the corners of his mouth, and his subject seemed faintly amused.
I made the mistake of laughing. Two of our immediate Vietnamese neighbours in the crowd looked up, plainly shocked. ‘Why do you laugh?’ Chu Ti said. ‘Is this funny?’
Snatching at an excuse, I said, ‘A little boy was making faces.’
‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. I had had a lucky escape.
By this time I knew her well enough to realise that, despite a show of imperturbability, she was intensely excited. ‘It’s the horoscope,’ she said a moment later. ‘Now you will see.’
A small scarlet barge had been lowered into the water from the junk and was being rowed in our direction, and the old-fashioned winged hat worn by the man standing in its bows indicated the distinction of its wearer. Another bishop, I almost said, but checked myself in time. The barge wound its way through the sampans, and the boat people gathered on their decks to wave their flags. ‘The messenger is coming,’ said Chu Ti, with the almost unnatural calm held in reserve by any Vietnamese rejecting unseemly excitement. She made for the water’s edge and I followed her through the thickening crowd. The boat bumped into the bank and the man in the winged hat scooped up his toga and jumped nimbly ashore. Chu Ti went to meet him, they both bowed and the man unrolled a paper and began to read. Several other young men and women had come running and placed themselves at Chu Ti’s side. The man in the winged hat was reading from a list. He would read out what seemed to be a name, followed by an interrogatory grunt, and someone in the rapidly forming crowd would grunt back. Mysterious things were happening on the junk, from which came the shrilling of the boatswain’s whistle and the popping of small fire-crackers. A party of rich Vietnamese in Western tropical clothes had just climbed aboard and were making deep obeisances to the cardinal, who had come down from his position under Victor Hugo’s portrait and now sat on a golden throne.
Chu Ti came back from the gathering at the waterside. It was good form not to show curiosity, so I waited for her explanation of what had been going on. The Cao-Dai had issued an information leaflet describing itself as the ‘Universal Religion of the Age of Improved Transport’, proving that there was no absurdity of which it was incapable. It was hard not to laugh at the pompous old men who had taken everything that could be used from Confucius and Lao Tze and fitted it into the new faith. Chu Ti said, ‘They have come to their decision.’
‘About what?’
‘The promotions,’ she said. ‘There are five new fidèles, and two fidèles ardentes. I am one of the two. They have given me a grade one.’
I took her hand. ‘That’s wonderful news. You must be relieved.’
‘What is relieved?’ The word was outside her vocabulary. Something from the no-man’s-land of the emotions with no equivalent in the firm definition of Vietnamese speech.
‘You must be very pleased,’ I said. Grade one, I thought. So even the ghost of the old examination system lingered on.
‘Tomorrow I have to make the three prostrations,’ she said. ‘Then I receive my toga. Will you come?’
I shook my head. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to Hanoi,’ I said, in effect detaching myself from her future. Then suddenly I found I was embarrassed. Surely I could have said that better? I asked myself. I knew by now that ceremony lurked everywhere, smoothing out human relationships among these people. Blunt announcements of all kinds were ruled out, and correct forms followed. The prostrations would almost certainly be the supreme moment to date in Chu Ti’s life and her invitation had been an honour. I wanted to explain in self-defence that as an outsider I had been given no models to go on. Doing my best to save the situation I said, ‘I am disappointed not to be with you, but the Information Office has booked a flight for me. I shall be back in two or three weeks’ time. I hope you will still be here.’ Nothing in her expression revealed her thoughts. Very often, as now, the faint beginnings of a smile might have recalled a pleasant memory. ‘There is no way I can tell,’ she said. ‘From now on I must listen to the orders of my superior in the Cao-Dai. Let us say, perhaps I will be here.’
At this point at least I knew what was expected of me, for I had already been warned that Vietnamese who have rejected the influence of the West do not say goodbye. We each turned and walked away, and the speechlessness at this conclusion of our meeting was part of a ceremony correctly performed.
De la Fournière came to the hotel to see me off. To emphasise that this was a social occasion he was dressed informally in sporting attire which included a tropical version of knickerbockers. ‘I can’t tell you how much I envy you,’ he said. ‘They’re real people up there. You’ll find it quite a surprise.’
The check-in formalities were conducted on the pavement, before boarding the bus. The police were there to inspect passes and ther
e was a perfunctory frisking for weapons. At this point accompanying friends were turned back. The armoured car that would lead the way to the airport rumbled into position, but there was a further wait for news of conditions on the road.
‘You’ll enjoy Hanoi,’ de la Fournière said. ‘A nice, old-fashioned town. The hotel is a disaster but I’m glad to say we were able to get you into the Camp de la Presse. Cheerful atmosphere, besides which you’ll be with people in your own line of business. All the home comforts and a wonderful directrice with a bunch of keys dangling from her belt. And, by the way, the chef is from Périgord. Do you enjoy frogs?’ Someone blew a whistle and I was clasped in a Gallic embrace. ‘Well, I’m afraid I have to leave you in peace. Have a good time. I’ll look forward to hearing all about it.’
We boarded the plane. There was a further delay while airport staff scrambled all over it searching for hidden explosives; then we took off. Few such experiences in this life turn out as expected. Despite De la Fournière’s forecast, we were carrying no soldiers. The handful of passengers included several Vietnamese government officials, immersed in their paperwork, and the Emperor Bao Dai’s ex-mistress who had risen to fame as Miss Saigon two years before. Now, according to the Vietnamese stewardess, she was popping up north for a brief visit to a French general she had got to know. She was exceedingly outgoing, flashed smiles in all directions, and fell almost instantly into a close-knit conversation with a French passenger who moved into the next seat. Hardly had we sat down when the captain came back with the chief steward carrying champagne and squares of toast spread with caviar. After a pause for him to settle his distinguished passenger’s nerves, he moved on to me and there was an opportunity to talk about Hanoi. All he could think to say about it was that it was a good place to pick up antiques. There was a market for Buddha images, stashed away over the centuries by the thousand in local caves. You could pick them up for nothing from the local peasants. He had brought back a crateful on his last trip, flogged the best of them and given the rest away to his friends for Christmas.
