The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  The way you look at him, he said, as though that finished it. When she seemed perplexed he added, The way he looks at you.

  We don’t always get along. It was easy to say this, but not entirely accurate. What she meant was that they had lives that were separate, that must always be so, it seemed. She did not mean they argued, because they did not.

  He loves you.

  Like that would matter, she said. I mean—

  She didn’t know what she meant. The statement seemed coarse and she immediately regretted it. She was not suggesting that love was meaningless, only that the question of such allegiances went unasked in Vietnam. It was its own small world, a theater of extremes, and it was temporary. She had borrowed Marc. That much was perfectly obvious to her. She had loaned him from the world in the same manner in which the GIs were on loan, the missiles and the aircraft, the supplies that arrived daily in the harbors, the tanks and helicopters. Not that these temporary arrangements did not matter. They were crucial, critical, without which none of them could be here. But one day everything would go back or be destroyed, or sold on, or thrown into the ocean. Nothing could remain as it was. But she could not explain this, not at the time, how she knew and had always known that Marc would leave her. Anyway this was not how Son would see it; Vietnam was his home. For him there was no place to retreat, no getaway, no other life or world.

  So she said, You must have a girlfriend. She might have added that she was not used to men who slept on floors, who spoke gently to her when she had a bad dream, who did not appear ever to look at her, except as a brother might. Perhaps you even have a wife? she said. Had he been American, had he been white, she would have asked this question of him a long time ago. Did she think he was any different for being Asian? She must have thought so, because one of the first questions to the soldiers in the field was always whether they had someone back home. She’d asked dozens of different GIs that question, so why hadn’t she asked Son? Now, whispering, with a certain dismay at her own odd behavior, she continued, Don’t you have someone, Son?

  They were at a market. He had spent the morning trailing behind her with a string bag and a plastic sack. The bag held condensed milk, coffee, dragonfruit, batteries, limes, the pork rolls that Son always bought, a few oranges. Beside them was a newsagent, stocked with newspapers, almost all of which were censored. Great gaps in the print, whole headlines blackened as though with a giant’s mighty pen. The papers with their blocks of blank newsprint, their darkened boxes, their tales of government victories, were crammed on to a rusted metal rack or stacked, like most of the goods in the market, on sagging cardboard cartons, piled in rows.

  Son stood near; anyone looking at them would have assumed they were lovers, deep in conversation over the things lovers whisper about, those forgotten questions and declarations, so important at the time. His gaze, angled at her, showed tenderness. Because of the bags in his hands, he could gesture only with his shoulders. A moment later, she took his elbow and walked closely beside him as he steered them through the crowd. She was talking quietly, head bent, her mouth near his collarbone. She would not dare to have such a conversation in the room. To speak of these things required the presence of market stalls, the busy movement of people, women cooking in blackened pots over small fires, the pickpockets and money changers, the flasks of dark tea, the bold children pushing Cola they sold to Americans for ninety cents a can. Otherwise, it was too intimate, too close.

  You must have somebody, she said. I can’t believe—

  I won’t say, he told her. But you are my best friend.

  But, Son. Don’t you ever, you know…? They stopped again. He faced her, standing with her bags as a good husband would. She took a long breath. It confused her, all this. Everywhere she went she was propositioned by soldiers, not always in a bad way. Some were polite, asking her to dance at a club or complimenting her in some small way, offering their cigarettes or pop, or just smiling and saying it was nice to see a woman who was a “round eye,” that they hadn’t seen one in months. Others were more direct, occasionally obscene. She let those comments bounce off. In truth, she really didn’t care what the soldiers said. She was too aware of how they spoke to one another, and how the officers degraded them with abuse that would be shocking if it weren’t so commonplace. It was all very impersonal, really. Even when men in the press corps teased her, or spoke in their brusque manner, so false, so full of bravado, she really didn’t care that much.

  But she did care what Son said. She looked at him as he smiled awkwardly, glancing up, then away, anything not to look directly at her. He was blushing. His hair had grown a little so it fell on either side of his head like a newly thatched roof. His cheekbones, his chin, his teeth were all so large, and yet he had a delicate face.

  No, never, he said, then his mouth formed a small smile which grew, erupting into laughter.

  She smiled and slapped him gently on the arm and said, All right then, enough of this.

  Eventually, she broke him down. She thought he broke down. This was weeks later. They had spent a difficult few days on a story about a hospital in Dak Nhon and had arrived back to Saigon once more, feeling that same relief and, for Susan anyway, a mild guilt that she could take refuge in the cramped comfort of the hotel, far away from the bombing, while those about whom she’d written her story could not. The moonlight streamed through the window, sliced by the slow rotation of the ceiling fan. The crickets chimed from the corners of the room and from the balcony outside. It was neither hot nor cold. The afternoon rain had cleared the dust and given the air outside the pleasant smell of a flower shop. They’d had pork rolls, the ones that Son always got from an acquaintance at the market who he said used the best meat, and they’d had a little to drink in order to celebrate the beautiful night. She was tired from traveling. She was half asleep when he began his confession. At first, when she heard him speak, she thought she might be dreaming. There is somebody, he said, and it was as though his voice passed through her dreams, alighting there.

  He was on the floor only a few feet from her bed, his clothes folded into their small package, his map dark against the wall. It was midnight, perhaps later. The papers from the pork rolls were torn and pressed into the bin. Their empty glasses were set along the window sill. The rice wine they’d drunk that night had come in a glass flask, like something you might find in a chemistry lab, and had a deceptively light taste she distrusted. She’d been unwilling to let it remain on her tongue and swallowed it all at once the way she had once been taught to eat oysters, feeling the effects almost immediately. She’d been drunk, but she was not drunk now.

  Son said, In Hué. But she is married.

  Her eyes opened. She realized he was telling her something important.

  Her husband is in the army—

  So that explained it.

  She turned toward him, folding her pillow in half to lift her head, nodding into the darkness. She wanted to hear everything, wanted to encourage him, but was afraid that saying so might have the opposite effect.

  They met at a relative’s house, he explained, so that nobody knew. She was four years younger than him, a mother.

  She is not so fond of her husband, he said. The way he said this caused Susan to smile for a moment, but she wiped the smile away when he spoke again, his voice serious. It was not her choice to marry, but that did not bother her. It was that he left, forced into the army.

  The woman’s husband had been chosen for her by her family; they met at the engagement, the wedding day having been decided by a fortune teller. When they knelt beside the ancestral altar, the bride who would one day betray her soldier husband had felt the heat of the incense against her cheeks, her eyelashes, and believed the warmth was a promise from her ancestors for a secure future. Now she had a house with a courtyard and a child, but her husband was never there. He’d been drafted into the army. She never saw him. Not even his family looked in on her and so she was on her own. Son discovered she was married long
after he fell in love with her. He returned to Hué again and again, pursuing her. It wasn’t her fault, he explained, it was his. Too late, he discovered how impossible the situation was. But now he was in love, trapped by it, betrothed in a manner that felt more final than if he really were married.

  The way he described it, she could see that there was as much pain in the mix as there was joy, sex, passion. She could also see now why it was possible for him to sleep night after night on her floor, the moonlight shining through the window and, even tonight with the slight drunkenness from the rice wine, never think of making love. He was in love up to his eyeballs and it pained him.

  It sounds to me that you’ve brought something wonderful into her life, Susan said. How could that be such a mistake?

  I have made it so very much harder, he said. He sounded sad. He sounded resigned. You can love a person and by doing so make everything harder.

  It was true. The moment she heard it from his mouth, she knew exactly what he meant. Not just in this case, but in all cases. She and Marc, for example. Though she didn’t intend to make it hard for him. She wasn’t going to hang on to him unduly.

  He sighed. And there should be no secrets. And with that he closed the conversation as one might close a door. In silence, she looked at his face, his eyes far away, burdened. He would say nothing more. She knew this. She drew in a breath, felt herself sigh inwardly. After a few minutes she turned over and watched the ceiling fan with its slow revolution, her mouth dry, her head throbbing lightly with her pulse.

  I’ll get you water, he said, reading her mind.

  From then on, whenever Son was gone, disappearing as he did every now and again, she imagined him in Hué, the turns of desire and guilt so powerful that they could be endured only for a few days. Sometimes, upon his return to Saigon, he stared out the window of the hotel room, his thoughts, Susan imagined, condensed into a single moment of intense vision. She believed that he was dreaming of the woman in Hué, a beautiful young Vietnamese wife who betrayed her soldier husband with a photographer who roamed the country taking pictures of the dead, of the dying. He took photographs of grieving soldiers, of mothers clutching their children, of elderly farmers watching their crops exploding, of orphanages so packed with children the floor was obscured so that the children appeared almost to be floating on air. Everywhere, he recorded the disastrous state of things. One disturbing love affair—she didn’t know what the consequences would be. Everything in the country was so political. Being caught by the Vietcong speaking to some marines, a chieftain is executed, his head adorning the gates as a warning to all. Being seen running from an American unit on a search mission a farmer is shot down in a rice paddy, his body left to float upon the glasslike reflection. What was the consequence of a betrayal of mere love? Probably nothing. Son would not tell her the woman’s name so Susan gave her one. She called her Han, which means faithful and moral. She couldn’t see a lover of Son being anything less, and she did not know what she may have suffered, this young woman. They were all suffering so much. She saw her as just so she called her Han.

  When he was not with Han, he was with Susan, working, or beside her on the floor near her bed, or occupying her room when she was with Marc. It was a marvelous game of musical beds. Outside, the Saigon streets were flush with sleeping children with only newsprint for blankets, with ordinary citizens whose every available room became someone’s bedroom at night. The streets filled as a vessel might, spilling over so that homes were made on the canals. In a city that had been designed for half a million people there now slept three million or more, pouring in from the countryside as the war ate up village after village like a hungry dog.

  In such circumstances, it was easy to become casual about where one lay down. She was used to stepping over Son’s slumbering body on her way to the bathroom. She was used to moving half a dozen things just to sit on the toilet. She didn’t mind. She liked falling asleep with him working on his still photographs, washing them, hanging them, correcting the errors that only his eye caught. Sometimes he would sit on the floor smoking Kools, streaming the smoke out the window, and tell her stories of an older Vietnam, the Vietnam that existed before the Americans came, before the French. That is how she learned how old he was, thirty one. He did not look more than twenty; he shaved at either end of his lip and one small patch of stubble on his chin. Only his hands, as rough and callused as those of a laborer, gave him any age at all.

  Last night, she wanted to tell him she had never believed there was a Han, that she had known from the start he was lying to her. She wanted to tell him she had only pretended to believe him, not because it would make any difference, but because she could not bear the thought that he had betrayed her for so long, that he’d convinced her with such an easy lie. He had guided her judgment of him. The way he’d locked on to the fictitious Han seemed to set him apart from all the men she met, the journalists with their singular vision, their consuming passion to beat others to the big stories, their ambition almost grotesque, consumptive, as bad as if they’d shaved their heads and joined a cult, however talented they were, however bold. She had thought Son was different and he was not. She’d been fooled. And not just her. He had fooled the entire press corps, the embassy officials, the American and Vietnamese military. This soft-hearted boyish man who carried her groceries and made her tea in his decorative pot, who spoke quietly and laughed at other people’s jokes, who blended in and caused little stir, had walked among them and tricked everyone he met. It occurred to her, too, that he may still be deceiving her.

  But buried in the earth, covered in mud and slime, none of that mattered. He’d run back to get her while the bombs exploded around them. He’d pulled her to safety, led her to the shelter, wrapped his arms around her, and shielded her as best he could. He’d even wrenched the stupid soldier off her when he tried to strangle her, stood up for her even when it was the others who had weapons. He had, quite clearly, risked his life for her. That was a fact. For surely the VC soldiers were as capable as any in this war of shooting someone who was attacking one of their ranks. You can love a person and by doing so make everything harder. He was certainly making it harder for himself now, on her behalf. And she had to set the fact that she was still alive against the fact he’d been in command posts and seen maps that would have been important to the communists, that he’d used her in that way, in order to find out information, plans of operation, to infiltrate and get knowledge about American forces. He’d lied to her and would even right now be continuing to lie to her, had they not been in the ambush together, had they not been taken prisoner.

  But he is remarkable; she feels herself drawn to him newly. He is not falling apart the way that she feels she is falling apart. And look at their captors: Long Hair is so covered in mud he gives the appearance he’s been unearthed from a tomb; Gap Tooth drags his sword with him up through the narrow chute that serves as an entrance to the shelter, looking as though he no longer cares if he lives or dies; the Thin One is still sniffling. Son is behind her as she pulls herself up from the muddy surface of the underground hide, her elbows and knees making the climb. He helps her through and then, in the open air once more, smiles at her encouragingly.

  “We were lucky,” he says.

  Lucky? She cannot imagine how he can say this.

  He says, “It’s so hard to hide in the Delta. Everywhere you dig is water, you see, so you cannot rely on a foxhole or an underground shelter. What a lot of luck we had.”

  “I don’t call what’s going on here luck,” she says.

  “Susan.” He touches her elbow. “You are alive.”

  And it is true. Despite everything that has happened, she is still alive, unharmed. Emerging into the evening, she is amazed by this. She finds the evening itself remarkable, as though she had forgotten, or never truly known, the wonder of a breeze. The air is fresh, cool; it seems to have weight, like a tangible presence she might hold. Though there is the smell of carbine and sap, burning folia
ge, and another scent, a woody, dark taste to the air that she cannot identify, it all feels brand new, to be savored. When she breathes she does so with her whole face—mouth and nose, her tongue slightly aloft between parted lips. In a clearing, she looks out into the darkening sky, grateful there are no more bombs, no great surges of fire raining down, and she has the thought—almost comical—that she will never again enjoy walking in the woods. She will never want to be one of those ramblers she has seen in her mother’s home in Buckinghamshire, who in waxed jackets, gaiters, and boots, disappear off to trek from one end of the Pennines to the other. She has had enough of heat and sweat, of clinging mud and painful feet. The insects bombard her, crashing against her body as though unable to sense her presence at all, and she thinks that if she ever gets out of here she will come no closer to nature than a window pane’s distance.

  “You are brave,” Son says. She does not feel brave. She feels grateful to this man next to her, who in some ways, she realizes now, she does not know at all.

  Every day in Saigon the sun burned a white hole in the sky so that by mid-morning the temperature was already climbing skywards from 98 degrees, the air claustrophobic and unbreathable. Her skin was forever damp; her hair took on a new texture, no longer silky, no longer smooth. It kinked up around her face and ears, tangling at her neck. It felt like heavy drapery. If not for vanity, she’d have cut it off. Occasionally, in the afternoon there was a sudden rain shower, which offered some relief. The rain was so abrupt and powerful it swept garbage along the street, making the flimsy stall coverings sag or fall, creating large puddles through which the ceaseless traffic splashed. But after the warm, startling rain, the atmosphere only became more humid so that it was like a hot kitchen, the steaming air so wet you felt you could reach out and lick it. Cutting through the sky once more, the over-bright sun lit the earth, stinging her eyes, so she wore sunglasses almost all the time, looking down upon an ever more ragged Saigon, whose contents tumbled and flowed. This was when it was all so new to her. A distant, exotic city in which she had recently become resident.