White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  Her amusement deepened. All Americans were crazy, but this was certainly crazier than most. ‘This evening, when I have finished work, then I will talk to her and ask her if she will meet you.’

  Her last sentence had brought an uncomfortable element of doubt into the situation. ‘Where would she enjoy dining most?’ he asked, feeling that if a time and place were decided upon, a successful outcome was just a little bit likelier. ‘The restaurant at the Continental? The Caravelle?’

  ‘I think perhaps the Continental,’ she said, wondering why, after eighteen months of being solicited by nearly every American who had crossed the International’s lobby, she was now capitulating to this tall, lean, criminally young helicopter pilot with the reckless eyes.

  ‘I’ll book a table for seven-thirty.’ It was a ridiculously early hour to be eating in Saigon, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to be in her company, and if that meant being in her sister’s company as well, then it was a small price to pay.

  ‘I can’t talk any longer,’ she said softly as a boisterous party of European construction engineers entered the lobby.

  He nodded, understanding at once. If she was overheard, or seen, talking to him with such familiarity, then the International’s patrons would assume she was available and she would be overwhelmed by amorous advances.

  ‘Right,’ he said briefly. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Cháo,’ she said, the dimple in her cheek still in evidence.

  As he strode past the engineers and out into the street he decided that it was time he came to grips with the Vietnamese language. Why on earth did the Viets use the word cháo to both say hello and good-bye? It didn’t make sense. For all he knew, they probably used the same word for other opposites, like stop and go, and friend and enemy. If they did, it was no wonder the American High Command had difficulties in understanding them!

  ‘How was Miss Goody Two-Shoes?’ Chuck asked him when he walked into their room at the Continental.

  ‘Okay,’ Kyle said, good-naturedly noncommittal.

  Chuck had already showered and changed into jeans and a T-shirt, ready to hit the streets. He finished combing his close-cropped light brown hair, tucking the comb into his hip pocket, saying in amusement, ‘So that’s the way the cookie crumbles, is it? Miss Goody Two-Shoes really is a serious item and not a fit subject for bawdy speculation?’

  ‘You got it.’ Kyle stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt.

  Chuck shook his head in mystification. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘If that’s the way it is, buddy, then even though I’ll never understand it, I promise I won’t give you a hassle. As far as I’m concerned, Miss Goody Two-Shoes is your wife, your sister, your mother, and the Virgin Mary all rolled into one, and will receive all due respect.’

  ‘Then start off by referring to her by her name,’ Kyle said, pulling off his trousers and throwing them in Chuck’s direction.

  Chuck dodged the trousers. ‘And that is?’

  ‘Trinh, and for your information, it means pure and virtuous.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Chuck was intrigued. ‘Did she tell you that?’

  Kyle walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower ‘No,’ he yelled over the sound of the gushing water. ‘There was a Vietnamese interpreter in camp the other day and I asked him!’

  Chuck stared towards the open bathroom door. Kyle was really taking this thing seriously, far too seriously for his liking. After all, what the hell could come of it? Kyle was married. The girl was probably a Buddhist or a Confucian and even if Kyle got a divorce, there would be no way that her family would allow her to marry him. In his book, for Kyle to embark on such a relationship was absolutely pointless.

  He shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t his business. He was Kyle’s buddy, not his keeper. And he was wasting precious time. The bars and brothels were waiting.

  ‘If you want to catch up with me, I’ll be in La Bohéme or The Sporting Bar,’ he yelled, striding out of the room, knowing that he wouldn’t be without a companion for very long.

  There was a whole long afternoon to while away before he was due to meet Trinh and her sister, and for once Kyle was perplexed as to how he should spend his time. He couldn’t do any heavy drinking. If he reeked of alcohol when he met her sister, then he would very probably never manage to date Trinh ever again. And he couldn’t whore. Or could he?

  He mentally debated the point while he towelled himself dry and changed into crisp, clean fatigues. After all, Trinh would never know, and if he didn’t get himself some sex in before their date, then he certainly wouldn’t get any during. He chuckled as he zipped up his pants. He was in grave danger of achieving the impossible. A three-day celibate R and R in Sin City. If word of it ever got around, his reputation would be shot to pieces.

  As he walked through the lobby he ran into a Vietnamese wedding party making their way towards the Continental’s tiny interior garden. The garden, with its mass of frangipani blossom and potted palms and gaily coloured turquoise china elephants was a great favourite with local photographers.

  He stood, watching them. The groom was almost as slightly built as his bride, and they were holding hands, laughing across at each other, their hair and shoulders thick with flower petals. The bride was dressed in red, not white, and her friends twittered around her, as pretty as butterflies in their floating, pastel ao dais. For a few brief minutes they surrounded him and then they were gone, crowding ebulliently into the little garden.

  He strolled out into the street. He was beginning to find the South Vietnamese a very attractive people. He wished to hell he had been taught more about their way of life and their customs when he had been at helicopter school. All he could remember was learning to call them dinks and slopes and gooks. His knuckles tightened fractionally. Anyone he heard referring to Trinh as a dink would very speedily regret it.

  He paused for a moment before turning into La Bohéme. Tu Do was massed with bicycles and cycles as it always was, but the cars honking for a passageway were American and driven by Americans. The dudes mobbing the pavement and dodging the street traffic were American. Neon signs advertised American brand names; Coke, Winstons, Levi’s. The music blaring from American transistors was American music: James Brown, Wilson Pickett, The Temptations.

  It was as if a monstrous wedge of downtown Los Angeles had been grafted on to the coast of Southeast Asia. And the Vietnamese smilingly serviced the invasion. They shined shoes and waited tables and cooked food and washed laundry and provided sex. For the first time Kyle wondered about the thoughts behind those smiles. He wondered what Trinh thought of the Americans in her city. He wondered what she thought of him.

  ‘Saigon tea? You buy me Saigon tea?’ a lady of the house said, curling herself around him.

  Kyle slapped two dollars into her palm to keep her quiet, and looked around for Chuck.

  ‘You number one,’ his newfound friend said, winding her arms around his neck and rubbing herself seductively up against him.

  Chuck was at the bar with a couple of marines, all of them with girls on their knees. All he had to do was walk across and join in the fun. He looked down at the girl, whose hand was now roving speculatively over the bulge in his crotch. She was very pretty, with fine, doll-like features and hair shimmering loosely down her back to her waist.

  ‘You buy me another Saigon tea?’ she asked winningly.

  Kyle grinned, down at her and then, surprising himself almost as much as he surprised the girl, he said, ‘No. Today I seem to be right out of money for Saigon teas.’

  The expression on the girl’s face changed from one of winsomeness to one of incredulity and then disgust.

  ‘You number-one cheap Charlie!’ she flared indignantly, removing herself from him with all speed. ‘You suck-suck!’

  From the bar Chuck caught sight of him, shouting across for him to join them. Kyle raised a hand in acknowledgement and then shook his head. ‘Not this time, buddy,’ he yelled back over the deafening sound of Wilson Pickett’s �
�Mustang Sally’. ‘See you later, back at the Continental.’

  For the rest of the long, hot afternoon he kept out of trouble, restricting himself to a couple of beers. After that he turned to coffee, sitting beneath the awning of a sidewalk café, watching the world go by and spurning all offers of female companionship. When he finally made his way back to the Continental, he saw Chuck and his companions stagger from a bar and half fall, laughing and uproariously drunk, into another.

  He grinned to himself. It was a strange sensation being sober and celibate in a city so swingingly sinful. It was certainly an afternoon he would remember. Hell, it was an afternoon in Saigon so stainlessly pure, he would be able to tell his grandchildren about

  it!

  He was glad that he had suggested they meet early. By 7:40 p.m. as a waiter led Trinh and her sister across to his table on the Continental’s terrace, the surrounding tables were already beginning to fill.

  He had been waiting for them for twenty minutes in an agony of impatience. For the past ten minutes he had been certain that they were not going to come, and then he had seen them, sumptuously dressed in silken ao dais, walking with head-turning grace in the waiter’s wake.

  As he rose to his feet his mouth was dry. He felt like a kid on his first date.

  ‘My sister, Mai,’ Trinh was saying to him: ‘Mai, Kyle…’

  ‘Anderson,’ he finished for her quickly, knowing that she still didn’t know his surname, as he, incredibly, did not know hers.

  ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Anderson,’ she said with cool formality.

  ‘Just call me Kyle.’ As they sat down, Kyle wondered if he had made a crass mistake. Perhaps such an invitation to a lady he had only just been introduced to was considered ill bred in polite Vietnamese circles. And he was certain that Trinh and her sister belonged to very polite circles indeed. As they had entered the hotel, and before the waiter had led them across the terrace, he had seen the proprietor bowing to them from the waist, greeting them warmly, an honour conferred on very few of the Continental’s guests.

  He ordered a bottle of chilled vin blanc cassis, and tried to redeem his thoughtless crassness.

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss …’ He could have bitten off his tongue. He still didn’t know her surname. ‘Mai,’ he said quickly, aware that Trinh was all too aware of his discomfiture and that she was having great difficulty in suppressing her giggles.

  ‘I am very pleased to meet you too,’ Mai said, her English charmingly touched with an unmistakable French accent. ‘Our family has many Western friends, but they are not—’ She paused, her sloe-dark eyes holding his. ‘They are not army personnel. You understand what I am saying, Mr Anderson?’

  He understood perfectly. He looked across at Trinh, as beautiful as an exotic flower in her silk ao dai, her eyes laughing into his, and then he turned once more towards her sister.

  ‘I know very little of Vietnamese customs and manners,’ he said truthfully. ‘But I do know that I want to see Trinh again. I understand the kind of girl she is, and the kind of family that she comes from, and that you are concerned for her reputation.’ He cleared his throat, wondering what Serena’s reaction would be if she could see and hear him. Would she throw the nearest available object at his head, or would she burst into shouts of disbelieving laughter? ‘If you allow me to see her, I promise you that she will come to no harm … that I won’t take unfair advantage …’ He was floundering and he knew it. He had never had these intentions before in his life, much less tried to articulate them.

  ‘As our parents are dead, I am the head of our family,’ Mai said, coming to his aid and looking too charmingly fragile to be the head of anything. ‘If you wish to see Trinh, then you may do so, Mr Anderson, providing she is adequately chaperoned.’

  ‘By yourself?’ Kyle asked, relieved that the inquisition, such as it was, appeared to be over.

  Mai nodded, smiling a little shyly, and he was suddenly aware that she, too, was relieved that the business of the evening was over. ‘Great,’ he said, reflecting in amusement that if the sister’s positions had been reversed, Trinh would have made a far sterner interrogator. ‘Now that that’s taken care of, let’s eat.’

  They started off with canh chua soup, a delicate mixture of shrimp and bean sprouts and pineapple and celery, and Trinh told him a little of her family history. ‘We are a very old family in Saigon,’ she said, sipping at her wine from a long-stemmed glass. ‘My father was a mandarin and an adviser to Bao Dai, the last emperor.’

  He listened, intrigued, discovering that she was neither Buddhist nor Confucian, but Roman Catholic, and that she had been educated in French schools in Saigon and had spent two years in Paris, at the Sorbonne.

  As rice and finely chopped, tender beef wrapped in grape leaves followed the soup, he was aware that they were receiving several curious glances from the other diners. The majority of them were Americans from the embassy and the aid agencies, eked out by a handful of portly Vietnamese businessmen dressed Western-style. He knew very well what they were all thinking. Were Mai and Trinh high-class hookers? And if they weren’t, what the hell was he doing squiring them around?

  He was grateful when a fair-haired about his own age walked across to a nearby table, escorting a Vietnamese companion who looked even more respectable than Mai and Trinh. She was, surprisingly, easily in her late thirties, and perhaps even in her early forties.

  He looked across at them speculatively, wondering about their relationship. The guy didn’t look to be army, his hair was far too long, and he didn’t look to be American. He was deeply suntanned, and even though he was young, there was a web of fine lines around his eyes, as if he were accustomed to screwing his eyes up to look into the sun. As soon as he spoke, asking for the wine list, Kyle knew he had been right about him. He was an Australian.

  ‘… where were you born in America?’ Mai was asking him.

  ‘Boston,’ he said, dismissing the Australian from his mind, and wondering when he was going to be able to surreptitiously hold Trinh’s hand.

  ‘Well?’ Chuck asked blearily the next morning as he dragged himself into the world of the living. ‘Has the novelty of being a monk worn off yet?’

  In the nearby twin bed Kyle rolled on to his back, resting his head on his hands. It was a very pertinent question. He had been able to hold Trinh’s hand only briefly, when he had handed her into the taxicab that Mai had insisted they go home in, alone. That had been the full extent of the physical contact between them. Smiles across a table and a hot, urgent handhold. He thought of Trinh’s delicate, flawless face and her laughing dark eyes, and his stomach turned a somersault as if he were going down a roller coaster.

  ‘No,’ he said, wondering for the first time where their relationship could possibly go. What it would lead to. ‘No, I seem to be turning into a pretty damned good monk!’

  Chuck groaned and pulled the sheet up over his head. ‘Later,’ was all Kyle could indistinctly hear. ‘Tell me all about Miss Goody Trinh Two-Shoes, later.’

  He did better than that. At lunchtime, in the lobby of the International he introduced Chuck to her.

  Chuck was impressed. She was certainly something, every inch a lady but with that naughty light of laughter in her eyes that every Vietnamese woman he had ever met seemed to have been born with. All the same, if he were Kyle, he knew where his preference would lie. And that would be with the five-foot-ten, wild aristocratic blonde, in swinging London.

  When they returned to camp, Kyle put his mind to the serious task of sorting out regular time in Saigon. Vietnam was a land that ran on bribes and corruption, and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t sink to those depths himself, if they would get him what he wanted.

  ‘You’re an Anderson of the Anderson banking family?’ his operations officer asked him, suddenly acutely attentive.

  Kyle nodded.

  ‘You’re not shitting me, are you? Because if you are …’

  ‘I’m not shitting
you,’ Kyle said, amused at how easy it was all going to be. ‘All I want to do is to come to an arrangement.’

  ‘Oh, I think we can do that all right,’ his operations op said, grinning broadly, ‘Yes, I certainly think we’ll be able to do that all right. For a price.’

  The price was astronomically high, but as far as Kyle was concerned,

  it was worth it. Before the month was out he was seeing Trinh at

  least two weekends out of every four. Mai still accompanied them on what Trinh termed their ‘official’ dates. But there were other times, snatched moments when she escaped from the hotel desk and they were able to be alone together. Sometimes they would walk through the back streets behind Tu Do, down to the river; sometimes they would walk in the park that backed on to the Presidential Palace gardens; sometimes they would sit drinking coffee in Broddards, a café that catered to Vietnamese rather than Americans. The idyll lasted until September, until Trinh said that she couldn’t see him on his next free day because it was the anniversary of her mother’s death and she was going to spend the day with Mai.

  Kyle now knew enough of Vietnamese tradition and custom to realize that it would be useless to argue with her. Even though she was a Catholic and not a Buddhist, as a Vietnamese, ancestor worship was in her blood and her bones.

  Now that he was beginning to understand a little of what made the Vietnamese tick, he was constantly exasperated by how ignorant his fellow Americans were about them. The Strategic Hamlet programme was a case in point. Under Diem, and with American approval and American aid, peasants had been forcibly removed from their villages and farms and transferred to new ‘fortified’ villages, villages which, in theory, the Viet Cong would be unable to penetrate.

  In regions such as the Mekong Delta, where the peasants did not live in concentrated settlements but in farmhouses strung out along the edges of the dykes, this involved taking them from the land that had been their father’s and their father’s father’s, and no new allotment of land was given to them. The peasants, far from being grateful for their new ‘safe’ villages, resented the government and the Americans who funded the government. And this was all because they didn’t understand that the plots of land, where their ancestors were buried, were sacred to the Vietnamese.