by Robert Stone
“You’re an entertaining fella,” Ian said. “But in general I object to your being around.”
Secure behind her porcelain smile, the waitress placed bowls of fish and rice before them. A party of American reporters came in, followed by four Filipino rock musicians with pachuco haircuts. The Honda salesmen and their Japanese girlfriends grew merrier as the sake flowed.
“I mean,” Ian said, “I love this country. It’s not the asshole of the world to me. I grew old here, man. Now when I leave, all I’ll be able to think back on is bastards like you in places like this.”
“Sometimes,” Jill said, “you act like you invented the country.”
“They’re a pack of perves,” Ian said. “You’re a pack of perves. Why don’t you go watch some other place die? They’ve got corpses by the river-full in Bangla Desh. Why not go there?”
“It’s dry,” Converse said.
A Vietnamese soldier with dark glasses and a white cane had been led in from the street by a little boy of about eight; they moved from table to table selling copies of the Saigon Herald. The American reporters reclining at the table behind Converse were watching them.
“Listen,” one of the reporters was saying, “he can see as well as you can. The guy uses about six different kids. He rents them in the market.”
“Yeah?” another reporter said. “I think he’s blind.”
“He’s got fresh Arvin fatigues on every day,” the first reporter insisted. “You know why he’s got fresh Arvin fatigues? ’Cause he’s in the Arvin. And even the Arvin don’t take blind people.”
When the Arvin and his boy came around, Converse and Ian bought Saigon Heralds and set them aside without looking at them.
“I met a lady today,” Converse said, “who told me that Satan was very powerful here.”
“Check it out,” Ian said. “Don’t dismiss anything you hear out of hand.”
Jill was trying to watch the American reporters unobserved.
“They’d know,” she said, nodding toward their table. “We could ask them.”
Converse turned to look at the reporters; they were sunburned, they had impressive Mexican mustaches, they used their chopsticks well.
“They wouldn’t go for it,” he said. “Satan might be hot stuff to the montagnards, but he’s just another coconut monk to those guys.”
They finished off the beef and rice and called for more “33.” The waitress brought them some peanuts which were inhabited by tiny spiderlike insects.
“Satan?” Jill said. “What do you think she meant?”
“She was a missionary,” Converse said.
The Percys ate their peanuts one by one, patiently dislodging the insects. Converse did without.
“I wonder who Tho is,” Jill said after a while. “I wonder what’s in it for Charmian.”
“Fancy fucking,” Ian said.
Converse said nothing.
“An Arvin colonel.” Jill thoughtfully sucked on a peanut. “What can that be like, I wonder?”
“Exquisite,” Ian said.
“Do you really think so?”
“Best fucking east of Suez,” Ian assured her. “I have it on good authority.”
“I have it on good authority,” Jill said, “that Kuwait has the best fucking east of Suez.”
“If you like Arabs. Some do, some don’t.”
“There’s an Arab blessing,” Converse informed them, “‘May the poetry of your love never turn to prose.’”
“There you are,” Jill said, “Kuwait for me.”
“I know a Parsee in Karachi,” Converse said, “who knows the Sultan of Kuwait very well. He’s a caterer. When the Sultan goes falconing my friend the Parsee supplies his every need. He could fix you up.”
“Crikey,” Jill said. “We’d falcon under the merciless sky. And at night while I’m asleep—into my tent he’ll creep.”
“Exactly,” Converse said, “and you’ll tickle his prostate with an ostrich feather.”
Jill affected to sigh. “With a peacock’s wing.”
Ian had turned to watch the waitress bend over her hibachi.
“This is sheer racism,” he said.
“Well,” Converse said, “that’s fucking. East of Suez.”
The shock came up at them from under the floor; Converse experienced a moment of dreadful recognition. When the noise ended, they looked, not at each other, but toward the street and saw that the glass window was gone and that they were looking directly on the metal grill that had stood in front of it. There was food in everyone’s lap.
“Incoming,” Jill Percy said. Someone in the kitchen cursed shrilly, scalded.
They knelt on the tea-stained mat, trying to find their shoes. The proprietor, who was a man of mild and scholarly appearance, was forcing his way toward the door in grim fury; people had begun to leave without paying. Through the space where the window had been, Converse could see a fine layer of dry white dust settling on the wet pavement.
The street outside was strangely quiet, as though the explosion had blown a pocket of silence in the din of the city, which was now only slowly drawing in the stricken cries and the police whistles.
Converse and the Percys walked toward the river; they could see the four American reporters at the corner ahead of them. Everyone seemed to know better than to run. Halfway to the corner they passed the Arvin newspaper seller and his rented little boy; the pair of them stood motionless on the sidewalk facing the street. The Arvin still had his glasses on; the boy watched them pass without expression, still holding the Arvin’s hand. On the corner itself was an old woman who held her hands pressed to her ears in the position of hearing no evil.
“The tax office,” Ian said. And when they turned the next corner they saw that it had indeed been the tax office. The street before it was in ruins; a whole section of the concrete pavement was blown away to show the black earth on which the city was built. Night-lights in the nearby buildings had been blown so it was a while before they could see anything clearly. By now there were plenty of sirens.
The tax office had been a Third Republic drollery, Babar the Elephant Colonial, and the bomb had made toothpicks of its wrought-iron fence.
One of the balconies was lying smashed in the forecourt, surrounded by shredded personifications of Rectitude and Civic Virtue and the Mission Civilatrice. As they stood watching, a jeep with four Arvin MPs shot past them and pulled up on the sidewalk.
In the light of the MPs’ torches, they could see that there were people sitting down in the street, trying to pick the concrete chips out of their flesh. It had been very crowded in the street because of the stalls. Families of refugees sold morsels of fish and noodles to the petitioners who stood all day outside the building, and at night they settled down to sleep among their wares. Since the building had been empty when the charge went, the street people had taken the casualties.
Converse and the Percys moved back against the metal shutters of a building across the way, as Arvin paratroopers arrived in canvas-covered trucks to seal off the street to traffic. The Arvins came picking their way through rubble, nervous as rats, poking people aside with the barrels of their M-16s.
After a few minutes, the barbed wire arrived. The emergency services in Vietnam always carried immense quantities of barbed wire for use in every conceivable situation. There was still no sign of an ambulance. They rolled the coils along the street to spread at each end of the block. Policemen were poking among the ruins by the fence, shining hurricane lamps. Now and then Converse could see marvelously bright gouts of blood.
When the ambulances came, fastidious men in white smocks got out and walked carefully toward the pile; when the wire caught their clothing they swatted at it with quick delicate gestures. Jill Percy followed them across the street and peered over their shoulders and over the shoulders of the National Policemen making a short patrol the length of their line. Converse tried to see her face in their lights.
From the way she recrossed the stre
et, Converse and Ian could tell what she had seen. Her steps were slow and deliberate and she appeared confused. If one stayed in the country long enough one saw a great many people moving about in that manner.
“Crikey,” she said. She made a small fluttering gesture with her hands. “Kids and . . . all.”
Ian Percy had brought his beer bottle from the Tempura House; he let it fall from his hand to shatter on the street. The Vietnamese nearby turned quickly at the sound and stared at him without expression.
“Somebody ought to set a plastique at the London School of Economics,” he said. “Or in Greenwich Village. All those bastards who think the Front are such sweet thunder—let them have their kids’ guts blown out.”
“It could be anybody,” Converse said. “It could be an irate taxpayer. Anybody can make a plastique.”
“Are you going to say it’s the Front?” Jill asked her husband. “Because it probably wasn’t, you know.”
“No,” Ian said. “I’ll say it probably wasn’t. It could have been anybody.”
He began to curse in Vietnamese. People moved away from him.
Converse went across the street and watched the ambulance people lug body bags over the rubble. Dead people and people who appeared to be dead had been laid out on the exposed earth where the cement had been blown away, and the blood and tissue were draining into the black soil. There were chopsticks, shards of pottery and ladles lying about and on close inspection Converse saw that at least some of what had appeared to be human fragments might be chicken or fish. Some of the bodies had boiled noodles all over them.
As he went back to where the Percys were, four men wearing rubber gauntlets came carrying large aluminum cans. When they reached the wreckage, they upturned the cans and scattered white powder over it.
“What is it?” Converse asked Ian.
“Chloride of lime.”
Jill Percy stood with her shoulders hunched, arms folded.
“If you get run over in the street,” she said, “they’ll come and string barbed wire around you. If you don’t get up fast enough they’ll sprinkle you with chloride of lime.”
They walked down the street a few yards until they stood before the glassless windows of a Toyota agency. In the glare of the lights, they could see the office inside with its charts and wall calendars and tiny electric fans on each desk. Reams of paper were scattered over the floor; because of the angle of the windows, the office had absorbed a great deal of the concussion. One of the interior walls was dappled with blood that looked as though it had been flung from a brush. Converse stopped for a moment to look at it.
“What?” Jill Percy asked.
“Nothing. I was trying to think of a moral.”
He could not think of a moral. It reminded him of the lizards smashed on his hotel wall.
In his office just off the tiny lobby of the Hotel Coligny, Monsieur Colletti was watching “Bonanza” on the Armed Forces Television Network. Monsieur Colletti had taken eight pipes of opium during the afternoon; he had taken eight pipes of opium every afternoon for forty years. When Converse entered, he turned from the set with a welcoming smile. He was the most courteous of men. Converse and Monsieur Colletti watched “Bonanza” for a while.
On the screen, two cowboys were exchanging rifle fire at a distance of thirty meters or so. They were fighting among enormous rounded boulders, and as far as one could tell each was trying to move as close to the other as possible. One cowboy was handsome, the other ugly. There was music. At length, the handsome cowboy surprised the ugly one loading his weapon. The ugly cowboy threw his rifle down and attempted to draw a sidearm. The handsome one blew him away.
Monsieur Colletti, who spoke no English, brought his palms together silently.
“Hoopla,” he said.
“It’s the same in Saigon,” Converse ventured. Monsieur Colletti always seemed to understand his French.
Monsieur Colletti shrugged.
“Here, sure. Everywhere it’s the same now.” Monsieur Colletti had been everywhere. “Everywhere it’s Chicago.”
He said it Sheeka-go.
“There was a bomb tonight,” Converse said. “At the office of taxes. It’s all ruined there.”
Monsieur Colletti made his eyes grow larger in an expression of surprise that was purely formal. It was not easy to bring him news of Saigon.
“But no,” he protested mildly. “Any dead?”
“Some, certainly. Outside.”
“Ah,” the patron said, “it’s cruel. They’re bastards.”
“You think it was the Front?”
“These days,” Colletti said, “it could be anybody.”
When “Bonanza” was over, they shook hands and Converse went upstairs. Back inside his room, he turned on the overhead fan and the air conditioner. The air conditioner did not work very well but it provided a busy and, to the American ear, vaguely reassuring noise which drowned out the sounds from the street. The sounds from the street were not reassuring to anyone’s ear.
He switched on the lamp on his writing desk to provide his room with the most agreeable cast of light. Small tricks, picked up all over. He took a bottle of PX Johnnie Walker Black Label from a locked suitcase and drank two large swallows.
There it is, he said to himself. That was what everyone said—GIs, reporters, even Arvins and bar girls. There it is. It would have been good not to have had a bomb that night. To get stoned with the Percys and then sleep. Because of the bomb he felt numb and stupid, and although there were situations in which stupidity would do almost as well as anything else, he was not in one of them.
And getting drunk wouldn’t do. Nor would smoking more grass. Better to have stayed downstairs and watched more Westerns with Monsieur Colletti.
In his own despite, he took another swallow of whiskey, lit a Park Lane, and began to walk up and down the length of the room. In the next room, the Dutch flower-lover was playing “Highway 61” on his tape recorder. After a few tokes, he decided that he was experiencing no more than a vague dissatisfaction.
Nothing serious. See them all the time. Side effect of low-grade fever.
After a while, he stopped pacing and went across the air shaft to the bathroom to squat over the hole. The hole had treaded foot grips beside it to put your feet on; it was a vestige of the Mission Civilatrice. Unlike some American guests, Converse did not object to using the hole. Often, especially if he was high, using it made him feel as though he were entering into communion with the tight-lipped durs of vanished France Ultra-Mer— the pilots of Saint-Exupéry, General Salan, Malraux. Sometimes he whistled “Non, J’ne regret rien” as he left the toilet.
Straining, trembling with the fever stirred in his intestines, Converse took his wife’s letter from his trouser pocket and began to reread it.
“Re Cosa Nostra—why the hell not? I’m prepared to take chances at this point and I don’t respond to the moral objections. The way things are set up the people concerned have nothing good coming to them and we’ll just be occupying a place that someone else will fill fast enough if they get the chance. I can’t think of a way of us getting money where the money would be harder earned and I think that makes us entitled.”
Perhaps, Converse thought, as he managed the business of the banknote-sized toilet paper and washed his hands, perhaps the vague dissatisfaction was a moral objection. Back across the air shaft, he secured the rusty double locks and took another swallow of Scotch. When Converse wrote thoughtful pieces for the small European publications which employed him, he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred. He knew the sort of people he was addressing and he knew the sort of moral objections they found most satisfying. Since his journey to Cambodia, he had experienced a certain difficulty in responding to moral objections but it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about them.
There were moral objections to children being blown out of sleep to death on a filthy street. And to their being burned to death by jel
lied petroleum. There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. And moral objections to people spending their lives shooting scag.
He stood facing the wall where the lizard stains were, rubbing the back of his neck.
Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.
Converse had once accompanied Ian Percy to a color film made by the U.N. soil conservation people about the eradication of termites. In a country that looked something like Nam, where there was elephant grass and red earth and palm trees, the local soldiery drove over the grasslands with bulldozers, destroying immense conical termite colonies. There was a reason, as he remembered; the mounds caused erosion or the termites ate crops or people’s houses. The termites were doing something bad. When the colonial mounds were overturned, termites came burrowing up from the ruins in frantic tens of thousands, flourishing their pincers in futile motions of defense. Soldiers with flame throwers came behind the bulldozers scorching the earth and burning the termites and their eggs to black cinders. Watching the film, one felt something very like a moral objection. But the moral objection was overridden. People were more important than termites.
So moral objections were sometimes overridden by larger and more profound concerns. One had to take the long view. It was also true that at a certain point the view might become too long and moral objections appear irrelevant. To view things at such length was an error. The human reference point must be maintained.
Really, Converse thought, I know all about this. He pressed his thumb against the wall and removed a dry particle of reptile spine from its cool surface. It was an error to take the long view in the face of moral objections. And it was an error to insist on moral objections when they were overridden. If one is well grounded in youth, the object of love and sound toilet training, these things become second nature.
In the red field, when the fragmentation bombs were falling out of what appeared to be a perfectly empty blue sky, he had experienced no moral objections at all.
