by Kyo Maclear
I opened my eyes and saw Arnaud sitting across from me. His black light-meter cord wagged outside his shirt pocket.
“Arnaud,” I said, grinning.
“Any new drawings?” he asked.
“Always,” I said, giving my sketchbook a pat.
He reached across the table. “Let me have a look.”
He opened the book and began paging through it, taking his time, murmuring as he went, “Glass . . . bark . . . hands . . .”
“I don’t usually look back over them when I’m done.”
“I’m the same way with my photographs. Once a picture is taken I want to forget it.”
“I have a friend named Pippa back in London who says that art should be an act, not a thing.”
He looked up and thought for a moment. “The problem is that one person’s act quickly becomes another person’s thing. But I agree that the act should come before the thing. Otherwise, you’re just a manufacturer.” He continued paging through the book for a bit, then stopped and asked, “Do you ever paint?”
“No. Painting always feels like too much of a bother to me.”
“Do you draw animals?”
“Sometimes.”
“Self-portraits?”
“Now and then.”
He reached across for my pencil. “May I?”
“Go ahead.”
He still hadn’t said what he thought of my drawings but it didn’t really matter. He was treating me as a peer and that bit of respect meant more to me than any compliment he could have dredged up.
I watched him flip to a blank page and draw an armadillo, a good, fast drawing. When he was finished, he looked at me and explained that he was an armadillo because he had a hard shell that protected him. If something scared or threatened him, he just rolled up into a tight ball. When things quieted down, he uncurled and walked away unharmed.
He did a few more sketches—a scorpion, a tortoise—then looked at his watch and said it was time for him to go. “We’ll see each other soon,” he said, before he walked away.
The café was now really crowded. Even the cushioned red stools by the soda fountain were occupied. As he strolled out, he stopped at a few tables to say hello to people he knew, clasping hands in greeting.
I waited for the café door to chime closed. Then I stood up and started making my way around the room. I wanted to know more about Arnaud. I sat down at one table, then another, and another.
“Oh, Arnaud!” his friends said with beaming smiles. Arnaud this. Arnaud that. I learned quite a bit. Arnaud had been in the Congo. Arnaud’s photo equipment had been destroyed. Arnaud took wedding and family portraits on the side. Arnaud was the son of a French father and a Vietnamese mother who had moved from Da Lat to France when he was five years old. He went to art school in Rennes and painted beautifully. At age twenty-two, he was sent to Vietnam as a French combat photographer and after his discharge stayed on as a civilian photographer. Now he worked for AP.
He was an artist. A genius. A loner. A saint. A magician. A romantic.
The next time I saw Arnaud he was standing across the street from the hotel. His head was tilted upwards. I realized that he was watching someone on the balcony. When I looked up I saw Anh—her loosely tied hair falling forward over one shoulder as she tossed a tablecloth free of invisible crumbs, lifting it up and down.
Eventually, as if sensing someone watching her, Anh looked down. When she spotted me, she gave a happy wave. Then her gaze travelled to Arnaud. She swept her hand across her forehead, gathering a few strands of hair. She locked eyes with him for a moment, then slowly stepped back into the room. The balcony door closed.
Arnaud turned to me with a smile. “Do you have time to sit with me today?”
“Of course.”
Arnaud took one last look at the balcony, then placed his hand lightly on my shoulder. “We’ll get drinks on the terrace. And you can tell me more about your beautiful amah.”
Frosty glasses on the table, a sliver of shade, I could feel Arnaud’s curiosity burning but I had my own questions for him once we were seated.
“What do you mean by ‘action zones’?” he repeated, puzzled.
I felt myself blushing. I opened my satchel and brought out a map of Vietnam I had taken from the lobby. I smoothed it out on the table. “Arnaud, please, just show me. Where are the hot spots?”
“Hot spots?” he said with a big laugh. “You mean the war!” He took the pen from his pocket and began to circle areas. “There is a hot spot here. Here. Hot spot. Hot spot. Here. Here. Hot, hot, hot. Here . . .”
While Arnaud continued scribbling I thought of Oliver and how he avoided speaking of the war directly when I was around. Now, I could see from the map that we were right in the middle of it. In a strange way, Arnaud’s honesty was a relief. And the way he delivered the truth—casually, as if he assumed it was something I could face—made me feel grown up.
“Here you are,” he said, passing me the map, which was now full of blue, overlapping circles. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Now tell me about your amah.”
I rattled off a few things (great cook, nice singing voice, easy-going). He looked so hopeful, so wistful, I didn’t mention that she seemed to have a lot of devotees.
“Anything else?”
I was thinking: She has a son. He’ll be joining Anh soon. But I couldn’t bring myself to mention that either.
The following Saturday morning, Anh’s son Dinh arrived while Oliver and I were having breakfast. Absorbed in our separate reading, we barely noticed the door open.
Anh walked in first to announce their arrival. “Marcel, Oliver,” she said. “This is my son. This is Dinh.”
I looked up and saw a boy about my height but thinner. He had those wide-set eyes I’d noticed in the photograph, a full mouth and short cowlicked hair, which Anh smoothed as if tidying him for his introduction. He returned my stare, curious, but made no sound or movement at all.
Oliver watched him for a moment and then, remembering his manners, said, “Hello, Dinh. We’re happy to meet you. Please, come join us.”
Anh nudged her son towards the table. He sat down tentatively, studying the bread she placed on a plate before him. Then he slowly began turning his head to look around the room—at Oliver’s desk, the balcony, our home.
I had been told that Dinh was only a year younger than me and also an only child. I had also been told that he was mute—by choice, not birth. In other words, it was not that he could not speak, it was that he would not. In public, he communicated in sighs and nods and tilts of his head. In private, he spoke fluently to his mother in a rapid, whispered Vietnamese too quick for my ears. Now, watching Anh crouch down and place her hands on Dinh’s knees, I felt a twist of jealousy.
A part of me just wanted him to turn around and leave. But wherever he had come from, it must have been very far away. He looked exhausted. He fumbled through his breakfast, and when Anh suggested he take a rest, he followed her like a zombie to my bedroom. She pulled down the covers of the unoccupied twin bed and he slipped inside without protest and promptly fell asleep.
He continued to sleep off and on for the next two days. And I discovered to my great annoyance that he was not a mute sleeper. He mumbled and moaned. Occasionally his voice would rise and words would form. The first night my eyes flew open to Dinh ranting in his sleep; by the second night I was convinced that he had arrived to ruin my life.
Dinh, on the other hand, slept like a prince. When he finally emerged from the bedroom that first morning, he looked replenished. He walked around the spacious suite, lifting up books and bottles, trailing his finger over chairs and cushions, surveying everything with curiosity. He finally joined me by the window and we sat watching the traffic below, cars and pedestrians darting like a school of fish around an old man and his slow-moving cart.
Anh called us both over to the table and put one hand around Dinh’s arm and another hand around mine and said with a smile, “Macee. You kn
ow this is my number one son. I know you will take care of each other.”
I nodded.
“So, Dinh, number one son,” I said with a smile. “What do you say we go exploring. Shall we start with the courtyard?”
Dinh was silent.
I looked over at Anh: What shall I do now? Anh pulled her shirt, so I pulled gently on Dinh’s sleeve and said, “Let’s go. Can’t wait all day.”
And finally Dinh nodded as though he understood and followed.
It wasn’t easy. It was hard to discern at first if he was smart or stupid, interested or indifferent. Even as I got to know Dinh, there were moments when his muteness was too much to bear. There were days when it felt like a punishing silent treatment.
“Dinh. Don’t think you’re going to get away with not speaking.”
When I was cross, Dinh looked baffled. Anh urged me not to take it personally. But I felt that Dinh’s muteness had never been properly explained.
“But why doesn’t he say anything?” I asked Anh one morning as she was washing her hair in the sink.
“He wants to save his voice so he can be famous opera singer one day.”
“Anh! Come on.”
She laughed, rinsing the last suds from her hair.
“Come on, Anh,” I pleaded. “Tell me the real reason!”
“The real reason,” she said, not smiling any more, “is his father.” She wrung the water from her hair and told me that Dinh’s father was a soldier in the north. One day he allowed himself to be “lifted off by the wind of war.” For several days he hovered in the air and then he saw that he would have to make a decision, to choose sides. When that happened, he left Hue, abandoning his family, and joined the northern guerillas. These soldiers had burrowed into the ground to survive and now lived in tunnels night and day. Anh had fled to the south, where she hoped to be able to protect her son. She said that Dinh was so upset by his father’s actions that he had decided to remain silent until they were reunited.
When she had finished her story, she wrapped her hair in a towel and walked over to the record player in the other room and turned it on, placing the needle on a groove in the middle. There was a crackle, then the sound of a woman’s voice singing in a language I didn’t recognize. Anh adjusted the volume, louder, louder, until the room was filled with a sad, moaning melody. “I think it’s Portuguese,” she said with a shaky smile. While the music continued playing, she used the record cover to flatten dried rice skins for cooking.
Once I learned about Dinh’s father, my attitude towards Dinh changed. It stirred something nurturing in me. I knew what it was like to have to adjust to life with a missing parent. I barely had one.
One afternoon as we reclined on the cold floor of our room, escaping the broiling heat outside, I remember whispering questions to him.
“Do you suppose it’s hard to live in a tunnel?”
“Is there a way of visiting him?
“How long can a person live without sunlight?”
When I tired of asking questions, I just began speaking my own thoughts.
“Oliver is going away to the war for the third time.”
“He’s never quite right when he returns.”
“Sometimes I think he wants to get hurt.”
“I hope my mother can find us here.”
“Maybe I should learn more Vietnamese.”
Dinh said nothing.
In the days that followed, with Oliver gone again, Dinh trailed me everywhere I went. He followed me to Givral’s and to get fruit shakes at the local stall. When we were out together, I sometimes found myself narrating our experiences (“This drink needs more ice.” “Boy, is it hot.”) just to occupy the thick silence.
Then one day I stopped narrating and the silence thinned and became easy. There were different kinds of silence, I discovered. Silence that hid things and silence that held a space. With Dinh, I began to notice other sounds: his breathing and the soft private noises he made—the hums and grunts—like a conversation that had no beginning, middle or end.
I discovered that Dinh loved animals. He adopted the lizards that floated up the corridor walls. He watched them stay still, their gentle heaving abdomens the only indication that they were alive. There was no such thing as moderate movement among lizards. No gradation of motion. They rested as if glued to the spot, then bolted off. Who knew what sudden, mysterious force propelled them forward?
Dinh combed his surroundings and mimicked the sound of birds in the trees and crickets in the courtyard, and beetles knocking against glass.
One lunchtime, I brought out a copy of National Geographic I had bought at Samedi’s with a special feature on American Midwest farm animals.
I pointed at a rooster. “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”
Anh and Dinh laughed.
“Chikiriki,” said Dinh in response.
I pointed at a dog and said, “Woof, woof.”
“Wau wau,” said Dinh.
Next came a pig: “Oink, oink.”
“Ut-it, ut-it,” said Dinh.
Then a sheep: “Baa, baaa.”
“Be-hehehehe.”
We went through the animals until all that was left was a photo of a solitary penguin on a drift of ice.
I felt really happy that day. It didn’t matter if Anh loved Dinh more, I felt I was living a normal home life.
That night I wrote back to Pippa. I sat at one end of the table while Anh and Dinh sat at the other end playing cards. I told her all about my new family, how wonderful everything was. I wanted to make her jealous. Painfully jealous. I wanted her to know what she had given up.
CHAPTER 6
A Thousand Tiny Surprises
OLIVER CAME BACK FROM HIS THIRD PATROL in rough shape. I had been in Saigon for three months by then. He had a nagging cough and jungle foot rot. He walked to his bed the day he arrived, flopped face down and fell asleep. When he awoke in the night, he sat down at his desk but the writing didn’t come easily. The sun rose and set and he was still stuck on his lead sentence. A cloud of smoke gathered around his head. He typed, then crossed out what he had written, then retyped.
The wastepaper bin was filled with false starts, crumpled papers which I uncrumpled and read.
Vietnamese peasant farmers are being kidnapped at gunpoint. A pile of ash marks the former home of 67-year-old Nguyen Nhat Ha. They were given four hours to leave.
“Fuck,” he said, pulling out his old typewriter ribbon, a thin ragged reel of red and black unscrolling onto the desk.
He went out, came back drunk. He typed until he was sober. Then he went out again the next day, came back drunk.
But then, four days after he came home, whatever had been blocking him finally lifted and the writing started to go well. Now, he typed without stop. He made his documents in triplicate and kept one copy locked up in an otherwise empty suitcase, snapping the latch shut with pride. For the next week, I watched as he feverishly cabled, Telexed and handed roundups to travellers who were leaving the country.
He wrote about the South Vietnamese army’s blunders and the guerrillas’ victories. He pounded out more than four thousand words a day. I was just relieved to see him more cheerful, smiling occasionally.
Joseph joined us for dinner one evening. Anh had prepared his favourite dish of grilled pork and scallions. As we ate together, Oliver and Joseph began exchanging stories about their various adventures over the years. Every now and then, Anh would nod or wrinkle her nose, and say, Sounds dangerous . . . or You are a lucky man. After a while, I realized that they were showing off for her, pushing each other further and further until they were laughing about their near-death experiences. (“So I told him I’d buy him a ticket to Las Vegas if he put the gun down” . . . “A few more steps to the right and I would have been human confetti!”)
Halfway through the meal, Anh noted the horror on my face and put her hand on my arm. “You okay, Macee?”
I shook my head.
Joseph saw my reaction and reassur
ed me with a warm smile. “Marcel, don’t worry. It’s the ones who can’t laugh that you worry about.”
“Or the ones who can’t stop,” added Oliver.
“Yes, those are the truly lost ones.”
I slept late the next morning and was still stretched out in bed when Dinh came in and called me to the table by poking me in the side with a butter knife.
“Stop jabbing me,” I said, swatting him away with my hand.
When he wouldn’t leave me alone, I finally rose, annoyed, and followed him out to the main room.
“Macee, I’m sorry to wake you up,” said Anh. “Sit down, drink some tea.” She was mopping a small spill with a cloth. There was a strained look on her face.
Oliver came and joined us.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“A small incident,” said Oliver.
“What happened?”
Oliver explained that South Vietnamese troops had fired into a crowd of protestors downtown, killing nine people. In retaliation, a grenade was thrown at the Paris Palace nightclub close to the hotel.
“Did anyone die at the nightclub?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
“Please, Marcel. The point is we need to be a bit more careful for a while,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He looked over at Anh, then back at me. “We want you and Dinh to be chaperoned until the streets are safer.”
I could see there was no point in even arguing so I just nodded. Then I slid off my chair to go look out the window, but everything outside looked the same as usual.
The next morning I overheard a few reporters in the lobby discussing the attack on the nightclub. It had made international headlines. Thirteen people had been killed, including two American soldiers and three British nurses working for the International Red Cross.
It seemed obvious to me: the streets would not get safer. But for the next two weeks, it was a prisoner’s life we led. The only thing that broke up the caged feeling were visits from Arnaud. We rushed to the door the minute we heard his voice. On weekends he took us to the theatre near the bridge at Da Kao where we sat in the red leather chairs in the balcony and watched movies. The movies were an assortment of French avant-garde cinema and American westerns. We also watched a Vietnamese slapstick comedy, which made us laugh so hard we cried. Strange that the comedy would have come from the place that was seeing so much tragedy.
