by Kyo Maclear
I AM OFFICIALLY STUCK. It’s the fucking Guardian comic. I’m trying (and failing) to break down the bigger picture, reducing war into its component parts, the “cells” from which comics are created. I have just spent an hour drawing a hooded prisoner, too caught up in the joyless labour of tiny details, sketching and resketching, to notice what I was actually creating. Now my prisoner looks baroque, bejewelled.
Iris watches me rip up page after page, curious but hesitant, observing me the way you might observe someone unhinged from reality. She has been treating me strangely ever since she came across those books. She follows me around but doesn’t speak much.
At the moment she is seated in my ergonomic Aeron chair, working at my desk, while I sit at the lightbox. She stretches her arms over her head, yawns extravagantly and then resumes working. A slight wind rattles the window. Around where she sits, desk drawers have been left open, 2B pencils and brushes dumped out on the desk’s surface. From my stash of drawing implements, she has chosen the most antiquated nib pen. Her knuckles are grained with ink. She is even using a blotting towel. These prehistoric artifacts seem to have unlocked Iris’s creative flow. Her page is full of beautiful black squiggles, thin imprecise lines snaking from the top edge of the paper to the bottom. They look like dribbles of rain. Every now and then she brings me “faces,” small squares with faint pencil marks. She likes to draw made-up things. They are the quietest pictures I’ve ever seen. Looking at them is like floating under water, feeling immediate silence.
I walk over to the pencil sharpener clamped to my desk and say, “Remember when you offered me drawing lessons? I think I want them now.”
The next thing I know we are sitting on the floor of the studio in front of a giant sheet of paper. We have agreed that our journey will begin in the top left. Beyond that, there are no rules. We take turns improvising, picking up where the other left off. The pen in my hand, the pen in her hand. Back and forth we go. My leaden line giving way to her almost weightless twirl. It’s hard for me. I don’t know the last time I set out on the page without a plan or direction. I suddenly realize that drawing has been a way of form-finding for me. It pains me mentally when things don’t cohere. Maybe it’s time for some incoherence, a different kind of knowing.
“What do you see?” she asks, stopping to point at the marks we’ve made so far.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Good,” she says with a nod.
We continue working. Then something happens. My pen begins to lift, hers begins to fall. Flat ink blobs appear on her side. My lines loosen. Drawing has been a way of keeping myself safely and purposefully detached, but now our pens make eye contact, and it turns my heart inside out.
OLIVER HAD STARTED to take even greater risks, joining soldiers in Viet Cong–infiltrated areas at the very southern tip of Vietnam. At night, when my worries seemed to swell the most, I found myself making endless private promises. I prayed with brand new spiritual zeal. I made deals with God. I would be very good and not run off any more. I would sit on the hotel steps and watch the General and absorb valuable lessons about discipline. I would give away all my pocket money and I would not, under any circumstances, wear any white, write the number “4,” eat an orange without first offering one to Buddha. I was determined to produce nothing but excellent karma for Oliver.
Very early in the morning, soon after Oliver had returned from yet another trip to the front, I heard him opening the window in the main room. I got up and went to him.
“Look,” he said. The moon was still in the sky, but a green army tank was rolling down the middle of Tu Do, spewing gusts of diesel into the air.
Oliver closed the window and went to make two cups of sugary, extra milky instant coffee while I sat down at the table.
“Above the fold?” he said when he returned with our drinks.
At some point, above the fold had become our code word for the greatest stories.
I grinned and replied, “Pippa’s famous penis display.”
He laughed, handed me my mug. “What were they supposed to be, again?”
“Stalagmites. She was trying to make a prehistoric cave with modelling clay.”
“Yes. That’s right,” said Oliver.
“They cracked as they dried. Some of them broke right off.”
Oliver winced.
We continued sipping our milky coffee.
“Do you remember that day she came home with a baby goat?” Oliver said.
“I remember. She brought it home in a taxi.”
“And what was the goat for?”
“I forget.”
We both laughed.
There was a fly buzzing around. It landed on the rim of my cup, then on Oliver’s forehead, then on the table.
We returned to our separate rooms and I fell asleep quickly, but by 8 a.m. I was awakened by the sound of chainsaws. Throughout the city, trees that had long ago been planted by the French forestry service were being chopped down to widen the roads for military traffic.
The toppling of the trees was a turning point. Even after the French left, Saigon had felt like a European city. Now, boxy American cars were overtaking the old French cars on the streets. The stores began stocking American chocolate, mayonnaise and cornflakes. On Tu Do, there were posters for an American rock band and, a block farther south, big American farm boys in sunglasses were lining up to eat at Big Boy Hamburgers.
I saw more reporters bolting off on more mornings. Swift-footed when they left, they walked slower when they returned—stinking of sweat, covered with bug bites and dust, criss-crossed with cuts and scratches. A few were really messed up. Joseph called them “hair-trigger boys” and warned me to avoid them. It wasn’t unusual to see a casual conversation end in a tantrum or a brawl.
Oliver left for night patrol early one Saturday morning and returned three days later with his loafers bound up with tape. He had walked all night through rice paddies up to his waist in water, then had to stay in water for about two hours before sweeping through a rebel village with a small platoon. I overheard him telling Anh about Americans with tommy guns pushing a scared company of South Vietnamese soldiers to continue.
“It’s going to get worse,” he said with strange openness. “Everything before now was small.”
When he was done talking he lay down on the sofa with his black feet and stared at the ceiling fan until he fell asleep.
The next morning Anh, Dinh and I went to Ben Thanh market, in the Chinese neighbourhood of Cholon, to do our shopping. The city was hazed in a morning fog. As we walked through the streets, I watched the grainy shapes of two women ahead of us and thought of my mother. All these years later, she was still a blurry image, only slightly more than a vaporous nothingness. I still imagined that a letter would arrive from her one day, pleading for my forgiveness, asking for a reunion.
Whatever thoughts I was having as we walked through the main entrance to Ben Thanh were instantly jostled aside by the crowds, all the vivid colours and layered noise, the pots clanging and customers arguing. It was prime selling time. We moved along with a surge of shoppers. There were narrow aisles brimming with baskets of dried fish, bottles of Bordeaux, live birds. After picking out a few mangos and fresh spring rolls for ourselves, we made our way to the clothing area to buy new shoes for Oliver.
This section of the market was less crowded. I stood under a pink-striped canopy while Anh and Dinh sauntered around looking through racks of shoes. A woman nearby was arranging a spiralling tower of silk slippers, carefully balancing each pair, reaching higher and higher.
Suddenly, from a few stalls over, I heard angry shouting. I turned and saw a skinny teenage boy guarded by two policemen. The boy looked terrified. From what I could gather, a third policeman had just discovered a box of ammunition beneath a pile of cotton shirts and straw mats. “Duma,” spat the policeman, lifting his hand to strike the boy. The boy flinched and momentarily lost his balance. It was almost imperceptible—no effort to bolt
away, just a small stumble backwards. But the policeman to his right reacted immediately, pulling a pistol out of his holster. It happened so quickly. I heard the word no leave my mouth. Then I heard the shot, and the boy dropped to his knees and fell to the ground, his hands still tied behind his back. I saw blood pooling.
Someone started yelling behind me. The boy was convulsing. I felt light-headed and steadied myself against a shoe rack. The boy’s face was unnaturally white. One of the policemen swore and made a tourniquet out of a torn shirt. I crouched down and closed my eyes and I tried to use Mrs. Bowne’s technique of picturing pleasant things. Think of the flowers in Eel Brook Common and the lake in Kelsey Park. Picture Kiyomi . . . It was no use.
I heard Anh yell in Vietnamese for someone to call an ambulance.
Then I opened my eyes and saw her backing away, scared. I stood to join her. Dinh was the last to follow. He didn’t want to leave.
The sun was out and the fog had lifted but we walked home in a daze. We watched a cyclo driver, huffing and puffing as he passed us. I held Dinh’s hand, which was cold and small, and I felt suddenly protective. Why had he wanted to stay? I could tell that we were all still inside the market, watching that boy with his cheek on the floor, shuddering in pain.
Back at the hotel, Dinh put on Anh’s favourite record again, the Portuguese music she had taken to calling “mornas.” After the first popping and scratching sounds, he raised the volume so the music drowned out the street noise, drowned out the gun that was still ringing in our ears. Even though the song was sad, it felt like being rinsed. The woman’s voice was so clear and full. Anh stood behind me and scratched my shoulders lightly with her fingernails. Then she walked over to Dinh and rested her hands on his shoulders. When the record ended, the room filled with the sound of the needle looping, the rhythm of empty grooves. Dinh lifted the arm and placed it back on the post. He turned the machine off and the record spun until it slowed and stopped.
That night I lay awake in bed listening to a street vendor’s singing lament rising through the window. Who wants vodka? Who wants banh mi? I heard the hypnotic clickclickclick of a playing card brushing bicycle spokes in Lam Son Square. And Dinh whimpering in his sleep. A part of me knew that Dinh was dreaming about his father, that it could have been his father in the market. When the whimpering continued, I hummed to him, trying to drown out his bad dream.
A letter arrived from Pippa the next morning. I tore the envelope open and unfolded the paper. She wrote how lovely it was to hear from me, to hear that I was so happy, but that she missed me terribly and did I know when I would be back. Wasn’t there a small part of me, she asked, that missed her too? Even just a little bit? She signed her name with fourteen hearts.
I had made her suffer—a hollow achievement, but I clung to it.
Oliver had started going to the Caravelle roof bar across the square. He now got drunk nearly every night, and had taken to sleeping at odd hours.
When he had been napping for an unusually long time one afternoon, Anh told me to wake him. I opened his bedroom door and saw him asleep on top of the covers. He was lying at the very edge of the bed, one leg dangling off the side.
“Oliver,” I said softly.
Usually he wrapped himself in a very thin gauze of sleep, on the verge of waking, but now he looked as though he had died.
“Wake up,” I said softly. I had read once that a soldier could wake up swinging, so I extended my arm and tried to tap Oliver’s shoulder from a distance. Tap, tap.
Oliver’s forehead made two deep vertical creases in the middle like coin slots. But he continued sleeping. I took the lace coverlet at the bottom of the bed and pulled it over him and walked back to the table, where Anh was mending one of Dinh’s shirts.
“I can’t wake him. He’s snoring pretty loudly.”
“We’ll let him have peace, then.”
I looked at Anh, trying to read her mood. “I think Arnaud’s back from Tokyo. Can I go to Givral’s and see if he’s there?”
She looked up and put down her sewing. “Yes. And if you find him, tell him to join us for dinner.”
I was not surprised when Anh started asking after Arnaud. He was the most charming man in the world. He looked like Pig Pen when he returned from the field, covered in dust. Half an hour later, he would look like nobility. A few of the Vietnamese men working at the hotel didn’t trust him because he was half French, but Anh would sneak peeks at his handsome face and giggle at his funny accent.
That night Anh made a fish hotpot for dinner. I was glad to have Arnaud there making conversation while Oliver and Dinh sat silently at opposite ends of the table, staring at the flowers Arnaud had brought. When the meal was over, Oliver excused himself and took off for the Caravelle roof bar. Shortly after, Dinh and I left Arnaud and Anh sitting at opposite ends of the French sofa and headed to Brodard’s for ice cream.
When we returned to the hotel an hour later, Arnaud and Anh were still on the sofa but now they were listening to a jazz record. Anh looked very happy. They were still sitting side by side. Anh’s slender hands were still folded on her lap, but it looked as if someone had tilted the room and slid them closer together.
There was a glow around them that I wanted to be part of, so I walked over and said the first thing that came to mind. “Arnaud, can you give me a photography lesson sometime?”
“Of course, Marcel. I’d like that. We’ll wait for a good shooting day. How does that sound?”
Several days later, Arnaud showed up to take me around the city for a photography lesson. In the absence of rain, the dust had been building, softening the sun’s usual glare.
Arnaud arrived toting a pair of cameras around his neck. His fishing vest was crammed with extra film. He handed me the smaller camera to carry and showed me how to set the light meter, adjust the lens, load a roll of film.
“Remember to keep the sun behind you,” he said. When he was satisfied that I had a grasp of the technical basics, he said, “Now forget all that. Let’s go.”
I trailed behind him, timidly snapping photos, while he kept repeating, “Don’t overthink! Don’t overthink!” We made our way over to Le Loi, where Arnaud explained that the street was named after the general and emperor who had won back independence for Vietnam from China in 1428. He pointed out how many streets were named after Vietnamese heroes who had fought off foreign invaders.
Arnaud took his own pictures during our walk. He snapped a group of five children sharing a giant red lollipop, vampiric smiles as they passed it up and down the row. He did a kind of twirl on the sidewalk and snapped two grenade guards, who were protecting a sidewalk café that had stayed open. He did this without them noticing, acting like a smooth dancerly spy. He stopped by a tree, which stood alone amid a row of stumps, and without taking a single picture—simply changing his camera angle—he demonstrated ten different ways of framing it.
“Elevated. Cropped. Intimate. Epic. Abstract. Tragic icon. Triumphant symbol . . .”
Once we had shot six rolls between us, Arnaud led me back to his darkroom on rue Pasteur—a converted lavatory in the AP offices. For the next hour, we stood shoulder to shoulder, tinted by the red light, soaking our gloved hands in vinegary developer and fixer.
My photos were all embarrassingly simple: subject right in the centre of the frame, flatly lit. There were orbs on all the photos I had taken of the General, circles of brightness that Arnaud explained were caused by moisture in the air. But it was an incredible feeling, knowing that I was creating a permanent record of some kind. Even the mistakes felt magical.
While we waited for the last batch of photos to dry, Arnaud showed me some of the recent pictures he had taken while on patrol.
“Soldier, peasant, child, peasant, soldier, soldier, soldier,” he said, sighing as he passed them to me one by one.
I noticed one particularly good photo of a backlit American soldier walking through a field. I lifted it up. “I can see this one on the cover of LIFE.”
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I passed the photo back to Arnaud, who looked at it for a moment, then shook his head. “Never trust a war picture that impresses too easily.” He ripped the photo in half and said, “Mythology impresses. Propaganda impresses. We’re not interested in the easy picture.”
I nodded uncertainly.
Arnaud sighed. “Look, I’m not really meant for this—war hunting. Given the choice, I’d prefer the quiet of a garden over the excitement of combat any day.”
“Then why don’t you switch and become a garden photographer?”
“Oh. It’s much too late for that.”
I didn’t really know what he meant: Too late because it would be hard to find work? Too late because even flowers would remind him of death? I decided to change the subject.
“How much can you get for a good war photo?”
“Well, I’m on staff but a stringer . . . let’s see. Probably ten, fifteen dollars.”
“Not bad,” I said.
Arnaud gave me a disappointed look and said, “No. Not good.”
When we were finished in the darkroom, Arnaud sat down at his desk, leaned back and said, “Well, let’s have a peek.”
I slid my photos across the desk. Arnaud picked them up, shuffled through them quickly and put them down.
“So?” I said tentatively. “Am I even remotely on the right track?”
He gave me a steady look and said, “Find the one with the dog.”
I searched through the stack until I came to the photo: a skinny black dog standing at the feet of a young Vietnamese soldier who was pinning his laundry to a bamboo rod. The dog was looking up devotedly.
