Who can say why? I think their actual ordinariness has something to do with it-mingled with an opposite element that takes us by surprise. I’m summing this up badly, and maybe the words aren’t to be found-not by a journalist, anyway. But I’ll try. I think it all has to do with mortality, in the end: mortality and its opposite. I’m talking about the odd illusion one sometimes has that particular men and women are-how can I put it?—very human, yet a little more than human, in some way. They talk in an ordinary manner, these people: they eat; laugh; walk in the streets; sit in a pool of sun in a coffee shop, or the artificial light of a bar: yet nothing dissolves the film of strangeness that surrounds them. It’s got nothing to do with conventional beauty; they haunt us in a way that’s beyond the impact of beauty. That’s the miracle of human beings, in my view. We grow old, we shrivel up, we die; we’re a sad lot of creatures, ultimately; and yet certain human faces can make us disbelieve it-or at least forget it for a while. How are they different? How can I say? They seem exempt, somehow. They change our lives like music; they put time and disappointment on hold; they even make us forget the final sadness of reality, and of our miserable physical decline. You never know when or where you’ll encounter them: faces that we look at in fascination, and can’t say why. We’re captivated by a particular shape of eye; a smile; a set of the mouth: captivated above all by the spirit behind the face: by a sort of easy daring, an always lighthearted ease with life that’s magical, and that seems to speak of a connection with-what?
I’m tempted to say: with a life other than this, on some sweeter level. It’s a face which in its youth-recurring in many variations, male and female-can never be devalued, never obliterated. Growing old, disappearing, it’s always replaced. No telling where it will reappear, in the famous or the obscure. In the end, it’s beyond analysis. It’s what makes us immortal.
So what I’m saying is this: if you want to understand about Mike, I think you have to understand about that. And if you want to understand how he changed after his wound, you have to understand about the crippled girl, Kim Anh.
When they brought him back to Saigon, to the big American field hospital at Tan Son Nhut, he was supposed to spend some time there. He’d been told he’d make a full recovery; but he’d been ordered to take a lot of bed rest. He was still very weak.
But he stayed there only a few days; then he signed himself out and moved to Madame Phan’s villa. She sent her car to fetch him, apparently; she even had her own Vietnamese doctor attending to him.
But now the fear that Langford had expressed to me on the Continental terrace turned out to be prophetic. Kim Anh, who’d been successfully treated in Sydney and fitted with her surgical boot, and who’d been living in Madame Phan’s household for some time, should have been there to greet him. But instead, she’d disappeared.
5.
AUDIO DIARY: LANGFORD
TAPE 12: NOVEMBER 16TH, 1965
-This room’s on the first floor, and the shutters of the windows are always open, above the courtyard. It’s as big as one of the bedrooms in the Continental, and a bit similar. But the only French furniture here is the heavy old wardrobe and the bed. The rest is Chinese, or Indochinese: a black, gold-edged cabinet; a carved camphorwood chest; a silk scroll painting of a pine tree and a bird.
-The only sounds are birds in the lychee tree outside, and the faint voices of the girls coming up from the kitchen, and the radio that they keep turned on low, playing Vietnamese pop music. Sometimes I imagine Kim Anh’s down there: that one of the voices is hers. But she’s still away visiting relatives.
-Once said to Claudine that her house was sleepy. She’s made a joke of it since: calls it her “sleepy house.” This sleepiness is healing me. Even the room’s red tiles, lukewarm under my feet when I walk across to the bathroom: they seem to heal me too. Peace: always peace in this room.
-Peace ever since the operation at Long Binh, when they opened up my skull. Keep seeing that big circular light over my head before I went out under the anesthetic, and the surgeon’s face, floating like a pink saucer. Another light shone to one side: softer, but with a bigger glow. I want to be clear about this, but maybe I never can be. The light had a human shape, with tall wings. An angel? I’ve never thought about angels before; never taken them seriously. There were pictures of them in the Bible at home, but don’t remember the old parson at Saint Matthew’s saying much about them. This figure didn’t look like the pictures in the Bible or on Christmas cards. Just a shape; no face. And yet I knew it was looking at me. It made me feel safe. Loved, I suppose.
NOVEMBER 22ND
-Elle est morte.
-The letter’s lying on the bed in front of me: my letter, unopened. My writing on the front. On the back, in ballpoint pen: Elle est morte. Small, neat writing, like a dull high school kid’s. The uncle. it must have been the uncle.
-Today Claudine sent a servant out to Chalon for me, with the letter. I’d begun to worry, and so had Claudine; Kim Anh’s been away a week. The servant was an old man who said he’d be able to find the place where she used to live. He took my letter and talked to a man there who knew her, he says; he didn’t get the man’s name. He tried to get this man to deliver the letter-but instead the man wrote a message on the back, and gave it back.
—Elle est morte.
-I won’t believe it. She can’t be dead.
-Can’t record any more tonight.
NOVEMBER 23RD
-I’ve got to get out and look for Kim Anh. But I still haven’t the strength. Often feel dizzy: can’t walk very far. My wound itches and throbs under the dressing. The Vietnamese doctor doesn’t want me to move from this room for another week.
-Elle estmorte.
—I keep seeing that hut where she used to live, in the shanty town at Cholon: the big ftat wastes like a tip, stinking of sewage and nuoc mam, with a maze of alleys between the sheet-metal humpies that are stamped with the names of American beer companies. At nigh out there weak electric bulbs hang from crazy illegal wires, and ragged people move in and out of the light like ghosts. The place is full of refugees from the bombed-out villages, and also full of drug dealers, prostitutes and black market operators with their hoards of luxury goods stolen from the PX stores. Why would she go back there? Why?
—Last night I dreamed about the place. Saw the uncle leading her away, going in and out of those sickly lights down the alleys, holding her hand. She was using her crutch again, as though she’d never had the operation, but looking more beautiful than ever. ! ran after them, but I lost them, and woke up.
—Claudine tells me that a man was hanging about outside the villa a few days before Kim Anh left. Two of the servants saw him and Kim Anh talking together—but Kim Anh denied it. She denied it: that’s what worries me most.
-The uncle: a man in his forties, with crooked teeth and a bad face. Is he even her uncle? She told me so; told me he looked after her when no one else did. He always wore fancy sports shirts and sunglasses: a petty crook, like so many others out there at Cholon, with their caves of stolen goods and the hootch girls they sell to the Americans. Once he was there when I visiited the shanty; but he scuttled off, not speaking to me.
-I don’t believe she’s dead. Now that she’s been fitted with the surgical shoe, and can walk without crutches, I believe the uncle’s seen a use for her. He’ll make her into a bar girl, selling Saigon Tea.
-Why would she have gone with him? Why?
NOVEMBER 27TH
-Claudine spends time with me every evening, after one of the girls has brought me a tray of food and I’ve eaten.
-She sits in a bamboo chair beside the bed, always smiling at me in the same way, strange greenish eyes looking at me from her Vietnamese face. Sometimes she’ll be wearing a smart, Western-style frock; at others, just a blouse and jeans. Her hair always up in a bun. She looks quite French, then. But last night she wore the ao dai: mauve silk tunic and pantaloons, looking entirely Vietnamese.
-She told me m
ore about herself than she’s ever done before, last night: I think to distract me. Then she told me something else.
—She’d carried a book in, and was holding it in her lop. You’re still grieving and fretting, Michael, she said. You have to stop. And if you try and get up now, you will do yourself damage. Be patient. Không xu, remember?
—I have to start looking for her, I said. You don’t believe she’s dead, either.
-Maybe not, she said. But if she isn‘t, she went because she wanted to go. You did a wonderful thing for her, Michael: because of you, she walks on two feet. Now she walks off into the world. She was only a child: you wouldn’t really have married her. You think so, but you wouldn’t. And you never even made love to her, did you? She was a dream. Most love is a dream we wake up from.
-She opened the book. I brought this to read to you, she said. A Chinese poet, translated into English. A poet from the Ming. Men like you don’t much like poetry, do they? But poetry is still important to us in Vietnam; men like you still read it here. I’m going to make you listen, Snow. This poem might teach you something—or else make you sleepy, in my sleepy house.
-Recently she started calling me Snow as a joke, when she heard that all the bao chi call me that; it seems to amuse her. Snow, she says, in that deep voice, and looks at me with a serious face before the laughter comes out.
-She read the poem to me now; it was short. Afterwards she left the book for me with the place marked. It’s true I don’t read poetry as a rule, but I liked this one, and I copied it out.
A little fishpond, just over two feet square,
and not terribly deep.
A pair of goldfish swim in it
asfreely as in a lake.
Like bones of mountains amongicy autumnclouds
tiny stalagmites pierce the rippling surface.
For the fish, it’s a question of being alive—
They don’t worry about the depth of the water.
—After she’d read it to me, Claudine sat quiet for a while. The room was half dark; only the little table lamp was on beside the bed, with its orange parchment shade. Then she began to talk.
-My European half’s fading out as I get older, she said. I used to read French and English novels; now I read only the Chinese and Vietnamese poets. I’d rather do that now than run the business.
-And she began to tell me about her youth, when she’d studied in Paris. Her father thought she’d marry a Frenchman. He sent her to Paris four years after the War to do a degree at the Sorbonne-and also to find a husband. At first she liked the idea, and she was excited by Europe: even by the cold, she said, and by gray winter skies with an orange sun showing through. She did all the things you do in Paris: talked with her friends in cafes about films and books, and had an alfair with an interesting Frenchman she liked but didn’t love. That was the French half of her spirit coming out, she said. But then her father died, and she came back here to Saigon.
-Ah, Snow, she said, where we spend our childhood, that’s what counts! And she told me how she’d missed her mother’s people, and the tamarind trees in the streets, and the heat and noises and smells. She’d missed the monsoon, with the rain bucketing down and everything coming alive in the Delta. She’d even missed the smells of monsoon drains.
—She found now that she was most truly Vietnamese: she even became nationalistic. She wanted the French to be thrown out, which would have made her father sad, if he’d still been alive. Her husband, Phan Le Dang, was young and idealistic too, when she met him. He’d come here from Hanoi, and he was very northern and serious, she said. They were both in the same political club. They wanted the French to go, but they didn’t like the Communists.
-We’d debated with enough Marxists to know that they were fanatics, she said. We weren’t attracted by people who would tell us how to think and how to live. Certainly we didn’t want to exchange French rule for another bloody dictatorship run by them. We wanted real freedom: but instead we got this filthy war.
-In those early years, she really loved Phan Le Dang. Helping him build the business, she found she had a talent for it. It linked her to him, and it linked her to the life here. For a South Vietnamese, life is business, she said. Yes, she said, there’s bribery and corruption involved—but that’s in every part of our life here: the pure-minded intellectuals are participating too. Most business people are cunning yet naive, I’ve found. A bit like politicians: complexity frightens them.
-For those reasons, she said, she stopped being amused by business and business people some time ago-and politicians too. And she lost her feeling for her husband. Making money had become all he wanted, and he began to do things that she couldn’t agree with and didn’t want to know about.
-I want to tell you something, Snow, she said. Phan Le Dang wasn’t just selling watches and food over the Cambodian border. He was selling automatic rifles—and I believe he was selling them to the North Vietnamese Army. He still had family in the North, and maybe the NVA people pressured him. I think this is why he disappeared; something went wrong. You’ll probably tell this to Aubrey Hardwick, won’t you? But Aubrey already knows, I’m sure.
-I told her no, I wouldn’t say anything to Aubrey. What she and I discussed was private. We were friends, and wasn’t on Hardwick’s payroll.
-I wouldn’t have told you this once, she said. Now I don’t care, I’m finished with it all. Do you understand what I’m saying? Don’t play those games for Aubrey, Snow. Don’t trust him, or you’ll eventually be sorry.
-The glow of the little orange lamp made her face like a beautiful mask: like one of her carvings downstairs. She sat up straight with folded hands, frowning at me. It was an expression I’d never seen her wear before.
-Aubrey had good-quality information from Phan Le Dang and me over the years, she said, especially about what was coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But now our Uncle must be worried: he must ask himself whether Dang was misinforming him: whether Dang had links with the North all along-or whether they’d perhaps turned him. This is always a spymaster’s nightmare, isn’t it? Well, you can tell Aubrey that I don’t know. I don’t know, because for years didn’t know my husband any more. And I’ll tell you something else. For all I know, it was Aubrey and his friends who arranged for my husband to disappear. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Don’t look so shocked. I’m finished with secret games. They’re over for me.
-She sighed then, and sat back; she looked tired.
-Business and politics and the war surround me like a bloody web, she said. I’m compelled to sit at the center of it, if only for the sake of my sons, who are still at school. They have only me to rely on. But I’m tired of it, Michael. I’d rather be reading my poetry. I’d rather run a restaurant, with my little Khanh Ha. Yes, perhaps I’ll sell off the business, and turn this house into a restaurant! My orphans will help me. What do you think?
-She threw back her head and gave that loud tough of hers; but there wasn’t much amusement in it tonight.
-Time you went to sleep, Snow, she said. Then she leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. She’s never done that before: her lips seemed very soft and tired.
NOVEMBER 29TH
-This morning when I woke, my mind was like a clean sheet hung out to dry in the sun.
-This isn’t happiness, but not grief either. lt’s the place that Claudine’s taken me to. I want to remember it, and all the things she’s said to me.
—Last night we talked again, and she lay on the bed beside me.
—We lay lightly together, head to head, foot to foot, holding each other. She’d come in the ao dai again; then she was naked, and her hair was hanging about us like a black tent. And even as we made love and I forgot everything, I knew that she could never belong to me, however much I might feel for her.
—Afterwards she spoke in my ear, while her hands kept moving over me. They seemed to explore and heal every muscle and nerve; and eventually every muscle and nerve would be made loose, and
I’d float free of my body. Nothing and no one’s ever made me feel like that before. For a while, she took away sadness: not just over Kim Anh: over everything.
—She lay propped on her elbow in the orange glow of the lamp, stroking my forehead and looking down at my face. She touched the wound there, and the other, behind my ear; then her finger traced the mark left on my forehead by the butt of that VC’s Kalashnikov, in the Delta.
-Snow, she said, in her deep voice; but she wasn’t laughing this time. So many wounds already. She shook her head, lips pursed. You nearly died, and you might not be so lucky next time. You could die down there with my cousin Trung, in some bloody Delta rice field. But you won’t stop going out, will you? This means that you live in a dream. So I mustn’t love you, because you’re always likely to disappear.
—Itold her I had no intention of disappearing. But she didn’t answer; just looked at me.
—Then she said: Don’t think I’m Hattering you, Michael. The opposite, really. It’s sad, being a warrior: and that’s what you are, of course. It means you’ll always be alone. You’re a warrior because battle is what you want most, and the comradeship of men. Don’t deny it. You really don’t do it for the money, do you? Many people say that they’re not interested in money, but they usually lie; especially those who can’t make much. But you’re truly not interested in it, I can tell: I’m an expert on that. And you’re the sort of warrior other men love, because you’re what they wish to be. You’d make a good father. But if you have children, they’ll end up orphans, won’t they? So better that your children are orphans already-like Kim Anh.
Highways to a War Page 22
