Part 29 (1/2)
13.
On the morning of the first Friday in July, Joseph sat down to breakfast in the paved inner courtyard of the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, trying hard not to look at his wrist.w.a.tch. Normally he found the fragrant flowering shrubs and the elegant statues amidst which the tables were set soothing and refres.h.i.+ng, but after a restless night in one of the high-ceilinged Continental bedrooms, he had fallen asleep properly for the first time only at dawn, and as a result had woken unaccustomedly late, feeling anxious and on edge. When the waiter approached his table, he ordered strawberries with his rolls and coffee as usual, but as soon as the little dish of crimson Dalat fruit was set before him, a mental picture of the neatly tilled terraces of the Lang-Biang plateau, where the berries had been grown, flashed in his mind, and he found he couldn't eat even one of them.
Suddenly it seemed. much longer than three months since he and Lan had spent those few poignant hours together in Dalat, and because the agonizing weeks of waiting were almost over, he wondered for the first time, with a stab of alarm, how he would come to terms with life without her if, against all his expectations, she decided not to marry him. By mutual agreement they had decided to avoid meeting again while the battle raged at Dien Bien Phu, and Joseph had let a whole month go by before contacting her after the news came out that Paul had been killed on the day that Dien Bien Phu had fallen. He knew that she would have to observe the proper Vietnamese interval of mourning if she were to marry again, but she had told him that she would give him her decision at least at the beginning of July. He had flown into Tan Son Nhut from Hong Kong the previous evening, leaving Tempe white-faced but determinedly calm, making preparations to pack her belongings and return to Baltimore; although visibly shaken by his abrupt request that she give him a divorce, Tempe had won the battle to retain her self-control, and her very calmness, instead of making it easier to leave, had somehow heightened the feelings of guilt and anguish that had haunted him constantly since his last departure from Dien Bien Phu. During the many sleepless nights that followed his last visit to the crumbling valley fortress, he had been unable to dismiss from his mind the memory of Paul standing outside his bunker as the last. Red Cross Dakota lifted him into the monsoon clouds, and when a few days after the garrison fell, Paul's name appeared on the Red Cross list of those who had died, the intensity of the grief Joseph felt had made him physically ill for a day or two. During the next few weeks he drank frequently and with unaccustomed heaviness and didn't allow himself to think of the future. But when his grief began to lessen, the Conviction that perhaps fate all along had determined that he should marry Lan had revived in him. Somehow at last it all seemed to have been destined and he became convinced that taking Lan and Tuyet away from Saigon was the only way of putting the terrible tragedies of the past behind them. On his arrival at the Continental Palace the night before, he'd found a note from Lan awaiting him, promising that she would meet him on the hotel terrace next morning at eleven o'clock, and as soon as he awoke he'd begun peering impatiently at the hands of his watch every few minutes.
As a result time hung heavy on him, and in an effort to calm himself Joseph picked up from beside his plate the French language Journal de Saigon, which every visiting foreign correspondent turned to on arrival to catch up on events in Vietnam. The main story on its front page purported to give details of the sweeping land redistribution program being carried out all over the northern half of Vietnam by the Communist cadres of President Ho Chi Minh's renamed Lao Dong Party - the Workers' Party; according to the newspaper, a.s.sa.s.sination and terror tactics were already being employed on a ma.s.sive scale against members of the landowning cla.s.ses, and tens of thousands of deaths had already been reported. Although the Geneva Conference of world leaders on Indochina had still not produced any formal agreement after two months of discussions, General Giap's victory at Dien Bien Phu had virtually forced France to begin seeking an armistice the day after its garrison was defeated, and in the north particularly, unashamedly Communist policies were rapidly being put into force in the vast areas under Viet Minh control. A separate story on the Journal's front page also related how even in the Mekong delta in the south, the Viet Minh were becoming daily more confident of their strength; a clandestine radio broadcast the previous night had announced that a stage-by-stage campaign was being launched immediately to eradicate big landholders there too, although the Geneva Conference seemed likely to end with Vietnam being divided into two zones, with the Communists holding the north and non-Communists the south.
Joseph ran his eye over all these news items, but found himself unable to concentrate on the details; he'd come to Saigon ostensibly to prepare a dispatch on the mood of the colonists in the wake of the humiliation suffered at Dien Bien Phu, but because of his inner preoccupations, he rose distractedly from his breakfast table after a few minutes' scrutiny of the newspaper and strolled out into the Rue Catinat, promising himself that he'd get down to work properly that afternoon.
For half an hour he wandered aimlessly, lost most of that time in his own thoughts, but even in his abstracted mood he couldn't help noticing how palpably the city he'd known for nearly thirty years was changing before his eyes. During the long eight-year war the thirty thousand French colons who had reestablished themselves in the city after the Second World War had affected a pose of studied unconcern; it came to be regarded as ”bad form” to peer about nervously searching for bombs or grenades while sipping an aperitif on a cafe terrace, and discussion of the Viet Minh had always to be light, dismissive and degage, as though the anti-French movement were a trifling irrelevance to life in the city. But with the advent of Dien Bien Phu, all that had changed. Some ten thousand colons had already left the city, and now the usually genial. and flamboyant proprietor of the Continental Palace no longer greeted coffee hour guests on his terra.s.se with his customary flourishes; instead Joseph saw him frowning deeply as he bent close to a grim-faced French financier Joseph knew by sight. In the PaG.o.da Tea Room, the Cafe de Ia Paix, where the veteran colons gathered, and in the Bodega, patrons and waiters who were normally expansive and relaxed conversed now in small anxious groups, their eyes furtive and alert. Usually the Surete Generale headquarters with its heavily barred windows at the top of the Rue Catinat was aswarm with activity, but as Joseph pa.s.sed, it seemed to stand unnaturally quiet; few French or Vietnamese were entering, and this uncharacteristic calm gave Joseph the impression that the dark and secret struggles it had for so long conducted were on the point of being abandoned. In the bearing of every Frenchman he pa.s.sed there was at least a hint of apprehension, and Joseph realized that the increasingly visible groups of Americans from the U.S. Emba.s.sy and other government agencies walked by contrast with an easy, free-swinging confidence; without being aware of it, by their relaxed laughter and their self-a.s.sured smiles they betrayed their smug belief that the French h2d only themselves to blame for their failure in a backward country like Vietnam. If they, the Americans, had been fighting the war, their att.i.tudes seemed to say, the result would have been vastly different.
As he strolled on through the growing heat of the day, Joseph began to wonder how far this dangerously simple line of reasoning might be taken by his own country. Although the French Union Forces were still holding in place in the Red River delta, the central highlands and the south while the Geneva Conference dragged on, it was clear that the will of France to continue the war had been broken psychologically at Dien Bien Phu. Not only had more than five thousand men been killed or wounded there, but the Russian news film of ten thousand more mud-covered skeletons being marched off to prison camps by their Viet Minh guards had shocked France and the world. The French people at home had always been indifferent to the faraway war in Indochina, and popular revulsion at the outcome of the battle in the valley in northwestern Tongking had ensured that France would at long last be forced to give up the remnants of its colonial rule there. But although the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Britain, China and France were discussing Indochina's future at Geneva, the fervently anti-Communist American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had pointedly absented himself from the proceedings early on, leaving a deputy holding a watching brief; by this gesture he had given notice that the United States would not willingly acquiesce in the concession of territory to the Communists in Indochina and by means of a growing presence of Americans in Saigon, Joseph realized, he was already signaling Was.h.i.+ngton's intention to continue the battle where France left off.
Often while the French defenders were battling heroically at Dien Bien Phu to hold off the ma.s.sed Viet Minh divisions, Joseph had recalled how he and a handful of OSS men had trained the nucleus of ragged guerrillas from which that ma.s.sive force had sprung. He had often wondered, too, how differently things might have turned out if the American government had responded to the seemingly sincere overtures made by Ho Chi Minh then; perhaps the goodwill won by the OSS could have been expanded and built upon. What if President Truman had replied to any of the half dozen or SO letters Ho had written seeking support against French attempts to destroy his revolution - wouldn't some kind of friends.h.i.+p have been possible? And when China fell to Communism in 1949, might it not have been possible to woo Ho Chi Minh and his followers away from the Russians and the Chinese as t.i.to had been in Europe? Conjecture was obviously futile because now there was a strong chance that Joseph's own government was about to compound these earlier mistakes by seeking a more direct confrontation with Ho Chi Minh. President Ho had convinced Joseph during their brief friends.h.i.+p that he and the people he led were determined to right the very real injustices they'd suffered under the French; he had understood very clearly that their deep sense of historical grievance was the powerful engine of their strength, and to plunge heedlessly into such a complex political whirlpool in order to confront Russia and China, as the American secretary of state seemed determined to do, seemed to Joseph a venture doomed to failure. These gloomy memories that swirled through his mind as he walked only served to reaffirm his conviction that he must remove Lan and Tuyet as quickly as possible from the evident dangers that lay ahead, and oppressed suddenly by these reflections, he stopped in mid-stride and turned back towards the Continental.
But when he got there, although it was already eleven o'clock, there was still no sign of Lan on the terrace, and after waiting impatiently for a quarter of an hour, he slipped into the hotel foyer and persuaded the concierge to let him use the telephone behind her guichet. He listened anxiously to the ringing tone for more than a minute before the receiver at Lan's home was lifted; but to his intense disappointment, one of her house servants answered.
Speaking sibilant, heavily accented French, the servant explained that Madam Devraux had left some time before to pay an urgent visit to her father; she offered her apologies but had said that if he called, he was to be told she hoped to arrive at the Continental within half an hour.
Unable to face another long wait on the terrace, Joseph stepped out into the Rue Catinat and began walking once more, this time towards the docks and the Saigon River. At the foot of the boulevard he hurried past the garish little Corsican-run bars where loud music spilled out onto the pavements and crossed to the concrete quays beside the river. Hoping the activity of the waterfront would soothe him, he leaned against a bollard and watched the crowds of sampans working back and forth among the oceangoing freighters. But the seething bustle of the waterborne craft, instead of relaxing him, reminded him of Hong Kong, and against his will the image of Tempe's strained, white face staring back at him against the backdrop of the harbor forced itself once more into his thoughts.
She had been standing with her back to the window in their house on the Peak when he had dropped his bombsh.e.l.l. For a long time she had said absolutely nothing, but had let him stumble on until he had exhausted every flimsy justification he could think of for what he knew in his heart was shoddy recompense for the loyalty and love she had always shown him. When at last she spoke there had been more pity in her voice than anger.
”So the wide-eyed boy in Khai Dinh's throne room is still searching for another jeweled bonnet, is he. Joseph?” The words had come out in a tremulous whisper, and for a moment her face had threatened to crumple; then she had regained her composure. ”You've always been dissatisfied with me, haven't you? I'm too ordinary, aren't I? You've always yearned for the exotic, for the unattainable. Perhaps you can't help it. Perhaps it's in your nature. Most boys give up trying to live out fairy tales long before they become grown men - but maybe your mother forgot to teach you that!”
Because she was close to tears she had laughed then, making a strangled sound in her throat that by a strange coincidence reminded him of the curious noise that she invariably made at the climax of lovemaking; he had always, without fully realizing it, found the sound faintly irritating, and to counter the irrational surge of anger which it suddenly provoked in him he had turned away from her and stared down into the harbor, concentrating hard on the distant turmoil of junks and sampans.
”You lied to me thirteen years ago, didn't you, Joseph?” she said softly, moving up behind him. ”On the train coming back from the ceremony in the new wing of the museum, do you remember? I asked if you had made love with your mandarin's daughter, and you said in an outraged tone, 'Oh no, Vietnamese families are very strict about that!' And already she had borne your child, hadn't she? Ever since, you've been living a lie. Maybe if you'd told me the truth then, it might have helped me to understand.”
At his shoulder he heard her breathing become ragged as she fought to hold back her tears. ”It was nine years before I knew,” said Joseph desperately, swinging around to face her. ”Can't you understand? I had asked her to marry me; she only decided against it later because of her lather!”
Tempe nodded quickly, biting her lip. ”And you came home looking for a comforting haven - I suppose I knew that deep in my heart. But I gave you what you wanted and needed, Joseph- two fine sons! A stronger man might have put his past behind him then for the reality of the present.” She shook her, head pityingly. ”But not you. You've always. gone on yearning for the magic mysteries of the East that captivated you at fifteen. Now you're middle-aged, but still you can't bear to think that you're not going to find another jeweled palace, can you - even if it's between a Saigon woman's thighs!”
He had closed his eyes then to blot out the unbearable sight of the hurt in her face. ”It was just an accident,” he had whispered. ”Don't you understand? If I hadn't gone back to Saigon quite by chance at the end of the war and discovered Tuyet, I don't suppose anything 'more would have come of it.”
”I don't think you went back entirely by chance, Joseph.”
He had opened his eyes wide then in amazement. ”What do you mean?”
She shook her head in bewilderment. ”I don't know. But there's something inevitable about all this. I suppose I've always known you would do something of the kind, If it hadn't been Saigon and the French officer's wife, it would have been someone else, somewhere different.”
She had been holding a gla.s.s of French wine in her hand as she spoke, and for an instant he'd thought that she might dash its contents in his face; then she put the gla.s.s down quietly on a table and walked from the room, bending forward slightly and hugging herself in her anguish; at that moment she looked old and vulnerable, and he had wanted desperately to comfort her. By the time he left for the airport an hour later, she had made her face up carefully and she watched him go, tight-lipped and pale but in full possession of herself. Above all else she had been determined not to shed any tears in front of him, and the recollection of her courage shamed him so that he could stand still no longer on the quayside.
When he turned his back on the river he found he was looking again at the first view he'd ever had of Saigon when the Avignon sailed up the river thirty years before. The same trees that had given shelter to the betel-chewing coolies then were still casting their shade on the burning streets, and the twin spires of the cathedral were still visible jutting above the rooftops. Suddenly a wave of terrible compa.s.sion for himself and all humankind swept over him: how could that innocent fifteen-year-old boy who had mistaken exhausted men for ma.s.sacre victims have been expected to know how to deal with all the impossible complexities of life that were to follow? How could anyone prepare a child for all the terrible pitfalls that lay in its path? Wasn't there any way of preventing grown men and women from injuring and wounding one another grievously generation after generation? Using their own sad weaknesses and failings as blunt instruments, they battered away at one another until all that was left was emotional pulp.
He turned these somber thoughts over endlessly in his mind as he walked back to the Continental, and he had almost reached the hotel again when he saw Lan coming towards him beneath the tamarind trees. She wore a pink flowered silken ao dai over billowing white trousers, and as she walked she was talking animatedly to someone at her side - but it was a moment or two before Joseph recognized her father. Portly from years of good living, Tran Van Hieu wore a Western business suit of a pale expensive linen flow instead of his mandarin's gown, and the hair above his moonlike face was stiff and white. His expression remained as shrewd and watchful as ever, but because he was concentrating on what his daughter was saying he hadn't noticed Joseph approaching among the crowds thronging the pavement. The sight of Lan holding her father's arm startled Joseph: he remembered all too clearly how she had sat silently beside him in an att.i.tude of rejection on his return from Hanoi, and seeing them together for the first time since then caused his spirits to sink.
But then he noticed that they were smiling happily at one another and he decided that Lan must after all have made up her mind in his favor. Unable to contain his impatience, Joseph stepped down from the hotel terrace to greet them in the street and almost knocked over a gangling Vietnamese peasant boy running fast along the inside of the sidewalk. The boy stumbled, then recovered himself and the reporter's eye in Joseph automatically registered the loose calico tunic, the dirty white trousers and the scuffed sandals that the youth wore, But then something odd about the way he was running compelled Joseph's full attention; the natural outline of his clothes was broken by the bulge of a lumpy package below the waist, and as he ran, he was supporting it awkwardly with one hand. Remembering the Journal de Saigon's front-page story of that morning, Joseph yelled a frantic warning and began to run, but the crowds outside the hotel did not recognize immediately, as he had done, a trained member of Battalion 905, the Viet Minh suicide squad. The youth was running faster now to carry out the first symbolic a.s.sa.s.sination under the new land reform decree, and Tran Van Hieu, long-time collaborationist, absentee landlord and owner of vast tracts of rice land in the Mekong delta, looked up at h1m for the first time at the moment he flung a fatal arm around his neck.
For a fleeting moment Joseph allowed himself to hope he had been wrong - the boy was merely expressing his grat.i.tude for some favor Tran Van Hieu had done his family in the rice fields. Then Lan s.h.i.+ed away from him, and he saw the smile freeze on her face as the peasant began jerking obscenely at his clothing below the waist with his free hand. Making an incongruous pair, the ragged peasant and one of Vietnam's wealthiest aristocrats swung crazily in the middle of the pavement for a moment in a macabre dance, their arms tight about one another's necks. Then the terrified crowd began scattering, and Joseph saw Lan trying to pull the youth off her father. But he held Tran Van Hieu fast in the crook of his arm as he must have held many practice ”victims” in his jungle training camp and the old man's eyes began to bulge with fear, Joseph tried to lunge towards them, but a Vietnamese woman, fleeing in panic, cannoned into him, sending him sprawling in the gutter. When the fragmentation grenade strapped to the youth's thigh exploded, it lifted Tran Van Hieu and the youth bodily off the ground, and they fell back together in a tangled heap. Several other pa.s.sersby collapsed around them under the horrified eyes of the colons taking coffee on the Continental terrace, and their blood mingled with that of the a.s.sa.s.sin and his victim in a spreading pool on the pavement. Because he was lying p.r.o.ne on the ground when the grenade detonated, Joseph escaped injury, but when he rose and walked unsteadily towards the carnage he could see that Lan's body, lying a few feet from her father's, was twisted and broken. He wasn't able to see her face because it was pressed against the pavement, but the pink silks of her dress were quickly turning crimson in the bright sunlight, and there was no sign of movement in her slender limbs.
14.
”I suppose you think I must be cold and unfeeling because you haven't seen me weeping,” said Tuyet quietly as she walked beside Joseph through the dappled shadows of the tamarinds lining the Rue Catinat. ”You probably think I don't care at all, don't you?”
”No, I don't think that,” replied Joseph, uncomfortable under her challenging stare, ”I can think of lots of reasons why you might want to keep your feelings to yourself.” He glanced down to find her watching him unblinkingly and found he couldn't hold her gaze. She was wearing a plain, unhemmed mourning ao dai of white silk, and a long white scarf trailed down her back, but although the traditional Vietnamese Costume of the bereaved was designed to convey that all thought of adornment was deliberately neglected in a time of grief, he found the natural beauty of her face almost painful to look on. During the funeral ceremonies for Lan and her father he had not dared look in her direction, but afterwards he had asked her to meet him later outside his hotel, and she had arrived promptly at the arranged time.
”Perhaps you ought to remember that I've had a lot of practice at not crying when I'm unhappy. It's something that can become a habit.”
”I do realize that,” said Joseph miserably. ”And of course it'd be quite natural if you didn't feel the same deep sense of shock about your mother's death that I do. But the last time I talked with her alone, she told me how unhappy she was that you'd had to grow up without knowing her very well.” Instead of replying, Tuyet tossed her head and looked away quickly across the boulevard, but not. before he'd noticed the hurt look in her eyes. ”But. I didn't ask you here to talk about the past and the unhappiness we've all suffered,” he continued gently. ”I wanted to talk about the future.”
”I'm surprised to hear that. I thought after what happened yesterday you'd never want to come back to Saigon again.”
”As long as you're here I'll never stay away!” Joseph spoke with such vehemence that she glanced up at him in surprise. ”That's what I wanted to discuss with you. Don't you remember the last time we met I tried to ask you something - but you were in too much of a hurry to listen?”
She shook her head stubbornly. ”No, I don't remember.”
”Well I did try.” He stopped and took a deep breath. ”I was going to ask you if you'd like to leave Saigon and make your home with me.”
He watched anxiously for her reaction, but she kept her gaze fixed on the ground and didn't reply.
”I don't mean in the United States,” he added hastily. ”We could live in Asia - Singapore perhaps, Hong Kong or even Tokyo. I could persuade my newspaper to base me in any of those places. I want it to be somewhere where you'll be happy.”
”Why do you want to help me now when you've never troubled yourself before? Has that awful-explosion left you with a guilty conscience?” Because she asked the question without noticeable rancor, the implication of her words shocked Joseph more deeply than if she'd screamed at him.
”Tuyet. I've always cared - from the very moment I knew of your existence. I've always sent money for you ever since. I thought you knew that.”
”Money! Do Americans think- everything can be solved by money? A child that doesn't know its real parents can't love money in a bank account!”
Joseph gazed at the swarms of pa.s.sing cyclo-pousses, feeling a sense of desperation rising within him. ”Tuyet, I'm terribly sorry about all the things that went wrong in the past. I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, but now I want to try to make the right one with you.”