Part 44 (1/2)

Joseph lunched with a member of Kissinger's staff who explained in confidence the background to the two dozen new clauses embodied in the final agreements, and by mid-afternoon he was back in his hotel room, fitting a blank piece of paper into his typewriter to begin his final article for The Times. For an hour he wrestled with the task of trying to explain how the final accords differed from the terms reportedly agreed before the ma.s.sive Christmas bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. He thought back over what the aide had told him over lunch: there were changes in the definition of the Demilitarized Zone, the American right to continue military a.s.sistance to Saigon had been clarified, some offensive phrases had been dropped and other favorable clauses had been strengthened, the aide had told him - but all of that had seemed to Joseph little more than wrangling over semantics. President Thieu, he'd learned, had been forced to go along with the agreement against his will in the end because the U.S. government had threatened to cut off all future aid and leave him to Hanoi's mercy if he didn't - but nothing he'd been told seemed to explain why the furious Christmas bombing onslaught had been necessary. - Joseph himself had spent an uneasy Christmas holiday in England at the country house deep in the West Suss.e.x Downs where he had lived with Naomi since their marriage in 1968. There he had listened round the clock to radio reports of the wholesale destruction wrought by the B-52s in North Vietnam. Harbor facilities, railways, bridges, roads, military dumps and factories had all been successfully destroyed, and Hanoi's capability to wage war had been severely curtailed, but side by side with the news had come furious, worldwide criticism of the ma.s.sive raids; some ninety-five thousand tons of explosives had been dumped on Indochina over the Christmas period, more than n.a.z.i Germany had dropped on Britain during the entire Second World War, and many newspapers and politicians throughout the Western world had condemned the bombing as barbarous. The raids had been called off finally on December 30 and the White House had then given an a.s.surance to Hanoi that they would not be resumed as long as ”serious negotiations” were taking place. Henry Kissinger had returned to Paris on January 8 to find that the bombing had left Le Duc Tho a greatly changed man; anxious to settle quickly, his manner was no longer obstructive as it had been during the round of talks in early December, and the Final details of the cease-fire had been hammered out in less than a week.

In those first days of 1973, Joseph knew that already in the United States the war had been recognized almost universally as a tragic mistake for the nation. Some fifty-seven thousand American lives had been lost and $146 billion had been wasted on a conflict that had divided his countrymen more deeply than any other issue since the Civil War, but as he sat in his Paris hotel room on that wintry afternoon, he nevertheless found himself struggling to give the moment the right perspective for the next day's paper. Hour after hour he grappled unsuccessfully with his thoughts, and he was still sitting before a blank sheet of paper at six o'clock when Tran Van Kim knocked crisply on his door. On entering, the Vietnamese offered no greeting but held a large manila envelope wordlessly towards him.

”What's that?” asked Joseph, taking the packet warily.

”Photographs,” replied Kim without looking at him.

”Photographs of whom?”

”Your daughter, Tuyet.”

There was silence for a moment, then with a puzzled frown Joseph began opening the envelope.

”I'm afraid she's dead,” added Kim quietly. ”She was killed in the Christmas bombing.”

Joseph stopped opening the envelope and stood still in the middle of the room. After a moment he dropped the package unopened on the table beside his typewriter and sat down with his back to the Vietnamese. Once or twice he rubbed his hand across his forehead as if to ease a pain, and all the time Kim stood waiting quietly just inside the door, his overcoat b.u.t.toned, his round face blank and expressionless.

”How did she die?”

”There was a direct hit on the underground shelter beneath her apartment block. She was found with a hundred other people buried in the rubble.”

”Were they all killed?”

”Fortunately a large proportion of the workers quartered in Kham Tien had already been evacuated from the city. But almost the whole of that suburb was atomized by the ferocity of the bombing on the last night - not a single dwelling was left standing.”

”I meant Tuyet and her family,” said Joseph dully. ”Were they all killed?”

”Her son Chuong died with her. The girl Trinh by chance had taken cover in another shelter. She survived.”

Joseph put his hands to his head and sat staring in front of him. Then his eye fell on the envelope again and he finished opening it and spread the half-dozen photographs inside across the table- top. There was one of Tuyet he had taken himself outside the Lycee Marie-Curie in Saigon; she had been a willowy sixteen- year-old then, dressed in a pale ao dai, and even wearing a faintly sullen expression, her youthful face was still strikingly beautiful. Another, apparently taken on her wedding day, showed her smiling and holding the arm of a handsome, fierce-eyed Vietnamese youth who seemed uncomfortable in a crumpled suit. A third picture showed Tuyet and Lan together, wearing their elegant national dress; both were slender and graceful, obviously mother and daughter, but they stood apart, neither touching nor looking at one another. There were others too of Tuyet and the children and the last one, showing Trinh and her brother Chuong, grown taller than in Hue, had apparently been taken sometime during the past four years.

Among the prints there was a short note scrawled in French on a sheet of rice paper; it was signed with Trinh's name, and Joseph felt a lump come to his throat as he read it.

My mother, I know, wanted you to have these photographs. She didn't talk of you often but I made her tell me all about you after Hue. I think she didn't like to talk too much about it because it always made her cry. She once told me you'd never seen most of these pictures and I thought my great-uncle Kim would know how to get them to you. I hope you don't mind, but I've kept for myself one of you and my mother outside her school in Saigon. Goodbye Trinh.

Joseph dropped the note on the desk and covered his face with his hands; he sat like this for a long time, ignoring the Vietnamese.

”She was very insistent that I pa.s.s them to you. Otherwise I wouldn't have made contact.”

Joseph started at the sound of Kim's voice; again he recognized the subdued, almost confiding tone in which the Vietnamese had spoken at the Avenue Kleber earlier in the day, and he swung round in his chair. ”What will become of Trinh?”

”The party will look after her welfare!” His quick response had a hollow ring to it, and as though suddenly embarra.s.sed by what he'd said, Kim took a hesitant step towards Joseph. ”I'll take a close interest in her too, myself, of course. Tuyet wasn't just your daughter, remember - she was also the child of my sister.”

”Were you close to her?” asked Joseph in a surprised tone.

”She was very conscious of her mixed blood after she came to Hanoi, and I think this made her distant with me. But I was able to help her in small ways without her knowing. As you can see from her note, Trinh is less inhibited - she thinks of me rightly as her great-uncle.”

Joseph nodded ruefully. ”If Lan had kept her promise to marry me, we would have been brothers-in-law, Kim.”

The Vietnamese raised his eyebrows in surprise. ”Tuyet once told me that you had asked my sister to marry you - but she said nothing of Lan's wishes.”

”Lan accepted when I first proposed to her,” replied Joseph, his face downcast. ”But in the end her loyalty to your father was too great. It was the same week that you quarreled with him, and after you'd gone she changed her mind. She said your father needed her loyalty more than ever then.”

Kim lowered his eyes and said nothing, and an uncomfortable silence lengthened between them.

”You don't have any family of your own, do you?” said Joseph quietly. ”I can sense it.”

”No, I never married. I decided like our late president to devote my life to our revolution.” Kim spoke almost defiantly, but Joseph could see that there was a trace of embarra.s.sment in his manner.

”Is that the only reason?'

”Perhaps my quarrel with my father had something to do with my decision,” he replied slowly, dropping his eyes again. ”Perhaps because of it I became skeptical about our stifling family traditions in Vietnam. Perhaps in the end, that wasn't the wisest decision of my life.”

Joseph could see that. the admission of his own error hadn't been made easily, and he felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for the stiff-faced man before him. ”It's ironic, Kim, isn't it that we should find ourselves talking together in Paris on a day like this. It's more than forty years since we first met, and both of us have suffered greatly because of the wars in your country. Your father, your sister and her daughter are dead and you cut yourself adrift from your family long ago. I've lost my elder son, my brother and a daughter - hut for what?”

”For freedom - the people of Vietnam have always been determined to be free.” Kim's words were uttered almost sorrowfully, and he unb.u.t.toned his coat and lowered himself wearily into a chair as he spoke. ”A conflict between those who collaborated with France and our country's true patriots was always inevitable. There was no way to stop brother fighting brother in Vietnam. The United States should have had enough sense to leave well alone. Then at least you wouldn't have shared in the tragedy.”

Joseph sat staring at the blank sheet of paper in his typewriter, then turned to look at the Vietnamese as a thought struck him. ”You'll probably never understand, Kim, but we came to Vietnam for n.o.ble motives. We were afraid Communism would swamp the world and change it beyond recognition if we didn't act. The trouble was, we went on fighting long after it became clear we'd been wrong about that. But we'd never understood the complicated background to your war, and in our frustration we used terror and methods of ma.s.s destruction which betrayed all our own dearest principles. In the end we were trying to win just to satisfy out national vanity. That's why the war has torn my country apart.”

The Vietnamese nodded. ”Bad mistakes are always costly for those who make them. Your country has paid its price.”

Joseph considered his response in silence for a moment. ”Have you never regretted, Kim, doing what you did in 1936? Haven't you ever regretted turning your back on your father and dividing your family?”

”It's often made me very sad,” replied the Vietnamese in a halting voice. ”I brought great sorrow to my mother and Lan, I know. I paid a high price for my political beliefs - but I always knew there was much more at stake than just my own relations with my family.”

”Hasn't the terrible destruction in your country ever given you second thoughts? Didn't you ever wonder whether you made the right choice?”

Kim was silent for a moment, then he shook his head slowly. ”It was perhaps impossible for my father to see things my way, I realize that now. He couldn't comprehend that history was about to change the world. He thought the lands granted to him unjustly by the French would remain in our hands forever. Your intervention in Vietnam stemmed the tide of history for a while and prolonged those vain hopes, but today's agreement has set history in motion again. Very soon my brother Tam's rice lands will be taken from him and he will realize at last that like my father he chose the wrong side.” Kim paused and sighed quietly. ”My father said to me that last day that Marxism would destroy our family and our country - but he was wrong about our country. What's happened here in Paris today has made me more convinced than ever that I made the right choice in 1936. My sacrifice has been worthwhile.”

”But you're a lonely man, Kim, I can see that.”

”Yes, I don't deny it - that's why I'll be pleased to do what I can for Trinh.” He looked up quickly at Joseph with an embarra.s.sed smile. ”When I look at Trinh, sometimes I see Lan as she was as a young girl when she and Tam and I were all happy together. The memory is sweet and painful at the same time - but as a man gets older his memories become more important if he has nothing else.”

Joseph stood up and crossed to the window to stare out into the wintry darkness. The rain had turned to Snow and big flakes were spinning silently to earth through the pools of light cast by the lamps in the Tuileries. The bleakness of the scene seemed suddenly to echo Joseph's own feelings, and he spoke over his shoulder in a dispirited voice. ”Back home the military are very proud of the Christmas bombing. Killing only sixteen hundred people while destroying all the strategic targets in two major cities is a cause for celebration for them. But even one death is too many - if it's your daughter.” Joseph continued to gaze unseeing into the falling snow. ”That bombing was our form of torture. You wrung propaganda confessions out of our pilots although everybody knew they were meaningless. Because Le Duc Tho wouldn't say what we wanted him to say in December, we launched the biggest air strike in history. We tightened our 'ropes' until Le Duc Tho rushed back to the Avenue Kleber to 'bao cao' and sign the agreements. We both know you signed to stop the pain of the bombs -. and we both know when you've recovered you'll take South Vietnam as you've intended to all along.”

Kim stood up, his face impa.s.sive, b.u.t.toning his coat. ”You're right, Monsieur Sherman. We shan't rest until we achieve our goal. Our country will be reunited one day - we haven't fought all our lives just for a compromise.”

Joseph turned from the window and stepped towards Kim, holding out his hand. The Vietnamese, taken aback, looked down at it with a startled expression on his face.

”We can't pretend we've always been friends, Kim, but we have known each other for nearly half a century - and today should be a day of reconciliation. Thank you for bringing the photographs. And thank you for telling me about Tuyet - I would rather have known.”

They shook hands briefly and the Vietnamese turned away towards the door. Joseph walked ahead of him, then hesitated before opening it, a quizzical look on his face. ”Tell me one other thing, Kim - did you meet with your brother Tam while you were both in Paris?”