The Man From Saigon (37 page)

“Are you high ranking?” she asks. “Please say you are not.” I am not.

“You are lying, aren’t you?”

“Ranks don’t really mean—”

“I knew it.”

When she wakes he is gone, though not without having tucked the edges of the poncho liner under her. She opens her eyes and is startled first by the dawn light that washes over her, and next by the vision of Minh, lying on his stomach, his rifle raised, aimed out the door. His head is inches away from her and she can see the way his hair rises in odd tufts, the curl of his ear, the metal glint of a chain he wears round his neck. His sword, bound by a length of hairy cord to his trousers, lies at an awkward angle from his side. He is concentrating, the muscles in his shoulders taut. She hears Anh giving an order and then his footsteps as he comes closer to the house. It would appear at first that Minh is aiming at Anh, that while she slept some kind of insane coup has taken place. Anh stomps forward, still barking orders, then clamps his hand over the barrel of the gun, his foot inches from Susan’s nose. He looks down at her as she stares, her eyes wide, unable to understand what on earth is going on between the soldiers and why it is that Minh would aim his gun at Anh. At that exact moment she hears the muffled squawk of a lonesome hen. It calls and coos, then calls again,
looking for its flock, which has clearly been confiscated by the soldiers, the ARVN or the Americans, whoever it was who took the village.

Anh continues looking down at Susan. He still has Minh’s rifle in his hands. Minh is speaking in Vietnamese but Anh ignores him altogether, addressing Susan instead. “He wants to shoot the chicken,” he says in French. “Stupid.”

He puts the rifle down on the table, then moves swiftly out the door. She hears the increasing chatter of the hen, some shuffling steps, flapping wings, the sounds louder and louder, the hen now squawking so loudly it might be crowing. Then, all at once, there is nothing at all. The silence is complete, as though someone has flipped a switch.

Or a wrung a neck, she realizes now.

They begin with the skin, which is seared by the flame of their fire and has the wonderful crackling texture of barbecued chicken. They sit on their heels, eating with their hands, pulling meat from bone with their teeth, moving the fat over their tongues as one might ice cream, savoring it. They eat every scrap of the chicken, even the brain and eyeballs, even the gizzard, sucking the bones afterwards, licking their fingers and lips. The bones are kept to make a soup, along with the feet and skull and beak. This bounty is packed away in a plastic bag at Minh’s hip. Just before setting off to go, Minh holds up the awful contents, delighting one last time, and the five begin walking together through the ravaged village. It is past dawn, the day rising quickly as though a curtain is rising on the horizon, letting in more and more sun.

“Minh, go on, give it to me. I’ll hold it!” she teases.

Minh smiles and makes to push away her fake grab for the chicken parts. The collection of bones might be pirates’ loot, gold nuggets, a set of valuable coins from a Christie’s auction. He will not part with them for the world.

“Aww, come on!” she insists.

Son joins in, too. “I’ll be the keeper. Much better, me!”

“No chance,” says Minh. “Then the woman will get a hold of it for sure!”

Now they all laugh. Minh races forward with the bones. The food has cheered them up. She feels as though her blood has grown thicker, her energy returning in a surge of new-found strength. She is still tired, of course. Her eyes itch and remain gritty no matter how often she splashes them with water, but she can walk now without feeling she may trip and fall, without feeling her legs are somehow disconnected, even failing. It is remarkable, she thinks, how at its most basic level, the body is like a machine. It works by fuel. It fails by neglect, or injury.

Hamlets like the one they now walk through are always so cleverly laid out, with shaded walkways created by woven bamboo, wide spaces for the gathering of the people, shaded by coconut palms. There is always a center area with its pump and well, the carefully fenced places for animals, the meticulously attended gardens. Susan has visited such hamlets before, marveling at how comfortable the peasants are able to make their lives simply by using the natural materials around them, and with none of the conveniences of the city.

But this hamlet looks as though it has been ransacked by animals. They pick their way around or through, dodging the walls of the former houses that lie half-burned among the heaped contents of households, laundry and baskets and hemp bags and crockery. In some areas, there really is nothing left, just charred patches on the ground, great holes in the earth where an explosive has been thrown into a shelter, or a fire has consumed whatever structure it was set to. There are torn sheaves, parts of wooden implements, coils of electrical wire, glass and pieces of gnarled metal. The trees are burnt stumps, sticking up from the ground like the ribs of some ancient half-buried monster. Further on, the fruit orchards look the same.
There are places that have somehow escaped the attack and they, too, stand, oddly pristine against the ruined landscape, a reminder of what used to be.

Susan is familiar with this kind of wreckage; it does not surprise her, and as always she finds herself searching for something human among it all. On the edges of the hamlet are signs of fighting, empty cartridge clips and shell holes. Whatever else occurred, there has been bloodshed. She has seen tree trunks against which people have been executed, the blood seeped into the bark, the darkened soil below. But that would not have happened here. Not this time. Here, it would have been the Americans who came and they did not execute people. They shot those who ran. They shot those who fired. Once in a while they shot somebody obviously innocent, but these cases were the exceptions—she still believes they are the exceptions, though she knows Marc does not. He says it’s random. Whoever runs is killed, and mostly whoever hides is killed. And if you don’t hide you are also in danger of being killed. So it would not surprise her, not at all, to find a body.

They no longer walk in the fashion of soldiers guarding prisoners. Anh leads the way with Son at his side. Minh pokes through the debris, using his sword. Hien looks sullenly at the surrounds, and then seems only to study his feet as he walks. The world has reduced itself to these few people: four young men with not enough food or clothes or medicine, herself among them.

They pass a low ditch around which are wet, ruined papers, plastic jugs of fluid, jagged pieces of burnt, melted plastic. She wonders if they are pieces of a bomb and asks Son about it. “No, those held chemicals. This was an area for photo processing, I suppose,” he says.

“Photos?” She cannot understand. “Whose photos?”

“The LNA,” he says. The Liberation News Agency, the Vietcong’s press. She sees now that he may be correct. The area,
though now nothing more than a shelled ditch, would have been ringed by sandbagged walls, camouflaged from above by foliage and bamboo. The rudimentary darkroom with its photo dryers and processing trays has been destroyed, but she could see within the debris the sort of plastic that you would not normally find in such a small hamlet. There are broken containers of chemicals, unusual sheets of white that might be processing paper left half-buried in the ground. She sees that in appearance it was likely an area of quiet, indoor work. Yes, it could be a field unit for photography. To think that the VC had their own press corps, their own dedicated men cradling cameras as well as guns—of course, she knew this—but to see the evidence of it before her makes it seem all the more extraordinary.

“Were you trained as a soldier?” she asks Son.

Son looks at her, surprised, but not in an unpleasant way. He smiles; she thinks he looks almost pleased. “Of course,” he says, and walks on.

The sun has not yet become so bright and hot that they need to preserve their energy. They walk with a leisurely, easy gait, almost strolling. Minh, holding the remains of the chicken, seems especially pleased. He pauses to inspect some small matter, then runs to catch up as a child might. From a distance, he might even be a child. It is only when you see him close up that you get a sense of the dense, compact muscles, the powerful, low shoulders, the solid, broad frame of him. He is handsome; she can see that beyond the dirt and the bad haircut and the awful clothes and the sheer menace of him with his gun and his sword, he is a handsome young man. Before they set off, she caught him looking at a set of photographs, small faded rectangles that showed a girl with blue black hair and a dimple in her cheek. “Is that your girlfriend?” she’d asked him.

“My wife,” he replied, to her astonishment.

“A wife!”

“Aren’t you somebody’s wife?” he asked. It had been an innocent question and she found herself feeling tender toward him for asking it in the manner in which he had. First, because she imagined that the girl in the photographs was the only girl he had ever known, but also because, for all his superior knowledge as a soldier, he could not imagine the complicated explanation as to why she was not a wife and did not belong in that way to anyone.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Soon,” he said, smiling in his fetching manner, the missing tooth showing a slice of his pink tongue. He seemed to study her face. “Soon you will be a wife, I think,” he said.

Anh brings her a bit of wet newsprint, soggy, poor-quality paper as from a child’s exercise book. Copies of the same page lie here and there like leaves around the hamlet. The wind has blown wads of them against tree trunks and what is left of the foundations of houses. Anh hands her the sheet and she sees it is a piece of propaganda, this time American.

“What does it say?” he asks.

The paper is written in Vietnamese. The sentences are short, but even so she cannot read it. “I wouldn’t know,” she tells Anh. “It’s not my language.”

She speaks in a tone as though Anh ought to have understood this. Anh’s face darkens. He grabs the paper from her hands and she realizes in that instant that if you cannot read at all then all languages look the same. Vietnamese would look like French, which could look like Swahili for all that. Anh shoves the paper under Son’s nose and Son explains carefully what the paper says, that it is a warning not to help Vietcong or else your village will look like this. He turns it over and shows Anh the picture, a crude cartoon-style drawing of bloody corpses and burning houses.

Anh balls up the notice, throws it on the ground. They head
north around the edges of the hamlet and Anh leads the way with fast, determined steps. The soldiers and Susan jog now to keep up, stepping around the remains of the trees, and then Anh suddenly turns back, his rifle off his shoulder, the sight to his eye. He aims and fires all at once, shooting a wad of balled paper, the same leaflet as before, which is lost instantly in the ash of the ground under a small canopy of smoke.

Minh raises his eyebrows at Susan.

“The boss is angry,” she says in English.

“He’s got reason,” says Son.

H
e is asked over and again by the refugees for permission. Permission for more rice, to return to their houses, to receive more food or blankets or clothes. He constantly has to explain he has no authority.
Bao chi
, he says, but they don’t seem to understand what he means. The words bounce off them unnoticed. He is not sure, himself, what he means any more. If, indeed, he is a reporter he really ought to be seen writing.

He gets out his notebook, his pens. He scratches a few words across the pages, but for some reason whenever he begins to let himself work through a thought (describing, for example, the absurd notion that by caging everyone who isn’t VC in a camp the military might scourge the land of every trace of the enemy) he feels the same awful loss of Susan. He cannot understand how her disappearance re-establishes itself again and again inside him. Wasn’t he prepared anyway to give her up? Wasn’t she always going to leave, be reabsorbed back into the world, into the country he hopes for and longs for and cannot quite imagine himself now part of: America, a place that feels to him now like a large and distant planet? Once, in the cramped, windowless room that was given over to women reporters in Danang (a room into which he was not allowed but went anyway, crossing the small hallway with easy confidence as she was the only woman there), she lay on top of him in his arms
and told him she would not go back.
I cannot live in America again
, she said.
England is no better, not really, but it is perhaps easier to forget there.
The heat was terrible in that room, the air so sticky it felt like a hot flannel over his mouth, his eyes. The fan had broken and he’d hauled one from the men’s quarters for her. For them.

He lay on the thin mattress with her above him, feeling her weight and the warm slick of sweat between them. The heat that rose in waves from their bodies was invisible in the darkness, though he could feel it, like the breath of a low fire pushing out into the room.

He thought she was talking about the war. He thought he understood what she meant by the need to forget. You crossed a line if you stayed long enough. A few months as a correspondent and you could probably go back home without a problem. Maybe longer, depending on where you traveled. But if you kept on, there was a danger, or something like a danger, that a kind of displacement set in. He nodded his head, agreeing with her. There were so many things he’d like to forget, but he did not think there was any place he could
go
now to forget. It was all tattooed inside him. He wanted to return to America and he kept thinking he would go back, but the months ticked by and recently he’d begun to think perhaps he never would. He said nothing, just nodded silently. If England were a place where Susan could forget all this, then she must go there. He’d been prepared for that kind of sudden exit, always ready for her to leave. It was part of it, part of the whole experience of being in country, the loss that swept through every corner of your life. You didn’t concern yourself with what would happen after, not in the first instance. Just that there would
be
an after, that was everything.