The Man From Saigon (46 page)

It is a relief not to be squinting, or ducking beneath the pressure of the sun, but moving along a paved road, feeling the space around her instead of the close, clinging, sticky green. In these streets, she has come home grateful even for the ugliness of Saigon. She passes the charred husk of a burnt-out car, a broken bicycle, denuded of its wheels, its frame bent in a forty-five-degree angle. She passes a mound of stinking garbage, the wispy remains of an old basket.

No police, no MPs, no armored cars with their load of guns. If near by there are the usual criminal gangs, the cowboys on their Vespas, she does not hear them. Between the harbor and
the airport, new tanks and cannons are banked along Hai Bai Trung. On Tu Do Street the taxis and pedicabs have collected the GIs who stream out of bars at curfew. She stands in a street that is quiet, unusually empty. The buildings are missing plaster, some have boarded windows, but the elegant, sagging balconies, the pleasant tiled roofs, the iron railings, speak of a different time, when the French tried to make their homes here and Saigon was called the Paris of the East. She admits that, at night, particularly on a pretty night like this, you do not notice the peeling paint or the bombed façades. Everything is hidden in darkness or behind the long, lazy branches of the trees lined up along the avenues, but it is a long way from Paris. The small acts of arson, the larger calamities of bombs, the constant stream of people and noise, the corrupt, inhuman police, teenage whores in run-down bars trying to be American with names like Texas and Florida, make Paris a distant dream.

She thinks of all the times she’s run into other journalists arriving back into the city in their muddy fatigues, their hair standing up, the dried sweat forming wavy, concentric circles on their field jackets. They stank and they didn’t care that they stank. They were drunk and didn’t care they were drunk. There was a heady exhaustion that followed you back from the field, kept you moving until the film got off to the network or the cable went through. She has been swept along on that same cloud of exhaustion and spent fear, but tonight she has no story she wishes to file, no place she wishes to go. At MACV they gave her some utilities that don’t fit her, a pair of shower shoes. They kept her clothes—she has no idea why. She wants to tear off her clothes and burn them. She wants to hide in a hole in the ground. Instead, she stands outside her hotel, a place she wasn’t sure she’d ever see again, waiting until the time is right to step silently through the narrow set of doors, past the yellow-lit reception.

Normally, there would be Thanh in the office, doing his paperwork beneath a halo of flapping moths, or sitting quietly,
as he often did, watching the tiny twelve-inch screen television that only got a military channel. On nights like this, he would wave to her, his smile like a banner across his face, speaking Vietnamese to Son, who always translated discreetly for her.
He says we look like criminals
, Son would whisper as Thanh sat on his chair, his hand opening and shutting hello, always so welcoming.
He says he could smell us from two blocks away

She never knew whether to believe him, or whether Son made up any old nonsense just because he didn’t like Thanh. Thanh disapproved of Son, thinking of course that he was scrounging off a paying customer, which she supposed he was.

Tonight, she waits until she can see the light in Thanh’s room. And then, before he returns to lock the half-dozen deadbolts he sees to every night, she skirts through the entrance. Her hurt feet make her even more careful; she kicks off the shower shoes and picks her way barefoot as though through fire. She has only minutes before he comes for the locks. The hotel at the other end of the street was half-destroyed by a bomb, deadbolts and all, and there are balconies all around the old, colonial-style building so you could climb up if you wished. Even so, Thanh attends to his locks, as much out of superstition as anything.

In the same way, perhaps for no reason at all, it is important to Susan that Thanh not see her.

In the front pocket of her fatigues is one single dry smokable cigarette. She remembers her editor telling her that smoking kept the bugs away, kept mosquitoes from flying into your mouth. On a sticky evening in Danang, when they were both getting bitten alive and had run out of DEET, Marc had put a cigarette in each ear and one between his teeth.
If this doesn’t work, I’ll light my head on fire
, he said. She’d have done better by lighting joss sticks, the incense that the women dried along the road in clusters that looked like spiny flowers. She had learned from such women to wear long sleeves, wide hats, and loose pants, to cook so it produced plenty of smoke. But the
cigarettes were easier. Now she moves up the dark staircase, not wanting to make any noise, focusing on the fact that in a few minutes she will have the comfort of her lone smoke. She had watched the soldiers, particularly Anh, how they moved on their toes like ballerinas, twisting so as to leave even vines undisturbed. The Americans have heavy packs, seventy, eighty pounds, while the enemy has his body and his gun. She recalls the soundless, splendid economy of their movements. All three dead, she thinks, dumped into a mass grave, or doused with gasoline and set aflame. She stops her thoughts right there. No, she tells herself, and concentrates on the floor beneath her feet.

The steps turn at a small landing where a standard lamp is set on a timer. At exactly twelve, the lamp will go off and the hallway will plunge into darkness. The long-term occupants all have flashlights or kerosene lanterns (difficult to find and highly valued), or make their way down the hall by match fire. Once, she watched some sad, pathetic young American kid stumble down the hall by the light of a bong he was sucking. You could hear the water churning at the bottom, see the glow of the bowl reflected against the walls. She pointed this out to Marc, who rolled his eyes and reminded her to get a new hotel.
Anything but this
, he’d said.

There is the glow of a quarter-moon outside the window. When she hears a noise from one of the rooms, she stops. She waits until she hears only the inner workings of the hotel, the drone of the air conditioning, the buzz of Thanh’s television. Until only these sounds drum in her ear, she stays still. She should have come home during the day, she decides now. She should have insisted upon it.

Finally, she makes her way down the dark hall to her door with the letter E5 on it in gold marker that is meant to look like brass. She feels a strange sensation in her chest, a kind of longing. Part of her does not want to open the door and find her clothes in their place, her books and her typewriter, her little metal pencil holder, her stack of notepaper and her stained
coffee mug. She doesn’t want to see Son’s tidy collection of chemicals and processing trays, his clothes and bird-cages and tea-making things. The Son and Susan that occupied the room no longer exist. Until they were separated at MACV he continued his own fierce defense, angered at how the Americans detained him, while she sat dismayed at his sheer bravado, and marveling at how he knew she would not tell. The lieutenant’s words keep ringing in her ears:
He was found with a weapon two yards away from his dead comrade, so don’t tell me he’s just taking snapshots for the local paper!

She keeps asking herself: who was he planning to shoot?

She opens her room door, expecting to see the clutter and dust, the dead plants, the cracking paint on the window frame, a new infiltration of roaches. But inside it is tidy. The spread is smoothed out along the mattress, her clothes are in their drawers, tucked away. It appears someone has swept it, making the small space seem more expansive than it usually would be. The blind, too, has been drawn, so she knows somebody has been here. Then she notices the bird-cage is gone. Son’s clothes, too, are missing from their spot under the chair. She turns immediately to her left, opening the bathroom, and discovers that it has been returned to its former self, no longer kitted out as a darkroom. Even the wire, which once held all the images Son worked so hard to process, is gone. He beat her here. How remarkable. The only thing he has forgotten is his map, the fairytale map of Vietnam that makes it look like a land of golden eggs and friendly giants. The map is still above her bed. And, too, she sees he has left a bottle of iodine on her nightstand, the same one that had been in Hien’s pack. It is remarkable that it survived the battle, she thinks, and that he brought it here. He has even polished that glass. Did he think she would not be able to find her own medicine? Not look after herself at all?

She sits on the bed, then she stretches out. It feels so odd now to be lying on a mattress, to be in a room on her own.
So he’s disappeared, she concludes, like all the other people she has met over the months in Vietnam. They come and go, as though through an invisible door. She should be used to it, but she’s not. She will tell Marc all of this and he will help her sift through it so it makes sense, she thinks, forgetting in her sleepiness that she cannot tell him anything, not a word about Son, which means of course that she cannot see him. Not really. War is a consuming fire; it blasts through everything, every relationship. She has learned this.

But right now she is too tired to remember about secrets. She has not even noticed yet what Son has left for her. In the morning she will discover a sheet of thin paper, like the sort used to wrap pork rolls, resting beneath the iodine. The cap, which was already damaged and did not fit properly on the bottle, is so loose that when she moves it she spills some of the iodine over the white page. A word appears. She watches it emerge on the paper, unsure at first what is going on, feeling as though there is a ghost in the room. Then she gets some cotton and rubs the whole of the sheet with the iodine. A letter unclothes itself, sentence by sentence, until it reveals itself fully in her hand. Of course, it is from Son.

She reads the letter in the quiet of her room, suddenly missing him so much that it feels like a wound opening across her chest, making it hard to breathe. She has so much she wants to ask him, but also to say to him. She thinks of how they curled up together that last night and how it felt—it really did feel—as though they were one.

You can do anything with rice
, the letter says,
even write a secret message to a loved one! I have left for the place on the map (go look).
She glances up at Son’s map and sees a tiny circle with two dashes for eyes and a smiling face, located just beside the city of Hanoi.
I have much to thank you for, dear Susan. One day, when our countries are not at war, I hope you will come back to be with me, or that you will consider letting me come to you! Yes, a proposal
of marriage, written with rice starch, a first! For I will always love you, and have always loved you. If you do not hear from me, it is not because I have forgotten, but because where I am I cannot write to you, though always I am writing to you in my thoughts, telling you what happens each day until a time, I hope, when we can once more have our days together. You must promise me to leave the country now. Yes, leave Vietnam! If I had paper enough and rice, I would explain more. Believe me, please, you must go. Leave before Tet. Tell Marc to leave, too. And Locke. Yours always, Son.

The message waits for her all night as she sleeps. It stays with her, hidden in the lining of a hat box when she packs for home, remains part of her for ever, like a tattoo or a scar. As the year ends, and she indeed departs for America once more, she wonders at times if he pretended everything—their friendship, his love for her—all for the purposes of the war. Always the war. He is smart enough to know that, if he stayed in Saigon, she would eventually have to let someone know, even after everything they had been through, and everything he had saved her from. She would not tell in anger, but because she was someone who yearned for truth, who did not feel comfortable with that which is hidden. And because, too, they kept sending her countrymen home in boxes. He is smart enough to understand all that, and therefore to slip away, not to write to her again. With time, the urgency to reveal him diminishes. It almost becomes irrelevant. There are moments, however, when she swears she will find someone who will listen to her and she will tell who he is, for surely it must be told. After all the stories of battles and deaths, of torture and loss and hatred, someone should tell this one, too, about a man who moved among them, who seemed to love them. But he has left her little to say that matters or is newsworthy. The facts seem to erase themselves, like footprints in snow. The clever man. Such a clever man. She cannot, with certainty, even remember what he ever confessed to have been.