The Quiet American (4 page)

“Home?” I said and laughed, and Pyle looked at me as though I were another Granger. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle-age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent, and I saw Phuong for a moment as I had seen her first, dancing past my table at the Grand Mondein a white ball-dress, eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who had been detemined on a good European marriage. An American had bought a ticket and asked her for a dance: he was a little drunk-not harmfully, and I suppose he was new to the country and thought the hostesses of the Grand Monde were whores. He held her much too close as they went round the floor the first time, and then suddenly there she was, going back to sit with her sister, and he was left, strand-ed and lost among the dancers, not knowing what had happened or why. And the girl whose name I didn’t know sat quietly there, occasionally sipping her orange juice, owning herself completely.

“Peut-on avoir l’honneur?” Pyle was saying in his terrible accent and a moment later I saw them dancing in silence at the other end of the room, Pyle holding her so far away from him that you expected him at any moment to sever contact. He was a very bad dancer, and she had been the best dancer I had ever known in her days at the Grand Monde.

It had been a long and frustrating courtship. If I could have offered marriage and a settlement everything would have been easy, and the elder sister would have slipped quietly and tactfully away whenever we were together. But three months passed before I saw her so much as momentarily alone, on a balcony at the Majestic, while her sister in the next room kept on asking when we proposed to come in. A cargo boat from France was being unloaded in Saigon River by the light of flares, the trishaw bells rang like telephones, and I might have been a young and inexperienced fool for all I found to say. I went back hopelessly to my bed in the rue Catinat and never dreamed that four months later she would be lying beside me, a little out of breath, laughing as though with surprise because nothing had been quite what she expected.

“Monsieur Fowlair.” I had been watching them dance and hadn’t seen her sister signalling to me from another table. Now she came over and I reluctantly asked her to sit down. We had never been .friends since the night she was taken ill in the Grand Monde and I had seen Phuong home.

“I haven’t seen you for a whole year,” she said. “I am away so often at Hanoi.” “Who is your friend?” she asked. “A man called Pyle.” “What does he do?”

“He belongs to the American Economic Mission. You know the kind of thing-electrical sewing machines for starving seamstresses.” “Are there any?” “I don’t know.”

“But they don’t use sewing machines. There wouldn’t be any electricity where they live.” She was a very literal woman.

“You’ll have to ask Pyle,” I said. “Is he married?”

I look at the dance floor. “I should say that’s as near be ever got to a women.” “He dances very badly,” she said. “Yes.” “But he looks a nice reliable man.”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit with you for a little? My friends are very dull.”

The music stopped and Pyle bowed stiffly to Phuong, then led her back and drew out her chair. I could tell that formality pleased her. I thought how much she missed in her relation to me.

“This is Phuong’s sister,” I said to Pyle. “Miss Hei.” “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said and blushed. “You come from New York?” she asked. “No. From Boston” “That is in the United States too?” “Oh yes. Yes.” “Is your father a business man?” “Not really. He’s a professor.”

“A teacher?” she asked with a faint note of disappointment. “Well, he’s a kind of authority, you know. People consult him.”

“About health? Is he a doctor?”

“Not that sort of doctor. He’s a doctor of engineering though. He understands all about underwater erosion. You know what that is?”

“No” Pyle said with a dim attempt at humour, “Well, I’ll leave it to Dad to tell you about that.” “He is here?”

“Oh, no.”

“But he is coming?”

“No. That was just a joke,” Pyle said apologetically. “Have you got another sister?” I asked Miss Hei. “No. Why?”

“It sounds as though you were examining Mr. Pyle’s marriageability.”

“I have only one sister,” Miss Hei said, and she clamped her hand heavily down on Phuong’s knee. like a chairman with his gavel marking a point of order. “She’s a very pretty sister,” Pyle said. “She is the most beautiful girl in Saigon,” Miss Hei said. as though she were correcting him. “I can believe it.”

I said, “It’s time we ordered dinner. Even the most beautiful girl in Saigon must eat.” “I am not hungry,” Phuong said.

“She is delicate,” Miss Hei went firmly on. There was a note of menace in her voice. “She needs care. She deserves care. She is very, very loyal.” “My friend is a lucky man,” Pyle said gravely. “She loves children,” Miss Hei said. I laughed and then caught Pyle’s eye: he was looking at me with shocked surprise, and suddenly it occurred to me that he was genuinely interested in what Miss Hei had to say. While I was ordering dinner (though Phuong had told me she was not hungry, I knew she could manage a good steak tartare with two raw eggs and etceteras), I listened to him seriously discussing the question of children. “I’ve always thought I’d like a lot of children,” he said. “A big family’s a wonderful interest. It makes for the stability of marriage. And it’s good for the children too. I was an only child. It’s a great disadvantage being an only child.” I had never heard him talk so much before.

“How old is your father?” Miss Hei asked with gluttony. “Sixty-nine.”

“Old people love grandchildren. It is very sad that my sister has no parents to rejoice in her children. When the day comes,” she added with a baleful look at me. “Nor you either,” Pyle said, rather unnecessarily I thought.

“Our father was of a very good family. He was a mandarin in Hue.”

I said, “I’ve ordered dinner for all of you.” “Not for me,” Miss Hei said. “I must be going to my friends. I would like to meet Mr. Pyle again. Perhaps you could manage that.”

“When I get back from the north,” I said. “Are you going to the north?” “I think it’s time I had a look at the war.” “But the Press are all back,” Pyle said. “That’s the best time for me. I .don’t have to meet Granger.” “Then you must come and have dinner with me and my sister when Monsieur Fowlair is gone.” She added with courtesy, “To cheer her up.” After she had gone Pyle said, “What a charming, cultivated woman. And she spoke English so well.” “Tell him my sister was in business once in Singapore,” Phuong said proudly. “Really? What kind of business?” translated for her. “Import, export. She can do short-

I wish we had more like her in the Economic Mission.” “I will speak to her,” Phuong said. “She would like to work for the Americans.”

After dinner they danced again. I am a bad dancer too and I hadn’t the unselfconsciousness of Pyle-or had I possessed it, I wondered, in the days when I was first in love with Phuong? There must have been many occasions at the Grand Monde before the memorable night of Miss Hei’s illness when I had danced with Phuong just for an opportunity to speak to her. Pyle was taking no such opportunity as they came round the floor again; he had relaxed a little, that was all, and was holding her less at arm’s length, but they were both silent. Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. I could hardly believe that in an hour, two hours, she would be coming back with me to that dingy room with the communal closet and the old women squatting on the landing.

I wished I had never heard the rumour about Phat Diem, or that the rumour had dealt with any other town than the one place in the north where my friendship with a French naval officer would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled. A newspaper scoop? Not in those days when all the world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people al-

Always. Everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

“Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong from you,” Pyle’s said.

“Oh. I’m no dancer, but I like watching her dance.” One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

The first cabaret of the evening began: a singer, a jug-gler, a comedian-he was very obscene, but when I looked at Pyle he obviously couldn’t follow the argot. He smiled when Phuong smiled and laughed uneasily when I laughed. “I wonder where Granger is now,” I said, and Pyle looked at me reproachfully.

Then came the turn of the evening: a troupe of female impersonators. I had seen many of them during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. “Fowlair,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her.”

From the bell tower of the Cathedral, the battle was only picturesque, fixed like a panorama of the Boer War in an old Illustrated London News. An aeroplane was parachuting supplies to an isolated post in the calcaire those strange weather-eroded mountains on the Annam border that look like piles of pumice, and because it always returned to the same place for its glide, it might never have moved, and the parachute was always there in the same spot, half-way to earth. From the plain the mortar-bursts rose unchangingly, the smoke as solid as stone, and in the market the flames burnt palely in the sunlight. The tiny figures of the parachutists moved in single file along the canals, but at this height they appeared stationary. Even the priest who sat in a corner of the tower never changed his position as he read in his breviary. The war was very tidy and clean at that distance.

I had come in before dawn in a landing-craft from Nam Dinh. We couldn’t land at the naval station because it was cut off by the enemy who completely surrounded the town at a range of six hundred yards, so the boat ran in beside the flaming market. We were an easy target in the light of the flames, but for some reason no one fired. Everything was quiet, except for the flop and crackle of the burning stalls. I could hear a Senegalese sentry on the river’s edge shift his stance.

I had known Phat Diem well in the days before the attack-the one long narrow street of wooden stalls, cut up every hundred yards by a canal, a church and a bridge. At night it had been lit only by candles or small oil lamps (there was no electricity in Phat Diem except in the French officers’ quarters), and day or night the street was packed and noisy. In its strange medieval way, under the shadow and protection of the Prince Bishop, it had been the most living town in all the country, and now when I landed and walked up to the officers’ quarters it was the most dead. Rubble and broken glass and the smell of burnt paint and plaster, the long street empty as far as the sight could reach, reminded me of a London thoroughfare in the early morn-after an all-clear: one expected to see a placard, “Un-exploded Bomb.”

The front wall of the officers’ house had been blown out, and the houses across the street were in ruins. Coming down the river from Nam Dinh I had learnt from Lieutenant Peraud what had happened. He was a serious young man, Freemason, and to him it was like a judgement on the superstitions of his fellows. The Bishop of Phat Diem had once visited Europe and acquired there a devotion to Our Lady of Fatima-that vision of the Virgin which appeared, so Roman Catholics believe, to a group of children in Portugal. When he came home, he built a grotto in her honour in the Cathedral precincts, and he celebrated her feast day every year with a procession. Relations with the colonel in charge of the French and Vietnamese troops had always been strained since the day when the authorities had dislfiaed the Bishop’s private army. This year the colonel- who had some sympathy with the Bishop, for to each of them his country was more important than Catholicism- made a gesture of amity and walked with his senior officers in the front of the procession. Never had a greater crowd gathered in Phat Diem to do honour to Our Lady of Fatima. Even many of the Buddhists-who formed about half the population-could not bear to miss the fun, and those who had belief in neither God believed that somehow all these banners and incense-burners and the golden monstrance would keep war from their homes. All that was left of the Bishop’s army-fais brass band-led the procession, and the French officers, pious by order of the colonel, followed like choirboys through the gateway into the Cathedral precincts, past the white statue of the Sacred Heart that stood on an island in the little lake before the Cathedral, under the bell tower with spreading oriental wings and into the carved wooden cathedral with its gigantic pillars formed out of single trees and the scarlet lacquer work of the altar, more Buddhist than Christian. From all the villages between the canals, from that Low Country landscape where young green rice-shoots and golden harvests take the place of tulips and churches of windmills, the people poured in.

Nobody noticed the Vietminh agents who had joined the procession too, and that night as the main Communist battalion moved through the passes in the calcaire, into the Tonkin plain, watched helplessly by the French outpost in the mountains above, the advance agents struck in Phat Diem.

Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories. The authorities would have stopped me in Hanoi if they had known of my purpose, but the further you get from headquarters, the looser becomes the control until, when you come within range of the enemy’s fire, you are a welcome guest—what has been a menace for the Etat Major in Hanoi, a worry for the full colonel in Nam Dinh, to the lieutenant in the field is a joke, a distraction, a mark of interest from the outer world, so that for a few blessed hours he can dramatise himself a little and see in a false heroic light even his own wounded and dead.

The priest shut his breviary and said, “Well, that’s finished.” He was a European, but not a Frenchman, for the Bishop would not have tolerated a French priest in his diocese. He said apologetically, “I have to come up here, you understand, for a bit of quiet from all those poor people.” The sound of the mortar-fire seemed to be closing in, or perhaps it was the enemy at last replying. The strange difficulty was to find them: there were a dozen narrow fronts, and between the canals, among the farm buildings and the paddy fields, innumerable opportunities for ambush. Immediately below us stood, sat and lay the whole population of Phat Diem. Catholics, Buddhists, pagans, they had all packed their most valued possessions—a cooking-stove, a lamp, a mirror, a wardrobe, some mats, a holy picture—and moved into the Cathedral precincts. Here in the north it would be bitterly cold when darkness came, and already the Cathedral was full: there was no more shelter; even on the stairs to the bell-tower every step was occupied, and all the time more people crowded through the gates, carrying their babies and household goods. They believed, whatever their religion, that here they would be safe. While we watched, a young man with a rifle in Vietnamese uniform pushed his way through: he was stopped by a priest, who took his rifle from him. The father at my side said in explanation, “We are neutral here. This is God’s territory.” I thought. It’s a strange poor population God has in his kingdom, frightened, cold, starving (“I don’t know how we are going to feed these people,” the priest told me): you’d think a great King would do better than that.’ But then I thought. It’s always the same wherever one goes- it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations. Little shops had already been set up below. I said, “It’s like an enormous fair, isn’t it, but without one smiling face.” The priest said, “They were terribly cold last night. We have, to keep the monastery gates shut or they would swamp us.”

“You all keep warm in there?” I asked. “Not very warm. And we would not .have room for a length of them.” He went on, “I know what you are thinking. it is essential for some of us to keep well. We have the only hospital in Phat Diem, and our only nurses are these nuns.” “And your surgeon?”

“I do what I can.” I saw then that his soutane was speckled with blood.

He said, “Did you come up here to find me?” “No. I wanted to get my bearings.” “I asked you because I had a man up here last night. He wanted to go to confession. He had got a little frightened, you see, with what he had seen along the canal. One couldn’t blame him.” “It’s bad along there?”

“The parachutists caught them in a cross-fire. Poor souls. I thought perhaps you were feeling the same.”

“I’m not a Roman Catholic. I don’t think you could even call me a Christian.” “It’s strange what fear does to a man.” “It would never do that to me. If I believed in any God atall, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me. Father, but to me it seems morbid- unmanly even.”

“Oh,” he said lightly, “I expect you are a good man. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had much ‘to regret.”

I looked along the churches, where they ran down evenly spaced between the canals, towards the sea. A light flashed from the second tower. I said, “You haven’t kept all your churches neutral.”

“It isn’t possible,” he said. “The French have agreed to leave the Cathedral precincts alone. We can’t expect more. That’s a Foreign Legion post you are looking at.” “I’ll be going long. Goodbye, Father.” “Goodbye and good luck. Be careful of snipers.” I had to push my way through the crowd to get out, past the lake and the white statue with its sugary out-spread arms, into the long street. I could see for nearly three quarters of a mile each way, and there were only two living beings in all that length besides myself-two soldiers with camouflaged helmets going slowly away up the edge of the street, their sten guns at the ready. I say the living because one body lay in a doorway with its head in the road. The buzz of flies collecting there and the squelch of the soldiers’ boots growing fainter and fainter were the only sounds. I walked quickly past the body, turning my head the other way. A few minutes later when I looked back I was quite alone with my shadow and there were no sounds except the sounds I made. I felt as though I were a mark on a firing range. It occurred to me that if something happened to me in this street it might be many hours before I was picked up: time for the flies to collect. When I had crossed two canals, I took a turning that led to a church. A dozen men sat on the ground in the camouflage of parachutists, while two officers examined a man. Nobody paid me any attention when I joined them. One man, who wore the long antennae of a walkie-talkie, said, “We can move now,” and everybody stood up.

I asked them in my bad French whether I could accompany them. An advantage of this war was that a European face proved in itself a passport on the field: a European could not be suspected of being an enemy agent. “Who are you?” the lieutenant asked. “I am writing about the war,” I said. “American?”
                   
. .”No, English.”
                
... “He said, “It is a very small affair, but if you wish to come with us...” He began to take off his steel helmet, “No, no,” I said, “that is for combatants.” “As you wish.”

We went out behind the church in single file, the lieutenant leading, and halted for a moment on a canal-bank for the soldier with the walkie-talkie to get contact with the patrols on either flank. The mortar shells tore over us and burst out of sight. We had picked up more men behind the church and were now about thirty strong. The lieutenant explained to me in a low voice, stabbing a finger at his map, “Three hundred have been reported in this village here. Perhaps massing for tonight. We don’t know. No one has found them yet.” “How far?” “Three hundred yards.”

Words came over the wireless and we went on in silence, to the right the straight canal, to the left low scrub and fields and scrub again. “All clear,” the lieutenant whispered with a reassuring wave as we started. Forty yards on, another canal, with what was left of a bridge, a single plank without rails, ran across our front. The lieutenant motioned to us to deploy and we squatted down facing the unknown territory ahead, thirty feet off, across the plank. The men looked at the water and then, as though by a word of command, all together, they looked away. For a moment I didn’t see what they had seen, but when I saw, my mind went back, I don’t know why, to the Chalet and the female impersonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle saying, “This isn’t a bit suitable.”

The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back, and I suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking,

‘Two can play at that game.’ I too took my eyes away; we didn’t want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except’ by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

The lieutenant sat beside the man with the walkie-talkie and stared at the ground between his feet. The instrument began to crackle instructions and with a sigh as though he had been roused from sleep he got up. There was an odd comradeliness about all their movements, as though they were equals engaged op a task they had performed together times out of mind. Nobody waited to be told what to do. Two men made for the plank and tried to cross it, but they were unbalanced by the weight of their arms and had to sit astride and work their way across a few inches at a time. Another man had found a punt hidden in some bushes down the canal and he worked it to where the lieutenant stood. Six of us got in and he began to pole it towards the other bank, but we ran on a shoal of bodies and stuck. He pushed away with his pole, sinking it into this human clay, and one body was released and floated up all its length beside the boat like a bather lying in the sun. Then we were free again, and once on the other side we scrambled out, with no backward look. No shots had been fired: we were alive: death had withdrawn perhaps as far as the next canal. I heard somebody just behind me say with great seriousness, “Gott sei dank.” Except for the lieutenant they were most of them Germans.