by Karin Tanabe
I took a deep breath, then lowered my hand from my face. As soon as I did, I jumped, losing one of my shoes. I moved frantically to put it back on, seeing a line of ants crossing my foot. They were all over the dirt floor. I stood up quickly and looked at one of the dead men. His skin had been partially eaten away. I turned away from him at once, nausea hitting me like a swell. I suddenly realized what I was looking at. I peered at the man closest to me and said, “Ai trong mấy người này là Ly Duc Khai?”
My Indochinese was still clumsy, but this they would understand: Is one of you Ly Duc Khai?
My heart began pounding the way it would in the seconds before my mother forced me to slaughter a chicken. The anticipation of the blood spattering from its neck, even if I had given it a blow to the skull before beheading it, the adrenaline surge that kept it moving even when headless, the tautness of its skin after I’d killed it. That was what I thought of as I looked at the emaciated, naked figures in front of me.
Two of the men who were still alive didn’t look at me, their bodies bent over, their torsos nearly touching their legs, their ribs visible even in the dim light.
But the man closest to me, the one I had addressed, turned his head to see me. “I am Khai,” he said.
His face didn’t match his voice. He had somehow found the energy to smile. He had hope—I was a woman, after all, and women had softer hearts than men. Even Western women.
I took a step forward so he could see me better.
Ly Duc Khai was the first name on the list that I’d obtained for Victor in Haiphong.
I stared at him for a few seconds more, at his naked body, his fading smile.
I met his eyes and saw the soul of the man still there, despite his body giving out. I bit my lip as hard as I could. My tears were desperate to fall, but I could not let them. I did not deserve to cry.
I could not help him. I had created a life for myself where I was nearly as tied up as he was. I was powerless to release him.
“Xin lỗi Anh.” I’m sorry, I whispered in Annamese. “I’m so sorry.” I walked into the pungent room a few more steps until I knew I was far enough inside that Victor could not see me. I leaned down and touched his head, my hand on his hair, which was heavy with grease and the dirt he’d been lying on. And then I brought my lips down on it quickly. “I can’t help you,” I said in French. Then I stood straight up again and put my hand on his back. “Please forgive me,” I said. “I am much weaker than you.” I hadn’t said those words since Virginia. Since the darkest day of my life.
A person could live for a week without water. But in that windowless room, in their coffin, it would be different. In three days at most, they would all be dead. I turned around, unable to bear the sight anymore. I shut the door behind me, locked it, and squeezed the doorknob, my heart hammering. Victor would be waiting for my reaction. What kind of a person was I, eight years into our marriage? Was I the kind of person who could support him as he carried out a plan that I had set into motion? As he made money that I needed more than he did? Was I the kind of woman who could forget such a sight and continue as a loyal wife no matter what? Or was I still the girl he’d forced on a train to be drugged in Switzerland? I felt much more like the girl on the train than I did a dutiful wife, but I knew that sentiment had to change. I slowly let go of the door frame, feeling my heart bleed. Even if I’d wanted to, I was powerless to save those men. Everyone’s arms were linked together here: the government, the police, and businessmen like Victor. And those dying men were the enemy. They were trying to take what the French and so many Annamites had built and improved over the last nearly fifty years, the economic prosperity, and knock it down again.
But the real reason I was powerless was that I needed money, far more than Victor did. I needed a good life for my daughter. I needed the world I’d fought so hard to be a part of not to disappear. No matter what.
I closed my eyes a moment and exhaled what felt like the remains of my soul. Then I turned to Victor, sitting back comfortably in his open-top car, looking at me expectantly.
“They were just days away from starting a communist uprising here. They were hiding weapons. Daggers and knives that they made in the auto shop. And worse. Over a dozen guns that had been smuggled in. Burying them in the earth. They were stocking food, had been for months. But thanks to you, I beat them to it,” he said, a glint of pride in his eyes. “I notified the police, who are as scared of another uprising as we are. It was decided that we should make an example out of these men instead. After this, things will be different. You’ll see. There will never be another strike like 1930 here, not after these men meet this fate.”
I lifted my right hand and threw the keys at him. “Then it’s all for the better,” I said, smiling.
TWENTY-TWO
Marcelle
November 2, 1933
“I told Sinh’s father,” said Khoi, who had just returned to Hanoi from Hue.
“I’m so glad he saw you,” I said, my anxiety over Khoi’s trip subsiding. After our shock that Paul Adrien was in Indochine, Khoi had rightly decided that the first thing we should do was tell the Cao family. We had not had much communication with any of them in the last year. “How did he react?” I asked.
“He’s not ready to call the firing squad on Haiphong, that’s for certain. He just said, ‘That’s unfortunate.’ I said, ‘The man who shot your son is in Haiphong,’ and he said those two words: ‘That’s unfortunate.’ I used the word ‘killed’ instead and he repeated the same phrase.”
“Well, it is unfortunate,” I replied. “And fortunate.”
“Fortunate because maybe we will find some closure. Other than that, what can we do? Murder him?”
“Potentially,” I said, not entirely joking. I looked at Khoi’s lacquered dining room table, the one that supposedly had blood in it. Far more valuable people had died in Indochine. “Or turn him in to the police,” I suggested. “Have someone investigate the details of Sinh’s death again. But, realistically, that would be aided greatly by the cooperation of Sinh’s father.”
“He will never help us. And to what end, Marcelle? Paul Adrien still wouldn’t be brought to justice. At most, he would be fined. Don’t you remember in 1927 when that native overseer Nguyen Van Chanh was kicked to death by the French senior overseer at Phu Rieng? A man named Valentin. The other Annamite overseers reported it, the police all nodded and smiled, promising the workers justice. They launched an investigation that lasted several months and then a trial that went on for only a few days. The overseer Valentin admitted to kicking the man to death but said it was Chanh’s fault. That the native man moved suddenly, and his spleen simply got in the way. Valentin was only trying to give him a small tap with his toe. Come to think of it, the story doesn’t sound that different from what we were told.”
“I remember it,” I said. It was something that I had thought about often since I’d found out the Lesages were coming to the colony.
“Then you’ll remember that the French overseer was found guilty of manslaughter and his only punishment was to pay the widow of the native overseer five piastres. Five! That is about sixty francs. So what would happen if we tried to get them to open a new inquiry into something they already investigated four years ago? Do you think they would really find a French policeman guilty of killing a communist? Even one with a father in the government? Sinh could have been walking down the street and Paul Adrien could have put a bullet in his head for no reason, and even if he were found guilty, his punishment would never match his crime.” He put his head back, letting it almost bob, and closed his eyes. “European men are not punished here. Only Annamites are. In that same year, when the workers killed the European overseer of Phu Rieng, Monteil, the workers who orchestrated it were sentenced to death, two other men received life sentences, and dozens more were beaten within an inch of their lives to give up the names of other comrades. And that’s just what the newspapers you and I read in Paris were able to dig out. Off the p
lantations, after the Yen Bai mutiny when nationalists and soldiers revolted against the French, thirty-nine men were given death sentences. Trust me, no native man has ever been offered a five-piastre slap on the wrist for murder. Instead, we are guillotined.”
“But we have to try something, Khoi,” I said, unable to hide my frustration, my disappointment.
“What we have been trying,” said Khoi as he paced the length of his living room, “is to help the men on these plantations live slightly better lives. We are carrying on Sinh’s legacy without harming anyone except for Michelin. They harmed Sinh, we harm them by slowly taking their business in Indochine out of their hands. We ruin Victor’s career and we send him and his helpful little wife back to France, disgraced.”
“They don’t seem anxious to sail,” I said. “I think she had far too much fun on your boat.”
“I thought she looked rather green and discouraged when she disembarked.”
“We’ll see,” I said grumpily. “I think you need to remember that that family killed Sinh, Khoi. At the very least, they put him in a position to be killed. Victor included.”
“I know, Marcelle. I know,” said Khoi, collapsing next to me. “But we can’t kill this man, too.”
I didn’t know that I could not kill Paul Adrien. Sitting there with him at the Sun Café in Haiphong, I’d believed that I could. I felt very capable of such a thing.
“I think,” said Khoi slowly, “that what I want more than anything is to speak to him. I think I was so desperate to find him because I want to look at him. I want to talk to him. I want to see how he reacts when I mention Cao Sinh. I need to know if he delighted in shooting him or if he was just paid to do it.”
“How do you know he would even speak to you? Maybe you’re just another useless mite to him. Maybe the name Cao Sinh won’t even mean anything to him,” I countered.
“Maybe. But maybe not.”
I thought of the man I’d drunk a whiskey with. I had no idea what he was and was not capable of. Men at rest were very different from men in the throes of chaos.
“You’ve never voiced this to me before—why?” I asked Khoi, reaching for a glass bottle of water that was nearby and drinking half of it down.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t agree, Marcelle,” said Khoi, exhaling loudly. He stood and moved away from me. “But I’ve realized that Sinh, being the consummate diplomat, the very good man that he was, with not one revengeful bone in his body, this is what he would want from me. He would want me to ask questions. He would want me to ask why.”
“I don’t agree. I think he would want us to try something official. Through the right channels,” I said again, crossing my arms and lying on the couch the way Anne-Marie used to.
“Marcelle, think for a minute,” Khoi said, watching me. “You know as well as I do that the French will do nothing. Especially not without Sinh’s family involved. ‘Who is he to you,’ that’s what they’ll say. He wasn’t even your lover. He was a friend. Your native acquaintance, they’ll think.”
“If Sinh’s father would lead the charge…” I said, my words fading.
“But he won’t, for the umpteenth time, Marcelle!” Khoi shouted. “It is frustrating, but he just won’t do anything to jeopardize his position. He is more French, more assimilated, than many French-born. He is far worse than I ever was.”
“You were never, despite what Anne-Marie and Sinh used to say to you, assimilated.”
“Yes, I was! I still am. Don’t you see it?” He trained his eyes on me. “Even you, in your way, want things to be wrapped in the same gloss as in France.”
“I do not want you to be French. I barely want to be French.”
“I know you don’t want me to physically be French,” he said, pensively. “But the thing of it is, Marcelle,” he continued as he paced, “would you be here, in my home, as my lover, if I didn’t wear Western clothes? Would you even have spoken to me in Paris if I were wearing an ao gam instead of a suit? If I had a long goatee instead of having just had a shave? Or what if my French was heavily accented? Or if I didn’t smell the way that is familiar to you, bathed in Acqua di Parma cologne? If I didn’t have a Parisian tailor and money? What if I didn’t have the kind of wealth that rivals any of the smug Europeans here? Would you still want me then?”
“Yes, I would,” I spat out in frustration. “I don’t care about your money. You know that. I care about you. And I care about what is fair. What is right. That’s what we’ve been working toward since I first came here, haven’t we? Finding justice for Sinh, for Anne-Marie. Trying to turn Michelin into something less terrible, keeping Lua Nguyen Thanh from being pulled away from your family. Khoi, I fell in love with the person that cared about doing these things. Who cared deeply about his family when I met him, and increasingly about his country.”
He looked at me, his expression slightly calmer but his eyes full of grief. We had wandered into the backyard, too restless to stay indoors. “Sinh changed me, enormously. But now, I don’t know. It feels strange to be pulling all these strings from this perch.”
He looked up at his beautiful house, which rivaled a home in Versailles or Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was cream-colored, with rows of tall windows on each of the four floors, wrought iron balconies, and, on the top floor, rounded dormers puncturing the slate mansard roof. It was, by consensus, one of the prettiest homes in the north.
“Khoi, no one forced you into this giant house,” I said wearily, turning away.
“I know. Look, I never declared myself a communist,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a hut and eschew all Western ideals. I still believe in capitalism, to an extent, just not colonialism. But these days, everything is different. After Yen Bai and the Nghe-Tinh uprisings three years ago, your delightful government decimated the communist and nationalist parties. The leadership went into hiding. I do think the communists will be the ones to eventually move us in the right direction. With complications to men like me, but most of the country is not men like me. As for the French,” he said, looking at me meaningfully, “they did force me into this house. I would not be allowed to figure so prominently as a member of the chamber of commerce if I wasn’t living like this, following their rules of so-called civility. Nor would I be allowed such economic freedom. That’s the part I’m hung up on right now, for some reason. It’s something you don’t seem to understand.”
“I’m trying,” I said, biting back my annoyance.
“My father,” said Khoi, pausing. “He, who thirty years ago managed to take his silk business beyond the borders of Indochine, providing to all of Southeast Asia, has somehow managed to keep the French out of our business. Until last year anyway. And that’s in part because he’s always done his best to assimilate. He’s been breaking his back to be French enough since the day he was born.”
“I have met your father many times,” I said. “His back is just fine.” I saw a servant walking toward us with fresh bottles of water and fell quiet. I had met Khoi’s father many times, but I had never met his mother, Tham. I’d only laid eyes on her once. It was the week I’d arrived in Hanoi. I was desperately curious to see the woman who had borne and raised the man I was in love with, so I’d hidden in the shadows near his family’s city house, a stately deco home far from the neighborhoods on the east side where the French lived. I saw her emerge just past dusk, dressed in a long, white, beaded gown, evidently heading to somewhere glamorous. No doubt it was a home or club that I would never see, someplace that the moneyed Annamites had managed to keep for themselves.
I could tell even from a distance that she was a beautiful woman, but I didn’t want her to have to dress a certain way. I was starting to see Khoi’s point. Would I have fallen in love with him if he wore traditional clothes, if he hadn’t been trying to resemble a university student in Paris?
Khoi pursed his lips as his servant bowed and said, “Would you like to eat lunch outside, Monsieur Khoi?”
“Non, merci, Ngoc. We will come in and
forage for food later.”
She nodded and left, stepping quickly over the manicured grass.
“Even my servants speak French,” he said, laughing. “Even though they are all Tonkin-born. How ridiculous is that?”
“Very,” I agreed. “But I’m glad you’re not yelling at me anymore. Are you convinced yet that I don’t want you to powder your hair and sing ‘La Marseillaise’?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I think you would like that. But I am ready to start formulating a plan about how we confront Paul Adrien. You met him once, can you do it again? Can you somehow invite him here, without saying why?”
“Maybe. If I invite him to something he can’t say no to.”
“Like a party with a man playing the ukulele, another with a monkey on his shoulder, and a bathtub full of gin?” said Khoi, daring a smile.
“He doesn’t deserve such a party. He deserves prison. But a party is a good idea. Yours are legendary. It would also be a very good way for you to finally meet Victor Lesage. It’s odd that you still haven’t.”
“To be frank, I haven’t wanted to. Perhaps the anger you hold for Paul Adrien, I hold for Victor. But I need to, so let’s change that,” said Khoi.
“And as for Paul Adrien, I’ll find another way for you to meet him. For both of us to finally have that conversation.”
Khoi opened his mouth to respond but closed it as we saw the same servant walking out again.
“There is a phone call for you,” she said after she’d bowed in apology.
“I’ll come in,” Khoi said, starting to stand.
“It’s not for you, sir,” she said quickly. “It’s for Madame de Fabry.”
“Who is it, please?” I asked, surprised. No one had ever called me at Khoi’s house.
“It is the concierge of the Hôtel Splendide,” she said.
“Ah, yes, of course,” I said, smiling, knowing immediately who it actually was.