The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  We drove on and on, and we could have been anywhere, being taken far away from our destination. There was no way of knowing or of asking the silent driver, who spoke no English. There was hardly a light to be discerned in the black landscape, and this was something I would learn, that the Vietnamese use electricity sparingly, and utter darkness is not unusual. When, at last, the glimmer of a city shone before us, my husband slid sideways onto my lap, resting his head there until we arrived at our hotel.

  ‘I’ll let you check in,’ he said, handing me his passport. This was something he had never done before.

  I HAD BEEN TRAVELLING FOR many hours. I gave my husband some Lomotil from our first aid supplies to cure his stomach upset, then lay down in the Sunway Hotel and slept until morning, hoping that he would do the same. The sheets were made of exquisitely fine white cotton.

  He was worse in the morning, but still I thought it would pass. I went to breakfast. The dining room of the hotel was restful, like that of a French inn. The walls were covered with vivid Vietnamese artworks that, although colourful, didn’t detract from the cool white and green ambience of the room. I ate some dragon fruit and melon and a little muesli. I walked along the street, a shabby crowded avenue in the Old Quarter, slung low with the great burden of electrical wires, just as when the war was on, although nearly thirty years had passed. I walked nearly to the end of the street until I came to the opera house, then became alarmed that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back, and my husband would be alone and frightened and more ill. At that moment, perhaps, I understood that things could be serious and that, actually, I was trying to walk away from the situation. I went back to the hotel. He looked dreadful. He didn’t want a doctor, but we agreed that if he wasn’t any better by three o’clock, I would call for one. It was two o’clock when I went to the reception desk. ‘Help me, please,’ I said. ‘My husband is sick.’

  ‘We’ll get a taxi for you, Madam, and send you to a clinic,’ the woman said.

  But no, I said, no, he needs a doctor to come to him, and very soon one did, a young woman, with an attendant following her, and a short time after that, an ambulance was summoned and my husband was carried on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face through the lobby of the Sunway Hotel, and a siren was shrieking above us, and through the window I saw the thousands of motorbikes that clog the streets of the city fanning out about us. I had dropped everything, thrown some valuables in the safe and fled.

  At the clinic, he was isolated from others coming and going, though I sat beside him and laughed and made jokes. I was given a gown and mask to wear. I said things like, ‘Here I am in Hanoi, looking after you, I’m pretending to be Hot Lips Houlihan’, and pushed my mouth out to make it fat.

  ‘Wrong war,’ he said. ‘Wrong country.’ He didn’t have much to say after that. Before I met him, my husband had been a pilot in the air force. I said, ‘Buck up, old chap.’ I sang a line or two of ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling’. Nothing made him laugh. I still didn’t believe there was much that a quick shot of antibiotic wouldn’t cure. A young French doctor came and went, his face grave. Hours passed. My husband seemed worse. ‘We think he has cholera,’ the French doctor said. I stopped joking.

  Outside, night had fallen. The doctor said, ‘You realise your husband is very ill?’ Dazed, I said yes, no, yes I did, and started to cry. He looked at me wearily as if I was misbehaving. ‘We’re going to send your husband to a hospital where he’ll be more comfortable. You’ll need to check it out with your insurance company.’

  But night was hours ahead of us in New Zealand, and when I tried to phone the insurance company there was nothing but a voice message giving the times that the company was open. The woman behind the desk at the clinic had an impassive Vietnamese expression. She explained that, if my insurance company could not confirm our policy, I must pay for my husband’s treatment for that afternoon. Could I please hand over my credit card? The cost was five thousand dollars, or thereabouts.

  In my haste to leave the hotel, I had brought only one of the two cards we carried, and it did not have enough money on it. I cried again, I may have shouted, but none of it made any difference. In the background my husband was a strange grey paste colour, and tubes and drips were poking out from all over him. I said that I would talk to my twenty-four-hour bank service and I did. In the end, the credit was authorised. As we left the clinic, we reached the street in the midst of Hanoi, its street vendors and crowds, the bright lights of open shops, the cascades of silk in front of them. An ambulance waited for us. My husband was carried by four men holding his wheelchair, but before he could be boarded he projected a wild, vile green plume of vomit that spread over everyone within reach. Green rain. Shrill cries of horror erupted from the passers-by. Those carrying my husband turned and began to carry him back into the clinic.

  ‘Put him in the ambulance,’ I screamed. ‘Please get him to the hospital.’

  But it seemed that first he must be made clean, so the whole process began all over again. Midnight had passed by the time the ambulance left the city. We drove, again through silence. The Vietnamese had put up their shutters, lain down to sleep. The motorbikes that had choked the streets earlier had disappeared. The lights had gone out except for the tiny flickers of fires peppering the pavements, illuminating the shadows of late workers bending over their pots. The ambulance moved very slowly. We seemed to be moving far away from the city centre. I had no idea what direction we were taking. I saw the shapes of buildings through the gloom so I knew that we must still be within the confines of the city. Days had passed since I left home, and already a day had gone since I had eaten the cloudy flesh of the dragon fruit at the hotel.

  We reached the hospital, a stark building, concrete and totally without charm. A team of nurses rushed to my husband’s side, and as suddenly as we had entered the fluorescent-lit space of the hospital, he had disappeared. The place appeared otherwise deserted, except for a man behind a big desk. ‘You will now show me your passport,’ he said.

  I showed it to him.

  ‘You will now give me your husband’s passport.’ He took it from me.

  ‘Can I have it back, please?’ I asked.

  He shook his head, with impatience. ‘Not until he leaves the hospital. They tell me your papers for the insurance are not in order. You will now give me five hundred dollars.’

  ‘American?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t have that much money on me,’ I said.

  ‘Show me how much.’

  I opened my wallet and turned it out on the counter; a little over three hundred dollars fell out, perhaps another fifty in smaller notes. He picked through them. ‘I have to have some money to get back to my hotel,’ I said. ‘I have no idea where I am.’

  ‘Three hundred will do,’ he said.

  ‘I want to see my husband.’

  ‘That is not possible. The doctor will come.’

  I WAITED IN A VESTIBULE with couches covered in brown faux leather. While I waited, a woman I soon discovered was American came to the desk. Her husband had just been admitted with a heart problem. He, too, had gone to intensive care. ‘But this is preposterous,’ she said loudly to the man at the desk. ‘He’s had a murmur like this before, he doesn’t need intensive care. In the morning I’ll take him to Bangkok, see a proper doctor. Tell them to take him out of there.’

  The man spread his hands in a gesture that said ‘This is not my problem’. Our eyes met, and for a moment something like sympathy passed between us. At least I hadn’t told him what to do. The woman introduced herself to me. Her name was Irene. She had just come to Hanoi with her husband, who was to work in one of the banks. I have never quite understood American women. When I travel, I find them often generous and funny and warm, but they have a brittle edge that threatens to snap if they are crossed. I’ve learnt never to talk about politics to an American woman. ‘Hey, seems you’re a bit stranded,’ Irene said, when we had exchanged a few wor
ds, and gave me her card. ‘If you’re still on your own tomorrow night, we could go out and play a bit, what d’you think? Don’t worry about your husband, he’ll be fine. At least these doctors know how to fix tummy bugs.’

  A Vietnamese doctor appeared and introduced himself to me. ‘Your husband is now in isolation,’ he said.

  ‘Has he got cholera?’

  ‘No. It is not cholera.’

  ‘What is wrong with him?’

  ‘He has rotavirus. Very infectious disease.’

  A virus, I thought. ‘It’s not serious, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, it is serious.’

  ‘He won’t die, will he?’

  ‘Oh, maybe. His kidneys do not work now. He is, how do you say, dehydrated. He should have seen a doctor much more early.’

  ‘Tonight? My husband might die tonight?’

  ‘Prob’ly.’

  ‘I must see him.’

  ‘Not possible. Now he is in isolation. You go home now.’

  ‘Where? Show me where he is.’

  After a while, he relented and took me in a lift to another floor. I was led through a door that had to be unlocked from the other side by some nurses. After that, there was another locked door, and through a window, in a bare cell, I saw my husband lying naked on a stripped-down bed. He appeared barely conscious.

  ‘I’ll stay here.’

  ‘No, you cannot stay here. You must leave now.’

  A nurse took my arm. She led me back to the lift and accompanied me to the ground floor. ‘You must go.’

  I shouted at her. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll sleep here.’

  She shrugged and made a face at the man behind the desk. I lay down on the concrete floor. The nurse left, and I was by myself. I sobbed then, as if I would never stop. All the old fretted and worn seams of love that had stretched but never parted were laid out before me. My husband was dying, and I was alone in a city where I had never been, lying on a concrete floor. Each of us was alone.

  The man at the desk came over to me. ‘You may lie on a bed that is in the next room,’ he said. ‘It is for emergencies. If an emergency comes, you must get out of the bed.’

  And this small act of kindness had its effect. My behaviour was pointless and ridiculous. I took my cellphone and worked out how to dial our children’s numbers with the country code added in. But it seemed they had turned off their phones for the night. I figured that it must be about half past five in the morning. I have a friend who sleeps badly and lives alone. I called her. I said, ‘Find my children. Please.’

  Our daughter rang me. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘Mum. Don’t let my father die.’

  Our son rang me. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Mum.’ He was crying.

  The man at the desk came into the room a short while later. He said, ‘Your ambassador is coming.’

  My daughter had rung the night desk at Foreign Affairs and explained that her father was dying in a hospital in Hanoi. The man had agreed, with a certain scepticism, to check it out. But the people from the embassy who arrived in a large Jeep at the door of the hospital were not sceptical. They were kind and practical and had brought a translator with them, and some food and bottles of mineral water and dry ginger ale. I had never been more pleased to see people from my own country. A while later, I left the hospital with them. I was told a senior doctor would see me in a few hours. They took me back to the hotel in the city, promising to fetch me when I had had time to shower and eat breakfast, talk to my insurance company and perhaps sleep a little. All of which I did, except the last. But before I did anything else, I wrote a long letter to my husband, in which I told him what had happened since we left Bangkok, because I was certain he wouldn’t remember, and I thought it unlikely the nurses would have the language to tell him where he was or how he had got there or why he couldn’t see me. I told him, too, how much I loved him, how he must fight to get well, because if he didn’t, I wasn’t sure that I could go on. Although this seemed like blackmail, it was better than saying goodbye in a letter. I needed him to help me go on with my life, I said. It was as simple as that. Once before he had nearly died, but he had got better, and he could do it again.

  I SAW THE SENIOR DOCTOR, an older man, impatient with people like me who had to be spoken to about their relatives. His job was to make people better, not talk to the family. The translator from the embassy sat with me, but the doctor did command some stilted formal English. He interrogated me. ‘Do you wash your hands properly?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘When you go to the lavatory?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘Rotavirus comes from dirty food that is contaminated with excrement. You need to be more careful.’

  ‘But I haven’t given my husband his dinner for more than two weeks,’ I said.

  So then I had to explain my journey, where I had come from, how my husband and I had met in Bangkok, how I had expected him to be happy when he saw me but he wasn’t. I made it into a little drama, waved my hands about, and he allowed himself a small smile before his expression closed again.

  ‘Your husband will be here for quite some time,’ he said. ‘We will do what we can to make him well. Now I must see the next wife.’

  The next wife was Irene, who had grown angrier since I saw her the night before, and a new wife waited behind her, a dark Portuguese woman, who was stranded and almost without language. She was weeping in a silent persistent way, unchecked snot covering her lip. This was Maria, whose husband had fallen down some steps on a cruise ship and hit his head. Smash, she said, smash.

  The translator took me to the clinic where I had been the day before. Now that the insurance company had cleared our policy I could get my money back. The clinic wanted to give me the money in dongs, Vietnamese currency. Fourteen million. In the end a deal was struck and I got the five thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills. ‘You must make sure the safe is locked very hard,’ said the translator.

  SO BEGAN MY LIFE IN the Sunway Hotel. A woman who ate dinner in the Allanté Restaurant most nights of the week and came to know the waiters by their names. The food was excellent, both Vietnamese and French. It’s difficult to recall what the dishes were although I would eat them over and over again, as a way of passing the time, of doing what I must in order to keep going, and yet it’s hard to remember. I know that there was food cooked with nuoc mam and ginger and lemongrass, as well as boeuf bourguignon and crème brûlée. The house wine was Luis Buñuel rosé. I supposed it was named for the Spanish movie director who had taken up with Mexico and made films about violent sex and religion and ecstasy. As rosés go it was all right. The problem was how to order more than two glasses without drawing attention to myself. It was wildly expensive, but I had handfuls of hundred-dollar bills in my safe and I didn’t really care. After dinner, I moved downstairs to the jazz bar and listened to a trio of musicians. I got to know their repertoire as well as I knew the menu, and have as easily forgotten it, but while I listened to them I could drink another glass of Luis Buñuel.

  I was a woman who was driven across the city of Hanoi in a taxi four times each day, return journeys made once in the morning and once in the afternoon, to find out how my husband was doing, because I couldn’t ring up and ask. Nobody had the language to answer me. When I arrived at the hospital I made my way to intensive care and waited for a doctor to see me, sometimes the Vietnamese doctor who got angry when he had to talk to me again, sometimes French doctors who were kinder on the whole. None of them would allow me into the room to see my husband, although I was allowed to peer through the glass. I talked to the other wives. Irene’s husband had taken a turn for the worse, but then so had Maria’s. The fizz had completely gone out of Irene, she was surly and tired. Maria crossed herself incessantly and cried.

  ‘It’s really a case of whose husband is going to die first, isn’t it?’ Irene said.

  WHEN I WAS NOT BEING driven to the hospital and back, I walked the streets and lakesides of the city. There are hundr
eds of lakes, but when I came to Hoan Kiem I was certain I had found the one I was looking for, the lake where Duras’s mother had run the boarding house, a location where Duras had suffered a great trauma as a child. I say location, because Duras was also a film-maker, so as I read her, my mind was making pictures. A red bridge led to a temple near the shore. I was constantly surprised by the redness of things in Vietnam. A pavilion that, from afar, appeared the size of a chimney, had been built in the centre of Hoan Kiem in honour of a fifteenth-century Vietnamese hero: his magical sword was said to have been eaten by a gold tortoise. Hoan Kiem means Lake of the Restored Sword. On the shoreline stood a row of French colonial villas, and I decided there and then that this was exactly where the boarding house was, or had been. I had thought there was a red bridge in Duras’s story, but when I go back to her text there is no sign of one. I had begun to feel impatient with Duras, that she had led me into unimaginable danger, and I had almost had enough of her. I crossed the red bridge and came to the temple and lit some incense for my husband, then I sat and watched the surface of the lake. In the green days of love, when we were young, he and I had sat on the steps of our apartment and watched the dark light of night falling across that other lake.

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN I ARRIVED at the hospital, a second American woman, the wife of another man who worked in the city, had set up camp at the entrance to intensive care. This woman, who was called Stacey, was very bad news, crazy and out of control, far worse than I had been. She was so thin she looked as though she might break in half. I have no idea what was really wrong with her husband, because her language was peppered with lengthy bursts of unintelligible medical terminology. From the drift of it, I supposed that, like Irene’s husband, it must be something to do with his heart. Both Stacey’s parents were doctors and she was on a cellphone calling them in New York, as they diagnosed her husband’s condition and told her what treatment he needed. She crouched on the floor, skinny backside in the air, shouting the names of drugs as she wrote them down on a pad in front of her. ‘These doctors,’ she screamed, ‘they have no idea what they’re doing. Mommy, I can’t let him die. I have to stop them doing what they’re doing.’ Two French doctors appeared and tried to calm her down. The Vietnamese doctor, the one I tried not to irritate, was watching, his expression implacable. He was not easy to appease. I had learnt to keep quite still in his presence, not to speak loudly or move my hands about quickly. A week of my vigil had now passed and I had been allowed in to see my husband for just one minute. I thought he had recognised me. He was surrounded by tiny Vietnamese nurses with hands like the wings of dragonflies, and it seemed that he knew them better, in that minute, than he did me. But then I was wearing a mask and gown.