The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  Irene and Maria and I looked at one another while Stacey raved on. ‘Pouf,’ said Maria, and turned away. She appeared not to have changed her clothes for several days. She was still wearing the same elegant dark garments she had on when I met her, only now they were soiled and shabby and her hair was matted round the sides of her face. Irene was trying to get her husband to Bangkok but their paperwork wasn’t in order, which had confounded her, and besides that, Bangkok airport was closed because of political riots.

  Irene, looking at Stacey, said: ‘Well, that sure as shit isn’t going to get her anywhere.’ We looked at one another again, for once with real recognition. The survivors. So far.

  AT THE EMBASSY I HAD struck up one of those surprising spontaneous friendships that would carry on beyond the moment, past Hanoi. Anne lived by the West Lake in a tower block of diplomatic apartments. The rooms were cool and beautifully furnished, with pictures by New Zealand artists on the wall and books by New Zealand writers on the shelves. I ate with her and her husband some evenings on their balcony overlooking the lake, and near to Trúc Bac, which John McCain famously parachuted into after he’d been shot down during the Vietnam War. Anne had begun to take me in hand. She had taught me how to say xin chao (hullo) and c m n (thank you), both very useful words. Xin chao, c m n, I said, endlessly smiling. What else could I say? Nobody would accept my Western tips, which were not permitted in communist Vietnam. Hullo and thank you got me a long way. Anne sent me to look at cathedrals, showed me about the city, took me to restaurants I wouldn’t have found on my own. I had promised the staff at the embassy that I wouldn’t walk out alone at night, and I had no real wish to do so. Once night fell, I wanted to stay in the Sunway Hotel, and eat, and listen to jazz. Oh yes, and drink Luis Buñuel rosé. Anne had lent me a novel by Joan Didion, one that captured a familiar tone in her writing: a lone woman in a deserted tropical hotel, drinking bourbon and waiting for something to happen, before someone gets killed by secret agents. Often there are jacaranda petals floating on a swimming pool filled with dirty water, and riots in the distance. There was no swimming pool at the Sunway, but yes, one night, two Americans went up in the lift at the same time as I did. They were dressed in beautiful suits, wore expensive watches, sported crisp handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. The older of the two, a big man, had shining silver hair, not a strand out of place. The younger one, shorter, tubbier, said, ‘So if there’s nothing doing here, what happens next?’ The older one said, ‘We go down to Saigon and see what we can stir up there.’ It was as if I was invisible. Later, in the jazz bar, I saw an Asian man, dressed with even more exquisite care — silk socks, gold-framed spectacles — sitting reading a newspaper. I thought, He’s going to meet with those men from upstairs. And, after a while, the older one did come down. The Asian man produced two very large cigars and, from his pocket, a guillotine cutter that sat snugly in the palm of his hand. He squeezed his hand shut, and opened it with a look of satisfaction on what I supposed was a perfect cut before offering it to the American and repeating the ritual. They sat, with little conversation between them. After some time had passed, the second, younger American appeared, took his seat and accepted the ritual of the cigar, though he looked pale at the prospect.

  Of course, I wanted to stay and hear what I could, but there are only so many glasses of Luis Buñuel one can drink, and so many times you can listen to a jazz trio when they have completed their repertoire for the third time, without being observed. The Asian man had become aware of my presence.

  The younger American reminded me of someone. Not Didion, I thought, Graham Greene. The Quiet American. There’s trouble brewing here.

  TROUBLE LURKED EVERYWHERE, if you let it find you. I took a taxi to the Temple of Literature, in the heart of Hanoi. The taxi driver charged me five times the fare I knew I should pay. When I remonstrated, he pushed me out of his taxi and came round to where I stood, clutching the side of the car, demanding the money. I gave it to him, but also, wrote the number of the taxi in my notebook as it disappeared down a boulevard.

  The temple I had come to visit was built in honour of literature, a university begun in the year 1076. Five courtyards lie behind thick stone walls, filled with flowers and ancient trees and white-robed monks gliding through the shadows. As I walked in the temple grounds, I thought how the concept of temples built to honour words was so different from where I came from. I have made a temple in my head for words for as long as I can remember. They have preoccupied me when I should have been doing other things. Cuckoos and crickets, spring crocuses, they have darted and bloomed in my brain. I’ve put them down on paper, fought them and rearranged them and regretted them. Sometimes, when we got older, my husband and I, words stood in the way of love, those wrongly chosen, spoken in haste, shouted, as if we were killing each other.

  As I am drawn to words so, too, I have a passion for synchonicity, numbers and apparently random events that fall into unexpected order. A strange thing had happened at the embassy the day before. One of the women who worked there asked me what part of my city I lived in, back home in New Zealand. When I told her, she said, ‘I’ve got a friend who lives in that suburb. What street?’

  I told her. She said, ‘That’s the street where my friends live. What number?’

  The house turned out to be two doors away from mine. In fact, it was a house where my husband and I had once lived. Although I can see the house as I write, and could reach its gate in seconds, I haven’t been back in nearly forty years. It was a house where we were unhappy, words as sour as milk on a hot day. We rescued ourselves, and our children, when we saw that the house along the street, unlike ours, had sunlight on the lawn, and we bought it.

  Now, in the Temple of Literature, some other words flooded back, ones that I’d forgotten for years: I bind myself unto this day. I stood still and listened to the refrain. Not writers’ words or the cruel barbs of the past. Nothing to do with Hanoi.

  I bind unto myself the power

  Of the great love of cherubum;

  The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour …

  It goes on for many verses. The St Patrick’s Day hymn. My father was Irish. I used to carry the words on a piece of paper in my wallet, until it grew so worn and thin it fell to pieces. Nothing and everything. What I knew was just this: I was bound each day to the hospital where my husband lay and words for the moment seemed neither here nor there.

  AT THE HOTEL, I REPORTED the taxi driver. Almost as soon as I had done this, I saw the irony of informing on a man who overcharged me in a country where tipping was forbidden. What did it matter? I had my dollars. But irony, I suspected, was a Western indulgence in a life and death country. The head of the taxi company came to the hotel, gave me back my money, apologised and bowed. I said, ‘I don’t want him to get into serious trouble. I expect he has a family who depend on him. Don’t make him lose his job.’ The head of the taxi company bowed again.

  I told someone at the embassy what had happened. ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he?’ I asked.

  The woman looked at me and shrugged. ‘He’s probably been taken into the forest and shot.’

  I said, ‘You don’t mean that.’ She didn’t reply.

  I don’t know what happened to the man. But I looked at myself in the mirror that night, Western and virtuous and deadly. Jacaranda petals on the surface of the pool.

  I blame myself. That is a fact, and it doesn’t go away.

  In the hospital, Stacey was still crouched on the floor outside intensive care, still babbling into her phone, banging her free fist up and down on the floor. She saw me and stood up, switching off the phone. ‘Do you believe it,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve told these jerks in there what to do, and they’re not listening to me. My daddy knows what they should be giving him.’

  ‘They may not have that specific drug,’ I said.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if they did, they’re too stupid to know what to do.’

  ‘Perhaps they know more than you think
,’ I said. I saw the Vietnamese doctor looking at me, his eyes calm and level. ‘Would you like to come in and see your husband?’ he said. ‘You could give him a little food.’

  I put on my mask and gown. ‘Does this mean that he’s going to get well?’

  ‘In time,’ he said. ‘Soon he will go to another ward.’

  I fed my husband small spoonfuls of rice porridge.

  I met Anne for lunch. We went to the Green Tangerine, a restaurant in an old French building with a mysterious staircase to an upper landing. We took a table in the courtyard; for dessert we ate citron givré, a tangerine carefully hollowed out, and refilled with the flesh mixed with cream and liqueur. The soft substance, the tart mixture of flavours combined like shots, as if we were drinking hard liquor. I began to feel drowsy. Anne said, ‘About that money you’ve got in your safe?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you bought yourself some treats. How about we go down silk street this afternoon?’

  So we resorted to Pho Hàng Gai, Rue de la Soie, the street lined with silk shops. I picked up handfuls of different silk, holding them to my face, and in some I thought I detected the scent of skin like warm honey on the tongue, though it may have been that of food cooking at the back of the shop or incense burning. It didn’t matter. If I closed my eyes for a moment, I was overcome with a young woman’s ardour, could see the golden sheen on the back of my husband, my beloved, the play of light and dark, and I thought, M.D., you haven’t abandoned me. I was wrong to doubt. I ordered jackets, and skirts and pants. I went on doing this for several days, the sweet cool fabrics slithering between my fingers, like the touch of my lover, while hundred-dollar bills drifted away.

  I LEFT THE THREE WIVES behind me at intensive care. No, I think Irene rescued her husband the same day my husband was moved to another room, one where I could make short visits and talk to him. Irene and her husband were returning to America. Stacey may still be in Hanoi, perhaps strapped to a chair somewhere, out in a forest. I could have spared her a backwards glance but I didn’t. But I did put my arm around Maria, awkwardly, because we were strangers, only there was nobody else and she was on her own. ‘He was a good man, my husband,’ she said, or that’s what I understood her words to mean. His body was being taken away.

  ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. WE TALKED a little during my visits but not about much. My husband couldn’t imagine the places I’d been visiting. I watched as the tiny beautiful hovering nurses tenderly massaged him. I saw that they liked him, and I wanted him back for myself. Early one morning, I made my forty-first taxi ride across the city. I met with a French nurse who was accompanying us back to New Zealand. Four seats were booked for our party, three at the front of the plane — one for the nurse, one for an oxygen tank, one for my husband — and a fourth for me at the rear of the plane. We boarded an ambulance, and my husband caught brief glimpses of the city as we drove through it. We passed over the long bridge I’d detected the night we arrived spanning the vast river. ‘Is that the Red River?’ he asked. When the nurse said yes, he turned his head and I saw he had tears in eyes.

  ‘Well, then, I’ve seen it,’ he said. ‘The Red River.’

  Tam biêt, I said under my breath. Goodbye. Goodbye Red River, red bridge, red country.

  I took his hand, our two skins crumpled together. Old silks.

  The Man from Tooley Street

  The farm lay on the edge of the river. The river sliced through the countryside, filled with a dark swollen power. During the milking season, a launch would collect cans of cream to take to a factory. The farmers stood on their makeshift wharves and shouted at the ferryman if he was late, fearing their cream would sour as the sun rose, and hard blue heat poured across the landscape.

  Les Mullens took up his land late in the 1920s. First he cleared tall slender-limbed kahikatea from the swamplands, and sold the timber for butter boxes. Then he dug trenches to drain the swamps and after that he burned the tree stumps. He could never be sure of getting the burn-off right. More than once he had had to watch helplessly when flames licked underground and ignited the peat. The fires filled the skies with smouldering light and turned sunsets into torrents of black and orange cloud that made him think the earth and sun were about to collide. Only rain would quench the underground swamp fires, so another year would pass before grass could be sown. He toiled to lay down paddocks, to build a shed for the milking, to put up fences. First he bought two cows and when they were milking well, he went to the saleyards and bought a dozen. He milked them in cold dawns, before separating the cream from the skim, in time for the launch, tooting to signal its arrival. His hands swelled with chilblains, his socks inside his gumboots smelled dank and unwashed, which they usually were, for he had only two pairs and wool took a long time to dry.

  In the morning, when he returned to the shed, he scrubbed and washed down for an hour or more. There was no knowing when a man from Tooley Street might pay him a visit. They did that sometimes, turning up unannounced to check on the suppliers, wearing their London-cut suits, four buttons instead of six, sharp lapels and shoulder pads. It seemed to Les they all looked the same, with sleek cheeks and tightly clipped moustaches. Even when they wore boots they picked their way through the mud, distaste in their eyes. The job of the Tooley Street agents was to report back to their masters in London to make sure the suppliers were sending them nothing but the best butter.

  When his small herd began to show a modest profit, the peat fires took hold again, driven in a tributary of flames beneath the earth’s crust from a neighbouring farm. It was as much as he could do to stay put another year, and the mortgage kept falling due month after month, even though he’d dried off most of his stock and had nothing coming in. He went labouring on the roads until he could start over again the next year.

  He took a couple of heifers to the saleyard the following season, where Percy George, the only man he thought of as a friend, said, ‘Mate, you need a wife.’

  ‘Christ, who’d take a second look at me,’ Les said. It was years since he’d looked in a mirror, except for a quick glance when he shaved before going out on days like this. When he touched his fingers to his face he felt the skin grizzled from the weather like that of an old man.

  All the same, he knew what Percy said was an answer. Married men were the ones who got ahead, acquired bigger herds and bought the new milking machines. They wore clean clothes and ate a decent meal now and then. The wives milked and turned the handle of the separator, and then when children came along they were out in the shed as soon as they could sit upright on a stool and strip a cow’s teat. The more kids the better, even if it did mean mouths to feed. There were other comforts a woman would bring, although he hadn’t thought of them in a long while. But now that the idea of a wife had surfaced, he was possessed with thoughts of what else she would bring to his existence.

  ‘Reckon I’m a bit past the dance halls,’ he said, the next time he met Percy. That was where men went to look for wives, only usually they started a bit earlier. ‘I’m thirty-five,’ he said, ‘an old bastard.’

  His friend leant on a railing, prodding a cow’s rump, the grey felt brim of his hat pulled over his eyes to keep the sun off his face, a cigarette stuck to his lip. ‘Could be you’re right.’ His suggestion hadn’t come out of thin air in the first place. He’d talked it over with his wife, Hazel, who thought perhaps it was what Les needed, although she worried about the sort of husband he’d make, whether there was a woman strong enough to cope with him.

  Les had a temper; she and Percy had both seen it in action the day he brought his cows along Hang Dog Road to put them to the bull. Hang Dog wasn’t the name on the maps, but that was what the locals called it. Hang Dog Road was a straight stretch of gravel a good ten miles long. Les’s farm was at the opposite end to Percy and Hazel’s.

  That day, when the cows were getting what Hazel called ‘their little fling’, Les had got in the bull’s way. The beast flicked his leg with one horn, drawing
blood. It was a good thing, Percy and Hazel said, that that bull had had his horns tipped or there would have been a death. Fortunately they kept a pitchfork on hand when their bull was mating because the animal got touchy if he wasn’t getting his way. But it was Les who flew into such a black rage that he grabbed the pitchfork and set off on his horse. The bull raced this way and that, foaming and rearing up against the fences when Les got near him, plunging his fork into the animal’s side so that there was blood and froth and screaming everywhere. Percy shouted, ‘Lay off my bull, Mullens’, and jumped on his own horse, pursuing Les with an axe in his hand. It was Hazel who walked out into the paddock and spoke quietly to the bull. The men, seeing her standing there, had both stopped. The bull, its eyes red and rolling, made to charge at her, then changed its mind. Hazel George didn’t stand nonsense.