by Bao Ninh
And now Kien, himself depressed, remembered it was her birthday. He bought a bunch of roses, intending to invite her to a restaurant to celebrate. There had been another power blackout so it would be an ideal excuse not to stay at home.
Although they had separated some time ago he had wanted to see her again. He knocked gently on the door, using a secret code reserved for him alone. But it was not Phuong who answered the door. He heard the key turn and saw the door open slightly.
Through the small opening came the smell of cigarette smoke, and cognac.
‘Good evening, uncle,’ Kien said to the slim man standing just inside the door. He shook a smooth, soft, well-manicured hand. It belonged to a man with a wrinkled, withered face. His tiny eyes blinked rapidly as he looked at Kien, mumbling some greeting. He had a rough, uneven beard and salt-and-pepper greying hair. Kien handed some roses past him, to Phuong.
‘Thank you, Kien!’ Phuong said delightedly. ‘I forgot my own birthday, yet you remembered Ah, let me introduce you. Kien, this is Mr Phu, an artist.’ The men stood looking at each other in silence.
Phuong had dropped into a seat, near a flickering candle. Her guitar lay on a small table in front of her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sorry we can’t do our usual. I didn’t even think of it.’
Her visitor became solicitous. ‘If you’ve got a date, please go ahead…’ he said.
‘No. No date. Don’t worry, Phu.’
Kien looked over to her, but she wouldn’t return his glance. He nodded to both of them and withdrew, closing her door behind him.
Back in his room he walked over to his desk, lit a lamp, and started looking at his manuscript. He had a choking sensation in his throat and a feeling of total inadequacy, which brought on a hot rush of self-pity. He stood and looked at winter raindrops hitting the window, sliding down in gloomy patterns on the window-pane.
He poured himself a glass of wine, filled it to the brim and tossed it down hurriedly. He sat in his chair and held his head in his hands.
Suddenly his door creaked open. Phuong had come in and softly moved to his side. ‘Kien,’ she whispered, standing close to him and stroking his hair, ‘Kien, you’re in sorry shape,’ she said, bending down and kissing his forehead.
Kien looked up, mumbling some foolish nonsense.
‘I had to come to see you,’ she said. ‘I won’t tell you everything, but some of the things I had to do in the past just to keep afloat, well, at times I felt like an animal. I did a number of beastly things. I’m badly soiled, rotten through and through now.’
Kien tried to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Now I just can’t help myself,’ she said. Kien remembered hearing late-night callers squabbling amongst each other to get her favours, the losers turning away in disgust. ‘I can’t help myself, but I also have to live. I’ll probably die some sinful, pleasurable death. But ignore me, I’m finished. This is the way I’ll see my life out,’ she said.
He pleaded with her to return, saying naive and foolish things, which she ignored. He said he wanted to live with her again, instead of just next door to her. But she cut in. ‘Don’t even think about it. It’s over. We deserved to have had a happy life together, but events conspired against us. You know that. You know the circumstances as well as I do. Let’s go our own separate ways from now on. Forever. It’s the only way.’
Kien looked up at her, a question in his eyes.
‘I met him last week, by chance,’ she said. ‘But I’m not leaving because of him. I’ve not decided anything with him yet.’
‘So why?’ he asked.
‘Because I can’t stand this tension any longer, that’s why.’
‘I don’t see why you have to run after that old clown. It can’t be that bad,’ he said.
‘Old? I’m no spring chicken myself. You still think I’m seventeen, that’s your problem. You’ve never adjusted.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tonight. Now. We won’t see each other ever again,’ she said.
‘Just like that? Like closing a bad book?’ he said.
They stood and embraced, kissing for a few moments. Phuong pushed him away. ‘That’s enough!’ she said.
Kien followed her as she walked to the door. As she was about to leave she turned and leaned against the door. ‘Forgive me, and now forget me,’ she said. ‘I may not know what exactly my future holds, but I do know we can’t meet again.’
‘Are you in love?’ he said.
‘I loved you, and only you, Kien. I never loved anyone else. And you?’ she asked.
‘I still love you,’ he replied.
She departed, forever. He had had only two loves in his entire life. Phuong at seventeen in the pre-war days, and Phuong now, after the war.
He heard them going downstairs together, carrying suitcases, locking her door. She had slipped an envelope under his door as she left.
The last thing he heard was her high heels in the corridor. His own feet were dragging slightly as he went to the door. He picked up the note: ‘Darling Kien, I’m leaving. Goodbye to you. It’s better this way. Better for both of us. Please, please, forget me, I beg you. I wish you great success.’
Kien coaxed himself: ‘I must write!’
Collar up, coat wrapped securely around him, he paced the quiet Hanoi streets night after night making promises to himself, dreaming up slogans to pull his thoughts into line.
‘I must write! It’s going to be like smashing granite with fists, like turning myself inside out and exposing all my secrets to the outside world.
‘I must write! To rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest instead of letting it float in a pool of shame and sorrow.
‘I must push on! Even if some hours spent at my desk appear wasted, or some of the story-lines I begin have to be discarded, I must press on. Otherwise the pain will be unbearable.’
The writing was coming along slowly. Pacing the pavement seemed to help, and to rid him of some of the ill humour that occasionally built up. Besides, pacing the streets occasionally brought him flashbacks by association.
Passing the silk quarter one day he stood watching the girls trying on new silk fashions. He was reminded of some Khmer girls who’d been appointed jungle guides in the West Dac Ret area. They wore their bras on the outside of their garments, as adornments, or like precious jewellery. The clever young soldiers who hid bras in knapsacks won themselves any of these young girls who’d volunteered to help their troops. These country girls would give themselves to the boys and fulfil their wildest fantasies in return for a bra.
In 1973 his regiment had mistakenly been sent a batch of uniforms and assorted articles meant for a women’s platoon. Side-buttoned trousers, waist-length jackets, and army-issue bras. They were rock-hard, coarsely woven, ugly things which resembled a pair of green beetles. Such was the tension that any little army supply bungle like that set the boys laughing.
Street scenes prompted him to generate stories for his book artificially. Scene: A beggar outside an expensive restaurant approaches a wealthy, well-dressed gentleman and a lady wearing gold and diamond rings. ‘Show compassion for comrades in these hard times,’ the beggar tells the rich man. The girl starts laughing at the beggar. The rich man says, ‘If you weren’t so bloody high-principled I’d give you some money. We Vietnamese are so good at fighting that we’ve forgotten our manners. Drop the aggression, old man, and I’ll give you something.
‘Just a minute, don’t I know you?’ he says, looking closely at the beggar.
‘I’ll use this scene,’ Kien said to himself. ‘I’ll have the rich man and beggar as former schoolmates.’
Later he decided it was a foolish idea. A fictional replacement for his true stories. But it did have the soothing effect of sustaining his interest in writing. After these encounters he would return and start work again.
It was by night that the old, true stories began to flow back, bringing their own urgency to him. He needed to trap them as the
y emerged, to get the details down. Parts of stories he thought he’d forgotten floated through his mind, like disconnected mathematical equations, and he’d grab them and pin them down on paper forever. He found they would float into his mind more freely if he took to the pavements at night. It was a curious phenomenon, but it worked.
Occasionally he would unconsciously begin following a pedestrian, wandering behind him aimlessly until he reached his destination.
He tried imagining how this one or that one would react to living their lives as we did. The ‘Holyland Boys’ they called the Hanoi men as the troops lay side by side, swinging in hammocks, at some rest point. The Holylanders would test each other in trivia: Where was a certain street? Which street in Hanoi had only one house? Which had the most? Which was the oldest street? The shortest? Why was the famous Chased Market called Chased? The others would listen in fascination to these nostalgic trivia.
One of the Holylanders was ‘Bullhead’ Thang, who was a third-generation pedicab driver working the Hang Co station, but even Thang admitted Kien knew Hanoi better than he did.
They referred to themselves not as Hanoiese, but as Thang Long soldiers, after the original name of Hanoi. No Thang Long soldier knew Hanoi better than he did. He could name all the streets in one area starting with ‘Hang’, knew scores of lakes, big and small, the street where the most beautiful girls were found, on which night the Pacific Cinema would have banned films, and also how to get in to see them.
What the others didn’t know was that Kien had known almost none of this inside information about Hanoi before he left. He had picked up these trivia during the war, from Hanoi units he fought with. As a teenager he had known little of Hanoi, for he was not allowed to wander the streets alone.
Military life in the jungles over those long years developed within him a deep, tender love for his home town. When he returned, some of that passion faded as the realities set in. It was not that Hanoi itself had changed – though yes, there had been changes – but he had changed. He had wanted to wind the clock back to his teenage days and relive those memories.
But the impressions of the friendliness and uniqueness of his home town that he had generated during those trivia sessions in the jungle had been based on hopes in a situation of despair.
Post-war Hanoi, in reality, was not like his jungle dreams. The streets revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off, like cheap flashing lights in a shop window. There was a shared loneliness in poverty, and in his everyday walks he felt this mood in the stream of people he walked with. Another idea that emerged during his long walks was flashed into his mind by a written sign: ‘Leave!’
‘Leave this place. Leave!’
He began dreaming again of returning to Mo Hill, where someone had promised to be waiting for him. The orchard at the rear of Mother Lanh’s house, the view across the stream to the forest, the peace of the rural scenes appealed to his desire for an escape.
Into his memory then flashed scenes of the B3 troop movements from Phan Rang on the coast to Ngoan Muc Pass, crossing the Da Nhim hydroelectric station, past Don Duong, Duc Trong, down to Di Linh to take Road 14. The twists and turns of that long, tiring march came to him as though it were yesterday. From Road 14 down to Loc Ninh, then turning around to regroup for an attack on western Saigon, to end the war. A mixture of marching and troop transports, across paddyfields and country paddocks.
They were in a field when most soldiers awoke, their faces weather-beaten from days of exposure to sun and dew. They spoke excitedly, knowing they were nearing the city but unsure of their exact whereabouts. The journey itself was an adventure; that’s what he needed now, to go travelling. Away from Hanoi.
His visions of the war-time journey faded as he paced along by the Hoan Kien lake in central Hanoi. He turned and walked down to the Balcony Café, a nightspot hidden away at the end of a narrow alley, a place he often visited late at night. No loud music, no vain poetic ramblings by aspiring authors as in other coffee shops around the Thuyen Quang lake.
‘Hello, foot-soldier,’ said the fat host, smiling and pleased to see him. The host had a bright red nose.
Unasked, he brought coffee to Kien’s table, adding a dish of sun-flower seeds and a half-bottle of brandy. ‘Want some female company?’ he asked.
‘Well, well. Even you have that service now?’
The landlord smiled. ‘Yes. It’s the new fashion.’
People around him were playing cards, drinking coffee, smoking pot and other weeds, and talking business.
In the first days of peace the host had been as impoverished as all other demobilised soldiers. He had been so thin then that he resembled a pipe-cleaner; the effect enhanced his dark face, the result of catching malaria in Laos. When he opened the place it quickly became unofficially known as the Veteran’s Club.
All the original customers were demobilised soldiers, most of them unemployed, still gathering their wits. Little by little the money they did get upon leaving the ‘jungle gate’ and being demobilised left their pockets and found its way into the owner’s pocket, and he began to prosper.
Those early days were pleasant and hilarious. The soldiers told each other stories of their attempts to adapt to civilian life with their special brand of humour.
Helped on by a drink or two, the mood in those days was always light and for hours they would laugh almost continuously. They shared new inside knowledge of how to apply for a job, how to bribe clerks to get on the housing list, how to get a Veteran’s pension, how to get admitted to the university – all sorts of helpful tips. Or they came for nostalgic conversation.
Kien on this night was sitting in a seat usually reserved for ‘Vuong the Clumsy’ a former armoured-car driver who now lived at the back of the railway station. When Vuong had first returned he had openly appealed to all his mates to help him find a job as a driver. Anything’ll do,’ he shouted. ‘Trucks, cars, buses, even steam-rollers. Anything that’s got a steering-wheel and drives on sealed roads.’
Vuong drank very little. He was a huge, tall, slightly clumsy man, but he was kind and timid.
After his unsuccessful appeal to mates to help find him a job, Vuong wasn’t seen for many months. When he did return, he was whiskered, red-eyed and hung-over. ‘I’ve given up driving, me old mates. Now alcohol drives me.’
For the next months Vuong was a fixture at the Balcony Cafe, sitting in ‘his’ little corner, always with a dish of food and a glass of alcohol.
When he became tipsy he sang loud military marches, or obscene ditties. ‘Drink up comrades!’ he would shout. ‘Afraid I’m broke? Hell, don’t worry. Without drivers like me you’d never be considered the world’s best infantrymen. That’s what the brass used to boast: “World’s best infantrymen.” Well, watch out, here come the infantry vehicles!’ And he would go into a pantomime of his fighting days as a combat driver.
Vuong went into a steep dive, reflecting his trauma. It was sad, almost unbelievable, that such a tough and courageous fighter could fall so quickly in the post-war days. His friends said he had hit one pothole too many. But they said it with sadness, not in jest. After a while he became a ragged, beggarly drunk.
It was in those drunken times he voiced his nightmares, as though they were stories. ‘Potholes are bearable,’ he would say, ‘but to ride on something squishy and soft, supple and pulpy, that used to make me vomit. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep. I used to run over the bodies. That’s what happened recently. I got a normal job driving, and had no troubles with potholes and puddles.
‘It was the soft surfaces that brought back the memories. Then people around me, bicyclists, pedestrians, started looking hatefully at me. So I started to drink.
‘Ever seen a tank running over bodies? You’d think we’d flatten them so much we’d never feel them. Well, I’ve got news for you, mates. No matter how soft they were they’d lift the tank up a bit. True! I used to feel it lift. After
a while I could tell the difference between mud and bodies, logs and bodies. They were like sacks of water. They’d pop open when I ran over them. Pop! Pop!
‘Now they’ve started running over me. I see the tanks coming and know exactly what’s going to happen to me. Remember when we chased Division 18 southern soldiers all over Xuan Loc? My tank tracks were choked up with skin and hair and blood. And the bloody maggots! And the fucking flies! Had to drive through a river to get the stuff out of the tracks.’
Vuong would drink until he dropped. Every night. There were many others like that – or well on their way.
The little club got a reputation as an interesting place and soon many more veterans, including vets from the war against the French, were joining the nightly sessions. Few were easily recognised by outsiders as veterans, including the now fat owner for one, and Kien.
One night, when he was one of the few left in the club, a roughly made-up prostitute wearing an army surplus jacket dropped into a seat at his table. She reeked of cheap Chinese perfume. ‘Don’t stay,’ he said.
‘You don’t like me?’ she asked.
‘Correct.’
‘You piss off then,’ she said.
‘You know plenty of places. You piss off,’ he said.
The whore laughed, revealing ugly broken teeth and blackened gums. Under twenty, he guessed. She looked better before she smiled, if better was the word.
‘It’s so cold here,’ she moaned, making no move to leave. ‘Fatty!’ she called to the host, ‘bring me a double Maxim.’
‘Drinking’s no good for little girls,’ he replied, but went for the drink anyway.
‘You’re pretty small yourself,’ she quipped.
She swung around and slipped her hand up between Kien’s legs. ‘Hah!’ she shouted, then withdrew her hand. ‘God, you’re dull. Let’s get drunk,’ she said, lifting her glass to Kien.
Drunk.
In all his life he’d only been truly drunk a few times, so drunk that, like Vuong, everything around him became meaningless and he had difficulty separating reality from hallucinations.