‘Lots of baby steps are better than one giant stride,’ Ted heard an English diplomat remark.
‘This is a victory for saying “Yes,”’ his Chinese counterpart replied. ‘When a person says “No” and really means it, he is doing a great deal more than uttering a tiny word. His entire being, his entire organism – glandular, nervous, muscular – merges into rejection. Then follows a physical withdrawal, or at least a readiness for withdrawal.’
The Englishman, a convivial diplomat who occasionally leaked documents about Vietnam to Ted, came across to the rope.
‘Did you hear what that Chinese chap just said to me? Who was he quoting? Was it Mao?’
‘Possibly Chou En-lai,’ Ted said, ‘but more likely Deng Xiaoping.’
‘But don’t you know? You of all people?’
‘I must be overcome – I should say, I must be influenced – by the moment. Hey, you couldn’t get me some of that skewered squid, could you? There’s nothing decent to eat back here. Grab the whole plate.’
As he ate, Ted leant against a pillar and watched the Khmer Rouge delegation. Son Sen retreated to a corner with his aides, where they sculled their beers and giggled. Nhem Kiry stood with his back to Son Sen and listened intently to the French deputy prime minister, who waved his arms about a lot as he spoke. Kiry nodded occasionally, smiled and made a point of inclining his head to demonstrate his intense satisfaction. Ted grabbed the elbow of a waiter who held a tray of drinks and stole two glasses of beer. He sipped from one and sat the other one between his feet. He scanned the room for security; the place, he saw, was crawling with goons of all nationalities. Still, he calculated the distance that separated him from Nhem Kiry and decided that it might just be possible to slip under the rope and pour his spare beer all over Kiry’s head. Was stealth the way to go, he wondered? Should he use the Japanese foreign minister then the Soviet ambassador then that drinks waiter for cover? Or should he sprint straight at Kiry and hope for the best?
Ted’s scheming was interrupted by the Australian foreign minister, a short man with a red face and a stomach that had dropped as if he were eight months pregnant. He vaulted the rope and thrust a piece of paper and a green texta at Ted. It was a press release – Foreign Minister Slattery Hails Signing of Cambodian Peace Deal – on which there was a mass of signatures.
‘Mr Ted Whittlemore: hello. Nice to see you still alive. What a glorious day. Even you must think so. Sign here, please,’ Slattery said, thrusting the press release at Ted.
‘Only if you give me a quick interview,’ Ted said.
‘No problem. Fire away,’ Slattery wheezed. He was having trouble catching his breath and he was perspiring heavily.
‘How does it feel to be part of one of the great whitewashes in modern history?’
‘Ha ha ha. Next question.’
Ted inclined his head towards Kiry, who was posing for a photograph with Sihanouk. ‘Seriously, you’ve legitimised – you’ve rewarded – one of the most horrid regimes in history: how can you bear it?’
‘Mate: off the record, it’s called getting the job done. It’s called baking bread using whatever ingredients you’re lumbered with. It’s called living in the real world.’
On the press release, Ted scribbled, ‘To withdraw in disgust is to win’ and signed it ‘Ho Chi Minh.’ Slattery skipped back into the VIP area, surprisingly light on his feet. ‘You bloody ripper!’ he yelled, embracing someone with one arm while waving the piece of paper above his head with the other. When he disengaged and pushed through the throng – ‘Gotta get the Russians to sign’ – he left Cornell Jackson standing in the afterglow of his affection. Ted waved and called out, ‘Over here, comrade.’
Cornell vaulted the rope and lifted Ted off the ground. ‘Hi there, buddy. Come on, givvus a squeeze. Everybody else is. Hey, who’s the fat guy with the sunburn? He sounds like one of your tribe.’
‘No idea. Look at you, all grown up and dressed in a suit. How’d you get into the VIP area?’
‘We did it. We’ve finally broken through.’
‘We?’
‘I can hardly believe it, buddy. You can’t doubt our bona fides now.’
‘Can’t I?’
‘You can’t tell me that America doesn’t keep its promises. The Vietnam War is finally over and guess what? After all these years, we won! Peace in our time: who was it who said that?’
‘Jack the Ripper?’
‘Who’s he, buddy?’
‘Just another English diplomat. Before your time.’
‘Do you know what I just heard?’
‘That some people don’t like America?’
‘I know that already, buddy. I don’t get it but believe me, I know it. No, listen: apparently Pol Pot was at that Supreme National Council gathering in Pattaya a couple of months back. Actually there. Can you believe it?’
‘That’s hardly news. My information is that he’s been going back and forth to Thailand for years.’
‘The word is he stayed in his hotel room and the Khmer Rouge delegation had to keep breaking off negotiations to go and get his approval. Isn’t that a riot?’
‘I think it’s despicable.’
‘Oh, come on, buddy, lighten up. Enjoy the moment. But get this: apparently Pol Pot got bored sitting around in his room. He wanted to go for a swim. So they cleared the pool, he put a towel over his head and staff lined up all along the route – with their backs turned, can you believe it? – so nobody – you know, like Sihanouk or Hun Sen or the Vietnamese – would accidentally bump into him. Do you wanna know the best thing?’
‘I’m dying to.’
‘He got an ear infection. From the crappy water.’
‘Oh joy.’
‘Cheer up, buddy. Why do you have to be such a sore loser? This is what we at the Edgar Institute call a classic CPL situation.’
‘Cesspool, eh? The Cambodian Comprehensive Settlement and Other Cesspools of Our Time.’
‘Don’t you read the stuff I send you? CPL: Can’t Possibly Lose. Listen, if the Khmer Rouge stick with the Comprehensive Settlement, we’ve delivered peace.’
‘We?’
‘Grow up, buddy: no America means no peace. And the beautiful thing is, there’s no risk. If the Khmer Rouge do the wrong thing, if they keep fighting, we can now take all necessary measures. And it’s the US of A talking: when we say “all necessary measures” you know we’re not messing about. Even the Chinese are happy. Come on, drink up, I’ll get you another one.’
‘This whole thing disgusts me. You disgust me.’
‘Come on, givvus a smile. Let me see your happy face. Don’t make me tickle you ... Goddammit, buddy, you’ve got to shape up: peace is peace, no matter how bad it smells.’
But Ted was staring beyond Cornell. He watched, aghast, as Sihanouk led the Vietnamese foreign minister by the hand towards Nhem Kiry. ‘Oh no,’ Ted said, grasping Cornell’s shoulder. ‘No, not that ... Please, don’t do it. Don’t ...’ Ted flung his hands over his eyes but it was too late: the image of the three men clinking glasses and toasting each other’s health embedded itself in his mind.
Part 3
1991
Ted Whittlemore loved the Núi Café in Ho Chi Minh City so much that he had moved into the apartment upstairs. One Wednesday morning, Ted descended the outside stairs. He felt unsettled and heavy-headed, as if he’d slept all night hanging by his ankles. But he gripped the handrail and inched towards the bowl of coffee that would restore his equilibrium.
Ted entered the café and slumped into a chair at his regular table near the window and beside a wall of tatty-spined French and English paperbacks, most of which were his. Deep breaths, he told himself. From the bottom shelf of the bookcase he pulled a fat manuscript of unbound pages, Ho Chi Minh: A New and True Biography of a Great Man by Edward Whittlemore, single-space typed and annotated in his ugly hand. From his top pocket he took a blue ballpoint pen, the end of which he chewed as he scanned the pages looking for sentences to rewrite.
Hieu arrived with coffee. Without looking up, Ted murmured his thanks.
‘You all right, Ted?’ Hieu asked.
‘Fine. Why?’
‘Your skin is yellow.’
‘Hmm, really?’ Ted held his arm out in front of him. His fat fingers pushed together; his hand trembled slightly; his wrist seemed smaller than he remembered. ‘That’s not yellow. I call that a healthy glow.’
‘You want food. Beef noodle soup?’
‘Maybe later.’
Ted sipped his coffee and pored over his Ho Chi Minh manuscript. It was nearly ready to be retyped and sent away. He just wanted to add a few concluding thoughts, although at 874 pages he supposed it was probably already too long. Although Ted had access to a virgin cache of papers in the Hanoi archives, his book was mostly a series of personal reminiscences. For instance, he’d taken forty-two pages to recall lovingly the time he and Ho had been stuck in a cave while US bombs landed all around them. To pass the time, Ho had explained to Ted just where Stalin had gone wrong. ‘He lost sight of the people,’ Ted quoted Ho saying, ‘and then quickly, no surprise, he cared nothing about life.’ Ho was no Pol Pot, no Stalin, no Mao, Ted wanted to tell the world. Ho epitomised everything communism could and should have been.
Hieu brought Ted a pot of jasmine tea. ‘Later you want beer, Ted?’ he asked in English.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good, good. I have very excellent news for you. I have cleaned the basement.’
‘Drained it, you mean. Last time I went down there I ruined a perfectly good pair of boots.’
‘I have found beer especially for you. Two bottles of Victoria Bitter.’
‘VB? You’ve got VB?’
‘This is your national beer?’
‘Close enough. Bring them over, I want them.’
‘No no no. You are very busy. You want to finish your working first?’
‘Bring them now.’
‘But don’t forget your writing. Uncle Ho needs your help. You need Uncle Ho’s help. You and Uncle Ho can save each other. But only if you concentrate.’
‘I want that beer. Now.’
‘But Ted, they are not cold. I put ice with them, yes?’
‘No!’
‘My ice is clean, very clean, from a good factory. We collect it ourselves, no worries, ha ha ha, no worries mate. You have my ice many times. You don’t get sick, not once even.’
‘Never – never – serve beer with ice. My father taught me that when I was fourteen years old.’
‘Surely that is a personal opinion. Surely it is a matter of taste.’
‘Don’t get all high and mighty and freedom of expression on me, mate, I’ve heard it all before. No ice with beer: it’s a fundamental truth.’
‘Please, Ted, please let me ice them.’
‘You can put them in an ice bucket. That’ll cool them nicely.’
‘No ice bucket.’
‘Why not?’
‘Waste ice, too much ice.’
‘You can still use it afterwards.’
‘Will melt. Ice ix-pen-hive. I poor, so poor. You not understand. You fat rich carpetelism en-tree-pree-neur from Aust-raa-lee.’ A smile broke onto Hieu’s face, which he quickly suppressed. ‘Ice, yes, I think so.’
‘I’ll buy you some more ice.’
‘Burr-ket for clean all onto floor. Burr-ket dir-tee.’
‘Your English is deteriorating,’ Ted remarked in Vietnamese.
Hieu doubled over, beat his hand on his knee, and exploded with laughter. ‘Me no underhand you, Mister Aust-raa-lee, me no underhand YOU.’
The door opened, admitting a beautiful woman in a dress of blue sequins. Ted fleetingly wondered how she possibly squeezed into the dress – and, less fleetingly, what gymnastics she engaged in to extricate herself. Hieu watched Ted staring openly at the woman. ‘Don’t dribble on my tablecloth,’ he said, not because he much cared but because he knew that Ted liked it when people noticed how much he loved women.
Later, Ted claimed to Hieu that the woman’s exquisite curves caused the dizziness that suddenly overcame him. His head sagged between his knees. He vomited on his sandals. His knee knocked the table and warm tea ran into his lap. He closed his eyes, thereby avoiding the spectacle of an unconscious man slowly sliding off a chair.
After Hieu doused him with water, Ted lay on his stomach and listened to Hieu and his family debate whether to lay him on his side or his back, whether to massage his neck or to slap his face. When they made preparations to soak Ted again, he turned himself over and said, ‘Could everyone please just shut up?’ He fanned himself with the introduction of his Ho Chi Minh manuscript, disappointed that the beautiful woman, now nowhere to be seen, had not rushed forward to cradle him in her arms. ‘Late for school, was she?’ he asked Hieu, who stared back uncomprehendingly.
Ted sat cross-legged on the ground and refused to budge until Hieu agreed to serve him a VB. Hieu muttered about crazy foreigners all the way to and from the basement, and pursed his lips as he poured the golden liquid into a glass.
Ted rinsed his mouth with VB, grimaced and spat between his feet.
‘It’s hot,’ he said.
‘I warned you,’ Hieu said.
‘It’s stale. And flat. When did you open it, ’65?’
‘If you don’t like it, give it back.’
‘Oh no,’ Ted said. He sipped another mouthful and this time swallowed. ‘It’s awful. It’s ... heavenly.’
Hieu wheeled his Vespa out from the kitchen. Ted rode in the middle. Hieu’s son sat perched on the back to make sure Ted didn’t fall off. They flirted with Saigon’s traffic, reaching out to touch bikes and cars and trucks and pedestrians. Somehow, they arrived unscathed at the doctor’s rooms. Hieu sent Ted inside with smiles and consoling thoughts. But Ted could tell that Hieu was worried that his weight had cracked the Vespa’s axle.
Hanh Nguyen had been Ted’s doctor since they’d met in a Viet Cong sanctuary in 1966. Twenty-six years old then, she was already a widow, and – though she didn’t know it at the time – two of her four siblings were dead. Ted was thirty-four, and dividing his time between Vietnam and Cambodia. Reporting on the war from the North Vietnamese perspective – ‘sleeping with the enemy,’ his critics said – he was at the height of his fame and influence. He arrived at the sanctuary filthy, high from snorting war pollution up his nostrils, and with several tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded in his thigh.
‘I can’t spare you any drugs,’ Hanh politely told him as she cleaned his leg of mud and metal.
Then a crowd of wounded soldiers and civilians arrived. Ted watched Hanh dig for bullets and seal holes and remove limbs and drag bodies away. He wrote about her in Living with the Patriot Vietnamese, a book he was particularly proud of: To say she works in tough conditions is an understatement. Somehow, perhaps through willpower alone, she maintains a sense of sterilisation, even though her operating theatre is in a swamp. She works without pause for several hours. Most of her face is hidden behind a mud-spotted surgical mask, so I watch her eyes. I have never seen such resolve. During an amputation, in the fifteen minutes that she works on the brave youth before he bleeds out, she doesn’t blink once. She saves more patients than she loses, though she impassively informs me that some of the wounded will die in the coming days. Then she takes her mask off and I try to comprehend how someone who has endured such a day can be so young.
Now, a couple of hours after Ted had collapsed in the Núi Café, Hanh scolded him as she helped him into the examining room. ‘Were you planning to tell me? Or were you just going to mention in your will that you were sick?’
‘I don’t feel that bad,’ Ted said. She handed him a mirror and he stared, shocked, at his yellow skin and bulbous, bloodshot eyes.
Hanh stuck thermometers into him like acupuncture needles. She stared at his tongue for a very long time: ‘I’m reading your fortune. Shut up and let me do it.’ She laid him on his back and massaged his side until he l
aughed so hard she worried he would crack a rib. She swabbed his cheek, stole blood, pointed an arrowhead light into his ear canals: ‘Disgusting.’ She prodded his testicles: ‘Take that smirk off your face.’ She made him touch his toes and then followed him as he floated around the room fighting the urge to faint.
Ted gave vague answers to her questions. He tiptoed around the truth. But he must have been resigned to hearing bad news or he would have found a stranger to examine him.
‘So what’s the diagnosis? It’s the napalm, isn’t it, finally catching up with me?’
‘No.’
‘It’s napalm. It must be, I know it is. Just promise me one thing: when I die make sure you write “American imperialism” on my death certificate.’
Hanh didn’t smile.
‘Come on then: what’s wrong with me?’
‘Lots of things. You’re old, for one thing. You’re wearing out.’
‘You’re not so young yourself.’
‘I act my age.’
‘Poor you.’
‘Ted, I can’t really say. You need better tests than I can give you here. You must—’
‘But it’s nothing terminal, right?’
‘You could have diabetes. There’s something wrong with your heart. Have you noticed that your left hand shakes sometimes? Your skin is yellow. You’re too fat. One of your balls is twice the size of the other one. Your liver—’
‘I’m flying to Phnom Penh on Tuesday. That’s okay, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got a contract, and Cornell’s promised to cover my costs. Nhem Kiry’s flying in, I’ve got to see him, the word is there’s going to be a demonstration, I’m going to try to interview him, it’s—’ ‘You’re going to have to stop.’
‘Stop? Stop what?’
‘Everything. No more travel. No more wars, Ted … You know, maybe it’s time you went home.’
‘Home?’
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