by Alexis Jenni
‘Trambassac seems decent enough.’
‘The only thing decent about Trambassac is his uniform. His battle fatigues are spotless, but well worn. Didn’t you wonder how they got like that? He runs them through the washing machine with pumice stone. Otherwise, he travels everywhere by plane, the only things he gets dirty are his shoes. It’s his office that sends us out on missions. In this country our lives depend on strange people. The French high command is as much of a danger to us as Uncle Ho and General Giáp. The only person you can count on is yourself. You hold your life in your hands. Be careful with it.’
He was to set off from the port of Haiphong, a soot-blackened city without a speck of grace or beauty; the people there worked like they did in Europe: in the coal mines, on the docks, loading timber and rubber, unloading weapons and spare parts for vehicles and aeroplanes. Everything was shipped by the Tonkin armoured train, which was regularly blown up en route. Sabotaging the train tracks was the simplest act of revolutionary warfare. It was easy to picture the scene as it looked if you lay on the track bed: reeling out the wires, placing the plastic explosive, waiting for the train to arrive. But Salagnon pictured it from above this time, from the train, from the flat wagon ringed with sandbags, from which the bare-chested Senegalese operated huge machine guns. With a slightly forced smile, they aimed the perforated, air-cooled barrels at anything and everything along the track capable of hiding a man; they carried long, heavy ammunition belts that accentuated their muscles. They reassured Salagnon, these bullets as long as his finger that could explode a torso, a head, a limb, these guns capable of firing thousands of rounds a minute. Nothing was blown up.
The train crawled along at a snail’s pace and eventually reached Haiphong. He boarded the boat. A Chinese junk operated as a ferry between the islands. Families travelled on deck with live chickens, sacks of rice and baskets of vegetables. They hung up bamboo mats to create shade, and as soon as the boat put out, they lit braziers so they could cook.
Salagnon took off his shoes and let his bare feet dangle over the side; the junk, little more than a floating crate, glided over the clear water. He could make out the seabed through a cerulean veil rumpled by wavelets. Brilliant white clouds floated high above, swirls of cream deposited on blue sheet metal; the wooden boat moved easily through the waters, creaking like a rocking chair. Around them the rocky islets soared steeply out of the bay, fingers pointed at the sky, warning signs between which the large boat weaved without incident. The crossing was calm, the weather magnificent; a sea breeze tempered the sweltering heat. These were the pleasantest hours he spent in his time in Indochine, peaceful hours where he did nothing but stare at the seabed through the crystalline water and watch the succession of precipitous islets on whose sheer slopes grew lopsided trees. Sitting on deck, dangling his legs through the gaps in the guard rail, he felt as if he were on the veranda of a clapboard house, as above, below, all around, the scenery flashed past, while swirling around him, shrouded in the sputtering of hot oil, came the wonderful aromas of their cooking. The families travelling with him did not look at the sea. They crouched in circles and ate; they dozed; they looked at each other, but said little; they tended to the animals they were transporting. Junks are cosy, they are not really like boats; there is no sense of the sea. The Chinese do not really like the sea, they tolerate it; if forced to live at sea, they build floating houses, boats that have beams, partition walls, floors, windows, curtains. If they live close to water – a river, a port, a bay – these boats drop anchor to become extensions of the streets; they live aboard them; they float, but that is all. He crossed Halong Bay in a sweet-scented daydream.
When he reached Ba Cuc, lost in the labyrinthine inlets of the bay, the last village to fly the tricolour, he was greeted by an officer with a less-than-military handshake. The man presented Salagnon with a metal trunk full of cash to pay the partisans’ salaries and two others filled with guns and ammunition, gave another quick salute and boarded the junk as it left.
‘Is that it?’ Salagnon shouted from the landing stage.
‘Someone will come to fetch you!’ the other shouted, as the boat pulled away.
‘How do I go about things?’
‘You’ll work it out…’
The rest of his words were lost in the distance, drowned by the creaking of the timbers on the landing stage, the fan-like fluttering of the battened sail as it was raised. Salagnon sat on his luggage, while all around him sacks of rice and crates of live hens were unloaded. He was alone on an island, sitting on a trunk; he did not really know where to go.
A click of heels made him start; of the thickly accented greeting, he understood only the word ‘lieut’nant’, with no middle ‘e’ and a hesitant breath after the ‘t’. An ageing legionnaire was standing to attention next to him; his regulation bearing was impeccable, indeed excessive. Back straight, chin up, his body trembling, his eyes misted over, his lower lip humid with saliva; his stance was the only thing keeping him upright.
‘At ease!’ he said, but the man remained at attention; he preferred it that way.
‘Soldat Goranidzé,’ he announced. ‘I’m your orderly. I am to drive you while you are on the island.’
‘The island?’
‘The island you are to command, sir.’
The idea of being in command of an island appealed to him. Goranidzé took him in a motorboat whose engine backfired, making it impossible to talk, and they trailed a black cloud that took some time to dissipate. He pointed to a villa clinging to the cliff of a rocky out-crop. Made of concrete, composed of horizontal lines and expansive windows, it was modern but already crumbling; set into the limestone cliff, it jutted out, hovering high above the water.
‘Your house!’ he bellowed.
It was reached by a narrow strip of sand, where fishermen were mending nets staked out in the sunshine; they helped to bring the boat ashore and unloaded the trunks brought by Salagnon and his orderly. Together they went up to the villa, taking a path carved into the cliff, some of whose steeper sections had been chiselled into stone steps.
‘Like a monastery,’ Soldat Goranidzé panted, his face flushed. ‘Where I grew up, we had monasteries that jutted from the mountains like shelves from a wall.’
‘Where did you grow up?’
‘Georgia. The country doesn’t exist now. The monasteries were ransacked after the Revolution. The monks were killed or evicted. We used to play in them. The walls in every room were painted with scenes describing the life of Christ.’
Here, too, the walls were covered with huge frescos, in the living room empty of furniture and the bedrooms that overlooked the sea.
‘I told you, Lieut’nant, just like a monastery.’
‘But I don’t think that these are scenes from the life of Christ.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve been a legionnaire too long to remember the details.’
They wandered through the rooms. The place smelled of neglect and damp. In the bedrooms, grubby tulle curtains, many of them torn, billowed in front of the unglazed windows, revealing glimpses of the blue sea. In the frescos adorning the walls, larger-than-life women of every race within the Empire were lying naked on lush, green grass, on large blankets woven in warm colours, in the shade of palm trees and flowering shrubs. Their faces were all visible, turned towards the viewer, eyes lowered, smiling.
‘Mary Magdalene, sir. Like I said, the life of Christ. One for every region of the Empire: just like it should be.’
They moved into the villa, the summer residence of the colonial governor, who had not used it since the war began.
Salagnon chose a bedroom with one whole wall missing, offering a sweeping view of the sea. He slept in a bed longer than he was tall, as broad as it was long, in which he could lie in any position he chose. The tulle curtain, swelled by the breeze, barely quivered; when he went to bed in this dark room, he could hear the faint roar of the backwash at the foot of the cliff. He lived the life of a kinglet in a
fairy tale, dreaming, imagining, his feet never touching the ground.
The walls of his bedroom were painted with women, half-eaten away by the damp. But their smiles were untouched: full, sensual lips gorged with tropical sap; the women of the Empire were recognizable by the splendour of their mouths. On the ceiling was the only man, naked, each arm clasping a woman to him; his graphic state made obvious his desire, but his face alone could not be seen, it was turned away. Sprawled on his back on the huge bed, keeping his eyes open, Salagnon could see him clearly, the lone man painted on the ceiling. He wished that Eurydice could join him. They could have lived as prince and princess in this floating castle. He wrote to her; he painted what he could see through the missing wall: the Chinese landscape of soaring islands, set in a bay of dazzling waters. He sent the letters by motorboat, which once a week made a run to the port where the junk dropped anchor. Goranidzé took care of everything, of the supplies, of the mail, of the meals and the laundry, all without losing that air of irreproachable stiffness; he also dealt with the native dignitaries, announcing them with a stentorian voice whenever they came to the door. But once a week he would come, respectfully announce to Salagnon that this was his day off, and hand him a key. He would get drunk on his own; then sleep it off in the small, windowless room he had chosen for himself, having asked Salagnon to lock the door and to keep the key until the booze had worn off. He feared that otherwise he might fall out of a window or slip on the stairs, either of which would have been fatal. The following morning Salagnon would come and open the door and he would resume his stiff formality, never mentioning what had happened the day before. He would spend these days cleaning the rooms they did not use. The supplies, together with the weapons and the money they had to distribute, provided enough wine for regular drinking binges. But the letters went only one way. Eurydice never responded to his sketches, his ink drawings of dizzyingly steep islands she would never have believed represented a landscape one might see; he wanted her to be incredulous, so that he could write back and assure her that he had actually seen all the things he drew. He regretted being unable to reaffirm, if only in a letter, the reality of his thoughts. They dematerialized.
Recruiting partisans was an easy task. In these islands peopled by fishermen and swallow-hunters, few had ever seen money, and no one had seen a gun other than the ancient Chinese muskets that no longer worked. Lieutenant Salagnon generously dispensed his riches in exchange for a promise to come and train for a few hours each morning. The young fishermen would arrive in groups, nervous, and one of them would step forwards, shyly, as the others laughed, and sign his enlistment papers: he would scrawl a cross at the bottom of a pink form and the paper, swollen by the damp, would often tear, since he held the pencil clumsily. Then he would take his rifle, which would be passed around, and a thin wad of piastres, which he would roll tightly and stow in a tobacco pouch hanging around his neck.
The forms quickly ran out. He had them sign little squares of blank paper, rubbing out the signatures at night, since the act itself was all that mattered, as no one on this island could read or write.
In the morning he organized training exercises on the beach. Many did not show up. He never had an exact count. They never seemed to learn anything. They handled their rifles as poorly as ever, like scooters whose backfire always made them start, made them laugh. When he grew accustomed to their faces and their family relationships, he realized that they attended on a rota basis, one from each family, although not always the same one. Families invariably sent the dull-witted young men, those who were more of a hindrance than a help when it came to fishing. This was a relatively safe way of keeping them busy and it earned them a salary that the family shared.
He went to the village, where he was received in a woven timber longhouse. In the murky darkness smelling of smoke and nam pla, an elderly man listened to him gravely without really understanding, although he nodded at the end of each sentence, at every break in the rhythm of this unfamiliar language. The interpreter had only limited French, and when Salagnon talked about the war, the Viet Minh, the recruitment of partisans, he translated with long, complicated phrases, which he repeated several times as if there were no words to communicate what Salagnon was saying. Still the old man nodded, politely, as though he did not understand. Then his eyes lit up; he laughed, turned to face Salagnon, who nodded and ventured a broad smile. He called into the shadows and a young girl with very long black hair appeared; she stood in front of them, her eyes lowered. She was wearing only a pagne wrapped around her narrow hips, her small breasts blossoming like buds filled with sap. The old man had her explain that he had finally understood, and that she could go and live with the lieutenant. Salagnon closed his eyes, shook his head. Things were not going well. No one seemed to understand anything.
In the villa clinging to the cliff, he would look at the slowly disintegrating frescos or at the sea beyond the slowly swelling tulle curtains. Things were not going well, yet no one but he seemed to notice this fact. And what difference did it make? How could one not love Indochine? How could one not love these places that, in France, could not be imagined? How could one not love the life here? He fell asleep, lulled by the ebb and flow of the waves, and the following morning he resumed the training exercises. Goranidzé taught the men to fall in, to hold their rifles straight, to march in step, raising their legs high. He had trained as a cadet in one of the tsar’s officer schools, briefly, before being catapulted into a long series of untidy wars. He loved nothing better than drilling and discipline; this, at least, was something that would never change. Towards midday the fishermen would return, haul their boats on to the beach and the partisans would break rank, laughing, and talk about how they had spent the morning. Goranidzé would sit in the shade, grilling fish to perfection with chilli and lemon, then he would go up to the villa for a nap. It was futile to think of doing anything else with the day. And so, from his bedroom, Salagnon would stare out at the bay, trying to work out how to paint these precipitous islands that rose abruptly out of the sea. He lived clinging to this cliff like an insect on a tree trunk, motionless for much of the day, waiting for metamorphosis.
By the time they were dispatched to Tonkin, his company was reduced to a quarter of those who had originally enlisted. They immediately hated the countryside. The delta of the Red River is little more than a flat expanse of mud, but the eye could see only as far as the next screen of bamboo encircling a village. There was nothing to see. Here, one had the feeling of being lost in an empty space and yet bounded by a shrunken horizon.
The fishing families of the bay had sent the young, the troubled, the distracted, those the village would not miss, those who might benefit from a little discipline. The one who spoke French acted as an interpreter and he treated his commitment as a journey. With their bush hats pushed down over their eyes, their overstuffed kitbags, their over-large rifles, they looked like children dressing up. They found it difficult to march, keeping their sandals tied to their kitbags, because barefoot they could better feel the path. They travelled on foot, trying to flush out the Viet Minh, who also moved on foot. They marched behind Salagnon in single file, with little space between them and, every fifteen minutes, Salagnon would shout for them to space out and stop talking. And they would move apart and fall silent, only to gradually begin chattering again, steadily closing the gap between them and the officer leading. Accustomed to the sands and the limestone of the bay, they slipped in the mud and fell on their arses in the flooded paddy fields. They would stop, crowd round, laugh and joke as they fished out whoever had fallen, who was now even muddier than his comrades. On manoeuvre they were raucous and unthreatening, incapable of surprising an enemy; on the level horizon they offered the perfect target. They suffered in the heat, since no sea breeze came to temper the hazy sun that beat down on this expanse of mud.
But when they saw the mountain, they did not like it. Triangular hills suddenly sprouted from the alluvial plain, soaring terraced slopes sh
rouded in mists than merged into the clouds at the summit. This was where the Viet Minh lived, like beasts of the forest that came at night to prey on the villages and devour the unwary.
Posts had been built to seal off the delta, posts set at regular intervals to scan for any sign of movement, tall square observation towers ringed with fences from which it was possible to see a great distance. How many people manned them? Three French soldiers, ten Vietnamese reserves; they guarded a village, monitored a bridge, symbolized French authority in this waterlogged labyrinth of ditches and channels. Back at headquarters, each watchtower was a little flag pinned on a map; it was removed when the post was destroyed during the night.
They had been sent to defend a vulnerable post. They approached it by the track that ran along the ditch, in single file, correctly spaced for once, each man stepping into the footprints of the man marching ahead of him. Salagnon had taught them this, since the trails were littered with traps. The post was protected by several rows of bamboo chevaux-de-frise, leaving only a narrow entrance to the stone tower, directly facing a loophole from which projected the perforated barrel of a machine gun. Black slurry trickled down the sharpened bamboo stakes, which had been coated with buffalo dung so that the wounds they caused would quickly become infected. They came to a halt. The door beneath the loophole was closed; it had been set high on the wall, with no flight of steps. A ladder was required to access it, a ladder that was removed at night and stored inside. Beneath it, on poles, were the heads of two Viet Minh, their severed necks smeared with black blood, their closed eyes buzzing with blowflies. It was sweltering on the small patch of ground in front of the tower; a suffocating humidity rose from the rice fields all around. Salagnon could hear nothing but the drone of the flies. A few approached him and flew off again. He shouted up. His voice sounded very faint in this sweeping landscape of flooded fields crushed by the sun. He shouted louder. After he had called out several times, the barrel of the machine gun twitched and a wary, hirsute man appeared at the loophole.