by John Warley
Our reservations are for three nights at a hotel franchised by an American chain. Here, quality is desirable for food and service but essential for air conditioning, still very much a luxury. At the entrance, uniformed porters engulf us and minutes later we enter the bracing chill of five-star air conditioning.
Behind a highly polished teak desk a striking woman in an ao dai, the long-sleeve traditional pantsuit, registers us. The clerk’s apparent boss, a young manager in a European suit, prowls the length of the counter and rivets his eyes on us as we sign the register and accept our keys. An ancient elevator, equipped with a living operator, takes us to the fifth floor.
The next morning, I take a tour alone. I had not planned it that way, but when I knocked on Mr. Quan’s door there was no answer. I waited half an hour, knocked again, and left a message. He either got out early, or never came home last night. I hope it was the latter. At any rate, I’m here mostly for him, and if he doesn’t need the support he thought he did, so much the better. Perhaps telling his story on the plane was catharsis. In late afternoon, I’m in the hotel lounge, showered, changed, and, with a little salt and soy, hungry enough to eat the wooden table at which I sit.
In the middle of my cocktail, a very professionally crafted martini, he gets off the elevator, spots me, and waves as he approaches. He offers no account of the past eighteen or so hours.
“Dinner this evening is on me,” he announces. “It may be unforgettable.”
“May be?” I ask.
“If the restaurant still exists,” he says.
We go out into the sluggish evening. Lights incongruously reminiscent of Forty-second Street and Times Square blink overhead as we walk the crowded sidewalks.
“Here, we are two blocks from the Saigon River,” he tells me as we stroll. A septic smell of salt water and fish waft by, borne on a breeze which is no cooler than the air it displaces. “The street is called Dong Khoi. It means, ‘Street of the General Uprising.’ In my day, Tu Do—Freedom Street. You could buy anything here.” He shoots me a knowing “for men only” glance.
We pass a club called Maxim’s, which Mr. Quan says caters to an international crowd hosted by tu san, Vietnamese capitalists beginning to emerge openly in the city. “The ones who look unhappy are Russians,” he deadpans as we pass. The canopied doorway is busy, and a band blares out as the door swings open. “It is not far,” he says.
In mid-block he slows, seemingly reluctant to have answered the fate of the restaurant to which he is leading us. Then, smiling broadly, he accelerates. “It’s still here.”
He enters ahead and inquires of the mâitre d’, who turns and disappears into the kitchen. Moments later, a wizened old man limps from the kitchen door, trailed by the head waiter. The old man approaches with the same restraint I observed moments ago in Mr. Quan, squinting as he nears. Mr. Quan advances. A brief pause, then both men enfold each other in fraternal embrace. Within seconds they are laughing, talking simultaneously and inspecting the changes wrought by fifteen years. The old man beckons aging waiters, who, upon recognition, abandon customers to join the reunion.
An hour later, our table resembles a cache of contraband from an international cuisine raid. Of the items I can identify, we are treated to giant shrimp, lobster Newburg, fried squid, conch, ginger duck, roasted pig, chicken in four distinct sauces, goat, and a medley of fresh vegetables. Unidentified are a murky soup, a shredded leafy something, and a sea creature who eyes me from the plate with almost the same intensity with which I am scrutinizing it. The spring rolls are the best I’ve ever had, provided I leave off a condiment popular around the table; a sauce that looks innocent enough but which would, in fact, take the ice off a Nova Scotia windshield. Veuve Clicquot champagne, plum wine, and a beer called Saigon Export wash it all down.
During this feast, Mr. Quan and Mr. Ngo, the old man, have held incessant conversation, while I remain contentedly ignored. Two waiters stand behind us, anticipating whims I don’t have. Unforgettable it is. At the other side of the table, smoke from Cuban cigars is wreathing their heads as the years are compressed into paragraphs punctuated by laughter. I extend my thanks to Mr. Ngo, who asks me in very fractured English to return another night.
Mr. Ngo, I learn as we exit, has told him of a friend he wants to find. “In the Phu Tho sector. I knew it well. If she is at home, we may find her.”
We alight on the sidewalk of the Phu Tho district as an evening crowd besieges street vendors selling food, as pungent as it is mysterious. We walk two blocks without slackening. Mr. Quan seems bent on a certain destination. At the window of a small jewelry shop, he slows.
“Wait here,” he instructs, then disappears inside with a jingle of the entry bells over the door.
Nearby, a vendor tends a rickety wooden pushcart. I idle over. He seems reserved at my approach, at odds with a merchant’s enthusiasm for a customer. Displayed on the dingy beige cloth overlaying the cart are cigarette lighters of distinctly American manufacture, old Zippos and others predating their modern disposable counterparts. I pick one up. On the side is engraved EHT. Near the lighters rest assorted rings. My eye is drawn to a large, substantial one: West Point, class of 1965. The name Boyd G. Fleming is inscribed inside; a name I silently wager is also chiseled into a black marble slab in Washington, D.C. The man says something to me, presumably a price.
The bells on the jeweler’s door rustle and Mr. Quan emerges, smiling. I beckon him over.
“I’d like to own this ring. Offer him whatever it takes.”
Mr. Quan engages him, shaking his head decidedly several times before turning to me. “He knows its value. It won’t be cheap.” A counter-offer later, it is mine. On my return, a Fleming may value it, and if not the USMA museum may suggest a display more appropriate than this tired street in this haunted city.
“She lives not far,” Mr. Quan announces. “The owner has not seen her for some time. Let us hope her health is good.”
We walk two more blocks. “Are you hungry?” he asks.
I shake my head. “After that meal? You must be joking.”
“It is just as well,” he says, indicating the aromatic stall we are passing. “Barbecued dog.” He turns to read my expression.
The neighborhood is declining. Tin doors languish on rusted hinges, half concealing almost certain squalor inside. Mr. Quan seems less assured here and consults a map crudely drawn by the jeweler. At a rundown tenement, he checks it yet again before approaching an unmarked door. He raps and we wait.
We hear no movement within but the door swings open. A frail woman looks inquiringly out. Her silver hair is pulled straight back. It is a rich, luxuriant sterling highlighted by contrast against her dark skin, so that she could be a Mayan princess whose headdress had been crafted from the ore of a priceless vein. On top a tortoiseshell comb serves as a demur crown. For a moment she does not recognize him, but when she does, the Mayan sun rises in her eyes.
They speak for several minutes. He introduces her as Lily Nguyen. She looks doubtful, neither confirming nor denying the relationship I feel sure they’ve shared. He offers more words and gestures toward me. When he stops, she bows her head and steps aside to permit us to enter. The room is immaculate. A Buddhist shrine, a scaled down miniature of the one in Mr. Quan’s apartment, lends a reverential aspect to what would otherwise be the mundane, if fastidious, appointments of her sitting room. Mr. Quan indicates we should be seated and that she will make tea. We are silent until she returns, carrying a tray with the spryness of a girl. She serves us. He apologizes for holding a conversation with her that is inaccessible to me, then speaks rapidly with her for thirty minutes. We leave as suddenly as we arrive, but even without a word of Vietnamese, I know he will be back.
We return to our hotel, where I place a call to Natalie. She has just gotten out of bed, she tells me, and the vision heightens my longing. I relate the events of my day, then ask about progress on the lawsuit. She has almost finished her research and will begin drafting th
e complaint that day. Before moving to more personal matters, I ask her to call Margarite.
“Tell her we return on the morning of the seventh and that it is critical that she gather the Board as soon as possible.”
“You’re going to meet with them again?”
“We’re going to meet with them again.”
I hang up, satisfied that all that can be done is being done. Still to be trod is that rural road between Cu Chi and Duc Lap, to an unmarked grave where the Army would say Philip gave the last full measure and where, in his own words, he bit the banana.
37
The road to Cu Chi quickly dissipates into a rural byway once we leave Saigon. Mr. Quan, driving a car borrowed from an old friend, assures me that it has been much improved over the two-lane pothole tarmac of twenty years ago. He has purchased since our arrival a lightweight jungle hat, resting on the seat between us, and a loosely fitting white silk shirt with a small dragon embroidered on the pocket. The countryside, green and pastoral with corn, languishes to either side. Iowa east.
“To understand what happened here,” he says over the hum of the engine, “you must see the tunnels.”
My arm is resting out the window and the wind is flapping my short sleeve and though it is not yet ten in the morning the air rushing by is hot and clammy, a devil’s breath which, when augmented with the unobstructed sun, foretells a day of vengeful heat. Nascent beads of sweat form at my hairline and on my chest, trickling downward in erratic tendrils. Mr. Quan does not appear to feel the heat.
He glances at me. “Do you have fear of tight places?”
“Claustrophobia?”
“The fear of being confined?”
“Yes. No, I have none.”
“Good,” he says with satisfaction. “These tunnels are veddy narrow.”
An hour out of Saigon we enter Cu Chi. The main road is paved and along it are parked trucks laden with produce and livestock, all pointed in the direction from which we have come. Mr. Quan is scanning the signs, he says for directions.
“I have not been in the tunnels since I was a young man, just after the French left.”
We turn left onto a dirt road and proceed for about a mile. He slows, then stops, pulling a few feet off the road in an area worn to bare ground.
“I see nothing,” I say as I climb from the car.
“Ah,” he says. “By seeing nothing, you see everything.”
He leads us toward a wooded enclave some hundred yards from where he has parked. A small sign peaks from the shade of mangroves. As we approach, from the deep shadow of the grove appears a man, a peasant. He and Mr. Quan exchange rapid conversation, then money. The peasant turns toward the deeper shadows within and we fall in, trailing. Fifteen or twenty yards from where we have met he stops, reaches down, grabs an iron ring and pulls upward, thereby raising a wooden door approximately two feet square. At the apex of the door’s arc on its hinges he lets it go, and before the door strikes the ground, jettisoning dust from beneath, he has entered the hole revealed. He disappears momentarily, resurfaces with a lantern, and motions us into the earth.
A crude ladder descends. The peasant waits for us at the bottom, a dirt cell approximately eight by eight and too shallow to permit me to stand erect, although both shorter men do so with inches to spare. Three burrows branch off of this conjunction, so that I am immediately put in mind of the stark lobby at the orphanage with its three converging halls. This dirt lobby is ornate by comparison.
A phrase of Vietnamese. “We are to wait,” says Mr. Quan as our guide disappears into the blackened yawn of one tunnel. Moments later, light flickers, illuminating the tunnel walls in a ghastly mustard yellow. I drop to my hands and knees behind Mr. Quan, who enters the orifice in the same duck wattle employed by the guide. He rapidly extends his lead, so that he has rounded a bend by the time I reach the light source, a candle mounted in a sconce that appears to be little more than a jagged metal shard thrust into the dirt wall. Light lures ahead, and my sense of urgency propels me faster. Having claimed to be immune from claustrophobia, I am beginning to wonder.
I reach a second candle, then a third. Ahead, I hear voices and redouble my crawl. Although the air is very cool here, I am sweating from the exertion of quick movement in a confined place. One salient reality of the tunnels has been driven home: the two Vietnamese are built for this clandestine movement and I am not. I see two pairs of legs ahead and when I emerge, panting, it is into a large room where both men are talking leisurely. Between them is a table, on which rests two candles and a large map.
“This is a command center,” explains Mr. Quan as I straighten almost upright before encountering the ceiling. “The tunnels were built by the Viet Minh to defeat the French. Then, of course, they were employed against you … us.”
I hover over the map, clearly the scheme of the labyrinth overlaid on a contour plat of the surrounding area. The network is quite extensive.
“Two hundred miles underground,” says Mr. Quan, and although he must fully realize the role this complex played in the ultimate demise of his chosen government, he cannot suppress a certain pride in what we see here. “Only a direct hit by the most powerful bombs would destroy a section. They would rebuild it within hours.” He leans over the map and traces a sector with his finger. “Notice how three tunnels lead to this spot. This provides alternate routes in case of destruction. The Ho Chi Minh trail worked on the same principle, which your generals never fully appreciated.”
I survey the room. There is not much to see but much to marvel at, not the least of which is that this network would require me to spend months or years on my hands and knees to fully explore. Mr. Quan consults the guide, then explains air vents, ambush points, communications, logistics, and sleeping quarters. The guide injects something.
“He says he himself lived here for over two months without once coming above ground.” I nod but make no reply.
Mr. Quan leads our exit, the guide trailing to extinguish candles as we retrace our steps. Patches of sky above the trapdoor are blue and beautiful, and I find myself climbing the ladder with alacrity. Mr. Quan and the guide exchange words as the door is closed. We are returning to the car when I stop and look back. We are ten yards from the entrance and I cannot see any trace of the hole from which I just emerged. The iron ring has been covered with leaves and the guide has vanished without a sound into the shadows of the mangroves.
“I thought you should see that,” he says as we approach the car, baking in waves of corrugated heat rising from the roof and hood.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m glad we came.”
The road to Duc Lap stretches southwest towards the Parrot’s Beak of Cambodia, less than twenty miles away. We travel a mere five minutes when Mr. Quan steers onto the shoulder, stops and shuts off the engine.
“This area was once a great producer of rubber,” he says. “Few of the old plantations remain. For a time it was what the Americans called a free-bombing zone. No command approval was required to shell and strafe.” He turns his head from the windshield to me. “This is about half way,” he says gravely. “You have precise information?”
“No. Only that it occurred half way between Cu Chi and Duc Lap.”
“Then perhaps this will do.”
I nod and gaze around. Blue sky domes over us. Emphatically benign fields extend from irrigation ditches running parallel to the road’s edge on either side. In the distance, a phlegmatic ox labors. Tethered to an antique plow held by a cone-hatted farmer, it surges forward a few yards before lumbering to a crawl. Each step taken by the massive beast appears to signal collapse. The farmer manifests no impatience. On the shoulder of the road ahead, two young boys are walking toward us escorting a cow. The smaller boy brandishes a willowy branch, occasionally touching the animal’s flanks. There is much evidence of life here, and none of death, but then what did I expect?
Stepping from the car, I wipe my neck and face with a bandana and stretch down into the back seat floorboa
rd for the Corona bottle propped upright in my satchel. A single rose purchased at the hotel this morning wades in two inches of water, its bud opening cautiously and attar drifting upward in defiance of the oppressive gravity of heat. I put on my hat, a white, narrow-brimmed affair I wear on the boat.
“I will remain here,” Mr. Quan says.
“Come with me. This won’t take long.”
“It is a private matter,” he insists. An awkward pause, while he trusts his hands in his pockets, avoiding me by looking purposefully around, as though waiting for a bus.
“Please,” I say. “It’ll only take a minute.”
He utters a barely discernible sigh of resignation. “Perhaps I can show us to shade,” he says, leading along a ditch in the direction of Duc Lap. We pass the boys and the cow without speaking. Some fifty yards from the car the bank drops more precipitously into the ditch and from the side some green ferns grow, shading a dark loam beneath.
Together, we sit down. I splay my legs on the sloping embankment and begin to dig listlessly between them, my hands acting as scoops and the dirt cool between my fingers.
“Careful,” says Mr. Quan. “Not all the mines have been found.” I cut my eyes at him to confirm he is joking. He is not.
Inside, I am also digging, not to create a hole but to fill one. On the plane coming over I picked up the airline’s in-flight magazine with its eclectic assortment of features designed to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of travelers, from one-armed horticulturists to dictators flying into exile. An article on solid waste disposal established a thousand years as the durability of a glass bottle in a landfill. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but it occurs to me here that the Corona bottle will “outlive” Philip by an astounding factor. This might not shock obstetricians or undertakers or others on speaking terms with the evanescence of organic things like people, but it gives me something to ponder. It reminds me that Philip will live on this earth only as a fragment of memory in those who knew him. In this landfill we call earth, over the span we call time, that amounts to little more than a vaporization.