War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  The child was already awake, playing on the floor. She had on a cheap pink nightdress from the Central Market. She had short, very straight black hair, round eyes and a flat cherubic face. He grinned at her and she grinned back.

  He went out, quietly closing the door behind him.

  He had coffee at the Shelf and checked the gossip with the other correspondents. Crosby wanted to know why Webb had not shown up at the Chicago. Webb muttered a lame excuse about being unwell. Crosby shrugged it off and proceeded to describe an incident that had taken place at the bar just before he got there.

  ‘VC threw a fucking grenade in there,’ Crosby said.

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘This Marine was telling me about it. Didn’t go off, thank God. Probably some Chicom dud. Last time I’m going there.’

  Webb smiled. ‘Me too.’

  He drank his coffee and left. He had been planning to hitch a ride into the Delta to Can Tho. Instead he crossed the square and bought fresh croissants at the Givral, and some green bananas from one of the street hawkers on the Tu Do. He took them back with him to the apartment.

  When he opened the door, Odile was waiting for him, standing in the middle of the room, her hands behind her back, as if she were waiting to pass inspection. He held up the croissants. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. ‘I bought some bananas for Phuong. She likes bananas?’

  ‘Yes, but you will have banana all over your apartment.’

  ‘Well, it needs redecorating. Yellow’s a good color as any.’

  She had put on the ao dai she had brought with her. That was better, he thought. They ate the croissants on the balcony while the city had clamored to life. The street was a tumult of car horns and siclo bells and the tinny music of radios came from a dozen windows and doorways.

  ‘How long since you’ve been to church?’ he asked her suddenly.

  ‘How can I go to church?’

  ‘Why not? God forgives, doesn’t he? Not that you did anything wrong in my opinion. You had a child to feed.’

  She ate her croissant delicately, in two hands.

  ‘We’ll go to Mass this morning,’ he said. ‘I’m not one of your lot but I think I know how it works. You can go to confession, and when you walk out you can start again with a clean slate.’

  ‘I do not think it is so simple.’

  ‘We’ll go anyway,’ he said.

  * * *

  The old canonesse was there, and Soeur Marie, a handful of the other novices from the convent in Cholon. Odile saw their faces turned in her direction but she avoided their eyes. She tried to concentrate on the service, but it was different from how it had been before. She did not belong in such a sacred place. She was exiled by her own sin.

  When the priest sanctified the host, she did not approach the altar for Communion. But when the service was over, Webb urged her towards the confessional.

  She silently obeyed.

  Odile remained for a long time on her knees in the gloom of the Lady Chapel while Webb held little Phuong. She closed her eyes and tried to form the words of prayer in her mind, but it was hopeless. She had brought her suffering on herself, had placed her own happiness over service to God. That was why she had been punished.

  She could not tell the Englishman but she had once even considered committing chat lam ba - infanticide. It was the traditional remedy for unwed mothers in Vietnam; chop the newborn child into three pieces, wrap the head, torso and legs in cloth and throw them in the river, so that the mistake could be washed away by the tide.

  To have contemplated such evil! How could she ever confess such things to a priest? It was impossible. She could not do it.

  * * *

  They stood on the cathedral steps in the bright morning sunshine. ‘Did you do it?’ Webb asked her.

  ‘I could not,’ she murmured. ‘There is too much shame.’

  ‘You said nothing?’

  ‘I accuse myself of the sin of envy. And once I think that I want to kill Monsieur Ryan. For that the cure he gives me penance and absolution.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘Please. You are very kind to me. But do not ask me to do what I cannot do.’ He has the round-eye’s belief in easy answers, she thought. They think that fate can be changed by force of will. Because he had taken her away from the Tu Do he thought he could take away from the shame, also.

  For herself she knew there was nowhere to go on this hot morning but back to the world God had sent her to, where the beggars patrolled the streets like crabs and the homeless children roamed in packs, the place she now belonged.

  Chapter 12

  It was midday and the heavy gold drapes inside Juliette’s were drawn against the sun. Webb could see over the rooftops of Saigon through a gap in the curtains. The city looked tawdry in the shimmering heat, a panorama of peeling hoardings and red-tiled roofs. He and Crosby sat on bar stools drinking ‘33’ beers and discussing where the sirens of war might lead them after Vietnam. The conversation turned to Cambodia, and then, predictably, to Ryan.

  ‘Have you heard from him recently?’ Webb asked.

  ‘A guy I know from UPI was in Phnom Penh last week, and said he ran into him. Still the same.’

  ‘You know where I can get in touch with him?’

  ‘Does he owe you money?’

  ‘It’s not for me. You remember the nun?’

  Crosby grinned, as if in anticipation of the punch line of a favorite joke. ‘Sure I remember.’

  ‘He left her with a baby.’

  Crosby did not seem quite sure how to react. Another chapter in the legend or did this smack of real scandal? ‘Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,’ he said, finally.

  ‘This wasn’t just some bar girl, Croz.’ When Crosby offered no comment, he added: ‘A lot of people seem to think he’s a lovable rogue. He’s an asshole.’

  ‘He saved your life once, man.’

  ‘Is my life so important to the world that it’s recompense for every outrage he cares to commit?’

  Crosby sucked on his front teeth, thinking about this. ‘There’s a lot of it going around. Kids with no fathers, I mean.’

  ‘Ryan isn’t some dumb nineteen-year-old fresh out of the boonies. And she’s not a whore. This is different.’

  Crosby played with the ends of his moustache. ‘He know about this kid?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Maybe someone should tell him. One of my guys is flying to Phnom Penh on Friday. If you want to get him a message, I’ll see it gets there.’

  * * *

  Whenever he was in Saigon he looked forward to going back to the apartment. Phuong for some reason found something pleasing about his presence and would smile at him as soon as he walked through the door. There was a domesticity to the arrangement that quickly became comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable.

  In the evenings, instead of drinking in the Caravelle or the Melody or the Continental with the other correspondents, he took Odile and Phuong to dinner in the Givral perhaps, or the Royale. Odile, however, remained diffident. It was as if she had pulled a curtain across her soul. She spoke little. She was attentive to Phuong, but nothing else in her life seemed to interest her.

  Webb was quickly aware that his initial charity, if that was what it was, had become obsession. He wanted to save her, unravel her mystery. He thought about her constantly.

  The letter to Ryan was never finished.

  * * *

  The air conditioner broke down and his Tonkinese landlord refused to repair it. He left the windows open at night but the city smelled foul. He took his typewriter onto the balcony, working in the semi-darkness rather than endure the stifling heat inside. He heard Odile singing softly to Phuong, settling her to sleep in her cot.

  He fed a blank sheet of paper into the Remington, writing a story to accompany the pictures he had taken that morning in the Delta. He was tired; it was a tired war. The photographs were unremarkable, and he doubted he would find an enthusiastic editor at Time-Life or
Paris-Match. The world was not interested in stories of Vietnamese killing Vietnamese; it seemed it was only truly horrible if the bodies were white. The real war was going on across the border in Cambodia and Laos now, away from prying eyes.

  He was suddenly aware of her standing behind him. He felt her hands on his shoulders kneading his neck muscles.

  He stopped typing, reached up and put his hands on hers. ‘I have to go away tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Danang. I may be gone for a week or two.’

  ‘I will miss you. I will pray you are safe.’

  ‘Will you? Miss me, I mean.’

  ‘You are a very good man.’

  He looked up at her. For a moment she reminded him of PFC Judge that day at An Qanh; there was such emptiness in her eyes. ‘What would you do if you were free?’ he asked her. ‘If you could do whatever you wanted?’

  ‘But I am not free. I was born bui doi. I will never know what freedom is.’

  ‘If you could leave Vietnam ...’

  She shrugged her shoulders, unable to imagine it.

  ‘If you want to get out of Vietnam, I can help you.’

  ‘What would I do? Be a prostitute in America? I can be prostitute here.’

  ‘You don’t have to go to America. And you don’t have to be a prostitute.’

  ‘I will always be prostitute now.’ She held a hand to her breast. ‘In here.’

  ‘What atrocity did you commit exactly? Compared to murder? Compared to torture? Compared to dropping napalm on villages or burying a mine and blowing off another man’s legs? Yours is such a small sin, Odile.’

  ‘You cannot compare one sin with another like they are melons in the market.’ She pulled her hands away. ‘In my head I still hear myself say things I think I can never say, do things I think I can never do. I want to be like I was before but ... it is like you are away from somewhere, the town you are born, and when you go back everything is changed. It can never be like it was before.’ She put her hands inside his shirt. ‘What is it you want from me?’ she whispered,

  ‘I don’t want anything from you.’

  ‘Non, çe n’est pas vrai. I see how you look at me.’

  She went back inside. He heard the rustle of silk, and when he looked around she was standing naked beside the bed. The yellow lamp beside the bed threw shadows over her body.

  Webb went inside. Exquisite. He reached out for her. Her skin was silken. He closed his eyes, wrestling with his desire and his guilt. He had to believe he did not do all this just to get her into bed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered.

  He kissed her neck; the scent of patchouli and silken hair against his cheek. A block away he could hear the traffic on the Tu Do, the barking cough of hundreds of Hondas, the heavy bass thump from the bars. A long way from London. A dream.

  Don’t let me fall in love with her now. Ah, too late.

  * * *

  Webb was gone for two weeks. During long nights wrapped in a poncho, shivering with cold and fear on a firebase somewhere in the Highlands, or sweating it out on patrols with the ARVN in the jungles around Pleiku, he thought about her, sorting through the decision he knew he would have to make. He had eked out a living for two long years in Vietnam, two years longer than he had any right to expect when he had first arrived. He had harbored dreams of death or glory, an ignominious end or a fast track to the top, but Vietnam had been neither. His photographs and stories had been used by some of the major international agencies and magazines, but he was neither dead nor famous. He had arrived a year too late; by the time he got there Vietnam was no longer the war in which to see and be seen.

  He had started to think about other career moves; and if he left Vietnam, he might perhaps take Odile with him.

  He still had not finished the letter to Ryan. If he told him about Phuong, what would Ryan do? There was no imperative for him to pick up the pieces.

  And certainly none for me, either.

  He could not stop thinking about that last night in his apartment. Did she love him, or was it just her way of repaying him for saving her from the Tu Do? The night before he flew back to Saigon he was sitting in the open-air cinema in Danang watching a rerun of The Graduate when the answer came to him. It didn’t matter. He would ask her to marry him anyway.

  Chapter 13

  Odile was in a siclo on Le Loi Boulevard, returning from the Central Market, when she saw him. He was sitting on the terrace, in one of those execrable Hawaiian shirts that he loved, smoking a cigarette. He was with some other journalists, in their tailor-made green safari jackets, laughing at some joke. She twisted around in the cracked leather seat and got just a glimpse of him before she lost him among the traffic and the mid-morning crowds.

  She put her arm around her little daughter; a bui doi, just like her, with the same terrible choices to make one day.

  She had always thought she still loved him, but she didn’t. What she felt in that moment was hate. She hated him as she had never hated anyone, for his deceit, for his cruelty and for his betrayal.

  When she got back to the apartment she settled Phuong on the floor with a plastic bottle of water and the wooden blocks Webb had bought for her. Then she took the wooden-handled paring knife that he used to cut fruit, hid it in her purse and walked out of the door.

  * * *

  She waited for him in the Givral across the square from the Continental. She ordered a café au lait and sat down.

  He was still there; hard to miss him in that shirt.

  Perhaps I should have told him about the child, she thought. But she had been too ashamed; if he did not love her, then she did not want his money or his pity. She felt so used, and so humiliated.

  The canonesse had tried to warn her; she should have listened.

  He left his companions, sauntered alone across Lam Son Square towards the Caravelle. She left money on the table for the coffee and rushed out of the door.

  He was mobbed outside the Caravelle by hordes of street children, shoeshine boys and cigarette vendors and flower girls. He laughed and reached into his pockets to give them his small change. They thrust packets of Embassy and handmade flower garlands at him even though he shook his head and said he didn’t want them, just take the money. It was one of the things she had loved most about him, this easy-going generosity. Hard to imagine that there was another side to the man; that was what had fooled her.

  She followed him into the foyer of the Caravelle.

  A sixth sense must have made him stop and turn around. There was a moment of astonishment and then he came towards her, laughing: ‘Odile!’

  He kissed her cheek.

  She felt the point of the knife in her leather purse. In the chest, in the stomach? How do you kill someone this way? And should I do it here in the lobby, in front of everyone? Or in secret, and then try to escape?

  If I am caught, what will happen to Phuong?

  ‘You look fantastic,’ he said, smiling.

  She couldn’t get her breath. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘When do you come back to Saigon?’

  ‘Couple of days ago.’ The grin fell away. ‘Guess you’re mad at me, huh?’

  She opened her purse, felt for the handle of the knife.

  ‘You’ve been following me,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘I saw you ... on the terrace.’

  ‘You must think I’m a real bastard.’

  She stared at him, dumbfounded to hear her anguish so easily circumscribed.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I should have written.’ He shrugged his shoulders as if that explained everything. ‘It’s not done you any harm. You look great.’

  She couldn’t kill him until he understood the enormity of what he had done. She had to make him sorry first. ‘There’s something I have to show you,’ she said.

  She turned and walked back through the doors. He ran after her. She found a siclo and jumped in. It was not far to the apartment but she didn’t trus
t her legs.

  As Ryan climbed in beside her she gave the siclo driver her address.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said.

  ‘You have somewhere else to go?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I guess not.’

  She turned her face away, one arm gripping the edge of the canopy. The sun was fierce. ‘You hurt me very much,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I honestly tried. Us, I mean. I didn’t set out to lie to you. It just .. . wasn’t working for me. Then when I got to Phnom Penh ... I guess I thought it was better that way.’

  ‘Easier, at least.’

  He had no answer for that.

  ‘I give up everything for you.’

  ‘You’re better off: You were never meant to be a nun.’

  I was never meant to be a prostitute either.

  He touched her knee. ‘Odile ...’

  She pushed his hand away. ‘Please ... don’t do that.’

  They turned off the Tu Do into a side street and stopped outside Webb’s apartment. Ryan looked puzzled but said nothing. He followed her inside, up the wrought-iron staircase.

  She opened the door.

  Phuong lay on her back on the floor, drinking from a bottle.

  ‘Christ,’ Ryan said.

  They stood there, in the doorway, for a long time. Ryan sagged against the lintel, his jaw slack with astonishment.

  ‘Her name is Phuong,’ Odile said, finally.

  He appeared not to have heard. But then he surprised her; he bent down and picked the child up in his arms, very gently. Phuong continued to drink from the bottle and stared back at Ryan with huge brown eyes.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  She had expected him to protest, to shake his head and say: ‘She’s not mine.’ But he didn’t. He did not even ask her assurance. Instead he sat down and bounced the little girl on his knee. Phuong gave a short hiccough of a laugh.

  ‘You should have told me,’ Ryan said. He looked around the room. He must recognize Webb’s photographs on the walls, she thought, but he just said: ‘You’ve got another guy?’