All the bits that your god had left over after making the world, Son once told her, he heaped into the jungle and they grew there in a big tangled mass. You see, all the trees, vines, fronds, everything piled on the smoking, moldy floor of the jungle is nothing but spare parts. A celestial junkyard. Buddha’s rubbish heap.
She laughed when he told her that.
That’s religious lesson number one, he said. I will teach you more about your god tomorrow in religious lesson number two.
Your god? she asked him. Do we each have separate gods?
What do you think I am? A pagan?
What could you possibly know about an English god anyway? she teased.
That he built the world in seven days. That he brought the animals in seven by seven—
Two by two, she corrected.
No, seven by seven. Only the unclean ones went two by two.
Son, you are remarkable.
Good with numbers, he replied, touching his temple with the tip of his forefinger. We Vietnamese very good with all things numbered.
Numerical.
Indeed, it is! A miracle!
You pretender! she said. You know exactly what I said!
You said miracle—
Numerical.
New miracle? I’m sorry, perhaps I misunderstand—
He was teasing her, of course. His English was perfect. She knew he was teasing and he knew she knew. But it was all part of the joke, somehow funnier because he play-acted.
Oh, Son, youuuuu!
He would do that, pretend to be the awkward, fumbling native, struggling to please colonial powers. At cocktail parties she would watch him as he lit another man’s cigarette like a waiter, or insisted he had no idea how to dance until she dragged him on to the floor for a waltz and he glided with her so easily it was clear he’d been taught. He would behave as though he was nothing more than a translator, a Saigon orphan grown now into a useful coolie, and then she’d turn around and see him talking to an admiral with all the confidence of his equal. He was quiet one minute, and the next a small crowd would gather round him as he explained what he thought about a particular political leader or the strategy of the communists. Everyone knew him. She had no idea how he became so educated in Western ways, but of course the French taught them, were still teaching them. And he was Son, therefore unique.
Religious lesson number two went like this. There was all this water not good enough for the ocean, but too good to throw away. Plus, really, there were no drains. So your god combined water and grass and mixed it in a big rice bowl and that became a large portion of our country. Every day he tries to cook the water and grass to make stew, which is why it is so hot.
I’ve read nothing of this in my King James—
This is Hoàng Van Sons version. Official, original edition.
So your point is that we are actually in God’s kitchen?
Exactly. But Buddha disapproves of this practice and so nothing ever gets done and your god goes hungry. Poor chap.
He’d always been like that and whatever warnings people like Donna might give her, she found him irresistible. After the night she sat up with Donna, she had gotten on a chopper out of Pleiku to An Khe, and there was Son, one among others. She recognized him right away, of course; tall for a Vietnamese, stitches on his lip, alone, as was she.
She was still so new that helicopters scared her. She decided early on that they had the aerodynamics of a chest freezer and was never sure whether she should move her leg or shift her weight when riding one, lest it topple to the ground. Unlike airplanes, helicopters seem to struggle to stay airborne. They cannot glide. It is difficult to fly one in the rain, and it rained all the time in Vietnam. Every noise was a piece of the rugged effort to keep the thing flying and there was no room between her and all the parts that made it fly. She couldn’t stand helicopters. Riding in them felt like being inside the heart of a giant machine, but there was no choice. She got used to them. She even got used to how the doors were left open for the gunners, so that the wind came through in a wild and constant rush. And to the fact you could not hear unless you wore headphones, and then you could only hear the pilot’s transmissions.
A helicopter is not a great place to hold a conversation, but Son was determined to do so.
He was sitting on a couple of mail sacks. His buff-colored trousers were so loose he had to strap his belt up high to keep them on his waist. Holding on to his ball cap, hugging himself with his free arm, he smiled at her, shivering a little. She pointed at her lip and mouthed the word “ouch.” He pointed at a star on one of the bags, the stripe of his open neck shirt, and mouthed “American?” They conversed like that, in an odd mix of mime and charades. He managed to tell her his name, where he was heading, and that he loved birds. She wasn’t as good as he was, not nearly so precise and communicative. When she tried to mime typing, he got it into his head that she was an entertainer. Later, they had their first real conversation.
How long have you played the piano? he asked.
I don’t play the piano. That was supposed to be a typewriter. I’m a reporter.
So does that mean you are not twelve years old either?
Not recently.
You are American?
Yes. My father’s side. My mother is English.
Well, I really do love birds, he said. It’s a shame you can’t play piano.
He convinced her to meet him in Saigon the next day. He said, Good! Excellent! I will show you my photographs and perhaps we can work together. I would love to work with you!
He said it so easily, as though there was nothing more to explain or decide upon. When she didn’t respond, he said, I’m a good photographer.
She told him she was sure he was good, but it wasn’t up to her what photographs were bought or used. Someone else pays me, she explained, and they don’t have much money either. Or at least they aren’t very… She thought of her editor, how she never once took her to lunch or asked her how she was feeling when she came back after a sick day or offered anything that could possibly be construed as a raise. One time she came by Susan’s desk with a package she presented as though it were a gift, handing her the crisp brown paper bag and saying, I’ve got something for you. Inside was a can of Crisco oil and a couple of lemons. She wanted Susan to cover a riot. For you, she said. Useful for getting the tear gas off. Susan looked at Son. How could she explain someone like this editor to such a man? They aren’t very generous, she began, hoping he’d understand her meaning. She remembered, too, how her editor had left the package on her desk and swept out of the newsroom. Oh, she added, looking over her shoulder, oil for the skin, lemons for the eyes.
Son said, Never mind about that, whether they are generous or not they will seethe photographs and decide! He had a youthful, almost innocent aspect to him that was fetching.
You learned English from a Brit, didn’t you? she said.
Who told you so?
Nobody told me, she said. It’s the way you pronounce your vowels.
Ah, yes, of course. The BBC. I’ve been copying it for years.
You learned English from the BBC?
Indirectly. Directly, I learned English from a Vietnamese actress who always hoped to go to London and star on the stage. The West End. Can you imagine?
No, she could not. Did she ever make it? she asked cautiously.
No, but she had a little dog and one day a famous English actress came through Saigon for some reason and saw the little dog and bought it from her. So the little dog went back to England and the story goes that the little dog became a stage celebrity! So, the actress teacher did not become famous, but she had a famous dog. We were all so happy!
Son, are you unusual or are all Vietnamese like you?
We are all of us unusual, he said. But, Susan, surely you want to know the dog’s name?
How would she know to stay away from such a man? There were no clues, except if you took that single, facile, ignorant one that she would neve
r adopt: that he was Vietnamese.
Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature. The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy above, allowing no breeze. Her hair, her clothes, stay wet and wetter still with no chance of drying in the humid air. Even in the cool mornings, the foggy mist is wet. During the sticky heat of noon, the air is wet. She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son, who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.
She feels best when they are passed by scout planes, droning above them like giant insects. Sometimes they are so low she cannot believe the pilots do not spot them. She looks up longingly, wishing she could signal.
“Stay perfectly still or else we will shoot you,” they tell her.
Or, “Don’t run or we will fire.”
“Where exactly would I run?” she says. She wants to put her arms up and embrace the plane. She wants to jump so high she can catch it.
Long into the night, she is scheming how she will make it through the jungle. She wishes she had a gun, but the gun would do no good at all—she doesn’t know how to shoot straight and she isn’t sure she could kill a person anyway. She might try, but she’d be too late. To kill a man in Vietnam requires complete conviction that this is what you must do now. Otherwise, he will shoot you. She has no such conviction. She has never considered the possibility. She feels that in many ways she is no different from the Saigon women in their tennis dresses, or all those overfed French women along the beach who smiled up at the pilots. She hadn’t really thought she’d need to know so much, or do so much.
She wishes she had her compass. Wherever you are in the jungle you are in the center of it. There is no way of getting any perspective except if you climb a tree, and the trees are hundreds of feet high. She remembers interviewing some of the soldiers in Mike Force, a mixed bag of mercenaries and Montagnards, a few Aussies thrown in, who apparently crawled along the brush, unwilling to stand, often stopping to evaluate the next twelve inches in front, looking for trip wires before continuing, burying their waste. She thinks now about all the questions she wishes she’d asked them.
Once, with Son, she’d visited a captured Vietcong village which had been made into a training ground for new recruits. The traps were set up so that you stepped over a trip wire with your right foot, but missed a different one with your left. The doors were rigged, the grass alive with explosives. It is hard enough to see a full-grown man in a jungle, much less the wires of American mines, or the vines of the Vietcong’s. In the ersatz village she had set off ten explosives in almost as many minutes. She thinks about this as she lies awake now, concentrating her thoughts, already separating herself mentally from the four men around her, sleeping.
If she could find a road, she could set up a kind of ambush, wait for ARVN or the Americans to come along, and try to get their attention and identify herself before they opened fire. With this in mind, she could make a white flag out of some bamboo and her underpants. But then she thinks how they have not crossed a road in four days of marching; she thinks she would tire of dragging the pole. The previous night, she washed her underpants in the water of a tree stump. They dried in a stiff shape as though starched, smelling of earth. She picked ants off them, then put them back on and discovered that the elastic had stretched. That, or her thighs were much thinner; the pants sagged on her as though they belonged to another woman. What was she going to do when they wore out completely?
Commonplace things—roads, plates, bedclothes, running water—feel unreachable, the thought of them absurd. Where would she find new underpants? She falls asleep for a few minutes, dreaming of fresh water and roads.
Son always said he hated the jungle, even though he would agree that the view from a helicopter is beautiful. There are two times when it is best to avoid the jungle, he joked. Night and day.
A few weeks ago, what feels like years now, she told Marc that joke, pretending it was her own. He didn’t laugh. Instead, he said, You don’t have to go. He wasn’t trying to discourage her. He was issuing information. He routinely accompanied soldiers into the field, carrying his recording equipment strapped to his back or chest, his pocket stuffed with batteries, cables, film. He was thin, no extra meat. He sometimes smoked while he walked. He sunburned badly. He went because if you didn’t stay with the troops you would listen to all the crap being said in Saigon and begin to believe it. He went because the only way to properly cover the war, he said, was to film it. Otherwise nobody would believe what you reported. You’d contradict the stories from the military, stories that were repeated by the hundreds of reporters who did not leave the city. If you contradicted those stories without proof, without footage or at least some photographs, you appeared misinformed, that was all, or as though you simply hadn’t observed correctly. The camera was key. But he didn’t want her to go. Why don’t you stick a little closer to home for a while?, he said to Susan. You don’t need to be out there all the time.
This was a night when he was a little drunk. He sat close to her, breaking their recent agreement to avoid each other, to put their relationship on hold, to check it back. They were supposed to be only “friends” now. His wife had written him that she was pregnant. However abstract that felt—an unborn baby thousands of miles away—the affair had to end. But they were finding it difficult to end it. Sitting together, she could feel the proximity of their bodies by the small change in heat between them. If they touched, the places their skin met would grow moist as though they were melting together. She knew this, just as she knew that if he ran his hand through her hair, his fingers would stick, and that, undressing, their clothes would peel away from their bodies like a rind. Once, after making love, they’d bathed together and she remembers tasting the water and being surprised by the salt in it, as though they’d produced their own kind of brine. Perhaps he, too, was remembering this. He looked at her for a long while, then he said, Come see me. Who knows? Things may have changed.
If he had made some small gesture, laced his fingers through hers, pushed her hair back, placed his palm against her cheek—something, anything—she might have been more kind. If he had said, I want to do whatever it takes to keep you. Or, Please, I want to see you so much and we could talk about a solution—she would have given in. It really would not have been difficult to hang on to her, if that was what he intended. And no, she didn’t expect a solution, not really.
But all he did was issue an invitation for her to take a chance, come and see, poke around once more in his life and decide for herself whether it was safe to come in. That’s the way he makes nothing his fault, she thought then. He made suggestions. He made proposals. He believed entirely in an individual’s responsibility to himself, to his own life and aspirations, and took no responsibility for another’s choices. It seemed to her there was a certain deceitfulness in this.
She preferred Son’s way of being, how he tried so hard to please her. He would arrive in her room, having raced up the steps, carrying something he’d found for her in the market. Here is a new teacup and saucer for your collection. Do you like it? He took responsibility for everything, would ensure she had the right bug spray, apologize when they got caught in a rain-storm. There was a woman in Hué whom he loved secretly and sneaked off to see. He claimed it to be his fault, his fault that he was so devoted, that he could not leave her alone. She, too, was married. They were both of them in love with married people. Why do we always love the wrong ones? she asked Son one night. They were sharing her last cigarette. She’d already gone from three a day, to five a day, to ten a day. As she turned the butt of the cigarette in his direction, he brushed her hand. That is our nature, he said. And not the worst of our nature, I am afraid.
From
Susan, he asked nothing. Sometimes she thought he must find her ugly or ungainly, for he almost seemed not to have noticed she was a woman. For her part, she was completely at ease in his presence, taking his arm sometimes as they walked, trimming his hair, a flowery towel draped over him like a cape, her scissors a delicate bird hovering at his ear. Much of what they did was more intimate than anything that happened with Marc. And yet, she was in love with Marc.
In the bar, the last time she saw Marc, sitting so close to him so that there was no mistaking they were lovers, hearing his fractured invitation, she said, I’m sorry, Marc, but please explain: what would have changed? You have a wife, and now a baby on the way. She spoke in a rational, logical voice that did not match how she felt. She could picture herself as he must see her, sitting stiffly in her chair, the chill of the air conditioning reflected in goosebumps along her bare arms, a tight smile, a slightly dark, wise look in her eyes. I mean, I can’t see how anything would have changed, she said. Or even, let’s face it, that you want it to change. She did not allow him to see how he hurt her, but she regretted the words, or rather the way they had come out, stinging, bitter, with no purpose other than to wound. It made her feel shrew-like and therefore less attractive. She kept thinking that if she were just a little more beautiful, he wouldn’t be so casual about her. A man who her father introduced her to years ago, a colonel like himself, once looked at her from across the dinner table, and proclaimed, Young women are wasted on young men. She’d taken it as a line of simple flattery, but now she saw there was a certain truth in what he had said. We are all in such abundance, she thought, like shiny fruit in a market stall.
I’m sorry, she said, a little softer, though she was not sorry.
The Man from Saigon Page 12