White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  Once the worst of the Tet offensive was over there were letters for both of them from Abbra, letters from Radford and Michel for Gabrielle, and a letter from Chuck for Serena.

  ‘I thought you said Chuck Wilson had discouraged you from keeping in contact with him,’ Gabrielle said curiously.

  ‘He did. But that was before we met.’ Serena slipped the letter into her lingerie drawer. Chuck Wilson was an ongoing dilemma for her. Whenever she thought of him, it was with sexual undertones. There were times when she wished she had the nerve to write to him, asking him outright if his injuries precluded him from making love. And if they didn’t? What would she do then? It was a question she could never satisfactorily answer. She knew only that she couldn’t shake him from her mind, and that she was glad that he had written to her.

  Gabrielle was bemused by Michel’s letter, and unsettled by Radford’s. Michel’s letter was full of details of the success of one of their songs. It was a lyric she had written in the Black Cat days, and that he had put music to, and that the band, with the singer who had replaced her, had recorded. It had reached number thirty-five in the British pop charts and had been covered almost immediately by a well-known British singer. It’s going to earn us a fortune, Michel had written ecstatically. Three more of our songs have already been sold to well-established singers and are due to be recorded within the next few months. You may have walked out on fame as a singer, Gabrielle, but it looks as if you’re going to make it as a songwriter!

  Radford’s letter had been short to the point of terseness. He simply wanted to know when the hell she was coming back.

  On 31 March, when President Johnson went on American television to tell the people he would not be running for re-election, Gabrielle was near the demilitarized zone. Nhu’s journalist friend had told her of a man who had served beneath Dinh in the North Vietnamese Army, and was now disabled with a war injury and living in his home village a few miles south of the 17th parallel. Accompanied by one of the many Vietnamese friends she had made, Gabrielle had immediately set off through the war-torn countryside in search of him.

  She returned to Saigon on 6 June, the day that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles.

  ‘Dear heaven,’ Serena said devoutly as Gabrielle entered their room at the Continental. ‘Where have you been?’

  Gabrielle, looking a good eight pounds lighter than when she had started out in March, grinned wearily. She was wearing a black cotton jacket and a pair of loose black trousers with a drawstring waist. Despite their shapelessness, the trousers fitted lightly on her hips, so that even dressed as a peasant, with rough, rubber-soled sandals on her feet, she still managed to look provocative and sexy.

  ‘Don’t ask, chérie,’ she said, collapsing into a softly upholstered cane-framed chair. ‘Not until you have poured me a Pernod. A very large Pernod.’

  When the ice-cold drink was safely in her hand she said, ‘I reached the village just south of the demilitarized zone, and I spoke to the man who had served in Dinh’s unit. He said that it was common knowledge that for a long period of time, Colonel Duong Quynh Dinh was accompanied nearly everywhere by a fair-haired round-eye.’

  ‘And?’ Serena prompted tensely.

  Gabrielle shook her head. ‘And that was the only reliable information he was able to give me. He was posted to another unit and has not seen or heard of Dinh for many months. He doesn’t know where Dinh now is, or if Gavin is still with him.’

  She paused and pushed a scratched and cut hand tiredly through her mop of fiery bait. ‘The good news is that I know that Gavin definitely is with Dinh, and that he remained with him after they left Saigon. The bad news is that I still don’t know where they are, or how I can contact them, or why Gavin has been unable to contact me.’

  Serena was silent for a while and then she said awkwardly, ‘Did the man you spoke to give any indication as to whether Gavin was being held against his will or not?’

  ‘No.’ Gabrielle’s eyes were suddenly very brilliant. ‘But he must be, chérie.’ Two large tears began to trickle down her cheeks. ‘There can be no other explanation for his silence and his long absence.’

  Abbra’s letter telling them that Lewis had died the previous October plunged them into even deeper despondency. Though they had not seen Abbra since the Washington peace march, the bond that they felt with her was as strong as ever.

  ‘Merde,’ Gabrielle said. ‘La pauvre petite. What will she do now, I wonder?’

  What Abbra proceeded to do stunned both of them so much that for several seconds neither of them could speak.

  ‘She did what?’ Gabrielle spluttered. She had just given le petit Gavin his morning cereal. He had arrived in Saigon two months previously, cared for on his flight from Paris an Air France stewardess. Ever since his arrival Gabrielle’s spirits had lifted and she was again dauntlessly confident that eventually one of the many contacts she was nurturing would bear fruit, and she would learn exactly where Gavin was being held.

  Serena looked down at the letter in her hand and began to grin. ‘She married her brother-in-law,’ she said again.

  ‘C’est impossible!’ Gabrielle forgot all about the mess her son was making with his food. ‘The quiet, so-well-behaved Abbra? She has married her brother-in-law? A professional football player? It is unbelievable, n’est-ce pas? Incroyable!’

  Serena’s grin deepened. ‘It may be incroyable, Gabrielle, but that’s what she has done. Still waters run deep, as my father always used to say. What shall we send her as a wedding present?’

  They had sent an exquisitely carved, traditional Vietnamese wedding box decorated in mother-of-pearl. And they had sent her all their love and all their sincerest best wishes for her future happiness.

  From the day that Serena had entered the doors of the Cáy Thóng orphanage, it had never occurred to her to leave Saigon and to return to London. With Mike Daniels’s reluctant help she had obtained a residence permit, her profession listed as charity relief worker. She existed on her own private income, receiving no money for the long, arduous hours that she worked. Under Mike Daniels’s grudging guidance she had learned to give medication and shots and to put in IV infusions. When she wasn’t tending the children, she helped out in the kitchen, making vast amounts of fresh yogurt each day, and killing giant-size spiders and cockroaches and ants.

  A few days after she had received Abbra’s letter she was sitting in the office, trying to catch up on some paperwork for Mike, when Lucy came in hurriedly, saying, ‘There’s a Vietnamese girl here, asking if we will care for her baby. Little Huong has haemorraghic fever and I must get him down to the Children’s Hospital as soon as possible. Interview her for me, will you? She doesn’t look the usual type. I don’t think she’s trying to abandon the child. I’ll send her in to you.’

  She dashed away and Serena put her pen down and pushed the report she had been working on to one side. A second or two later a rather hesitant young Vietnamese woman entered the office, a child of about eighteen months in her arms. Serena’s interest quickened. The child, a little girl, was obviously Amerasian. Though the hair was glossily black and poker straight, her eyes were blue, her skin so pale she could easily have been mistaken for a Celt.

  Lucy had been right about the mother too. All too often they were approached by prostitutes wishing to permanently relinquish their inconvenient babies. It was a task that no member of the orphanage staff liked to undertake. Mike Daniels insisted that every mother be counselled against abandoning her child, and that they were all told that they would be given whatever help they needed if they would only change their mind and keep their babies.

  The woman standing in front of her was obviously no prostitute. She was twenty-one or twenty-two and was dressed in a traditional silk ao dai. Her hair hung waist-length down her back, glossily sleek. Her face showed signs of strain but she was still stunningly pretty, and when she spoke it was in carefully phrased English.

  �
��Excuse me,’ Trinh said a little uncertainly. ‘I was told that I must come and speak to you if I wish to leave my daughter in your care.’

  Serena shook her head gently. ‘I am sorry, but it is not our policy to care for children who have mothers able to care for them…’ she began.

  Trinh flushed rosily. ‘I do not want to leave my daughter with you permanently. I was told that you sometimes took in children of working mothers on a daily basis. You see, I have no mother, and my sister cannot help me, as she also is working. As a secretary,’ she added quickly, in case the phrase should be misunderstood and it should be thought that Mai was a bar girl or a prostitute. ‘I am a hotel receptionist, but I need someone to look after Kylie for me through the day…’

  ‘Kylie?’ It suddenly seemed very quiet. Serena could hear no street noise, no noise from the nearby creche. She looked at the child and the child looked back at her with a confident, curious, blue-eyed stare, her hair tumbling forwards over her forehead in a familiar manner.

  ‘Kylie is my daughter’s name.’

  Serena sat very still. She had seen eyes like that before. And hair that fell the same way. The more she looked at the child, the more certain she became. There wasn’t only American and Vietnamese blood running in the little girl’s veins, there was a dash of Irish blood as well.

  ‘Kylie is an unusual name,’ she said, dragging her eyes away from the child and back to the mother with difficulty. ‘Is it her full name?’

  ‘No,’ Trinh said, slightly overawed by Serena’s elegantly cool, gold-haired beauty. ‘Her full name is Huyen Anderson Kylie.’

  Serena let out a long sigh. Why, knowing Kyle as well as she did, had the prospect of such an eventuality never occurred to her?

  ‘And your name?’ she asked, wondering if Kyle had known about the child before he had left on his last mission, wondering which of the emotions she was feeling was uppermost, grief, or rage, or wounded pride, or disillusionment.

  ‘Trinh,’ Trinh said, wondering why the English girl’s manner had suddenly become so taut.

  Serena drew in a deep, steadying breath. The next few minutes were not going to be pleasant ones for either of them. ‘We need to talk, Trinh,’ she said, and all the conflicting emotions that had initially assailed her faded, and in their place she felt only stoic resignation. ‘We need to talk about Kylie’s father.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Gavin found Hanoi fascinating. If the price he had to pay for being there was temporary loss of his freedom, then it was a price he was happy to pay. Hanoi seemed like the real Vietnam to him, the Vietnam he had not found in Saigon. Beneath the shabbiness and the poverty it was still a beautiful city. The wide, ponderous splendour of the Red River curved protectively around it in a giant arc, and nearer to the city, some of them even in its heart, was lake after lake.

  By daylight the Lake of the Restored Sword was even more beautiful it had been at dusk. On a small verdant island a pagoda rose, drowned in magnolia blossom and honeysuckle. Gavin stood looking at it, Dinh at his side. When he had first stepped out into the crowded streets he had been afraid that he would be regarded as an enemy, an American. He had been pleasantly surprised. On their walk through the crowded city streets he had met with no hostility, only curiosity.

  ‘There is a story about the pagoda,’ Dinh said as a pair of young lovers strolled past them, the girl with her head resting on the boy’s shoulder, their hands tightly clasped. ‘It is built on the spot where a turtle arose from the water, carrying a sword with which an ancient Vietnamese hero drove out Chinese invaders.’

  Gavin smiled. Dinh was no longer so stiff and formal with him. They were becoming companions, friends.

  ‘And now we will go to the school,’ Dinh said, turning away from the lake, walking past a bench full of old men resting and gossiping. ‘You will see how well prepared we are for imperialist bombing attacks.’

  When Dinh and Gavin entered the classroom, the girls showed the same interest and the curiosity that he had met with on the streets, though this time politely masked. Beside every desk was a trapdoor leading to an underground shelter.

  ‘My entire class of fifty children can disappear within seconds,’ the teacher told them with pride.

  The same meticulous protection against attack was visible in the streets. The French-built centre of the city was laid out on a craft basis, entire streets devoted to ivory carving or wood carving or leatherwork. Here there were no trapdoors, but every few yards they had to sidestep a manhole cover.

  Dinh removed one of the covers to reveal an underground dugout just large enough for one man. ‘And it is not only Hanoi that is well prepared against attack,’ he said as he replaced the cover. ‘Every village creche is similarly protected. Deep shelters have been dug beneath the cribs and the little ones can be lowered into them at a moment’s notice, en masse, on slings.’

  ‘I’d like to go out to one of the villages,’ Gavin said as they began to cross a road thick with cyclo-pousses and handcarts. ‘It’s the villagers who have been suffering most from the bombing, isn’t it?’

  Dinh nodded grimly. ‘I will take you, Comrade. You are going to learn more about life in the North than any western journalist has ever learned.’

  For the next few months Gavin was high on sheer adrenaline. When he returned to Europe he would be seen as an expert on North Vietnamese affairs. He would be able to write a book, several books. He still missed Gabrielle desperately, just as he would have missed her if he had remained in Saigon. When they had parted they bad known that it would be at least a year before they would be together again. His being in the North instead of the South made no difference to their separation, now that he had learned she knew where he was, and who he was with.

  ‘And she does,’ Dinh had assured him. ‘There is no need to worry anymore. Comrade. She will be with you in spirit and her heart and her mind will be at peace.’

  At Tet he shared in the celebrations as if he were a native-born Vietnamese. The streets were vivid with red flags, the air thick with the sound and smell of firecrackers. He and Dinh shared rice cakes and then mingled with the crowds in the street, slowly but surely making their way to Lake Hoan Kiem and the Ngoc Son temple. As they crossed the Hue Bridge, surrounded by peasants dressed in their festive best, Gavin knew that if Gabrielle had been beside him, it would have been the happiest, most memorable moment in his life.

  Two weeks later they set off for Thai Binh, a northern town near the coast which had suffered a heavy bombing attack.

  ‘When we return I am afraid that we will not see each other quite so often,’ Dinh said regretfully. ‘I am to undertake active duty again and this time in a place and on a mission that you are not to be informed of.’

  The jeep they were travelling in rocked and bumped over a potholed road.

  ‘How long will you be away?’ There was apprehension in Gavin’s voice. Whenever Dinh was away he was replaced by an impassive-faced NVA officer whom Gavin cordially disliked. And also, his year in North Vietnam was coming to an end. He had enough copy to keep him at his typewriter for a lifetime, and his longing for Gabrielle and le petit Gavin was becoming unbearable.

  ‘I cannot say, Comrade. It could be …’

  His sentence was never completed. Death came out of the air as it had come to so many thousands of others. One minute they were driving along the road leading to Haiphong with other army vehicles a few hundred yards in front of them, the next they were bombed into oblivion. Gavin could feel himself being sucked into the air, his eardrums bursting, his heart bursting, his only thought, ‘Not now! Jesus, not now! Not when I’m so close to seeing Gaby again!’

  He was slammed bodily into a tree, losing consciousness. When he regained it, blood was streaming down his face, and the air was thick and acrid with smoke and debris.

  ‘Dinh!’ he shouted, pushing himself to his knees, experiencing the same terrible fear that had seized him when they had been bombed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. ‘Dinh!’<
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  This time there was no answer. Dinh’s body was still in the burning jeep, the head at an improbable angle.

  ‘Oh, God, no!’ he sobbed, staggering to his feet. ‘Dinh! Dinh!’

  He began to run towards the leaping flames. Army officers from one of the vehicles that had been in front of diem reached it first. Dinh was dragged from the jeep and laid at the side of the road.

  Gavin ran stumblingly towards it, half blinded by pain and blood. ‘He’s dead,’ one of the army officers said cursorily, and then, turning, saw Gavin clearly for the first time.

  Gavin was oblivious of the sudden change of expression on the officer’s face. He stared down at Dinh, tears mixing with the blood on his cheek. He had been a good friend in North Vietnam, he had been his only friend.

  The army officer who had spoken to him was joined by another. They flanked Gavin, AK-47s at the ready.

  ‘I am Australian, not American,’ Gavin said, his first, old fear returning. ‘I am a guest in North Vietnam. A journalist.’

  ‘Come,’ one of the officers said, motioning him towards an undamaged vehicle.

  Gavin felt cold fingers beginning to close around his heart. They would, he supposed, take him back to Hanoi. In Hanoi he would be taken before Dinh’s military superiors, the superiors who had authorized his presence in North Vietnam. What would happen then? Would the impassive-faced NVA officer be assigned to him on a permanent basis? Would he be told that his mission was over and would he then be escorted back down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South? He had no way of knowing. All he could do was climb obligingly into the army truck and hope for the best.

  They did not take him to Hanoi. They continued northwards to an army camp.

  ‘I should be taken back to Hanoi,’ Gavin said patiently when he was first officially questioned. ‘The authorities in Hanoi know who I am. They have given me authorization to be in North Vietnam.’

  ‘Where are your papers?’ his interrogator demanded. ‘Where is your authorization?’