I am escorted to the head nun’s hut where I’m told to stay hidden.
After half an hour of anxious waiting, Co Ngoc comes with food and drink. She explains that the police have made a surprise visit so I will have to remain in the hut until they leave. She is calm. She says it won’t be long now.
I spend the next hour flicking idly through an English–Vietnamese dictionary and making plans for all the ways I am going to change my life: I will find a swimming pool. I used to swim three times a week in Melbourne. I will eat well and stop drinking so much – I will get my strength back. I will try to be a better teacher, and friend. I will learn to speak Vietnamese. I will stop running and maybe, after all, I will not die of loneliness.
I am released – the police have gone – and suddenly our time is up. We are leaving. I have been excited about going back, but now that we are packing our bags, rolling up our mats, I don’t feel ready.
We drink our last coconut juice; I break off a sprig from the vine outside the window; then we are closing the door of our little hut behind us.
On the way up the drive, Co Ngoc takes my hand. There are about a dozen nuns gathered around her Honda, waiting to say goodbye. Co Ngoc begins her farewells. I embrace Co My and we squeeze one another tight. I thank them all, again and again, blurry with tears. I will miss these women, their chanting, their laughter, their fruit and vegetables; the utter peace of this place. I will miss the work, the sense of purpose.
The head nun tells me I can come back whenever I want to; I say I wish I could stay forever. And then we’re riding out through the big stone archway, bound for the city.
TWENTY-TWO
It’s strange to get back to Saigon. Now I have to adjust again to the real world: the streets are an ambush of honking horns and urgent voices, pungent smells, steam rising like smoke from the asphalt.
Co Ngoc drops me outside the hotel. ‘I don’t know how to thank you enough,’ I say to her, climbing off the back of her mud-spattered Honda Dream. I’ve been clutching the sprig of flowers all the way home and now I tuck it behind her ear.
She smiles. ‘We had a good rest.’
‘Yes.’
We hug. ‘I will see you in class on Monday.’
‘Say hi to the boys.’
And then she rides away, the mother hen, grey robes flapping, leaving me standing on the footpath next to the soup stand, with my day pack, as if I haven’t been anywhere much at all.
Hien is listening to the radio and munching watermelon seeds, busily ignoring the two women who are filling out their forms on the brown couch.
‘Miss Ella!’
‘Hien!’ I give her a kiss and the bag of fruit I picked at the farm.
She picks out a custard apple, mang cau, and turns it over in her hand, appraisingly. ‘You have good holiday?’
‘Yes, very good. I feel like I’ve been away for a month.’ She pushes the seeds towards me and I take a few, crack them open with my teeth, spit out the shells. ‘Have you been well?’
She frowns. ‘Too busy! Too many tourist want room.’
One of the women puts her completed forms gingerly down on the desk. She has fine silver bangles right up to her elbow. We exchange a small smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Hien, were there any calls for me?’
‘Yes, your mother say to you to speak with her and you have notice, here, say package wait for you at post office.’
I take the notice and slowly climb the concrete stairs, past a mop and bucket on the first-floor landing, the dusty potted palm on the third. I unlock the door to Room 513: it is hot and stale, smells of fermenting banana. I open the doors to the balcony, throw away old fruit, unpack my few things, take a cold shower, do a load of hand-washing and brew lotus tea. Then I lie under the mosquito net with my tea and gaze out at the cloudy sky, trying to hold on to the essence of the past ten days, the stillness. I stay like that, unmoving, until sunset. The walls fade to a dull olive green, the stain retreats, and Bones starts to move around on the ceiling, his great bulging eyes making him look silly and vulnerable. The night is closing in.
I consider calling Hugh, or Suze, but I don’t feel ready to talk so I go down to the street and buy a bowl of pho and a bottle of water. Hien has gone home. I carry the soup up to my room and eat hunched over the coffee table. I drink some more tea. When it gets dark I switch on the light – I can stay up now as long as I like! – but it makes everything too stark so I turn it off again and light the kerosene lamp, as if I were back at the nunnery.
I gaze around at my dim surroundings. After six months, the room is still drab and anonymous – a transit lounge, not a home; a place to pause, not to stop – a physical manifestation of my helplessness. I imagine being back under the gazebo with the nuns, taking the short walk home to our bamboo hut, brushing our teeth in the moonlight, the straw mat, the scratchy blankets, the low rumble of Co Ngoc snoring. I ache for the farm – but now I am on my own again.
I light a cigarette from an old pack on the coffee table, my first in ten days, and go and sit out on the balcony in the dark. A group of backpackers are leaving the hotel, their excited voices lifting one over the other. They’ll be gone in a week. I have a sharp stab of regret that nothing went as planned, that I have strayed so far from that first green itinerary. When I’ve finished the cigarette, I walk in to the wardrobe, stand up on my tiptoes and pull down my big backpack. I reach in to the inside zip pocket and take out the bulging blue folder. I don’t do anything with it; I just hold it in my hands in the flickering lamplight. Then I put it down on the bedside table next to the shrine.
I stare at the photo of my nineteen-year-old dad. He looks, of course, just the same as ever: black hair to his shoulders, snow-white skin, glowering black eyes. I feel an upsurge of anger, new and surprising. When did I make him into such a hero? He fought the dirty war, he came home and cried, and then he walked out on us. He never looked back. Fuck! How great can the man be?
‘You’re no Pa Ingalls, are you,’ I say to the photo. Pa Ingalls always came back.
Naturally, he doesn’t respond.
I take the lamp into the bathroom to brush my teeth then creep into my bed. It can’t be much past eight.
I spend most of the weekend alone in a kind of post-nunnery daze. I drink mixed juice from the sinh to stand and get my hair cut at a hot toc on Pham Ngu Lao. I ride to the post office and pick up a birthday package from Jess containing a skipping rope and I drop into the second-hand bookshop to say hello to Thien. I don’t call Mum back – not yet; I’m afraid of what might come spilling out. At the Ben Thanh market I finally buy myself a tape deck and then spend hours in my room transcribing the rest of Appetite for Destruction. I take painkillers for a toothache that comes and goes, eat my meals sober at the Smiling Café, and read in the newspaper that Vietnam is on target to welcome one million tourists this year ‘as news of its beautiful scenery and cultural relics spreads around the world’. At last Vietnam is a country, not just a war.
On Sunday night I meet Suze and Dave at Cappuccino. Suze is wearing a shimmering gold lamé dress. We order pasta and the house red. It tastes terrible.
‘So what have I missed?’ I ask them.
‘Martin has announced his intended betrothal to Phuong,’ Dave says.
‘No way!’
‘Yes.’
‘Klaus leaves for Germany next week to see his dying father,’ Suze adds. Dave grimaces. I pat his hand. ‘And I went on a date with Hoang – Vietnamese ballroom dancing … yeah, I know, I know. Please just don’t say a thing, honey, not a single word.’
Our food comes, rich, creamy pasta, but I long for home-grown pumpkin and leafy greens.
I frown at Suze. ‘All right, then … what about your piece on the MIAs?’
‘Scrapped. I’ve started something on export-processing zones, those safe havens for slave labour.’
‘Another good news story,’ quips Dave.
‘So how was it?’ Suze asks. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘What did you do there? Lots of prayer and hard physical labour?’
I nod. I am misty-eyed describing the workings of the farm, the different nuns and their various habits, the food, the gardens, the midnight chanting.
‘To the nuns,’ Dave says solemnly. We clink glasses.
‘How’s Ariel?’ I ask casually, glancing down at my plate.
‘He met up with a French journalist who works with AFP and they’re collaborating on a couple of stories,’ Dave says.
‘Wow! That’s great!’ I look up, smiling. ‘He’ll be really excited about that!’ Then, ‘Has he mentioned me at all?’
Dave smiles. ‘Only yesterday he asked after you with a similar tortured nonchalance.’
My heart quakes. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said you were on some kind of Buddhist retreat.’
After dinner, the three of us pile onto Suze’s motorbike to head downtown. Some German guy is putting on a dance party in a warehouse. When we get there, the vast room is so packed with expats we could be anywhere in the world. Ariel is nowhere to be seen.
I catch up with the Australian teacher, Kate, and her new Swedish boyfriend. I say hello to the big Texan, who is homesick and wants to buy me a drink. I take a soda water and tell him a couple of Hugh’s Vietnamese jokes. I chat with an Air France pilot just to listen to his accent but it only makes me long for Ariel, for his careful opinion and his beautiful thoughts. I would do anything just to talk with him. Right now, just to talk would be enough.
Suze and I end up outside smoking cigarettes, sitting in the gutter like the night we first met. ‘I’m not going to start seeing him again,’ she says. ‘I told him it was a one-off.’
I sigh and shove her arm. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘I’m serious, honey. I just needed to see him, to see how it felt.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’
‘Are you missing your young Parisian?’
‘So much.’
‘From what I gather he’s feeling pretty lonesome too. What’s to stop you from calling him up? It’s been a while since the whole White Water debacle.’
‘I don’t know … I don’t know if I’d be able to do things any differently, you know? I don’t want to just fuck it up again.’
Then I tell her about my father, about him coming here to fight, about him disappearing. It comes out so easily it is strangely exhilarating.
‘I can’t believe you’ve never told me this shit,’ Suze says, eyes wide. ‘All our late-night conversations … honey, you’re a dark horse.’
‘I grew up not talking about it. It was too shameful. It would send my mother to the drink. Whatever you do, just don’t mention the war.’
She nods, squinting at me. ‘You know, a lot of those guys, the ones who came back, pretty much stayed MIA. You know what I’m saying?’
I shrug. ‘Or maybe he just never gave a fuck. In twenty years he hasn’t tried to call me, not once. I don’t know why it still hurts so much.’
Suze puts her arm around me, and tells me about her father, a historian, an academic, with strong ethics, great humanitarian values, who was never at home and always with his lover – everyone knew.
‘Far out, Suze, and now here you are being the other woman,’ I point out.
‘Fuuuck!’ She slaps her forehead. ‘You know, I have never made that connection. Man … is this me just trying to get my father’s attention? What a cliché!’
We laugh and laugh, and then Suze goes back inside to dance. There’s a bartender she has her eye on. I find a xich lo to take me home to bed.
Miss Jenny is waiting for me when I arrive at Speak Easy on Monday. She asks after my vacation then demands to know my intentions for the rest of the year. I have just one month left on my visa: will I be staying in Vietnam or going home? I stare at her blankly because I don’t have an answer. I’m not in the habit of making long-term plans. She informs me I am an asset to the school and that she can offer me extra classes if I want them. We are standing in the cool, bare foyer. I ask her if I can have a couple of weeks to think it over. It seems important this time that I actually make a decision.
I get into class ten minutes early and most of my students are already seated. My heart swells. I tell them how much I missed them and Minh says he missed me too – the stand-in teacher was boring! Ngu has had a haircut and I wonder again if one of the pea pod, Phuc, is pregnant – there is a definite bump. When the last couple of students have arrived, I ask what they did while I was gone. Mr Trung reports that they were given a test of their comprehension. ‘I think this was a very good way to show our improvement,’ he says gravely.
I frown. ‘Hmm, yes. So you would like more tests?’
There is a flurry of nods. Oops. I’ve never even considered assessment. ‘Okay, well, I’ve got something else planned for today.’
Over the weekend, between transcribing Guns N’ Roses songs, I cut a mountain of single words from a pile of old newspapers and now I organise the students into small groups and ask them to create story collages. On the way to class I even remembered glue and card.
They set to work. I move around the groups watching what they are doing. After two weeks away it feels great to be back with my students, teaching with a clear head. It makes me realise that this job is no longer just the thing I’ve fallen into, but has become, instead, something I love, that feels good and truly mine.
When an hour is up, I ask the class to finish up and the groups take turns reading out their work. The comic tale about foreigners drinking bia hoi, from Minh’s group, gets the strongest response. I line the stories up along the window ledge; maybe I will get them laminated. We spend the next half-hour chatting about the problem of beer and riding motorbikes. We learn some new words: inebriated, irresponsible, idiot! They love this last one. I don’t mention my little accident outside the Apocalypse.
After class, Co Ngoc and I go off to meet her boys for the monthly soup and lesson. When we get there, Co Ngoc tells me Quy won’t be coming. She came back from the nunnery to find him in hospital after a street fight.
‘Is he okay?’
‘He will be okay.’
‘What happened?’
She shrugs. ‘He is angry. When they are together, many boys, they fight – like roosters. Their self-esteem is very low.’
I nod. ‘What about the drugs, Co Ngoc? Is there any change?’
She shrugs. ‘Same-same, no different. Maybe hospital will be good for him.’
‘I hope so.’
Thanh, Anh, Bao, Duc, Dung and Chinh all turn up; only Quy and Hoc are absent. The boys give me their completed word searches and I give Duc back his CD with the rest of my handwritten lyrics. His face lights up.
‘Thank you, Teacher. I am so happy. Next time, can you help me? Can you know AC/DC? From Uc, right?’
I laugh and groan. ‘Yes. Okay. AC/DC next.’
We eat and talk, the boys practising their English, me practising my Vietnamese, learning new words and phrases, correcting intonation. Apparently, Chinh has been visiting restaurants trying to find a job as a chef’s apprentice. There is nothing yet but there are many more restaurants to visit. Thanh looks strong and well, nothing like the boy I met in a hospital bed many months ago. He has stopped making the fabric flowers but has set up, with Co Ngoc’s help, his own table outside the An Dong market in Cholon where he makes little plasticine figures on sticks, of dragons and pretty girls and horses, to sell to children and young lovers. He enjoys making things, maybe one day he will be a real artist.
After soup, in the twilight, I get on my bike and ride to the Blue Dragon. I know Ariel won’t be there – it is too early – I just want to be near the idea of him, his phantom. I peer through the glass front. A couple of his bar staff are inside drinking coffee and playing cards. I wave and they wave back. I cycle back to the hotel.
On Wednesday my tooth is aching again. I dose up on painkill
ers and go to class and afterwards ride out towards Cholon during a rain shower, just for something to do. I’m only halfway there when I come level with a crowd gathered at the side of the street. I tune into the frenzied squawking and excited shouts – a cock fight. Usually I would grit my teeth and keep going but this time I pull over.
The onlookers are jammed tightly together in their rain ponchos; I lock my bike and push through. A few glance up but they’re too absorbed in the action to mind me. Inside the circle, the cocks are in the final stage of battle. One is barely standing, his white feathers soaked red. The other is also badly injured but just keeps coming and coming, pecking and slashing with the blades tied to his spurs, trained to kill. The crowd roars and cheers.
The blood lust reminds me of the scene at the end of The Deer Hunter, when the war is finally over but our fucked-up hero Christopher Walken returns to Saigon, where he spends each night in a seedy backroom playing Russian roulette; putting himself back, voluntarily, into his moment of trauma – again and again; exploding heads, all that cheering and clapping. Until at last he gets his wish and the bullet blows his brains out.
What happens in war to lock some people into their horror so they cannot move on? Is it what they see or what they do? Their fear or their shame? The pain caused to them or the pain they cause others? It all seems so unfathomable, beyond the reach of the uninitiated. The impenetrable mystery of the thousand-yard stare.
A sudden silence brings me into the present. It is over: one cock lies dead, the other sways on uncertain feet. Within minutes, bets are settled, the birds are removed and the crowd dissipates, as if it never happened. But there is blood, dark and sticky, all over the ground.
I stand and stare at it for a long time, mesmerised, then get on my bike and cycle on towards Cholon through the watery streets, the rainbow of ponchos.
In the evening I go to the Smiling Café. Allan is sitting with his bottle of whisky and what looks like a foreign broadsheet. Our eyes meet briefly as I pass and I nod; he nods back. I sit down and Chanh brings a beer without my asking. He stays to chat for a while then goes to the kitchen to order my dinner.
The Rainy Season Page 22