Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  “I see you’re looking at Mr. Devereux,” Marcus said. “Well, he’s yours now. That’s the picture Mike wanted you to have.”

  “Is that his name? I’d assumed it was Langford.”

  “No; he was on the maternal side, I reckon. So far back, not much is known. I’ve never heard of any other Devereux relatives. The family must have died out, or moved to the mainland.”

  “It’s a fine painting,” I said.

  It was; and I nursed a quiet excitement at taking possession of such an excellent piece of colonial portraiture: an excitement I prudently tried to hide, in case Marcus should change his mind.

  The picture was even better executed than my memory of it, and had the power to hint at its subject’s spirit. I bent and squinted at the signature, which my fifteen-year-old self hadn’t thought of doing. N. Howard: I’d heard of no such colonial painter; no doubt he was forgotten, or had been in Van Diemen’s Land only briefly. I’d have to check with the Museum. Howard’s subject, hidden here all this time, continued to ruminate ironically on something to the right of the frame, which was my left. Certainly he was a handsome man: my memory here had proved correct. But he appeared more youthful now, with his mane of brown hair, than he’d done twenty-five years ago. After all, he was now something like ten years younger than I, instead of some fifteen years older. And the intensity and play of opposites in this face were not things that my young self had merely imagined. I also saw now the things I’d failed to do at fifteen: humor, sensitivity and arrogance mingled, and an underlying aggressiveness whose nature couldn’t be guessed. The likeness to Mike—and, more distantly, to Ken—struck me again.

  “The picture belongs to all three of us, strictly speaking,” Marcus said. “But Mike knew Cliff and I had no interest in old pictures. Not much interest in ancestors either. Cliff and I hardly know anything about this bloke. So Mike wanted you to have it as a gift, you being so interested in history. That and the old diaries this great-great-grandfather Devereux kept, which Cliff and I aren’t interested in either. Never read them, to tell you the truth, so I don’t know what’s in them. Dad read them, but he didn’t talk about them much, except he said there was a lot of politics and filth in them. So it’s all a last present to you from Mike, you might say. Of course, if he turns up, you can give them back to him. Here.”

  He turned the key of the writing-slope, pulled back the lid, and drew out the two calfskin-covered notebooks. He handed them to me somewhat awkwardly, watching my face. I flicked open the first few pages of the top one: pages I hadn’t had time to read, at fifteen.

  Journal, 1848-1850

  Commenced on board the hulk “Medway,” at Bermuda. Continued on board the transport “Sir Stamford Raffles” and at Van Diemen’s Land. Robert Devereux

  June 21st 1848. Aboard the hulk “Medway.” They are talking about me, through the wall ...

  I closed the book again, pretending that my interest was cursory; my heart was racing at the prospect of possession of such archives, and I was fearful that Marcus would change his mind about handing them over. “Yes. Interesting,” I said. “I’ll give them a good read at home. I’m honored Mike’s left me these things.”

  He smiled; and I saw his sly streak. “Not much of an honor,” he said. “Haven’t you wondered why the old Dad kept his great-great-grandfather hidden away in here, instead of hanging him over the mantelpiece?”

  He had a secret to impart, I saw, and he was enjoying it. Yes, I said, I had wondered why.

  “For the reason people always used to hide ancestors in Tasmania, Ray. He was a convict.”

  “I see.” I stared at the picture in surprise. The opening pages of the journal were explained—or partly. I’d assumed Devereux was a colonial official, or military man: a guard, in other words, not a prisoner. Now, before I could check myself, I found myself using the old nineteenth-century cliché. “The stain,” I said.

  Marcus’s amused grin widened, and he nodded. “The stain,” he agreed. “And this Devereux must have been a bad bugger. The old Dad was terribly ashamed of it. I don’t give a stuff, myself—I’m not such a snob as the old man was. But you know how it used to be, Ray: it was always the big disgrace, having convicts in the family, wasn’t it? People never wanted to know anything about their great-grandparents, for fear they’d find one.”

  Yes, I said, I knew.

  In old John Langford’s generation the discovery would have been much more disturbing than it was now; and the truth was that it still created mixed feelings, despite our current declarations that the discovery of convict ancestors should be a matter for pride. For John Langford, it would have been the greatest shame imaginable. Convict stock: now I understood his anger. The threat all Tasmanians secretly feared: it had come up through the fathoms of the years to violate him, to disgrace and diminish him: to enlist him in its squalid and gloomy ranks forever. And he had wanted simply to reject it; he had locked it away and hidden it, as his father and grandfather had done. But he could not hide it from himself. It had always been here, like evidence of an hereditary illness.

  “It’s a wonder he didn’t burn these diaries,” I said.

  “He was too bloody mean,” Marcus said. “He thought they might be valuable—even though Devereux was a convict. Apparently this feller was a cut above the average. Good family, and all that.”

  “He doesn’t look like a criminal,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “Dad said it was something political. He was Irish. Always made trouble, the Irish, didn’t they? You’ll probably find out in the diaries, if you can get through ‘em. Maybe you’ll publish them, Ray.”

  He was fingering the writing-slope, and now he grinned sideways at me, with a flash of country cunning. “You don’t get this letter case, though. The old man used to reckon it was Devereux‘s, so it’s pretty old. Nice workmanship: mahogany and brass. Worth a bit, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. It’s a nice heirloom,” I said. “I wonder how a convict would manage to bring a thing like that out with him. Do you mind if I have a look?”

  He nodded somewhat reluctantly, and I began to examine the interior. “These writing-slopes usually have secret drawers,” I said. “They’re not hard to find.”

  I proved to be right; it pulled back on a spring in the usual way, and Marcus looked at me sharply. “Well, well,” he said. “We never knew that was there.” He moved closer, as though fearing I’d purloin the contents, and peered into the drawer. “Anything valuable in there?”

  There were only some personal letters. I unfolded one of them; it plainly came from the same period as the diaries, and was signed Catherine. My heart raced again; these letters had been undisturbed and unread for over a hundred years, and I lusted after them. “They seem to be from his wife,” I said. “Can I put them with the diaries?”

  “Take them,” Marcus said. “They’ve got no interest for me.”

  His expression was glum; he’d perhaps been expecting money, and he looked around the storeroom now as though wondering why he was here. This had been a lot of talking for Marcus. The light through the blind was going, and his features were indistinct, his eyes lost in their deep sockets. When he spoke again, it seemed to me that he took on the dark authority of his youth, when he’d moved through the hop fields with his staff and tally-book.

  “Some people carry the past on their backs like a saddle,” he said. “My father did. It ate into his hide. I reckon this stuff affected him, sitting in here. Let’s get it bundled up, Ray.”

  I put the journals and letters carefully into my briefcase; then I picked up the set of news photographs, and I was held for a moment by the one on top.

  Mike walked in a line of South Vietnamese soldiers through a paddy field in the Mekong Delta. They were marching on a dyke above the rice field’s shallow water; young shoots could be seen. A small cinecamera was slung from Langford’s wrist by a strap; he wore cotton military fatigues and jungle boots like the soldiers. But unlike the soldiers, he ha
d no helmet, and his blond hair was bright against the background of water and trees. He looked very tall, among the smaller Vietnamese men, but their faces were engraved with histories of experience that made his face look childlike. He was young; it was the sixties; he had a beauty that made him a little unreal. The war would always go on, and he would never die. He smiled with cool amusement, his lower lip pushed out.

  The photograph, like that decade, like the war, like the nineteenth-century portrait on the table, was dead, and gave off the subtle scent of all dead objects. And I reminded myself once again that Mike himself was almost certainly dead. Yet he and the man in the painting both resumed life as I looked at them, their smiles one smile, repeated on two different faces.

  5.

  I switched the desk lamp off, and sat in darkness.

  Forty, I said. Maybe you’ve only made it to forty. No further ever, now. Four months younger than me. November child and July child. You the arrow in the air; I the crab under the rock. Now I’ve got your hoard, under my rock. What am I going to do with it?

  Over the past two weeks, most of us had continued to maintain that Langford must still be alive. But this week something had happened to reduce our hopes. It had also made me decide to do as Diana Lockhart had suggested: I’d go up to Bangkok to see what I could find out for myself. I’d written to Jim Feng to arrange a meeting with him, and was booked on a flight from Melbourne in ten days.

  A number of English-speaking papers around the world, while hedging their bets about Langford’s fate, had this week published what amounted to obituaries. A final assessment was being made of his achievement, and of what the papers were now calling his “legend.” All this because of an unsubstantiated report that had come in from the Thai-Cambodian border.

  Even the New York Times had run a three-column story, and tributes had flowed in from journalists in North America, Europe and Asia. Foreign correspondents seemed more or less unanimous in regarding him as one of the best war photographers produced by the Vietnam conflict; he even had hero-worshipers who’d declared him one of the best of all time. I’d been startled by the upsurge of sentiment; Mike seemed to have been liked—even loved—by just about everyone he’d ever worked with. He’d come to belong to the fraternity of international journalists rather than to a country; but the Australian press was claiming him as its own, and was striking organ-notes of sentimental pride in feature articles. At the same time, it was able to revel in a mystery, and to hint that Langford could still reappear.

  Like Lockhart, I’d never thought that could be counted on, considering the nature of the Khmer Rouge regime. Yet our hopes had been kept alive until now by Langford’s colleagues of the press in Asia.

  “Langford can’t have bought it,” one of them said. He was a cheerful, middle-aged Australian broadcasting correspondent working in Bangkok: one of Mike’s drinking mates, interviewed on television. “Not Snow,” he said. “He’ll turn up, and buy us all drinks in the Foxhole Bar.”

  But then the report of Mike’s death came in.

  It had originated with a new batch of Khmer refugees who’d got across the border, and it was vague about details. The exact way in which Langford was supposed to have died remained uncertain, since the refugees hadn’t witnessed it, but had got it by word of mouth. On one thing they were unanimous, though: a Western correspondent answering to his description had been taken prisoner by the Khmer Rouge—and this man was said to have been executed.

  —I sometimes think of writing up some memoirs from them, now that the war’s over. I hope of course that you’ll never get to listen to them—no one ever has—but if you do, they may be of interest. You always were fond of history....

  I punched off the letter-tape again. Did he really want me to “write up” these memoirs for him? He didn’t say so directly; he was always a little sly like that. But I thought he did want it; and if he proved to be lost irrevocably, I’d do it: I knew that already. So did he, standing behind my shoulder.

  The taped diaries, nearly all of which I’d now heard, had surprised me deeply. Mike’s silences had always made me see him as inarticulate; even unimaginative. But not on tape, it had turned out: not when he was alone, speaking into his machine. Was it old John Langford’s beatings that froze him outwardly? His mother’s early death? There was an inner life I’d half suspected, but had seldom been given a glimpse of; now it was all in my hands, more complex and intense than I would have thought possible—to be dealt with as I wished.

  There’d be a great deal to be sorted through, if I were to do this properly. What I’d have to do first would be to organize all the material into categories: tapes, photographs, work diaries, notebooks, reports and the letters Marcus had given me. There was a small mountain of material: eventually I’d have to start reference cards. I was thinking of a text illustrated with his photographs: a memorial.

  The work would be extensive, but not difficult. His notebooks and papers were well organized and barely travel-stained—like the effects of a fastidious bachelor whose existence was completely stable; even dull. Yes: it was all in surprisingly good condition for the personal effects of a war photographer who moved constantly from country to country and battle zone to battle zone, his existence seen as utterly fluid, rootless and dangerous—especially by certain kinds of safe, wistful men who openly envied him, and who questioned me about him with a common expression of naked yearning on their faces: men who lived as Mike did only in their fantasies, and who wouldn’t have found his reality tolerable, even for a day.

  The work diaries interested me least, containing as they did a bare professional record of assignments covered, costs of film stock, and expenses claimed. But they all had one feature in common that did interest me. Each one of them had the same epigraph written in the flyleaf, in Langford’s small, careful hand:You have never lived

  Until you almost died;

  And for those who fight for them

  Life and freedom have a flavor

  The protected will never know.

  No author was given. Where did he hit upon it? When I’d first read it, I’d been touched and embarrassed, as though I’d uncovered something no one was meant to see; and I reflected that when a man of action revealed the secrets of his spirit, he was apt to seem jejune. There was something almost schoolboyish about his having faithfully entered that inscription into the work diary every year. But now, looking at it again, I no longer felt so patronizing. This was the creed he’d lived by, and had probably died for. He’d earned the right to inscribe it in his work diaries —even though it did make me see him as incurably young. At thirty and at forty he’d been the same young man, hitting himself each day with the elixir of risk, and writing into the book of each new year the same magic rune that made it all worthwhile. Well, why not? He’d probably lived more intensely in any two weeks than I’d done in a lifetime.

  The notebooks had at first appeared to be personal journals, but had proved on examination not to be. Each of them carried the title “Contact Notes,” and these contact notebooks dealt entirely with other people—mostly political, military and business leaders in Indochina. They took the form of running diaries, detailing Langford’s meetings with the subjects of the entries. Until I’d listened to the tapes, it had been hard for me to see why a war photographer would want background material of such detail, or would record these meetings so meticulously.

  It had taken many evenings to carry out this audition of what I’ll call his audio diary. He had each cassette neatly labeled, and they dated from February 1965 to the week preceding the fall of Saigon—just over a year ago.

  It was clear that in many of these recorded diary entries he had in mind his projected memoirs. There was a good deal of analysis of the progress of the Vietnam War, records of his experiences of battle, and impressions of military and political leaders. Such passages recorded a life lived on the plane of momentous public events; life as history. He certainly documented it well. And I’d begun to suspect t
hat he’d seen himself as living inside his own preplotted story from the time he’d first arrived in Singapore. But many other passages were highly personal. These, as he’d indicated in his taped letter, were pretty clearly records made only for himself. Electrical recording has made this fatally easy to do: much easier than confiding to a written diary. But even in such passages, intimate though they were, I found that Langford still remained somehow a little removed, as he used to do in life; and I wondered if there were once even franker passages that he’d decided to wipe.

  The narrative I’d decided I might attempt wouldn’t be quite the sort of book he’d planned to do himself. I’d take the liberty of expanding on the account in the audio diary where I felt I had the knowledge or insight to do so—and where his friends might add to the record, when I got up to Bangkok. I might even take some of the liberties of the novelist—some, but not too many. If the result proved more revealing than he might have anticipated, I’d have to hope that he’d forgive me; but it was the inner story, after all, that was the one most worth telling.

  In portraying the outer story, I’d be helped by his photographs: the two books on the Indochina war published in New York and London, and the unpublished prints, negatives and transparencies he’d left in my hands.

  I drew some of these out now: black-and-white prints from a package labeled The Delta. Images of the Vietnam War accumulated and flowered in the circle of light on the desk—most of them taken by Langford, some by his fellow cameramen or by friends, since these featured Mike himself. South Vietnamese troops in steel helmets slogged thigh-deep through the water of a rice paddy, on patrol: small, wiry men, their faces set with fatigue. They rested on a bank, automatic rifles stacked beside them. They lay flat, under fire. I pulled out more, and the desk was covered with black-and-white glimpses of that long, fruitless conflict which a year ago had slid into history, with all the other wars. Langford’s war: the center of his life.