Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  At first neither the assailants nor Sao and his friend had raised their voices. Vlady and Helge had been paralysed by this silent tableau, which from a distance appeared as a grotesque display of shadow puppetry. Then the girl had screamed for help, and Vlady and Helge had rushed across the street screaming abuse and calling for the police. The assailants had run away. Vlady helped to lift Sao, whose nose was bleeding. Helge undid her scarf and used it to stem the flow of blood. The young girl was sobbing.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘My balls are still here,’ Sao had replied, managing a weak smile. ‘As for the rest, you can see. Thank you.’

  ‘Who were they?’ inquired Helge.

  Sao’s friend spoke for the first time. ‘Young Communists!’ she hissed. ‘One of them’s been after me for months. When he found out I was seeing Sao, he threatened to kill him.’

  ‘I hope you will report this to the police,’ Vlady said somewhat pompously. ‘I would be happy to be a witness. Do you know his name?’

  Sao laughed. ‘The boy who wanted to castrate me? Of course, but do you know that his father is the party boss in this town? If you complain, I am the one who will suffer. They will deport me.’

  ‘How can you be so calm?’

  ‘I am not at all calm,’ Sao replied, keeping his anger under control. ‘I am very angry, very embittered and filled with thoughts of revenge, but I am also powerless here in your very Democratic Republic. If I lost my self-control, I would be dead within a few weeks.’

  A bewildered Vlady indicated that he could not follow Vietnamese logic. Sao smiled through the blood. ‘I’m a trained soldier. A war veteran. I was taught to kill the enemy silently. I could have broken their necks if you had not arrived. And then the Stasi would have engineered an incident in my factory. Something heavy would have fallen on me. A small accident, another foreign worker dead. So you see, my friend, you saved my manhood and my life. Now please, we must go home. She to her mother’s apartment, I to my dormitory.’

  Helge insisted on taking Sao back to her own home. There she treated his wounds, none of which were severe, and overcame his reluctance to impose on them any further. Sao had a bath and, later, after an improvised meal, Vlady drove him to the Vietnamese dormitory, an ugly prison-style structure on the edge of the town. They arranged to meet the next day. Thus was their friendship born.

  A year after the Dresden incident, Sao disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. One day a letter arrived from Moscow. Sao wanted Helge and Vlady to know that he had settled there and was happy. He had cousins, friends, fellow veterans from the Vietnam War dotted all over the Soviet Union. He was in constant communication with them all and travelled a great deal. He hoped Vlady, Helge and little Karl were well. He would see them soon. That was all the letter said.

  Over the next few years they received the odd postcard; on occasion a visitor from Moscow would bring them a present from Sao, usually a large unmarked tin of caviar with a note from their friend informing them that this was a caviar specially designated for the Politburo. After tasting it, Vlady and Helge realized that Sao was not joking. They talked of him often, speculating as to his activities and whereabouts.

  Vlady now recalled his many conversations with Sao. After a while he had begun to ignore his friend’s endless fantasies, all of which revolved around making money. The two men could not have been more dissimilar. Their contrasts reflected their conditioning and origins.

  Vlady Meyer had imbibed German idealism. Despite his addiction to many aspects of Marxist thinking, he was, deep down, a romantic agonizer. A living example, if not a parody, of why the German vocabulary current in the world language, English, has to contain words like Weltschmerz, Angst, Zeitgeist.

  Once an ardent Young Communist, Sao had almost lost his life in the war, and seeing what was happening now he was impatient with abstractions. He came from a middle-peasant family. His father had fought in the French Army. For a long time, Sao had obliterated memories of his origins, but in the deprivation and gloom of the postwar years, he remembered his mother and uncles and how important verbs like buy, build, exchange and sell were to their everyday life. Increasingly alienated from the state for which he had fought, Sao moved backwards in time and forward simultaneously. He now appreciated the merits of the old peasant economy and pre-urban family relations. These could not be recreated, but the memory was important in helping him to reconstruct his own social status. He did not want to deaden the shocks produced by the new order that existed in the world. Whereas Vlady’s instinct was to see the new realities as a depressing intrusion, Sao was determined to take advantage of them. It was this side of their family friend that appealed to young Karl.

  Vlady was a useful counter-balance. Their regular exchange of ideas and experiences laid the basis for a relationship that had become fruitful for both of them.

  Ten years passed. One day in 1992, Sao turned up without warning and knocked on the door of Vlady’s apartment. At first Helge did not recognize him. Then she screamed with pleasure, bringing Vlady and Karl to the door. All three were taken aback. The old slave-worker was attired in a three-piece designer suit, a black silk fedora sat uncomfortably on his head and he was loaded with presents. He looked like a fifties photograph of Bao Dai, the deposed emperor of Vietnam, in his Parisian exile.

  The reunion was joyous. He had insisted on taking them all to a small island off the Baltic coast, a seaside resort that was once the exclusive holidaying preserve of Party bigwigs. Sao, who spent a lot of time at the Casino in Nice, had assumed that there would be some luxury facilities, but he was a few years too early. His obvious disappointment had amused Helge, but it was a relaxed week. Vlady and Helge had not realized how much the continuous political activity of the last six months had exhausted them. Meetings, street demonstrations, all-night discussions had taken over their lives. Poor Karl had been virtually ignored. Now, thanks to Sao, they were all together again.

  The poor citizens of the DDR were about to be orphaned, shell-shocked and raped, but few of them realized this in the heady weeks before reunification. Vlady was one of the few. His doubts had been aired in the press and on television. In those days, the little cabbages, mimicking the Big Cabbage in Bonn, used to respond in a friendly, albeit patronizing, fashion.

  ‘Professor Meyer, you and your friends belong to the old world. We know you will always be a socialist at heart, but we don’t hold that against you. We are ready to forgive and forget. You can still render some services to democracy. Come with us. Let us build the new Germany together.’

  Sao knew that Vlady’s thoughts were elsewhere. Vlady had shown only polite interest in the story of his friend’s transformation from slave-worker to property-holder. Vlady and Helge had begun to feel guilty after a few days in the sunshine. At night Sao would hear them whispering to each other. He couldn’t hear them properly but certain words and phrases indicated that they were obsessed with the future of their country.

  It was young Karl who had followed every curve in the story. How Sao had exploited the quickened pace of history to transform his own life. The adventures of a Vietnamese entrepreneur and how he made his first million was just more exciting, thought Karl. He had been alienated from his parents and their recent activities. The big demonstrations in Berlin and Dresden had left the young man unmoved. He was, by temperament, a creature of the committee room rather than the street. Displays of public emotion embarrassed him. The passions of the multitude frightened him. Vlady and Helge were reduced to exchanging looks of despair or resignation as they watched their young cub grow.

  Sao’s odyssey had excited Karl. It was as if Sao had cast a spell on him. He listened carefully, his eyes sparkling, and occasionally he interrupted the story-teller to get exact details. It was Karl’s interest that alerted his parents and compelled them – against their will, because all they wanted to think about was the precarious condition of the Politburo in Berlin – to pay serious attention to the tales being told by thei
r Vietnamese friend.

  Sao had fled to Moscow. Compared to Dresden and Berlin, he told them, Moscow was a cosmopolitan paradise. He had immediately established contact with the Vietnamese community and found a bed in a two-roomed apartment, which he shared with only five other people. Two of these were always travelling and, of the rest, there was one who came from a neighbouring village. Sao asked them about his cousin in Kiev, whom he hadn’t seen for several years. They had no knowledge of him. When Sao asked if they would take a letter from him on their next trip to the Ukraine, they laughed and took Sao along instead. Travel documents and money posed no problems. It soon became clear that the two travellers were unofficial businessmen, involved in the task of primitively accumulating capital. They ran a growing black market for Vietnamese communities throughout the Soviet Union. Their distribution network was both efficient and reliable.

  Sao was staggered by the scale of the operation and by the fact that the only currency they used was dollars or deutsche marks. On the train to Kiev, he thought of his own country. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the leaders in Hanoi had found themselves at the head of a ruined country. Its ecology had been severely damaged by chemical warfare; its bombed cities needed to be rebuilt; its orphans had to be found homes; its demobilized soldiers, traumatized by the war, had to be found jobs; surplus labour had to be sold to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in return for badly needed equipment and essential commodities.

  The United States had promised reparations, but reneged on each and every promise and imposed an economic embargo instead. Sao knew that his country was being punished. They had dared to resist and win. Now they had to pay a price for their sensational victory against the most powerful country in the world.

  The war years had been full of tension, anguish, fear, but also a sense of excitement at the thought that they would one day win and reunite Vietnam. That was all over. Peace had brought few dividends for the common people. Sao was bitter. He had fought hard. He knew that paradise was only a dream, but surely, he had thought, the immediate future would bring some relief.

  Hope, struggle, hope, betrayal, hope, revenge, hope, collapse … no hope. He had said all that at a party meeting in Hanoi. Many heads, too many, had nodded in silent agreement. Within three weeks they had packed him off to a new front, the DDR, a misnamed country ruled by misled bureaucrats. What a life.

  He felt he had come to the crossing of ways. He was travelling on shifting ground. His life could take many routes. He looked at his compatriots, busy working out what they would buy and sell in Kiev, and decided to join them. He felt the network should be extended to every major city in the Soviet Union and that they should develop links with Vietnamese workers in Eastern Europe.

  ‘Commodities needed to be circulated,’ Sao had laughed, ‘and who better than us to circulate them? For centuries we had been ruled by the Chinese. Then it was the French. Then came the Russians. Now, we thought, let us work for an economic system.’

  Sao and his friends developed a tried and tested network of middlemen, which straddled the whole country. Their money became a mountain. With the beginning of the collapse, they insisted on being paid in dollars or marks. Some of the money they filtered back to Vietnam. Many a new motorcycle or television/video set in Hanoi was the result of such activities. Hanoi actually experienced a tiny boom as it began to catch up with Ho Chi Minh City, which was still really Saigon.

  ‘In the early days,’ Sao continued, ‘we had to share our profits with party bureaucrats big and small, starting with party officials of the oblast and ending up with members of the Central Committee. Then they decided to change the system. At first we panicked: could this be the end of us? We were small fish in a medium-sized lake. Now we would become minnows in the sea. The sharks would get everything. How wrong we were, my friends. How wrong we were.’

  He stopped at this point and laughed. And laughed. There was more than a trace of hysteria in his laughter.

  ‘What’s so funny Uncle Sao?’ Karl inquired in a puzzled voice.

  ‘What’s so funny is that we were the only ones in a position to exploit the collapse. Nobody had imagined that the Soviet Union would disintegrate so quickly, but it did. It did. Yeltsin was in a hurry to dump Gorbachev, and if he had to dump the old Soviet Union first he would do so. And he did. The Russian mafia was caught by surprise. Anyway, their connections were neither as extensive nor as efficient as ours. They had relied too heavily on their links with party officials. The old system was paralysed. Distribution collapsed. We Vietnamese came to the rescue, but at a price, just like they had come to the rescue during our war. At a price. We established a chain of command. We moved goods. We developed our own transport system. We stepped into the breach, my young Karl. And now your Uncle Sao has an apartment in Paris and a French wife. I can travel anywhere, but Vlady and Helge are my two best friends. Real friends. There is nobody like them anywhere else. Remember that Karl, always. OK?’

  And then he was gone again.

  A week or so ago he had rung Vlady to warn him of his imminent arrival in Berlin on important business. They had agreed a date for dinner. Vlady was on his way.

  Nguyen van Sao, son of Vietnamese peasants, was submerged in a foam-filled bath in a luxury suite on the third floor of the Kempinski. He was in a foul mood. It had been an awful day. The flight from London had been delayed. Berlin immigration had inspected his French passport with too much care, but, biggest disappointment of all, he had failed earlier in the day to acquire a seventeenth-century silk condom, with an embossed fleur-de-lis, which had once been used by Louis XIV, though with what success was not made clear in the catalogue. Had it really impeded the pox which might otherwise have felled the Sun King?

  Sao had wanted the object as a gift for his father’s seventieth birthday, but at the Sotheby’s auction he had been outbid by a determined, fur-coated Chechen, probably acting for some big dealer in Moscow or Berlin. At least, Sao mused, as he rose from the tub and wrapped himself in a comforting bathrobe, I forced the sonofabitch to pay fifty thousand dollars for the privilege of feeling the King’s silk. Since more dollars were being printed in Russia than in America these days, he hoped that Sotheby’s had been paid in forged currency. Sao felt remote and isolated from the world in which he had become so successful.

  The problem remained. What should he buy his father? In previous years Sao had sent the old man silk shirts, handmade shoes, antique Vietnamese gowns, crates of champagne cognac and much else besides. Most of these presents ended up on the Hanoi black market.

  This year, for the first time, his father had expressed a wish. He had read in a magazine that a Louis XIV condom was being offered for sale. For some deep, mystical and, to Sao, totally incomprehensible reason, it had become an object of desire for his father. Sao felt guilty. Perhaps he should have fought the Chechen to a standstill. It was the first time that his father had ever asked him for anything and he had failed. Sao loved his father.

  Sao père had fought at Dienbienphu – a small town in Northern Vietnam occupied by the French, who imagined it to be impregnable – in 1954, but on the French side, though this fact was long forgotten and never mentioned. Family history claimed that he had always been a communist agent. This was not true.

  He had been a uniformed menial, a batman who served and was well treated by an aristocratic French colonel with a large estate near Nîmes. Old clothes, discarded boots, generous tips, dregs of cognac and the odd kind word had kept the simple Vietnamese soldier happy. And all this because the Vietnamese, a skilled barber, shaved his master with great care every morning.

  So pleased was the Colonel that he had offered to take him back to France. And so it might have been if history had not proved so awkward. One morning in 1954, Sao’s father woke up in the besieged town of Dienbienphu and realized, even though he was no great military strategist, that the unthinkable was about to happen. His side was on the verge of collapse. The chief of the Vietnamese resistance army, Vo
Nguyen Giap, the ‘Bush General’, as the French called him, was on the eve of a sensational victory. The elite corps of the French Army had only two options: abject surrender or annihilation.

  Cruel disillusionment set in. Sao’s father deserted to the winning side. He wasn’t the only one. Two days later the French army surrendered. The second Vietnam War was over.

  Old Sao was sure that his old master would die rather than yield. Despite the belated conversion, it turned out to be an astute move, politically and emotionally. The French were defeated. They withdrew from the Vietnamese peninsula, never to return. The Colonel had confirmed his native batman’s instincts and shot himself in the head.

  And, most important of all, Sao’s father had met Sao’s mother. Thu Van, twenty years old, already regarded as a veteran by her guerrilla comrades, had participated in the siege of Dienbienphu. It was she who had first sighted her future husband, in French army fatigues, crawling underneath the barbed wire and waving an extremely clean white handkerchief on a stick. For some reason the sight of him had made her laugh. She had debriefed him thoroughly, reported his defection and handed him over to her political officer, and returned to the front-line.

  After the surrender, he did not give her a moment’s peace. He followed her everywhere till she admitted to herself that she, too, loved him. Thu Van was a deeply committed Communist. She took her lover’s political education very seriously. It was only after she felt that his education was complete, that he was a new man, that she deigned to bear him a son. Young Sao.

  After the accords of 1956, when the country was partitioned, pending a general election, Sao’s father stayed in the north with Thu Van and the Communists, abandoning Hue to the catholic priests and his cramped living quarters to a cousin.

  Even though he regretted having served in the French army, deep in his heart old Sao missed the ways of the French. And, if the truth be told, he missed the dregs of the colonel’s cognac and the tinned grenouilles. He missed the songs they used to sing. He missed the photographs of beautiful French women and curly-haired children. He missed the French colonial epoch. All the expensive presents and foodstuffs his son sent him from Paris did not taste the same. Their moral flavour was repugnant to his senses.