The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

  The radio was working again. The lieutenant said wearily, ‘They are going to bomb the village. Patrols are called in for the night.’ We rose and began our journey back, punting again around the shoal of bodies, filing past the church. We hadn’t gone very far, and yet it seemed a long enough journey to have made with the killing of those two as the only result. The planes had gone up and behind us as the bombing began.

  Dark had fallen by the time I reached the officers’ quarters, where I was spending the night. The temperature was only a degree above zero, and the sole warmth anywhere was in the blazing market. With one wall destroyed by a bazooka and the doors buckled, canvas curtains couldn’t shut out the draughts. The electric dynamo was not working, and we had to build barricades of boxes and books to keep the candles burning. I played Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un for Communist currency with a Captain Sorel: it wasn’t possible to play for drinks as I was a guest of the mess. The luck went wearisomely back and forth. I opened my bottle of whisky to try to warm us a little, and the others gathered round. The colonel said, ‘This is the first glass of whisky I have had since I left Paris.’

  A lieutenant came in from his round of the sentries. ‘Perhaps we shall have a quiet night,’ he said.

  ‘They will not attack before four,’ the colonel said. ‘Have you a gun?’ he asked me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll find you one. Better keep it on your pillow.’ He added courteously, ‘I am afraid you will find your mattress rather hard. And at three-thirty the mortar-fire will begin. We try to break up any concentrations.’

  ‘How long do you suppose this will go on?’

  ‘Who knows? We can’t spare any more troops from Nam Dinh. This is just a diversion. If we can hold out with no more help than we got two days ago, it is, one may say, a victory.’

  The wind was up again, prowling for an entry. The canvas curtain sagged (I was reminded of Polonius stabbed behind the arras) and the candle wavered. The shadows were theatrical. We might have been a company of barnstormers.

  ‘Have your posts held?’

  ‘As far as we know.’ He said with an effect of great tiredness, ‘This is nothing, you understand, an affair of no importance compared with what is happening a hundred kilometres away at Hoa Binh. That is a battle.’

  ‘Another glass, Colonel?’

  ‘Thank you, no. It is wonderful, your English whisky, but it is better to keep a little for the night in case of need. I think, if you will excuse me, I will get some sleep. One cannot sleep after the mortars start. Captain Sorel, you will see that Monsieur Fowlair has everything he needs, a candle, matches, a revolver.’ He went into his room.

  It was the signal for all of us. They had put a mattress on the floor for me in a small store-room and I was surrounded by wooden cases. I stayed awake only a very short time—the hardness of the floors was like rest. I wondered, but oddly without jealousy, whether Phuong was at the flat. The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing—perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves. We were all expendable. When I fell asleep I dreamed of Pyle. He was dancing all by himself on a stage, stiffly, with his arms held out to an invisible partner, and I sat and watched him from a seat like a music-stool with a gun in my hand in case anyone should interfere with his dance. A programme set up by the stage, like the numbers in an English music-hall, read, ‘The Dance of Love “A” certificate.’ Somebody moved at the back of the theatre and I held my gun tighter. Then I woke.

  My hand was on the gun they had lent me, and a man stood in the doorway with a candle in his hand. He wore a steel helmet which threw a shadow over his eyes, and it was only when he spoke that I knew he was Pyle. He said shyly, ‘I’m awfully sorry to wake you up. They told me I could sleep in here.’

  I was still not fully awake. ‘Where did you get that helmet?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, somebody lent it to me,’ he said vaguely. He dragged in after him a military kitbag and began to pull out a wool-lined sleeping-bag.

  ‘You are very well equipped,’ I said, trying to recollect why either of us should be here.

  ‘This is the standard travelling kit,’ he said, ‘of our medical aid teams. They lent me one in Hanoi.’ He took out a thermos and a small spirit stove, a hair-brush, a shaving-set and a tin of rations. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three in the morning.

  II

  Pyle continued to unpack. He made a little ledge of cases, on which he put his shaving-mirror and tackle. I said, ‘I doubt if you’ll get any water.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ve enough in the thermos for the morning.’ He sat down on his sleeping-bag and began to pull off his boots.

  ‘How on earth did you get here?’ I asked.

  ‘They let me through as far as Nam Dinh to see our trachoma team, and then I hired a boat.’

  ‘A boat?’

  ‘Oh, some kind of a punt—I don’t know the name for it. As a matter of fact I had to buy it. It didn’t cost much.’

  ‘And you came down the river by yourself?’

  ‘It wasn’t really difficult, you know. The current was with me.’

  ‘You are crazy.’

  ‘Oh no. The only real danger was running aground.’

  ‘Or being shot up by a naval patrol, or a French plane. Or having your throat cut by the Vietminh.’

  He laughed shyly. ‘Well, I’m here anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, there are two reasons. But I don’t want to keep you awake.’

  ‘I’m not sleepy. The guns will be starting soon.’

  ‘Do you mind if I move the candle? It’s a little too bright here.’ He seemed nervous.

  ‘What’s the first reason?’

  ‘Well, the other day you made me think this place was rather interesting. You remember when we were with Granger . . . and Phuong.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I thought I ought to take a look at it. To tell you the truth, I was a little ashamed of Granger.’

  ‘I see. As simple as all that.’

  ‘Well, there wasn’t any real difficulty, was there?’ He began to play with his bootlaces, and there was a long silence. ‘I’m not being quite honest,’ he said at last.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I really came to see you.’

  ‘You came here to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I had to tell you—I’ve fallen in love with Phuong.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was so unexpected and serious. I said, ‘Couldn’t you have waited till I got back? I shall be in Saigon next week.’

  ‘You might have been killed,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have been honourable. And then I don’t know if I could have stayed away from Phuong all that time.’

  ‘You mean, you have stayed away?’

  ‘Of course. You don’t think I’ll tell her—without you knowing?’

  ‘People do,’ I said. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘I guess it was that night at the Chalet, dancing with her.’

  ‘I didn’t think you ever got close enough.’

  He looked at me in a puzzled way. If his conduct seemed crazy to me, mine was obviously inexplicable to him. He said, ‘You know, I think it was seeing all those girls in that house. They were so pretty. Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted to protect her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s in need of protection. Has Miss Hei invited you out?’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t gone. I’ve kept away.’ He said gloomily, ‘It’s been terrible. I feel such a heel, but you do believe me, don’t you, that if you’d been married—why, I wouldn’t ever come between a man and his wife.’

  ‘You seem pretty sure you can come between,’ I said. For the first time he had irritated me.

  ‘Fowler,’ he said, ‘I don’t know your Christian name . . . ?

  ‘Thomas. Why?’

&nbs
p; ‘I can call you Tom, can’t I? I feel in a way this has brought us together. Loving the same woman, I mean.’

  ‘What’s your next move?’

  He sat up enthusiastically against the packing-cases. ‘Everything seems different now that you know,’ he said. ‘I shall ask her to marry me, Tom.’

  ‘I’d rather you called me Thomas.’

  ‘She’ll just have to choose between us, Thomas. That’s fair enough.’ But was it fair? I felt for the first time the premonitory chill of loneliness. It was all fantastic, and yet . . . He might be a poor lover, but I was the poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability.

  He began to undress and I thought, ‘He has youth too.’ How sad it was to envy Pyle.

  I said, ‘I can’t marry her. I have a wife at home. She would never divorce me. She’s High Church—if you know what that means.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Thomas. By the way, my name’s Alden, if you’d care . . .’

  ‘I’d rather stick to Pyle,’ I said. ‘I think of you as Pyle.’

  He got into his sleeping-bag and stretched his hand out for the candle. ‘Whew,’ he said, ‘I’m glad that’s over, Thomas. I’ve been feeling awfully bad about it.’ It was only too evident that he no longer did.

  When the candle was out I could just see the outline of his crew-cut against the light of the flames outside. ‘Goodnight, Thomas. Sleep well,’ and immediately at those words like a bad comedy cue the mortars opened up, whirring, shrieking, exploding.

  ‘Good God,’ Pyle said, ‘is it an attack?’

  ‘They are trying to stop an attack.’

  ‘Well, I suppose, there’ll be no sleep for us now?’

  ‘No sleep.’

  ‘Thomas, I want you to know what I think of the way you’ve taken all this—I think you’ve been swell, swell, there’s no other word for it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’ve seen so much more of the world than I have. You know, in some ways Boston is a bit—cramping. Even if you aren’t a Lowell or a Cabot. I wish you’d advise me, Thomas.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Phuong.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust my advice if I were you. I’m biased. I want to keep her.’

  ‘Oh, but I know you’re straight, absolutely straight and we both have her interests at heart.’

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, ‘I don’t care that for her interests. You can have her interests. I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than, than . . . look after her damned interests.’

  He said, ‘Oh,’ in a weak voice, in the dark.

  I went on, ‘If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good . . .’ The crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.

  But there was a quality of the implacable in Pyle. He had determined I was behaving well and I had to behave well. He said, ‘I know what you are suffering, Thomas.’

  ‘I’m not suffering.’

  ‘Oh yes, you are. I know what I’d suffer if I had to give up Phuong.’

  ‘But I haven’t given her up.’

  ‘I’m pretty physical too, Thomas, but I’d give up all hope of that if I could see Phuong happy.’

  ‘She is happy.’

  ‘She can’t be—not in her situation. She needs children.’

  ‘Do you really believe all that nonsense her sister . . .’

  ‘A sister sometimes knows better . . .’

  ‘She was just trying to sell the notion to you, Pyle, because she thinks you have more money. And, my God, she has sold it all right.’

  ‘I’ve only got my salary.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got a favourable rate of exchange anyway.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, Thomas. These things happen. I wish it had happened to anybody else but you. Are those our mortars?’

  ‘Yes, “our” mortars. You talk as though she was leaving me, Pyle.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said without conviction, ‘she may choose to stay with you.’

  ‘What would you do then?’

  ‘I’d apply for a transfer.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go away, Pyle, without causing trouble?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair to her, Thomas,’ he said quite seriously. I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused. He added, ‘I don’t think you quite understand Phuong.’

  And waking that morning months later with Phuong beside me, I thought, ‘And did you understand her either? Could you have anticipated this situation? Phuong so happily asleep beside me and you dead?’ Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

  ‘Are you sure there’s anything much to understand?’ I asked Pyle. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, let’s have a whisky. It’s too noisy to argue.’

  ‘It’s a little early,’ Pyle said.

  ‘It’s damned late.’

  I poured out two glasses and Pyle raised his and stared through the whisky at the light of the candle. His hand shook whenever a shell burst, and yet he had made that senseless trip from Nam Dinh.

  Pyle said, ‘It’s a strange thing that neither of us can say “Good luck”.’ So we drank saying nothing.

  5

  I

  I had thought I would be only one week away from Saigon, but it was nearly three weeks before I returned. In the first place it proved more difficult to get out of the Phat Diem area than it had been to get in. The road was cut between Nam Dinh and Hanoi and aerial transport could not be spared for one reporter who shouldn’t have been there anyway. Then when I reached Hanoi the correspondents had been flown up for briefing on the latest victory and the plane that took them back had no seat left for me. Pyle got away from Phat Diem the morning he arrived: he had fulfilled his mission—to speak to me about Phuong, and there was nothing to keep him. I left him asleep when the mortar-fire stopped at five-thirty and when I returned from a cup of coffee and some biscuits in the mess he wasn’t there. I assumed that he had gone for a stroll—after punting all the way down the river from Nam Dinh a few snipers would not have worried him; he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others. On one occasion—but that was months later—I lost control and thrust his foot into it, into the pain I mean, and I remember how he turned away and looked at his stained shoe in perplexity and said, ‘I must get a shine before I see the Minister.’ I knew then he was already forming his phrases in the style he had learnt from York Harding. Yet he was sincere in his way: it was coincidence that the sacrifices were all paid by others, until that final night under the bridge to Dakow.

  It was only when I returned to Saigon that I learnt how Pyle, while I drank my coffee, had persuaded a young naval officer to take him on a landing-craft which after a routine patrol dropped him surreptitiously at Nam Dinh. Luck was with him and he got back to Hanoi with his trachoma team twenty-four hours before the road was officially regarded as cut. When I reached Hanoi he had already left for the south, leaving me a note with the barman at the Press Camp.

  ‘Dear Thomas,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how swell you were the other night. I can tell you my heart was in my mouth when I walked into that room to find you.’ (Where had it been on the long boat-ride down the river?) ‘There are not many men who would have taken the whole thing so calmly. You were great, and I don’t feel half as mean as I did, now that I’ve told you.’ (Was he the only one that mattered? I wondered angrily, and yet I knew that he didn’t intend it that w
ay. To him the whole affair would be happier as soon as he didn’t feel mean—I would be happier, Phuong would be happier, the whole world would be happier, even the Economic Attaché and the Minister. Spring had come to Indo-China now that Pyle was mean no longer.) ‘I waited for you here for twenty-four hours, but I shan’t get back to Saigon for a week if I don’t leave today, and my real work is in the south. I’ve told the boys who are running the trachoma teams to look you up—you’ll like them. They are great boys and doing a man-size job. Don’t worry in any way that I’m returning to Saigon ahead of you. I promise you I won’t see Phuong until you return. I don’t want you to feel later that I’ve been unfair in any way. Cordially yours, Alden.’

  Again that calm assumption that ‘later’ it would be I who would lose Phuong. Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody. But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came, and even opium had its value there. But I never foresaw that the first future I would have to break to Phuong would be the death of Pyle.

  I went—for I had nothing better to do—to the Press Conference. Granger, of course, was there. A young and too beautiful French colonel presided. He spoke in French and a junior officer translated. The French correspondents sat together like a rival football-team. I found it hard to keep my mind on what the colonel was saying: all the time it wandered back to Phuong and the one thought—suppose Pyle is right and I lose her: where does one go from here?