The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Yet it seems to take very little to get Japanese people laughing. They break up at a touch. For example, my telephone rings and a male voice informs me: “I spreak no Engrish. I spreak only Japanese”—laughter.

  “I speak only English,” I assured the voice, “I can’t speak Japanese.”

  This, it seems, is funny, too.

  Voice: “Hord line one morment prease.”

  I hord line.

  Second male voice: “This man spreak no Engrish. He speak onry Japanese.”

  “I can’t speak Japanese. Only English.”

  This time they both break up.

  Finally: “Srank you very much. Good-bye.”

  This happens several times a day. I’d like to get in on the joke, too.

  Prostitution is illegal here. It was outlawed in 1957. Then what are those miniskirted lovelies doing smiling to me under a red lantern? If they’re secretaries, they’re working awfully late.

  What the Japanese do with neon is to make a fairyland of this city at night: the signs don’t pitch, like American ads, by hard-selling: Buy! They seduce your eyes in purple, chartreuse, violet, orange, Chinese red, pale pale blue, silver and green—signs that move in squares, in circles, up, down and sidewise in an alphabet consisting of pictures rather than letters. English is the second language; but it’s running a poor second. French is third, and not too far behind to catch up. The French seem to be better liked here than Americans. Well, they never blasted a Japanese city as a demonstration of military might, for one reason.

  It would be one of the great ironies of history if, in return for the most deathly strike any people ever inflicted upon another, the East should return that explosion with a life-giving one: if the arts of the West should be drawn away from Paris, London and New York to the great cities of the Orient. After witnessing the condition of the arts in Chicago, one can only hope something like that is happening.

  These people are nothing if not logical—especially if you’re caught jay-walking in the middle of Tokyo traffic. These little cars keep at sixty, and they don’t stop when there’s no red light. It’s Jump, mother—and mother jumps. So you see, that stuff about “Day of Infamy” is all wrong —they were just going that way, that’s all.

  I’ll modify my observation about no kissing—mothers kiss their babies. I can’t help wondering if in the privacy of their homes husbands kiss their wives—or do they keep bowing?

  This bowing isn’t just politeness. It’s part of conversation: discussion is punctuated by bowing. The woman’s deep bow to the man as she is introduced, and his short bow in return, indicate, I take it, that his station is higher than her own. Which is still how it is in Japan.

  My two Japanese friends—Terayama and the twenty-two-year-old girl, Keiko—are modern young people whose ways and dress and interests are Western. Yet, after we had spent a day together Keiko told me, “Mr. Terayama aparigize because he cannot do Lady-First.”

  After a minute, I got it: I’d been opening doors for her to go first, helping her on with her coat, all the customary American deferences of the man to the woman. But a young Japanese man, like Terayama, doesn’t even think of such deference—and the Japanese girl doesn’t expect it. “Mr. Terayama must not aparigize because he is Japanese man.”

  It’s perfectly natural for a man to hit his wife or daughter, Keiko believes, “if she deserve.” But it is never all right for a woman to strike a man. Which accounts, in part, for the relative contentment of Japanese women, compared to the dissatisfied, irritable, unresponsive and boring American female. They have better taste, too.

  “What is it that men find so rare and desirable in Japanese women?” Jacqueline Paul inquires in her illustrated opinion of modern Japanese life, Japan Quest, and answers herself: “I see it as the acceptance (real or apparent) of male dominance. Self-effacement in the interests of the man, a charming facade maintained by mannerisms which hide the true feelings, and proper behavior as prescribed by custom; these are the repertoire. If a woman is to earn approval, she must act in conformity with the preconceived role in which a man has placed her. In order to appear feminine to men (and to women as well) she must appear to accept things-as-they-are with a soft humility.

  “The men love it, of course. And of course they get bored.”

  WHAT COUNTRY DO YOU

  THINK YOU’RE IN?

  IN the season of the elephant-mango, when motorbike riders wear raincoats backwards, I lived in a hotel on an avenue once named Rue Catinat. That is now Tu-Do-Street. The year was 1969.

  It was also that season when cricket-hunters come down Cong-Ly with bamboo-poles and glue-pots. And all cricket fighters hope for the rains that come on the summer monsoons. For crickets fight harder then.

  I communicated with only three people in that hotel: a black GI living with a Vietnamese girl, who called himself Duke; Pham-Quynn, an eleven-year-old cricket-fancier; and a woman in a white aodai called Giang; for whom Pham served as a procurer. Giang was his mother.

  Duke’s girl complained of the prices of American whiskey and cigarettes on the black markets. So I changed his green money into piastres, through an Indian bookseller; changed the piastres into Military Payment Certificates with a Chinese leather-goods merchant; then bought whiskey and cigarettes, as well as soap and comic-books, for Duke at the PX. Where he got green money I didn’t inquire. And how long he’d been awol I didn’t conjecture.

  Pham spoke to Duke and myself in GI English; to Duke’s girl in Vietnamese; and used sign-language with his mother.

  To eight a.m. motorbike riders down Tu-Do, Pasteur and Cong-Ly, red warning lights meant only to slow down to 40; yellow meant GO! And the green signaled the right of way to all riders to wheel up on the walks. Then an air of mischief, touched by desperation, began dividing Honda from Harley and trishaw from taxi. As if the mischievous headlines were inspiring them to out-gun, out-ride, out-risk and out-dare one another both ways down the Tran Hung-Dao:

  REDS DECIMATED

  REDS REPULSED

  LT. JUMPS ON GRENADE

  NVA WALKS INTO TRAP

  NVA RALLIES TO CHIEU HOI

  HOI CHANH LEADS GIS TO CACHE

  PRESIDENT RAPS WHISKEY-DRINKING INTELLECTUALS

  SEE ACCEPTANCE BY VANQUISHED VC

  The same lieutenant leaped upon the same grenade every morning. Day after day the NVA walked into the same trap. The President rapped the same intellectuals drinking the same whiskey. Reds who weren’t immediately decimated were instantly repulsed. The few who strangely survived rallied to the Open Arms-Chieu Hoi program—“rallying” here meaning that an NVA defector had led Americans to a cache of Russian-made arms, slaughtered eighteen of his former comrades to establish his loyalty to the Saigon Government; and then had jumped on a grenade to save democracy. While vanquished VC wandered aimlessly about looking for somebody to put them to work. Preferably in the Cholon PX.

  Yet the mortars still came in and yet bike-riders flung plastiques. Gun-ship and fireship searched the skies and docks; while MP patrols cruised the darkened alleys.

  Whenever I saw a motorbike upturned, its wheels spinning slowly and more slowly, above a rider whose face was now part of the pavement, and a policeman looking languidly down at the rider’s splattered head, I realized that traffic accidents were part of the struggle to win the hearts and minds of men.

  Giang wasn’t trying to win hearts or minds. It was all she could do to hold onto her own. Though her features were Vietnamese, her expression was French. For her eyes, commonly languid among Vietnamese, were energetic. The openness of her glance, not unusual in women of Paris, was unique on Tu-Do. She was deaf and mute.

  Once she was standing in the hotel entrance, toward evening, and made way for me as I entered. She flashed her wide white smile, then folded her hands against her cheek and closed her eyes, feigning sleep. I thought it was a good idea.

  Later I had dinner, alone, on the riverboat restaurant Phat Diem. On a river with a view of a shore th
at looked, in the evening air, like the beginning of a contented country, I decided to invite Giang and Pham to have dinner with me here the following Sunday.

  When I asked Pham, he ran, exhilarated, to inform his mother. She came to the door, in her white aodai, and nodded confirmation to me. She seemed pleased.

  I told Duke that I had invited Giang and Pham to the Phat Diem.

  “Numba Ten,” Duke’s girl put in.

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked Duke.

  “She says that, in this country, it’s smart not to get involved.”

  “What kind of country does she think she’s in anyhow?” I asked Duke.

  When I rapped Giang’s door the following Sunday, Pham opened it—dressed less for an afternoon on a riverboat than for an alley. He was barefoot, uncombed, was holding a peanut butter jar, and had a GI toothbrush hanging around his neck. I’d expected Giang to have him ready and to be ready herself. I didn’t want to be on the Saigon River after dark.

  Pham indicated that his mother was home; but she didn’t appear. And instead of getting ready, Pham insisted on showing me the stupid cricket, that he called Skippy, in the peanut butter jar. A few grains of rice and the remains of a spider lay on the jar’s bottom. Feeling both disappointed and annoyed with Giang, I got up to go; but Pham took my hand.

  “Tau Chit Choot,” he told me, and led me down to the street: we were going to a cricket fight.

  Every trade had its own tune in Saigon, and each tune its own pitch. The fellow wheeling along the curb, rattling a chain as he cycled, was asking for knives to grind or scissors to sharpen. The little man, afoot with a big shears as if preparing to cut his way through the throng, had nougats ready for cutting if only you’d buy. The ten-year-old boy blowing piercingly on a tin whistle was whistling for bike or motorbike tires on which to put patches for whatever you’d pay. The woman getting a chirping cry out of coca-cola tops strung on a wire, was offering to massage me, on the street, for fifty piastres.

  The boy beating a pair of strung balls with a pair of drumsticks, in a three-step beat, was an advance-man, announcing the coming of steamed rice; in a Chinese soup-wagon hauled by his mother. If the beat was slower it wasn’t steamed rice. It was the woman who’d dye your trousers while you waited.

  While whistles kept shrilling, sirens kept warning, horns kept squawking, ducks kept quacking, and toy-tanks kept zapping chopchop eaters at their chopstick bowls, a girl with a basket on her head came crying, among charcoal fires and children squatting to pee, “Ay vit lon! Ay vit lon!” like a querulous bird.

  Down an areaway so narrow only one could pass, we came into a shadowed and gutted shack where a couple dozen men and boys, safe from the National Police, were crowding around a battered and rusted washtub.

  The washtub was the ring. A stout Vietnamese was the matchmaker. He held all bets and took a percentage off the winner. He was the Maurice Stans of the cricket-fighting world.

  How long ago Charcoal Crickets and Fire Crickets plunged Southeast Asia into a holy cicada, or war of mutual cricket-extermination—literally biting off one another’s antennae to spite their stupid faces, is lost in the mists of cricket-history.

  All we know for certain is that the Charcoal bug, being black, cannot bear the presence of the Fire Cricket; who is just as much of a bug because he can’t endure the sight of the darker insect.

  Since neither one has eyes, how does either distinguish between friend and foe? We are trapped here in an ecological mystery to which no satisfactory solution has been offered either by science or Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. (whose own blind charges have afforded so much diversion to TV viewers).

  Certain arthropodists contend that colors have odors: that the smell of black infuriates the Fire Cricket while the Charcoal Cricket sees red when he smells yellow. But this is mere circumvention. For, if so, wouldn’t the Charcoal Cricket keep beating out his brains against chartreuse houses? And what would keep Fire Crickets from attacking Cadillacs? The fact is that both species are noseless as well as eyeless. Back to the old drawingboard, Professor.

  Because it’s territorial instinct—let me make this perfectly clear—which arouses both species to fight to the death at the touch of antennae. This touch being provided—I’m sure you’ve already guessed—by a human being whose territorial instinct is aroused by the hand of another human on his wallet.

  But if the stupid bugs didn’t go about dressed in contrasting trunks, like opponents on the Friday Night Fights, there wouldn’t be any fights-to-the-death. For the simple reason that nobody would be able to tell whose boy won and whose lost.

  Pham brushed the antennae of his fighter carefully, with his GI tooth-brush, until it stood up on its hind legs, tense for battle. When his anten-nae touched that of the Fire Cricket opposing him, the battle was joined.

  Skippy looked pretty good in there at first. He got a strong hold of the Fire Cricket and spun him onto his back with all six firelegs kicking helplessly. Pham cheered. But instead of finishing his opponent off, Skippy just stood waving at the crowd. That bug purely loved applause.

  The Fire Cricket’s owner called time out. He tied a thread to the yellow cricket’s leg and spun the bug around his head. Whether this was to restore the insect’s sense or drive him even crazier I still have no idea.

  Yet it worked. As soon as the yellow cricket was back on his legs, he jumped across the ring, the thread still dangling, and bit off Skippy’s head. Skippy stood one moment, still acknowledging applause. Then his body followed his severed head. The Fire Cricket was lifted up, the black thread still dangling, put back in the winner’s jar and fed a fresh spider.

  Pham had put a lot of work into feeding and brushing and training that stupid bug, and he looked solemn as we passed among copper-gong beaters, shaven-head bonzes bearing umbrellas; and old women whose mouths were bloody with betel, spitting as they came.

  Children came hauling between donkey-cart shafts; children being many and donkeys few.

  Then a chopper, flying much too low, beat down all sound and rumor of sound: for a moment after it passed silence held all the choking air.

  Then the cry “Ay vit lon!” broke through again and all the market’s voices hurried back as if invited by that cry. What was that girl selling?

  Half a dozen of Giang’s deaf-mute colleagues were waiting for her in front of the hotel.

  One, who looked no older than fifteen, handed Pham a folded note and nodded toward me. Pham handed it to me and I put it in my pocket; still folded.

  Duke was waiting for me at my door, which surprised me. He didn’t speak until I’d offered him a drink.

  “Did you hear the blast?” he asked me at last.

  “Which one?”

  “On the river. They blew up the Phat Diem.”

  I reached for the note as if feeling, suddenly, that whatever it was, I needed it. It was written with painstaking effort:

  I sorry. I afraid go by Phat Diem

  Be not mad please.

  Giang

  I handed it to Duke, who grinned when he read it; inspected the blank side then handed it back. Yet he said nothing.

  “Some coincident,” was all I could think to say.

  “What coincident?” Duke wanted to know. “The woman was trying to tell you something but you were too dumb to get it, that’s all. What did you want her to do? Hand you a plan of the operation? Put you on her grapevine?”

  “She’s not politically involved,” I protested.

  “For God’s sake,” Duke became impatient, “she’s Vietnamese, isn’t she? How can she not be involved?” Then added after a minute, “It was just lucky for you she didn’t have something against you, that was all.”

  “What if she had?”

  “Why, she would have kept the date, then ducked with the boy, that’s all. What country do you think you’re in, buddy?”

  POLICE AND MAMA-SANS GET IT ALL

  THE street called Huong-Dieu slants through a slum pervaded by the yellowi
sh scents of raw fish, urine, and charcoal fires. You push your way through throngs of yam-and-mango vendors, Vietnamese veterans still wearing their field uniforms the better to beg, women between the shafts of donkey-carts, and small girls who tug your sleeve but speak not a word; from one sunstriped alley to the next until you reach 22 Huong-Dieu.

  Up a stairwell so worn its wood looked gnawed, I passed into a narrow passage, made narrower by heavy red draperies, and into a room where women sat or lay upon a dozen beds. Some wore slacks, some miniskirts and some were in their slips. Above, several candles burned in Buddhist altars. Only one had a Christ impaled above her. I favored Jesus as being the lesser fire hazard. I was in a camp of refugee whores.

  An upended container, marked US ARMY in rusting white paint, held water for both washing and drinking. Yet the room was so spacious that 22 Huong-Dieu, I surmised, must once have been a luxurious French hotel; there were still gas fixtures from that long-gone time. Now the water was off and lights were out and all the carefree times were done.

  “Where Xuong?” I asked one of the women.

  “What numba?”

  I’d first spoken to Xuong in the Central Market. I’d been shopping for oranges. Not the little green-skinned lumps that pass for oranges in Saigon—I wanted those big yellow California Sunkist dandies imported from the nearest American commissary.

  A foreigner pays half a dollar each for them; a Vietnamese gets them for a quarter. Moreover, when a foreigner buys six, he winds up with five. These market women are really deft.

  I asked Xuong to buy a dozen for me and gave her the piastres. When she returned with oranges and the change, I was impressed; it was the first time I’d seen a Vietnamese return change to a foreigner. I gave three oranges to her eight-year-old boy to show my appreciation.

  “O, me wuv you too much,” she thanked me, and added, indicating the boy as we walked out of the market, “him Hiep.” I would have walked her further but she seemed embarrassed.