Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  But the machines moved paper to the extent that such movement was possible, and on a day when the news was official, and Danang was falling and Saigon would certainly fall, and sources said there were no spaces on the flights, no flights, no way to get to the airport, no airport, no pilots left in the country, no planes, the papers arrived for Hua-ling and Marie. Marie raced back down Tu Do Street with the manila envelope soaking sweat under her blouse, restraining herself to a pace befitting business rather than panic, more terrified to have these precious papers, even, than she had been of the chance of never getting them.

  She crossed Tu Do in the hope of skirting a group of six or seven ARVN officers who moved along the sidewalk with a shopping cart full of what seemed to be gold bullion. When they came to the broken curb of a cross street, four of them had to take hold of the heavy cart and ease it down, and then up over the next curb. The group stopped in front of a closed goldsmith’s, and one of the officers, who carried his sidearm unholstered, banged on the door with his free hand.

  Marie turned left and got off Tu Do. The side street she entered was empty. Dressed in the anachronistic white suit of the tropic colonial, a man who made no sound of footsteps strolled toward her from its far end. Her father.

  The heat of their surroundings smelled of fear, a humming, ozone fragrance. She stopped still and waited, stroked by its sickly fingers until she felt weak. He kept walking but got no closer.

  When she moved back onto the larger street, the ARVN officers were out of sight inside the shop, and except for a patrol of their subordinates passing in a jeep, white-faced, weeping boys manning a high-caliber machine gun and draped with belts of its ammunition on the day of their defeat, the traffic seemed suddenly usual.

  Mme. Troix bid Marie and her mother goodbye. She’d been on the phone, and was crying and dancing jerkily through the hallways in fear. “The big helicopter have seen leaving the roof of the U.S. Embassy. You see everything is finish! I have predicted it! I have predicted it!”

  There were barricades up, she said, along all the roads between the city proper and Tonsonhut Airport. People from the countryside were crowding into Saigon. The American Embassy was being mobbed. She herself had made secret arrangements for Hong Kong. The black mascara streaked down her face as she cried and kissed them goodbye, because they’d all grown very close in Hua-ling’s illness, and Mme. Troix had been nursemaid, friend, and, finally, hysterically loyal family member, refusing to take herself out of the doomed city until she knew that Hua-ling’s and Marie’s papers had gone through.

  Wiping her neighbor’s tears from her neck, Hua-ling seemed to grasp the situation for a moment. She wished Mme. Troix a passage without hazard, and gave her a black lace shawl for a gift of parting. But a stealthy satisfaction firmed the lines of her mouth, as if the end of things in Saigon was something she’d arranged single-handedly, to get back at everyone.

  Were they on the boat yet? Where was Captain Minh? Grandmother went to take a sip of her tea, and it smelled amazingly like curry. Stuff was floating in it . . . it had turned into soup. A thin white hand set down a cup of rice next to it. Now arrives the metal spoon with the wooden handle. Now you’re going to put a napkin under my chin. “Let me put the napkin, Grandmother,” her grandson’s wife said. It had been like this for as long as Marie could remember.

  But what had she been remembering? She couldn’t remember. The boat, the helicopter, the airport, the apartment—her mother, Hua-ling, standing next to her yellow oxygen tank with a cigaret lighter, threatening to blow up the world. “Where are you taking me?” she said in Chinese. She hardly ever spoke English anymore.

  “America. America. Look—see? The apartment is empty. We don’t live here anymore,” Marie told her.

  When she appreciated that they were leaving the city, Hua-ling dropped her cigaret lighter and found strength to gather up a nylon robe and put it on, moving with pale force, swimming through fuzz. She took from the black walnut table by the door a cigaret she’d been dealing with and abandoning for half an hour, while Marie hefted a suitcase holding a few essential items. “Do you have a match?” Hua-ling said. The power went off at that instant and the air conditioner ceased humming. Hua-ling looked around herself curiously, as if just getting there.

  When they got outside, they found their neighborhood completely changed. The afternoon had surrendered any pretense of control. Marie choked on the smell of sweat, exhaust, and smoldering rubber—they were burning piles of garbage on Tu Do Street. In the movements of the people all up and down the thoroughfare—khaki or black or white movements, everyone seemed to wear khaki or black or white—everything was being done for the last time: people who for years had been the walking dead were now awake; eyes that had been filmed and cynical were glittering and blind with adrenaline.

  Hua-ling, wearing a nylon robe the color of cream and spattered with coffee and whiskey, appeared alert and walked slowly on her own power. Marie wore her most businesslike dress and carried only one small suitcase, which she held in her lap in the crumbling taxi, sitting next to her mother in the back seat.

  The taxi’s driver was afraid of the airport. When Marie told him to go there, he looked out his side window for other passengers, his nostrils widening and his wooden lips clamping shut. She offered him a wad of piasters without counting it, but he refused, talking in Vietnamese to this Eurasian girl, as everyone did.

  “I’m British! I’m American!” Marie said, waving her British passport with the American visa.

  These documents were more persuasive to him than money. “Police blocking barricade on a highway now,” he said, but he drove along Tu Do, steering around humps of debris—belongings grown too heavy for the people walking into or out of the city, three or four of whom now stepped aboard the taxi’s rear bumper and rode on the back. Marie ignored them, but her mother turned around and tried banishing them with an irritated gesture. “Excuse me! Lice of rodents,” she said in Chinese.

  Marie, as they got closer to the airport, felt powerful enough to pass through any kind of trial if she and Hua-ling would ultimately be lifted out of the war. Her mother, too, had drawn some energy from the prospect of getting away, but the air seemed to go out of her as the cab shook her back and forth, until her head was rolling from side to side and thumping against the window whenever they had to swerve. She looked dead, but she was still half-conscious, suddenly rousing herself to demand a light for her cigaret.

  The young men in charge of the advance barricade—two ARVN and two policemen—were willing to let whoever manned the later obstacles take care of the actual work. They turned back every second vehicle automatically and let all the others through. Marie waved her papers, but the guard wasn’t even looking as they passed. He was already busy turning back the car behind them. Hua-ling said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” to him, intoning the Chinese words expressionlessly, and belched up a stench of brandy. “Do you have a match,” she said to him long after he’d disappeared from her window, “do you have a match, do you have a match?” Her head drooped. “Gimme a light,” she said in English.

  As they approached the last highway barricade, not quite a mile from Tonsonhut Airport, the men riding on the trunk jumped off and left the road. The bulk of the traffic moved against their progress slowly like volcanic rubble, while a swifter current of pedestrians ridden by huge bundles overflowed the roadside ditches. Twenty meters out in front of the makeshift thatched kiosk and oil-drum and sawhorse roadblock, a policeman stood waving one hand with a shooing motion and resting the other on the rifle slung across his chest. All passenger vehicles were being turned back automatically.

  Now the taxi driver behaved like someone trapped under water. Over Marie’s threats and despite her offers of money, he started yanking at the wheel and raising up halfway in his seat to look behind them and begin a U-turn, broadcasting relief with his body heat.

  “I just want a cigaret. You’re denying me this small thing,” Hua-ling said.
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br />   “Don’t turn around!” Marie told the driver. “I’m trying to get us out of this,” she said to her mother. The driver was successfully herding his cab into the flow of cars going back into Saigon.

  In English her mother said, “A facking cigaret. Give—me—a facking—light.” Her eyes were curtained with hatred.

  Marie and the driver couldn’t heed her. The driver ignored Marie as well, until she slapped the back of his head finally, weeping. Now that he found himself able to inch along in the crosscurrent, he wouldn’t give up his tiny momentum to let them out. “You greasy bastard—stupid, stupid, monkey!” she screamed, wrenching open her door and stepping out dizzily from the moving cab. Within a few feet the taxi was jammed up in the stalled warfare of cars and small trucks. Marie reached in through the open door and tried to assist her mother in getting out, but Hua-ling pulled her hand away. “Where are you taking me!” Her face was slack, her vision unfocused, but she had a firmness to her voice born of angry fear. “Don’t pull me,” she said.

  “We have to get on the plane now.” Marie put her knees on the seat and tried to haul her mother out by gripping her under the arms; but her mother was limp. “It’s time!” Marie cried out.

  “Stop pulling,” her mother said. “Fack you,” she said in English. “I’m not go nowhere until I have a rest, and smoke a cigaret.”

  The cab was in motion again in a lane of vehicles that had somehow found space to move. Marie backed herself out of the cab and nearly fell in the road beside it, exhausted of pleas and strength, holding her papers and their only suitcase. The suitcase eluded her grip and spilled open on the road, and she knelt to stuff the contents back into it, but then understood that there was nothing in it valuable enough to stop for. She stood surrounded by machines that honked, gunned, roared, screeched their brakes, and she watched an airplane take to the air over Tonsonhut Airport, realizing, as she yearned after it to the point she believed her vital organs would tear themselves free, that in order to save her life she had to do what she’d actually been in the process of doing for some time. She had to abandon everything and escape. She had to let go of the suitcase. She had to leave her mother behind.

  The forward patrolman ignored her as she passed him hugging the edge of the roadside ditch, at one point stepping onto the bumper of a car and clambering across its hood to bridge the mess of vehicles. But at the barricade proper, the guards stopped her cold, not at all impressed by her papers. “Gimp me your ticket!” the man insisted. “Show me!”

  “It’s—my ticket is waiting for me,” she said.

  “Show me one ticket!” the guard said.

  Marie moved her mouth, about to tell another lie, but instead said, “I have money. I have money, no ticket.”

  The guard laughed and turned from her. He was brown and Polynesian-looking. She wanted to throw herself at him, and she saw herself crushing his Adam’s apple. The other guard was pounding bitterly with the butt of his rifle on the hood of the only vehicle to have floundered all the way to this last barricade, a black Mercedes that had evidently been mistaken for some kind of official transport, but which now turned out to be filled with a Saigon businessman, his wife and children, and several white-uniformed servants. As he pounded, the rifle discharged with a single loud crack by no means overwhelming in this cauldron of noise, and the guard, who couldn’t have appeared more startled if he’d shot himself, gingerly changed the weapon from hand to hand, and wiggled the safety. The Mercedes leapt into reverse, banging into the edge of the kiosk, and then instantly forward again, the driver making haste, after this gesture on the guard’s part, to turn around and leave. Everyone in the dust-streaked automobile was crying except for the owner, who sat in the front and managed to look only mildly set back by the sundering of his household and the destruction of his way of life. Between the businessman and a white-garbed maidservant, Marie saw her father’s ghost.

  He looked at his daughter in some confusion, and then took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his hand, for he too was crying.

  She turned away from him. “I will fuck you,” Marie said to the guard. “My mother is dead,” she added. The guard looked at her in genuine amusement and also seemed a little shocked. “I can get a ticket,” she said. “Just tell me—what do you want?”

  “Go!” the guard said, waving her on. “Go airport! You’ll die tonight.” He pointed to the area of the airport beyond them, the sunburned fields and the control tower diminished by open space. His expression showed real concern about the whole situation and possibly for Marie herself. “Nobody—” He just stopped there, weary of seeking foreign words for unprecedented things, and dropped his hand and turned away. Behind them, people were abandoning their cars and taking to the fields, avoiding the barricades entirely.

  Marie moved past the guard and made for the tower in the distance. She picked up her pace, losing one of her high-heeled shoes and kicking the other from her foot. When she stepped on a sharp rock she knew about the pain but did not actually feel it. In the same way she knew that she was looking around inside the moment when her father had thrown it all away—Marie his daughter, her mother his wife, and the war in Vietnam—the instant in time when escape rises, rippling translucently, out of a stifling landscape. Already the noise behind her was drowned in itself. What she could hear was the wind through the chest-high blades of coarse grass, and faintly a jet engine, like chalk across slate. A plane that seemed unconnected with this sound lifted into the film of heat. Ahead of her, people who’d made their way through the field’s sharp teeth were coming out of them and taking to the road.

  It was clear from the scene at the end of the paved service street that nobody was getting into the terminal today. At the entrance, under a modern awning whose aluminum gave a sting to the echoes of terrified and angry voices, the plate-glass windows and electric-eye doors were shattered and covered with boards. Dozens of purple-bereted Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers and Saigon Police guards held back a mass of city people at bayonet-point. Marie took in a picture of men who’d forgotten their purpose here and wanted only to be heard for once, their faces the color of bruises, the veins in their necks like ropes, and the black shocks of hair leaping from their heads as they let themselves be pushed from behind, oblivious of the bayonets, their eyes fixed on the faces of the guards. When a small man vaulted between two riflemen and tried to clamber through a space in the boards across a window, one of the guards turned and smashed the butt of his rifle into the man’s kidneys. He doubled up and fell to the pavement and crawled backward, driven before a bayonet, until he was consumed and trampled by the others.

  Marie orbited the crowd’s periphery as if caged, checking through a route that touched panic, dull hope, and nauseated surrender. Lingering on the airport’s centerpiece—a broad disk of lawn, now trampled bare, and a flagpole still exposing the colors of South Vietnam to the wind—she found she’d drifted among the ranks of those who’d given up. Enclosed with their flag in a circle bounded by the asphalt drive, old men and women squatted on their heels, making pillows of their arms across their knees, and slept. Women sat on wide bundles of their belongings tied up in sheets, with children on their laps and other children standing around them, and here and there a husband waited with his arms wrapped around himself and his head bowed, exhausted and pensive, trying to find a way. Not even the children moved here.

  The only thing to catch her eye was a figure in light khaki, and she followed his progress along the rear of the crowd. He moved deliberately but not slowly, looking at everybody and acknowledging no one. As he neared, peering right through her, she recognized his outfit as distinctly military. On the flap of his blouse pocket he wore an insignia of wings—Air Force flight personnel. His eyes scintillated as if he were drugged or dreaming. He was just a skinny boy who looked no older than Marie.

  Marie was instantly sure he’d stolen this uniform. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt as he passed, and he turned around, smiling and da
zed. “Where can I get?” She jerked the cloth of his blouse. “Where? I want a uniform. Uniform!” she repeated in anger, seeing he made nothing of the word.

  As if they’d been together all day, he took hold of her wrist and pulled her along toward the rearward fringes of the mob before the terminal’s entrance.

  “Merican money,” he said.

  “Yes!” Marie said. “I have! I have it!”

  With blows of his fists, like a figure come alive off one of Saigon’s theater posters for karate and t’ai-chi fantasies, he advanced them through the crowd and lunged at the first guard he reached, brandishing identification. The guard stepped back, and the boy dragged Marie between barricades. The guard shouted at the boy now, the two spoke heatedly in Vietnamese, the guard pausing to threaten the forward ranks of the crowd with his bayonet. “Vietnam money,” the boy said to Marie.

  “Yes!” Marie said. “I have! Have Biet-nam mohnee,” she said.

  There was no way through the boarded-up doorway. The guard led them behind the line of soldiers and police for some fifty meters to the terminal building’s east corner, where the windows ceased and only cinder block presented itself, past more sawhorse barricades, and then through a metal door. When they were inside with a few soldiers and two desks—where an odor of boiled coffee overwhelmed her and gave a fearsome homey ordinariness to things—all the men raised their voices. Talking fast and with great confidence, keeping her upper arm in his grip, the boy shook her at the soldiers as if she were compelling evidence, complete proof, that nothing was what they thought it was. Marie nodded emphatically, reaching for the money in her blouse and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to the Special Forces officer, a lieutenant she guessed, who was soon doing all the talking. What she might be bartering for was unimportant. The language of Saigon transactions was being spoken, the push and pull, the forefinger repeatedly jabbing the open palm. This man had something which he believed she could be made to want. She wanted it.