Behind the Moon (19 page)

In the end, Mr Thieu arranged for Linh to take up a position as a companion and housekeeper to a middleaged Eurasian woman living in Saigon.

‘She is an educated woman. She reads Michel de Montaigne and is fond of Camus,’ was Mr Professor’s reassuring reply to Mr Ho’s anxious queries about her character. ‘I knew her father many, many years ago when we studied together in Paris. Ah,
les temps heureux quand
la vie était bonne
.’

Madame Catinat was a short, spry woman with a huge head out of proportion to her thin limbs and hipless body. The bulk of her long black hair, quiffed over her unnaturally smooth forehead and disciplined into a formidably tight bun held together with two elegantly lacquered red and gold wooden pins, added to the overall impression of a dangerously enlarged head. Walking briskly down the street in her cream-coloured Jackie Kennedy suit, snakeskin handbag draped neatly over the crook of her left arm, she looked like a bobbing liquorice-flavoured lollipop. Her face was compelling, even bizarrely attractive, in its sheer ugliness. She had kohl-lined Picasso eyes which slid constantly from side to side, a broad flat nose with long nostrils, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth with an overbite. She looked like a frog and could adopt the hypnotic watchfulness of one as well. You constantly expected a long tongue to flick out and whip the whining mosquitoes from the air, but like all the rich, she slept under a gauze mosquito net swathed neatly around her fourposter Louis Quinze bed.

Her grandfather was French and she often claimed that the former rue Catinat-restyled Tu-Do, freedom, after the French departed Vietnam—was so named in his honour. When hesitantly challenged by a Vietnamese officer who wondered whether the fashionable boulevard might not perhaps have been named after a French warship that had taken part in military operations in Da Nang and Saigon during the mid-nineteenth century, she was in no way discomposed. ‘
Mais oui
,’ she replied swiftly, the massive head inclining slightly in condescending approval, like a teacher graciously smiling on an idiot child who’d got it right for once. ‘But that warship was, in any event, named after Grandpère Catinat.
Voilà
.’

In the afternoons, like all the rich in Saigon after their siesta, she liked to take long strolls along the boulevard, window-shop, meet acquaintances, gossip. ‘
Alors, je vais
catinater maintenant
,’ she would say to Linh as she pulled on white gloves and fussed her handbag onto her arm. It was her greatest source of pride that, so famous was the rue Catinat (not until the late 1960s did the young Saigonese call it Tu-Do), a verb, ‘catinater’, had been coined by the Saigonese to describe their daily strolls to meet and greet people, to meander to the cafés and chat.

Nobody knew exactly what Grandpère Catinat had done to acquire his fortune, still less from whence Madame Catinat’s considerable income continued to flow. She held lavish soirées at her elegant colonial town house for diplomats and high-ranking officers, and wild raucous parties for junior officers and run-of-the-mill GIs. Linh was expected to serve at the former and savour the latter, when the gilded ballroom of Maison Catinat was transformed into a sauna of twisting, jiving bodies and ear-piercing giggles. Couples stamped hors d’oeuvres into the parquetry, slid in puddles of spilled Carlsberg and 33 beer, and hollered for faster, hotter songs as they scrounged remnants of spring rolls and
dau sanh vung
from garnished platters, shying the pieces of fried sticky rice balls at whitejacketed band members.

It was at one of these romps that Linh met Bucky Thibodeaux, love of her life. She had spent most of the evening creeping uncertainly around the perimeter of the ballroom, wishing that she was serving instead. She would have felt more comfortable slinking through the crowd with a tray of drinks or a platter of food in her hands. She had tried to do that earlier in the evening, but Madame Catinat spotted her and waved her over imperiously.

‘
Non, non. Pas ce soir
,’ she said as she gestured to a waiter to take the tray. ‘You are to
enjoy
yourself tonight. You look beautiful. Now go. Dance. Meet people. Talk. Flirt.
Enjoy
yourself. Here.’ She thrust a champagne flute into Linh’s hands, slid her arm into her companion’s, and pulled him onto the dance floor. They were swallowed up by the seething crowd and lost amid the screams. Craning her neck a few moments later, Linh could see that big head of black hair emerging at the far side of the room, companion still in tow. They disappeared through the large, gilded double doors.

Resigning herself to her orders, Linh backed towards the wall and tried to merge into invisibility, clasping the sweating glass of lukewarm champagne in both hands like a crucifix to comfort herself in her isolation while she warded off the embarrassment of social interaction with the Americans. She could read and understand English, thanks to Mr Professor, but she was too shy to speak to the big white men.

She cast her eyes down and wondered what her family was doing back in Cholon. It was nearly a month since she had seen them. Duc’s wife, Phi-Phuong, was pregnant, she knew, and Duong’s wife, Ai-Van, was trying to compete. She wanted to be able to fuss over Phi-Phuong, to give her a sponge bath and fan her in the humid afternoons just before the storm broke and dust boiled in the streets. She wanted to brew Phi-Phuong cups of tea and touch that slowly distending belly. She felt homesickness well up in her throat, a regurgitation of desolation, but she pressed her lips together firmly, steadied herself with a deep breath, and looked up. And that was when she saw him: a tall gangly scarecrow of a man with close-cropped curls, the profile of a crane, skin the colour of
café phin
, and buckteeth that jutted out like an awning over his lower lip when he grinned.

Étienne ‘Bucky’ Thibodeaux hadn’t volunteered for the war in Vietnam but he hadn’t tried to dodge the draft either. He was working on a submersible drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico—just off the coast of Morgan City, Louisiana—when his orders flew in on the supply helicopter one afternoon so hot and still the wind barely ruffled the waves and the bright glare of the sun bounced off the brilliant water and hurt his eyes. He ripped open the envelope and scanned the unfamiliar words. Uncertainly, he read it through another couple of times.

‘
Merde
,’ he said, resigned and unsurprised, for bad luck never failed to find him. He went home to say goodbye to his Cajun father and Creole mother. ‘Be a good boy, Bucky. We’ll have a
fais do do
for you when you come home,
cher
,’ she said. ‘
Reviens vite
.’ Then he cut his hair and caught a Greyhound bus to boot camp.

He endured Parris Island and found himself doing tours of duty through Vietnamese villages whose names he could not pronounce let alone remember, ploughing his way across swamps where the sucking mud clung to his combat boots and it was all he could do to yank out one leg after another and trudge through the needling rain, let alone keep an eye out for the VC. On dry days, he choked down the rich red dust of dirt tracks, squinted up at helicopters whirling overhead like dragonflies, rested his eyes on the verdant green of lush jungles, and wondered how the rookie Tommy Dempsey was working out with the New Orleans Saints. Before he died, please god, he thought, he wanted to see Dempsey—born without toes on his right foot, so he’d heard!—scoring a field goal at Tulane Stadium. At night he scratched mosquito bites in his sleep and dreamed he was back home, sliding through silent cypress everglades in his pirogue, baiting crawfish traps and casting a line for catfish and striped bass. Once a week, he wrote cheerful chatty postcards back to his mother, but he did not expect to survive the war. ‘Bad luck’ll get me. You’ll see,’ he foretold laconically. He was astonished when he survived his first few months.

He could have spent his R&R anywhere in Asia but he chose to stay in Vietnam. He hitched a ride down to the Mekong Delta and hiked through rickety villages where thatched huts patched together from sheets of corrugated iron, ammunition boxes and unpressed CocaCola cans perched atop palm-wood platforms in the middle of brimming paddy fields. In the distance, white tombs rose out of the emerald-green rice, housing the bones of ancestors who watched impassively over their descendants. Red water buffaloes plashed and swished their tails placidly.

Bucky distributed gum and chocolate to swarms of big-eyed barefoot children who chanted ‘
Ong My! Ong
My!
’—Mr American—and pranced beside him along a river track strewn with coconut husks and longan seeds. He goggled at slim young Vietnamese women in black trouser suits and white thongs who hurriedly covered their faces with their conical palm-leaf hats when they caught him staring. He grinned and scratched his head when a bare-chested young lad in faded pyjama trousers offered him a cocky grin and a grubby deck of ‘feelthy peek-tures, monsieur! One dollah!’

And, for the first time in months, he felt something approaching contentment as he clambered aboard a wooden sampan which nosed along the riverine Mekong system, ducking under flimsy monkey bridges, dodging spiky palm fronds and pushing away from the rapidly proliferating water hyacinths that knotted along the banks. He sank a line but didn’t catch anything, then happily stepped ashore to feast on fried fish and mint leaves rolled in rice paper.

When he made it back to Saigon without encountering an ambush, no-one was more surprised than him. He hunched himself into a cyclo and was hauled through the thronging streets by a rail-thin cyclist in a baseball cap who skilfully wove his way between bicycles, Vespas, yellow and blue Renault taxicabs, overloaded threewheeled lambrettas with men hanging perilously off the sides, postie Hondas seating entire families, dark limousines, and a South Vietnamese official’s BMW sedan, which bore a bumper sticker proudly proclaiming ‘Ronnie Lau Trading Company. 273 Thomson Road Singapore. Specialists in buying, selling and exporting second-hand Mercedes-Benz, Jaguars and BMW cars’.

He was dislodged in front of La Pagode on Tu-Do, so he ambled inside for a beer and was waylaid by a bunch of Australians who had come in for the weekend from the base out at Nui Dat. After several rounds, he stumbled around the bar sentimentally hugging his new best friends. The next thing he knew, he was hanging out on the streets of Saigon with a certain Bob Gibson, waiting to crash a party at Maison Catinat. They stopped at a roadside stall and slurped up chicken soup and rice noodles, crouching over tables so low that back in the States they would only be found in kindergarten classrooms. Overhead, garish hoardings blinked giant neon-lit advertisements for Sanyo, 33 beer, cigarettes, aspirins, powdered milk and toothpaste.

‘You don’t want to eat too much, mate,’ Bob told him. ‘There’s always plenty of tucker where we’re going.’

‘You’ve been there before?’

‘Yeah. Couple of times with the other guys. She holds these do’s every weekend. They get pretty wild.’

It was nothing less than the truth. He drank copiously, stuffed his face with food he’d never tasted before, danced with smartly turned-out women, managed to avoid the brightly made-up transvestites, snorted some coke, and stumbled to the toilet to throw everything up. He rinsed his mouth out and, when he emerged, Bob was waiting for him.

‘You right?’ he asked, looking doubtfully at the American.

‘Yeah,’ Bucky said and grinned weakly. He had a feeling that he wasn’t coming out well at all in the masculinity stakes. ‘Hey, come on. Let’s party.
Laissez le bon
temps rouler!
’

He sidled back onto the dance floor and bopped along with a couple of girls. They snaked their lovely hands all over him in languid caresses, ground their crotches against him and he was sandwiched between the unmistakable bulges of hard erections under their thin nylon dresses. ‘Hi, GI. You buku handsome, yessir. You like same-same, baby-san?’ He was horrified to feel his penis twitching in vague arousal and he felt sickened.

At that moment he looked up, locked eyes with Linh, and fell in love.

. . .

Vung Tau had its purely Vietnamese streets where names such as TÃN H.NG, VÕNH-THO-DUONG, and LIÍN-PHONG marched in an orderly row over shop terraces, and few white faces were to be seen. Then there was the relatively Anglicised section near the beach promenade where the gaudy lettering for HOLLYWOOD HAIR incongruously lorded it over HÙT TÙC—BÕNH-DÁN, flanked by large threetoned posters of men with short back and sides, and smaller signs announcing ‘Hair cut short’ or ‘Cream hair soft’. The bars were ranged along these streets: Chikito Bar, Milano Bar, Hoáng Hotel (Air-Conditioned Bar and Restaurant), the Queen, and the Dong Tam Olympia Bar and Night Club. Not too far away, the Ly-Ly theatre stood opposite TÁY HO Photo, the Pharmacie, and a blue metal board announcing GASOIL, painted vertically, was nailed to a lamppost. In this section of town, an old man in a faded blue shirt, dark grey shorts, white thongs and a white cotton hat swept the streets each morning and afternoon with a palm branch, collecting rubbish in his wooden handcart. Brightly coloured fin-tailed American cars and the odd army truck could be seen here among the trishaws, bicycles and motorcycles. On the pavements outside the shop terraces, women wearing conical
non-la
hats sat on low wooden stools and cooked
pho
at kerbside stoves while children pranced around a hawker’s huge pannier baskets yoked together with a long bamboo stick.

Linh stayed in a one-room apartment which Bucky rented for her in this quarter. It was only a few minutes’ walk to the Dong Tam Olympia Bar where she now worked, and a short distance to the beach where he had taught her to swim. When he was not around, she shared the flat with a fellow bar-girl. Every piastre she saved went towards her trousseau, for there would be a marriage one day. She was sure of it. The only anxiety the future held for her was whether she’d have the right clothes to wear when she finally met his mother. She refused to consider the possibility that her father might object to him as a son-in-law because he was dark-skinned.