Please Enjoy Your Happiness (27 page)

I could hear you practising with your
kokyu
– the ancient stringed instrument that came to Japan from China many centuries ago. You were seated cross-legged on the
tatami
with the
kokyu
held vertically in your lap. You were moving the taut horsehair bow slowly across the silk strings. You had a name for that tune, which for me was like no other. It spiralled upward into the night sky as if it were wind or a prayer.

‘That is the old Chinese melody “Stairway to Heaven”,’ you said. ‘I like to sit alone, in the dark, like I did when I was a child in Manchuria. I use the bow like this, and the
kokyu
speaks for me.’

Even all these years later I choked up, remembering that
plaintive sound and how it gave voice to your loneliness.

‘Memories and tears are locked together for all eternity, like lovers,’ you said. It is hard for me now to imagine one without the other.

20

Am I OK?

I see myself as I was then with the supremely sweet sadness of old age, Yuki. I say ‘sweet sadness’ because there is still so much yet to savour and so little I can forget. I am no longer innocent. However – and you would probably be delighted to know this – I am still just as intense. I spend hours considering every aspect of the issues confronting me now. If you could hear me having conversations with myself you might also wonder why sometimes I laugh out loud in delight when intensity results in inspiration, and why at other times I become reflective, especially when I have to pass my city’s vast cemetery, with all that blinding white marble bearing so many fine words. Sometimes I remember one small thing you said. Yesterday I was laying out a gravel pathway in my cactus garden and I suddenly heard you declaring, as you did one day when you were showing me how to write kanji with an ink brush, ‘God did not intend for kanji to be straight.’ I looked. I could curve the path round
a boulder and then again round the next boulder, so visitors would pay attention to each of the tiny cacti I have planted that otherwise would go unnoticed. I like to think that path is my kanji in the desert.

In my later years something I cannot define has happened to me, Yukiko. Maybe similar things have happened to you too. I pay attention to many things I formerly ignored or did not notice. Sunsets: I’ve begun looking up at the evening sky. Dew: I’ve started walking on the grass in my bare feet. The key smile that defines a person: I now remember that smile. The unopened book waiting to be opened. The music yet to be heard. The love song yet to be written. The two-mile walk around my block waiting to be walked. The woman staring up at the dead tree in her front lawn who suddenly asked me if it was true that she could get a kiss if she stood underneath the live mistletoe growing on a branch above her head. The little army of dark green seedlings in the black earth where last year I buried the yellow rind and seeds of a delicately flavoured Vietnamese pomelo.

I also have welcomed memories of people long gone, Yuki. Has this happened to you too? I no longer shut them out: my father, who died in 1992 of a post-heart-attack operation gone wrong; my mother killed by Alzheimer’s in 2006. I wait for my parents in my library. It happens late in the afternoon. They do not arrive together. They don’t speak to me but I speak to them, out loud. Then there is the clan of sixty writer and photographer colleagues who were killed or vanished or murdered in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Among them are Kyoichi Sawada; Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared together and whose remains were never found; Larry Burrows and Welles Hangen; and Keisaburo Shimamoto,
Claude Arpin, François Sully, and Kent Potter, who all were working for
Newsweek
, with which I spent ten years of my life. They form an unruly judgement committee from another realm observing the way I live my life. They materialize in my dreams, Yuki. They ask if I am enjoying my life and I never know how to reply. I share the guilt of those who survived. At other times, the dead are right there beside me, or so it seems, still young, still passionate, still magically talented with their black-bodied Nikons and Leicas. I now understand that those who died or who disappeared have an insatiable need to talk.

You used an old bellows camera to take my picture once on an outing to somewhere quiet and dark and green, a place of shadows now unknown to me.

The shutter went
click
. You laughed and you said, ‘There is no escape. There! I have you now.’

I asked, not realizing that you meant you would possess me forever, ‘When we are old, will we also be young when we think about each other?’

And you said, ‘That is a very strange question. Do you mean when we think about each other will we see each other the way we are now? We will have to see if the life you live allows you to be forever young.’

If you still have that photo, that will be your memory of me. I will be forever young. Until recently, I have been able to permit myself to say that I am becoming older much more quickly than I did ten years ago. Age is stripping away what remains of my youth with a cruelty that no young person, even my children, can understand. When they visit me they look, they nod, they smile, but what do they see? They see their ‘old man’, Paul. That is the way I was with my dad. Towards the end of his life he was inside, looking out. I saw no further than what
I gleaned from a glance. What would I see if I could see you now? Of course, I have not been able to watch you grow old. Every time I see a photo of a Japanese woman in her seventies or eighties I look, I peer. I study the face, the hair, the hands, and especially the eyes. I am searching for that woman’s youth. Somewhere in the interior, behind those wrinkles and the shy smile, I know that you are still there. If we listened again to Puccini’s ‘Un Bel Dì’ we would both weep a tear or two to celebrate a memory of us that never died. What a gift that was. What a gift that has been!

I am sometimes astonished when I wake up in the morning and discover that I am still alive. I am pretty sure this happens to you too because so many of my friends of a similar age say they experience this same shock. Yes, I am alive. It is still dark outside and the local mockingbird, having now built his nest, is in full chorus deep inside the dense stand of giant timber bamboo that serves as a battlement along the white stucco wall of my garden. That bird singing at four a.m. is evidence I am alive. I turn on the light and look in the mirror. This is the young man you knew? Not exactly. But I have the memory. I was too young when I knew you to be able to quote Thoreau. But here is how he saw it. Please enjoy his happiness:

I would much prefer to die in my sleep, even though there will be no weeping partner to find me. Some of us never wake up. Where do we go? If you can shed light on this, Yukiko, please let me know. Recently I have become preoccupied with accepting the fact that I will not be able to witness my own funeral. I resent that. As a chronicler of human behaviour for half a century I have been to many funerals. I remember details from most of them: who turned up to mourn and who did not. What was said and what was not said. The blanched faces, the sidelong glances, the winces, the air heavy with the inevitability of decay, the small room in which the family members gather awkwardly around the open casket, not knowing whether they should shake my hand or embrace me, the surprising things said among those who have dressed up for the service as if they were at a wedding and not at a funeral, the priest or minister reciting a dirge with rehearsed sincerity that reverberates off the stark, bleak Sheetrock walls.

Six years ago, Yuki, I joined a ‘closed’ internet group called Vietnam Old Hacks. This site is moderated by the genial Carl
Robinson, an American who married a Vietnamese woman and became an Australian after running the Associated Press photo desk in Saigon during the Vietnam War. It is an international online watering hole for reporters, photographers, TV crew, stringers, spies, operatives, actors (including the alluring Kieu Chinh and the dapper George Hamilton), former military advisors, ex-mercenaries, and various retired ambassadors and embassy personnel, plus a smattering of academics with an interest in the thirty years of combat in Indochina and, of course, veterans of the US State Department with intimate, unpublished memoirs of backroom deals and other skullduggery of the type beloved by John le Carré. Some Old Hacks have a futile and tiresome hatred for Jane Fonda because she visited North Vietnam in 1972, met there with American POWs, and posed for photos with an anti-aircraft gunnery crew in Hanoi. She apologized. But even in old age, when it seems to me all should be forgiven, these Old Hacks need to hate.

The daily chatter among group members is entertaining at times but the group’s most useful function is letting its members know who among them has dropped dead or is seriously ill. These men and women, who witnessed combat and survived that and all the associated drama of covering war non-stop, once regarded themselves as indestructible. ‘Who will be the last man standing?’ I have asked a couple of close friends.

Within three weeks of my writing this chapter the illnesses or deaths of four Old Hacks had been announced and discussed.

They included Jacques Tonnaire, a.k.a. Jacques Thunder, former French paratrooper and freelance photographer who did courageous work along the DMZ in the early 1970s. ‘Gutsy guy to the end, Jacques Thunder.’ Carl said a French friend told him, ‘I hate that doc who promised him [Jacques], and more
than once, that he would have “quite a few years of good quality life” ahead. Normally this is the type of lie you get from politicians. Since when do docs behave like that? Today we learn that all his suffering, physical and moral, was useless. The chemo did not stop or contain his cancer.’

Jacques died at the beginning of May 2014. The week before his death, his son, Chuong Duy, sent this email:

It is difficult for me to talk about war experiences with someone who was not there. Some people I’ve come to know have told me that when they met me for the first time they sensed I had ‘hidden history’, and it made them feel uncomfortable. But when I meet up with those who were there, there is no stopping the memory surges and the sudden infusion of youth – as if youth were a serum and not an intangible.

Last week Van Thanh Lim, the former UPI combat photographer, suddenly called me from Los Angeles. I had heard that he had had major heart surgery. We had not spoken since 1975 in Saigon, when the war was shuddering to a close and I had had an encounter with a desperate upper-class Vietnamese woman at the venerable Continental Palace Hotel, who was trying to sell an exquisite necklace of emeralds and diamonds
so she and her family could escape Saigon and flee overseas. Fear on the face of such a woman is truly frightening. It is an indication that the end is near.

‘This is Van,’ my friend said when he called me, as if I would know who he was, as if we had just spoken yesterday. His voice was full of joy and excitement. ‘How are you, Paul? We are not getting any younger. Please have lunch or dinner with me sometime. Please try your best to visit me. Are you OK?’ He talked about wanting to have dinner with me and Nick Ut, the AP photographer, also Vietnamese, who shot the photo of the burning girl running down a road away from her village just after it had been hit by napalm. ‘We should have dinner in Little Saigon,’ Van said. He meant Little Saigon in Orange County, California. A Little Saigon that did not exist in 1975.

Am I OK?

I notice that I make more errors than ever when typing, Yukiko. I sleep in two- or three-hour fits and starts. My eyes fill with tears a lot more frequently now. This happens, strangely, when I am confronted by beauty and kindness. For example, my joy early in the light of day comes from noting that everything in my garden is in bloom: roses and ginger and citrus and apples. In the morning, before dawn, when it is cool and tropical birds continue the loud songs they learned in the jungle, a layer of absurdly perfumed mist coats all those flowers and me in the nectar of youth. The other day I watched the recent Japanese film
Ame agaru
[
After the Rain
], made from a screenplay Kurosawa wrote before his death. I started choking up when the good-natured samurai Ihei and his sweet wife Tayo did their best to bring happiness to other guests at a country inn where they were all trapped by heavy summer rains. That would not have been my reaction in my younger years. The
truth is that old age is duplicitous. It is the age of death. But it also is the age of rebirth. I am sure you understand, Yuki. Spring will soon be here and everything, including myself, will be in renewal. I sense it. For a few days, or maybe for a few weeks, I will be young again. I will pull out your letters once more. I have the moment planned for that. I have a chair set up among the roses, and on a certain hour of the day I am going to read your letters one last time. I am going to hold the paper in my hands, and then I am going to put it all away in a place known only to me.