Saigon (21 page)

“Comrade Lat! Comrade Lat!” The anxious voice made him turn, and he saw Ngo Van Loc struggling through the crowd towards him. “The Legion guard post up ahead sent an Annamese messenger to ask about our intentions, and some women at the front of the crowd said we were carrying tax petitions.” 

“Yes, yes. What of it?” snapped Lat irritably. 

“They say now that we must stop here and send a delegation into Yen Xuyen to deliver them.” 

“And if we don’t?” 

“Then they say they will fire on us.” 

Lat snorted contemptuously. “Are the women and children still leading the march?” 

“Yes. The front ranks are solid. The first two or three hundred are women and young people.” 

At that moment Hao arrived back beside them and leaped of I the bicycle, panting with exertion. “There are only about a dozen soldiers of the Legion, Comrade Lat,” he gasped. ‘Arid fifty or sixty Annamese militia.” 

The column was moving up an incline, and looking back Lat could see the great swathe of marchers winding along the narrow road behind them for several miles. Visibly moved by the sight, he drew a long slow breath. “Twelve soldiers of France and sixty puppet troops against ten thousand peasants of Vietnam! How dare they command us to stop.” 

He glanced in turn at those around him. Loc’s face was taut with anxiety, while the boy Hao was awaiting Lat’s decision with a look of awed admiration on his face. Lien had bent her head so that her face was invisible beneath the wide hat, but he fancied that he saw her slender shoulders shake once in a silent sob. Suddenly a helpless rage seized him, “They will never be able to stop us! We go all the way through to Vinh as planned. Tell the Annamese messenger that!” 

It was another half hour before the little Potez 25 biplane that had spotted the column in the early morning appeared again. By then the front ranks of the marchers were within a quarter of a mile of the roadblock set up by the French Foreign Legion, and on Lat’s instructions the pace was quickening. But this time the fighting biplane was not on a reconnaissance mission. The two external bomb racks below its pinewood and fabric fuselage were fully loaded with a dozen twenty-two-pounders, and the rear cockpit was occupied by a sergeant observer who was traversing his Lewis guns in practice sweeps as they neared their target. Two more Potez 25s of the Armée de l’Air Vinh squadron were flying above and behind it and they too were fully manned and loaded with bombs. 

The planes had been in sight, small specks in the sky dead ahead of the marching column, for a minute or two before Lat heard their engines. Although the peasants appeared to be marching in silence, in the midst of the throng a low murmur of muttered conversations was audible, and at first the distant airplanes sounded like an intensification of this muted hum of human voices. But gradually the angry, high-pitched buzz of their four- hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Lorraine engines became unmistakably clear as they drew nearer, and Lat and the marchers began screwing up their eyes to stare into the bright sky. The three aircraft were coming in from the east with the sun behind them, and Lat had difficulty in seeing them clearly at first; then suddenly Ngo Van Loc was beside him, yelling in his ear. “Remember Co Am, Comrade Lat! Remember Co Am!” 

Lat glanced about himself in desperation. The marchers were wedged in a tight mass between a long stretch of flooded, tree lined paddy fields. It would take an hour or two to disperse them along the narrow highway; even to scatter them across the adjoining rice fields would take more time than they had — and would end the march in defeat and humiliation. 

He looked frantically at the sky again. The engine noise of the three biplanes was growing louder and when the pitch suddenly rose it became clear that they were starting to dive. 

“Disperse them!” he yelled suddenly into Ngo Van Loc’s face. “They’re going to bomb us.” He turned and ran into the water of the roadside paddy, screaming and waving his arms in both directions along the column. “Scatter! Scatter! We are going to be bombed.” 

Instead of following into the fields, the peasants all around him stood rooted to the spot, staring incredulously, first at him then back at the dark smudges of the three biplanes falling towards them out of the blinding sun. Four hundred feet above their heads, the adjutant chef in the leading Potez tightened his grip on the control column and eased it gently back towards his groin. As the biplane reached the bottom of its dive and began to pull up again fifty feet above the heads of the marchers, the first bomb slipped from its rack and twenty-two pounds of high explosive encased in cold steel rose and fell in a gentle arc towards the densest part of the column just behind the leaders. When it detonated on impact with the ground, it brought down a hundred marchers instantly. The explosion enveloped the front of the column in a pall of white smoke, and in this lethal fog survivors found themselves scrambling blindly over piles of torn and burned corpses that blocked the road. A moment later the other two planes released their bombs on the middle and rear sections of the column, and these explosions cut down another hundred marchers. 

Horribly mutilated men and women not killed outright staggered into the paddies to die, and the flooded fields along the roadsides were soon -stained a dark crimson with their blood. As the planes rose and dived, dropping more bombs and raking the marchers with long bursts of fire from their Lewis guns, Lat scrambled knee-deep through the sludge trying desperately to disperse crowds of peasants who were huddling close together in their terror. But shocked and hysterical, they refused to listen to his advice, and after a few minutes he stopped and stood still, gazing about him at the carnage with tears streaming down his face. 

He saw Ngo Van Loc throw up his arms and collapse in a heap as one of the biplanes swayed across the fields at tree-top height machine-gunning those Annamese still stumbling among the dead and wounded. Another exploding bomb ripped up mud and earth in a fountain from the fields on the far side of the road, but Lat didn’t bother to take cover. When its fumes cleared he began stumbling blindly back towards the section of the route where only a minute before the front of the column had halted. When he got there he found the road •surface slippery with blood, and he searched with a sinking heart through the tangled mass of broken bodies. 

Many of them were unrecognizable, their features obliterated by burns and blast, but even before he saw the single gold bangle on the anonymous stump of a handless arm, he knew that he would find her dead. The gruesomely truncated corpse of Comrade Hao, who had also fallen in the first explosion, half covered her, but when he rolled the dead boy aside he saw that Lien’s long, lustrous hair was matted and clogged with blood. Part of her face and one eye were gone, and her mouth, a gaping animal’s maw, was horribly contorted as though in one last formless scream of protest at such a hideous death. Lat realized then that a bullet or a piece of shrapnel had pierced his own side, and sinking to his knees, he lay uncaring with his head resting on the trunk of her dead body as the squadron of French planes roared back and forth through the smoke and din, dropping more bombs and strafing the road and surrounding fields again and again with their machine guns. 

In 1936 the colonial territories of Indochina were enjoying a new era of peace and stability. The French had crushed all Annamese resistance to their rule by the beginning of 1932 and the economy had recovered. But beneath the surface calm, hatred of the French had intensified as a result of the atrocities committed against the rebels during 1930 and 1931. The world at large knew little of these events, but the Annamese calculated that more than ten thousand of their countrymen had been executed, tortured to death or killed with bombs, guns and bayonets during those two violent years. The bombing of unarmed marchers at Vinh in September 1930 accounted for more than two hundred dead, and another seven hundred Annamese were guillotined without trial. During the same period only two Frenchmen were killed. About fifty thousand Annamese nationalists and Communists were imprisoned or deported, but the true dimensions of the brutality emerged only when soldiers of the French Foreign Legion were put on trial; then it was revealed the Legionnaires often took ten prisoners at random from a village and killed nine before interrogating the survivor, sometimes interrogated prisoners in pairs, 

decapitating one and forcing the other to hold the severed head while they questioned him. On occasions Legion troops brutalized prisoners in their cells without reason, cutting off their ears, gouging flesh from their faces with their bayonets, and leaving them, according to one contemporary account, “marinating in an abominable mess of blood, urine and vomit.” Atrocities, however, were not committed only by the French. The Communists set up rural “soviets” in some provinces, modeled on the peasant-ruled areas first created by Mao Tse-tung in southern China, and their “self-defense” forces, armed with sticks and knives, employed terror tactics against their enemies. Peasants who refused to join or who were judged to have betrayed the Communist cause were murdered in secret, pro-French mandarins and Annamese landlords were publicly hanged, garroted, or thrown into lakes in weighted bamboo cages, while particularly detested victims had their noses cut off, their teeth wrenched out and their beards set on fire before they were killed. Nguyen the Patriot, the elusive Communist leader of the insurgency, was eventually sentenced to death in his absence by the French for organizing the rebellion, but although he spent a brief spell in a British prison in Hong Kong, he continued to elude the Süreté Générale, and realizing that the tide of the revolution was ebbing, he disappeared once more to the obscurity of Moscow where in 1932 he was officially reported by the Communist press to have died. Almost all the leading members of the Communist movement he had founded were arrested, and the crowded cells of Paulo Condore off the coast of Cochin-China became the training ground for a new generation of Annamese Communists. These prisoners might have languished longer in the island’s dungeons, but Hitler’s rise to power in Germany prompted the French Communist Party to join socialists and centrists in an anti-Fascist coalition in Paris. This new Popular Front Government legalized the Communist Party in Indochina and in the early months of 1936 declared an amnesty for the prisoners of Paulo Condore. As the prisoners began returning to Saigon, Hanoi and Hue, agents of the Süreté Générale were again put quietly on alert to watch for new signs of anti-French conspiracy. 

As he walked the darkened streets of Saigon for the first time since 1925,Joseph Sherman wondered whether his senses were playing him false. Above his head the tamarinds in the Rue Catinat drooped lifelessly in the stifling April heat, but in contrast the dank, saturated air filling his throat seemed to be producing in him an overexcited, breathless sensation that was both disturbing yet vaguely pleasurable; at the same time every nerve in his body seemed to be dilating and expanding to absorb as many new impressions as possible of the city that had lived on so poignantly in his memory during the eleven years that had passed since his last visit. 

Tall, broad-shouldered and strongly built at twenty-six, Joseph’s still-boyish features had broadened with the approach of maturity, giving his face the same kind of chiseled handsomeness with which his dead brother had once been endowed, Perhaps, he told himself as he walked, he had Feb like this during that first unforgettable pousse-pousse ride with Chuck along the city’s boulevards — he couldn’t really remember. Or perhaps a reawakening of the grief he had suffered on hearing the news of his brother’s death was in some way responsible for this strangely heightened sense of perception. 

In the quiet residential streets north of the cathedral where he strolled after dining alone at the Continental Palace, he had fancied he could distinguish all the many pungent night odors that drifted from the lush gardens of the opulent French villas —— the cellar-damp reek of mold that everywhere discolored their pale walls, the fetid perfumes of wet earth and fleshy leaves, the headier mingled scents of jasmine, lotus. cycas, papaya and countless other tropical fruits and flowers whose names he had never known. In his ears the liquid notes of a piano drifting down from an unseen balcony, accompanied by French laughter arid the gentle clink of glasses, had lingered for a time, magnified by the moist air, as though to emphasize for him the civilized sophistication of Indochina’s colonizers. 

In the streets of the native quarter too, around the central market, the pavements seemed to Joseph’s eyes to teem with Life painted in dense primary colors. The bodies of bare-chested Annamese peasants glowed like gold in the light of naphtha flares as they crouched beside brilliant green mounds of tropical fruits and vegetables, Indian women with gaudy red and yellow sampots wound about their brown bodies hovered in servile attendance on curbside moneylenders, while along the gutters other Annamese gambled noisily with dice and cards, and pousse-pousse coolies crouched at rest, scooping rice into their mouths with grimy hands. Before their open shop fronts fat Chinese merchants gabbled praise of their wares in guttural Cantonese, and amidst all this clamor Joseph caught a glimpse through a half-open door of a candlelit altar bearing brass Buddhist images and ancestral tablets; he stopped to peer in and aw a goateed Annamese donning a silken long gown to perform his evening devotions. 

The reverent composure of the old man’s face as he lowered his frail body to the floor brought back vividly to Joseph’s mind the Tet ceremony of homage to the emperor that he had watched with his mother in the Palace of Perfect Concord, and in that instant he understood more clearly than ever before just how profoundly his callow, fifteen-year-old mind had been influenced by the experiences of that first visit; it had been those few enchanted moments beside the Emperor Khai Dinh’s throne, he was suddenly sure, that had made it impossible for him to accept the soldier’s life that his father had wanted for him. After gulping down those heady draughts of the exotic in the ancient capital of Annam, his early fascination for history had focused itself unshakably on the Orient, and he had elected to follow in his dead brother’s footsteps and go to Harvard. His decision to major in Asian history could only have flowed, he realized now, from that fleeting contact with one of the spectacular rituals of Annam’s Confucian past. He had studied the Chinese language so that he could work with the originals of ancient texts, and the great emperors of the Han, Ming and Ching dynasties of whom he had read so deeply had all come to life in his mind’s eye, it was clear, only as variations of the bejeweled figure of Khai Dinh whom he had seen seated on his sumptuous throne in Hue. 

An unquenchable obsession with his subject had led him after graduation into further study, and he had completed a successful doctoral dissertation on the “Middle Kingdom’s” tributary states — Korea, Burma, Siam, Mongolia, Tibet and Annam — that over many centuries had acknowledged the supremacy of Chinas emperors with regular gifts of silver and other treasure. The study was to be published in book form, and as he strolled on through the heart of the sweltering city the thought occurred to him that even the choice of his doctoral subject might have been decided by that first fateful visit to the Annamese lands. Had he, in choosing to concentrate on the vassal states of Imperial China, been subconsciously seeking a reason to come back to the country that held both painful and poignant memories for him? It had been Joseph’s own idea that he should do some vital research in the archives of the Ecole Francaise d’Extrêrne Orient in Hanoi to lend greater authority in the published version to his chapters on the Annamese, and it was only after the Harvard professor advising him on the project had approved his plans that he became vaguely aware that his desire to return might not have been motivated exclusively by academic zeal. 

In the weeks before he set out on the long sea journey he had found his thoughts returning increasingly to the hunting expedition that had ended so tragically with the death of the brother he had both envied and admired. Before leaving America, Joseph had made a rare visit to the Sherman Field Museum of Natural History on the Mall in Washington to look at the groups of buffalo, banteng and seladang shot by Chuck and his father. Seeing the lifelike animals in their original jungle habitats again had begun to stir feelings in him that had lain buried for more than a decade, and during the long voyage from Vancouver to Hong Kong on a Canadian Pacific liner he had found himself growing increasingly restless. He had sailed on to Saigon in a steamer of the French Messageries Maritimes that had come from Marseilles, and when he caught a glimpse of the spires of the Saigon Cathedral dancing above the trees in the tortuously winding river, he had felt once again the spellbinding strangeness of the tropics that had first engulfed his young mind so many years before. 

The sight of’ the voracious green jungle reaching to the water’s edge on both banks had brought memories long held in check flooding back into his consciousness; tears had started to his eyes when he recalled how deeply his dead brother had relished the prospect of hunting there as they sailed up the river together for the first time, and in a happier moment he had remembered with a wry smile the great sense of exaltation that followed his own secret triumph in the Moi village. But he had an uneasy feeling, too, that other more ominous thoughts might he hovering in the outer darkness of his memory; a troubled dream on shipboard had jumbled together disturbed images of brutal French colons, slaughtered buffalo and mandarins kowtowing in golden palaces, and Chuck, along with his mother and father, had floated among them like disembodied wraiths, unable or unwilling to see him or communicate with him. Confused and left utterly alone in the dream, he had experienced again the same deep sense of shock and bewilderment that he had known during that midnight storm in the jungle hunting camp, and he had woken on his bunk in a cold sweat. 

On arrival in Saigon Joseph had been surprised to find that the Sherman family’s first ill-fated visit had not been entirely forgotten. An alert French journalist who kept a weather eye on hotel arrivals had remembered the famous American name that had figured in the tragic front-page stories of 1925, and Joseph had been promptly interviewed and photographed in his room at the Continental Palace for one of the colonial news sheets. A report had already appeared in the evening edition, accompanied by his picture, outlining the reasons for his visit and mentioning that the game animals shot by his father and late brother were now central exhibits in Washington’s Sherman Field Museum. Joseph had carried a copy of the paper with him on his walk, and when he arrived back at his hotel he sank into one of the wicker chairs on the terrace and cast his eye idly over the story again while a waiter fetched him a drink. 

“So you’ve come back to see if your little Moi princess is still waiting for you in her smoky jungle palace, have you, Joseph?” 

The voice speaking heavily accented English close to his ear made the American start, and he turned to find himself looking into the grinning face, of a captain of the French Infanterie Coloniale. For a moment Joseph stared uncomprehendingly at the darkly handsome face with its neatly clipped military mustache, the creaking, highly polished boots and belt, the immaculately pressed uniform. 

“Don’t tell me le jeune Américain amoureux doesn’t recognize the companion of his first illicit encounter with the fair sex,” said the captain, removing his white sun helmet with an indignant flourish to reveal a mop of dark curly hair. “Don’t tell rue you refuse to come this time. I have a motor car and horses arranged. The pholy is already uncorking the ternum 

The Frenchman’s infectious laughter caused heads to turn in their direction all over the crowded terrace as Joseph rose uncertainly from his chair to take his outstretched hand. “I can hardly believe it,” he said hesitantly. “Is it really Paul Devraux?” 

The French officer gripped Joseph’s hand warmly with both his own. “Indeed it is. When I saw your picture in the paper tonight I had to come straight over here.” He leaned closer, still grinning, and spoke against Joseph’s ear in a stage whisper. “I should perhaps warn you before we leave for the Moi village — those women age very quickly. She’s run to fat, and is gray-haired like the pholy now. But she’s still waiting for you in that same fragrant hut. Never forgotten you, never taken another lover. Told the pholy no other man could ever match her ‘Amorous American.’” 

He laughed delightedly again, but Joseph, uncomfortable under the stares of those around them, didn’t join in. Seeing Paul’s face for the first time since leaving the jungle hunting camp had catapulted his thoughts against his will back to that desolate morning after the storm; he felt a sudden flush of embarrassment enter his face and wondered bleakly if Paul had any inkling of what had happened during that night. 

“I take it all this stuff in the newspaper about you going on to Hanoi to do historical research is just a cover,” said Paul in the same loud whisper, grinning and tapping the newspaper that lay open on the table. “You couldn’t very well admit to the press, could you, that you crossed the Pacific just to visit your old Moi girlfriend.” 

Paul’s tanned, good-natured face remained creased in what was obviously a genuinely delighted smile of welcome, and Joseph’s doubts dissolved suddenly under its influence. “You’re as jealous as ever, Paul, aren’t you — even after eleven years,” he said, his expression still serious. 

“Jealous?” The Frenchman’s smile faded a little. “How do you mean, Joseph?” 

“That I got the prettiest one!” 

Both men erupted into a new round of laughter at the same moment, and Paul clapped Joseph warmly on the shoulder as he sank into a chair at his side. The waiter arrived at that moment with the modest glass of beer that Joseph had ordered for himself, and Paul, seeing this, waved it away with an expression of mock horror on his face. “Bring us a bottle of good champagne, garcon, s’il vous plait,” he demanded in a loud voice. “We are celebrating an historic event — the return to Saigon of one of the world’s greatest lovers!” 

They were still laughing boisterously at exaggerated reminiscences of their visit to the Moi village when the waiter returned with a chilled bottle of Perrier-Jouet and two glasses, and they drank one another’s health with gusto. Both men were equally surprised and pleased to discover that the long-forgotten bond of friendship forged so briefly in their youth had endured the passage of time; they felt as relaxed and at ease in one another’s company in their twenties as they had been in their teens, and only gradually did their humorous banter give way to more serious inquiries about the years that had intervened. 

“You have changed a lot in your appearance, you know, Joseph,” said Paul, grinning affectionately at him as he refilled their glasses for the second time. “You look much more like your brother, Chuck, now than you did as a boy—more handsome. For a moment when I first saw you, I thought ...“ Paul stopped pouring champagne suddenly and shot a worried glance at the American. “I’m sorry — we haven’t seen each other since that dreadful accident. You left the expedition before it happened, didn’t you?” 

Joseph nodded quickly and waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all right, Paul. It’s all been said before.” He paused in the midst of lifting his refilled glass to his lips. “But I must confess that coming back here has made me think more about my brother than I have for many years. You must have got to know him quite well during those weeks you spent hunting together, didn’t you?” 

“Yes, I did.” For a moment Paul gazed reflectively into the evening crowds strolling beneath the tamarinds across the road from the hotel. “He was a very brave young man, your brother, and a fine shot. A most amiable companion, too. His death shocked me and my father very deeply.” 

A silence fell between the two men for the first time, and for a minute or two they sipped their drinks without speaking. 

“We talked a lot together in the camp in the evenings,” continued Paul at last, “and he said something one night which stayed in my mind for a long time afterwards.” 

“What was that?” 

“He said that your father had very high expectations for him as a politician and hoped he might even be president of the United States one day. He grinned as he told me and admitted that he wasn’t all that interested in politics — that’s why I remember it, I think. It all seemed so sad in view of what happened later.” Paul hesitated for a moment, then looked directly across the table at Joseph. “Has your father transferred those hopes to you? Will you be going into politics?”