Saigon (28 page)

They crossed the wide road to the bank of the River of Perfumes and strolled on under the trees. Lan closed her eyes arid lifted her face to let the faint breeze blowing off the water play on her cheeks. “It’s cooler now, Joseph. And the river is so beautiful. There seems to be a magic in the air here, doesn’t there?” 

Joseph nodded happily. “The white tiger and the blue dragon are obviously at peace with one another tonight.” He glanced down to find her smiling at him with unexpected warmth; unbidden, she drew closer to him, and he put his arm around her slender shoulders. 

Clusters of empty sampans were drawn up by the bank, some with dim lanterns illuminating the cushioned, mahogany interiors of their little cabins; others were in darkness, and Joseph wrinkled his nose at the sweet, acrid fragrance floating under the trees. A coolie called something unintelligible in Annamese as they passed, and Lan laughed in embarrassment. 

“What did he say?” 

“He asks if monsieur would like to smoke a pipe or two of opium while he listens to the rites. You can hire his sampan, he says, for half a piastre. Very clean.” 

Joseph laughed too; then he stopped and ran back to talk to the coolie, and a note changed hands. When he returned to her, he was grinning broadly. “Would you like a cool ride on the river?” He spread his hands. “Strictly no opium, I promise.” 

Her face clouded with doubt. “It’s not proper, Joseph, for me to go on the river alone with you. If Tam were with us, it would be different.” 

“Just for a few minutes.” He took her hands in his and smiled into her eyes. “Perhaps the river breezes will blow the cobwebs of incense from your head before we return to the Nam Giao.” 

She laughed uncertainly. “All right, as you are a visitor to Hue I must be a good hostess. We’ll go just for a short while.” 

She allowed him to help her aboard, and he settled her in the cabin before returning to the stern. The boatman’s grin broadened with delight when Joseph thrust another ten-piastre note into his hands, and he helped push the sampan out into the stream. When Joseph didn’t return to sit beside her in the cabin, Lan looked over her shoulder and, seeing him standing on the stern, her expression changed to one of alarm. 

“What are you doing, Joseph? Have you ever rowed a sampan alone before?” 

His happy laughter echoed across the water as he removed his jacket. “No — but don’t look so frightened, I’ve been watching the coolies and I’m dying to try it for myself. It can’t be that difficult.” He turned the bows of the long boat southwards and got it moving. “You see!” 

His confident smile reassured her, and she moved to the mouth of the cabin and sat down on cushions, facing him. Silhouetted above her against the starry sky, he worked the oar with an easy rhythm, and she watched him in silence, wondering at his grace and strength. For several minutes he rowed the sampan upstream, brushing beneath the willows that leaned out from the bank; as the river turned in a gentle curve to the southeast he pointed inland. “Look, Lan, you can see the southern light shining from the Azure Temple.” He clutched excitedly at the tresses of a willow tree, halting the sampan. 

Lao stood up beside him to look in the direction of the slender finger of light pointing down the southern sky. The faint beat of gongs reached their ears, mingled with the sound of trumpets and bells; then a joyful chorus of female voices rose thrillingly above the music. 

“They’re singing the Hymn of Happy Augury.” 

All around them the willow fronds rustled and whispered in the breeze. “I suppose it’s time we turned back,” he said hesitantly. 

She didn’t reply, and when he looked down, her lovely face, barely visible in the faint light from the stars, seemed constantly to be dissolving and re-forming among the willow leaves. From the distant Nam Giao the choir of female voices began to sing a new and plaintive hymn. 

“It’s the Chant of the Exquisite,” murmured Lan in a dreamy voice. “The offerings of silk and jade are being made.” 

The boat rocked gently against the current, and Joseph dropped his hand lightly on her shoulder to steady her. “We must go now if we are to see the climax to the ceremony,” he whispered. 

To his surprise she turned and put her hand on his among the leaves and tendrils of the tree. ‘We can follow the sacred rites from here, Joseph,” she said softly. “The spirits of this beautiful river seem to have ordained it.” 

For a long time he just stood and stared at her shadowy face. Then he looped the sampan’s mooring rope quickly over a bough of the willow. “All right, if you’re sure that’s what you want.” 

“We’ll be able to hear the music and the singing quite clearly. I know every part of the ritual. I’ll describe it to you.” 

When he lifted her hand to kiss her fingers, she didn’t try to move away. The warmth of his lips against her skin made her feel as though her soul were suddenly melting within her; a sweet, trembling helplessness seized her and she longed to feel the strength of his arms around her, longed to bury her face against his chest. 

“Lan, I love you, I love you,” he murmured as he pressed her to himself. “Do you feel it too?” 

He wondered the first time if the gentle motion of the sampan, the pale starlight and the shifting willow vines were conspiring to deceive him, but the second time he had no doubt; although she didn’t speak she had moved her head quite definitely in a little ecstatic motion of assent. 

Inside the sacred tabernacle on the highest terrace of the Azure Temple, the hot, scented air swam in the light of a thousand beeswax candles as the emperor advanced for the third and last time to the Altar of Heaven and flung himself down before it. In the same instant his mandarins, their assistants and all the servers attending the shrines on the other terraces prostrated themselves on their altar mats. When the heralds on the terrace outside cried “Receive the Blessed Nourishment!” the emperor straightened slowly and took the proffered platter of roasted buffalo flesh. Raising it to his forehead he held it there with closed eyes for several seconds before handing it on. 

Then the heralds, drawing out their words with a sonorous finality, voiced their concluding chant: “Drink . . now . . the Wine.. . of. . . Happiness.” 

The emperor received the goblet offered with utmost reverence by an assistant and raised it aloft; the hush that had fallen over the Azure Temple deepened, and beyond its walls the entire city seemed to hold its breath. In that magical fragment of time the emperor, in accordance with beliefs that had endured throughout recorded history, was drawn into solemn communion with the Divine Majesty of Heaven. 

In the shadows of the sampan’s little matting cabin on the nearby River of Perfumes, Lan trembled as Joseph took her gently in his arms, Her exquisite nakedness sent a flood of stark strength coursing through him but at the same time the fragility of her beauty excited a countervailing storm of tenderness that held his strength in thrall. In the glow of the tiny lamp their wondering eyes met again and again as they murmured incoherent words of love; then the tender agony became unendurable for them both and they clung blindly to one another, crying aloud in unison. 

When his breath at last returned, Joseph lay watching a tiny red spider run slowly in a zigzag line across the roof of the little cabin. Lan lay still in his arms, her face turned away, her unpinned hair a living garment of silken black filaments that covered her slender body to the waist; the sampan continued to rock gently on the quiet river, the willow branches continued to caress the cocoa palm fiber above their heads, and eventually the tiny red spider climbed slowly around the bamboo frame and disappeared into the soft night. 

In the tabernacle of the Azure Temple they were burning the prayer tablets and the offerings. The mysterious moment had passed; the Son of Heaven was already returning slowly to the House of Fasting. 

Several times during his first week in Hanoi, Joseph had cause to wonder whether someone might be deliberately following him. On two or three different occasions he noticed the same languid French youth sauntering along the pavement at his back as he walked between his hotel and the archives of the École Française d’Extrême Orient; while strolling in the evening too through the cobbled streets of the northern capital’s old craft quarter, he had spotted the youth, dressed in a pale tropical suit and trilby hat, apparently wandering aimlessly in the same area. But his suspicions remained vague and half-formed; it never occurred to him that his presence in the city could be of any interest to the French security authorities, and because his head was awhirl with excited thoughts of Lan and his new discoveries in the archives, he never focused his full attention on the possibility that he might be under surveillance. 

Images of Lan had filled his thoughts, waking and sleeping, from the moment he left Hue. In his mind’s eye he saw again and again her happy smile as she gazed at her recovered bracelet in the Sacred Grove; constantly he recalled the vision of her lying naked in his arms during those ecstatic moments on the River of Perfumes, saw her walking demurely beside him the next day in the garden of her father’s official residence inside the red-walled Citadel and waving to him finally from the gateway when he reluctantly took leave of her. The close proximity of her family on that last day had made her reserved with him again, and she had insisted on his observing the proper Annamese formalities of courtship even when they were alone. Without saying SO directly, she had indicated by her subdued manner that she had suffered some pangs of remorse because of her impetuous behavior the previous night, but this remorse had not entirely obscured her feelings for him. Once or twice her eyes had shone with that same inner excitement when she looked at him, and she had allowed him to hold her hand briefly, Out of sight of the house beside the lotus pool. He had wanted to talk to her father there and then, but she had insisted that they allow some time for him to recover from Kim’s defection. Eventually he had agreed reluctantly to her suggestion to wait until he returned to Saigon from Hanoi. 

During that last meeting there had been a moment of anxiety for him when she announced in a grave voice that she had to ask him a very important question — the date of his birth. He had tried to make light of it, but her face had remained serious. When he told her the day and the year, she had counted on her fingers for a moment, then revealed that he had been born in the Year of the Dog. 

“It’s most important in my country to know in what lunar year you were born,” she told him. “Before anybody considers marriage they must see if they are the children of harmonious moons.” 

“What year were you born, Lan?” he had asked anxiously, “In 1915— the Year of the Cat.” 

“The Year of the Cat?” he had repeated in alarm. “Can people horn in the Year of the Cat and the Year of the Dog live in harmony?” 

Her face had remained grave for a moment longer and his heart had stood still — then she had laughed at him outright. “When Buddha invited all the animals to appear before him to have the years named after them, only twelve came,” she explained, still smiling. “But in our horoscopes the animals don’t behave as they do in reality. Cat and dog may fight on earth-—but the astrologers say that if the ‘Cat’ is female, she can bring peace and serenity to the life of a male ‘Dog.’” 

“Then our signs are favorable!” He had grasped her hands more tightly, feeling suddenly weak with love for her, and she smiled happily back at him. 

“It seems they are, Joseph ... but it’s necessary to have detailed horoscopes cast by an expert to be really sure.” 

Her family had arranged to return to Saigon later that same day, and she and Joseph had taken leave of one another by the ornamental stone archway leading from the garden. He had kissed her hand tenderly again as he had done on the river, and for a moment her eyes had misted with tears of happiness. 

“I’ll write every day from Hanoi,” he had promised fervently, and when he hurried off towards the railway station she waited smiling and waving beneath the flag-draped archway until he disappeared from her sight. 

As he journeyed north his love for her seemed to grow by the hour and by the time he reached Hanoi he was filled with an acute physical longing for her. He found the northern capital sweltering under unseasonably hot temperatures, and the heat made concentration by day difficult and sleep almost impossible by night — even under the breeze of art electric fan. Because his thoughts revolved entirely around Lan, he found his eyes drawn constantly to the sinuous Annamese girls moving gracefully among the city crowds, and their tantalizingly narrow haunches, the delicate tilt of their tiny breasts, the sensuous slap of their bare feet on the pavements all Hashed the same messages of arousal to his brain. Often he groaned aloud in his throat as he walked: was he desperately seeking Lan in every Annamese girl, he wondered? Was he really honorably in love with her? Or were his senses, fevered by this exotic land, falling prey to impossible lustful desires? Sometimes in the fragrant dusk of evening in certain streets, a wire-wheeled pousse-pousse would pull silently to the pavement and a diminutive, amber-cheeked girl would whisper endearments in sibilant French to heighten his growing physical torment. 

His obsessive love for Lan affected his work deeply too; instead of concentrating exclusively on Annam’s historic kinship with Peking, he found himself driven to delve deeper each day into the dusty files of the archives in an effort to broaden his understanding of her country and its people. He spent many hours trying to discover the origins of her race and its language among the many tribes that had flooded southwards down the Indochina peninsula in the dawn of history, but discovered that after tracing vague links to the peoples of Indonesian stock who had settled the islands of the Pacific, French scholars had been unable to untangle the true roots of the Annamese and their culture. But wherever they came from, they had established their distinct nation — Nam Viet — in the northeastern coastal strip of the Indochina peninsula two thousand years before the French arrived, then throughout a long turbulent history struggled indefatigably to throw off China’s tutelage. This struggle had lasted more than a thousand years, but during that time they had also expanded their own territory southwards in wars of conquest that exterminated a weaker peace- loving people known as the Cham. Joseph was surprised to find that even while the Annamese emperors were themselves paying tribute to Peking in later centuries, they established a supremacy in the peninsula which allowed them in turn to demand tribute themselves from the princes of Laos and Cambodia; when the French arrived from the other side of the world in the nineteenth century to colonize them, the tenacious people of Nam Viet were then poised to extend their own domains farther through armed invasion of the neighboring Cambodian and Lao peoples. 

Joseph also found documents and papers that showed how the French government had been dragged into Indochina by merchant adventurers and soldiers who foraged for land and power for themselves before persuading Paris to support them. One vital memorandum written in 1790 by one of these soldiers of fortune urged France to seize Indochina because her great rival, Britain, already possessed India and Burma; if France wished to avoid humiliation and remain a contender for power and influence in the world, she must seize some territory in Asia, the memorandum insisted. No mention was made of the noble ideals of the “mission civilisatrice,” Joseph noted, until long after France was established in Indochina for much baser reasons of power. The archives also revealed that no consistent plan as to how the colony should be run had ever been conceived in Paris; policies had been chopped and changed haphazardly with the appointment of successive governors, and the picture that emerged from the hundreds of documents he scanned was one of accident and muddle which had led gradually by default to the crass exploitation of a people backward only in comparison with the advanced countries of Europe. He found studies by French scholars too, analyzing the brutal and bloodthirsty periods of Annamese history, and the files on this topic had been brought up to date with Süreté Générale documentation of the Red Terror of 1931. Verbatim accounts of the Süreté’s own interrogations, bound in printed booklets, told in gory detail how Communists had murdered and tortured landlords, mandarins and even their own renegade supporters, and Joseph shuddered as he read the documents. Men and women, according to the interrogations, had been burned, butchered, buried alive and drowned in a sustained burst of medieval sa1agery, and somehow the horrors of which he read brought back to his mind the note of deep loathing in Ngo Van Loc’s voice when he spoke in the market of how the French had murdered ten thousand of his countrymen during the uprisings of 1930—31. A conviction grew in him that the Annamese were an ill-starred people destined always to be haunted by violence and tragedy, and these thoughts oppressed him greatly. In an effort to lift his spirits he decided late one afternoon towards the end of his second week to immerse himself in the tranquility of the Pagode des Corbeaux 
— the Pagoda of Ravens — a famous fifteenth-century Confucian temple dedicated to the study of literature. 

The temple, built on the banks of the city’s Grand Lac, was deserted when he arrived, and above its ancient grove of mango trees the flock of glossy-winged birds that had roosted there for centuries were wheeling in a last frenzy of activity before settling for the night. But even inside the ancient walls a sense of peace eluded him; as he paced slowly through the five connecting courts of the temple he realized that somebody had followed him there, and when he stopped to inspect stone tablets bearing the names of distinguished mandarin scholars of the glorious three-hundred- year Le dynasty, he clearly heard the sound of stealthy footsteps behind him. Turning abruptly he caught a glimpse of the same languid youth who had shadowed him earlier in his visit; for an instant their eyes met and the youth seemed almost to sneer at him before moving out of sight behind one of the lacquered pillars in the adjoining court. 

Beyond the windows the dark shapes of ravens were whirling and shrieking in the luminous dusk and Joseph felt suddenly unnerved — both by the gloomy temple and by the youth who was so obviously following him now without taking much effort to conceal himself. His reading of the Süreté interrogations during the afternoon had left a strong impression in his mind of that organization’s ruthless vigilance, and suddenly he was certain that for reasons he didn’t understand he was being shadowed by one of its agents. Moving quietly On his toes, he walked back to the place where he had seen the youth conceal himself and stepped round the pillar. 

“Why are you following me?” lie demanded brusquely in French. 

The youth showed no sign of surprise and made no attempt to answer or move away. Instead he gazed unblinkingly back at Joseph with a composed, insolent expression, and after a moment the American turned on his heel and strode out of the temple. Halfway along one of the tree-lined avenues leading to the pagoda he turned and looked back; the agent had come out of the pillared entrance and was standing gazing after him quite openly. A moment later a black official-looking Citroën slid into the temple forecourt from another direction, and the youth approached it deferentially. The rear window was wound down, and the youth leaned towards the rear seat. There was not sufficient light for Joseph to identify the car’s occupant, hut he saw the youth nod once in his direction as he talked; then he stepped back respectfully as the rear window was wound up again and the car came on slowly in his direction. 

When it drew abreast of him and the rear door swung open across his path, Joseph was astonished to find himself looking into the gaunt, wasted face of Jacques Devraux. 

“We can avoid unnecessary unpleasantness, Joseph, if you accept my offer to drive you back to your hotel.” Devraux spoke in a flat impersonal voice and his clouded eyes gazed over the American’s shoulder as he waited for his reply. 

“I should have known you were responsible for having me followed,” said Joseph, glowering angrily at the Süreté chief. “Is this an official arrest?” 

“I want to talk to you.” 

“To apologize for having me followed without reason?” 

“That conclusion might be a trifle premature.” 

Joseph looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?” 

“Please get in the car.” 

Reluctantly Joseph climbed into the rear seat and Devraux signaled the chauffeur to drive on. “I won’t waste any time,” said the Süreté officer, sitting back in his seat and staring ahead. “I want to know why you met and spoke with the released prisoner Ngo Van Loi in Saigon.” 

Joseph turned and stared incredulously at the Frenchman’s impassive face. “You were having rue followed even then?” 

“You met a known Communist who’s already been involved in plots to overthrow our government here. What did you discuss with him?” 

Joseph continued to stare. “That’s my business. Why should it interest you.” 

“Did you discuss political action?” Devraux’s voice was cold and distant, as if he had no personal interest in the response. 

“I refuse to answer your questions. It’s none of your business.” 

Devraux sank back wearily against the leather upholstery and lit a cheroot, then opened the window to toss the match into the darkness. As he took the little cigar between his fingers, Joseph noticed that his hand shook slightly. “If I told you that an attempt was made on my life in Hue, would that make you think I had the right to ask you some questions?