Saigon (53 page)

At his shoulder he heard her breathing become ragged as she fought to hold back her tears. “It was nine years before I knew,” said Joseph desperately, swinging around to face her. “Can’t you understand? I had asked her to marry me; she only decided against it later because of her lather!” 

Tempe nodded quickly, biting her lip. “And you came home looking for a comforting haven — I suppose I knew that deep in my heart. But I gave you what you wanted and needed, Joseph— two fine sons! A stronger man might have put his past behind him then for the reality of the present.” She shook her, head pityingly. “But not you. You’ve always. gone on yearning for the magic mysteries of the East that captivated you at fifteen. Now you’re middle-aged, but still you can’t bear to think that you’re not going to find another jeweled palace, can you — even if it’s between a Saigon woman’s thighs!” 

He had closed his eyes then to blot out the unbearable sight of the hurt in her face. “It was just an accident,” he had whispered. “Don’t you understand? If I hadn’t gone back to Saigon quite by chance at the end of the war and discovered Tuyet, I don’t suppose anything ‘more would have come of it.” 

“I don’t think you went back entirely by chance, Joseph.” 

He had opened his eyes wide then in amazement. “What do you mean?” 

She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t know. But there’s something inevitable about all this. I suppose I’ve always known you would do something of the kind, If it hadn’t been Saigon and the French officer’s wife, it would have been someone else, somewhere different.” 

She had been holding a glass of French wine in her hand as she spoke, and for an instant he’d thought that she might dash its contents in his face; then she put the glass down quietly on a table and walked from the room, bending forward slightly and hugging herself in her anguish; at that moment she looked old and vulnerable, and he had wanted desperately to comfort her. By the time he left for the airport an hour later, she had made her face up carefully and she watched him go, tight-lipped and pale but in full possession of herself. Above all else she had been determined not to shed any tears in front of him, and the recollection of her courage shamed him so that he could stand still no longer on the quayside. 

When he turned his back on the river he found he was looking again at the first view he’d ever had of Saigon when the Avignon sailed up the river thirty years before. The same trees that had given shelter to the betel-chewing coolies then were still casting their shade on the burning streets, and the twin spires of the cathedral were still visible jutting above the rooftops. Suddenly a wave of terrible compassion for himself and all humankind swept over him: how could that innocent fifteen-year-old boy who had mistaken exhausted men for massacre victims have been expected to know how to deal with all the impossible complexities of life that were to follow? How could anyone prepare a child for all the terrible pitfalls that lay in its path? Wasn’t there any way of preventing grown men and women from injuring and wounding one another grievously generation after generation? Using their own sad weaknesses and failings as blunt instruments, they battered away at one another until all that was left was emotional pulp. 

He turned these somber thoughts over endlessly in his mind as he walked back to the Continental, and he had almost reached the hotel again when he saw Lan coming towards him beneath the tamarind trees. She wore a pink flowered silken ao dai over billowing white trousers, and as she walked she was talking animatedly to someone at her side — but it was a moment or two before Joseph recognized her father. Portly from years of good living, Tran Van Hieu wore a Western business suit of a pale expensive linen flow instead of his mandarin’s gown, and the hair above his moonlike face was stiff and white. His expression remained as shrewd and watchful as ever, but because he was concentrating on what his daughter was saying he hadn’t noticed Joseph approaching among the crowds thronging the pavement. The sight of Lan holding her father’s arm startled Joseph: he remembered all too clearly how she had sat silently beside him in an attitude of rejection on his return from Hanoi, and seeing them together for the first time since then caused his spirits to sink. 

But then he noticed that they were smiling happily at one another and he decided that Lan must after all have made up her mind in his favor. Unable to contain his impatience, Joseph stepped down from the hotel terrace to greet them in the street and almost knocked over a gangling Vietnamese peasant boy running fast along the inside of the sidewalk. The boy stumbled, then recovered himself and the reporter’s eye in Joseph automatically registered the loose calico tunic, the dirty white trousers and the scuffed sandals that the youth wore, But then something odd about the way he was running compelled Joseph’s full attention; the natural outline of his clothes was broken by the bulge of a lumpy package below the waist, and as he ran, he was supporting it awkwardly with one hand. Remembering the Journal de Saigon’s front-page story of that morning, Joseph yelled a frantic warning and began to run, but the crowds outside the hotel did not recognize immediately, as he had done, a trained member of Battalion 905, the Viet Minh suicide squad. The youth was running faster now to carry out the first symbolic assassination under the new land reform decree, and Tran Van Hieu, long-time collaborationist, absentee landlord and owner of vast tracts of rice land in the Mekong delta, looked up at h1m for the first time at the moment he flung a fatal arm around his neck. 

For a fleeting moment Joseph allowed himself to hope he had been wrong — the boy was merely expressing his gratitude for some favor Tran Van Hieu had done his family in the rice fields. Then Lan shied away from him, and he saw the smile freeze on her face as the peasant began jerking obscenely at his clothing below the waist with his free hand. Making an incongruous pair, the ragged peasant and one of Vietnam’s wealthiest aristocrats swung crazily in the middle of the pavement for a moment in a macabre dance, their arms tight about one another’s necks. Then the terrified crowd began scattering, and Joseph saw Lan trying to pull the youth off her father. But he held Tran Van Hieu fast in the crook of his arm as he must have held many practice “victims” in his jungle training camp and the old man’s eyes began to bulge with fear, Joseph tried to lunge towards them, but a Vietnamese woman, fleeing in panic, cannoned into him, sending him sprawling in the gutter. When the fragmentation grenade strapped to the youth’s thigh exploded, it lifted Tran Van Hieu and the youth bodily off the ground, and they fell back together in a tangled heap. Several other passersby collapsed around them under the horrified eyes of the colons taking coffee on the Continental terrace, and their blood mingled with that of the assassin and his victim in a spreading pool on the pavement. Because he was lying prone on the ground when the grenade detonated, Joseph escaped injury, but when he rose and walked unsteadily towards the carnage he could see that Lan’s body, lying a few feet from her father’s, was twisted and broken. He wasn’t able to see her face because it was pressed against the pavement, but the pink silks of her dress were quickly turning crimson in the bright sunlight, and there was no sign of movement in her slender limbs. 

“I suppose you think I must be cold and unfeeling because you haven’t seen me weeping,” said Tuyet quietly as she walked beside Joseph through the dappled shadows of the tamarinds lining the Rue Catinat. “You probably think I don’t care at all, don’t you?” 

“No, I don’t think that,” replied Joseph, uncomfortable under her challenging stare, “I can think of lots of reasons why you might want to keep your feelings to yourself.” He glanced down to find her watching him unblinkingly and found he couldn’t hold her gaze. She was wearing a plain, unhemmed mourning ao dai of white silk, and a long white scarf trailed down her back, but although the traditional Vietnamese Costume of the bereaved was designed to convey that all thought of adornment was deliberately neglected in a time of grief, he found the natural beauty of her face almost painful to look on. During the funeral ceremonies for Lan and her father he had not dared look in her direction, but afterwards he had asked her to meet him later outside his hotel, and she had arrived promptly at the arranged time. 

“Perhaps you ought to remember that I’ve had a lot of practice at not crying when I’m unhappy. It’s something that can become a habit.” 

“I do realize that,” said Joseph miserably. “And of course it’d be quite natural if you didn’t feel the same deep sense of shock about your mother’s death that I do. But the last time I talked with her alone, she told me how unhappy she was that you’d had to grow up without knowing her very well.” Instead of replying, Tuyet tossed her head and looked away quickly across the boulevard, but not. before he’d noticed the hurt look in her eyes. “But. I didn’t ask you here to talk about the past and the unhappiness we’ve all suffered,” he continued gently. “I wanted to talk about the future.” 

“I’m surprised to hear that. I thought after what happened yesterday you’d never want to come back to Saigon again.” 

“As long as you’re here I’ll never stay away!” Joseph spoke with such vehemence that she glanced up at him in surprise. “That’s what I wanted to discuss with you. Don’t you remember the last time we met I tried to ask you something — but you were in too much of a hurry to listen?” 

She shook her head stubbornly. “No, I don’t remember.” 

“Well I did try.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “I was going to ask you if you’d like to leave Saigon and make your home with me.” 

He watched anxiously for her reaction, but she kept her gaze fixed on the ground and didn’t reply. 

“I don’t mean in the United States,” he added hastily. “We could live in Asia — Singapore perhaps, Hong Kong or even Tokyo. I could persuade my newspaper to base me in any of those places. I want it to be somewhere where you’ll be happy.” 

“Why do you want to help me now when you’ve never troubled yourself before? Has that awful-explosion left you with a guilty conscience?” Because she asked the question without noticeable rancor, the implication of her words shocked Joseph more deeply than if she’d screamed at him. 

“Tuyet. I’ve always cared — from the very moment I knew of your existence. I’ve always sent money for you ever since. I thought you knew that.” 

“Money! Do Americans think- everything can be solved by money? A child that doesn’t know its real parents can’t love money in a bank account!” 

Joseph gazed at the swarms of passing cyclo-pousses, feeling a sense of desperation rising within him. “Tuyet, I’m terribly sorry about all the things that went wrong in the past. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life, but now I want to try to make the right one with you.” 

“Did you discuss this with my mother before she died?” She asked the question hesitantly, but watched his face with a peculiar intensity as she waited for him to reply. 

“Yes I did. We talked about it at Dalat. I wanted both of you to come away with me — both of you, don’t you understand? I wanted all of us to be together as we should have been from the start, I wanted us to travel together, really get to know one another properly.. 

“And what did she say?” 

Joseph looked away. “She said we ought to wait ... until we knew what was going to happen at Dien Bien Phu.” 

“But that was all over two months ago.” 

“I know. But her husband was fighting there, remember.” 

“And she never gave you an answer?” 

Seeing from her expression how important the question was to her made his heart begin to sink. “I think she might have agreed.” 

“But she never told you you’re not really sure what she wanted to do?” 

Joseph shook his head helplessly. “No. She had promised to tell me yesterday — but she never got the chance.” 

They walked in silence for a minute or two, and Joseph searched his mind desperately for new arguments that might help sway her; beside him he could see she was biting her lower lip in agitation. 

“I don’t want to leave Vietnam,” she said suddenly, blurting the words out in a defiant tone. “I don’t know even now whether I can trust you. I know nothing of the way you live. Besides there’s someone here who really loves me.” 

Joseph stared at her in dismay. “I know your uncle Tam’s been very kind, but you don’t seem to understand 

Her dark eyes flashed suddenly. “I don’t mean Uncle Tam!” 

Joseph stopped and looked at her with a puzzled expression. “What do you mean, then?” 

For a moment she fiddled with the sun hat she’d been carrying, then placed it carefully on her head and took her time tying the silk ribbons beneath her chin. When she looked up at him, her face in the shadow of its brim reminded him more than ever before of Lan. “I have a friend,” she said in a voice that broke a little. “He doesn’t love the French or America but he does love me. Perhaps he’s the first person who ever has.” 

She turned away suddenly, and he gazed down helplessly at her, realizing she was close to tears. 

“I’m going now. Don’t try to contact me anymore. Goodbye... Father!” 

She turned and ran quickly away along the boulevard, holding her hat in place with one hand, and she didn’t slow to a walk until she was almost out of sight. He stood watching her slender figure until it was finally swallowed up by the late afternoon crowds moving across the Place du Theâtre, but she didn’t stop or turn her head again to look back at him. 

1963 

The Geneva Conference that finally ended the first 
Indochina war divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel to allow the French Union forces to regroup in the south while the Communists moved their forces to the north. The delegates agreed that the division should be temporary and that elections to unify the country should be held within two years — but because the United States was determined not to concede further ground to Communism in the wake of the Korean war, no American signature was ever placed on the final Geneva agreements, and Washington encouraged President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam to dissociate himself from the decisions too. Because it suited their purposes at the time, neither China nor the Soviet Union objected very strongly. As a result, the Saigon government turned the provisional demarcation line at the seventeenth parallel into a national border and refused to cooperate with Hanoi in the holding of elections that would certainly have swept Ho Chi Minh to power after his spectacular defeat of the French. When Ho descended in triumph from the hills of Tongking at the close of the Geneva Conference to set up his government in Hanoi, nearly a million frightened 

Vietnamese Catholics born in the north followed the French forces south; some ninety thousand southern supporters of Ho meanwhile trekked northward, and these two internal migrations helped polarize the country into opposing 

Communist and anti-Communist camps. During the next five years the Communists, exhausted after their long war, were content to consolidate their rule in the north, while President Diem did the same in the south. But although the United States poured massive amounts of military and economic aid into Saigon, the government of South Vietnam became increasingly oppressive and never won the support of the largely peasant population of the region. Ngo Dinh Diem, an austere Catholic bachelor born of a Hue mandarin family, had been appointed prime minister by Bao Dai before the former emperor abdicated for the last time, and after proclaiming himself president following a dubious referendum, Diem succeeded in restoring order to the chaotic southern areas of Vietnam by breaking the power of the religious sects and dispersing their private armies. But as time passed, he resorted increasingly to undemocratic methods to sustain his government; nepotism and corruption became commonplace, and under the influence of his 

megalomaniac brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the government security apparatus terrorized their serious opponents and herded even the mildest critics into prison camps. It was in this atmosphere of strife and discontent that Ho Chi Minh turned his attention once more to the task of completing the revolution he had embarked on nearly half a century earlier. In 1959 he began infiltrating the ninety thousand southerners who had gone north in 1954 back to their homelands, and within a year these Communist cadres had fused a dozen disparate political groups and religious sects into a new organization called the Mat Tran Dan Toc Giai Phong — the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Dedicated to overthrowing “the camouflaged colonial regime of Diem and the United States,” the Front armed itself with American weapons captured from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam — popularly known as “ARVN” — and by 1962 it commanded support in four-fifths of all the villages in the south. President Diem’s propaganda ministry inaccurately dubbed all members of the Liberation Front Viet Cong — Vietnamese Communists — although the movement was led, like the Viet Minh before it, by only a small core of convinced Communists who employed the same propaganda and terror tactics that had proved so effective in converting uneducated peasants to the anti-French cause In the United States, the real hardships that the historically downtrodden peasants of South Vietnam were continuing to suffer under President Diem were not seen in their true perspective; to the peasants, Ngo Dinh Diem and his government seemed no different from the corrupt mandarins who had battened on them for a hundred years, except that the white colonial overlords behind them were now Americans, not French. In Washington, however, the new Liberation Front was seen only as an artificial cover organization for Communist aggression, directed from Moscow and Peking, and when President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, determined that his country should “pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the survival of liberty,” South Vietnam seemed to be just the place where such lofty idealism should be put into practice. At that time there were only seven hundred Americans attached to the military advisory team that had first been established in Saigon in 1950, but over the next few years President Kennedy constantly increased their strength. By 1963 a million and a half dollars were being spent on the jungle and paddy field war every day, some sixteen thousand American “advisory” troops were involved in the fighting, and the casualty toll was mounting— in 1961 fourteen Americans had died, by the end of 1962 more than a hundred. On the political front American funds were being used to build “Strategic Hamlets” — villages fortified by barbed-wire barricades and palisades of spiked bamboo — and by 1963 ten million of South Vietnam’s fifteen million peasants had been herded into these stockades to separate the guerrillas from their main base of support, the people, But although American involvement was increasing in all areas, considerable tension plagued key battlefield relationships between the American military men and the little Asian soldiers they were trying to advise, President Diem developed an obsession with keeping losses among his own troops to a minimum, and because he demoted officers who allowed their units to suffer more than minimal casualties, the Americans often found themselves going into action with soldiers whose first thought was to avoid contact with the enemy: Despite this drawback, however, the introduction of American helicopters and armed river craft gave the South Vietnamese a dramatic new mobility, and towards the end of 1962 for the first time the Viet Cong began to suffer sizable casualties in swiftly mounted search-and-destroy missions. To counteract these battle successes and the effects of the Strategic Hamlets program, the Communist leadership in Hanoi began sending to the south high4evel North Vietnamese party cadres who had fought at Dien Bien Phu; this was done secretly to maintain the deception that the insurrection in the south was a purely local affair, but it stiffened the Liberation Front, and in the early months of 1963 the conflict in and around the vital Mekong delta intensified rapidly as the better-organized guerrillas and the American-equipped forces of President Diem threw themselves into a new struggle for supremacy.