Single White Female in Hanoi (34 page)

The land I first set foot in has returned to the top of the magic faraway tree, familiar now as it was strange then.

It's a land of dragonfruit, soursop, longans and rambutan, and of power cuts. It's a land of monsoon – as improbable, as surreal as last time. On the rare occasions I get to walk out of an air-conditioned room, it's hard to accept that climate alone can be responsible for the steaming fan-forced kiln that is the outside world. Hard to understand how the heat doesn't spread outwards and broil the whole planet.

Last night there were two power cuts – the sound of the overhead fan grinding to a halt now a familiar death knell, like being forced underwater and wondering how long you'll be able to hold your breath. By day, street vendors slump under trees waving bamboo fans in an automatic gesture. By night, more people than ever sleep on the street, causing me to speculate that for some, at least, it's voluntary.

For more than a fortnight, I've nursed a queasy feeling about Hien. She's disappeared from her position outside
Nam Bo
supermarket again, and the last time I saw her she was too sick to speak. I need to know, but I'm afraid to ask.

Finally I ask her homeless friend whose name I've never learnt. My suspicions are confirmed with a kind hand on my arm. ‘
Co Hien da Chet
.' Hien has died. ‘
Benh Lao
' – tuberculosis. I couldn't save her. I don't know where she died, or whether she had anyone with her. I don't know whether she got a funeral. I do know she had some family in a province up north, but she was too sick and too poor to visit them. I have some photos and a collection of strange, colourful knitted things to remember her by.

Zac was right. Hien's death hurts more than I expected. I'll always wonder whether there was something else I could have done. It should have been so easy. She died from a single cause – poverty, and I was a hundred metres up the road with enough money to save her many times over. I just couldn't work out how to get my money into the right pockets.

Tonight, I'm meeting Kiwi Alexa for our one-year anniversary dinner at an Indian restaurant. Alexa arrived less than 48 hours after I did last year, both of us vegetarian, antipodean single women, trained English teachers, knowing barely a soul. Our similarities begin to founder after that. Alexa is reserved, gracious, organised, and unswervingly positive. She rarely speaks cynically or disparagingly about anything. She believes in uplifting things, like the immortal human soul, energies that heal, and that ‘shit happens for a reason'. She didn't compromise her dignity chasing Vietnamese guys either, enjoying instead a couple of discreet flings with friendly English expats before settling down with one of them, a guy called Jack.

Our one-year anniversary dinner is very enjoyable. Alexa keeps the conversation mild and chatty. It's not until dessert that she finally drops the bomb.

‘I know I'm a bit late in announcing this,' she begins, ‘but I'm having a baby with Jack. At the end of the year.'

‘You're joking!' I exclaim stupidly. That's six months away. Obviously she's spent some time considering whether or not to go through with it. I can appreciate that Alexa would be a great mum.

‘Where will you live?' I ask her.

‘We'll stay here,' she tells me. ‘I'm going to have the baby at Bach Mai hospital,'

Our lives
have
taken different courses. I don't want to rain on her amazing announcement, but I feel ready to make one of my own.

‘Funnily enough,' I say, ‘I've kind of decided to leave Hanoi.' Hearing the words spoken out loud gives me a fright, even though I booked the flight yesterday afternoon, after being offered a slew of gigs in Sydney. I leave in a fortnight

‘Oh my god!' Alexa stares at me for a minute with her hands on her cheeks. ‘Where will you go?'

‘Back to Sydney. I guess.' I frown for a moment. ‘Not really sure though, in the long term.'

‘Why?'

‘It just feels like the right time. Natassia's gone. I've fallen out with Zac … '

‘But you've got the band!'

‘I know, I know. I've already lined up a replacement. That Danish guy. I've just got to tell him. And the band.'

‘What about our choir performance?' Alexa's panicking now. She's a fellow contralto in the Hanoi International choir, and we've got our performance of Vivaldi's
Gloria
at the Hanoi Opera House coming up.

‘God – I'm not missing that! I'll leave the following day. That gig's gonna be my swan song!'

Alexa looks at me for a while.

So you're going to miss our wedding,' she says. Jack and I are going to get married after the baby's born.'

‘Jesus. Is there anything else you want to tell me?'

Erin lets me into the yellow house, then heads into town for a drink. There's no one else home.

I climb the first two flights of stairs to the landing where the electronic piano is set up. I'm carrying a folder of jazz charts and the full score for Vivaldi's
Gloria
, which I'll be singing in a week. I figure I've got two hours' worth of playing ahead.

First I warm up, playing scales and exercises for about forty minutes. Having the big house to myself is a luxury, since it means I can play without having to entertain anyone. Downstairs, the phone is ringing unanswered. I immerse myself in my practice.

When my fingers feel warmed up, I play through some jazz tunes, soloing through the changes, sometimes stopping and starting as I work out new ways to voice chords or play melodies. Then I run over the Caboose set list, since there are still two more gigs to go before I leave.

Next I spend half an hour revising a few band tunes from Sydney. If I'm to be back on the music scene there, I'd better get my act together. Two storeys below, the phone rings periodically.

Finally I take a look at the four-part vocal harmonies to
Gloria
. It helps me to learn my parts if I can play them on the piano. Playing simple melodies means I'm not drowning out the noise of the ringing telephone so much, and it begins to impinge on my consciousness.

A few more ring cycles and I trot down the stairs. It seems like a phone that wants to be answered.

‘Hello?'

‘Carolyn!' says Alexa through the din at the other end.

‘What's happening?'

‘I'm at the
Bia Hoi
,' I can hear a smile in her voice. ‘I have a surprise for you' I hear the phasing sound of a phone being passed, the shout of a shoeshine boy, then a familiar slow drawl says:

‘Carolyn?'

‘Nats!' I scream.

Natassia's right there, backpacks beside her, looking a bit road-weary but more relaxed and more beautiful than I've ever seen her. Her hair, longer and a little unruly, is sun-bleached, her skin, a dark reddish tan. The light around the
Bia Hoi
, filtered though the smoke and the haze, seems to glow with a subdued radiance. The scene has taken on the look of a 70s home movie.

It's been five long months with little more than a hurried email from Saigon for contact. My friend's been adventuring in Laos, Cambodia and Burma. Now she's back – two weeks before I'm due to leave.

‘Nooooooooo!' she drawls firmly when I tell her. ‘Noooooo'. She shakes her head irritably, lights a cigarette, thinks for a minute, then nods. ‘Okay, so, I'll stay at your place while you're in Australia, and I'll find us a big house. A good house. When you get back we can move in. Let's stay in Hanoi till the end of the year.'

I stare at her. My brain is brimming over. She blows smoke and holds my gaze.

‘Ow!' I manage, holding my head in my hands.

‘That's only six months!' she points out. ‘We can take lots of trips around the country. We never did enough of that.'

‘OK,' I shrug finally. ‘What the hell. I'll come back.'

Luckily, I'm rational, or I'd ascribe what happens next to some kind of sentience on the part of this city. It's as though Hanoi decides it wants to give me something. Something special. Because three days before my departure I have an experience so extraordinary, no one believes it.

It starts when I drop in on my British friend, Tim. I visit him after lunch in his plush new office on the southern bank of Hoan Kiem Lake to say goodbye. As a self-described ‘scumbag', Tim's time here couldn't have gone better. Not just because he likes beef and bikes and
loves
beer, but because he arrived as a shit-kicker in the UK film industry and has since re-invented himself as a legitimate journalist, stringing for
Time
and several international press agencies. With a well-balanced mixture of compassion, intelligence, an unfailing ironic wit and intractable alcoholism, he has the perfect temperament for the job.

Tim's onto a lead involving Vietnam's Central Highlands, an area now so politically sensitive that the press is mostly barred from entering. Anyone who speaks out about what's happening there does so anonymously or risks a jail sentence. Last year there were mass protests by the tribespeople who occupy the area. They were asking for independence, the return of ancestral lands, and religious freedom. The authorities said ‘no' by destroying churches, confiscating land, and sending in armed forces by the thousand. With what turns out to have been unerring accuracy, Zac told me a lot of what I know about this. Zac also claimed the police were torturing detained tribespeople with electric batons. Tim confirms this.

Word now is that thousands of highlanders have fled across the Cambodian border and are living in refugee camps. Strangely, the police and army presence in Hanoi has been stepped up lately in a display of military might – I wonder if this is what prompted it. The streets are full of roving police shouting through megaphones. I've seen Armoured Personnel Carriers on Hoang Dieu Street, two blocks from my place, and a great number of uniformed guys standing around with AK47s.

Tim and I drink a cup of tea, then knock back a couple of vodkas. We smoke on the balcony, which overlooks the full length of Hoan Kiem Lake. Today the ‘Lake of the Restored Sword' is a shimmering field of green. Ludemis, a visiting Greek poet, once described it as ‘an emerald jewel set in the heart of the city.'

The crumbling tortoise pagoda stands alone on its little island at our end. At the Northern end is Ngoc Son Pagoda, which is open to visitors. Inside the pagoda is a bizarre artefact. It's an unknown species of turtle, apparently 500 years old, preserved rather in the manner of Ho Chi Minh. It was recovered from the lake in 1968. The plaque beside it suggests it was introduced to the lake in the Middle Ages, whereupon it spent 500 years as the lake's sole inhabitant. Oddly enough, the legend of the restored sword puts a large talking tortoise in the waters around about the same time. The tortoise of legend confiscated the famous sword from the emperor. Some Hanoians believe the mythical beast still lives at the bottom of the lake, a fact Zac used to illustrate his point that this, clearly, was a backward society.

I love the lake and its legends, but I'm less than charmed by the tradition of releasing pet fish alive into its foul waters. The fish die shortly afterwards then drift belly-up towards the outside of the lake to ring the waterline.

Tim goes back to his Central Highlands story and I decide to wander into the Old Quarter at the far end of Hoan Kiem. I feel like a walk along the lake's edge, avoiding the road. The pathway is lined with weeping willows and stone benches on which elderly people sit and talk. It's Old Hanoi – pre-communism, pre-famine, pre-American war, pre-Japanese invasion, pre-French colonialism – perfectly preserved as, metres away, teenagers on motorcycles tear noisily around the ring road.

About 100 metres along the lake's edge, I find half a dozen people standing together and pointing into the water. Apart from one backpacker, they're all locals. I join them, staring deep into the lake's edge. There's nothing to see apart from algae, garbage and a few dead fish. The backpacker, who seems a bit slow-witted, tells me he thinks maybe a child has fallen in. I notice two people in the crowd have cameras, good cameras.

‘What's happening here?' I ask a young Vietnamese guy beside me.

‘
Con Rua
,' he replies, gesturing towards the water near us.

‘Tortoise?' I laugh. He shrugs, doesn't speak English.

I squint dubiously into the water. Tuning into the chatter around me, I notice ‘
con rua
' features heavily. And the crowd is growing. We all keep staring into the water, except for the backpacker, who has wandered off. Minutes pass. I try to make out movement below the surface, but the water is stagnant to the point of opacity.

The crowd is now about twenty-strong. Suddenly there's shouting, and a wave of excitement travels through the spectators. Turning back to the lake, I catch sight of a most improbable thing.

The improbable thing is maybe half a metre high and shaped like a traffic bollard. Actually, it looks altogether like a traffic bollard. It has reared almost perpendicularly from the water about five metres from us. There are no discernible facial features, just an expanse of dirty grey with a few gnarled black markings. The cameras start snapping furiously. I try to couch what I'm seeing in everyday terms, but I'm forced to conclude that it's the head of some kind of giant turtle.

As quickly as it appeared, the turtle-head sinks back below the waterline. There's a sigh of disappointment, then it reappears again a metre closer. I stare at the thing incredulously. ‘
It's a fucking dinosaur,
' I whisper. I make out two possible nostrils at the top end. Suddenly it opens what I presume to be its mouth and it crosses my mind that it may start speaking. But it doesn't, it just jaws at us bizarrely and sinks again. By now there's a woman in a conical hat leaning on me, and a palpable feeling of solidarity throughout the crowd. There's no doubting the extraordinary nature of the occasion.

The turtle-head surfaces a few more times at a variety of angles, postures stiffly for the cameras, then sinks for the last time. The crowd begins to thin. It may be years before it's seen again. I continue on my way to the Old Quarter in an exalted state. ‘
No one's gonna believe this
,' I think to myself.

And I'm right. Before the day is out, I've told Vietnamese friends and expat friends alike, and, apart from Natassia, all of them remain as sceptical as I would have been.

‘I don't see how anything with a pulse could live down there,' is the average response.

‘Did you look around for a guy with a remote control?' asks my Vietnamese friend and neighbour, Dat.

I'm happy for them to think I hallucinated the whole thing. For me, the turtle was a moment of profound contact with Hanoi. Seeing it was a privilege that, for all I know, may never have been extended to a foreigner before. I never win raffles – or any kind of competition, really – but when that mythical creature rose from the lake, I felt like I'd won the lottery.

And I'm vindicated the next day. Photos of the beast are all over the local papers.

Flicking through, I also spot an ad for our choir's Vivaldi performance. It's two nights away.