Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

The crowd of foreigners on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel reminded Christopher of travelers on the deck of a ship. Everything that interested them lay inside the rails; the Vietnamese, as alike as gulls, went by on the sidewalk, locked in a language that made no sense to white men. Christopher saw four Americans he knew, all of them journalists. He sat at the other end of the terrace with his back to their table and ordered a vermouth cassis. In the street, ordinary women in ao dai and trousers and bar girls in miniskirts that spoiled the grace of their slender bodies were out walking; a rawboned American girl carrying an armload of packages strode through the crowd, whistling a love song, her hair swinging.

Christopher waited. Dark had fallen, and most of the people on the terrace had gone inside to have dinner, when the girl came. She had changed out of her white gown into a linen suit, with a tangled necklace of pearls at her throat and her heavy hair coiled on her neck.

She paused in the doorway, saw Christopher, and walked straight to his table. She took the bamboo chair opposite Christopher, sitting on its edge with her spine straight. She wore a faint violet scent, and Christopher thought of Honey’s bikini printed with foreign flowers she had never seen. Christopher did not speak again, except to summon the waiter; he let the girl order her own Coca-Cola.

“It’s curious,” she said, “this was the very first place I looked for you. I’m glad you’re so easy to find.”

“There aren’t many places in Saigon to look for a foreigner,” Christopher said. “I’m a little surprised that the Truong toe sent you-I had an idea he’d send a male relative.”

The girl wrapped a paper napkin around the sweating glass the waiter had set before her. “I detest ice,” she said. “It makes one feel no cooler to swallow these freezing drinks.”

She smiled and lifted the glass; her gestures, like her face, were softer outside the Truong toe’s house. She had the fine features of the Vietnamese young; her fresh skin was lighter than Honey’s. She had had a better diet: the bones of her neck were covered with smooth flesh and her hair shone with health. Her small ears, pierced by the golden earrings of an engaged girl, were almost transparent.

“My uncle was impressed with you,” she said. “He wasn’t pleased that I had been rude to you.”

“Neither was I. Perhaps we can come to the point. I’m a little tired, and very hungry.”

“You repay me my rudeness, I see. You have the right. There’s been death in our family, as you know, and it’s difficult sometimes to remember one’s manners. I’m exhausted with condolences-everyone comes to the Truong toe’s house, and I’m tired of all the sadness.”

“I understood. It’s not important.”

“My uncle would like to talk to you again.”

“Would he? I have nothing more to tell him about your cousin.”

“He knows that, but he would like to meet with you. What’s your Christian name? We can’t go on calling each other ‘monsieur’ and ‘mademoiselle.’ I am called Nicole, in French.”

“Nicole? And in Vietnamese?”

She smiled. “Nicole is easier. And you?”

“Paul.”

“Like the angry saint. I’ve always liked that name.” She spoke French like a Parisian, with a studied musicality that paid compliments to the language. She was not speaking to him in the same way as before. Like an educated Frenchwoman, she had two voices: her natural speech for ordinary business, and a sweeter tone when she wished to be charming.

“I’d be glad to see the Truong toe again,” Christopher said. “Has he a time and place in mind?”

“He asked me to bring you to him.”

“That’s kind, but I know the way.”

“He’s not at home tonight-we’d have to go to another place, and I’m not sure you could find it. It’s in Cholon, and the streets are not easy there.”

“All right. I have a car-but really I must eat before we go. I’ve had nothing since yesterday.”

Nicole reached across the table and lifted Christopher’s wrist to look at his watch. “It’s only eight-we have time,” she said.

During the meal Nicole talked about France. “I was educated to belong there, all of us were whose families had enough money,” she said. “I think in French even now-it really is the language of logic. I separate people into French categories, intelligent or not intelligent. Everything is so simple in French, one knows the difference between things.”

“And do you feel in French as well?” Christopher asked.

“Ah, no-a Vietnamese feels in Vietnamese. French is a language of the mind-Vietnamese, of the blood.”

“You sound like Diem-what was he to you, an uncle?”

“A sort of cousin. Why should I sound like him? He hardly ever spoke.”

“He spoke enough,” Christopher said. “Is this mystical idea of Vietnamese nationhood something the mandarin class has invented? You’re the only ones who speak of it.”

“How would you know? You can only speak to people who understand French.”

“That’s true, and you all have this tendency to dramatize the Vietnamese side of your nature. You take such pleasure in tantalizing outsiders with your national mystery, as if it were something hidden, but in plain sight.”

“And what, in your opinion, is that mystery?”

“A pride in your murders. It’s not a quality that’s confined to Vietnam. There’s a tribe in Ghana that believes no one dies a natural death-when a man dies, they use magic to find who in the tribe has killed him, and by what spell. Then the dead man’s son is given his father’s sandals. When he grows big enough to wear them, he kills his father’s murderer. Eventually, of course, he too is killed in revenge. It goes on, generation after generation.”

“You think the Vietnamese question is as simple as that?”

“I think the human question is as simple as that, Nicole. Intellectual systems are developed to justify the exchange of death; the system of the Ghanaian tribe is as sensible as Christianity or your own family’s sense of aristocracy, or what the Americans call the dignity of the individual. In Germany, two thousand years of Christian teaching produced the SS. In Vietnam, two thousand years of colonialism produced this slaughter of peasants Ho Chi Minh calls a revolution and Diem never put a name to. It required only a hundred years of technology to produce the Hiroshima bomb. All achieved the same results- murder without guilt.”

Nicole put down her knife and fork and leaned back in her chair, peering at Christopher as if his words had formed a frame around him. “You believe in nothing, then,” she said.

“I believe in consequences,” Christopher replied.

Cholon was alive at night. The Chinese were everywhere, crouching in the street to eat rice, moving quickly through the din of voices and loudspeaker music on errands, exchanging goods for money. Christopher drove the Citroen through the boiling crowd; pedestrians banged on the thin metal hood to let him know that they were there.

“We’d do better to walk,” Nicole said.

Christopher parked the car; the gray Simca that had followed them from the hotel stopped a block behind. Two Vietnamese, shorter than the Chinese who filled the street, got out of the Simca and vanished into the crowd.

Nicole led Christopher through a series of alleys; the mob thinned and finally disappeared altogether as they entered a narrow dirt street lined with the windowless walls of warehouses. Nicole opened a door that squealed across a concrete floor and grasped Christopher’s wrist, guiding him along a walkway past piles of crates.