Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

The two women sat in silence, Bernadette rapping with her scarlet fingernails on the plastic steering column, Nan Luc remembering all the other youth demonstrations she had taken part in: the long columns winding their way through the dusty tracks of the countryside behind Saigon, the times when, as the banners were shaken and the chanting against China or America taken up even more strongly, the peasant women in conical hats would look up from the paddy fields. Sometimes a child or two would wave, but through most of the long, trudging marches only the water buffaloes, the movement of their great heads slowly following the progress of the column along the banked road, registered the passing of the dispirited demonstrators.

With a sharp and sudden touch of anguish she thought of student demonstrations she had seen in Paris where young people marched because they felt strongly about something. Now she watched the demonstrators crossing in front of the car, their weary chants paying slogan lip service to unfelt international hatreds, and tears rose in her eyes.

Bernadette thrust the car into gear as the last of the column passed. ‘You’re a fool, Nan Luc.’ Her anger bubbled over again. ‘After Paris you could have gone on anywhere. London, even Washington.’

‘And what will happen now?’ Nan Luc asked.

‘You will go to one of the provinces. And you will never, on any account, talk to anyone about anything Benning’s son told you in Paris.’

The main square of the city of Cahn Roc, capital city of Cahn Roc province, was hot and dusty as the old Dodge truck coughed and wheezed to a stop after the journey up from Ho Chi Minh City. The balconied buildings set back behind the line of palm trees were French colonial in style, run-down now with paint blistering and peeling from the doors, and broken windows stuffed with rags. But the people had a lighter air than those in Saigon. The same swarms of cyclists emerged from side roads in a cascade of tinkling bells, the same dusty evidence in the form of broken cafe tables existed from a life more generous than the present. But the girls’ high-buttoned blouses were in fresh contrast to their billowing black trousers and officials in straw helmets chatted and exchanged civic information on street corners.

It was almost, Nan Luc thought as she swung her linen bag on her shoulder and headed towards the flag-draped headquarters building, as if a cafe might materialise in a dusty shop front or the faint sound of American music might rise above the cyclists’ bells, above the revolutionary pop song, endlessly and triumphantly repeated from the square’s loudspeakers, ‘Hue, Saigon, Hanoi’.

She stepped through the open doors of the administrative building into the deep shade of a tiled hall. A cast-iron staircase rose in an elegant sweep to the next floor. High panelled doors stood in pairs on either side of her. Nothing indicated who might be working behind the doors; nothing guided the visitor to where enquiries could be made. Then a woman’s voice rose from behind one of the doors and Nan Luc took a breath, knocked on the door and entered.

She was in a large room with a surprising barrel-vaulted ceiling, some parts of which had lost its plaster and exposed the dusty laths beneath. A large, cracked inscription still reading Liberte , Egalite , Fraternite curved along the line of the barrelling. Three or four desks were placed at random angles in the room, each occupied by a woman in a high white jacket. The faces of the four women were turned towards the door as if they had been sitting in this posture all afternoon.

Nan Luc entered and closed the door behind her. ‘Good afternoon, sisters,’ she said politely. ‘I am Nan Luc the new recording clerk.’

The women reacted immediately, all four rising from their seats and executing something resembling a clumsy bow. ‘It is a privilege to meet you, comrade recording clerk,’ one of the women said in a husky, nervous voice. ‘But this is only the charges and sentences office. The offices of Provincial Administrator Quatch are upstairs.’

A few minutes later she stood before the toad-eyed Monsieur Quatch as he smiled a gold flecked smile and congratulated her on her appointment to the Cahn Roc Provincial People’s Court.

‘I have to thank you, monsieur,’ she said warily.

‘There is no need to thank me, mademoiselle,’ he said with his frightening smile. ‘You can be sure I have kept an eye on you. Even though it has been at a distance.’

‘You are very kind,’ she said, her thoughts racing ahead.

He looked down at papers in front of his desk. ‘I can rely on you to understand, however, that even I cannot extract you from any further indiscretions. The death of Peter Benning lies within realms of state policy. It is therefore beyond discussion. In any event the matter is closed.’ As he echoed her grandmother’s words Nan Luc was still at a loss to know what they meant.

She watched him pull down the lapels of his white jacket. His strange eyes moved round the room from an unmoving toad’s head. ‘I understand, monsieur,’ she said.

He rounded his desk and guided her to the door. ‘Do your work here as you’re capable of doing it and you will hear no more about it. The episode in Paris has already been expunged from your record.’ His hand on her bare upper arm, he led her to the door. ‘Simple accommodation has been allocated to you in the town,’ he said. ‘For your use during the week. We will get to know each other at my river pavilion at the weekend.’

Nan Luc stiffened. He held her arm, his round head angled enquiringly. ‘With respect, monsieur,’ Nan Luc said. ‘No.’

He looked up at her. His hand dropped from her arm. The round, wet mouth quivered slightly. She was rigid with fear. The refusal had leapt out before she had considered a way of rephrasing it, softening it.

He opened the door slowly but she knew that she was not yet dismissed. ‘Remember my words, Nan Luc,’ he said. ‘I have chosen you for a very special part in the theatre of my life.’ He looked at her coldly. ‘I will not be refused.’

He swung open the door the rest of the way and inclined his head for her to leave. Her last sight of him was as he smiled, owlishly, like a benign professor. But his tongue was darting, moistening the bright round of his mouth.

On the day of her arrival at Cahn Roc, Nan Luc was introduced to the new provincial prosecutor, Kiet Van Khoa, a forty-year-old veteran of great battles at Hue and Da Nang. A dedicated servant of the state, Van Khoa saw his role as maintaining the legal purity of the revolution. He was not in any sense a democrat. Though fully aware that the original Vietnamese Declaration of Independence had, ironically, been modelled on another, more famous declaration, Van Khoa never allowed that to lead him to the belief that the people should choose. The law chose. The law was the creation of ancestors, the government and above all the wisdom of the late Ho Chi Minh. There was no room left for doubt.

Yet despite a relentlessly undeviating line on the law, Van Khoa, his dark hair flopping forward over his dark-olive forehead, pointing to the map with the only finger left on his injured hand, was still able to give real sympathy and consideration to village boundary disputes or fishing rights on the river banks.

From the first anxious day Nan Luc was plunged into work. There was little civil crime except occasional incidents in the capital Cahn Roc itself. Most of her duties were echoes of the reverberating problems caused by the American war. A village which had been flattened in the US Army urbanisation programme might have had land annexed by a half dozen neighbouring villages. But if the scattered families of the village returned, even to huts blackened by the fires of a decade or more ago, the land itself was an inalienable part of their family heritage.