Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘Let’s see now. How about stay at home, have a few drinks and fool around a little?’

‘You’re getting warmer.’

‘I am,’ Sunny conceded. ‘It must be the thought of Gardener Fitzgerald, call me Fitz. See you in an hour. Home safe.’

Cy put down the phone. In his mind’s eye he saw his wife do the same. For a moment he held the image before him of a tall patrician young woman, thirty-three just, her hair russet blonde, her mouth wide, ever smiling. Sexually it wasn’t an image that moved him much.

Raising his eyes from street level above the aluminium grille of a liquor store, he caught sight of a pair of stone heads, part of the decoration of the old building. Even scarred and burnt by the city’s acid air they were still recognisable as George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

Ahead the traffic was shaking out. His eyes brushed over the cabal of black teenagers on the street corner, their furtive dealings overlooked by two American presidents. He touched the gas pedal, sending the Mercedes silently forward.

In the cool air he shivered as he left behind the kids on the street corner. Perhaps it was the reminder of his own childhood in Detroit, a reminder of the sullen, loveless faces of those he had once lived with.

The car glided forward, past a clutch of Vietnamese food stores, past Vietnamese faces in the doorways, gestures, a restaurant painted in dirty red and gold. Cy Stevenson gazed at the scene, experiencing a micromoment of transference as if he were back in Vietnam. As he turned his eyes away he shivered again, more violently this time.

His Polish grandmother, back in those far-off days when he admitted to having a Polish grandmother, would have said that someone had just walked over his grave.

In a haunting memory, before other more true or false memories had displaced it, the child lay quiet, burrowed into a mountain of bedsheets, listening, above the warm reassuring voice of the American radio station, for the next hissing salvo of rocket shells. They had told her that her mother would never come back. Her Aunt Louise had gone away to America. Only the radio, the music and the warm voices brought her comfort.

The rockets hissed. Outside, the explosions seemed to roll along the old Rue Catinat and on, grumbling like oxen carts, across all Saigon. After a while there was a lull. Six-year-old Nan Luc knew that when the hissing demons stopped, they stopped for long enough for her to crawl from under the pile of bedclothes she trusted to protect her.

She switched off the radio.

The Eros Bar was silent. The Rue Catinat was silent. All Saigon seemed suddenly to be bathed in silence. Nan Luc walked out on to the landing. From there, looking down through a skylight, she could see into the bar where the music had played and the girls had danced with the GIs. Now broken glass littered the floor, sparkling like silent fire in an orange shaft of evening sunlight.

Nan Luc stood listening. She was a tall child for her age. Very erect. Self-contained. At first, when her aunt had left to go to America and her mother had not come back from the forest, she had cried herself to sleep. But she drew strength from the daylight hours. And from the radio. And the hope that somebody would come for her.

There was food in the big refrigerator, stored beside the hundreds of cans of beer. She took a bowl of rice and slowly climbed the stairs, picking at the white grains with a small dusty hand.

A mirror halted her. She always stopped for a mirror. She always stopped and puzzled that she looked so different from most of the other girls in the Ecole Normale in the narrow alley known as the street of the deaf woman, the Rue de la Sourde.

At school they spoke French, the old colonial language. At home her mother spoke to her only in English. In the streets Nan Luc spoke Vietnamese with the accent of Saigon.

Downstairs there was a noise. The crunch of wheels over rubble. And women’s voices. She ran to the window and looked out. A black car was parked in the street below, a Red Cross flag attached to the side of the windshield.

Two Vietnamese women in khakis, one with a Red Cross band on her arm, looked up at her. ‘Come with us, Nan Luc,’ the woman with the Red Cross band said. ‘We’ll find somewhere where you’ll be looked after.’

Nan Luc looked down at the black car. On the side words were stencilled that, at the age of six, she could just read but not fully understand: The St Christophe Orphanage, Cholon, Saigon.

‘Did my mother send you?’ Nan Luc asked.

The women hesitated, glancing at each other and then up at Nan Luc. ‘Your mother wanted you to come,’ one of the women said.

Late in that first autumn of Communist victory, on the newly named Avenue Giap in the administrative district of what was now called Ho Chi Minh City, the well-dressed middle-aged Vietnamese woman left the entrance of the elegant French-built apartment block and stood in the sunlight as her car drew level at the kerb. By all but a few of the most privileged ladies of the revolution European clothes were no longer worn. In what the world still thought of as Saigon the right to wear bourgeois clothes or to be conducted across town in a chauffeured motor car was given to very few.

Sitting in the back of the Citroen, Bernadette Hyn looked what she was, a figure from the recent pre-revolutionary past. Admitting to no more than forty of her nearly fifty years, she was still, in a slender Vietnamese way, a strikingly beautiful woman.

As her car crossed stop lights or was waved on by policemen in khakis and sun-helmets, Bernadette allowed a certain curiosity to build inside her. For nearly a year now since the Americans had evacuated Saigon she had assumed her family irretrievably lost: her younger daughter, Louise, long departed, married to an American; Pham her elder daughter, a nurse in the defeated South Vietnamese Army, dead; and Nan Luc, her granddaughter, lost among the tidal wave of orphaned and dispossessed which inundated the south.

Lost and perhaps now found. Bernadette had put out enquiries as soon as she and her lover, the senior administrator Quatch, had been recalled from their duties in Paris. Of the dozens of orphanages in Saigon at the end of the war, Catholic or Bhuddist, English, German or Swedish run, most had by now been amalgamated into the new state system. A child named Nan Luc, without a known family name, of approximately the right age and with an American heredity had been taken into St Christophe’s Children’s Home, State Orphanage Cholon 7, as it was now known. The child’s original notes recorded that she had been found living alone at the waterfront Eros bar-hotel. Nan Luc had apparently been admitted to St Christophe’s shortly before the Spring Victory. Approaching a year ago now. A year in which the glitzy wealth of the American period had drained out of Saigon. A year in which the new Ho Chi Minh City had been changed to a grim, silent fortress. For everybody but those as well placed and determined as Bernadette Hyn.

The young matron who met her at the main gate of the orphanage was carefully courteous, uncertain how to address this perfumed lady from the already inconceivable past. ‘I had the child brought into the courtyard, comrade madame,’ she said as she conducted her visitor up to her office.

Bernadette crossed the room. From the window she looked down into a courtyard slashed by sunlight. At first she saw nothing but the lower barred windows and the round, plank-topped well in the centre of the cobbled courtyard. Then, in the shadow, she saw a movement. And a child rose from a stone bench and wandered into the sunlit half of the enclosed square. As Bernadette watched, the child, six or seven years of age, raised her head towards the dozens of small, barred dormitory windows. It was a small movement, puzzled and imperious, of a girl child unquelled by her surroundings. As the sunlight touched her face her eyes flashed a startling clear green. Her hair, chestnut in colour, fell in waves rather than straight down the sides of her face as might the hair of a purely Vietnamese child. Bernadette smiled grimly.