Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

At midday when they were given sandwiches and a can of beer, Max looked up to see a broad-shouldered, middle-aged American reporter standing next to his seat.

‘Mind if I join you?’ the man said. ‘My name’s Bolson. Hal Bolson. You’re Max Benning, aren’t you?’

Max moved his bag aside. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

Bolson slumped into the seat and peered across Max out of the window. ‘Never really thought I’d be here again,’ he said.

For a few moments they talked in a desultory way about Saigon in the last violent glittering months of the war, the cafes, the hotels and bars the journalists used. ‘I came across your father a few times before the end,’ Bolson said. Max looked at him in surprise. ‘Nothing strange about it,’ Bolson said. ‘I didn’t know him well but we all used the same places, newsmen, hustlers, Vietcong agents. We were parasites, Max. Not your father. But the rest of us lived off each other.’

‘What was he like, my father?’

‘Big good-looking guy like you. But very, very tough. Not like you I’d guess.’

‘No,’ Max smiled, ‘not like me.’

‘He did crazy things. No wonder the Viets are giving him a monument. He pulled half their history out of the ruins.’

Max smiled. ‘I take it there’s a degree of exaggeration there.’

‘A degree,’ Bolson conceded. ‘I knew Quatch too,’ he added casually.

‘Do you think he killed my father?’

‘Probably. Your father pursued him to Paris, and that was the only way out for Quatch.’

‘Did you like him?’

‘Your father? He wasn’t an easy man, you understand. There was almost a religious sense of purpose about him. He could drink any of us under the table, but he’d still have an ear open for a clue to a manuscript or piece of statuary he was tracking.’ Bolson pushed himself up out of his seat. ‘We’ll be seeing more of each other, Max,’ he said and made his way back down the aisle.

At Can Tho they stayed the night in a long palm-thatched schoolroom on the outskirts of the town. Here US Army cots had been provided and clean sheets and blankets. Dinner in the teachers’ room met the qualified approval of even the French. There were a few bottles of wine and even some whisky. It was, altogether, a more comfortable night than the one before.

Dawn the next morning saw them climbing back into the bus under a cloudless sky. The road was now straight and asphalted and travelling west they reached the border of Cahn Roc province in less than two hours.

The night before, at dinner, Nan Luc had explained the geography of the region. Cahn Roc was a small, poor province on both sides of the Cahn Roc River. The road they would be following ran alongside the river through mango swamps until they reached higher ground. This was the most prosperous part of Cahn Roc, a plateau where mining and timber were the principal occupations. From this plateau they would be able to see, on the coast, the small port and provincial capital, Cahn Roc, and beyond it the Gulf of Thailand.

Arriving at the provincial capital they drove through the outskirts of the tiny town, mostly through narrow roads awash with floodwater from the days or months before. The houses were a shambles of small French administrators’ villas and more recent rusted tin structures. There seemed to be cultivated strips and patches between every building from which women with conical straw hats looked up, shielding their eyes from the rays of the setting sun.

They swung round on a cobbled road through the port with its mass of fishing boats being prepared for the night’s fishing and stopped in the main square of solid colonial buildings. Each was easily identifiable: an old Catholic convent or monastery, perhaps; the Palais de Justice, now the People’s Court; and along one side of the square a barracks, damaged by shellfire, windowless but with washing hanging from strings across the gaping holes. A gigantic puddle filled a large part of the centre of the paved square and the palm trees outside the courthouse looked bowed and battered by the rains.

The bus pulled up outside the hotel building which occupied the fourth side of the square. There had been no attempt to change the French name. It was still the Grand Hotel. Its yellow stucco walls were peeling in large patches, its balcony ironwork was red with rust. On a side wall a barely legible painted advertisement promoted the aperitif ‘Suze’.

‘Let’s ask them if they can get this trial through before the weekend,’ Hunter said, surveying the square with a horrified grimace. A sudden rain squall struck them and he dragged his duffel bag and equipment into the Grand Hotel with Max behind him.

‘Listen,’ one of the British newsmen was saying in the hotel lobby to Nan Luc, ‘I thought this trial was taking place in Saigon.’

‘Quatch was administrator in Cahn Roc,’ she told him. ‘It seemed more appropriate to hold it here.’

‘There’s not much going on in Cahn Roc at night?’

‘Oh plenty,’ Max heard Nan Luc say.

‘Music, clubs?’

‘Political discussions,’ Nan said with mock seriousness, ‘diamat lectures.’

‘What do you do in the evening?’ the journalist pressed.

‘I get ready for the next day, monsieur.’ She turned away. As she walked past Max a faint wry smile, aimed only at him, touched her lips. He followed her out into the place .

Dusk was falling and the old French lamps threw a thin yellow light through the palm trees on to the flooded square. He felt as if they were walking round the edges of a Chinese lake, the fountain in the middle rising from the water, the peeling neglect of all the surrounding buildings hidden by the darkness.

‘Do you live here, in Cahn Roc?’ Max asked her.

‘I live down by the port. I have a room in the old harbourmaster’s tower.’

‘Sounds very picturesque.’

She put her face to one side and smiled. ‘It will be a long time before Vietnam can afford to indulge the picturesque.’

‘The war was over fifteen years ago,’ he said. ‘That’s a long time.’

She stopped, her head down, looking into the reflections in the still water. What she said so echoed his father’s letter that he turned his head in surprise. ‘It will take more than this century,’ she said, ‘to bring peace to the people of Vietnam.’ He knew that by peace she didn’t just mean the absence of war.

They continued on slowly round the place . They were opposite the Grand Hotel now, looking back on the lighted windows and the figures of the journalists moving behind them.

‘Is it true that New York is a dirty city? That garbage blows through the streets?’ she asked.

‘It’s a year or two since I was there but I don’t think things have changed too much.’

‘And the roads are pitted and pot-holed like the roads of Saigon?’

‘Some of them.’

‘And black Americans are discriminated against?’

‘There’s discrimination, sure.’

‘There’s discrimination here too,’ she said. ‘Against people of Chinese descent. Against anyone with European or American blood.’

‘How old were you when the Americans left?’

‘I was six years old.’

‘You remember nothing at all of the American past?’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have memories, I don’t know. Children fabricate the past to suit themselves.’

Max had a strong sense of trespassing into another human being’s dream. They walked on in silence until he nodded to the road running down to the harbour, the Rue du Port. ‘Are you going home now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me walk you back.’ They began to walk down the steep, cobbled road towards the port.

‘I hope you will be satisfied by the trial,’ she said. ‘Van Khoa has put a lot into preparing it.’