Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘When was your granddaughter last heard of?’ the matron asked.

‘The dates seem to fit well enough,’ Bernadette said. She was in no doubt that this was her grandchild. She came into the middle of the room. ‘And what did the child have to tell you about her family?’

The matron carefully studied the record. ‘She made no mention of a grandmother. If she had of course…’

Bernadette waved the matter aside. ‘I was on a revolutionary assignment in Paris at the time. But the child must have spoken of her mother?’

‘Yes.’ The young matron knew this was a point to be handled with care. The Hyns were clearly an old bourgeois family. A note on the record showed the child had even spoken of an aunt, Louise, who had left with an American soldier.

Bernadette tapped the desk impatiently. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told us her mother was a nurse in the jungle. From Nan Luc’s description we concluded her mother might have worked for an American medical unit.’

‘Erase that from the record,’ Bernadette said brusquely. ‘My daughter, Pham, served gallantly in a frontline Vietcong medical company operating clandestinely on the outskirts of Saigon. Enter the correction.’ The matron bent over the record and wrote carefully. ‘And her father?’ Bernadette asked. ‘Is anything known?’

‘He was American, obviously.’ The girl flinched as Bernadette stared at her coldly. ‘Nothing further is known, madame,’ she said hurriedly. ‘When she first came here the child asked if this was America. She said she had been promised her father would take her with him. Most mixed blood children were told the same story, of course.’

‘Were you at St Christophe’s before the victory?’

‘I was with a frontline company on the Danang sector,’ the girl said proudly.

Bernadette nodded and turned back to the window and watched while the child, bored with her unexplained confinement in the courtyard, began to skip back and forth.

‘How old is she now?’ she asked the young matron.

‘She said she was nearly seven. Tall for her age obviously. But as her grandmother…’

Bernadette lifted her hand imperiously. ‘I was not present when she was born,’ she said. ‘I told you I was away in Paris, working for the Revolution.’

‘Would you like me to send for her things, madame?’

Bernadette frowned. ‘Her things? What for?’

‘I thought when you took her with you…’

Bernadette glared at her irritably. ‘Not at all. Nan Luc will stay here.’

The matron looked down. ‘Is there anything you wish us to do for her.’

Bernadette shook her head. ‘No. Treat her like any of the others.’ She pressed a slim fold of US one dollar bills into the matron’s hand. ‘I’ll be back to keep an eye on her.’ She paused, turning from the window. ‘In a year or two.’

The second visit to the orphanage provided Bernadette with a modest shock. Almost three years after her first visit she had driven across to Cholon and been taken into the young matron’s office. Through a low glass transom she could look down on to a broad staircase up which groups of disciplined children climbed on their way to class.

‘A good proportion of your children had American fathers, I see,’ Bernadette mused almost to herself.

‘This is the main orphanage in the city for Amerasian children. They are treated of course just like our own children. Or as much as is possible for a half foreigner.’

‘You find them different?’

The matron shivered just short of revulsion. ‘They’re so big. Clumsy. Some of them look so American that you wonder what they’re doing here.’ Bernadette was silent. ‘Worse than that,’ the girl said, ‘they take pleasure in speaking American among themselves. It’s forbidden of course, but we have found it difficult to eradicate.’

‘A foreign language can be an asset,’ Bernadette said. ‘A revolutionary asset.’

‘In some circumstances,’ the girl agreed cautiously. ‘But for some of these children American is not a foreign language. We, the authorities, are convinced they consider it their first language.’

‘My granddaughter too?’

‘She speaks with great fluency, I am told. She has been reprimanded several times.’ Bernadette stood, watching the flow of children across the hall towards the stairway. The young matron leaned forward. ‘Just at the foot of the stairs now.’

The girl reaching for the baluster was still a child. Still unmistakably ten or eleven years of age but the young woman she would become was clearly prefigured. Bernadette gasped. She had never doubted her grandchild would be beautiful. All the Hyn women were beautiful. But she knew the addition of Caucasian genes invited the equal possibility of reducing, or compounding, that beauty. In Nan Luc’s case there was no doubt, even as Bernadette looked at her as a child, that she would be an astonishingly beautiful young woman. And soon.

Bernadette turned to the matron. ‘And what sort of child is she?’ she asked. ‘Disciplined? Will she take correction?’

The young matron nodded. ‘Disciplined, yes. And ready to take correction…’

Bernadette heard something additional in the matron’s voice. ‘But what?’ she said.

‘Nan Luc,’ the matron said slowly, ‘will accept any correction without complaint.’

‘Excellent.’

The matron fiddled with pencils on her desk. ‘Nan Luc,’ she said in a rush of words, ‘lives in her own world. You can never be sure that the correction has changed her, changed her way of thinking. You can never be sure if, in the end, she has been persuaded . ’

Bernadette nodded her head slowly. ‘I recognise what you’re saying, comrade.’

‘Is there anything we should do?’ the matron asked. ‘She responds well in political classes. I have her reports here. She has quickness, intelligence.’

‘And yet…?’

‘Some of the reports consider her interest in anything American is unhealthy. Among the children she is considered a leader.’

Bernadette nodded. ‘So. She has a will of her own. Later it will have to be broken. Goodbye, matron.’

On her last visit to the orphanage Bernadette braced herself for what she was likely to see. It was almost four years later and her granddaughter was now just fourteen years of age. When she watched the coltish young woman digging in the vegetable garden, she had turned away quickly and left without her usual small gift of dollars to the matron.

Nan Luc was on the edge of womanhood, the breasts swelling, the hips rounding, flashing bright smiles at the Amerasian boy working the next row. Exhilarated by her own youth.

At home on the Avenue Giap Bernadette stood in front of her long dressing-room mirror. Today she was wearing Western clothes. They suited her, she was sure of that. But her makeup now required renewal every hour or so. She turned from the mirror, sickly jealous of that young creature so carelessly laughing and moving her body in the orphanage garden.

But then again she was consoled by the fact that Nan Luc was after all her granddaughter. And in the old Vietnamese world to which Bernadette Hyn still secretly adhered, her granddaughter and her possession .

Memories of those far-off days in Saigon tortured Nan Luc still. As part of their education in the story of the War of Independence the children of Orphanage Cholon 7 were taken to see the former US embassy and dramatic accounts were given of the last days of the American invader on Vietnamese soil, the days when General Giap’s revolutionary army was massing out beyond the airport ready for the last drive into the city. Each incident described by her instructors seemed to have the sharp edge of clarity; every rocket burst, every running man, the clack of helicopter blades, the piles of abandoned uniforms of the deserting soldiers and policemen of Saigon. And into these images Nan Luc wove her own. Of her American father frantically searching through the crumbling streets, of his arriving at the orphanage in creased khakis, a tall light-haired man with a yellow bandanna tied round his forehead. When she closed her eyes tight, she could hear his voice even, raised in anger as he demanded she be brought to him. ‘I’ve a right to my own daughter, for God’s sake,’ he had sworn at the trembling women of St Christophe’s.