Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

They drank tea from small, palely decorated cups.

After a long silence Nan Luc placed her cup carefully on the table in front of her. ‘I have some questions to ask you,’ she said. ‘About my family. About my mother.’ Bernadette raised her eyebrows, signalling reluctant permission for the girl to continue. ‘I know nothing about her,’ Nan Luc said. ‘Apart from cloudy memories, I hardly know what she looked like. I know nothing about why she received a medal from the government. I know nothing of my father,’ she added, ‘except,’ her hand brushed her face, ‘that he was American.’

‘These things you wish to know.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though they are no longer relevant to your life today.’

‘Even so.’

For a few moments the grandmother was silent. Then she put aside her teacup with the air of someone who has made up her mind. ‘Some things I can tell you,’ she said. ‘Not all. This is my decision. It is not negotiable.’

‘Very well. I accept that.’

The eyebrows fluttered. ‘You say that now. When you have heard the little I am about to tell you, you will want more.’ Nan Luc was silent. ‘There will be no more, Nan Luc. Accept that now.’

‘I will try.’

‘Good.’ Bernadette stood up and walked towards the window. For some moments she stood there looking down at the dusty bicycle traffic on the Avenue Giap. She reached across to a silver box on the table and took out an American cigarette.

‘When I grew up, Hanoi was a city of dancing, of sidewalk cafes, of dinners a deux . For us, the bourgeois Vietnamese, a French existence. At home we spoke French of course, we gave our children French names, we dressed in French clothes. But the core of our lives was still the family. Our family. However many French universities we attended we could not be fully colonialised while the family remained a family. I was married just after the Communist war against the French began. I was not much more than your age and my husband, your grandfather, was given to wishful thinking. He believed the French Army would defeat Ho Chi Minh. Your mother Pham was born and a few years later, Louise, her sister. But still Ho Chi Minh was undefeated. Then at Dien Bien Phu General Giap turned the tables on the French. You know of Dien Bien Phu?’

Nan nodded. Revolutionary history was part of all orphanage studies. The victory at Dien Bien Phu had led to the agreement to divide Vietnam in two, a Communist north and pro-Western south.

‘Of course, the war against the south continued. Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas naturally continued the war they were winning. For families like us, trapped in Hanoi, it was a time of grave decision.’

Nan Luc, watching her grandmother, could see her agitation in the sharply inhaled breaths, the incessant movement of her hands. Her cigarette burned unsmoked in a silver ashtray on the desk.

‘We decided to come south. The family. There were perhaps twenty, twenty-five who set out. We drove as far as we could and then, like a pack of animals, took to the forests.’

‘Did you survive, all of you?’

Bernadette snatched up her cigarette, ignoring the ash that fell on her Paris skirt. ‘We were hunted by the guerrillas. We were attacked and some of the women raped by the montagnards, you know, those primitives who live on the high plateaux. My husband died of fever. We were scattered, tried to regroup and were scattered again. When I limped into Saigon I was alone. I had lost my husband. I had lost my two daughters, your mother Pham and my younger daughter Louise. I had lost my family.’

‘What did you do? How did you live?’

‘A clandestine member of the government in Hanoi offered me money to start a bar here in Saigon.’

‘The Eros?’

She nodded. ‘It was to be a place where Westerners came to relax. A place where people would drink too much and talk too freely.’

‘You were working for Hanoi, even though you had just fled Hanoi.’

‘To live in Saigon and to be subsidised by Hanoi, can you think of a better way of insuring against the future?’

‘I see,’ Nan Luc said slowly, ‘and did Monsieur Quatch come to the bar?’

She chuckled. ‘The Eros was his idea.’

‘And how long did it take for you to find my mother?’

‘Many, many years.’ She shrugged. ‘I found your Aunt Louise first. I was no longer looking, you understand. The Americans were arriving. One night at a party I told my story. A man there thought it was familiar. Of course, it was. It was the story of half a nation. But the names and ages fitted. Louise worked in a bar not half a mile from the Eros.’

‘You all came together again?’

Her grandmother puffed her lips. ‘We were not a family any more. A family is a unit which reveres the same ancestors, indulges the same children, nurtures the land of its ownership.’ Nan Luc sat silently. She thought of Uncle Qui and the shattered, broken families he had reunited or revenged.

Her grandmother extinguished her cigarette and took another from the silver box. ‘I brought Louise to the Eros. I moved in with Monsieur Quatch. She became manageress. A great success. The American boys loved her.’

‘And Maman?’ Nan Luc’s head came up. ‘Was she a bar-girl too?’

Her grandmother smiled. ‘No, your mother was not like her sister. She did not take clients.’

The anger surged again in Nan Luc. The hypocrisy of this woman who could make a difference between a madame and a whore! She lifted her teacup and sipped at the thin cooling liquid. When she set the cup down again she had recovered her composure.

‘What else would you like to know?’ Bernadette enquired with an amused display of solicitude.

‘I would like to know what happened to my mother in the War of Independence. Did she fight against the Americans?’

‘Why do you ask?’ her grandmother said warily.

‘After the war she was presented with a medal. A posthumous Ho Chi Minh Star for fighting as a secret officer of the Liberation Army.’

‘Are you proud of your mother’s medal?’

‘It has been useful to me,’ Nan Luc said candidly.

Bernadette laughed. ‘Quatch said it would be. It does me no harm, also,’ she said.

‘You mean Monsieur Quatch arranged the medal?’

‘Yes. It involved a little minor doctoring of the record. Half of Saigon was trying to do that at the time.’

‘So Maman did not fight in the forest.’

‘She served in a medical unit. Unfortunately she chose the losing side.’

‘She was killed in the fighting?’

‘In the last days there were many deaths.’

Nan Luc took a deep breath. ‘What was my father’s name?’

Her grandmother shook her head impatiently. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Was he here long, in Saigon?’

She shrugged. ‘I was in Paris at the time.’

‘Tell me anything you can about him,’ Nan Luc said. ‘Anything my mother said about him.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ Bernadette said sharply. ‘Your mother had an American lover. So did thousands of others.’

‘You must know something about him,’ Nan Luc said desperately.

Her grandmother looked at her coldly. ‘Forget your father. You are Vietnamese. Your father is none of your concern. Any interest in someone you will never see is childish and absurd. I will not discuss the question.’

Nan inclined her head obediently as she had learned to do in the orphanage. But the gesture only disguised feelings of boiling anger and disbelief.

Bernadette took a photograph which lay face down on the secretaire. Glancing briefly at it, she pushed it into Nan Luc’s hand. ‘Have this,’ she said. ‘Pham, your mother.’

Nan looked down eagerly at the small black and white portrait booth photograph. She was a woman with thick black hair, olive skin and deep set eyes. Less than a woman perhaps. A twenty-year-old girl. Attractive without being markedly beautiful, a girl in a plain white blouse.