Figurehead (21 page)

‘Please, Ted, please let me ice them.’

‘You can put them in an ice bucket. That’ll cool them nicely.’

‘No ice bucket.’

‘Why not?’

‘Waste ice, too much ice.’

‘You can still use it afterwards.’

‘Will melt. Ice ix-pen-hive. I poor, so poor. You not understand. You fat rich carpetelism en-tree-pree-neur from Aust-raa-lee.’ A smile broke onto Hieu’s face, which he quickly suppressed. ‘Ice, yes, I think so.’

‘I’ll buy you some more ice.’

‘Burr-ket for clean all onto floor. Burr-ket dir-tee.’

‘Your English is deteriorating,’ Ted remarked in Vietnamese.

Hieu doubled over, beat his hand on his knee, and exploded with laughter. ‘Me no underhand you, Mister Aust-raa-lee, me no underhand YOU.’

The door opened, admitting a beautiful woman in a dress of blue sequins. Ted fleetingly wondered how she possibly squeezed into the dress – and, less fleetingly, what gymnastics she engaged in to extricate herself. Hieu watched Ted staring openly at the woman. ‘Don’t dribble on my tablecloth,’ he said, not because he much cared but because he knew that Ted liked it when people noticed how much he loved women.

Later, Ted claimed to Hieu that the woman’s exquisite curves caused the dizziness that suddenly overcame him. His head sagged between his knees. He vomited on his sandals. His knee knocked the table and warm tea ran into his lap. He closed his eyes, thereby avoiding the spectacle of an unconscious man slowly sliding off a chair.

After Hieu doused him with water, Ted lay on his stomach and listened to Hieu and his family debate whether to lay him on his side or his back, whether to massage his neck or to slap his face. When they made preparations to soak Ted again, he turned himself over and said, ‘Could everyone please just shut up?’ He fanned himself with the introduction of his Ho Chi Minh manuscript, disappointed that the beautiful woman, now nowhere to be seen, had not rushed forward to cradle him in her arms. ‘Late for school, was she?’ he asked Hieu, who stared back uncomprehendingly.

Ted sat cross-legged on the ground and refused to budge until Hieu agreed to serve him a VB. Hieu muttered about crazy foreigners all the way to and from the basement, and pursed his lips as he poured the golden liquid into a glass.

Ted rinsed his mouth with VB, grimaced and spat between his feet.

‘It’s hot,’ he said.

‘I warned you,’ Hieu said.

‘It’s stale. And flat. When did you open it, ’65?’

‘If you don’t like it, give it back.’

‘Oh no,’ Ted said. He sipped another mouthful and this time swallowed. ‘It’s awful. It’s ... heavenly.’

Hieu wheeled his Vespa out from the kitchen. Ted rode in the middle. Hieu’s son sat perched on the back to make sure Ted didn’t fall off. They flirted with Saigon’s traffic, reaching out to touch bikes and cars and trucks and pedestrians. Somehow, they arrived unscathed at the doctor’s rooms. Hieu sent Ted inside with smiles and consoling thoughts. But Ted could tell that Hieu was worried that his weight had cracked the Vespa’s axle.

Hanh Nguyen had been Ted’s doctor since they’d met in a Viet Cong sanctuary in 1966. Twenty-six years old then, she was already a widow, and – though she didn’t know it at the time – two of her four siblings were dead. Ted was thirty-four, and dividing his time between Vietnam and Cambodia. Reporting on the war from the North Vietnamese perspective – ‘sleeping with the enemy,’ his critics said – he was at the height of his fame and influence. He arrived at the sanctuary filthy, high from snorting war pollution up his nostrils, and with several tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded in his thigh.

‘I can’t spare you any drugs,’ Hanh politely told him as she cleaned his leg of mud and metal.

Then a crowd of wounded soldiers and civilians arrived. Ted watched Hanh dig for bullets and seal holes and remove limbs and drag bodies away. He wrote about her in
Living with the Patriot Vietnamese
, a book he was particularly proud of:
To say she works in tough
conditions is an understatement. Somehow, perhaps through willpower
alone, she maintains a sense of sterilisation, even though her operating
theatre is in a swamp. She works without pause for several hours. Most of
her face is hidden behind a mud-spotted surgical mask, so I watch her eyes.
I have never seen such resolve. During an amputation, in the fifteen minutes
that she works on the brave youth before he bleeds out, she doesn’t blink
once. She saves more patients than she loses, though she impassively informs
me that some of the wounded will die in the coming days. Then she takes her
mask off and I try to comprehend how someone who has endured such a day
can be so young.

Now, a couple of hours after Ted had collapsed in the Núi Café, Hanh scolded him as she helped him into the examining room. ‘Were you planning to tell me? Or were you just going to mention in your will that you were sick?’

‘I don’t feel
that
bad,’ Ted said. She handed him a mirror and he stared, shocked, at his yellow skin and bulbous, bloodshot eyes.

Hanh stuck thermometers into him like acupuncture needles. She stared at his tongue for a very long time: ‘I’m reading your fortune. Shut up and let me do it.’ She laid him on his back and massaged his side until he laughed so hard she worried he would crack a rib. She swabbed his cheek, stole blood, pointed an arrowhead light into his ear canals: ‘Disgusting.’ She prodded his testicles: ‘Take that smirk off your face.’ She made him touch his toes and then followed him as he floated around the room fighting the urge to faint.

Ted gave vague answers to her questions. He tiptoed around the truth. But he must have been resigned to hearing bad news or he would have found a stranger to examine him.

‘So what’s the diagnosis? It’s the napalm, isn’t it, finally catching up with me?’

‘No.’

‘It’s napalm. It must be, I know it is. Just promise me one thing: when I die make sure you write “American imperialism” on my death certificate.’

Hanh didn’t smile.

‘Come on then: what’s wrong with me?’

‘Lots of things. You’re old, for one thing. You’re wearing out.’

‘You’re not so young yourself.’

‘I act my age.’

‘Poor you.’

‘Ted, I can’t really say. You need better tests than I can give you here. You must—’

‘But it’s nothing terminal, right?’

‘You could have diabetes. There’s something wrong with your heart. Have you noticed that your left hand shakes sometimes? Your skin is yellow. You’re too fat. One of your balls is twice the size of the other one. Your liver—’

‘I’m flying to Phnom Penh on Tuesday. That’s okay, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got a contract, and Cornell’s promised to cover my costs. Nhem Kiry’s flying in, I’ve got to see him, the word is there’s going to be a demonstration, I’m going to try to interview him, it’s—’ ‘You’re going to have to stop.’

‘Stop? Stop what?’

‘Everything. No more travel. No more wars, Ted … You know, maybe it’s time you went home.’

‘Home?’

‘And no drinking.’

‘Home? What do you mean, home? I mean … Where, go where?’

‘Australia.’

‘
Australia?
Have you lost your bloody mind?’

‘Wherever you want then. Wherever you think is best. Moscow. England. New York. France.’

‘But I want to stay here. Fair go. How would you feel if I told you that you had to leave?’

Hanh sat down and stared at the floor between her feet. When she looked up she had tears in her eyes. She opened her mouth but a long moment passed before she spoke.

‘If I could get out of here, just like that,’ she said eventually. ‘If I could pack a bag and leave and never come back, I’d be gone before dark.’

* * *

Cornell was there that day in ’91 when the people of Phnom Penh attacked
Nhem Kiry. Lucky bastard. He’d booked me five-star accommodation and in
return I’d promised to critique some god-awful manuscript he wanted to
publish about America’s triumph in Indochina, written by one of his fuckwit
neo-liberal mates. But then I collapsed in Ho Chi Minh City and that
was that. Forever, as it turned out.

When I asked him what the demonstration was like, he said, ‘I don’t
mind telling you, buddy, I was so scared I nearly shitted myself. And my
shirt got ripped: two hundred bucks down the drain.’

‘What do you reckon: was it staged or was it real?’ I asked him.

‘What’s the difference?’ Cornell asked.

Nhem Kiry blinked – once, twice – to clear the blood from his eyes. The man wielding the iron bar swung it at him again but he was drunk on tenacity – or just plain drunk, Kiry suspected – and he lurched forward and swiped the air. Kiry wished for a calmer, more rational atmosphere. He felt sure he needed only to sit the poor misguided fellow down, share a pot of tea, or a bottle of beer if that’s what it took, and remind him that he – Nhem Kiry – had sacrificed his whole life to improve the circumstances of the ordinary people. ‘Nothing is more important,’ Kiry would have counselled, ‘than the fact that we are both patriots. And, by the way, please vote for me next year.’

As the man took aim at him again, Kiry dropped to all fours and scuttled like a cockroach into a wardrobe. Akor Sok jumped in too and pulled the door shut.

‘I’ll save you, Your Excellency,’ he said.

‘Really? Who’s going to save you?’ Kiry replied.

The mob opened the doors of the wardrobe. ‘Kill him,’ they chanted, ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him.’ Someone threw Sok into a corner as if he was Kiry’s dirty laundry. They dragged Kiry into the middle of the room. Concrete thoughts eluded him. Later, when he tried to recall the moment, all he could conjure in his mind was the sensation of multiple hands yanking at his collar to expose his neck.

Then someone lifted him off the ground – later he learned that it was Ol – and threw him into the bathroom. One of the French photographers was already in there: aren’t women brave, Kiry thought. Her camera hung from her hip, its lens peering up at him. He turned his back on her and pressed a towel against the wound above his eye.

When Ol opened the door, the room had miraculously cleared of rioters. That’s when Kiry lost all feeling in his legs. His minders led him to the bed. He lay on his side and bloodied a pillow.

Son Sen entered the room. He was shaken. His hair, usually immaculate, took off in all directions.

‘Oh dear. You’ve got a thumbprint on your glasses,’ Kiry said.

Without knocking, government officials entered the room.

‘You must go. You must go now,’ one official said, waving a walkie-talkie around as if that was proof of something.

‘We have every right to be here,’ Kiry said. ‘Mr Son Sen and I have come to Phnom Penh in our official capacity as members of the Supreme National Council. We have the legitimacy of the United Nations behind us and the support of the international community.’

‘Yes, Your Excellency, forgive me, you are correct in every sense. Now you must go to the airport.’

They bundled Kiry into an armoured personnel carrier and jammed a blue UN helmet onto his head, an outcome he found almost as shameful as the beating he’d just endured.

Kiry could barely breathe, even before they started jamming bodies around him. His staff threw their elbows about and complained or whimpered or compared bruises in what Kiry considered a most unseemly way. He felt like crying out, ‘Be proud.’

As the personnel carrier rumbled out of the city, Kiry closed his eyes and pretended he was alone in an open field: the soft light of dawn, fresh air, a log to sit on, a mango and a knife. Sok thought Kiry had fainted and shook him. Kiry’s helmet – made for a larger head – banged against his wound and he started bleeding again.

At the airport he sat on the tarmac. Sok held an umbrella over his head to keep the sun away, but his hands still shook with fear. Kiry made him hand the umbrella to Ol. Sok, who hated to have his limitations exposed, became sullen and resorted to acute politeness: ‘Would Your Excellency care for a glass of iced water?’ and ‘Does Your Excellency require a trip to the toilet before we leave?’ and ‘Are you hungry, Your Excellency? Perhaps something sweet: a banana or a Mars Bar? At times like this it is important to remember to eat.’

The commercial flight they took to Bangkok was only half full. Son Sen sat across the aisle from Kiry and fell asleep immediately. His arm dropped into the aisle. His glasses slipped to the end of his nose, where they balanced precariously but did not fall, even though several people bumped his arm on their way to the restroom (Akor Sok made a point of hitting him at pace).

Kiry had heard rumours that Pol Pot, on Nuon Chea’s urging, was planning to cut back Son Sen’s responsibilities as defence minister. Kiry thought that that was probably for the best. He seems so easily tired, Kiry thought, so readily distracted. He’s not good for much anymore other than ordering people about. Why not let him retire to Beijing so he can read those military histories he’s so fond of?

Kiry failed to sleep. He thought about how close the mob had come to killing him. In his mind, death – like malaria, like bad press, like stale food on an aeroplane – was an ever-present possibility. The thought of it bothered him, but what he feared more was losing control of himself: drinking tainted water and soiling himself because he could not drop his trousers and squat fast enough; being harangued by Nuon Chea or bullied by Ta Mok in front of a room full of witnesses; getting the shakes while waiting in an anteroom to meet Chairman Mao. These moments – today’s attack was another one – never left him. They made him stronger. Except that Kiry wasn’t sure how much more toughening up he needed.

At Bangkok airport, Kiry was irritated to find there was a helicopter waiting to fly Son Sen to Pattaya. What about me, he thought, but he said nothing.

‘See a doctor,’ Son Sen said as he departed. ‘Try to rest.’

‘Yes, yes.’

Sok read Kiry’s complaint in his tone and spoke out on his behalf: ‘You were the one who was nearly killed. Surely you’re the one who should be rushed to the beach.’