Highways to a War (28 page)

There was nothing more we could do; Mike was still unconscious. At first, we felt hopeful. But back in Villa Volkov that night, we began to sink into gloom.

Perhaps we were affected by fatigue; but we decided the surgeon had been giving us false comfort. Privately, I felt little hope at all. Shrapnel in the brain! It threatened the seat of reason; of memory and dreams.

Dmitri sat in his leather chair nursing Marshal, his face as serious as the monkey’s. “Snow has gone out one time too many,” he said. “Jesus. Just when he was hitting the top with his work. I did warn him, as a matter of fact. You heard, Jim.”

“We must hope,” Jim said. “No use to think about it tonight.” His face was blank, his voice toneless. He sat very still, smoking one cigarette after another.

“Hope?” Dmitri said. “Our brother will live as bloody vegetable, most likely. What hope is there in that?”

“No,” Jim said. His voice was stern. “Remember he asked for his lucky hat before passing out? The brain was
working,
Count.”

Volkov looked up with faint eagerness. “True,” he said. “Yes, true. You have heard, Harvey—he did ask for the hat.”

The request for the hat was discussed at length, and Dmitri swung now to absolute optimism, jumping up from his chair so that Marshal made a leap onto the coffee table. “You’re right: Snow is the lucky type,” he said. “Yes, gentlemen! The hat will have saved him; I feel it.”

 

 

 

Most combat cameramen, undergoing the risks they do together, regard one another as brothers. They used the term often, in Vietnam.

Unlike us correspondents, who could pick and choose our risks, they had no choice. Any week could be their last, and it made them sentimentalists as well as superstitious; it made for a bond, even when they were in competition. But even allowing for that, the way in which Feng and Volkov were affected by Mike’s wounding seemed to me to have an extra intensity; and I found I was affected in something of the same way myself. Believing as I did that he’d sustained irreparable brain damage, I shared in a yearning sadness that went beyond sadness. It simply wasn’t tolerable to us that Langford might die, or be wiped out mentally.

Until now, I’d merely been mildly amused by the attraction he had for people: men and women alike. His unusual risk taking, his quick success, and his blond, country-style good looks were what accounted for it, I thought-nothing more. As I’ve said, I’d seen him as rather ordinary. But now that I’d been with him in action, I knew there was something more.

It’s not easy to put into words. It had something to do with the soft-spoken, uncanny amiability which had made me feel safe behind the log, up in the Triangle. It was something he extended to everybody: a sort of low-key yet vital affection; a calm concern. But this wasn’t all. Most of what I sensed about him now was crystallized in my recollection of his unconscious face as he lay on the stretcher in the medevac chopper, on the way to Long Binh. Dead white, the blood cleaned away from it, the heavy eyelids closed under their high-arched brows, it had become a different face. It resembled a piece of nineteenth-century sculpture, I thought: one of those pieces deriving from classical antiquity. It was a face that tended to change a lot: did you ever notice that? He could appear plain or good-looking; tough or sensitive: sensitive to the point of being feminine. I don’t imply anything in particular by that. But there are certain apparently ordinary faces which grow extraordinary as you look at them-and Mike’s was one of them.

Who can say why? I think their actual ordinariness has something to do with it-mingled with an opposite element that takes us by surprise. I’m summing this up badly, and maybe the words aren’t to be found-not by a journalist, anyway. But I’ll try. I think it all has to do with mortality, in the end: mortality and its opposite. I’m talking about the odd illusion one sometimes has that particular men and women are-how can I put it?—very human, yet a little more than human, in some way. They talk in an ordinary manner, these people: they eat; laugh; walk in the streets; sit in a pool of sun in a coffee shop, or the artificial light of a bar: yet nothing dissolves the film of strangeness that surrounds them. It’s got nothing to do with conventional beauty; they haunt us in a way that’s beyond the impact of beauty. That’s the miracle of human beings, in my view. We grow old, we shrivel up, we die; we’re a sad lot of creatures, ultimately; and yet certain human faces can make us disbelieve it-or at least forget it for a while. How are they different? How can I say? They seem exempt, somehow. They change our lives like music; they put time and disappointment on hold; they even make us forget the final sadness of reality, and of our miserable physical decline. You never know when or where you’ll encounter them: faces that we look at in fascination, and can’t say why. We’re captivated by a particular shape of eye; a smile; a set of the mouth: captivated above all by the spirit behind the face: by a sort of easy daring, an always lighthearted ease with life that’s magical, and that seems to speak of a connection with-what?

I’m tempted to say: with a life other than this, on some sweeter level. It’s a face which in its youth-recurring in many variations, male and female-can never be devalued, never obliterated. Growing old, disappearing, it’s always replaced. No telling where it will reappear, in the famous or the obscure. In the end, it’s beyond analysis. It’s what makes us immortal.

So what I’m saying is this: if you want to understand about Mike, I think you have to understand about that. And if you want to understand how he changed after his wound, you have to understand about the crippled girl, Kim Anh.

When they brought him back to Saigon, to the big American field hospital at Tan Son Nhut, he was supposed to spend some time there. He’d been told he’d make a full recovery; but he’d been ordered to take a lot of bed rest. He was still very weak.

But he stayed there only a few days; then he signed himself out and moved to Madame Phan’s villa. She sent her car to fetch him, apparently; she even had her own Vietnamese doctor attending to him.

But now the fear that Langford had expressed to me on the Continental terrace turned out to be prophetic. Kim Anh, who’d been successfully treated in Sydney and fitted with her surgical boot, and who’d been living in Madame Phan’s household for some time, should have been there to greet him. But instead, she’d disappeared.

TAPE 12: NOVEMBER 16TH, 1965

-This room’s on the first floor, and the shutters of the windows are always open, above the courtyard. It’s as big as one of the bedrooms in the Continental, and a bit similar. But the only French furniture here is the heavy old wardrobe and the bed. The rest is Chinese, or Indochinese: a black, gold-edged cabinet; a carved camphorwood chest; a silk scroll painting of a pine tree and a bird.

-The only sounds are birds in the lychee tree outside, and the faint voices of the girls coming up from the kitchen, and the radio that they keep turned on low, playing Vietnamese pop music. Sometimes I imagine Kim Anh’s down there: that one of the voices is hers. But she’s still away visiting relatives.

-Once said to Claudine that her house was sleepy. She’s made a joke of it since: calls it her “sleepy house.” This sleepiness is healing me. Even the room’s red tiles, lukewarm under my feet when I walk across to the bathroom: they seem to heal me too. Peace: always peace in this room.

-Peace ever since the operation at Long Binh, when they opened up my skull. Keep seeing that big circular light over my head before I went out under the anesthetic, and the surgeon’s face, floating like a pink saucer. Another light shone to one side: softer, but with a bigger glow. I want to be clear about this, but maybe I never can be. The light had a human shape, with tall wings. An angel? I’ve never thought about angels before; never taken them seriously. There were pictures of them in the Bible at home, but don’t remember the old parson at Saint Matthew’s saying much about them. This figure didn’t look like the pictures in the Bible or on Christmas cards. Just a shape; no face. And yet I knew it was looking at me. It made me feel safe. Loved, I suppose.

NOVEMBER 22ND

-Elle
est morte.

-The letter’s lying on the bed in front of me: my letter, unopened. My writing on the front. On the back, in ballpoint pen:
Elle est
morte. Small, neat writing, like a dull high school kid’s. The uncle. it must have been the uncle.

-Today Claudine sent a servant out to Chalon for me, with the letter. I’d begun to worry, and so had Claudine; Kim Anh’s been away a week. The servant was an old man who said he’d be able to find the place where she used to live. He took my letter and talked to a man there who knew her, he says; he didn’t get the man’s name. He tried to get this man to deliver the letter-but instead the man wrote a message on the back, and gave it back.

—
Elle
est morte.

-I won’t believe it. She can’t be dead.

-Can’t record any more tonight.

 

NOVEMBER 23RD

-I’ve got to get out and look for Kim Anh. But I still haven’t the strength. Often feel dizzy: can’t walk very far. My wound itches and throbs under the dressing. The Vietnamese doctor doesn’t want me to move from this room for another week.

-Elle est
morte.

—I keep seeing that hut where she used to live, in the shanty town at Cholon: the big ftat wastes like a tip, stinking of sewage and nuoc mam, with a maze of alleys between the sheet-metal humpies that are stamped with the names of American beer companies. At nigh out there weak electric bulbs hang from crazy illegal wires, and ragged people move in and out of the light like ghosts. The place is full of refugees from the bombed-out villages, and also full of drug dealers, prostitutes and black market operators with their hoards of luxury goods stolen from the PX stores. Why would she go back there? Why?

—Last night I dreamed about the place. Saw the uncle leading her away, going in and out of those sickly lights down the alleys, holding her hand. She was using her crutch again, as though she’d never had the operation, but looking more beautiful than ever. ! ran after them, but I lost them, and woke up.

—Claudine tells me that a man was hanging about outside the villa a few days before Kim Anh left. Two of the servants saw him and Kim Anh talking together—but Kim Anh denied it. She denied it: that’s what worries me most.

-The uncle: a man in his forties, with crooked teeth and a bad face. Is he even her uncle? She told me so; told me he looked after her when no one else did. He always wore fancy sports shirts and sunglasses: a petty crook, like so many others out there at Cholon, with their caves of stolen goods and the hootch girls they sell to the Americans. Once he was there when I visiited the shanty; but he scuttled off, not speaking to me.

-I don’t believe she’s dead. Now that she’s been fitted with the surgical shoe, and can walk without crutches, I believe the uncle’s seen a use for her. He’ll make her into a bar girl, selling Saigon Tea.

-Why would she have gone with him? Why?

NOVEMBER 27TH

-Claudine spends time with me every evening, after one of the girls has brought me a tray of food and I’ve eaten.

-She sits in a bamboo chair beside the bed, always smiling at me in the same way, strange greenish eyes looking at me from her Vietnamese face. Sometimes she’ll be wearing a smart, Western-style frock; at others, just a blouse and jeans. Her hair always up in a bun. She looks quite French, then. But last night she wore the ao
dai:
mauve silk tunic and pantaloons, looking entirely Vietnamese.

-She told me more about herself than she’s ever done before, last night: I think to distract me. Then she told me something else.

—She’d carried a book in, and was holding it in her lop. You’re still grieving and fretting, Michael, she said. You have to stop. And if you try and get up now, you will do yourself damage. Be patient.
Không xu,
remember?

—I have to start looking for her, I said. You don’t believe she’s dead, either.

-Maybe not, she said. But if she isn‘t, she went because she wanted to go. You did a wonderful thing for her, Michael: because of you, she walks on two feet. Now she walks off into the world. She was only a child: you wouldn’t really have married her. You think so, but you wouldn’t. And you never even made love to her, did you? She was a dream. Most love is a dream we wake up from.

-She opened the book. I brought this to read to you, she said. A Chinese poet, translated into English. A poet from the Ming. Men like you don’t much like poetry, do they? But poetry is still important to us in Vietnam; men like you still read it here. I’m going to make you listen, Snow. This poem might teach you something—or else make you sleepy, in my sleepy house.

-Recently she started calling me Snow as a joke, when she heard that all the
bao
chi call me that; it seems to amuse her. Snow, she says, in that deep voice, and looks at me with a serious face before the laughter comes out.

-She read the poem to me now; it was short. Afterwards she left the book for me with the place marked. It’s true I don’t read poetry as a rule, but I liked this one, and I copied it out.

—After she’d read it to me, Claudine sat quiet for a while. The room was half dark; only the little table lamp was on beside the bed, with its orange parchment shade. Then she began to talk.