Highways to a War (43 page)

He suddenly smiles. It’s a benevolent smile, but not really directed at me: he’s far off inside himself.

“We’d lived inside that war for so long,” he says. “What the bloody hell were we going to do without it?”

The opium lamp stood beside me, on its brass tray. It was an oil lamp, made of copper and heavy glass to focus the heat, and it gave off a warm golden glow. An antique: a lamp from the nineteenth century, still burning here in Asia, at Madame Delphine’s. There was also a warm golden smell: it made my mouth water.

A little marijuana I could handle; couscous nights I now half enjoyed; but opium I’d always drawn the line at. Yet here I was, on an evening in the last week of April, naked except for a sarong (as the ceremony at Madame’s required), stretched on my back on a floor which was a single huge mattress, my friends lying in the dimness around me.

The majority of journalists only had a pipe occasionally; but Langford, Dmitri Volkov, Jim Feng and Hubert Whatley now came at least once a week to Madame’s. Langford seemed unaffected by it, just as he was unaffected by alcohol, and by every other physical stimulus and stress: he had the constitution of a bull, and kept his intake within bounds. So did Jim Feng. But rumor had it that Volkov and Whatley were lately coming here even in the lunch hours, and were well on their way to becoming addicts. They came to numb themselves to what was outside: the bombing, the ruined countryside, the people half crazed from grief, rocking the bodies of dead children on their laps. Tonight I wanted oblivion too, if opium would give it to me.

The atmosphere of the city had become unnerving. I would have gone anywhere, that evening, rather than stay in my room in the Hotel le Royal. The power had gone off again: the fans had stopped working and the room was stifling. The continuing artillery fire outside the city was causing the building to vibrate, and once there was a huge crash in the bathroom. I’d run in there, my heart thudding: I thought a rocket had scored a direct hit. But it was only the manhole cover in the ceiling: it had fallen down into the bath.

The Khmer Rouge blockade of the Mekong was now preventing all but a small number of supply ships and tankers from getting up the river. Most supplies were being brought in by air. The Rice Road to Battambang had been cut, petrol was running out, electricity cuts were constant, and we were told that Phnom Penh currently had enough food and fuel to get through three more weeks. Beyond the city, the bombing by the invisible B-52s went on: massive and terrifying, targeting the army of Khmer Rouge guerrillas there, but often hitting villages as well. The American aim was to stall the Khmer Rouge’s dry-season offensive: an offensive directed against Phnom Penh itself, and already reaching its suburbs. The received wisdom at the Press Center was that the city would fall by August.

I was lying on the straw smoking-mat. It was my turn; time for my first pipe. Madame Delphine squatted on her thighs beside me, the lamp putting big shadows on her fleshy, French-Chinese face, her eyes shining like black olives. Madame was like a nurse; she could almost make you believe this was good for you. She didn’t smile much, she was middle-aged and stern, but she had a sort of matronly charm, and the Nurseryman claimed to be in love with her. Careful as a surgeon, she held the opium bead over the flame on its needle, and then coaxed it into the pipe. Muttering in French, she brought the stem to my mouth, urging me to draw.

I inhaled, and the opium bubbled like sugar on a hot plate. Then I rolled off the mat to make way for Jim Feng, and a heavy tingling went down to my toes. It brought with it love of the world and my friends; love of the world inside me. I lay bathed in yellow delight, my head on a little leather pillow.

 

 

There were many smoking rooms in that dark family house; I found it a confusing place.

Madame Delphine’s was in a lane off Monivong Boulevard, smelling of open drains: a Cambodian house on stilts, entered by a set of wooden steps, all in darkness from outside except for a single electric bulb, as a precaution against the police. The walls in our smoking room were hung with Cambodian straw mats worked in gold and chocolate, and a big, dim mosquito net hung above us like a cloud. No ceiling: through the net, from our mattress floor, we were looking up at the beams of the roof, and at fans that were slowly turning: the power supply was back. A radio was playing somewhere, turned down low. Quiet voices floated from adjoining rooms: the voices of French businessmen, Sûreté operatives, correspondents, and diplomats from the various Western missions. No Cambodians: this was a den for foreigners.

Blissful sighs came from out of the dark on all sides; the pipe bubbled. I could just make out the motionless shapes of my colleagues. They all spoke on a calm, purring note I’d not heard before: the voice of opium. No one spoke aggressively; no one sounded tense; every remark hung in the dark as something to meditate on. Time slowed to the ooze of honey, and often after someone had spoken it seemed to me that an hour went by before anyone replied, although it might have been two minutes. Sometimes the voices went away to somewhere else, and I no longer heard them. Madame Delphine came and went, her lamp creating big shadows, and after my second pipe, I found that I was in two places at once.

I was still in the smoking room, but I also saw a wide plain stretching away: an empty place of dry white grass and low bushes, going towards a green sky. I neither liked nor disliked it; it was simply there, inside me. At the same time, I could hear Hubert Whatley speaking. His voice was very distinct, entering my head as though through an amplifier.

I opened my eyes and turned towards the sound: I could just make out his face and beard, and the great white hills of his naked chest and belly, rising on the other side of Volkov. He seemed to be replying to something that Dmitri had said: a remark I hadn’t heard; a gap on the tape.

“Soon, dear boy, yes. Soon they’ll close the Mekong. But we still have our Cambodia for a little while longer. A country one saw in visions before one ever came here. The B-52s are dropping their bloody tonnages on Paradise.”

After perhaps ten minutes, Jim Feng spoke. “True, Hubert: Paradise. Greatest supply of cheap grass ever seen, and prettiest women.”

Soft laughter; but the Nurseryman wasn’t to be deflected from his theme. A little while later, he resumed.

“Soon we’ll be the only ones who remember the magic peace. Our crass colleagues arriving here now never knew that peace, did they, gentlemen? The French planters drinking coffee at their curbside tables. The caravans of oxcarts coming in from the country, with all the country’s fruits. Upswept shafts like the prows of boats. Straw piled on their awnings; the kids and dogs trotting beside them. Was it always noon when they came?”

A long silence followed: nobody answered, and I wondered if his rumbling voice would go on. It went on; speaking to itself.

“Yes: the noon hush. No guns to break it then; no sound of bombers. Just the oxcarts, coming into town in lines a mile long.”

We all lay watching the carts, and hearing their creaking in the heat.

Madame Delphine had arrived with fresh pipes, and the Nurseryman, grunting, rolled onto the mat by the lamp.

“Ah Madame,”
he said.
“Je t‘aime. Je suis ton esclave.”

“Je vous en prie, Monsieur,”
she said.
“Ça suffit! Vous êtes trop galant.”
But her impassive face showed faint amusement.

“Alas,” he told us. “I am in love with Madame, but she has eyes only for Snow.”

Turning the opium ball on its needle, Madame Delphine glanced at Mike.
“Il est plus beau,”
she said. And for the first time she smiled faintly.

But Langford now had gone deeper into trance, unconscious of what was being said. Arms at his sides, curved blond shards of hair lying on his forehead, he was looking up into the mosquito net, dead-white face in profile. And his face had suddenly become a statue‘s, empty of expression and even of life: a phenomenon I remembered seeing only once before, when he was wounded in Vietnam. He was suddenly no longer himself, but someone else.

As I watched, he turned his head towards Volkov and came back again, his eyes refocusing and reflecting the flame of the lamp.

“I’ve got something for tomorrow, if you don’t want to retire just yet, Count,” he said. He spoke slowly, as though in his sleep. “I’m going up to Kompong Cham. Taking a Government chopper. You and Jim could come. There’s room.”

“Kompong Cham?” Volkov said. “You are serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious,” Langford said. “There’s a risk—but that’s why it’s a good story.”

They peered, heads turned towards each other. Then Mike smiled, and Volkov let out a hiss of laughter. He nodded once, as though agreeing to a crime, and looked across at Jim.

“I’ll come,” Jim said.

Kompong Cham, fifty miles to the northeast, was an important city: a crossroads on the Mekong, strategically vital. Any action there was worth covering. But nearly all of Kompong Cham Province had now fallen to the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, and the rest was going fast. The city itself was said to be about to fall.

Hubert, who had inhaled his pipe, raised his head from the pillow. “You have all gone mad,” he said faintly, and lowered his head again.

I’d like to be able to say that this was a tense, decisive moment. But it wasn’t; not for me. I’d had five pipes now, and had begun to float away: I saw my grassy plain again.

It was sinking into twilight, and the Soldiers Three were there. They were walking fast through the grass, looking as I’d seen them a hundred times before: all of them hung with cameras and camera bags, wearing their fatigues.

They were laughing and looked happy; but I knew that they were going to die, and a terrible vertigo gripped me.

 

 

Volkov was kind to me that night. He helped me through the attack of nausea which is the usual reaction to opium in a first-time user.

Like me, Dmitri continued to live at the Royal; his room was one floor down from mine. He saw me back there, when we finally emerged from Madame‘s, holding me by the arm all the way. The nausea got worse, and as soon as we got to my room, I rushed to the bathroom to throw up. When I came back, Volkov was sitting in the rattan chair beside the bed.

“Hit the sack, Harvey,” he said. “I will sit with you for a while.”

I said there was no need, but he held up his hand. “Just stretch out, man, and don’t argue. A bad trip is a bad trip. Go with it; don’t fight it: float. I will sit awhile.”

I pulled off my boots and lay down on the lumpy double bed. Speaking was now difficult, and Dmitri seemed to understand this. The air-conditioning was still off, but the ceiling fans were working, and I blessed them: I was pouring with sweat. Dmitri turned off the bedside light, leaving one lamp lit on the writing desk; then he lay back in his chair in the half-dark, taking out his cigarettes. He didn’t attempt further conversation, but I was glad he was here.

It was now about ten o‘clock. For some time I was aware of Volkov a few feet away, smoking and staring in front of him, apparently deep in thought. Then I drifted into sleep, and had terrifying dreams, none of which I remember.

I woke suddenly, and thought I was still on the mattress at Madame Delphine’s. I found my head was clear; but I had no idea how many hours had gone by. Volkov still sat here, smoking. He’d never been a big man, despite his physical toughness, and in those first seconds of waking he looked to me almost frail.

I peered at my watch, and found that it was nearly one in the morning. He’d been sitting here for three hours.

My God, Count, I said. You didn’t have to stay all this time. Go to bed.

“That’s OK,” he said. “Somebody had to see you through this,
tovarich.
After all, we took you to Madame’s den. Your first and last visit, I presume.”

I was inclined to think so, I said.

“Probably wise,” he said. “You are not the junkie type. Unlike me. I am a junkie for everything.”

Including trouble, I said. Would he really go to Kompong Cham tomorrow?

“Yes, I will go,” he said. “You want to come, Harvey?”

No thanks, I said, it was too much like Russian roulette to ride the roads now. More your game than mine, I said—but I think you should skip this one, brother. So should Mike and Jim. It smells bad.

He smiled. “Sensible as always. You are no doubt right, Harvey. Yes, it gets worse. Last week, two American correspondents tried to drive down Highway 1. New here. They put a notice on their windshield that says: ‘Don’t Shoot. Press.’ Jesus. They only got as far as Neak Luong and have not been seen again, poor bastards. Khmer Rouge have executed them, for sure. Khmer Rouge are even worse than Viet Cong: they do not seem to play by any rules at all. It’s bad now: it’s creepy.” He stretched and yawned. “You are a words man, Harvey; you can avoid some of this. But getting shot at on daily basis is my game, you know this. Bloody bureau chief in Hong Kong keeps riding me, for one thing. Last week I sent only four hundred feet, and bastard asked on phone did I take the lens cap off. So I go—and so does Jim. Mike doesn’t need to—but always he wants to push his luck a little further, and I can’t allow him to do this on his own. Besides, he has said the big story is at Kompong Cham, and he is generally right.”

He stood up. “You should sleep, brother. Can you manage to do this now without bad dreams?”

I said I was sure I could, and got up and saw him to the door. He paused outside, standing in the deserted corridor with its dim green walls.

“I have favor to ask you,” he said. He fumbled in his shirt pocket, and produced a sealed envelope. “I want you to keep this for me.”

I took it doubtfully, and he said: “Duplicate key. If anything happens to me tomorrow, or any time, I want you to take charge of small wooden box under my bed.”