Highways to a War (61 page)

“How can I thank this man, Harvey? How can I thank this Snow of mine?” Despite the old-fashioned flippancy of the words, her tone wasn’t light, but serious.

Langford answered her before I could. “I’ll tell you how, Claude. By letting me put your name on the list. Tomorrow. There’s no bloody time to lose.”

She released his hand and put a finger to her lips, closing her eyes and frowning as though at a sudden migraine. “No,” she said. “No,
mon cher;
don’t start that again.”

Her eyes remained closed; she sat still, and both of us contemplated her face’s blind mask as though for clues as to what might move her. And now Mike looked despairing, his mouth compressed, his eyes wide and exasperated: the expression of a child who tries to digest some loss that threatens childhood’s roots. The silence extended, in that strange room.

There were six small round tables there, covered with lace cloths, a candle burning on each. They were set well apart, each of them provided with high-backed old French chairs. The high ceiling made the place formal and imposing, but there was a sense of dustiness, and the walls were dim and grimy. Everything looked neglected. Despite an overhead fan, it was stuffy in there. I doubt that the place had changed since the sixties, or, perhaps, since the thirties: it had the air of being stuck in time. Valuable Indochinese antiques stood on gilded cabinets; tall shelves were crowded with European books. It didn’t look at all like a restaurant; Madame Phan had simply thrown open her drawing room as it was. There’d been no sign advertising the place outside, either: she catered for a small clientele, Mike had told me, who came by appointment only.

Most of the tables had been occupied, when we’d arrived. All the diners were Vietnamese, and all but one were well-dressed members of the middle class. I guessed them to be officials and business people and their wives. Langford had kissed Claudine on the cheek, while the nearest diners covertly watched; and I was struck by the way he did it. There was a kind of tender respect I can only call filial; and in Claudine’s face, there was a pleasure that looked maternal. Yet it wasn’t quite that: I sensed other dimensions. She had told us she’d join us later, and had gone off among the tables; finally she’d vanished to the kitchens.

The meal, served by the gliding, white-clad young women, had been delicious: a wonderful blend of French provincial and Vietnamese, accompanied by a fine Bordeaux. But we ate in a state of tension. There was no music, and the diners spoke in low, furtive voices, so as not to be overheard. Their conversation was punctuated by long, unnatural silences, during which they would toy with their cutlery, or stare into their wineglasses. Some would stop eating and stare into space, and I would occasionally look up and intercept a curious glance, which would then dart away. All of them wore the same inward-looking expression I’d seen on Tu Do Street.
Where, where can I run?
The clicking of cutlery and dishes took on an unnatural loudness, and an atmosphere grew that was amorphously sinister. But everything seemed sinister in Saigon now.

A diner sitting alone had caused me particular unease. He certainly wasn’t of the middle class like the others, and didn’t seem to fit here. He was a long-haired, youngish Vietnamese in a cheap white sports shirt and black trousers, seated in a corner. He had a face I didn’t like at all: ascetic and cruel at the same time. At least, that’s how it looked to me in the dimness, in the nervous state I was in. Every time I looked up, I would find him watching us. Nor would he look away: his dark eyes held mine with a sort of contempt. I tried staring him down, but his gaze wouldn’t drop: it then became openly menacing.

I’d suddenly become convinced that he was Viet Cong: he looked the type, and I’d drawn Langford’s attention to him.

“Right,” he’d said. “VC for sure. I wonder why Claudine let him in? They’ll have been watching her for years, of course.” He’d stared past me, at bleak visions. “You see why I’ve got to get her out.”

Madame Phan’s eyes were still closed, and the silence continued.

Langford tipped his brandy balloon up and drained it; then he looked at me. “Make her understand, Harvey.”

At this, Claudine opened her eyes and gazed at us both in silence; then she smiled, and waited politely for my answer.

I believe Mike’s giving you good advice, I told her. It’s not my business, Madame, but I really think you should do what he says. It’s a chance you may never have again.

I knew it was hopeless: she’d hear me out, but purely from courtesy. She’d clearly reached that phase of life where calm and resignation predominate, in a woman of understanding. And in her case, I began to perceive an underlying spirit I won’t call melancholy, but which was melancholy’s sister. In my mind, it matched the spirit of her city, whose collapse was now so near; but in Madame Phan, it didn’t have the effect of pathos.

I think you’ve got about a week, I told her. Two weeks at the most. That’s the estimate my American contacts give me. Then it’s all over.

“The sides may come to an agreement,” she said. “The Communists may not come into Saigon. Perhaps if President Thieu is replaced with someone they approve of, they’ll agree to an armistice, leaving us a little of the South. That’s what some are hoping for. Even the Americans.”

Do you believe that? I asked.

She smiled like a young girl caught out in a white lie. “No,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Because they don’t have to make concessions, do they? They can take it all, and they will. They’ll want unconditional surrender. And you must know what that means, Madame.”

“Call me Claudine,” she said. “I like you, Harvey; I can see you are a good friend to Mike.” She sipped her brandy and looked at me seriously; almost coldly. “Do you think I don’t know the Communists, after all this time? Everything will be taken from us: you’re right. We’ll be told what to do and what to think and how to think it. All real freedom will be gone. We’ll be put in re-education camps, and sent into the jungle to plant rice. That’s why I wanted Mike to save my sons, and he’s done it: they’ll start a new life in America. But not me, Harvey. It’s too late for me.”

Mike interrupted, his eyes fixed on her face, wide and almost imploring. “It’s
not
too late,” he said. “That’s bullshit, Claudine! All you have to do is let me put you on that list.” Hunched over the table, he held both hands out to her, fingers crooked, seeming to suspend some heavy, valuable object for her inspection. It was the closest I’d ever seen him to being agitated. “Do it, for Christ’s sake! There’s no more time,” he said. “Don’t you understand?”

But still she shook her head, and reached out to caress his cheek. What struck me now was that it was she who was comforting him, when logic said that it should be the other way around.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I understand that. And I understand what you’re offering, Snow. You put me on the list, and the Americans take me away in their magic helicopter, with all the other poor bloody runaways. Yes?”

Suddenly she threw back her head and laughed. It was a startling, full-throated laugh, boisterous and infectious. In spite of ourselves, we both smiled. But then she stopped abruptly, and her face became serious again. “But when I get off the helicopter: what then?”

We looked at her blankly.

“Then I become a refugee,” she said. “And what’s a refugee? Someone who belongs nowhere. Don’t speak, Michael: listen. I’m too old, darling, do you see? Too old to belong anywhere else. What would I do in America? Start another restaurant? Pretend I’d created a little bit of Vietnam in a corner of some foreign city? Taste
nuoc mam
and get sentimental? That’s not me. It wouldn’t be enough: I won’t live in a bloody bubble. And I won’t be a runaway. You saw them in here tonight, looking into their wine. They were thinking: ‘What can I do? Who can I trust? If I plan my escape and fail, others may denounce me to the Communists when they come!’ You see them thinking that in the cafés along Tu Do, stirring their coffees, waiting for the end. I won’t be like that. For Claudine Phan, business as usual!”

And again, she gave her shout of laughter: unnaturally loud, this time. Then she pointed at Langford, glancing at me.

“Look at him, Harvey! He wants to keep everything fixed, like his photographs. Yes? Fixed and not changing—nothing and no one ever lost.” She leaned forward to Mike, and her voice sank. “But everything gets lost in the end, Snow—everything and everyone. Don’t you know that, yet? Can’t you live with it? We all have to live with it, every moment. Every moment, every day of our lives, we watch people and things being lost. And some day we’ll be lost ourselves. You are so tough—can’t you be tough about
that
yet?”

Mike didn’t answer. He sat absolutely still, staring at her. More than ever he looked to me like a large, bemused child: a child whose immobile face was masking a response to the unbearable. Their eyes held and silence extended, broken only by faint clatterings from the kitchen. The two of them seemed to have forgotten my presence.

To break the tension, I spoke to Claudine. You could go, I said, and then wait to come back here. It may change.

She turned and looked at me. “Yes, it will change,” she said, and her voice was flat, now. “But not until I am an old woman —or dead. People forget this, Harvey, when a bad regime finally ends. They say: Look, it wasn’t so bad after all. But they forget the people whose lives have been taken away from them forever. How can you give those lives back?”

“There was a VC in here tonight,” Mike said suddenly. “Did you know that, Claude?”

“Of course I know,” she said. “I know him well. He gets his meals here for nothing. So do his comrades.”

Mike’s long jaw set. He looked shocked now, and the effect was faintly comical.

“And when they take over, I may get protection, if I’m lucky,” she said. “My restaurant may even stay open for business, in Communist Saigon. Don’t look so horrified,
mon cher.
It’s called surviving. Don’t you even understand that, after so long? Only a bloody fool dies for ideas, when the ideas have no more allies. You might tell that to Uncle Aubrey, if you see him sometime. And if I don’t survive—”

She shrugged in a manner that was suddenly French, and reached for the brandy bottle.

 

 

A little while later, she saw us out.

We paused outside the entrance, in front of the double doors. Claudine was accompanied by one of the white-clad young women she called her orphans. This one was little more than a girl, and clearly spoke no English. Her bright, unchanging smile assumed our farewells to be just routine: no different from any other happy parting.

“Don’t worry, Snow,” Madame Phan said. “I’ll stay afloat. That’s my specialty, remember?”

Her voice now had gone soft and young, but the strand of gray hair still hung down from the chignon, making her seem an old woman. Mike stood mute, hands hanging heavy at his sides like a farmer‘s, and Claudine craned her head and kissed him on the mouth, one hand resting on his shoulder.

“Worry about your little Cambodian,” she said; and she was speaking as though neither I nor the Vietnamese girl was here. “I’ll miss you, Mike. I’ll miss you. Now go back to her.”

She turned abruptly to me, her hand still on his shoulder. “Make sure he does go, Harvey. He has to understand that he can’t worry about everybody.”

Then she drew back into the doorway, holding the girl’s tiny waist. “I have these little ones to worry about now,” she said. “Who’ll do it if I don’t?”

Langford and I walked towards the gates. Mike didn’t look back; but I did. The two women were watching us go, both of them smiling as though at good news, Claudine still holding the girl by the waist. Framed by the tall, aged doors, the orange glow of the anteroom behind them, they seemed to look out from a stage: players in some traditional theater of which both Langford and I were ignorant.

I believe Claudine Phan used to be called a dragon lady. She certainly wasn’t that any more: the business empire gone, disaster flooding towards her villa’s iron gates down the dark, teeming tunnel of Highway 1. But the woman I met was more impressive than any dragon lady. I understood now why Langford had been devoted to her for so many years.

 

 

The next day was Saturday the 12th. We were booked on an Air Cambodge flight that left for Phnom Penh at noon. At ten o‘clock, Mike and I walked around to the Eden Building on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, to see what we could learn in the AP office. Jim had gone off on his own, shooting film about the city.

The AP office had a reception area out in front, with big French easy chairs. Correspondents from other organizations were always calling in there to see what information they could pick up, and you could seldom find an empty chair. Most of us would stand leaning on the counter that divided the reception area from the main office—mainly in order to read the clipboard. The clipboard, which lay on the counter, held teletype copies of stories that had come in on the loop from New York, and were available for public consumption. Only favored visitors—of whom I was one-Were permitted to enter the main office, where we were sometimes allowed to read the original stories. These came straight off the outgoing teleprinter, and were supposed to be closely guarded until the story was edited and sent out again by New York.

Today the reception room was unusually crowded, and I knew as soon as we came in that something had happened: you can never mistake the electricity. The clipboard was currently being read by a
Washington Post
correspondent: a middle-aged veteran called Barbara Hauser. Others were looking over her shoulder. We peered over her shoulder with them, and asked her what had broken.

“Phnom Penh’s fallen,” Barbara said. “Finito.” She had a quick, flat delivery, and her tanned face showed no emotion. She went on leafing through the sheets, frowning intently.